Death of Kings st-6

by Bernard Cornwell

  No Danes attacked. I had been so sure that Alfred’s death would mean war, but it brought one of those strange periods during which swords rested in their scabbards, and Edward was crowned in peace and afterwards he went to Lundene and summoned me there to a great council. The streets of the old Roman city were hung with banners, all in celebration of Edward’s coronation, while the formidable ramparts were thick with troops. None of that was surprising, but what was astonishing was to find Eohric there.

  King Eohric of East Anglia, who had conspired to kill me, was in Lundene by invitation of Archbishop Plegmund who had sent two of his own nephews as hostages to guarantee the king’s safety. Eohric and his followers had come up the Temes in three lion-prowed boats and were now quartered in the great Mercian palace that crowned the hill at the centre of the old Roman city. Eohric was a big man, bellied like a pregnant sow, strong as a bullock, with a suspicious, small-eyed face. I first saw him on the ramparts where he was walking with a group of his men along the old Roman defences. He had three wolfhounds on leashes and their presence on the ramparts was provoking the dogs in the city beneath to howl. Weohstan, the commander of the garrison, was Eohric’s guide, presumably because Edward had ordered him to show the East Anglian king whatever he wanted to see.

  I was with Finan. We climbed to the ramparts up a Roman stair built into one tower of the gate that men called the Bishop’s Gate. It was morning, and the sun was warming the old stone. It stank because the ditch outside the wall was filling with refuse and offal. Children were scavenging there.

  A dozen West Saxon soldiers were clearing the way for Eohric’s men, but they let me alone and Finan and I just waited as the East Anglians approached us. Weohstan looked alarmed, perhaps because Finan and I were both wearing swords, though neither of us had mail or helmets or shields. I bowed to the king. ‘You’ve met the Lord Uhtred?’ Weohstan asked Eohric.

  The small eyes stared at me. One of the wolfhounds snarled and was quietened. ‘The burner of boats,’ Eohric said, clearly amused.

  ‘He burns towns too,’ Finan could not resist saying, reminding Eohric that I had burned his fine port at Dumnoc.

  Eohric’s mouth tightened, but he did not rise to the bait. Instead he glanced south at the city. ‘A fine place, Lord Uhtred.’

  ‘May I ask what brings you here, lord King?’ I asked respectfully.

  ‘I am a Christian,’ Eohric said. His voice was a rumble, impressive and deep, ‘and the Holy Father in Rome tells me that Plegmund is my spiritual father. The archbishop invited me, I came.’

  ‘We’re honoured,’ I said, because what else do you say to a king?

  ‘Weohstan tells me you captured the city,’ Eohric said. He sounded bored, like a man who knows he must make conversation, but is not interested in what is being said.

  ‘I did, lord.’

  ‘At the gate over there?’ he gestured west towards Ludd’s Gate.

  ‘Yes, lord King.’

  ‘You must tell me the tale,’ he said, though he was only being polite. We were both being polite. This was a man who had tried to kill me and neither of us acknowledged that, but instead made stilted conversation. I knew what he was thinking. He was thinking that the wall beside the Bishop’s Gate was the most vulnerable place in the whole three miles of Roman ramparts. It offered the easiest approach, though the rubbish-stinking ditch was a formidable obstacle, but east of the gate the wall’s ragstone had crumbled in places and been replaced with a palisade of oak trunks. A whole stretch of wall between the Bishop’s Gate and the Old Gate was derelict. When I had commanded the garrison I had made the palisade, but it needed repair and if Lundene could be captured then this was the easiest place to attack, and Eohric was thinking the same thing. He gestured to a man beside him. ‘This is the Jarl Oscytel,’ he said.

  Oscytel was the commander of Eohric’s household troops. He was what I expected, big and brutal, and I nodded to him and he nodded back. ‘You’ve come to pray too?’ I asked him.

  ‘I come because my king ordered me to come,’ Oscytel said.

  And why, I thought angrily, had Edward allowed this nonsense? Eohric and Oscytel could well become Wessex’s enemies, yet here they were being welcomed to Lundene and treated as honoured guests. There was a great feast that night and one of Edward’s harpists chanted a great poem in praise of Eohric, celebrating his heroism, though in truth Eohric had never made any great reputation in battle. He was a sly, clever man, who ruled by force, who avoided battle, who survived because his kingdom lay at the edge of Britain and so no armies needed to cross his land to reach their enemies.

