‘I wish to know about Guthred’s sister.’
Offa half smiled. ‘That one! She’s a nun.’
‘Gisela!’ I was shocked. ‘A nun? She’s become a Christian?’
‘I doubt she’s a Christian,’ Offa said, ‘but going into a nunnery protected her.’
‘From whom?’
‘Kjartan. He wanted the girl as a bride for his son.’
That did surprise me. ‘But Kjartan hates Guthred,’ I said.
‘But even so Kjartan decided Guthred’s sister would be a suitable bride for his one-eyed son,’ Offa said. ‘I suspect he wants the son to be king in Eoferwic one day, and marrying Guthred’s sister would help that ambition. Whatever, he sent men to Eoferwic and offered Guthred money, peace and a promise to stop molesting Christians and I think Guthred was half tempted.’
‘How could he be?’
‘Because a desperate man needs allies. Perhaps, for a day or two, Guthred dreamed of separating Ivarr and Kjartan. He certainly needs money, and Guthred has the fatal mind of a man who always believes the best in other people. His sister isn’t so burdened with charitable ideas, and she would have none of it. She fled to a nunnery.’
‘When was this?’
‘Last year. Kjartan took her rejection as another insult and has threatened to let his men rape her one by one.’
‘She’s still in the nunnery?’
‘She was when I left Eoferwic. She’s safe from marriage there, isn’t she? Perhaps she doesn’t like men. Lots of nuns don’t. But I doubt her brother will leave her there for very much longer. She’s too useful as a peace cow.’
‘To marry Kjartan’s son?’ I asked scornfully.
‘That won’t happen,’ Offa said. He poured himself more ale. ‘Father Hrothweard, you know who he is?’
‘A nasty man,’ I said, remembering how Hrothweard had raised the mob in Eoferwic to murder the Danes.
‘Hrothweard is an exceedingly unpleasant creature,’ Offa agreed with rare enthusiasm. ‘He was the one who suggested the church tax on the Danes. He’s also suggested that Guthred’s sister becomes your uncle’s new wife, and that notion probably does have some appeal to Guthred. Ælfric needs a wife, and if he were willing to send his spearmen south then it would hugely increase Guthred’s strength.’
‘It would leave Bebbanburg unprotected,’ I said.
‘Sixty men can hold Bebbanburg till Judgment Day,’ Offa said dismissively. ‘Guthred needs a larger army, and two hundred men from Bebbanburg would be a Godsend, and certainly worth a sister. Mind you, Ivarr would do anything to stop that marriage. He doesn’t want the Saxons of northern Northumbria uniting with the Christians of Eoferwic. So, lord,’ he pushed his bench back as if to suggest that his survey was finished, ‘Britain is at peace, except for Northumbria, where Guthred is in trouble.’
‘No trouble in Mercia?’ I asked.
He shook his head. ‘Nothing unusual.’
‘East Anglia?’
He paused. ‘No trouble there,’ he said after the hesitation, but I knew the pause had been deliberate, a bait on a hook, and so I waited. Offa just looked innocently at me and so I sighed, took another coin from my purse and placed it on the table. He rang it to make sure the silver was good. ‘King Æthelstan,’ he said, ‘Guthrum as was, negotiates with Alfred. Alfred doesn’t think I know, but I do. Together they will divide England.’
‘They?’ I asked. ‘Divide England? It’s not theirs to divide!’
‘The Danes will be given Northumbria, East Anglia and the north-eastern parts of Mercia. Wessex will gain the south-western part of Mercia.’
I stared at him. ‘Alfred won’t agree to that,’ I said.
‘He will.’
‘He wants all England,’ I protested.
‘He wants Wessex to be safe,’ Offa said, spinning the coin on the table.
‘So he’ll agree to give up half England?’ I asked in disbelief.
Offa smiled. ‘Think of it this way, lord,’ he said. ‘In Wessex there are no Danes, but where the Danes rule there are many Saxons. If the Danes agree not to attack Alfred then he can feel safe. But how can the Danes ever feel safe? Even if Alfred agrees not to attack them, they still have thousands of Saxons on their land and those Saxons could rise against them at any time, especially if they receive encouragement from Wessex. King Æthelstan will make his treaty with Alfred, but it won’t be worth the parchment it’s scribbled on.’
‘You mean Alfred will break the treaty?’
