The Pale Horseman s-2

by Bernard Cornwell

  'Draw your sword,' he ordered me.

  When Serpent-Breath was naked he unwound the chain from the hasps and pushed the door inwards. He entered cautiously, pushing the hood back from his face. He held the torch high, and in its light I saw the big man huddled on the floor.

  'Steapa!' Alfred hissed.

  Steapa was only pretending to be asleep and he uncoiled from the floor with wolf-like speed, lashing out at Alfred, and I rammed the sword towards his breast, but then he saw Alfred's bruised face and he froze, oblivious of the blade. 'Lord?'

  'You're coming with us,' Alfred said.

  'Lord!' Steapa fell to his knees in front of his king.

  'It's cold out there,' Alfred said. It was freezing inside the cell as well. 'You can sheath your sword, Uhtred.' Steapa looked at me and seemed vaguely surprised to find I was the man he had been fighting when the Danes came. 'The two of you will be friends,' Alfred said sternly, and the big man nodded.

  'And we have one other person to fetch,' Alfred said, 'so come.'

  'One other person?' I asked.

  'You spoke of a nun,' Alfred said.

  So I had to find the nun's cell, and she was still there, lying crushed against the wall by a Dane who was snoring flabbily. The flame-light showed a small, frightened face half-hidden by the Dane's beard. His beard was black and her hair was gold, pale gold, and she was awake and, seeing us, gasped, and that woke the Dane who blinked in the flame-light and then snarled at us as he tried to throw off the thick cloaks serving as blankets. Steapa hit him and it was like the sound of a bullock being clubbed, wet and hard at the same time. The man's head snapped back and Alfred pulled the cloaks away and the nun tried to hide her nakedness. Alfred hurriedly put the cloaks back. He had been embarrassed and I had been impressed, for she was young and. very beautiful and I wondered why such a woman would waste her sweetness on religion.

  'You know who I am?' Alfred asked her.

  She shook her head.

  'I am your king,' he said softly, 'and you will come with us, sister.'

  Her clothes were long gone, so we swathed her in the heavy cloaks. The Dane was dead by now, his throat cut by Wasp-Sting, and I had found a pouch of coins strung around his neck on a leather thong.

  'That money goes to the church,' Alfred said.

  'I found it,' I said, 'and I killed him.'

  'It is the money of sin,' he said patiently, 'and must be redeemed.'

  He smiled at the nun. 'Are there any other sisters here?' he asked.

  'Only me,' she said in a small voice.

  'And now you are safe, sister.' He straightened. 'We can go.'

  Steapa carried the nun who was called Hild. She clung to him, whimpering, either from the cold or, more likely, from the memory of her ordeal.

  We could have captured Cippanhamm that night with a hundred men. It was so bitterly cold that no guards stood on the ramparts. The gate sentries were in a house by the wall, crouched by the fire, and all the notice they took of the bar being lifted was to shout a bad-tempered question wanting to know who we were.

  'Guthrum's men,' I called back, and they did not bother us further.

  A half-hour later we were in the watermill, reunited with Father Adelbert, Egwine and the three soldiers.

  'We should give thanks to God for our deliverance,' Alfred said to Father Adelbert, who had been aghast to see the blood and bruises on the king's face. 'Say a prayer, father,' Alfred ordered.

  Adelbert prayed, but I did not listen. I just crouched by the fire, thought I would never be warm again, and then slept.

  It snowed all next day. Thick snow. We made a fire, careless that the Danes might see the smoke, for no Dane was going to struggle through the bitter cold and deepening snow to investigate one small, far-off trickle of grey against a grey sky.

  Alfred brooded. He spoke little that day, though once he frowned and asked me if it could really he true about Wulfhere. 'We didn't see him with Guthrum,' he added plaintively, desperately hoping that the Ealdorman had not betrayed him.

  'The hostages lived,' I said.

