Death of Kings

by Bernard Cornwell

‘He will,’ she agreed, ‘but he can be indecisive. I would have made a better king.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘you would.’

  ‘Poor Edward,’ she said.

  ‘Poor? He’ll be king soon.’

  ‘He lost his love,’ she said.

  ‘And the babies live.’

  ‘The babies live,’ she agreed.

  I think I loved Gisela best of all the women in my life. I mourn her still. But of all those women, Æthelflaed was always the closest. She thought like me. I would sometimes start to say something and she would finish the sentence. In time we just looked at each other and knew what the other was thinking. Of all the friends I have made in my life, I loved Æthelflaed the best.

  Sometime in that wet darkness, Thor’s Day turned into Freya’s Day. Freya was Woden’s wife, the goddess of love, and for all of her day the rain continued to fall. A wind rose in the afternoon, a high wind that tore at Wintanceaster’s thatch and drove the rain in malevolent spite, and that same night King Alfred, who had ruled in Wessex for twenty-eight years and was in the fiftieth year of his life, died.

  The next morning there was no rain and little wind. Wintanceaster was silent, except for the pigs rooting in the streets, the cockerels crowing, the dogs howling or barking and the thud of the sentries’ boots on the waterlogged planks of the ramparts. Folk seemed dazed. A bell began to toll in mid-morning, just a single bell struck again and again, and the sound faded down the river valley where floods sheeted the meadows, then came again with brutal force. The king is dead, long live the king.

  Æthelflaed wanted to pray in the nuns’ chapel, and I left her in Saint Hedda’s and walked through the silent streets to the palace where I surrendered my sword at the gatehouse and saw Steapa sitting alone in the outer courtyard. His grim, skin-stretched face that had terrified so many of Alfred’s enemies was wet with tears. I sat on the bench beside him, but said nothing. A woman hurried past carrying a stack of folded linens. The king dies, yet still sheets must be washed, rooms swept, ashes thrown out, wood stacked, grain milled. A score of horses had been saddled and were waiting at the courtyard’s farther end. I supposed they were for messengers who would carry the news of the king’s death to every corner of his kingdom, but instead a troop of men, all in mail and all helmeted, appeared from a doorway and were helped up into their saddles. ‘Your men?’ I asked Steapa.

  He gave them a sour glance. ‘Not mine.’

  They were Æthelwold’s men. Æthelwold himself was the last to appear and, like his followers, he was dressed for war in a helmet and mail. Three servants had brought the troops’ swords from the gatehouse and men milled about in search of their own blade, then strapped the swords and belts about their waists. Æthelwold took his own long-sword, let a servant buckle the belt, then was helped up onto his horse, a big black stallion. He saw me then. He kicked the horse towards me and pulled the blade out of its scabbard. I did not move, and he curbed the stallion a few paces away. The horse flailed a hoof at the cobblestones, striking a spark. ‘A sad day, Lord Uhtred,’ Æthelwold said. The bare sword was at his side, pointing down. He wanted to use it and he dared not use it. He had ambition and he was weak.

  I looked up into his long face, once so handsome, now ravaged by drink and anger and disappointment. There was grey at his temples. ‘A sad day, my prince,’ I agreed.

  He was measuring me, measuring the distance his sword needed to travel, measuring the chance he would have to escape through the gate arch after striking the blow. He glanced around the courtyard to see how many of the royal bodyguard were in sight. There were only two. He could have struck me, let his followers take care of the two men, and be gone, all in a moment, but still he hesitated. One of his followers pushed his horse close. The man wore a helmet with closed cheek-plates, so all I could see of his face were his eyes. A shield was slung on his back and on it was painted the head of a bull with bloodied horns. His horse was nervous and he slapped its neck hard. I saw the scars on the beast’s flanks where he had used his spurs deep and hard. He leaned close to Æthelwold and said something under his breath, but was interrupted by Steapa, who simply stood up. He was a huge man, frighteningly tall and broad and, as commander of the royal bodyguard, permitted to wear his sword throughout the palace. He grasped his sword’s hilt and Æthelwold immediately pushed his own blade halfway back into its scabbard. ‘I was worried,’ he said, ‘that the damp weather would have rusted the sword. It seems not.’

  ‘You put fleece-grease on the blade?’ I asked.