‘Not openly, no. But he will encourage Saxon revolt, he will support Christians, he will foment trouble, and all the time he will say his prayers and swear eternal friendship with the enemy. You all think of Alfred as a pious scholar, but his ambition embraces all the land between here and Scotland. You see him praying, I see him dreaming. He will send missionaries to the Danes and you will think that’s all he does, but whenever a Saxon kills a Dane then Alfred will have supplied the blade.’
‘No,’ I said, ‘not Alfred. His god won’t let him be treacherous.’
‘What do you know of Alfred’s god?’ Offa asked scornfully, then closed his eyes. ‘“Then the Lord our God delivered the enemy to us,”’ he intoned, ‘“and we struck him, and his sons, and all his tribe. We took all his cities and utterly destroyed the men, and the women, and the little children.”’ He opened his eyes. ‘Those are the actions of Alfred’s god, Lord Uhtred. You want more from the holy scriptures? “The Lord thy God shall deliver all thy enemies to thee and thou shalt smite them and utterly destroy them.”’ Offa grimaced. ‘Alfred believes in God’s promises, and he dreams of a land free of pagans, a land where the enemy is utterly destroyed and where only godly Christians live. If there is one man in the island of Britain to fear, Lord Uhtred, that man is King Alfred.’ He stood. ‘I must make sure those stupid women have fed my dogs.’
I watched him go and I thought he was a clever man who had misunderstood Alfred.
Which was, of course, what Alfred wanted me to think.
Seven
The Witan was the royal council, formed by the leading men of the kingdom, and it assembled for the dedication of Alfred’s new church and to celebrate Æthelflaed’s betrothal to my cousin. Ragnar and I had no business in their discussions so we drank in the town’s taverns while they talked. Brida had been allowed to join us and Ragnar was the happier for it. She was an East Anglian Saxon and had once been my lover, but that had been years before when we were both children. Now she was a woman and more Danish than the Danes. She and Ragnar had never formally married, but she was his friend, lover, adviser and sorceress. He was fair and she was dark, he ate like a boar while she picked at her food, he was raucous and she was quietly wise, but together they were happiness. I spent hours telling her about Gisela, and Brida listened patiently. ‘You really think she’s waited for you?’ she asked me.
‘I hope so,’ I said and touched Thor’s hammer.
‘Poor girl,’ Brida said, smiling. ‘So you’re in love?’
‘Yes.’
‘Again,’ she said.
The three of us were in the Two Cranes on the day before Æthelflaed’s formal betrothal and Father Beocca found us there. His hands were filthy with ink. ‘You’ve been writing again,’ I accused him.
‘We are making lists of the shire fyrds,’ he explained. ‘Every man between twelve and sixty has to take an oath to serve the king now. I’m compiling the lists, but we’ve run out of ink.’
‘No wonder,’ I said, ‘it’s all on you.’
‘They’re mixing a new pot,’ he said, ignoring me, ‘and that will take time, so I thought you’d like to see the new church.’
‘I’ve been dreaming of little else,’ I said.
He insisted on taking us and the church was, indeed, a thing of utter splendour. It was bigger than any hall I had ever seen. It soared to a great height, its roof held up by massive oak beams that had been carved with saints and kings. The carvings had been painted, while the crowns of the
kings and the haloes and wings of the saints glinted with gold leaf that Beocca said had been applied by craftsmen brought from Frankia. The floor was stone-flagged, all of it, so that no rushes were needed and dogs were confused where to piss. Alfred had made a rule that no dogs were allowed in the church, but they got in anyway, so he had appointed a warden who was given a whip and charged with driving the animals out of the big nave, but the warden had lost a leg to a Danish war axe at Ethandun and he could only move slowly, so the dogs had no trouble avoiding him. The lower part of the church’s walls were built of dressed stone, but the upper parts and the roof were of timber, and just below the roof were high windows that were filled with scraped horn so the rain could not come in. Every scrap of the walls was covered with stretched leather panels painted with pictures of heaven and hell. Heaven was populated with Saxons while hell seemed to be the abode of Danes, though I noticed, with surprise, that a couple of priests seemed to have tumbled down to the devil’s flames. ‘There are bad priests,’ Beocca assured me earnestly. ‘Not many, of course.’