  Yet Eohric was not negligible. He could lead at least two thousand well-equipped warriors to war and if the Danes were ever to make a wholehearted assault on Wessex then Eohric’s men would be a valuable addition. Equally, if the Christians were ever to make an assault on the northern pagans they would welcome those two thousand troops. Both sides tried to seduce Eohric and Eohric received the gifts, made promises and did nothing.

  Eohric did nothing, but he was the key to Plegmund’s grand idea to unite all Britain. The archbishop claimed it had come to him in a dream after Alfred’s funeral, and he had persuaded Edward that the dream was from God. Britain would be united by Christ, not by the sword, and there was something propitious in the year, 900. Plegmund believed, and convinced Edward, that Christ would return in the year 1000, and that it was the divine will that the last hundred years of the Christian millennium should be spent converting the Danes in readiness for the second coming. ‘War has failed,’ Plegmund thundered from his pulpit, ‘so we must put our faith in peace!’ He believed the time had come to convert the pagans and he wanted Eohric’s Christian Danes to be his missionaries to Sigurd and Cnut.

  ‘He wants what?’ I asked Edward. I had been summoned to the king’s presence on the morning after the great feast and had listened as Edward explained the archbishop’s hopes.

  ‘He wants the conversion of the heathen,’ Edward said stiffly.

  ‘And they want Wessex, lord.’

  ‘Christian will not fight Christian,’ Edward said.

  ‘Tell that to the Welsh, lord King.’

  ‘They keep the peace,’ he said, ‘mostly.’

  He was married by then. His bride, Ælflæd, was little more than a child, perhaps thirteen or fourteen, already pregnant, and she was playing with her companions and a kitten in the small garden where I had so often met Æthelflaed. The window in the king’s chamber looked down on that small garden and Edward saw where I was looking. He sighed. ‘The Witan believes Eohric will prove an ally.’

  ‘Your father-in-law believes that?’

  Edward nodded. ‘We’ve had war for three generations,’ he said sternly, ‘and still it has not brought peace. Plegmund says we must try prayer and preaching. My mother agrees.’

  I laughed at that. So we were to defeat our enemies with prayer? Cnut and Sigurd, I thought, would welcome that tactic. ‘And what does Eohric want from us?’ I asked.

  ‘Nothing!’ Edward seemed surprised by the question.

  ‘He wants nothing, lord?’

  ‘He wants the archbishop’s blessing.’

  Edward, in those first years of his reign, was under the influence of his mother, his father-in-law, and the archbishop, and all three resented the cost of war. Building the burhs and equipping the fyrd had taken huge sums of silver, while to put an army into the field cost even more, and that money came from the church and from the ealdormen. They wanted to keep their silver. War is expensive, but prayer is free. I scoffed at the idea, and Edward cut me off with an abrupt gesture. ‘Tell me about the twins,’ he said.

  ‘They thrive,’ I said.

  ‘My sister said the same, but I heard Æthelstan won’t suckle?’ he sounded anguished.

  ‘Æthelstan sucks like a bull calf,’ I said. ‘I started a rumour that he’s weak. It’s what your mother and your father-in-law want to hear.’

  ‘Ah,’ Edward said, and smiled. ‘I�
��m forced to deny their legitimacy,’ he went on, ‘but they are dear to me.’

  ‘They’re safe and well, lord,’ I assured him.

  He touched my forearm. ‘Keep them that way! And Lord Uhtred,’ his hand tightened on my forearm to emphasise his next words, ‘I don’t want the Danes provoked! You understand me?’

  ‘Yes, lord King.’

  He suddenly realised he was gripping my arm and pulled his hand away. He was awkward with me, I assumed because he was embarrassed that he had made me nursemaid to his royal bastards, or perhaps because I was his sister’s lover, or perhaps because he had ordered me to keep the peace when he knew I believed that peace was fraudulent. But the Danes were not to be provoked, and I was sworn to obey Edward.

  So I set out to provoke the Danes.

  PART THREE

  Angels

  Nine

  ‘Edward’s under the thumb of the priests,’ I grumbled to Ludda, ‘and his damned mother is worse. Stupid bitch.’ We had returned to Fagranforda and I had taken him northwards to the edge of the hills from where a man can stare across the wide Sæfern into the hills of Wales. It was raining in that far west, but a watery sun reflected like beaten silver from the river in the valley beneath us. ‘They think they can avoid war by praying,’ I went on, ‘and all because of that fool Plegmund. He thinks God will geld the Danes.’

