The Burning Land sc-5

by Bernard Cornwell

  So we rode south and for a long time I could not speak. Father Pyrlig sensed my mood and said nothing till at last I broke the morose silence. “You say my cousin’s sick in the mind?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he said, “and no.”

  “Thank you for making it so plain,” I said.

  He half smiled. He rode beside me, eyes narrowed against the day’s sun. “He’s not mad as poor Guthred is mad,” he said after a while, “he doesn’t have visions or talk to the angels or chew the rushes. He’s angry that he’s not a king. Æthelred knows that when he dies Mercia will fall to Wessex. That’s what Alfred wants, and what Alfred wants he usually gets.”

  “So why does Æthelflæd send for me?”

  “Your cousin hates his wife,” Pyrlig said, his voice low so it would not carry to Finan and Sihtric who rode close behind. A dog harried sheep out of our path, obeying the shrill whistle of a shepherd on a farther hill. Pyrlig sighed. “Every time he sees Æthelflæd,” he went on, “he feels the chains that Alfred has hung on him. He would be king, and he cannot be king because Alfred will not allow it.”

  “Because Alfred wants to be King of Mercia?”

  “Alfred wants to be King of England,” Pyrlig said, “and if he can not boast that title, then he would have his son wear that crown. And so there cannot be another Saxon king. A king is God’s anointed, a king is sacred, so there must be no other anointed king to obstruct the path.”

  “And Æthelred resents that,” I said.

  “He does, and he would punish his wife.”

  “How?”

  “By divorcing her.”

  “Alfred wouldn’t stand for it,” I said dismissively.

  “Alfred is a sick man. He could die at any moment.”

  “Divorcing her,” I said, “which means…” I paused. Æthelflæd, of course, had told me of her husband’s ambitions before, but I still found them scarcely credible. “No, he wouldn’t do that!”

  “He tried when we all thought Alfred lay dying,” Pyrlig said, “and Æthelflæd got word of what was to happen and took refuge in a nunnery at Lecelad.”

  “On the border of Wessex?”

  Pyrlig nodded. “So she can flee to her father if they try again, which they will.”

  I swore softly. “Aldhelm?” I asked.

  “The Lord Aldhelm,” Pyrlig agreed.

  “Æthelred will force her to Aldhelm’s bed?” I asked, my voice rising with incredulity.

  “That would be the Lord Æthelred’s pleasure,” Pyrlig said drily, “and doubtless Lord Aldhelm’s greater pleasure. And when it is done Æthelred can offer the church proof of adultery, confine her to a nunnery and the marriage is over. Then he’s free to marry again, beget an heir, and as soon as Alfred dies he can call himself king.”

  “So who protects her?” I asked, “and who protects my children?”

  “Nuns.”

  “No man protects her?”

  “Her husband is the giver of gold, not she,” Pyrlig said. “Men love her, but she has no wealth to give them.”

  “She does now,” I said savagely, and dug my spurs into the horse I had purchased in Dunholm. I did not have much wealth left. I had purchased more than seventy horses to make this journey possible, and the little silver that remained was packed into two saddlebags, but I had Serpent-Breath and I had Wasp-Sting and now, because the three spinners had twisted my life yet again, I had a purpose. I would go to Æthelflæd.

  Lecelad was a straggle of hovels built along the northern bank of the Temes where the Lec, a boggy stream, flowed into the river. A watermill stood where the stream emptied itself, and next to it was a wharf where a handful of small, leaking boats was tied. At the eastern end of the village street, which was a collection of mud-colored puddles, was the convent. It was surrounded by a palisade built, I suspected, to keep the nuns in rather than their enemies out, and over that rain-darkened wall reared a gaunt and ugly church made of timber and wattle. The bell-tower scraped the low clouds as rain seethed from the west. On the far side of the Temes was a wooden landing stage and above it, on the bank, a group of men who sheltered beneath a makeshift awning propped on poles. They were all in mail, their spears stacked against a willow. I stepped onto the wharf, cupped my hands, and shouted at them. “Who do you serve?”

  “Lord Æthelnoth!” one of the men shouted back. He did not recognize me. I was swathed in a dark cloak and had a hood over my fair hair.

