Kings and Pawns

by James L. Nelson

  There was an open field just short of halfway to Christchurch, mostly surrounded by trees, and they made camp there at first light, hoping the woods would be enough to hide their presence from the Northmen. They were still too far from Christchurch Priory to see the top of the church tower there, so Nothwulf knew that the heathens could not see them. But he would expect even those lazy buggers to send out scouts, if for no other reason than to see what had become of the last scouts.

  Or maybe the heathens did not care enough, or worry enough to do so. He could only hope and pray to God that that was the case.

  The soldiers, having spent the day before training and preparing, and then having marched all night, were exhausted, and Nothwulf gave leave for them to pass the day sleeping. They would move again when the sun was down, closing with Christchurch Priory in the dark, resting some there, and then attacking at dawn. He wanted his men as fresh as they could be, he wanted the heathens to be dead asleep and he wanted complete surprise if such a thing was possible. And thus far it seemed it might be.

  Nothwulf did not feel the need for rest. His every nerve seemed to be firing like sparks from a blacksmith’s hammer. He told Leofric that he would ride for Christchurch Priory, get as close as he dared, and see what he could see. To his surprise Leofric asked if he could go as well. The old man had to be twice Nothwulf’s age, but he had stamina that even Nothwulf could envy.

  They mounted up. “Should we bring a guard?” Leofric asked. “Half a dozen of my best men? It wouldn’t do for the ealdorman to come to harm at such a time.”

  “No,” Nothwulf said. “Two mounted men might go unremarked, but eight would surely be noticed. Surprise, my dear Leofric, it’s all about surprise.”

  They rode out of camp with the sun a few hours above the horizon, the light flowing over the green fields and the darker brush and the road stretched out before them, now dried to a light brown color after the unusually long stretch of fine weather.

  “It’s good we move at night,” Leofric said. “The army moving on this road will raise a cloud of dust they could see in Winchester. Even drunken Northmen would not miss it.”

  “I pray the Northmen don’t know we’re coming,” Nothwulf said, “and I pray we can keep it that way. I’m sure our numbers are well superior to theirs, but the fyrd makes up a good portion of our men, and I wouldn’t necessarily credit them with standing up to the heathens.”

  “That’s why we send them in first,” Leofric said. “Let them beat up on the heathens a bit, tire them out, and then the heathens will trip over their bodies when they try to get to our men-at-arms.”

  They rode on in silence for some time longer, until the tip of the church tower at Christchurch Priory began to poke above the trees in the distance. The smell of salt water was more noticeable now, and gulls, rather than hawks, wheeled above them.

  “Nothing seems amiss,” Leofric said at last.

  “No,” Nothwulf said. There were no columns of smoke rising from the priory, no townsfolk streaming down the road to escape the savage Northmen, no screaming or clatter of weapons. But in truth neither man had expected that. The Northmen had been there for nearly two weeks now. Even they could not continue to terrorize for that long.

  The road came at last to the cluster of small homes and shops that lay scattered, seemingly at random, around the low walls of the priory. They were deserted, as far as Nothwulf and Leofric could see. They stopped at the first, a blacksmith’s home judging by the forge and tools hanging from a makeshift shelter on the side of the thatched home. They dismounted and approached the house, moving with caution. Not that caution was necessarily called for; it just seemed the thing to do.

  “Anyone there?” Nothwulf called, but he got no response. He stepped closer. The door to the house was open and he stepped in.

  The interior, dark and smoky, was just what he would have expected. A crude wooden table and benches, a hearth on the floor at the far end of the house, a wide pallet for a bed, some tattered wool blanket tossed over it. All seemed in place. But no one was there.

  They mounted again and rode on, closer to the priory, but still they could see nothing amiss, save for the fact that the village seemed quite deserted.

  “Have they all fled?” Nothwulf asked.

  “Could be,” Leofric said. “If so, they’ve found someplace to go. We haven’t encountered a one of them on the road.”

  They were a quarter mile from the wall of the priory when they stopped again. “I’m loath to go any farther,” Nothwulf said. “If there were folk here we could mix in with them, but as it is we stand out a bit, being the only living things in the village.”

  Even if there had been folk there, the two would have stood out with their fine horses and mail and cloaks. Nothwulf did not want to risk having the Northmen know that men-at-arms were near, and he could see no benefit that could be had from getting closer. Still, they had seen no sign of the Northmen, and that worried him.

  “Come with me,” Nothwulf said and turned his horse down a road that ran roughly parallel to the priory wall. The houses blocked their view of the priory, except for those few times that the space opened to give them an unobstructed look, and then they saw no one, and Nothwulf hoped it meant no one saw them. But every time he looked at that seemingly deserted place he grew more and more concerned.

  The road continued to follow the curve of the priory wall, running around to the south, toward the bank of the River Stour which led to the shallow bay and then to the sea. Soon the houses grew more sparse as the village ended and the river bank and the place where the fishing boats were pulled up on shore met.

  Nothwulf slipped down from his horse and Leofric did the same. They moved slowly toward the edge of the village and the open space beyond. They kept close to the line of small, shabby, abandoned cottages where the fishermen lived. Or did.

