The Burning Land Part 26

The hall filled as the news spread. My children were there, and Bishop Erkenwald and aelfwold and Father Pyrlig, then Finan and Weohstan. "The aetheling Edward will lead the forces," Steapa said, "but he is to accept Lord Uhtred's guidance."

Bishop Erkenwald looked astonished. He was glancing from aethelflaed to me and I could tell he was scenting sin with the eagerness of a terrier smelling a fox's earth. "The king sent you?" he asked Steapa.

"Yes, lord."

"But what of the Danes in Defnascir?"

"They're just scratching..." Steapa said, then reddened because he had almost said something that he thought would offend the bishop, let alone a king's daughter.

"Scratching their a.r.s.es?" I finished for him.

"They're doing nothing, my lady," Steapa muttered. He was the son of slaves and, for all his eminence as the commander of Alfred's bodyguard, he was awed by aethelflaed's presence. "But the king wants his men back soon, lord," Steapa said, looking at me, "just in case the Northumbrian Danes do wake up."

"So finish your breakfast," I said, "then ride back to Edward. Tell him he's not to enter the city." I did not want the West Saxon army inside Lundene with its tempting taverns and wh.o.r.es. "He's to march north around the city," I ordered, "and keep marching east."

Steapa frowned. "He's expecting to find supplies here."

I looked at Bishop Erkenwald. "You'll send food and ale to the army. Weohstan's garrison will provide escorts."

The bishop, offended by my peremptory tone, hesitated, then nodded. He knew I spoke now with Alfred's authority. "Where do I send the supplies?" he asked.

"You remember Thunresleam?" I asked Steapa.

"The old hall on the hill, lord?"

"Edward's to meet me there. You too." I looked back to the bishop. "Send the supplies there."

"To Thunresleam?" Bishop Erkenwald asked suspiciously, smelling still more sin because the name reeked of paganism.

"Thor's Grove," I confirmed. "It's close to Beamfleot." The bishop made the sign of the cross, but he dared not protest. "You and one hundred of your men are coming with me," I told Weohstan.

"My orders are to defend Lundene," Weohstan said uncertainly.

"If we're at Beamfleot," I said, "there'll be no Danes threatening Lundene. We march in two hours."

It took nearer four hours, but with aelfwold's Mercians, Weohstan's West Saxons, and my own men we numbered over four hundred mounted warriors who clattered through the city's eastern gate. I left my children in the care of aethelflaed's servants. aethelflaed insisted on riding with us. I argued against that, telling her she should not risk her life, but she refused to stay in Lundene. "Didn't you take an oath to serve me?" she asked.

"More fool me, yes."

"Then I give the orders," she said, smiling.

"Yes, my duck," I said, and earned a thump on the arm. At the beginning of their marriage aethelred had always called aethelflaed "my duck," an endearment that annoyed her. So now she rode beneath my banner of the wolf's head, Weohstan flew the West Saxon dragon, while aelfwold's Mercians displayed a long flag showing the Christian cross. "I want my own banner," aethelflaed told me.

"Then make one," I said.

"It will show geese," she said.

"Geese! Not ducks?"

She made a face at me. "Geese are Saint Werburgh's symbol," she explained. "There was a huge flock of geese ravaging a cornfield and she prayed and G.o.d sent the geese away. It was a miracle!"

"The abbess at Lecelad did that?"

"No, no! The abbess was named after Saint Werburgh. The saint died a long time ago. Maybe I'll show her on my banner. I know she protects me! I prayed to her last night and see what she did?" She gestured at the men following us. "My prayers were answered!"

I wondered if she had prayed before or after she had come to my room, but decided that was a question best left unasked.

We rode just north of the drab marshes that edged the Temes. This was East Anglian territory, but there were no great estates close to Lundene. There had once been beamed halls and busy villages, but the frequent raids and counter-raids had left the halls in ashes and the villages in terror. The Danish King Eohric of East Anglia was supposedly a Christian and had signed a peace treaty with Alfred, agreeing that his Danes would stay away from both Mercia and Wess.e.x, but the two kings might as well have signed an agreement to stop men drinking ale. The Danes were forever crossing the frontier and the Saxons retaliated, and so we rode past impoverished settlements. The people saw us coming and fled to the marshes or else to the woods on the few small hills. We ignored them.

Beamfleot lay at the southern end of the great line of hills which barred our path. Most of the hills were heavily wooded, though above the village, where the slopes were highest and steepest, we could see the old fort which had been made on the gra.s.sy dome above the river. We swerved northward, climbing a steep track which led to Thunresleam, and we rode cautiously because the Danes would have seen us coming and they could easily have sent a force to attack us as we rode uphill through the thick trees. I expected that attack. I had sent aethelflaed and her two maidservants to the center of our column and had ordered every man to ride with his s.h.i.+eld looped onto his arms and weapons ready. I listened for the sound of birds fleeing through the leaves, for the clink of harness, for the thud of a hoof on leaf mold, for the sudden shout that would announce a charge of Viking hors.e.m.e.n from the hill above, but the only birds clattering through the leaves were the pigeons we ourselves scared away. The defenders of Beamfleot had evidently yielded the hill to us, and not one Dane tried to stop us.