  “Why are you there?” I shouted, but the only reply was a shrug of incomprehension.

  That southern bank was West Saxon territory, which was doubtless why Æthelflæd had chosen Lecelad. She could flee into her father’s kingdom at a moment’s notice, though Alfred, who held the bonds of marriage to be sacred, would doubtless be reluctant to offer her refuge for fear of the resultant scandal. Nevertheless I guessed he had ordered Ealdorman Æthelnoth of Sumorsæte to watch the convent, if for no other reason than to report any strange happenings on the river’s Mercian bank. They would have something to report now, I thought.

  “Who are you, lord?” the man called back across the river. He might not have recognized me, but he saw I led a band of horsemen and perhaps the gold of my lavish cloak-brooch glinted in the dull rainy air.

  I ignored his question, turning instead to Finan who grinned at me from horseback. “Just thirty men, lord,” he told me. I had sent him to explore the village and find how many men guarded the convent.

  “Is that all?”

  “There are more in a village to the north,” he said.

  “Who commands the thirty?”

  “Some poor bastard who almost shit himself when he saw us.”

  The thirty men were posted in Lecelad itself, presumably on my cousin’s orders and presumably to make sure Æthelflæd stayed immured in the ugly convent. I hauled myself into the wet, slippery saddle and fiddled my right foot into the stirrup. “Let’s kick this wasp’s nest,” I said.

  I led my men eastward past cottages, dunghills, and rooting pigs. Some folk watched us from doorways, while at the street’s end, in front of the convent itself, a straggle of men in leather jerkins and rusted helmets waited, but if they had orders to prevent anyone entering the convent they were in no mood to enforce them. They moved sullenly aside as we approached. I ignored them and they neither demanded my name nor tried to stop us.

  I kicked the convent’s gate, spattering rain from its upper edge. My horse whinnied, and I kicked the gate a second time. The Mercian troops watched. One ran into an alley and I suspected he was going to fetch help. “We’ll be fighting someone before this day’s through,” I told Finan.

  “I hope so, lord,” he said gloomily, “it’s been much too long.”

  A small hatch in the big gate slid open and a woman’s face appeared in the hole. “What do you want?” the face demanded.

  “To get out of this rain,” I said.

  “The villagers will offer you shelter,” the woman said and began to slide the hatch shut, but I managed to get my toe into the space.

  “You can open the gate,” I said, “or you can watch us chop it to splinters.”

  “They are friends of the Lady Æthelflæd,” Father Pyrlig intervened helpfully.

  The hatch slid fully open again. “Is that you, father?”

  “It is, sister.”

  “Have manners vanished from the surface of God’s earth?” she asked.

  “He can’t help it, sister,” Pyrlig said, “he’s just a brute.” He grinned at me.

  “Remove your foot,” the woman demanded crossly, and when I obeyed she closed the hatch and I heard the locking bar being lifted. Then the gate creaked wide.

  I climbed out of the saddle. “Wait,” I told my men, and walked into the nunnery’s courtyard. The gaunt church comprised the whole of the southern part, while the other three sides were edged with low timber buildings, thatched with straw, in which I assumed the nuns slept, ate, and spun wool. The nun, who introduced herself as the Abbess Werburgh, bowed
to me. “You’re truly a friend of the Lady Æthelflæd?” she asked. She was an elderly woman, so small that she scarcely reached my waist, but she had a fierce face.

  “I am.”

  Werburgh twitched with disapproval when she noticed the hammer of Thor hanging at my neck. “And your name?” she demanded, but just then a shriek sounded and a child hurtled out of a doorway and pelted across the puddled courtyard.

  It was Stiorra, my daughter, and she threw herself at me, wrapping her arms around my neck and her legs around my waist. I was glad it was raining, or else the nun might have thought the drops on my face were tears. They were. “I knew you’d come,” Stiorra said fiercely, “I knew, I knew, I knew.”

  “You’re Lord Uhtred?” the abbess asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Thank God,” she said.

