Kings of the North

by Kings of the North (retail) (epub)

  Edmund had seen this man before at his father’s feast in Winchester. This was Thorkel the Tall, chief of the Jomsvikings. A dozen other men stood around him, and a yellow-haired boy, no more than five or six, crouched at his feet. In dansker, the Jomsviking said, “So you are Edmund Aetheling?”

  “Yes.”

  The tall man sipped from his horn, as if he knew that made Edmund’s throat tighten, raw. In English, he said, “You father pay?”

  “I don’t know,” Edmund said. “You’ll have to ask him.”

  Thorkel took another pull of the ale. His eyes gleamed with pleasure at Edmund’s thirst. He said, “You have pay?”

  “I have nothing,” Edmund said, “nothing to give to you except a sword in the belly.”

  Thorkel leered at him. “You talk good. I think you father pay gold for you.”

  He fetched the boy at his feet a kick and threw him the drinking horn. The boy gave him a black look and took the horn away. Thorkel bellowed, “Einar!”

  One of the men behind him came forward, a Dane hardly older than Edmund. Thorkel jabbed his finger at Edmund. “Keep this alive until we come to Sweyn. This is money.” The tall man drew a mirthless smile across his lips, his eyes on Edmund. “Talk good, you English. Always lose. Go.” Edmund went away, humiliated.

  Einar led him off into the camp. On the way they passed the yellow-haired boy. He had just filled Thorkel’s cup from a barrel as tall as he was. The way he was standing caught Edmund’s eye; the boy turned slightly away, the cup below his waist, and his free hand in his clothes. He was pissing into Thorkel’s ale. Repayment for the kick. Repayment maybe for a lot of kicks. Edmund clamped his lips shut to keep from laughing and followed after Einar.

  * * *

  In the days following he heard no more talk of ransom. There was little for any of them to eat. It had been a bad summer anyway, and the Danes had trampled and burned the fields as they came. In the days that followed, trudging along, Einar brought him a crust of bread, a handful of beans, a cup to scoop up water from the ground. They had taken off the rope, but Einar was always beside him. The Dane poked and slapped him at first but then left him alone. They talked in stubs of words. “Cold.” “Piss.” Around them, as they plodded along, the Vikings themselves complained they were hungry.

  At night he slept on the ground, and Einar slept beside him, and by morning they were nestled together like puppies. He taught Einar to swear in Saxon, words he had never dared use aloud before. Einar taught him more dansker and found him a cloak.

  They walked through a ruined land. After the rainless summer that had doomed the crops, now it was raining every day. The Danish army, scattered in small bands, slogged through it, foraging as they went, Edmund carried along in their midst like spindrift. He held the cup into the rain to catch something to drink and shared it with Einar. He grubbed worms from under rocks, ate leaves. One night Einar brought him a bone with some meat on it that he gnawed on all the next day as they walked.

  So, step by step, day by day, they came at last to a great church. The village around it had been burned to the ground. The Jomsvikings threw up a camp on the west side of it; they meant to stay, at least for a while.

  Edmund said, “What are they going to do?” He was planning ways to escape, which would be hard, but dying in the effort would be better than dying sitting down. His clothes were stiff with mud, and he had grown some scraggly hairs of a beard.

  Einar gave him a withered apple and a bit of cheese and crouched there, watching him eat. Edmund ate the cheese first and then the apple, even the core. Einar said, “I’m supposed to take you in there.” He jerked his head toward the big church. “Sweyn is in there. Sweyn Tjugas.”

  “The King,” Edmund said, excited, and the Dane nodded and stood up.

  “Yes. You’ve been ransomed. Let’s go.”

  * * *

  The great church resounded with noise. Men packed both sides of the nave, mostly sitting on the floor and eating and drinking. In a line down the center three fires burned on the flagstone floor, each with a carcass spitted over it; the smoke wreathed the air above them. The smell of roasting meat filled Edmund’s nose and made his mouth water. As they walked along the nave the crowds of men on either side hooted and yelled at him.

  “English! Kill him!”

