think you could?’ I asked.
He grinned his mischievous grin. ‘Ah, you like me, lord, even though I am a Welshman and a priest, and you’d be reluctant to kill me, and I’d have three strokes before you woke up to your danger, so yes, lord, I would kill you.’
I put my right hand on the cross. ‘I swear it,’ I said.
And I was still Alfred’s man.
We reached Coccham that evening and I watched Gisela, who had as little love for Christianity as I did, warm to Father Pyrlig. He flirted with her outrageously, complimented her extravagantly and played with our children. We had two then, and we had been lucky, for both babies had lived, as had their mother. Uhtred was the oldest. My son. He was four years old with hair as golden-coloured as mine and a strong little face with a pug nose, blue eyes and a stubborn chin. I loved him then. My daughter Stiorra was two years old. She had a strange name and at first I had not liked it, but Gisela had pleaded with me and I could refuse her almost nothing, and certainly not the naming of a daughter. Stiorra simply meant ‘star’, and Gisela swore that she and I had met under a lucky star and that our daughter had been born under the same star. I had got used to the name by now and loved it as I loved the child, who had her mother’s dark hair and long face and sudden mischievous smile. ‘Stiorra, Stiorra!’ I would say as I tickled her, or let her play with my arm rings. Stiorra, so beautiful.
I played with her on the night before Gisela and I left for Wintanceaster. It was spring and the Temes had subsided so that the river meadows showed again and the world was hazed with green as the leaves budded. The first lambs wobbled in fields bright with cowslips, and the blackbirds filled the sky with rippling song. Salmon had returned to the river and our woven willow traps provided good eating. The pear trees in Coccham were thick with buds, and just as thick with bullfinches, which had to be scared away by small boys so that we would have fruit in the summertime. It was a good time of year, a time when the world stirred, and a time when we had been summoned to Alfred’s capital for the wedding of his daughter, Æthelflaed, to my cousin, Æthelred. And that night, as I pretended my knee was a horse and that Stiorra was the horse’s rider, I thought about my promise to provide Æthelred with his wedding gift. The gift of a city. Lundene.
Gisela was spinning wool. She had shrugged when I had told her she was not to be Queen of Mercia, and she had nodded gravely when I said I would keep my oath with Alfred. She accepted fate more readily than I did. Fate and that fortunate star, she said, had brought us together despite all that the world had done to keep us apart. ‘If you keep your oath to Alfred,’ she said suddenly, interrupting my play with Stiorra, ‘then you must capture Lundene from Sigefrid?’
‘Yes,’ I said, marvelling as I often did that her thoughts and mine were so often the same.
‘Can you?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ I said. Sigefrid and Erik were still in the old city, their men guarding the Roman walls that they had repaired with timber. No ship could now come up the Temes without paying the brothers their toll, and that toll was huge, so that the river traffic had stopped, as merchants sought other ways to bring goods to Wessex. King Guthrum of East Anglia had threatened Sigefrid and Erik with war, but his threat had proved empty. Guthrum did not want war, he just wanted to persuade Alfred that he was doing his best to keep the peace treaty, so if Sigefrid was to be removed, then it would be the West Saxons who did the work, and I who would be responsible for leading them.
I had made my plans. I had written to the king and he, in turn, had written to the ealdormen of the shires, and I had been promised four hundred trained warriors along with the fyrd of Berrocscire. The fyrd was an army of farmers, foresters and labourers, and though it would be numerous it would also be untrained. The four hundred trained men would be the ones I relied on, and spies said Sigefrid now had at least six hundred in the old city. Those same spies said that Haesten had gone back to his camp at Beamfleot, but that was not far from Lundene and he would hurry to reinforce his allies, as would those Danes of East Anglia who hated Guthrum’s Christianity and wanted Sigefrid and Erik to begin their war of conquest. The enemy, I thought, would number at least a thousand, and all of them would be skilled with sword, axe or spear. They would be war-Danes. Enemies to fear.
‘The king,’ Gisela said mildly, ‘will want to know how you plan to do it.’
‘Then I shall tell him,’ I said.
She gave me a dubious glance. ‘You will?’
‘Of course,’ I said, ‘he’s the king.’
She laid the distaff on her lap and frowned at me. ‘You will tell him the truth?’
‘Of course not,’ I said. ‘He may be the king, but I’m not a fool.’
She laughed, which made Stiorra echo the laugh. ‘I wish I could come with you to Lundene,’ Gisela said wistfully.
‘You can’t,’ I said forcefully.
‘I know,’ she answered with uncharacteristic meekness, then touched a hand to her belly. ‘I really can’t.’
I stared at her. I stared a long time as her news settled in my mind. I stared, I smiled and then I laughed. I threw Stiorra high into the air so that her dark hair almost touched the smoke-blackened thatch. ‘Your mother’s pregnant,’ I told the happily squealing child.
‘And it’s all your father’s fault,’ Gisela added sternly.
We were so happy.
Æthelred was my cousin, the son of my mother’s brother. He was a Mercian, though for years now he had been loyal to Alfred of Wessex, and that day in Wintanceaster, in the great church Alfred had built, Æthelred of Mercia received his reward for that loyalty.
He was given Æthelflaed, Alfred’s eldest daughter and second child. She was golden haired and had eyes the colour and brightness of a summer’s sky. Æthelflaed was thirteen or fourteen years old then, the proper age for a girl to marry, and she had grown into a tall young woman with an upright stance and a bold look. She was already as tall as the man who was to be her husband.
Æthelred is a hero now. I hear tales of him, tales told by firelight in Saxon halls the length of England. Æthelred the Bold, Æthelred the Warrior, Æthelred the Loyal. I smile when I hear the stories, but I do not say anything, not even when men ask if it is true that I once knew Æthelred. Of course I knew Æthelred, and it is true that he was a warrior before sickness slowed and stilled him, and he was also bold, though his shrewdest stroke was to pay poets to be his courtiers so that they would make up songs about his prowess. A man could become rich in Æthelred’s court by stringing words like beads.
He was never King of Mercia, though he wanted to be. Alfred made sure of that, for Alfred wanted no king in Mercia. He wanted a loyal follower to be the ruler of Mercia, and he made sure that loyal follower was dependent on West Saxon money, and Æthelred was his chosen man. He was given the title Ealdorman of Mercia, and in all but name he was king, though the Danes of northern Mercia never recognised his authority. They did recognise his power, and that power came from being Alfred’s son-in-law, which was why the Saxon thegns of southern Mercia also accepted him. They may not have liked Ealdorman Æthelred, but they knew he could bring West Saxon troops to confront any southward move by the Danes.
And on a spring day in Wintanceaster,