  ‘My servant must,’ he said airily. He pushed the blade home. The man with the bloodied bull’s horns on his shield stared at me from the shadows of his helmet.

  ‘You’ll return for the funeral?’ I asked Æthelwold.

  ‘And for the coronation too,’ he said slyly, ‘but till then I have business at Tweoxnam.’ He offered me an unfriendly smile. ‘My estate there is not so large as yours at Fagranforda, Lord Uhtred, but large enough to need my attention in these sad days.’ He gathered the reins and rammed back his spurs so that the stallion leaped forward. His men followed, their horses’ hooves loud on the stone.

  ‘Who shows a bull’s head on his shield?’ I asked Steapa.

  ‘Sigebriht of Cent,’ Steapa said, watching the men disappear through the arch. ‘A young rich fool.’

  ‘Were they his followers? Or Æthelwold’s?’

  ‘Æthelwold has men,’ Steapa said. ‘He can afford them. He owns his father’s estates at Tweoxnam and Wimburnan, and that makes him wealthy.’

  ‘He should be dead.’

  ‘It’s family business,’ Steapa said, ‘nothing to do with you and me.’

  ‘It’s you and me who’ll be doing the killing for the family,’ I said.

  ‘I’m getting too old for it,’ he grumbled.

  ‘How old are you?’

  ‘No idea,’ he said, ‘forty?’

  He led me through a small gate in the palace wall, then across a patch of waterlogged grass towards Alfred’s old church that stood beside the new minster. Scaffolding spider-webbed the sky where the great stone tower was unfinished. Townsfolk stood by the old church door. They did not speak, but stood and looked bereft, shuffling aside as Steapa and I approached. Some bowed. The door was guarded today by six of Steapa’s men, who pulled their spears aside when they saw us.

  Steapa made the sign of the cross as we entered the old church. It was cold inside. The stone walls were painted with scenes from the Christian scriptures, while gold, silver and crystal glinted from the altars. A Dane’s dream, I thought, because there was enough treasure here to buy a fleet and fill it with swords. ‘He thought this church was too small,’ Steapa said in wonderment as he gazed up at the high roof beams. Birds flew there. ‘A falcon nested up there last year,’ he said.

  The king had already been brought to the church and laid in front of the high altar. A harpist played and Brother John’s choir sang from the shadows. I wondered if my son was among them, but did not look. Priests muttered in front of side-altars or knelt beside the coffin where the king lay. Alfred’s eyes were closed and his face tied with a white cloth that compressed his lips between which I could just see a crust, presumably because a priest had placed a piece of the Christian’s holy bread in the dead man’s mouth. He was dressed in a penitent’s white robe, like the one he had once forced me to wear. That had been years before, when Æthelwold and I had been commanded to abase ourselves before an altar, and I had been given no choice but to agree, but Æthelwold had turned the whole miserable ceremony into farce. He had pretended to be full of remorse, and shouted that remorse to the sky, ‘No more tits, God! No more tits! Keep me from tits!’ and I remembered how Alfred had turned away in frustrated disgust.

  ‘Exanceaster,’ Steapa said.

  ‘You were remembering the same day,’ I said.

  ‘It was raining,’ he said, ‘and you had to crawl to the altar in the field. I remember.’

  That had been the very first ti
me I had seen Steapa, so baleful and frightening, and later we had fought and then become friends, and it was all such a long time ago, and I stood beside Alfred’s coffin and thought how life slipped by, and how, for nearly all my life, Alfred had been there like a great landmark. I had not liked him. I had struggled against him and for him, I had cursed him and thanked him, despised him and admired him. I hated his religion and its cold disapproving gaze, its malevolence that cloaked itself in pretended kindness, and its allegiance to a god who would drain the joy from the world by naming it sin, but Alfred’s religion had made him a good man and a good king.

  And Alfred’s joyless soul had proved a rock against which the Danes had broken themselves. Time and again they had attacked, and time and again Alfred had out-thought them, and Wessex grew ever stronger and richer and all that was because of Alfred. We think of kings as privileged men who rule over us and have the freedom to make, break and flaunt the law, but Alfred was never above the law he loved to make. He saw his life as a duty to his god and to the people of Wessex and I have never seen a better king, and I doubt my sons, grandsons and their children’s children will ever see a better one. I never liked him, but I have never stopped admiring him. He was my king and all that I now have I owe to him. The food that I eat, the hall where I live and the swords of my men, all started with Alfred, who hated me at times, loved me at times, and was generous with me. He was a gold-giver.