  ‘Prayer might work, lord,’ Ludda said cheerfully.

  ‘Of course it won’t work,’ I snarled, ‘if your god wanted it to work then why didn’t he do it twenty years ago?’

  Ludda was too sensible to offer an answer. There were just the two of us. I was seeking something, and I did not want folk to know what I sought, and so Ludda and I rode the crestline alone. We were searching, talking to slaves in the fields and to thegns in their halls, and on the third day I found what I sought. It was not perfect. It was too near to Fagranforda for my liking and not close enough to Danish land.

  ‘But there’s nothing like this to the north,’ Ludda said, ‘not that I know of. There are plenty of weird stones up north, but not any buried stones.’

  Weird stones are strange circles of great boulders placed by the old people, presumably in honour of their gods. Usually, when we find such a place, we dig at the base of the stones and I have found treasure at one or two. The buried stones are in mounds, some of which are round heaps and some like long ridges, and both are the old people’s graves. We dig into them too, though some folk believe the skeletons inside are protected by spirits or even by dragons with fiery breath, but I once uncovered a jar filled with jet, amber and golden ornaments inside just such a grave. The mound we discovered that day was on a high ridge with views stretching all around. Looking north we could see into the far-off Danish land, though that was a long way off, too far-off, but nevertheless I thought this ancient tomb would suit us.

  The place was called Natangrafum and it belonged to a Mercian thegn named Ælwold, who was happy that I should dig into his mound. ‘I’ll lend you slaves to do the work,’ he told me, ‘bastards don’t have enough to do until the harvest.’

  ‘I’ll use my own,’ I said.

  Ælwold was immediately suspicious, but I was Uhtred and he did not want to antagonise me. ‘You’ll share anything you find?’ he asked anxiously.

  ‘I will,’ I said, then put gold on his table. ‘That gold,’ I said, ‘is for your silence. No one knows I’m here and you tell no one. If I find you break that silence I’ll come back and I’ll bury you in that mound.’

  ‘I’ll say nothing, lord,’ he promised. He was older than I, with pendulous jowls and long grey hair. ‘God knows I don’t want trouble,’ he went on, ‘last year’s harvest was bad, the Danes aren’t that far away, and I just pray for a quiet life.’ He took the gold. ‘But you’ll find nothing in that mound, lord. My father dug it out years ago and there’s nothing there but skeletons. Not even a bead.’

  There were two graves on the ridge top, one built upon the other. A circular mound lay in the centre and athwart it and beneath it, running east and west, was a long mound some ten feet high and over sixty paces long. Much of that long mound was just that, a mound of earth and chalk, but at its eastern end were man-made caves that were entered through a boulder-clad doorway that faced towards the rising sun.

  I sent Ludda to fetch a dozen slaves from Fagranforda and they moved the boulder, and cleared the entrance of earth so that we were able to stoop into the long, stone-lined passageway. Four chambers, two on either side, opened from that tunnel. We lit the tomb with pitch-soaked torches and pulled down the heavy rocks that blocked the chamber entrances and found, as Ælwold had said, nothing but skeletons.

  ‘Will it do?’ I asked Ludda.

  He did not answer at first. He was staring at the skeletons and there was fear on his face. ‘They’ll come back to haunt us, lord,’ he said softly.

  ‘No,’ I said, yet felt a cold shiver in my blood. ‘No,’ I said again, though I did not believe it.

  ‘Don’t touch them, lord,’ he pleaded.

  ‘Ælwold said his father disturbed them,’ I said, trying to convince myself, ‘so we should be safe.’

  ‘He disturbed them, lord, and that means he woke them. Now they’re waiting to take revenge.’ The skeletons lay in untidy heaps, adults and children together. Their skulls grinned at us. One bony head had a great gash in its left side and there were vestiges of hair on another. A child lay curled in a skeleton’s lap. Another corpse reached a bony arm towards us, its finger bones spread on the stony floor. ‘Their spirits are here,’ Ludda whispered, ‘I can feel them, lord.’

  I felt the cold shiver again. ‘Ride back to Fagranforda,’ I told Ludda, ‘and bring Father Cuthbert and my best hound.’

  ‘Your best hound?’

  ‘Lightning, bring him. I’ll expect you tomorrow.’