"That's crazy," Finan said as we reached the crest. "They could have killed a score of us."

"They're confident," I said. "They must know the walls of their fort will stop us."

"Or else they don't know their business," Finan said.

"When did you last meet a Dane who didn't know how to fight?"

We sent men to scout the surrounding trees as we approached the old hall at Thunresleam, but still no enemy appeared. We had been to this hall years before, back when we had negotiated with the Nors.e.m.e.n, Sigefrid and Erik, and afterward we had fought a bitter battle in the creek beneath the fort. Those events seemed so distant now and both Sigefrid and Erik were dead. Haesten had survived that long ago fight, and now I had come to oppose him again, though none of us knew whether Haesten himself had returned to Beamfleot. Rumor said he was still ravaging Mercia, which implied he was confident that Beamfleot's garrison could protect itself.

The oak-beamed hall at Thunresleam would be at the center of my camp. It had once been a magnificent building, but it had been abandoned many years before and the pillars were rotting and the thatch was black, damp and sagging. The great beams were thick with bird droppings while the floor was a ma.s.s of weeds. Just outside the hall was a stone pillar about the height of a man. There was a hole through the stone that was filled with pebbles and sc.r.a.ps of cloth, the votive offerings left by the local folk who had fled our arrival. Their village was a mile eastward and I knew it had a church, but the Christians of Thunresleam understood that their high place and old hall were sacred to Thor and so they still came and sent prayers to that older G.o.d. Mankind can never be too safe. I might not like the Christian G.o.d, but I do not deny his existence and, at hard moments in my life, I have sent prayers to him as well as to my own G.o.ds.

"Shall we make a palisade?" Weohstan asked me.

"No."

He stared at me. "No?"

"Clear out as many trees as you can," I ordered him, "but no palisade."

"But..."

"No palisade!"

I was taking a risk, but if I made a palisade I would give my men a place of safety and I knew how reluctant men were to abandon such security. I had often noticed how a bull, brought for entertainment to some feast, will adopt a patch of land as its refuge and defend it self from the attacking dogs with a terrible ferocity so long as it stays in its chosen refuge, but goad the bull out and it loses confidence and the dogs sense the vulnerability and attack with a renewed savagery. I did not want my men to feel safe. I wanted them nervous and alert. I wanted them to know that safety lay not in a fort of their own making, but in capturing the enemy's fort. And I wanted that capture to be quick.

I ordered aelfwold's men to cut trees to the west, clearing the woods back to the hill's edge and beyond so we could see far across the country toward Lundene. If the Danes brought men back from Mercia I wanted to see them. I put Osferth in charge of our sentries. Their job was to make a screen between us and Beamfleot to warn of any sally by the Danes. Those sentries were in the woods, hidden from the old high fort, and if the Danes came I expected to fight them among the trees. Osferth's men would slow them until my whole force could be brought against the attackers, and I ordered that every man was to sleep wearing his mail coat and with his weapons close by.

I asked aelfwold to protect our northern and western flanks. His men would watch for the approach of our supplies and guard against reinforcements coming from Haesten's men who still smeared the far horizon with smoke. Then, those orders given, I took fifty men to explore the country about our encampment that rang with the sound of axes biting into trees. Finan, Pyrlig, and Osferth accompanied me, as did aethelflaed who ignored all my advice to stay out of danger.

We went first to the village of Thunresleam. It was a straggle of thick-thatched cottages built about the scorched and collapsed ruin of a church. The villagers had fled when we climbed the hill, but a few braver souls now appeared from the woods beyond their small fields where the first shoots of wheat, barley, and rye greened the furrows. They were Saxons and the first to approach us were led by a burly peasant with matted brown hair, one eye, and work-blackened hands. He looked up at aelfwold's banner that showed the Christian cross. I had borrowed the banner to make it clear we were not Danes, and the cross evidently rea.s.sured the one-eyed man who knelt to us and beckoned for his companions to kneel. "I am Father Heahberht," he said.

He told me he was priest to the village and to two other settlements farther east. "You don't look like a priest," I said.

"If I did, lord, I'd be dead," he said, "the witch in the fort kills priests."

I glanced southward, though from here the old fort on the hill was not visible. "The witch?"

"She is called Skade, lord."

"I know Skade."

"She burned our church, lord."

"And she took the girls, lord," a woman said tearfully, "even the young ones. She took my daughter and she was only ten years old, lord."