  Finally they came to a place where Nothwulf could see what he wanted to see. He stopped and he felt the tension ease and realized he’d been clenching his shoulders as if he were bracing against a bitter cold wind. There, a hundred yards away, pulled up on the shore, were seven longships. The heathens had not yet left.

  “Hmm, our friends are still here,” Leofric said in a soft voice.

  “Yes. Seven. Must be the bastards from Swanage. Do they look as if they’re making ready to sail?”

  The two studied the ships for some time. There were men working on them, Northmen presumably, but it was too far to tell what they were doing. There were not very many men, however, and they seemed in no hurry. There was no sense that anything important was about to happen.

  “I know little of such things,” Leofric said. “But it doesn’t look to me as if they plan to leave any time soon.”

  “I agree,” Nothwulf said, still feeling that sense of relief. If he fought the Northmen and lost, that would be bad enough, but if they managed to slip though his fingers one more time, that would be a disaster. There would be whispers of cowardice, or gross stupidity. Cynewise would take full advantage of his bungling. But it seemed he would be spared that. They returned to their horses and headed back the way they had come.

  They rode on in silence for some time, Nothwulf working himself up to ask Leofric the thing he most wanted to ask. Finally he cleared his throat and said, “Tell me, Leofric, do you hear anything of that pretender Cynewise? What she’s been up to?”

  Leofric was one of the most informed men Nothwulf knew, and he had just made the round of the thegns in an effort to gather men-at-arms, so Nothwulf imagined he had a good notion of what was going on in Sherborne. But he could also be tight-lipped at times, discreet to a fault, and Nothwulf knew he might have to do a bit of prying to get him to speak.

  “Mmm, I hear this and that,” Leofric said. They rode on in silence, but Nothwulf knew his friend well enough to know that he had only to wait to hear more.

  “The thegns are pretty well divided,” Leofric continued after some length. “Some side with her, some with you. The m
ost of them, you know…their loyalty lies with whomever they think will end up in the ealdorman’s seat. Whoever can do them the most good. And they don’t much care who that is.”

  “Is there…do most of them lean one way or another?” Nothwulf asked. If he had been at Sherborne, or anyplace of importance, then he would hear these things for himself. But he felt like he was in exile, living in the wilderness, banished. And that was not so far from the truth of it.

  “That’s hard to say,” Leofric said. “But there’s another twist in this odd tale. There’s word that Cynewise’s father, Ceorle, intends to come from Devonshire to Dorset with a few hundred of his best men. To shore Cynewise up, apparently.”

  “Really?” Nothwulf said and he could not keep the genuine surprise and concern from his voice. Nor could he stop himself before he said, “You might have told me about that, you know, without me having to pry it from you.”

  Leofric shrugged. “It’s mere rumor at this point. Gossip I picked up. I don’t know if it’s true. If it is, it’s likely a mistake on the part of Cynewise and Ceorle. The thegns are not in love with the idea of Devon’s men-at-arms marching around Dorset. They don’t care for Ceorle having such influence here. Better for Cynewise to be entirely independent of her father, as far as they’re concerned.”

  Nothwulf fell silent, thinking about that as they rode. It gave him the first bit of hope he had felt in some time. The little bitch might have made a grave error this time, he thought. Tried to be a bit too clever, shown that she doesn’t have the mettle to be ealdorman without her father’s help.

  Then his thoughts moved off in another direction. He thought of the silver chalices lined up like soldiers on Bishop Ealhstan’s table, Ceorle’s coat of arms etched in the side, an image that often returned to his mind. He thought of the influence that Ceorle had with his old friend, King Æthelwulf. If the thegns were looking to back the one with the most power in Dorsetshire, that one might well be Cynewise, with the backing of the bishop and her father. Nothwulf felt his hope snuffed out as quickly as it had been kindled.

  It was just after noon when the two men returned to the camp. They had been challenged by pickets long before they arrived, several times in fact, and Nothwulf was glad of it. Had they been able to approach the camp unnoticed then he would have given Bryning a significant tongue lashing, but he knew it was only his ill-humor that made him think Bryning could ever be so negligent. There was a reason he trusted Bryning so.

  The camp was quiet, most of the men asleep, as Nothwulf wished them to be. For now, rest was the thing, since, with God’s grace, they were looking at a long night ahead with a bloody and victorious battle in the morning. He and Leofric ate, and then they slept as well.

  The sun was nearly down when Nothwulf’s servant gently shook his shoulder to wake him from a less than restful slumber. Nothwulf stood and stretched and stepped out of his tent. The camp, nearly lost from sight in the growing dark, was already bustling, the captains getting their men ready to move again, issuing orders in harsh but soft tones. There was no reason for quiet, really. They were miles from the enemy. But still, the secrecy of a night march seemed to call for a minimum of noise.

  It was well past dark by the time the column snaked its way out of the clearing and back onto the road to Christchurch Priory, the one Nothwulf and Leofric had traveled that morning. They moved in near silence, just as they had the night before, and the miles dropped off quickly. The wagons with the tents and the food and the camp supplies had been left back at the clearing. They would not be needed over the next few days. That, at least, was Nothwulf’s intention.

