Conqueror

by Stephen Baxter

  ‘Yet they failed,’ Arngrim had pointed out to Cynewulf as they discussed this. ‘There is still hope.’

  But Alfred could not fight back, not for now; English farmer-armies could not be raised in the depths of winter.

  By the time Arngrim and his companions got back to Aethelingaig after their spying expedition, Alfred’s men had had three days to get organised. Around the camp a ditch had been dug out and an earthen bank thrown up. Inside this perimeter turf fires burned smokily, tents had been set up, and latrines and food pits were being dug. Parties had been sent out into the countryside to demand food for the King from the soggy water-folk. Further afield rivers had been blocked with logs to keep the Danes from sailing up.

  This toy fortress, scratched out of a sodden moor under a sky like a grey lid, was all that was left of the domain of the King of Wessex.

  In the camp the thegns huddled in uneasy groups, poring over bits of parchment, some even scribbling maps in the mud with bits of stick. The King was nowhere to be seen. Arngrim quizzed the thegns, telling what he had learned himself and finding out what else was known.

  The news was detailed, surprisingly, since even here the King’s clerks scribbled and jotted constantly. After nearly a century of the Viking catastrophe the monastic system had collapsed and England was left empty of scholars. It was a tragedy for a land that in Bede’s time had been full of books and learning. But to Alfred, the scholar-King, words on parchment were a weapon of war; he knew that it was with words, words, words, endlessly recorded, that the Roman army had mustered the deep collective wisdom that had once enabled it to conquer the world. So Alfred had searched for literate servants from the British nations of the west and north, from Ireland, even from the continent.

  Today the news, however painstakingly assembled, was dismal.

  There were three principal nations among the Northmen: the Norse, the Swedes and the Danes. It had been the Norse who had first struck at Lindisfarena. They assaulted Britain, Ireland and the Frankish kingdoms. Colonies were planted in Ireland, and on Britain’s offshore islands. Some said the Norse had pushed ever further west, seeking lands beyond the ocean known only to the ancients.

  The Swedes, meanwhile, looked east. Using the great continental rivers, even dragging their boats between river courses, they plunged deep into Asia. In the end they had attacked even Constantinople.

  And the Danes, said to be fleeing tyrannical kings, turned west and south, hitting Britain and western Europe. The petty kingdoms of England and a fragmented Europe had been ripe fruit to be plucked by these ferocious raiders. After five decades of pinprick assaults the character of the incursions changed. A new generation of Danish invaders came in great coordinated waves, far more numerous than before, and they began to overwinter. They had come to seize, not just wealth, but land.

  Alfred’s whole life had been shaped by the wars with the Danes.

  All four of the sons of Alfred’s father, Aethelwulf, became kings. And it was in the reign of the second son, Aethelbert, that the Danish Force came to England, a unified army of perhaps two thousand warriors. The Danes landed first in East Anglia, whose king sued for peace. Then they headed north into Northumbria, where as usual rival kings were at each other’s throats. The Danes burned out the great old city of Eoforwic, and in a great bloodbath around the Roman walls both the rival Northumbrian kings were slain: one of them, Aelle, suffered the blood eagle, his back split open and his lungs splayed. Northumbria, a kingdom which had once dominated Britain, had collapsed like a dry mushroom.

  In the next season the Force turned on Mercia. Alfred, still just nineteen, fought in a siege of the Danes at Snotingaham. Mercia fell; the Force took Lunden, among other prizes. The East Angles now made a belated stand, but their king, Edmund, too was toppled; he too suffered the blood eagle.

  Just five years after the Force landed, only Wessex survived, and it bore the brunt of the Force’s fury. Alfred and his brothers won one mighty victory for the English, at a place called Aescesdun. But the repeated battles proved inconclusive. King Aethelred, Alfred’s last surviving brother, died of wounds incurred on too many battlefields. Alfred, succeeding to the throne, sued for peace; both sides were exhausted.