"Why did she do..." aethelflaed began the question, then abruptly stopped as she realized the answer was obvious.

"Have they abandoned the old fort?" I asked. "The one on the hill?"

"No, lord," Father Heahberht answered, "they use it to keep watch. And we have to take food there, lord."

"How many men there?"

"About fifty, lord. They keep the horses there, too."

I did not doubt that the priest told the truth, but the Danes had seen us coming and I reckoned the old fort would have been reinforced by now. "How many men are in the new fort?" I asked.

"They won't let us near the new fort, lord," Father Heahberht said, "but I've watched it from the hill at Haethlegh, lord, and I could not count all the men inside." He looked up at me nervously. His dead eye was milky white and ulcerated. He was s.h.i.+vering with fear, not because he thought we were an enemy like the Danes, but because we were lords. He forced himself to speak as calmly as he could. "They number in their hundreds, lord. Three thousand men rode west, lord, but they left all their wives and children in Beamfleot."

"You counted the ones who left?"

"I tried, lord."

"Their wives and children are here?" aethelflaed asked.

"They live on the beached boats, lady," Heahberht said.

The priest was an observant man and I rewarded him with a silver coin. "So who commands in the new fort?" I asked him. "Haesten himself?"

Father Heahberht shook his head. "Skade does, lord."

"Skade! She's in command?"

"We're told so, lord."

"Haesten hasn't returned?" I asked.

"No, lord," Heahberht said, "not that we've heard." He told us how Haesten had started building his new fort as soon as his fleet arrived from Cent. "They made us cut oak and elm for them, lord."

"I need to see this new fort," I said and I gave Heahberht another coin before kicking my horse between two of the cottages and onto a field of growing barley. I was thinking of Skade, of her cruelties, of her desperate l.u.s.t to be a ruler. She could order men by the pure strength of her will, but did she have the skills to deploy them in battle? Yet Haesten was no fool, he would not have left her in command if he doubted her ability, and I did not doubt that he had also left her sufficient troops and competent advisers. I kicked the horse again, riding south now into the trees. My men followed. I rode recklessly, careless that the Danes might have men in the woods, though we saw none. I sensed that Skade's garrison was content to stay behind its walls, confident in their ability to resist any attack.

We reached the edge of that high ground where the land dropped steeply to the web of creeks and inlets that threaded the marsh. Beyond that was the wide Temes, its southern sh.o.r.e just visible in the distant haze. Four s.h.i.+ps idled in the middle of that great spread of light-reflecting water. They were Danes patrolling for prey and watching for any Saxon wars.h.i.+ps coming downstream from Lundene.

And to my right I could see Caninga and its creek, and the great fleet of boats beached on Caninga's sh.o.r.e. The new fort was just visible around the shoulder of the high hill where the old fort stood. What had Father Heahberht said? That only about fifty men guarded the old ramparts. I could see spear-tips glinting by the north-facing gate and there looked to be far more than fifty, and the wall they defended was in good condition. I knew that the southern wall, overlooking the creek, had decayed, but the landward defenses had been kept in good repair. "Skade saw us coming," I said, "and reinforced the old fort."

"She's got enough spears there," Finan agreed.

"So we have to capture two forts," I said.

"Why not let this one rot?" Finan asked, gesturing at the old fort.

"Because I don't want those b.a.s.t.a.r.ds behind our backs when we attack the new fort," I said, "so we have to kill them first."

Finan said nothing. No one spoke. The war we had been fighting all our lives had forced rulers to build forts because forts won wars. Alfred protected Wess.e.x with burhs that were nothing but large, well-manned forts. aethelred of Mercia was building burhs. Haesten, so far as we knew, had not yet dared attack any burh for he knew that his men would die in the ditches and under the high walls. He wanted to weaken Mercia and starve the burh's defenders before he dared attack those ramparts. The two forts at Beamfleot were not burhs, but their defenses were just as formidable. There were walls, ditches with stakes, and doubtless, down on the creek, a moat. And behind the walls were men who knew how to kill, spear-Danes and sword-Danes, and they waited for us not in one fortress, but two.

"We have to take both forts?" aethelflaed asked timidly, breaking the silence.

"The first will be easy," I said.

"Easy, lord?" Finan asked with a crooked grin.

"And quick," I said, sounding a good deal more confident than I felt. The old fort was formidable, and it was large, but I doubted the Danes had committed enough men to defend every yard of its ramparts. Once the aetheling Edward's troops reached me I reckoned I would have enough troops to a.s.sail the old fort in several places at once, and those a.s.saults would thin out the defenders until one of our attacks broke through. It was not much of a plan, but it would work, though I feared it would be expensive in men. Yet I had small choice. I had to do the impossible. I had to take two forts and, if truth be told, I had no idea how to take the second newer fort by the water. I just knew it had to be done.

