you making a name for yourself.’
Æthelwold frowned at me. ‘A name?’ he asked, puzzled.
‘If you become a famous warrior,’ I said, knowing I was right, ‘men will follow you. You’re already a prince, which is dangerous enough, but Alfred won’t want you to become a famous warrior prince, will he?’
‘The pious bastard,’ Æthelwold said. He pushed his long black hair off his face and gazed moodily at Eanflæd, the redhead who was given a room in the tavern and brought it a deal of business. ‘God, she’s pretty,’ he said. ‘He was caught humping a nun once.’
‘Alfred was? A nun?’
‘That’s what I was told. And he was always after girls. Couldn’t keep his breeches buttoned! Now the priests have got hold of him. What I ought to do,’ he went on gloomily, ‘is slit the bastard’s gizzard.’
‘Say that to anyone but me,’ I said, ‘and you’ll be hanged.’
‘I could run off and join the Danes,’ he suggested.
‘You could,’ I said, ‘and they’d welcome you.’
‘Then use me?’ he asked, showing that he was not entirely a fool.
I nodded. ‘You’ll be like Egbert or Burghred, or that new man in Mercia.’
‘Ceolwulf.’
‘King at their pleasure,’ I said. Ceolwulf, a Mercian Ealdorman, had been named king of his country now that Burghred was on his knees in Rome, but Ceolwulf was no more a real king than Burghred had been. He issued coins, of course, and he administered justice, but everyone knew there were Danes in his council chamber and he dared do nothing that would earn their wrath. ‘So is that what you want?’ I asked. ‘To run off to the Danes and be useful to them?’
He shook his head. ‘No.’ He traced a pattern on the table with spilt ale. ‘Better to do nothing,’ he suggested.
‘Nothing?’
‘If I do nothing,’ he said earnestly, ‘then the bastard might die. He’s always ill! He can’t live long, can he? And his son is just a baby. So if he dies I’ll be king! Oh, sweet Jesus!’ This blasphemy was uttered because two priests had entered the tavern, both of them in Æthelwold’s entourage, though they were more like jailers than courtiers and they had come to find him and take him off to his bed.
Beocca did not approve of my friendship with Æthelwold. ‘He’s a foolish creature,’ he warned me.
‘So am I, or so you tell me.’
‘Then you don’t need your foolishness encouraged, do you? Now let us read about how the holy Swithun built the town’s East Gate.’
By the Feast of the Epiphany I could read as well as a clever twelve-year-old, or so Beocca said, and that was good enough for Alfred who did not, after all, require me to read theological texts, but only to decipher his orders, should he ever decide to give me any, and that, of course, was the heart of the matter. Leofric and I wanted to command troops, to which end I had endured Beocca’s teaching and had come to appreciate the holy Swithun’s skill with trout, seagulls and broken eggs, but the granting of those troops depended on the king, and in truth there were not many troops to command.
The West Saxon army was in two parts. The first and smaller part was composed of the king’s own men, his retainers who guarded him and his family. They did nothing else because they were professional warriors, but they were not many and neither Leofric nor I wanted anything to do with them because joining the household guard would mean staying in close proximity to Alfred which, in turn, would mean going to church.
The second part of the army, and by far the largest, was the fyrd, and that, in turn, was divided among the shires. Each shire, under its Ealdorman and reeve, was responsible for raising the fyrd that was supposedly composed of every able-bodied man within the shire boundary. That could raise a vast number of men. Hamptonscir, for example, could easily put three thousand men under arms, and there were nine shires in Wessex capable of summoning similar numbers. Yet, apart from the troops who served the Ealdormen, the fyrd was mostly composed of farmers. Some had a shield of sorts, spears and axes were plentiful enough, but swords and armour were in short supply, and worse, the fyrd was always reluctant to march beyond its shire borders, and even more reluctant to serve when there was work to be done on the farm. At Æsc’s Hill, the one battle the West Saxons had won against the Danes, it had been the household troops who had gained the victory. Divided between Alfred and his brother they had spearheaded the fighting while the fyrd, as it usually did, looked menacing, but only became engaged when the real soldiers had already won the fight. The fyrd, in brief, was about as much use as a hole in a boat’s bottom, but that was where Leofric could expect to find men.
Except there were those ships’ crews getting drunk in Hamtun’s winter taverns and those were the men Leofric wanted, and to get them he had to persuade Alfred to relieve Hacca of their command, and luckily for us Hacca himself came to Cippanhamm and pleaded to be released from the fleet. He prayed daily, he told Alfred, never to see the ocean again. ‘I get seasick, lord.’
Alfred was always sympathetic to men who suffered sickness because he was so often ill himself, and he must have known that Hacca was an inadequate commander of ships, but Alfred’s problem was how to replace him. To which end he summoned four bishops, two abbots and a priest to advise him, and I learned from Beocca that they were all praying about the new appointment. ‘Do something!’ Leofric snarled at me.
‘What the devil am I supposed to do?’
‘You have friends who are priests! Talk to them. Talk to Alfred, Earsling.’ He rarely called me that any more, only when he was angry.
‘He doesn’t like me,’ I said. ‘If I ask him to put us in charge of the fleet he’ll give it to anyone but us. He’ll give it to a bishop, probably.’
‘Hell!’ Leofric said.
In the end it was Eanflæd who saved us. The redhead was a merry soul and had a particular fondness for Leofric, and she heard us arguing and sat down, slapped her hands on the table to silence us, and then asked what we were fighting about. Then she sneezed because she had a cold.
‘I want this useless earsling,’ Leofric jerked his thumb at me, ‘to be named commander of the fleet, only he’s too young, too ugly, too horrible and too pagan, and Alfred’s listening to a pack of bishops who’ll end up naming some wizened old fart who doesn’t know his prow from his prick.’
‘Which bishops?’ Eanflæd wanted to know.
‘Scireburnan, Wintanceaster, Winburnan and Exanceaster,’ I said.
She smiled, sneezed again, and two days later I was summoned to Alfred’s presence. It turned out that the Bishop of Exanceaster was partial to redheads.
Alfred greeted me in his hall; a fine building with beams, rafters and a central stone hearth. His guards watched us from the doorway where a group of petitioners waited to see the king, and a huddle of priests prayed at the hall’s other end, but the two of us were alone by the hearth where Alfred paced up and down as he talked. He said he was thinking of appointing me to command the fleet. Just thinking, he stressed. God, he went on, was guiding his choice, but now he must talk with me to see whether God’s advice chimed with his own intuition. He put great store by intuition.