  The Force used the time to consolidate its gains. More Danes flooded over from the homeland to settle in Northumbria, East Anglia and in the north-east of Mercia. Their leaders were already minting their own coins in Lunden, and Eoforwic began to develop as a Danish market town, a hub of a trading federation that stretched from Ireland across northern England and deep into Europe and Asia beyond.

  The mass of the common folk toiled at their land as they had always done. But if Wessex fell it would be the end of England. And in a new Dane-land, determinedly pagan, thoroughly illiterate, Danish-speaking, the brilliant age of Bede would soon be but a dream.

  The peace won by Alfred had been broken the previous year when the Danes, now under their petty king Guthrum, at last moved against Wessex. Storms wrecked their ships; weakened and cut off, Guthrum agreed another truce with Alfred, and withdrew. It was this truce which the Danes had treacherously broken, in their Twelve Days assault on Alfred’s estate at Cippanhamm.

  And now, Arngrim learned, the news was worse yet. Since Cippanhamm many of the Wessex nobility, losing faith in English kings, had thrown in their lot with the Danes.

  When they had gleaned all they could from the dispirited thegns, Arngrim, Ibn Zuhr and Cynewulf found logs to sit on. Cradling mugs of bark tea, bitter-tasting but warming, they huddled in cloaks that were damp with dew, for the short January day was already ending.

  Arngrim grumbled, ‘The King skulks in his tent, attending his endless prayer services and having his meaningless thoughts copied down by his clerks. He isn’t doing anything.’

  ‘It’s said he muses on the ageing of the English race,’ Cynewulf said. Our centuries of vigour are done, and now we must be pushed aside, as once we pushed aside the Romans.’

  Arngrim grunted. ‘If you asks me he spends too much time thinking about the Romans.’ Alfred’s father Aethelwulf, deeply pious himself, had sent his youngest son to Rome, twice before his tenth birthday. Alfred was struck deeply by the ancient city, its fabric rotting after centuries of neglect and sackings. ‘I heard a rumour that he’s planning a pilgrimage to Rome. He wouldn’t be the first to escape that way.’

  ‘That,’ said Cynewulf, ‘would be a disaster.’

  ‘Well, if the King is in shock, it seems to me he must be drawn out of it. But how?’

  Cynewulf said slowly, ‘I think I know a way.’

  Arngrim said, ‘You mean your prophecy.’

  ‘Yes.’ Seeing Arngrim’s sceptical expression, he said quickly, ‘Think about it, cousin. Aebbe has told me damnably little about this vision from the past. She always knew it was her sole bit of power. But what she did tell me was tantalising. “Even the dragon must lie/At the foot of the Cross.” What can that prophesy but the triumph of Christ over the pagans—and what Christian king can lead us but Alfred? For if he falls, there will be none to follow.’

  Arngrim scowled. ‘How do you know this has anything to do with our century at all? Perhaps this verse speaks of the dead past, or the far future.’

  ‘No,’ Cynewulf said. ‘The prophecy contains specific dates, tied to the appearances of a comet - the calculations are difficult. I know it speaks of now, cousin. I am sure of it.’

  ‘So you say. Even though you can’t work out these dates for yourself.’

  Ibn Zuhr said, ‘I would be intrigued to hear your prophecy. I know a different way of figuring, more advanced than yours. Perhaps I could interpret the dates for you—’

  Arngrim ignored him. ‘The trouble is,’ he said practically, ‘we don’t have Aebbe. The Danes do, and they are intent on taking her to Eoforwic, where they will sell her, body, soul, prophecy and all.’

  Cynewulf clenched his small fist. ‘Then we must find her, and bring her back. If it means we must travel all the way to Eo
forwic - well, that’s what we will do, for we must give the King hope. Are you with me, cousin?’

  Arngrim was reluctant. He felt he should stay here; his instinct was to fight. There was talk of finding ways to use this marshy base to strike back at the Danes. But if the King could not be revived from his scholarly torpor, perhaps there would be no fighting at all. He said reluctantly, ‘I don’t have any better idea.’