We rode back to our camp.

Everything became confused next morning. It was as though the Danes woke up to the threat we posed and decided to do what they should have done the previous day.

They knew we were camped around Thunresleam's old hall. I had placed a large number of sentries in the woods south of the hall, but doubtless some clever Dane had avoided them to spy on the newly cleared s.p.a.ce about the hall, and Skade, or whoever advised her, decided an attack at dawn would kill many of us and discourage the rest. Which was a clever enough idea, except that it was obvious, and to prepare for it I had roused every man in the heart of the starlit night. I ordered the sentries back from the trees, made sure we were all awake, then we saddled horses, pulled on mail, and left. The campfires still smoldered, suggesting we were sleeping. Our departure made enough noise to disturb the dead in Thunresleam's small graveyard, but the Danes were presumably making their own noise and had no idea we had decamped.

"We can't do this every morning," aelfwold grumbled.

"If they're going to attack us," I said, "it will be this morning. By tomorrow we'll be in their high fort."

"By tomorrow?" He sounded surprised.

"If Edward comes today," I said. I planned to a.s.sault the old fortress as soon as I possibly could. I just needed enough men to make eight or nine simultaneous attacks.

We rode to the village and we waited there. We were four hundred men ready for battle. I knew it was possible the Danes had detected our move, and so I insisted we stayed in our saddles. The newly woken villagers brought us sour ale and Father Heahberht nervously offered me a cup of mead. It was surprisingly good, and I told him to give some to aethelflaed and her two maidservants, the only women with our force. "If the Danes attack," I told her, "you'll be staying here with a bodyguard." She looked at me dubiously, but for once did not argue.

It was still dark. The only sounds were the clink of bridles and the thump of restless hooves. Sometimes a man spoke, but most just slumped asleep in their saddles. Smoke drifted from holes in the hovel roofs, an owl called forlorn from the woods, and I felt a chill bleakness descend on my spirit. I could not rouse myself from that bleakness. I touched Thor's hammer and sent a prayer to the G.o.ds to send me a sign, but all I heard was the owl's mournful cry repeated. How could I take two forts? I feared the G.o.ds had forsaken me, and that by coming south from Northumbria I had forfeited their favor. What had I told Alfred? That we were here to amuse our G.o.ds, but how could those G.o.ds be amused by my betrayals? I thought of Ragnar's disappointment and that memory gored my soul. I remembered Brida's scorn and knew it was deserved. I felt worthless that morning as the sky's edge lightened behind me to a streak of gray, I felt as though my future held nothing, and the feeling was so strong that I was close to despair. I twisted in the saddle, looking for Pyrlig. The Welsh priest was one of the few men I trusted with my soul, and I wanted his counsel, but before I could summon him a man called out a warning. "There's a horseman coming, lord!"

I had left Finan and a handful of men as our only sentries. They were posted at the edge of the fields, halfway between the village and the old hall and Finan had sent one man to warn me that the Danes were moving. "They're in the woods, lord," the man told me, "by our camp."

"How many?"

"We can't tell, lord, but it sounds like a horde."

Which could mean two hundred or two thousand, and prudence suggested I should wait till Finan could estimate the enemy more accurately, but I was in that bleak mood, feeling doomed and desperate for a sign from the G.o.ds, and so I turned to aethelflaed. "You wait here with your bodyguard," I said, and did not wait for an answer, but just drew Serpent-Breath, taking comfort from the sound of the long steel sc.r.a.ping through the scabbard's throat. "The Danes are at our camp!" I shouted, "and we're going to kill them!" I spurred my horse, the same stallion I had taken from Aldhelm. It was a good horse, properly schooled, but I was still unfamiliar with him.

aelfwold spurred to catch me. "How many are there?" he asked.

"Enough!" I called to him. I was feeling reckless, careless and I knew it was foolish. But I reckoned the Danes would attack the encampment and almost immediately realize we had antic.i.p.ated them, and then they would be wary. I wanted them unaware and so I kicked the stallion into a trot. My whole force, over three hundred men, was streaming along the track behind me. The day's first shadows were being cast into the furrows and birds were flying up from the woods ahead.

I turned in my saddle to see spears and swords, axes and s.h.i.+elds. Saxon warriors, gray-mailed in a gray dawn, grim-faced beneath helmets, and I felt the battle anger rising. I wanted to kill. I was in that bleak mood, a.s.sailed by the certainty that I had to throw myself on the mercy of the G.o.ds. If they wanted me to live, if the spinners were willing to weave my thread back into the golden weft, then I would live through this morning. Omens and signs, we live by them, and so I rode to discover the will of the G.o.ds. It was foolish.

Hors.e.m.e.n appeared on our left, startling me, but it was only Finan and his seven remaining men who galloped to join us. "There might be three hundred of them," he shouted, "or maybe four hundred!"