  “Stupid baby – learn to fight, baby!”

  Edmund felt himself flush. He wanted to wheel on them and charge, but he plodded along after Einar up toward the altar. The Christ still hung on the wall behind it, looking down mildly, as if this were nothing new.

  They had dragged the altar out from the wall so that half a dozen men could sit behind it. On the left was Thorkel the Tall. The little yellow-haired boy leaned against the wall behind him. At the very center of the table sat a broad-shouldered man with red-gold hair and a sweeping long, tawny moustache, and Edmund knew this was Sweyn Forkbeard, the King of Denmark.

  Einar brought them up before him and bowed stiffly from the waist. Edmund stood straight where he was.

  “Edmund Aetheling,” Einar said, his voice shrill to clear the uproar around him. “My lord King.” He turned to Edmund. “Bow.”

  Edmund said, in English, “I greet the King of Denmark.” He bent his head to the King, as he would to his father.

  Sweyn was drinking from a chalice. The bones of his dinner lay scattered before him on the gold-embroidered altar cloth, now patchy with blood and dirt. He set the cup down. He had wide-set, pale blue eyes, and when he smiled he showed his teeth.

  He glanced at Thorkel. “You took this little hero? What a feat that must have been; you’ll need a drapa.”

  Edmund had gotten enough dansker from Einar to understand this, and he heated at it; he said, “Some Jomsvikings gone too. I fight.” He bit his lip, wondering if he had said what he meant. If he should have said anything.

  Sweyn’s eyebrows jacked up and down. His mouth turned down humorously under the luxuriant moustache. “Nothing much lost there.” He turned back to English. “Aetheling, I will have of you a pledge not to fight against me.”

  Edmund said, “Lord, I will give you no such pledge.”

  The other men around the table shifted in their places, exchanged looks, and growled. Thorkel said, “Odin’s balls. What a little viper. Just kill him, then, Sweyn. Ethelred will give you the money anyway.”

  The Danish King’s smile did not waver. He said, “Are you such an iron one, then, little prince, to think you can make any difference against me?”

  “No,” Edmund said. “But I am an Englishman, and I will not swear away my country.”

  Sweyn’s smile flattened. He twisted one long end of his moustache around his forefinger, and he nodded once. “I like your courage. You may look like a sparrow, but I think you are eagle-hearted. All right, iron Edmund, go sit down, and you can leave tomorrow.”

  Edmund’s legs went wobbly with relief. He followed Einar over to the side, and they sat on the floor by the end of the altar. Nobody gave them anything to eat or drink. The roasted sheep on the fires were almost all just hulks of empty bones, anyway, and around the room, roars went up for more, for mead and ale, for blood and fighting. Sweyn’s name racketed through the heights of the church in waves of sound, and then on the other side men started to call out Thorkel’s name, and for a while the church resounded with waves of chanted names, like some kind of horrible false Mass.

  Then up the nave came another ragged prisoner, pushed along by Vikings. Edmund saw him, and his mouth dropped; this was Alphege, the archbishop of Canterbury.

  The old man was much changed. He had starved too. Barefoot, limping, he wore a tattered gown and leaned on his staff, but with the curled crozier end broken off. He had been a heavy man. Now his face was hollow, the skin hanging in empty folds below the bones, and the body under his gown looked made of twigs.

  He was still fierce. His eyes blazed from the pits of his skull. He came up before Sweyn Forkbeard and banged his staff on the floor.

&nb
sp; “You will suffer in hell for this, pagan devil!”

  Sweyn glanced from side to side, and his smile came back, all teeth. He said, “Alphege, archbishop of somewhere, devil that I am, I will have a ransom of you.”

  The churchman banged his staff on the floor again. “I shall not! You pigs have desecrated God’s house, and you will burn for it – from me you get nothing more than you have taken by force.”

  Thorkel muttered, “We have already eaten all of that.”

  Sweyn said, “A ransom, Alphege, or you die. I have nothing to feed prisoners.”