  'Dear God,' he said, convinced by that argument, and leaned his head against the wall. He watched the snow through one of the small windows. 'He's family!' he said after a while, then fell silent again.

  I fed the horses the last of the hay we had brought with us, then sharpened my swords for lack of anything else to do. Hild wept. Alfred tried to comfort her, but he was awkward and had no words, and oddly it was Steapa who calmed her. He talked to her softly, his voice a deep grumble, and when Serpent-Breath and Wasp-Sting were as sharp as I could make them, and as the snow sifted endlessly onto a silent world, I brooded like Alfred. I thought of Ragnar wanting my oath. I thought of him wanting my allegiance.

  The world began in chaos and it will end in chaos. The gods brought the world into existence, and they will end it when they fight among themselves, but in between the chaos of the world's birth and the chaos of the world's death is order, and order is made by oaths, and oaths bind us like the buckles of a harness. I was hound to Alfred by an oath, and before I gave that oath I had wanted to bind myself to Ragnar, but now I felt affronted that he had even asked me. That was pride growing in me and changing me. I was Uhtred of Bebbanburg, slayer of Ubba, and while I would give an oath to a king I was reluctant to make an oath to an equal. The oath-giver is subservient to the man who accepts the oath. Ragnar would have said I was a friend, he would treat me like a brother, but his assumption that I would give him an oath demonstrated that he still believed I was his follower. I was a lord of Northumbria, but he was a Dane, and to a Dane all Saxons are lesser men, and so he had demanded an oath. If I gave him an oath then he would be generous, but I would be expected to show gratitude, and I could only ever hold Bebbanburg because he allowed me to hold it. I had never thought it all through before, but suddenly, on that cold day, I understood that among the Danes I was as important as my friends, and without friends I was just another landless, masterless warrior. But among the Saxons I was another Saxon, and among the Saxons I did not need another man's generosity.

  'You look thoughtful, Uhtred,' Alfred interrupted my reverie.

  'I was thinking, lord,' I said, 'that we need warm food.' I fed the fire, then went outside to the stream where I knocked away the skim of ice and scooped water into a pot. Steapa had followed me outside, not to talk, but to piss, and I stood behind him.

  'At the witanegemot,' I said, 'you lied about Cynuit.'

  He tied the scrap of rope that served as a belt and turned to look at me. 'If the Danes had not come,' he said in his growling voice, 'I would have killed you.'

  I did not argue with that, for he was probably right.

  'At Cynuit,' I said instead, 'when Ubba died, where were you?'

  'There.'

  'I didn't see you,' I said. 'I was in the thick of the battle, but I didn't see you.'

  'You think I wasn't there?' he was angry.

  'You were with Odda the Younger?' I asked, and he nodded. 'You were with him,' I guessed,

  'because his father told you to protect him?' He nodded again. And Odda the Younger,' I said, 'stayed a long way from any danger. Isn't that right?'

  He did not answer, but his silence told me I was right. He decided he had nothing more to say to me so started back towards the mill, but I pulled on his arm to stop him. He was surprised by that. Steapa was so big and so strong and so feared that he was unused to men using force on him, and I could see the slow anger burning in him. I fed it. 'You were Odda's nursemaid,' I sneered. 'The great Steapa Snotor was a nursemaid. Other men faced and fought the Danes and you just held Odda's hand.'

  He just stared at me. His face, so tight-skinned and expressionless, was like an animal's gaze, nothing there but hunger and anger and violence. He wanted to kill me, especially after I used his nickname, but I understood something more about Steapa Snotor. He was truly stupid. He would kill me if he was ordered to kill me, but without someone to instruct him he did not kno
w what to do, so I thrust the pot of water at hire. 'Carry that inside,' I told him. He hesitated. 'Don't stand there like a dumb ox!' I snapped. 'Take it! And don't spill it.' He took the pot. 'It has to go on the fire,' I told him,

  'and next time we fight the Danes you'll be with me.'

  'You?'

