it means is that they’ve sent monks to stir up trouble. I doubt it will amount to much. Anyway, once we’ve settled with Alfred we can go back. Go home, eh?’
But settling with Alfred was not as easy as Halfdan or Ragnar had supposed. It was true that Alfred was the supplicant and that he wanted peace because the Danish forces had been raiding deep into Wessex, but he was not ready to collapse as Burghred had yielded in Mercia. When Halfdan proposed that Alfred stay king, but that the Danes occupy the chief West Saxon forts, Alfred threatened to walk out and continue the war. ‘You insult me,’ he said calmly. ‘If you wish to take the fortresses, then come and take them.’
‘We will,’ Halfdan threatened and Alfred merely shrugged as if to say the Danes were welcome to try, but Halfdan knew, as all the Danes knew, that their campaign had failed. It was true that we had scoured large swathes of Wessex, we had taken much treasure, slaughtered or captured livestock, burned mills and homes and churches, but the price had been high. Many of our best men were dead or else so badly wounded that they would be forced to live off their lords’ charity for the rest of their days. We had also failed to take a single West Saxon fortress, which meant that when winter came we would be forced to withdraw to the safety of Lundene or Mercia.
Yet if the Danes were exhausted by the campaign, so were the West Saxons. They had also lost many of their best men, they had lost treasure and Alfred was worried that the Britons, the ancient enemy who had been defeated by his ancestors, might flood out of their fastnesses in Wales and Cornwalum. Yet Alfred would not succumb to his fears, he would not meekly give in to Halfdan’s demands, though he knew he must meet some of them, and so the bargaining went on for a week and I was surprised by Alfred’s stubbornness.
He was not an impressive man to look at. There was something spindly about him, and his long face had a weak cast, but that was a deception. He never smiled as he faced Halfdan, he rarely took those clever brown eyes off his enemy’s face, he pressed his point tediously and he was always calm, never raising his voice even when the Danes were screaming at him. ‘What we want,’ he explained again and again, ‘is peace. You need it, and it is my duty to give it to my country. So you will leave my country.’ His priests, Beocca among them, wrote down every word, filling precious sheets of parchment with endless lines of script. They must have used every drop of ink in Wessex to record that meeting and I doubt anyone ever read the whole account.
Not that the meetings went on all day. Alfred insisted they could not start until he had attended church, and he broke at midday for more prayer, and he finished before sundown so that he could return to the church. How that man prayed! But his patient bargaining was just as remorseless, and in the end Halfdan agreed to evacuate Wessex, but only on payment of six thousand pieces of silver and, to make sure it was paid, he insisted that his forces must remain in Readingum where Alfred was required to deliver three wagons of fodder daily and five wagons of rye grain. When the silver was paid, Halfdan promised, the ships would slide back down the Temes and Wessex would be free of pagans. Alfred argued against allowing the Danes to stay in Readingum, insisting that they withdraw east of Lundene, but in the end, desperate for peace, he accepted that they could remain in the town and so, with solemn oaths on both sides, the peace was made.
I was not there when the conference ended, nor was Brida. We had been there most days, serving as Ravn’s eyes in the big Roman hall where the talking went on, but when we got bored, or rather when Ravn was tired of our boredom, we would go to the bath and swim. I loved that water.
We were swimming on the day before the talking finished. There were just the two of us in the great echoing chamber. I liked to stand where the water gushed in from a hole in a stone, letting it cascade over my long hair, and I was standing there, eyes closed, when I heard Brida squeal. I opened my eyes and just then a pair of strong hands gripped my shoulders. My skin was slippery and I twisted away, but a man in a leather coat jumped into the bath, told me to be quiet, and seized me again. Two other men were wading across the pool, using long staves to shepherd Brida to the water’s edge. ‘What are you …’ I began to ask, using Danish.
‘Quiet, boy,’ one of the men answered. He was a West Saxon and there were a dozen of them, and when they had pulled our wet naked bodies out of the water they wrapped us in big, stinking cloaks, scooped up our clothes and hurried us away. I shouted for help and was rewarded by a thump on my head that might have stunned an ox.
We were pushed over the saddles of two horses and then we travelled for some time with men mounted behind us, and the cloaks were only taken off at the top of the big hill that overlooks Baðum from the south. And there, beaming at us, was Beocca. ‘You are rescued, lord,’ he said to me, ‘praise Almighty God, you are rescued! As are you, my lady,’ he added to Brida.
I could only stare at him. Rescued? Kidnapped, more like. Brida looked at me, and I at her, and she gave the smallest shake of her head as if to suggest we should keep silent, at least I took it to mean that, and did so, then Beocca told us to get dressed.
I had slipped my hammer amulet and my arm rings into my belt pouch when I undressed and I left them there as Beocca hurried us into a nearby church, little more than a wood and straw shack that was no bigger than a peasant’s pigsty, and there he gave thanks to God for our deliverance. Afterwards he took us to a nearby hall where we were introduced to Ælswith, Alfred’s wife, who was attended by a dozen women, three of them nuns, and guarded by a score of heavily armed men.
Ælswith was a small woman with mouse-brown hair, small eyes, a small mouth and a very determined chin. She was wearing a blue dress which had angels embroidered in silver thread about its skirt and about the hem of its wide sleeves, and she wore a heavy crucifix of gold. A baby was in a wooden cradle beside her and later, much later, I realised that the baby must have been Æthelflaed, so that was the very first time I ever saw her, though I thought nothing of it at the time. Ælswith welcomed me, speaking in the distinctive tones of a Mercian, and after she had enquired about my parentage, she told me we had to be related because her father was Æthelred who had been an Ealdorman in Mercia, and he was first cousin to the late lamented Æthelwulf whose body I had seen outside Readingum. ‘And now you,’ she turned to Brida, ‘Father Beocca tells me you are niece to the holy King Edmund?’
Brida just nodded.
‘But who are your parents?’ Ælswith demanded, frowning. ‘Edmund had no brothers, and his two sisters are nuns.’
‘Hild,’ Brida said. I knew that had been the name of her aunt, whom Brida had hated.
‘Hild?’ Ælswith was puzzled, more than puzzled, suspicious. ‘Neither of good King Edmund’s sisters are called Hild.’
‘I’m not his niece,’ Brida confessed in a small voice.
‘Ah.’ Ælswith leaned back in her chair, her sharp face showing the look of satisfaction some people assume when they have caught a liar telling an untruth.
‘But I was taught to call him uncle,’ Brida went on, surprising me, for I thought she had found herself in an impossible quandary and was confessing the lie, but instead, I realised, she was embroidering it. ‘My mother was called Hild and she had no husband but she insisted I call King Edmund uncle,’ she spoke in a small, frightened voice, ‘and he liked that.’
‘He liked it?’ Ælswith snapped. ‘Why?’
‘Because,’ Brida said, and then blushed, and how she made herself blush I do not know, but she lowered her eyes, reddened and looked as if she were about to burst into tears.
‘Ah,’ Ælswith said again, catching on to the girl’s meaning and blushing herself. ‘So he was your …’ she did not finish, not wanting to accuse the dead and holy King