  Steapa had tears on his cheeks. Some of the priests kneeling about the coffin were openly weeping. ‘They’ll make a grave for him tonight,’ Steapa said, pointing towards the high altar that was heaped with the glittering reliquaries that Alfred had loved.

  ‘They’re burying him in here?’ I asked.

  ‘There’s a vault,’ he said, ‘but it has to be opened. Once the new church is finished he’ll be taken there.’

  ‘And the funeral is tomorrow?’

  ‘Maybe a week. They need time so folk can travel here.’

  We stayed a long time in the church, greeting men who came to mourn, and at midday the new king arrived with a group of nobles. Edward was tall, long-faced, thin-lipped and had very black hair that he wore brushed back. He looked so young to me. He wore a blue robe that was belted with a gold-panelled strip of leather, and over it a black cape that hung to the floor. He wore no crown, for he was not yet crowned, but had a bronze circlet about his skull.

  I recognised most of the ealdormen who accompanied him, Æthelnoth, Wilfrith and, of course, Edward’s future father-in-law, Æthelhelm, who walked beside Father Coenwulf who was Edward’s confessor and guardian. There was a half-dozen younger men I did not know, and then I saw my cousin, Æthelred, and he saw me at the same moment and checked. Edward, walking towards his father’s coffin, beckoned him on. Steapa and I both went down on one knee and stayed there as Edward knelt at the foot of his father’s coffin and put his hands together in prayer. His guard all knelt. No one spoke. The choir was chanting interminably as incense smoke drifted in the sun-shafted air.

  Æthelred’s eyes were closed in pretend prayer. The look on his face was bitter and strangely aged, perhaps because he had been ill and was, as Alfred his father-in-law had been, prone to bouts of sickness. I watched him, wondering. He must have hoped that Alfred’s death would loosen the leash that tied Mercia to Wessex. He must have been hoping that there would be two coronations, one in Wessex and another in Mercia, and he must have known that Edward knew all that. What stood in his way was his wife, who was beloved in Mercia, and who he had tried to make powerless by immuring her in Saint Hedda’s convent, and the other obstacle was his wife’s lover.

  ‘Lord Uhtred,’ Edward had opened his eyes, though his hands were still clasped in prayer.

  ‘Lord?’ I asked.

  ‘You will stay for the burial?’

  ‘If you wish, lord.’

  ‘I do wish,’ he said.

  ‘And then you must go to your estate in Fagranforda,’ he went on. ‘I am sure you have much to do there.’

  ‘Yes, lord.’

  ‘The Lord Æthelred,’ Edward spoke firmly and loudly, ‘will stay to counsel me for a few weeks. I have need of wise counsel and I can think of none more able to deliver it.’

  That was a lie. A spavined idiot could give better counsel than Æthelred, but of course Edward did not want my cousin’s advice. He wanted Æthelred where he could see him, where it would be difficult for Æthelred to foment unrest, and he was sending me to Mercia because he trusted me to keep Mercia on the West Saxon leash. And because he knew that if I went to Mercia so would his sister. I kept a very straight face.

  A sparrow flew in the high church roof and its dropping, wet and white, fell on Alfred’s dead face, spattering messily from his nose to his left cheek.

  An omen so bad, so terrible, that every man about the coffin held his breath.

  And just then one of Steapa’s guards came into the church and hurried up the long nave, but did not kneel. Instead he looked from Edward to Æthelred, and from Æthelred to me, and he seemed not to know what to say until Steapa growled at him to speak.

  ‘The Lady Æthelflaed,’ the man said.

  ‘What of her?’ Edward asked.

  ‘The Lord Æthelwold took her by force, lord, from the convent. Took her, lord. And they’ve gone.’

  So the struggle for Wessex had begun.

  Seven

  Æthelred laughed. Perhaps it was a nervous reaction, but in that old church the sound echoed mockingly from the lower walls that were made of stone. When the sound died away all I could hear was water dripping onto the floor from the rain-soaked thatch.