  Ibn Zuhr, an outsider in this drama of kin, kingship, religion and culture, smiled to himself. ‘Tell me - what oracle is the author of your prophecy?’

  ‘It is said to be a Weaver. An emperor of the future who sees all history, like the pages of an open book.’

  ‘Perhaps we should consider why he would want Alfred to prevail.’

  These strange words, quietly delivered, made Cynewulf shudder, unaccountably.

  VII

  Arngrim requisitioned horses, stout travelling clothes and a few purses packed with silver. Early one February morning he, Ibn Zuhr and Cynewulf set off to cross England to the Vikings’ greatest city.

  Avoiding the Danes at Cippanhamm they headed east across a countryside still locked down by winter, and they met few people on the road. This may have been a country at a pivot of its history, but almost everybody in England worked on the land, and January and February, when you could venture out at all, were months for ploughing and pruning, for eking out last year’s stores, for preparing for the spring, not for travelling. They developed a habit of setting off before dawn and riding until after dark, with Cynewulf fretting at the shortness of the midwinter days. Ibn Zuhr negotiated places for them to stay each night, where their horses could be stabled or exchanged. The German tradition of hospitality had survived even in these times of raids and invasion, but Ibn Zuhr was always careful to approach any dwelling cautiously, his cloak thrown back to show he had no weapons drawn, and with a blast on his horn well before he came within bow-shot.

  During the journey Ibn Zuhr asked more questions about the prophecy. Though Cynewulf didn’t have a copy of the Menologium itself he did have fragments of analysis of it, much of it by a long-dead monk called Boniface, whose commentary had been rescued from the ruined library of Lindisfarena. Ibn Zuhr read all this avidly, but if he came to any conclusions he kept them to himself.

  They came to the town of Snotingaham, at the heart of Mercia. The great Offa’s kingdom was now ruled by a Danish puppet-king, much of it colonised by Northmen and their families. Snotingaham itself was under the thumb of the Danes, but the English went about their lives mostly unperturbed.

  Here, Amgrim sought out a friend of his called Leofgar.

  Leofgar was a burly, jovial, prosperous-looking man with a livid scar painted across his face. His hair was a woolly mass as black as night; Cynewulf wondered if he dyed it.

  Leofgar clapped an arm around Arngrim. ‘We’re old buddies,’ he said to Cynewulf. ‘We fought together against the Danes a decade ago, when they took Snotingaham and holed up in it, and the West Saxons came to help us out.’ He touched the scar on his face. ‘We couldn’t get rid of the Danes back then, but I took away a trophy, as you can see - that and the life of the Danish brute who gave it to me.’

  Since his fighting days Leofgar had become a weapons dealer. And from the look of his fine cloak and jewellery, a decade of war with the Force hadn’t done business any harm. Cynewulf wondered cynically if he had any qualms about selling weapons to both sides.

  Arngrim said this formidable man was to be their guide for the rest of the journey through Northumbria to Eoforwic. They needed him, for as everybody knew the Northumbrians were a rough lot, and had been even before the Danes came and killed their kings.

  They were treated to a heavy night of eating and drinking at Leofgar’s home. Then they woke before dawn as usual. With banging heads and growling stomachs, led by Leofgar, they resumed their long journey, progressing into the bleak, hilly country of Northumbria.

  The Northumbrians’ uncouth accent was all but incomprehensible to Cynewulf. They were a sour bunch who resented their British neighbours to the north, and the English kingdoms to the south, and their new Danish overlords in Eoforwic. They didn’t even much like each other, and given half a chance they would be at each other’s throats pursuing ancient grievances once again. And they drank prodigiously. In their cups they would sing long mournful songs about the great days of Kings Edwin or Oswald or Oswiu, before they fell to puking, fighting, humping, or all three.

  ‘And that’s just the monks,’ as Arngrim said dryly.

  But even among these dour folk change was apparent. Quite unconsciously, they laced their speech with Danish words.

