‘Beyond the street?’ I spoke English again.
‘Yes, lord,’ he said.
‘And when does Bjorn disturb your land again?’
‘The day after tomorrow, lord. He will come after moonrise.’
‘You are sent to guide me?’
‘Yes, lord.’
We rode next day. Gisela wanted to come, but I would not allow her for I did not wholly trust the summons, and because of that mistrust I rode with six men; Finan, Clapa, Sihtric, Rypere, Eadric and Cenwulf. The last three were Saxons, Clapa and Sihtric were Danes, and Finan was the fiery Irishman who commanded my household troops, and all six were my oath-men. My life was theirs as theirs was mine. Gisela stayed behind Coccham’s walls, guarded by the fyrd and by the remainder of my household troops.
We rode in mail and we carried weapons. We went west and north first because the Temes was winter swollen and we had to ride a long way upstream to find a ford shallow enough to be crossed. That was at Welengaford, another burh, and I noted how the earth walls were unfinished and how the timber to make the palisades lay rotting and untrimmed in the mud. The commander of the garrison, a man named Oslac, wanted to know why we crossed the river, and it was his right to know because he guarded this part of the frontier between Wessex and lawless Mercia. I said a fugitive had fled Coccham and was thought to be skulking on the Temes’s northern bank, and Oslac believed the tale. It would reach Alfred soon enough.
The man who had brought the summons was our guide. He was called Huda and he told me he served a Dane named Eilaf who had an estate that bordered the eastern side of Wæclingastræt. That made Eilaf an East Anglian and a subject of King Guthrum. ‘Is Eilaf a Christian?’ I asked Huda.
‘We are all Christians, lord,’ Huda said, ‘King Guthrum demands it.’
‘So what does Eilaf wear about his neck?’ I asked.
‘The same as you, lord,’ he said. I wore Thor’s hammer because I was no Christian and Huda’s answer told me that Eilaf, like me, worshipped the older gods, though to please his king, Guthrum, he pretended to a belief in the Christian god. I had known Guthrum in the days when he had led great armies to attack Wessex, but he was getting old now. He had adopted his enemy’s religion and it seemed he no longer wanted to rule all Britain, but was content with the wide fertile fields of East Anglia as his kingdom. Yet there were many in his lands who were not content. Sigefrid, Erik, Haesten, and probably Eilaf. They were Norsemen and Danes, they were warriors, they sacrificed to Thor and to Odin, they kept their swords sharp and they dreamed, as all Northmen dream, of the richer lands of Wessex.
We rode through Mercia, the land without a king, and I noted how many farmsteads had been burned so that the only trace of their existence was now a patch of scorched earth where weeds grew. More weeds smothered what had been ploughland. Hazel saplings had invaded the pastures. Where folk did still live, they lived in fear and when they saw us coming they ran to the woodlands, or else shut themselves behind palisades. ‘Who rules here?’ I asked Huda.
‘Danes,’ he said, then jerked his head westwards, ‘Saxons over there.’
‘Eilaf doesn’t want this land?’
‘He has much of it, lord,’ Huda said, ‘but the Saxons harass him.’
According to the treaty between Alfred and Guthrum this land was Saxon, but the Danes are land hungry and Guthrum could not control all his thegns. So this was battle land, a place where both sides fought a sullen, small and endless war, and the Danes were offering me its crown.
I am a Saxon. A northerner. I am Uhtred of Bebbanburg, but I had been raised by the Danes and I knew their ways. I spoke their tongue, I had married a Dane, and I worshipped their gods. If I were to be king here then the Saxons would know they had a Saxon ruler while the Danes would accept me because I had been as a son to Earl Ragnar. But to be king here was to turn on Alfred and, if the dead man had spoken truly, to put Alfred’s drunken nephew on the throne of Wessex, and how long would Æthelwold last? Less than a year, I reckoned, before the Danes killed him, and then all England would be under Danish rule except for Mercia where I, a Saxon who thought like a Dane, would be king. And how long would the Danes tolerate me?
‘Do you want to be a king?’ Gisela had asked me the night before we rode.
‘I never thought I did,’ I answered cautiously.
‘Then why go?’
I had stared into the fire. ‘Because the dead man brings a message from the Fates,’ I told her.
She had touched her amulet. ‘The Fates can’t be avoided,’ she said softly. Wyrd bið ful ãræd.
‘So I must go,’ I said, ‘because fate demands it. And because I want to see a dead man talk.’
‘And if the dead man says you are to be a king?’
‘Then you will be a queen,’ I said.
‘And you will fight Alfred?’ Gisela asked.
‘If the Fates say so,’ I said.
‘And your oath to him?’
‘The Fates know that answer,’ I said, ‘but I don’t.’
And now we rode beneath beech-covered hills that slanted east and north. We spent the night in a deserted farm and one of us was always awake. Nothing disturbed us and, in the dawn, under a sky the colour of sword-steel, we rode on. Huda led, mounted on one of my horses. I talked to him for a while to discover that he was a huntsman and that he had served a Saxon lord killed by Eilaf, and that he reckoned himself content under the Dane’s lordship. His replies became surlier and shorter as we neared Wæclingastræt so, after a while, I dropped back to ride beside Finan. ‘Trust him?’ Finan asked, nodding at Huda.
I shrugged. ‘His master does Sigefrid and Haesten’s bidding,’ I said, ‘and I know Haesten. I saved his life and that means something.’
Finan thought about it. ‘You saved his life? How?’
‘I rescued him from some Frisians. He became my oath-man.’
‘And broke his oath?’
‘He did.’
‘So Haesten can’t be trusted,’ Finan said firmly. I said nothing. Three deer stood poised for flight at the far side of a bare pasture. We rode on an overgrown track beside a hedgerow where crocuses grew. ‘What they want,’ Finan went on, ‘is Wessex. And to take Wessex they must fight. And they know you are Alfred’s greatest warrior.’
‘What they want,’ I said, ‘is the burh at Coccham.’ And to get it they would offer me the crown of Mercia, though I had not revealed that offer to Finan or to any other man. I had only told Gisela.
Of course they wanted much more. They wanted Lundene because it gave them a walled town on the Temes, but Lundene was on the Mercian bank and would not help them invade Wessex. But if I gave them Coccham then they were on the river’s south bank and they could use Coccham as a base to raid deep into Wessex. At the very least Alfred would pay them to leave Coccham and so they would make much silver even if they failed to dislodge him from the throne.