  “God will preserve me,” the churchman shrieked. “God will send you to the deepest—”

  “Preserve you from this,” Thorkel shouted, standing up, and threw a bone at him. It was a shin bone, and it hit the archbishop square in the face.

  Sweyn put one hand out, as if to stop him. But all over the church the Vikings howled, and they rose. Their arms cocked back and forward, and a hail of bones flew through the air. At first Alphege stood there, the blood running down his face from the first blow, his eyes furious on Sweyn, and the bones pounding down all around him. Bones smashed on the floor, struck his shoulders, his back, his round, bald head. The Vikings pressed closer, to hit him harder, and the bones became a blizzard.

  Under the barrage Alphege sank slowly down onto his knees. Edmund gasped and started up, but Einar held him where he was. The archbishop crumpled to the floor. Around him on the flagstones a pool of blood widened. The bones heaped up around him. The skin of his bald head split, and streams of blood spilled down his face and cheeks. His torn robe was sodden with it. He folded forward, his mouth open, his eyes glazing.

  Sweyn said something, harsh, and one of the men behind him vaulted over the table, taking an axe from his belt. The storm of bones dwindled out. The axeman went to the folded form of the churchman, lifted the axe, and cleaved the archbishop’s skull with it.

  Edmund groaned. Slaves dragged the body away, trailing a smear of blood all down the flagstone floor, through the heaped bones. Edmund put his hands over his eyes, shaking.

  * * *

  In the morning the Danes were leaving in streams, heading for the coast. Einar told Edmund, in dansker, “There’s nothing to eat, anyway. What a piss-poor little country this is; I don’t know why Sweyn wants it.”

  “Then leave it,” Edmund said. “Leave it to us.”

  “It’s yours,” the other boy said. He put his hand on Edmund’s arm a moment. Then drew back. “Go.” Ahead of them the road wound away over the ruined countryside. Edmund began the long trudge to London, where the King was now.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The long summer came to an end, and there was no harvest. The ordinary people hunted desperately through the brakes and wild places for hares and squirrels, nuts and berries, roots and mushrooms, and moss and lichen. The stormy weather raised the rivers and washed out bridges and towns. The Danes went away, since there was nothing left to steal.

  Aethelstan said, “I cannot see my way in this. The kingdom is desperate, and someone must rule; but my father lives and is often times easy of mind.”

  Edmund sat opposite him. They had come into a tavern in Winchester, the day blowing a cold, snowy gale, and there were not many folk around. “When our father is easy of mind, he is still often cruel as an ogre.”

  “This is not a fit charge against a king,” Aethelstan said, “who has such enemies as ours. Against the Danes, cruelty is only justice. You yourself suffered so at their hands. I hate them for it, how they treated you.”

  His face was riven with lines, his cheeks sunken, so he looked much older. Slowly he looked around the room and then returned his gaze to Edmund.

  “And what they did to the old archbishop. How they have destroyed the kingdom. But from this hate to seizing the crown myself – that is a step longer than I can take. My father lives. My father is true King, Alfred’s heir, God’s champion in England.”

  There was a little silence. Edmund could see how this ate at Aethelstan, and he was sorry he had brought it up again, as doubtless everybody did. Finally his brother turned to him and said, “What would you do?”

  Edmund said, “I have seen you do all a king should do, when our father does none of it. To me you are the King of the English.”

  “Ah,” Aethelstan said, looking away, “you are a child.”

  “So was our Lord when he spoke to the priests,” Edmund said.

  “I cannot decide,” Aethelstan said, with a shake of his head. “It is too much for me. God keep you, Edmund. God keep you from this.” He got up and went away.

  * * *

  Edmund went out to make water in the evening, and Eadric Streona came up just beside him, as if he had been waiting for him. The Saxon said, “Let us not mince words here. I know you are inciting the prince Aethelstan against the King. Come to the King and denounce Aethelstan, and he will hear nothing of your own treasons.”

  Edmund turned, abruptly, his cock in his hand, and scattered piss all over Streona’s shoes. “Like that,” he said, and went away, pulling his clothes together.

  The next day in the crowded church, someone struck at him with a knife. Edmund lost the man almost at once in the crowd, but the blade slit a long gash in his cloak.

