The Pale Horseman (30 page)

'I want to know about my enemies,' he said.

'And I found out for you,' I said. `There are roughly two thousand of them.'

'That's what I thought,' he said, then grimaced. 'What's on this cloak?'

'Danish vomit,' I said.

He shuddered. 'Three of them attacked me,' he sounded surprised. 'They kicked and punched
me.'

'I told you, the Danes like good music,' I said, helping him to his feet. 'You're lucky they
didn't kill you.'

'They thought I was Danish,' he said, then spat blood that trickled from his swollen lower
lip.

'Were they drunk?' I asked. You don't even look like a Dane.'

'I pretended I was a musician who couldn't speak,' he mouthed silently at me, then
grinned bloodily, proud of his deception. I did not grin back and he sighed. 'They were very
drunk, but I need to know their mood, Uhtred. Are they confident? Are they readying to
attack?' He paused to wipe more blood from his lips. 'I could only find that out by coming to
see them for myself. Did you see Steapa?'

'Yes.'

'I want to take him back with us.'

'Lord,' I said savagely, 'you are a fool. He's in chains. He's got half a dozen guards.'

'Daniel was in a lion's den, yet he escaped. Saint Paul was imprisoned, yet God freed
him.'

'Then let God look after Steapa,' I said. 'You're coming back with me. Now.'

He bent to relieve a pain in his belly. 'They punched me in the stomach,' he said as he
straightened. In the morning, I thought, he would have a rare black eye to display. He
flinched as a huge cheer sounded from the courtyard and I guessed Steapa had either died or
downed his last opponent.

'I want to see my hall,' Alfred said stubbornly.

'Why?'

'I'm a man who would look at his own home. You can come or stay.'

'Guthrum's there) You want to be recognised? You want to die?'

'Guthrum will be inside, and I just want to look at the outside.'

He would not be dissuaded and so I led him through the court yard to the street, wondering
if I should simply pick him up and carry him away, but in his obdurate mood he would
probably struggle and shout until men came to find out the cause of the noise.

'I wonder what happened to the nuns,' he said as we left the nunnery.

'One of them is being whored in there for pennies,' I said.

'Oh, dear God.' He made the sign of the cross and turned back and I knew he was thinking of
rescuing the woman, so I dragged him onwards.

'This is madness!' I protested.

'It is a necessary madness,' he said calmly, then stopped to lecture me. 'What does
Wessex believe? It thinks I am defeated, it thinks the Danes have won, it readies itself
for the spring and the coming of more Danes. So they must learn something different. They
must learn that the king lives, that he walked among his enemies and that he made fools of
them.'

'That he got given a bloody nose and a black eye,' I said.

'You won't tell then that,' he said, 'any more than you'll tell folk about that wretched
woman who hit me with an eel. We must give men hope, Uhtred, and in the spring that hope will
blossom into victory. Remember Boethius, Uhtred, remember Boethius! Never give up
hope.'

He believed it. He believed that God was protecting him, that he could walk among his
enemies without fear or harm, and to an extent the was right for the Danes were well supplied
with ale, birch wine and mead, and most were much too drunk to care about a bruised man
carrying a broken harp.

No one stopped us going into the royal compound, but there were six black-cloaked guards
at the hall door and I refused to let Alfred get close to them.

'They'll take one look at your bloodied face,' I said, 'and finish what the others
began.'

'Then let me at least go to the church.'

'You want to pray?' I asked sarcastically.

'Yes,' he said simply.

I tried to stop him. 'If you die here,' I said, 'then Iseult dies.'

'That wasn't my doing,' he said.

'You're the king, aren't you?'

'The bishop thought you would join the Danes,' he said. 'And others agreed.'

'I have no friends left among the Danes,' I said. 'They were your hostages and they died.'

'Then I shall pray for their pagan souls,' he said, and pulled away from me and went to the
church door where he instinctively pushed the hood off his head to show respect. I snatched
it back over his hair, shadowing his bruises. He did not resist, but just pushed the door
open and made the sign of the cross.

The church was being used to shelter more of Guthrum's men. There were straw mattresses,
heaps of chain mail, stacks of weapons and a score of men and women, gathered around a
newly-made hearth in the nave. They were playing dice and none took any particular
interest in our arrival until someone shouted that we should shut the door.

'We're leaving,' I said to Alfred. 'You can't pray here.'

He did not answer. He was gazing reverently to where the altar had been, and where a
half-dozen horses were now tethered.

'We're leaving!' I insisted again.

