The Burning Land (33 page)

He attacked with the despair of a man who did not believe he could win. He did not gauge me, as Beornoth had, but just came as fast as he could and hacked with his sword as strongly as he was able, and I met the massive blow by holding Serpent-Breath upright. I knew that sword, I knew her strength, I had watched as Ealdwulf the Smith had forged the four rods of iron and three of steel into one long blade. I had fought with her, I had killed with her, and I had matched her against the blades of Saxons, Danes, Norsemen, and Frisians. I knew her and I trusted her, and when Aldhelm’s sword met her with a clang that must have been heard far across the river, I knew what would happen.

His sword broke. It shattered. The broken end, two thirds of the blade, struck my helmet and fell to the mud, then I was pursuing Aldhelm who, holding a stump of sword, tried to flee, but there was no escape. The fight was over. The men who had supported him were either dead or disarmed, and the warriors who had sided with me formed a circle that ringed the two of us. Aldhelm curbed his stallion and stared at me. He opened his mouth, but could find no words. “Down,” I told him, and when he hesitated, I shouted it again, “down!” I looked at Beornoth who had recovered his horse. “Give him your sword,” I ordered.

Aldhelm was unsteady on his feet. He had a shield and now he had Beornoth’s sword, but there was no fight in him. He was whimpering. There was no pleasure in killing such a man and so I made it quick. One thrust above his crossed-ax shield, which made him lift
it and I dropped Serpent-Breath before the blade struck and cut instead into his left ankle with enough force to topple him. He fell to one knee and Serpent-Breath took him on the side of his neck. He wore a mail hood beneath his helmet, and the links did not split, but the blow drove him into a puddle and I struck again, this time breaking the neck-mail so that his blood misted and splashed across the nearest horsemen. He was shaking and crying, and I sawed the blade toward me until the blade’s point was in the ragged wound of blood and mangled mail, then I thrust her down hard into his gullet where I twisted her. He was quivering, bleeding like a pig, and then he was dead.

I threw his banner into the Temes, then cupped my hands and shouted at the men across the river. “Tell Alfred that Uhtred of Bebbanburg has returned!”

Only now I was fighting for Mercia.

Æthelflæd insisted that Aldhelm receive a Christian burial. There was a small church in the village, little more than a cattle byre with a cross nailed to its gable, and around it was a graveyard where we dug six graves for the six dead men. The existing graves were badly marked and one of the spades sliced into a corpse, tearing the woolen shroud and spilling stinking fat and ribs. We lay Aldhelm into that grave and, because so many of the Mercians had been his men and I did not want to strain their loyalty any further, I let him be buried in his fine clothes and mail coat. I kept his helmet, a gold chain, and his horse. Father Pyrlig prayed above the fresh burials, and then we could leave. My cousin was evidently at his estate near Gleawecestre, and so we rode there. I now led over two hundred men, mostly Mercians and, doubtless, in my cousin’s eyes, rebels. “You want me to kill Æthelred?” I asked Æthelflæd.

“No!” She sounded shocked.

“Why not?”

“Do you want to be Lord of Mercia?” she retorted.

“No.”

“He is the chief Ealdorman of Mercia,” Æthelflæd said, “and my husband.” She shrugged. “I may not like him, but I am wedded to him.”

“You can’t be wedded to a dead man,” I said.

“Murder is still a sin,” Æthelflæd said gently.

“Sin,” I said scornfully.

“Some sins are so bad,” she said, “that a lifetime’s penance isn’t enough to redeem them.”

“Then let me do the sinning,” I suggested.

“I know what’s in your heart,” she said, “and if I don’t stop you then I am as guilty as you.”

I growled some retort, then nodded curtly to folk who knelt as we passed through their village that was all thatch, dung, and pigs. The villagers had no idea who we were, but they recognized mail and weapons and shields. They would be holding their breath till we had gone, but soon, I thought, the Danes might come this way and the thatch would be burned and the children taken for slaves.

“When you die,” Æthelflæd said, “you’ll want a sword in your hand.”

“Of course.”

“Why?”

“You know why.”

“So you’ll go to Valhalla. When I die, Uhtred, I want to go to heaven. Would you deny me that?”

“Of course not.”

“Then I cannot commit the awful sin of murder. Æthelred must live. Besides,” she gave me a smile, “my father would never forgive me if I were to murder Æthelred. Or allow you to murder him. And I don’t want to disappoint my father. He’s a dear man.”

I laughed at that. “Your father,” I said, “will be angry anyway.”

“Why?”

“Because you asked for my help, of course.”

Æthelflæd gave me a curious look. “Who do you think suggested that I ask for your help?”

“What?” I gaped at her and she laughed. “Your father wanted me to come to you?” I asked in disbelief.

“Of course!” she said.

I felt like a fool. I thought I had escaped Alfred, only to discover that he had drawn me south. Pyrlig must have known, but had been very careful not to tell me. “But your father hates me!” I told Æthelflæd.

“Of course he doesn’t. He just thinks of you as a very wayward hound, one that needs a whipping now and then.” She gave me a deprecatory smile, then shrugged. “He knows Mercia will be attacked, Uhtred, and fears that Wessex won’t be able to help.”

“Wessex always helps Mercia.”

“Not if Danes are landing on Wessex’s coast,” she said, and I almost laughed aloud. We had gone to such trouble in Dunholm to keep our plans secret, yet Alfred was already preparing for those plans. To which end he had used his daughter to draw me south, and I thought first how clever he was, then wondered just what sins that clever man was prepared to tolerate to keep the Danes from destroying Christianity in England.