  'Because we are warriors,' I said, 'and our job is to kill our enemies, not be nursemaids to weaklings.'

  I collected firewood, then went inside to find Alfred staring at nothing and Steapa sitting beside Hild who now seemed to be consoling him rather than being consoled. I crumbled oatcakes and dried fish into the water and stirred the mess with a stick. It was a gruel of sorts and tasted horrible, but it was hot.

  That night it stopped snowing and next morning we went home.

  Alfred need not have gone to Cippanhamm. Anything he learned there he could have discovered by sending spies, but he had insisted on going himself and he came back more worried than before. He had learned some good things, that Guthrum did not have the men to subjugate all Wessex and so was waiting for reinforcements, but he had also learned that Guthrum was trying to turn the nobility of Wessex to his side. Wulfhere was sworn to the Danes, who else?

  'Will the fyrd of Wiltunscir fight for Wulfhere?' he asked us.

  Of course they would fight for Wulfhere. Most of the men in Wiltunscir were loyal to their lord, and if their lord ordered them to follow his banner to war then they would march. Those men who were in the parts of the shire not occupied by the Danes might go to Alfred, but the rest would do what they always did, follow their lord. And other Ealdormen, seeing that Wulfhere had not lost his estates, would reckon that their own future, and their family's safety, lay with the Danes. The Danes had ever worked that way. Their armies were too small and too disorganised to defeat a great kingdom so they recruited lords of the kingdom, flattered them, even made them into kings, and only when they were secure did they turn on those Saxons and kill them.

  So back in Æthelingaeg Alfred did what he did best. He wrote letters. He wrote letters to all his nobility, and messengers were sent into every corner of Wessex to find Ealdormen, thegns and bishops, and deliver the letters. I am alive, the scraps of parchment said, and after Easter I shall take Wessex from the pagans, and you will help me. We waited for the replies.

  'You must teach me to read,' Iseult said when I told her about the letters.

  ‘Why?'

  'It is a magic,' she said.

  'What magic? So you can read psalms?'

  'Words are like breath,' she said, 'you say them and they're gone. But writing traps them. You could write down stories, poems.'

  'Hild will teach you,' I said, and the nun did, scratching letters in the mud. I watched them sometimes and thought they could have been taken for sisters except one had hair black as a raven's wing and the other had hair of pale gold.

  So Iseult learned her letters and I practised the men with their weapons and shields until they were too tired to curse me, and we also made a new fortress. We restored one of the beamwegs that led south to the hills at the edge of the swamp, and where that log road met dry land we made a strong fort of earth and tree-trunks. None of Guthrum's men tried to stop the work, though we saw Danes watching us from the higher hills, and by the time Guthrum understood what we were doing the fort was finished.

  In late February a hundred Danes came to challenge it, but they saw the thorn palisade protecting the ditch, saw the strength of the log wall behind the ditch, saw our spears thick against the sky and rode away.

  Next day I took sixty men to the farm where we had seen the Danish horses. They were gone, and the farm was burned out. We rode inland, seeing no enemy. We found newborn lambs slaughtered by foxes, but no Danes, and from that day on we rode ever deeper into Wessex, carrying the message that the king lived and fought, and some days we met Danish bands, but we only fought if we outnumbered them for we could not afford to lose men.

  Ælswith gave birth to a daughter whom she and Alfred called Æthelgifu. Ælswith wanted to leave the swamp. She knew that Huppa of Thornsaeta was holding Dornwaraceaster for the Ealdorman had replied to Alfred's letter saying that the town was secure and, as soon as Alfred demanded it, the fyrd of Thornsaeta would march to his aid. Dornwaraceaster was not so large as Cippanhamm, but it had Roman walls and Ælswith was tired of living in the marshes, tired of the endless damp, of the chill mists, and she said her newborn baby would die of the cold, and that Edward's sickness would come back, and Bishop Alewold supported her. He had a vision of a large house in Dornwaraceaster, of warm fires and priestly comfort, but Alfred refused. If he moved to Dornwaraceaster then the Danes would immediately abandon Cippanhamm and besiege Alfred and starvation would soon threaten the garrison, but in the swamp there was food. In Dornwaraceaster Alfred would be a prisoner of the Danes, but in the swamp he was free, and he wrote more letters, telling Wessex he lived, that he grew stronger and that after Easter, but before Pentecost, he would strike the pagans.