  They had been on the road for a few hours when the scouts returned to say the village encircling the priory was just another mile or so ahead. Had it been daytime, Nothwulf was sure they would have been able to see the church tower from where they were, but the moon, now low in the sky, did not provide light enough for that.

  An hour later they reached the edge of the village and those men who had horses dismounted, including Nothwulf and Leofric. The boys who marched with the army led the animals away, and the lesser thegns and the captains got their men organized into four columns.

  Nothwulf and the others had discussed this all, how the four columns would each move through the village and position themselves at the four cardinal directions in relation to the wall surrounding the priory. When they attacked, it would be from four directions. The heathens could not possibly have enough men to defend each point of the wall.

  Nothwulf spoke a few words to the thegns, reiterating the plan, and then he let each of the columns move off through the dark. When at last there was only the column led by him and Leofric, he waved his arm over his head, unsure if the men could actually see the gesture. He stepped off, gratified to hear the sound of nearly a hundred men behind him, walking as stealthily as they might.

  The village seemed to have a different quality now than it had when he and Leofric had scouted the place the day before. Then it had seemed abandoned, but now it did not, despite the fact that there was no one to be seen. He could smell the smoke from cooking fires, and he thought he heard the sounds of snoring from a few of the hovels they passed. A dog barked at them as they moved down the dark road, and it did not stop until one of the men behind Nothwulf silenced it for good with his spear. Nothwulf thought he saw a face peer out from the doorway, but it disappeared before he could be certain.

  Then the priory was just ahead, just across a stretch of open ground, a beaten road that circled the monastery wall. Nothwulf held up his hand and stopped and he heard the men behind him stop, too. They were still in the shadows of the village houses, hidden in the dark places where the tall peaked thatch roofs blocked off the moon’s weak light. He felt something brush his arm and he saw Leofric step up beside him.

  “Looks to be fires burning,” Leofric said in a whisper.

  Nothwulf nodded. He had seen the same thing, a soft glow of light that left the top of the wall easily distinguished from the rest of the priory behind. It probably meant small fires burning in the yard on the other side, which probably meant the Northmen were there.

  Leofric turned to the man behind him. “Stand easy, pass it down the line,” he whispered and the instructions made their way from man to man. There was some time yet until dawn. As soon as there was light enough to see the wall clearly they would move forward, and when the other columns saw them they would move as well. But until then, they had only to wait.

  Nothwulf felt his uncertainty clawing at him.

  This will not be a repeat of Swanage, he thought, which was his foremost worry. The Northmen had landed at Swanage, and there he and Leofric had moved their men-at-arms into the village, hidden in the dark, waiting for a dawn attack, just as they were doing now. But when the sun came up it revealed that the Northmen had gone, sailed away during the night.

  But that would not happen this time.

  The hours of darkness dragged on, and Nothwulf knew enough of this sort of waiting to know that every minute would seem an hour. It was torment, really, a taste of what eternity must be like, and a good reminder of why you did not want to spend it in the pits of Hell. He sat on a barrel pushed up against the house behind which they were hiding and tried to relax.

  Sometime later he felt his shoulder jostled, saw the odd images floating in his head dissolve away and he realized with a flush that he had fallen asleep. It was Leofric who had jostled him, just the subtlest of touches. Nothwulf looked left and right, collecting himself before he spoke.

  It was getting light. He could see the dull shape of the wall across the open ground, and the buildings around them were more distinct. Not long now, not long at all. He could hear from the soft sounds in the shadows behind, the rustle of mail, the soft scrape of weapons being drawn, the shuffle of shoes on the soft ground, that the men were making ready. They all knew. Not long now.

  Nothwulf stepped out into the open, nothing between him and the far wall. He looked left and right b
ut could see nothing. He stepped back.

  “Soon, soon,” he said to Leofric, and Leofric nodded. Nothwulf picked up the shield he had leaned against the wall of the hut and slung it over his back. He looked out over the open ground. The light had spread enough for them to see a hundred yards in any direction. Not sunrise yet, but close enough. Time to move.

  Nothwulf moved out of the shadow of the hovel where they had been sheltering and Leofric and the others followed behind. He moved slowly, looking left and right. He was halfway to the wall and still had seen nothing and was just considering sending messengers when he saw the other columns, to the north and the south, also emerging from their concealed places. The thegns had been watching, and now they were moving as they had been told.

  The wall was not high, about five feet, but Nothwulf did not want the delay that even a short wall could cause. He waved his arm and a dozen men behind him came running past carrying short barrels, crates, stools, whatever they had found to assist in getting the men over the top. They ran to the wall and placed the makeshift steps against the stone, then stepped aside.

  Nothwulf was first up and over. He put his foot on a crate, his palms down on the top of the wall and swung his leg up. He twisted onto the top of the wall and then hopped down the other side. His feet hit the dirt and he swung the shield around and grabbed the handle on the inside of the boss and with his right hand he drew his sword.

  Only then did he look around. He saw the smoldering remains of half a dozen small fires scattered around the priory grounds. That was it. There was no one to be seen. Nothwulf felt a twist in his stomach, the taste of panic in his mouth.