  We crept back out of the passage and the slaves put back the great boulder that sealed the dead from the living, and that night the sky was lit with great curtains of pale blue and glowing white that shivered high to hide the stars. I have seen those lights before, usually in the depths of winter and always in the northern sky, but it was surely no coincidence that they shimmered the heavens on the day I had let light fall on the dead beneath the earth.

  I had rented a house from Ælwold. It was a Roman house, mostly in ruins, which lay a small distance from a village called Turcandene, which was a short ride south of the tomb. Brambles choked most of the house and ivy wriggled up its broken walls, but the two largest rooms, from where the Romans had once lorded the nearby countryside, had been used as a cattle shed and were protected by crude rafters and stinking thatch. We cleared those rooms and I slept under the thatch that night and next morning went back to the tomb. A mist hovered about the long mound. I waited there with the slaves squatting a few paces away. Ludda returned about midday and the mist still lingered. He had Lightning, my good deerhound, on a leash, and with him was Father Cuthbert. I took Lightning’s leash from Ludda. The hound whimpered and I ruffled his ears. ‘What you have to do now,’ I told Cuthbert, ‘is make certain that the spirits in this grave don’t interfere with us.’

  ‘May I ask, lord, what it is you do here?’

  ‘What did Ludda tell you?’

  ‘Just that you needed me, and to bring the doggy.’

  ‘Then that’s all you need to know. And make sure you drive those spirits away.’

  We took the great entrance stone away and Cuthbert went into the grave where he chanted prayers, sprinkled water and planted a cross he made from tree branches. ‘We must wait till the night’s heart, lord,’ he told me, ‘to make sure the prayers have worked.’ He looked distraught and waved his hands in gestures that suggested hopelessness. He had the hugest hands and never seemed to know quite what to do with them. ‘Will the spirits obey me?’ he asked, ‘I don’t know! They sleep during the day and should wake to find themselves chained and helpless, but perhaps they’re stronger than we know? We’ll discover tonight.’ />
  ‘Why tonight? Why not now?’

  ‘They sleep in the daytime, lord, then they’ll wake tonight and scream like souls in torment. If they break the chains?’ He shuddered. ‘But I shall stay through the night and summon angels.’

  ‘Angels?’

  He nodded seriously. ‘Yes, lord, angels.’ He saw my puzzlement and smiled. ‘Oh don’t think of angels as pretty girls, lord. Simple folk believe angels are lovely bright things with wonderful,’ he paused, his huge hands fluttering over his chest, ‘fawns,’ he finally said, ‘but in truth they’re the shield-warriors of God. Fiercely formidable creatures!’ He flapped his hands, to suggest wings, then went very still as he became aware of my gaze. I stared at him so long that he became nervous. ‘Lord?’ he asked tremulously.

  ‘You’re clever, Cuthbert,’ I said.

  He looked pleased and bashful. ‘I am indeed, lord.’

  ‘Saint Cuthbert the Clever,’ I said in admiration. ‘A fool,’ I went on, ‘but such a clever fool!’

  ‘Thank you, lord, you’re so kind.’

  That night Cuthbert and I stayed in the tomb’s entrance and watched the stars grow bright. Lightning lay with his head on my lap as I stroked him. He was a great hound, full of running, fierce as a warrior, and fearless. A quarter moon climbed above the hills. The night was filled with noises, the rustle of creatures in nearby woods, the haunting call of a hunting owl, the cry of a vixen far away. When the moon had climbed to its height Father Cuthbert faced the tomb, went to his knees, and began to pray silently, his lips moving and his hands clasping the broken cross. If angels came, I did not see them, but perhaps they were there; the bright-winged and beautiful shield-warriors of the Christian god.

  I let Cuthbert pray as I took Lightning to the top of the mound where I knelt and cuddled the hound. I told him how good he was, how loyal and how brave. I stroked his coarse pelt and I buried my head in his fur and I told him he was the greatest hound I had ever known, and I was still cuddling him as I cut his throat with one hard tug of a knife I had sharpened that afternoon. I felt his huge body struggle and lurch, the sudden howl fading fast, the blood soaking my mail and knees, and I was crying because of his death, and I held his shivering body and I told Thor I had made the sacrifice. I did not want to, but it is the sacrifice of things dear to us that touches the minds of the gods, and I held Lightning until he died. It was mercifully swift. I begged Thor to accept the sacrifice and in return to keep the dead silent in their grave.