  It rained that late winter. Rain and more rain. I remember standing on the muddy parapet of the new fort and watching the rain just falling and falling. Mail coats rusted, fabrics rotted and food went mouldy. Our huts fell apart and we had no men skilled in making new ones. We slid and splashed through greasy mud, our clothes were never dry, and still grey swathes of rain marched from the west.

  Thatch dripped, huts flooded, the world was sullen.

  We ate well enough, though as more men came to Æthelingaeg, the food became scarcer, but no one starved and no one complained except Bishop Alewold who grimaced whenever he saw another fish stew. There were no deer left in the swamp, all had been netted and eaten, but at least we had fish, eels and wildfowl, while outside the swamp, in those areas the Danes had plundered, folk starved.

  We practised with our weapons, fought mock battles with staves, watched the hills, and welcomed the messengers who brought news. Burgweard, the fleet commander, wrote from Hamtun saying that the town was garrisoned by Saxons, but that Danish ships were off the coast.

  'I don't suppose he's fighting them,' Leofric remarked glumly when he heard that news.

  'He doesn't say so,' I said.

  'Doesn't want to get his nice ships dirty,' Leofric guessed. 'At least he still has the ships.'

  A letter came from a priest in distant Kent saying that Vikings from Lundene had occupied Contwaraburg and others had settled on the Isle of Sceapig, and that the Ealdorman had made his peace with the invaders. News came from Stith Seaxa of more Danish raids, but also a reassurance from Arnulf, Ealdorman of Suth Seaxa, that his fyrd would gather in the spring. He sent a gospel book to Alfred as a token of his loyalty, and for days Alfred carried the book until the rain soaked into the pages and made the ink run. Wiglaf, Ealdorman of Sumorsaete, appeared in early March and brought seventy men. He claimed to have been hiding in the hills south of Barnum and Alfred ignored the rumours which said Wiglaf had been negotiating with Guthrum. All that mattered was that the Ealdorman had come to Æthelingaeg and Alfred gave him command of the troops that continually rode inland to shadow the Danes and to ambush their forage parties. Not all the news was so encouraging.

  Wilfrith of Hamptonscir had fled across the water to Frankia, as had a score of other Ealdormen and thegns.

  But Odda the Younger, Ealdorman of Defnascir, was still in Wessex. He sent a priest who brought a letter reporting that the Ealdorman was holding Exanceaster. 'God he praised,' the letter read, 'but there are no pagans in the town'.

  'So where are they?' Alfred asked the priest. We knew that Svein, despite losing his ships, had not marched to join Guthrum, which suggested he was still skulking in Defnascir.

  The priest, a young man who seemed terrified of the king, shrugged, hesitated, then stammered that Svein was close to Exanceaster.

  'Close?' the king asked.

  'Nearby,' the priest managed to say.

  'They besiege the town?' Alfred asked.

  'No, lord.'

  Alfred read th
e letter a second time. He always had great faith in the written word and he was trying to find some hint of the truth that had escaped him in the first reading. 'They are not in Exanceaster,' he concluded, 'but the letter does not say where they are. Nor how many they are. Nor what they're doing.'

  'They are nearby, lord,' the priest said hopelessly. 'To the west, I think.'

  'The west?'

  'I think they're to the west.'

  'What's to the west?' Alfred asked me.

  'The high moor,' I said.

  Alfred threw the letter down in disgust. 'Maybe you should go to Defnascir,' he told me, and find out what the pagans are doing.'