  Edward looked at me, then at Æthelred, finally at Æthelhelm. He appeared confused.

  ‘Where did Lord Æthelwold go?’ Steapa asked usefully.

  ‘The nuns said he was going to Tweoxnam,’ the messenger said.

  ‘But he gave me his oath!’ Edward protested.

  ‘He was always a lying bastard,’ I said. I looked at the man who had brought the news. ‘He told the nuns he was going to Tweoxnam?’

  ‘Yes, lord.’

  ‘He said the same to me,’ I said.

  Edward gathered himself. ‘I want every man armed and mounted,’ he told Steapa, ‘and ready to ride to Tweoxnam.’

  ‘Is that his only estate, lord King?’ I asked.

  ‘He owns Wimburnan,’ Edward said, ‘why?’

  ‘Isn’t his father buried at Wimburnan?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then that’s where he’s gone,’ I said. ‘He told us Tweoxnam because he wants to confuse us. If you abduct someone you don’t tell your pursuers where you’re taking them.’

  ‘Why abduct Æthelflaed?’ Edward was looking lost again.

  ‘Because he wants Mercia on his side,’ I said. ‘Is she friendly to him?’

  ‘Friendly? We all tried to be,’ Edward said. ‘He’s our cousin.’

  ‘He thinks he can persuade her to bring Mercia to his cause,’ I suggested, and did not add that it would not just be Mercia. If Æthelflaed declared for her cousin then many in Wessex would be persuaded to support him.’

  ‘We go to Tweoxnam?’ Steapa asked uncertainly.

  Edward hesitated, then shook his head and looked to me. ‘The two places are very close,’ he said, still hesitant, but then remembered he was a king and made up his mind. ‘We ride to Wimburnan,’ he said.

  ‘And I go with you, lord King,’ I said.

  ‘Why?’ Æthelred blurted the question before he had the sense or time to think what he was asking. The king and the ealdormen looked embarrassed.

  I let the question hang till its echo had faded, then smiled. ‘To protect the honour of the king’s sister, of course,’ I said, and I was still laughing when we rode out.

  It took time, it always takes time. Horses had to be saddled, mail donned and banners fetched, and while the royal housecarls readied themselves I went with Osferth to Saint Hedda’s where Abbess Hildegyth was in tears. ‘He said she was wanted at t
he church,’ she explained to me, ‘that the family was praying together for her father’s soul.’

  ‘You did nothing wrong,’ I told her.

  ‘But he’s taken her!’

  ‘He won’t hurt her,’ I reassured her.

  ‘But…’ her voice faded, and I knew she was remembering the shame of being raped by the Danes so many years before.

  ‘She’s Alfred’s daughter,’ I said, ‘and he wants her help, not her enmity. Her support gives him legitimacy.’

  ‘She’s still a hostage,’ Hild said.

  ‘Yes, but we’ll get her back.’

  ‘How?’

  I touched Serpent-Breath’s hilt, showing Hild the silver cross embedded in the pommel, a cross she had given me so long ago. ‘With this,’ I said, meaning the sword, not the cross.

  ‘You shouldn’t wear a sword in a nunnery,’ she said with mock sternness.

  ‘There are many things I shouldn’t do in a nunnery,’ I told her, ‘but I did most of them anyway.’

  She sighed. ‘What does Æthelwold hope to gain?’

  Osferth answered. ‘He hopes to persuade her that he should be the king. And he hopes she will persuade Lord Uhtred to support him.’ He glanced at me and, at that moment, looked astonishingly like his father. ‘I’ve no doubt,’ he went on drily, ‘he’ll offer to make it possible for the Lord Uhtred and the Lady Æthelflaed to marry, and will probably hold out the throne of Mercia as an enticement. He doesn’t just want the Lady Æthelflaed’s support, he wants Lord Uhtred’s too.’

  I had not thought of that and it took me by surprise. There had been a time when Æthelwold and I had been friends, but that was long ago when we were both young and a shared resentment of Alfred had brought us together. Æthelwold’s resentment had soured into hatred, while mine had turned into reluctant admiration, and so we were friends no longer. ‘He’s a fool,’ I said, ‘and he always was a fool.’

  ‘A desperate fool,’ Osferth added, ‘but a fool who knows this is his last chance to gain the throne.’