  Stiorra was telling me of her adventures, and Osbert, my youngest, had run to me and was trying to climb my leg. Uhtred, my eldest son, was nowhere to be seen. I picked up Osbert and shouted for Finan to bring the other men inside. “I don’t know how long we’re staying,” I told the Abbess Werburgh, “but the horses need stabling and food.”

  “You think we’re a tavern?” she demanded.

  “You won’t leave again, will you?” Stiorra was asking insistently.

  “No,” I said, “no, no, no,” and then I stopped talking because Æthelflæd had appeared in a doorway, framed there by the darkness behind and even on that drab gray day it seemed to me that, though she was dressed in a cloak and hood of coarse brown weave, she glowed.

  And I remembered Iseult’s prophecy made so many years ago, made when Æthelflæd was no older than Stiorra, a prophecy made when Wessex was at its weakest, when the Danes had overrun the country and Alfred was a fugitive in the marshes. Iseult, that strange and lovely woman, dark as shadows, had promised me that Alfred would give me power and that my woman would be a creature of gold.

  And I stared at Æthelflæd and she stared back, and I knew the promise I had made to my daughter was one I would keep. I would not leave.

  I put my children down, warning them to stay away from the horses’ hooves, and I walked across the puddled courtyard, oblivious of the nuns who had crept out to watch our arrival. I planned to bow to Æthelflæd. She was, after all, a king’s daughter and the wife of Mercia’s ruler, but her face was at once tearful and happy and I did not bow. I held out my arms and she came to me, and I felt her body trembling as I held her close. Maybe she could feel my heart beating, for it seemed to me as loud as a great drumbeat. “You’ve come,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “I knew you would.”

  I pushed back her hood to see her hair, as golden as mine. I smiled. “A creature of gold,” I said.

  “Foolish man,” she said, smiling.

  “What happens now?” I asked her.

  “I imagine,” she said, stepping gently away from me and pulling the hood back over her hair, “that my husband will try to kill you.”

  “And he can summon?” I asked, then paused to think, “fifteen hundred trained warriors?”

  “At least that many.”

  “Then I see no difficulty,” I said lightly. “I have at least forty men.”

  And that afternoon the first of the Mercian warriors came.

  They arrived in groups, ten or twenty at a time, riding from the north and making a loose cordon about the nunnery. I watched them from the bell-tower, counting over a hundred warriors, and still more came. “The thirty men in the village,” I asked Æthelflæd, “they were here to keep you from leaving?”

  “They were supposed to stop food reaching the nunnery,” she said, “though they weren’t very effective. Supplies came across the river by boat.”

  “They wanted to starve you?”

  “My husband thought that would make me leave. Then I’d have to go back to him.”

  “Not to your father?”

  She grimaced. “He would have sent me back to my husband, wouldn’t he?”

  “Would he?”

  “Marriage is a sacrament, Uhtred,” she said almost wearily, “it is sanctified by God, and you know my father won’t offend God.”

  “So why didn’t Æthelred just drag you back?”

  “Invade a nunnery? My father would disapprove of that!”

  “He would,” I said, watching a larger group of horsemen appear to the north.

  “They thought my father would die at any moment,” she said, and I knew she spoke of my cousin and his friend, Aldhelm, “and they were waiting for that.”

  “But your father lives.”

  “He recovers,” Æthelflæd said, “God be thanked.”

  “And here comes trouble,” I said, because the new band of horsemen, at least fifty in number, rode beneath a banner, suggesting that whoever commanded the troops guarding the nunnery was coming himself. As the horsemen drew nearer, I saw the banner displayed a cross made of two big-bladed war axes. “Whose badge is that?”

  “Aldhelm’s,” Æthelflæd said flatly.

  Two hundred men ringed the monastery now, and Aldhelm, riding a tall black stallion, placed himself fifty paces from the nunnery gates. He had a bodyguard of two priests and a dozen warriors. The warriors carried shields that bore their lord’s crossed-ax badge, and those grim men gathered just behind him and, like their lord, gazed in silence at the closed gates. Did Aldhelm know I was inside? He might have suspected, but I doubt he had any certainty. We had ridden fast through Mercia, keeping to the eastern half where the Danes were strongest, so few men in Saxon Mercia would realize I had come south. Yet perhaps Aldhelm suspected I was there, for he made no attempt to enter the nunnery, or else he was under orders not to offend his god by committing sacrilege. Alfred might forgive Æthelred for making Æthelflæd unhappy, but he would never forgive an insult to his god.