‘And there are good priests,’ I said, pleasing Beocca, ‘talking of which, do you hear anything of Father Pyrlig?’ Pyrlig was a Briton who had fought beside me at Ethandun and I was fond of him. He spoke Danish and had been sent to be one of Guthrum’s priests in East Anglia.
‘He does the Lord’s work,’ Beocca said enthusiastically. ‘He says the Danes are being baptised in great numbers! I truly believe we are seeing the conversion of the pagans.’
‘Not this pagan,’ Ragnar said.
Beocca shook his head. ‘Christ will come to you one day, Lord Ragnar, and you will be astonished by his grace.’
Ragnar said nothing. I could see, though, that he was as impressed as I was by Alfred’s new church. The tomb of Saint Swithun was railed in silver and lay in front of the high altar that was covered with a red cloth as big as a dragon-boat’s sail. On the altar were a dozen fine wax candles in silver holders that flanked a big silver cross inlaid with gold that Ragnar muttered would be worth a month’s voyaging to capture. Either side of the cross were reliquaries; boxes and flasks of silver and gold, all studded with jewels, and some had small crystal windows through which the relics could be glimpsed. Mary Magdalene’s toe ring was there, and what remained of the feather from the dove that Noah had released from the ark. There was Saint Kenelm’s horn spoon, a flask of dust from Saint Hedda’s tomb, and a hoof from the donkey that Jesus rode into Jerusalem. The cloth with which Mary Magdalene had washed Jesus’s feet was encased in a great golden chest and next to it, and quite dwarfed by the gold’s splendour, were Saint Oswald’s teeth, the gift from Guthred. The two teeth were still encased in their silver oyster pot which looked very shabby compared to the other vessels. Beocca showed us all the holy treasures, but was most proud of a scrap of bone displayed behind a shard of milky crystal. ‘I found this one,’ he said, ‘and it’s most exciting!’ He lifted the lid of the box and took out the bone, which looked like something left over from a bad stew. ‘It’s Saint Cedd’s aestel!’ Beocca said with awe in his voice. He made the sign of the cross and peered at the yellowed bone sliver with his one good eye as if the arrow-head shaped relic had just dropped from heaven.
‘Saint Cedd’s what?’ I asked.
‘His aestel.’
‘What’s an aestel?’ Ragnar asked. His English, after years of being a hostage, was good, but some words still confused him.
‘An aestel is a device to help reading,’ Beocca said. ‘You use it to follow the lines. It’s a pointer.’
‘What’s wrong with a finger?’ Ragnar wanted to know.
‘It can smear the ink. An aestel is clean.’
‘And that one really belonged to Saint Cedd?’ I asked, pretending to be amazed.
‘It did, it did,’ Beocca said, almost delirious with wonder, ‘the holy Cedd’s very own aestel. I discovered it! It was in a little church in Dornwaraceaster and the priest there was an ignorant fellow and had no idea what it was. It was in a horn box and Saint Cedd’s name was scratched on the box and the priest couldn’t even read the writing! A priest! Illiterate! So I confiscated it.’
‘You mean you stole it?’
‘I took it into safekeeping!’ he said, offended.
‘And when you’re a saint,’ I said, ‘someone will put one of those smelly shoes of yours into a golden box and worship it.’
Beocca blushed. ‘You tease me, Uhtred, you tease me.’ He laughed, but I saw from his blush that I had touched on his secret ambition. He wanted to be declared a saint, and why not? He was a good man, far better than many I have known who are now revered as saints.
Brida and I visited Hild that afternoon and I gave her nunnery thirty shillings, almost all the money I had, but Ragnar was blithely confident that Sverri’s fortune would come from Jutland and that Ragnar would share with me, and in that belief I pressed the money on Hild who was delighted by the silver cross in Serpent-Breath’s hilt. ‘You must use the sword wisely from now on,’ she told me sternly.
‘I always use it wisely.’
‘You have harnessed the power of God to the blade,’ she said, ‘and it must do nothing evil.’
I doubted I would obey that command, but it was good to see Hild. Alfred had given her a gift of some of the dust from Saint Hedda’s tomb and she told me that mixed with curds it made a miraculous medicine that had prompted at least a dozen cures among the nunnery’s sick. ‘If you are ever ill,’ she said, ‘you must come here and we shall mix the dust with fresh curds and anoint you.’