And just then a voice hailed me. It was a voice full of astonishment and I saw one of the
dice players stand and stare at me. A dog ran from the shadows and began to jump up and down,
trying to lick me, and I saw the dog was Nihtgenga and that the man who had recognised me
was Ragnar. Earl Ragnar, my friend. Who I had thought was dead.

Ragnar embraced me. There were tears in both our eyes and for a moment neither of us could
speak, though I retained enough sense to look behind me to make sure Alfred was safe. He was
squatting beside the door, deep in the shadow of a bale of wool, with his cloak's hood drawn
over his face.

'I thought you were dead!' I said to Ragnar.

'I hoped you would come,' he said at the same moment, and for a time we both talked and
neither listened, and then Brida walked from the back of the church and I watched her, seeing
a woman instead of a girl, and she laughed to see me and gave me a decorous kiss.

'Uhtred,' she said my name as a caress. We had been lovers once, though we had been little
more than children then. She was Saxon, but she had chosen the Danish side to be with
Ragnar. The other women in the hall were hung with silver, garnet, jet, amber and gold, but
Brida wore no jewellery other than an ivory comb that held her thick black hair in a pile.
'Uhtred,' she said again.

'Why aren't you dead?' I asked Ragnar. He had been a hostage, and the hostages' lives had
been forfeit the moment Guthrum crossed the frontier.

‘Wulfhere liked us,' Ragnar said. He put an arm around my shoulder and drew me to the
central hearth where the fire blazed.

'This is Uhtred,' he announced to the dice players, 'a Saxon, which makes him scum, of
course, but he is also my friend and my brother. Ale,' he pointed to jars, 'wine. Wulfhere let
us live.'

'And you let him live?'

'Of course we did! He's here. Feasting with Guthrum.'

'Wulfhere? Is he a prisoner?'

'He's an ally!' Ragnar said, thrusting a pot into my hand and pulling me down beside the
fire. 'He's with us now.' He grinned at me, and I laughed for the sheer joy of finding him
alive. He was a big man, golden-haired, open-faced, and as full of mischief, life and
kindness as his father had been.

'Wulfhere used to talk to Brida,' Ragnar went on, 'and through her to me. We liked each
other. Hard to kill a man you like.'

'You persuaded him to change sides?'

'Didn't need a great deal of persuasion,' Ragnar said. 'He could see we were going to win,
and by changing sides he keeps his land, doesn't he? Are you going to drink that ale or just
stare at it?'

I pretended to drink, letting some of the ale drip down my beard, and I remembered
Wulfhere telling me that when the Danes came we must all make what shifts we could to survive.
But Wulfhere? Alfred's cousin and the Ealdorman of Wiltunscir? He had changed sides? So how
many other thegns had followed his example and now served the Danes?

'Who's that?' Brida asked. She was staring at Alfred. He was in shadow, but there was
something oddly mysterious about the way he squatted alone and silent.

'A servant,' I said.

'He can come by the fire.'

'He cannot,' I said harshly. 'I'm punishing him.'

'What did you do?' Brida called to him in English. His face came up and he stared at her,
but the hood still shadowed him.

'Speak, you bastard,' I said, 'and I'll whip you till your bones show.' I could just see his
eyes in the hood's shadow. 'He insulted me,' I spoke in Danish again, 'and I've sworn him to
silence, and for every word he utters he receives ten blows of the whip.'

That satisfied them. Ragnar forgot the strange hooded servant and told me how he had
persuaded Wulfhere to send a messenger to Guthrum, promising to spare the hostages, and how
Guthrum had warned Wulfhere when the attack would come to make sure that the ealdorman had
time to remove the hostages from Alfred's revenge. That, I thought, was why Wulfhere had left
so early on the morning of the attack. He had known the Danes were coming.

‘You call him an ally,' I said. 'Does that make him just a friend? Or a man who will fight
for Guthrum?'

'He's an ally,' Ragnar said, 'and he's sworn to fight for us. At least he's sworn to fight
for the Saxon king.'

'The Saxon king?' I asked, confused, 'Alfred?'

'Not Alfred, no. The true king. The boy who was the other one's son.'

Ragnar meant Æthelwold, who had been heir to Alfred's brother, King Ethelred, and of
course the Danes would want Æthelwold. Whenever they captured a Saxon kingdom they
appointed a Saxon as king, and that gave their conquest a cloak of legality, though the
Saxon never lasted long. Guthrum, who already called himself King of East Anglia, wanted
to be King of Wessex too, but by putting Æthelwold on the throne he might attract other West
Saxons who could convince themselves they were fighting for the true heir. And once the fight
was over and Danish rule established Æthelwold would be quietly killed.