  I went down to the courtyard. “What’s he waiting for?” Finan asked me.

  “Me,” I said.

  I dressed for war. I dressed in shining mail, sword-belted, booted, with my wolf-crested helmet and my shield with the wolf badge, and I chose to carry a war ax as well as my two scabbarded swords. I ordered one leaf of the convent gate to be opened, then walked out alone. I did not ride because I had not been able to buy a battle-trained stallion.

  I walked in silence and Aldhelm’s men watched me. If Aldhelm had possessed a scrap of courage he should have ridden at me and chopped me down with the long sword hanging at his waist, and even without courage he could have ordered his personal guard to cut me down, but instead he just stared at me.

  I stopped a dozen paces from him, then leaned the battle-ax on my shoulder. I had pushed open the hinged cheek-plates of my helmet so Aldhelm’s men could see my face. “Men of Mercia!” I shouted so that not only Aldhelm’s men could hear me, but the West Saxon troops across the river. “Any day now Jarl Haesten will lead an attack on your country! He comes with thousands of men, hungry men, spear-Danes, sword-Danes, Danes who would rape your wives, enslave your children, and steal your lands. They will make a greater army than the horde of warriors you defeated at Fearnhamme! How many of you were at Fearnhamme?”

  Men glanced at each other, but none raised a hand or shouted that they had been present at that great victory.

  “You’re ashamed of your triumph?” I asked them. “You made a slaughter that will be remembered so long as men live in Mercia! And you are ashamed of it? How many of you were at Fearnhamme?”

  Some found their courage then and lifted their arms, and one man cheered, and suddenly most of them were cheering. They cheered themselves. Aldhelm, confused, raised a hand to call for silence, but they ignored him.

  “And who,” I bellowed louder, “do you want to lead you against the Jarl Haesten who comes here with Vikings and pirates, with killers and slavers, with spears and axes, with murder and fire? It was the Lady Æthelflæd who encouraged you to victory at Fearnhamme, and you want her locked in a nunnery? She begged me to come and fight with you again,
and here I am, and you greet me with swords? With spears? So who do you want to lead you against Jarl Haesten and his killers?” I let that question hang for a few heartbeats, then I leveled the ax so it pointed at Aldhelm. “Do you want him?” I shouted, “or me?”

  What a fool that man was. At that moment, in the remnants of rain that spat out of the west, he should have killed me fast, or else he should have embraced me. He could have leaped from his saddle and offered me friendship, and so pretended an alliance that would buy him the time during which he could arrange my death by stealth, but instead he showed fear. He was a coward, he had always been a coward, brave only when faced by the weak, and the fear was on his face, it was in his hesitation, and it was not till one of his followers leaned and whispered in his ear that he found his voice. “This man,” he called, pointing at me, “is outlawed from Wessex.”

  That was news to me, but it was not surprising. I had broken my oath to Alfred, so Alfred would have little choice but to declare me outlaw and thus prey to anyone with the courage to capture me. “So I’m an outlaw!” I shouted, “so come and kill me! And who will protect you from Jarl Haesten then?”

  Aldhelm came to his senses then and muttered something to the man who had whispered to him, and that man, a big broad-shouldered warrior, spurred his horse forward. His sword was drawn. He knew what he was doing. He did not ride at me frantically, but deliberately. He came to kill me, and I could see his eyes judging me from deep in the shadow of his helmet. His sword was already drawn back, his arm tensed for the sweeping stroke that would crash into my shield with the weight of man and horse behind the blade to throw me off balance. Then the horse would turn into me and the sword would come again from behind me, and he knew that I knew all that, but he was reassured when I raised my shield, for that meant I would do what he expected me to do. I saw his mouth tighten and his heels nudge back and his stallion, a big gray beast, lunged ahead and the sword flashed in the dull air.

  All the man’s great strength was in that stroke. It came from my right. My shield was in my left hand, the ax in my right. I did two things.