I saw Hild again the next day when we were all summoned to the church for its consecration and to witness Æthelflaed’s betrothal. Hild, with all the other nuns of Wintanceaster, was in the side aisle, while Ragnar, Brida and I, because we arrived late, had to stand at the very back of the church. I was taller than most men, but I could still see very little of the ceremony which seemed to last for ever. Two bishops said prayers, priests scattered holy water and a choir of monks chanted. Then the Archbishop of Contwaraburg preached a long sermon which, bizarrely, said nothing about the new church, nor about the betrothal, but instead berated the clergy of Wessex for wearing short tunics instead of long robes. This bestial practice, the archbishop thundered, had offended the holy father in Rome and must stop forthwith on pain of excommunication. A priest standing near us was wearing a short tunic and tried to crouch so that he looked like a dwarf in a long robe. The monks sang again and then my cousin, red-haired and cocksure, strutted to the altar and little Æthelflaed was led to his side by her father. The archbishop mumbled over them, they were sprinkled with holy water, then the newly betrothed couple were presented to the congregation and we all dutifully cheered.
Æthelflaed was hurried away as the men in the church congratulated Æthelred. He was twenty years old, eleven years older than Æthelflaed, and he was a short, red-haired, bumptious young man who was convinced of his own importance. That importance was that he was his father’s son, and his father was the chief ealdorman in southern Mercia which was the region of that country least infested by Danes, and so one day Æthelred would become the leader of the free Mercian Saxons. Æthelred, in short, could deliver a large part of Mercia to Wessex’s rule, which was why he had been promised Alfred’s daughter in marriage. He made his way down the nave, greeting the lords of Wessex, then saw me and looked surprised. ‘I heard you were captured in the north,’ he said.
‘I was.’
‘And here you are. And you’re just the man I want.’ He smiled, certain that I liked him, in which certainty he could not have been more mistaken, but Æthelred assumed that everyone else in the whole world was envious of him and wanted nothing more than to be his friend. ‘The king,’ he said, ‘has honoured me with the command of his household guard.’
‘Alfred has?’ I asked, surprised.
‘At least until I assume my father’s duties.’
‘Your father’s well, I trust?’ I asked drily.
‘He’s sic
k,’ Æthelred said, sounding pleased, ‘so who knows how long I shall command Alfred’s guard. But you’d be of great use to me if you would serve in the household troops.’
‘I’d rather shovel shit,’ I said, then held a hand towards Brida. ‘Do you remember Brida?’ I asked. ‘You tried to rape her ten years ago.’
He went bright red, said nothing, but just hurried away. Brida laughed as he retreated, then gave a very small bow because Ælswith, Alfred’s wife, was walking past us. Ælswith ignored us, for she had never liked Brida or me, but Eanflæd smiled. She was Ælswith’s closest companion and I kissed my hand towards her. ‘She was a tavern whore,’ I told Brida, ‘and now she rules the king’s household.’
‘Good for her,’ Brida said.
‘Does Alfred know she was a whore?’ Ragnar asked.
‘He pretends not to know,’ I said.
Alfred came last. He looked sick, but that was nothing unusual. He half inclined his head to me, but said nothing, though Beocca scuttled over to me as we waited for the crowd at the door to thin. ‘You’re to see the king after midday prayers,’ he told me, ‘and you too, Lord Ragnar. I shall summon you.’
‘We’ll be in the Two Cranes,’ I told him.
‘I don’t know why you like that tavern.’
‘Because it’s a brothel too, of course,’ I said. ‘And if you go there, father, make sure you carve a notch in one of the beams to show you humped one of the ladies. I’d recommend Ethel. She’s only got one hand, but it’s a miracle what she can do with it.’
‘Oh, dear God, Uhtred, dear God. What an ugly cesspit you have for a mind. If I ever marry, and I pray God for that dear happiness, I shall go unstained to my bride.’
‘I pray you do too, father,’ I said, and I meant it. Poor Beocca. He was so ugly and he dreamed of a wife, but he had never found one and I doubted he ever would. There were plenty of women willing to marry him, squint and all, for he was, after all, a privileged priest high in Alfred’s estimation, but Beocca was waiting for love to strike him like a lightning bolt. He would stare at beautiful women, dream his hopeless dreams and say his prayers. Perhaps, I thought, his heaven would reward him with a glorious bride, but nothing I had ever heard about the Christian heaven suggested that such joys were available.
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