Halfdan lost as well. He was attacking uphill, climbing a smooth gentle slope, but it was late in the day and the sun was in his men’s eyes, or so they said afterwards, and King Æthelred, like Alfred, encouraged his men so well that they launched a howling downhill attack that bit deep into Halfdan’s ranks, who became discouraged when they saw the lower army retreating from Alfred’s stubborn defence. There were no angels with fiery swords present, despite what the priests now say. At least I saw none. There was a waterlogged ditch, there was a battle, the Danes lost and destiny changed.
I did not know the Danes could lose, but at fourteen years old I learned that lesson and, for the first time I heard Saxon cheers and jeers, and something hidden in my soul stirred.
And we went back to Readingum.
There was plenty more fighting as winter turned to spring and spring to summer. New Danes came with the new year, and our ranks were thus restored, and we won all our subsequent encounters with the West Saxons, twice fighting them at Basengas in Hamptonscir, then at Mereton, which was in Wiltunscir and thus deep inside their territory, and again in Wiltunscir at Wiltun, and each time we won, which meant we held the battlefield at day’s end, but at none of those clashes did we destroy the enemy. Instead we wore each other out, fought each other to a bloody standstill, and as summer caressed the land we were no nearer conquering Wessex than we had been at Yule.
But we did manage to kill King Æthelred. That happened at Wiltun where the king received a deep axe wound to his left shoulder and, though he was hurried from the field, and though priests and monks prayed over his sickbed, and though cunning men treated him with herbs and leeches, he died after a few days.
And he left an heir, an ætheling, Æthelwold. He was Prince Æthelwold, eldest son of Æthelred, but he was not old enough to be his own master for, like me, he was only fifteen, yet even so some men proclaimed his right to be named the King of Wessex, but Alfred had far more powerful friends and he deployed the legend of the Pope having invested him as the future king. The legend must have worked its magic for, sure enough, at the meeting of the Wessex witan, which was the assembly of nobles, bishops and powerful men, Alfred was acclaimed as the new king. Perhaps the witan had no choice. Wessex, after all, was desperately fighting off Halfdan’s forces and it would have been a bad time to make a boy into a king. Wessex needed a leader and so the witan chose Alfred, and Æthelwold and his younger brother were whisked off to an abbey where they were told to get on with their lessons. ‘Alfred should have murdered the little bastards,’ Ragnar told me cheerfully, and he was probably right.
So Alfred, the youngest of six brothers, was now the King of Wessex. The year was 871. I did not know it then, but Alfred’s wife had just given birth to a daughter he named Æthelflaed. Æthelflaed was fifteen years younger than me and even if I had known of her birth I would have dismissed it as unimportant. But destiny is all. The spinners work and we do their will whether we will or not.
Alfred’s first act as king, other than to bury his brother and put his nephews away in a monastery and have himself crowned and go to church a hundred times and weary God’s ears with unceasing prayers, was to send messengers to Halfdan proposing a conference. He wanted peace, it seemed, and as it was midsummer and we were no nearer to victory than we had been at midwinter, Halfdan agreed to the meeting, and so, with his army’s leaders and a bodyguard of picked men, he went to Baðum.
I went too, with Ragnar, Ravn and Brida. Rorik, still sick, stayed in Readingum and I was sorry he did not see Baðum for, though it was only a small town, it was almost as marvellous as Lundene. There was a bath in the town’s centre, not a small tub, but an enormous building with pillars and a crumbling roof above a great stone hollow that was filled with hot water. The water came from the underworld and Ragnar was certain that it was heated by the forges of the dwarves. The bath, of course, had been built by the Romans, as had all the other extraordinary buildings in Baðum’s valley. Not many men wanted to get into the bath because they feared water even though they loved their ships, but Brida and I went in and I discovered she could swim like a fish. I clung to the edge and marvelled at the strange experience of having hot water all over my naked skin.
Beocca found us there. The centre of Baðum was covered by a truce which meant no man could carry weapons there, and West Saxons and Danes mixed amicably enough in the streets so there was nothing to stop Beocca searching for me. He came to the bath with two other priests, both gloomy-looking men with running noses, and they watched as Beocca leaned down to me. ‘I saw you come in here,’ he said, then he noticed Brida who was swimming underwater, her long black hair streaming, then she reared up and he could not miss her small breasts and he recoiled as though she were the devil’s handmaid. ‘She’s a girl, Uhtred!’
‘I know,’ I said.
‘Naked!’
‘God is good,’ I said.
He stepped forward to slap me, but I pushed myself away from the edge of the bath and he nearly fell in. The other two priests were staring at Brida. God knows why. They probably had wives, but priests, I have found, get very excited about women. So do warriors, but we do not shake like aspens just because a girl shows us her tits. Beocca tried to ignore her, though that was difficult because Brida swam up behind me and put her arms around my waist. ‘You must slip away,’ Beocca whispered to me.
‘Slip away?’
‘From the pagans! Come to our quarters, we’ll hide you.’
‘Who is he?’ Brida asked me. She spoke in Danish.
‘He was a priest I knew at home,’ I said.
‘Ugly, isn’t he?’ she said.
‘You have to come,’ Beocca hissed at me. ‘We need you!’
‘You need me?’
He leaned even closer. ‘There’s unrest in Northumbria, Uhtred. You must have heard what happened.’ He paused to make the sign of the cross. ‘All those monks and nuns slaughtered! They were murdered! A terrible thing, Uhtred, but God will not be mocked. There is to be a rising in Northumbria and Alfred will encourage it. If we can say that Uhtred of Bebbanburg is on our side it will help!’
I doubted it would help at all. I was fifteen and hardly old enough to inspire men into making suicidal attacks on Danish strongholds. ‘She’s not a Dane,’ I told Beocca, who I did not think would have said these things if he believed Brida could understand them, ‘she’s from East Anglia.’
He stared at her. ‘East Anglia?’
I nodded, then let mischief have its way. ‘She’s the niece of King Edmund,’ I lied, and Brida giggled and ran a hand down my body to try to make me laugh.
Beocca made the sign of the cross again. ‘Poor man! A martyr! Poor girl.’ Then he frowned. ‘But …’ he began, then stopped, quite incapable of understanding why the dreaded Danes allowed two of their prisoners to frolic naked in a bath of hot water, then he closed his squinty eyes because he saw where Brida’s hand had come to rest. ‘We must get you both out of here,’ he said urgently, ‘to a place where you can learn God’s ways.’
‘I should like that,’ I said and Brida squeezed so hard that I almost cried out in pain.
‘Our quarters are to the south of here,’ Beocca said, ‘across the river and on top of the hill. Go there, Uhtred, and we shall take you away. Both of you.’
Of course I did no such thing. I told Ragnar, who laughed at my invention that Brida was King Edmund’s