  The King still had some Normans around him. Edmund’s eyes fell on their mail coats. Few Saxons wore them. Made of iron links sewn onto leather, they were heavy and awkward and made moving around hard sometimes. But he saw their value, and he went into London, to the armory there, and had one made for him.

  * * *

  Ethelred threw his hands up. To Streona, he said, “Who can I trust, then, if not my own blood? No one!”

  “My lord,” Streona said, “while there are many who favor Aethelstan over you, I myself have never—”

  “My own fyrd runs from the Danes,” Ethelred cried. “My own son and heir plots to steal my crown! This truly is the wolf time.”

  Streona said, “Sir, there is an army ready to hand, who will be loyal only to you.”

  Ethelred wheeled. He had become much fatter, since the haunting began, as if the only comfort he could find was to eat. As if he could put a barrier of lard between the ghost and him. His cheeks were shiny and red above his curly beard. He said, “Not English, I assure you.”

  “No, sir,” Streona said. He smiled, nodding, easing the King along into this. “These men are not English.”

  * * *

  “My dear one. My darling.” Ethelred kissed her and took her plump white hands in his. “Mother of my true sons.” He kissed her again.

  Emma smiled; the Lady recoiled from him. Ethelred was chafing more and more on her. He had realized her presence kept the ghost away, and he stayed by her, day and night, insisting she sleep in the same bed, even when she complained of his snoring and thrashing. There were armed guards on all the doors. If she lay down to sleep, he lay down beside her; he woke her every few moments, starting awake, and groaning.

  She could not go abroad, then, since if he found her untenanted body, there was no telling what he might do, especially if the ghost happened to be there. He could kill her or enough of her to make it impossible to keep on. She could distill herself into some other creature and so slip away – a fly or a bird or even a wolf, just as she had that one time – but she had noticed that most animals were even stupider than human beings, harder to manage and easily distracted. And she could not consume souls when she was in such a state, only kill, and that slowly.

  It mattered little now, because after the bloody war she was replete with souls, but it annoyed her to be constrained. She began to think she might replace him. Her eye fell on Streona, who was no better. But there would be one, somewhere. She began to winnow out the possibilities, looking for the ripe kernel.

  * * *

  The King pushed at the food before him. “Is there no meat in all England?”

  The Queen said, “I have heard, in Jorvik, there is food aplenty.”

  “Jorvi
k.” Ethelred swept that away with a wave of his hand. “There can be nothing left of Jorvik.”

  The Queen was silent. She knew how much there was in Jorvik, and it gnawed at her.

  She had nearly devoured him once in the battle over the downs. He still had not realized that attacking her like that only made her stronger. She would take him, one time soon, and then she would have no rival anywhere in this world. She put him out of her thoughts, laying her mind instead on Aethelstan.

  The Aetheling sat down the table from her, among his friends, noisy and good humored, heedlessly handsome, just the sort Emma loved, with his flowing blond hair. Like all the Saxon lords he wore his hair long, well combed, shining. She did not look at him. He would be a beautiful king, if nothing else. And he was brave, had fought hard, barely escaping, in the battle on the downs.

  A page had come in and stood shifting from foot to foot, waiting for the King to beckon him forward. The Queen lowered her eyes. This was probably another of Ethelred’s connivances. He was always trying to work some little scheme, kill somebody else, steal somebody else’s land. They made her angry, all these men, weaving their spidery little plots.

  The urge burned in her, never quite gone now, to pack her many souls together and explode them all. She throttled it. That meant giving up everything just for a moment’s unparalleled glut. She was not ready yet for that.

  Ethelred said, quietly, “Wait here.”

  She clutched his arm. “Where are you going?” Trying to sound fretful.

  “Just stay here, where I can find you at once. I have someone to meet.” He kissed her and went off.

  The Queen turned, looking around. With him gone she felt suddenly much larger, easier. She told herself to be patient until the war started again. For a while now she should go by sideways moves, by indirections. That meant showing them only silly, man-loving Emma.