'But Wulfhere will fight for you?' I persisted.

'Of course he will if he wants to keep his land,' Ragnar said, then grimaced. 'But what
fighting? We just sit here like sheep and do nothing!'

'It's winter.'

'Best time to fight. Nothing else to do.' He wanted to know where I had been since Yule and
I said I had been deep inside Defnascir. He assumed I had been making sure my family was
safe, and he also assumed I had now come to Cippanhamm to join him.

'You're not sworn to Alfred, are you?' he asked.

'Who knows where Alfred is?' I evaded the question.

'You were sworn to him,' he said reproachfully.

'I was sworn to him,' I said, truthfully enough, 'but only for a year, and that year has
long ended.'

That was no lie, I just did not tell Ragnar I had sworn myself to Alfred once again.

'So you can join me?' he asked eagerly. 'You'll give me your oath?'

I took the question lightly, though in truth it worried me.

'You want my oath?' I asked, 'just so I can sit here like a sheep doing nothing?'

'We make some raids,' Ragnar said defensively, 'and men are guarding the swamp. That's
where Alfred is. In the swamps. But Svein will dig him out.' So Guthrum and his men had yet to
hear that Svein's fleet was ashes beside the sea.

'So why are you just sitting here?' I asked.

'Because Guthrum won't divide his army,' Ragnar said. I half smiled at that because I
remembered Ragnar's grandfather advising Guthrum never to divide an army again. Guthrum
had done that at Iusc's Hill and that had been the first victory of the West Saxons over the
Danes. He had done it again when he abandoned Werham to attack Exanceaster, and the part of
his army that went by sea was virtually destroyed by the storm.

'I've told him,' Ragnar said, 'that we should split the army into a dozen parts. Take a
dozen more towns and garrison them. All those places in southern Wessex, we should capture
them, but he won't listen.'

'Guthrum holds the north and east,' I said, as if I was defending him.

'And we should have the rest! But instead we're waiting till spring in hope more men will
join us. Which they will. There's land here, good land. Better than the land up north.' He
seemed to have forgotten the matter of my oath. I knew he would want me to join him, but
instead he talked of what happened in Northumbria, how our enemies, Kjartan and Sven,
thrived in Dunholm, and how that father and son dared not leave the fortress for fear of
Ragnar's revenge. They had taken his sister captive and, so far as Ragnar knew, they held
her still, and Ragnar, like me, was sworn to kill them. He had no news of Bebbanburg other
than that my treacherous uncle still lived and held the fortress.

'When we've finished with Wessex,' Ragnar promised me, 'we shall go north. You and I
together. We'll carry swords to Dunholm.'

'Swords to Dunholm,' I said and raised my pot of ale.

I did not drink much, or if I did it seemed to have little effect. I was thinking, sitting
there, that with one sentence I could finish Alfred for ever. I could betray him, I could
have him dragged in front of Guthrum and then watch as he died. Guthrum would even forgive me
the insults to his mother if I gave him Alfred, and thus I could finish Wessex, for without
Alfred there was no man about whom the fyrd would muster. I could stay with my friend, Ragnar,
I could earn more arm rings, I could make a name that would be celebrated wherever Northmen
sailed their long ships, and all it would take was one sentence.

And I was so tempted that night in Cippanhamm's royal church. There is such joy in chaos.
Stow all the world's evils behind a door and tell men that they must never, ever, open the
door, and it will be opened because there is pure joy in destruction. At one moment, when
Ragnar was bellowing with laughter and slapping my shoulder so hard that it hurt, I felt
the words form on my tongue. That is Alfred, I would have said, pointing at him, and all my
world would have changed and there would have been no more England. Yet, at the last moment,
when the first word was on my tongue, I choked it back. Brida was watching me, her shrewd eyes
calm, and I caught her gaze and I thought of Iseult. In a year or two, I thought, Iseult would
look like Brida. They had the same tense beauty, the same dark colouring and the same
smouldering fire in the soul. If I spoke, I thought, Iseult would be dead, and I could not bear
that. And I thought of Æthelflaed, Alfred's daughter, and knew she would be enslaved, and
also knew that wherever the remnants of the Saxons gathered about their fires of exile my
name would be cursed. I would be Uhtredaerwe for ever, the man who destroyed a people.