  There was another difference. Markets studded the countryside: small places, not towns, springing up at crossroads or river crossings, anywhere convenient. They were just huddles of stalls and booths where you could buy salted meat and winter vegetables, and bits of clothing, shoes, knives. There were even, strangely, bits of jewellery to buy. Cynewulf had only ever seen kings, thegns and bishops and their ladies sporting jewellery; here even humble peasants wore glittering clasps and shoulder-brooches.

  All this was more change brought by the Danes. Before the invasions England had been fragmented into vast estates, with a river or two for transport and for fishing, some good lowland for ploughing, hill country or moorland for the sheep, and so on. The estates were like miniature countries, contained in themselves. And you expected to spend your whole life on your estate, tied by bonds of loyalty and tax duty, and you would barter and spend at the estate’s own markets.

  Now the Danes were sweeping all this away. The Danish warriors, parcelling up the countryside, were farmers themselves. But their holdings were smaller, and whatever they couldn’t supply themselves they traded for: fleeces for timber, perhaps, or horses for hops. Suddenly trade was exploding across England in a network of tiny markets, and vast quantities of money washed across the countryside.

  And the English in the new Danish territories, having exchanged one lot of lords for another, were paradoxically discovering a new form of freedom. You didn’t have to live off the estate where you happened to work; you could choose what to buy, to wear or to eat. And if you had a surplus, even a small one, you might buy yourself a little luxury: pepper or some other spice, perhaps, or even a bit of jewellery. Suddenly you had choice. And vendors were taking the opportunity to chum out cheap brooches, pots and plates to sell to these new customers.

  All these markets were at places that had no need of names before, and a rain of new place names was falling across Dane-controlled England from Lunden to Eoforwic and beyond - and most of those names were Danish.

  Arngrim didn’t like this. ‘Even if Alfred wins,’ he growled, ‘even if he or his sons push the Danes all the way back into the sea where they came from, it will be hard to scrub all this out of men’s minds.’

  VIII

  At last they reached Eoforwic, which the Romans had called Eburacum, and its new Danish kings called Jorvik. Whatever its name, the stony Roman core of the city still stood square on its high ground over the river. Wharves snaked down to the water, and carts and foot-travellers slogged up rough tracks to the city walls.

  To reach the city the travellers had to cross a bridge, Roman-built, decayed, eroded, scarred by fire, but still solid, and busy with travellers. From the bridge Cynewulf peered down at a crowded waterway. Danish ships made their way with oars plashing, sails furled, and masts lowered so they could make it under the bridge. But there were lesser vessels too: log-ships each carved out of a single tree-trunk, and boats that were little more than leather-covered frames, like the currachs that had once carried the Irish monks into the ocean. These smaller craft, piled high with fish, eels and dried bundles of reeds, were manned by English folk whose ancestors had made their living from the river for generations before the Danes.

  Once they were over the bridge they followed a good road that ran up from the river bank, through a jumble of slumped wooden buildings, strai
ght to a gatehouse in the solid Roman walls. After centuries of weather and war the walls were much repaired, but they still stood twice as tall as a man. In one corner a tower had been erected, much cruder than the original Roman structures, perhaps planted there by a long-dead Northumbrian king. Leofgar said that for a while the Danes had installed a puppet English king here, but now Danish kings had taken over, and the latest ruler was planning a proper palace, a timber marvel to be built in the south-east corner of the walls.

  At the gatehouse they were stopped by tough-looking Danish warriors who demanded a toll. Once Arngrim had paid up Leofgar led them all confidently into the town.

  Inside the walls the place felt even more cramped than Cynewulf had expected, full of low wooden buildings crammed in around the feet of the vaster Roman ruins. He was overwhelmed by the crowds, the yells of vendors, and above all by the stink, of human sewage and rotting thatch and animal droppings. It was like walking into a vast compost heap. But this crowded place was full of life, and Cynewulf, unused to cities, felt excitement stir in his soul.