We left the village to ride through sunlit country. The grass had greened and was growing fast. Cattle, released from their winter imprisonment, were gorging themselves. A hare stood on its hind legs to watch us, then skittered away before standing and staring at us again. The road climbed gently into the soft hills. This was good country, well watered and fertile, the kind of land the Danes craved. I had been to their homeland and seen how men scratched a bare living from small fields, from sand and from rock. No wonder they wanted England.

The sun was sinking as we passed through another village. A girl carrying two yoked pails of milk was so scared by the sight of armed men that she stumbled as she tried to kneel and the precious milk ran into the road’s ruts. She began to cry. I tossed her a silver coin, enough to dry her tears, and asked her if there was a lord living nearby. She pointed us northward to where, behind a great stand of elm trees, we discovered a fine hall surrounded by a decaying palisade.

The thegn who owned the village was named Ealdhith. He was a stout, red-haired man who looked aghast at the number of horses
and riders who came seeking shelter for the night. “I can’t feed you all,” he grumbled, “and who are you?”

“My name is Uhtred,” I said, “and that is the Lady Æthelflæd.”

“My lady,” he said, and went onto one knee.

Ealdhith fed us well enough, though he complained next morning that we had emptied all his ale barrels. I consoled him with a gold link I chopped from Aldhelm’s chain. Ealdhith had little news to tell us. He had heard, of course, that Æthelflæd had been a prisoner in the convent at Lecelad. “We sent eggs and flour to her, lord,” he told me.

“Why?”

“Because I live a stone’s throw from Wessex,” he said, “and I like West Saxons to be friendly to my folk.”

“Have you seen any Danes this spring?”

“Danes, lord? Those bastards don’t come near here!” Ealdhith was sure of that, which explained why he had allowed his palisade to deteriorate. “We just till our land and raise our cattle,” he said guardedly.

“And if Lord Æthelred summons you?” I asked, “you go to war?”

“I pray it doesn’t happen, but yes, lord. I can take six good warriors to serve.”

“You were at Fearnhamme?”

“I couldn’t go, lord, I had a broken leg.” He lifted his smock to show me a twisted calf. “I was lucky to live.”

“Be ready for a summons now,” I warned him.

He made the sign of the cross. “There’s trouble coming?”

“There’s always trouble coming,” I said, and hauled myself into the saddle of Aldhelm’s fine stallion. The horse, unused to me, trembled and I patted his neck.

We rode westward in the cool morning air. My children rode with me. A beggar was coming the other way and he knelt by the ditch to let us pass, holding out one mangled hand. “I was wounded in the fight at Lundene,” he called. There were many such men reduced by war’s injury to beggary. I gave my son Uhtred a silver coin and told him to toss it to the man, which he did, but then added some words. “May Christ bless you!”

“What did you say?” I demanded.

“You heard him.” Æthelflæd, riding on my left, was amused.

“I offered him a blessing, Father,” Uhtred said.

“Don’t tell me you’ve become a Christian!” I snarled.

He reddened, but before he could say anything in reply Osferth spurred from among the horsemen behind. “Lord! Lord!”

“What is it?”

He did not answer, but just pointed back the way we had come.

I turned to see a thickening plume of smoke on the eastern horizon. How often I have seen those great smoke columns! I have caused many myself, the marks of war.

“What is it?” Æthelflæd asked.

“Haesten,” I said, my son’s idiocy forgotten. “It has to be Haesten.” I could think of no other explanation.

The war had started.

THREE

Seventy of us rode toward the pyre of smoke that now appeared as a dark slow-moving smudge on the hazed horizon. Half the seventy were my men and half were Mercians. I had left my children in the village where Osferth and Beornoth were under orders to wait for our return.

Æthelflæd insisted on riding with us. I tried to stop her, but she would take no orders from me. “This is my country,” she said firmly, “and my people, and I need to see what is being done to them.”

“Probably nothing,” I said. Fires were frequent. Houses had thatched roofs and open hearths, and sparks and straw go ill together, but I still had a sense of foreboding that had made me dress in mail before we started this return journey. My first response on seeing the smoke had been to suspect Haesten and, though reflection made that explanation seem ever more unlikely, I could not lose the suspicion.

“There’s no other smoke,” Finan noted when we had retraced half our steps. Usually, if an army scavenges through a land, it fires every village, yet only the one dark smoke plume drifted skyward. “And Lecelad’s a far way from East Anglia,” he went on, “if that fire is in Lecelad.”

“True enough,” I grunted. Lecelad was a long way from Haesten’s camp in Beamfleot, indeed so deep in Saxon country that any Danish army marching straight on Lecelad was putting itself in danger. None of it made sense, unless, as both Finan and I wanted to believe, it was simply an errant spark and dry thatch.

The fire was indeed at Lecelad. It took some time to be certain of that for the land was flat and our view was obscured by trees, but we had no doubts once we were close enough to see the heat shimmering amidst the smoke. We were following the river, but now I turned away so that we could approach the village from the north. That, I believed, would be the direction in which any Danes retreated and we might have a chance to intercept them. Reason still said this had to be a simple house fire, but my instincts were also prickling uncomfortably.

We reached the northward road to see it had been churned by hooves. The weather had been dry, so the hoofprints were not distinct, but even at a glance I could tell they had not been left by Aldhelm’s men who, just the day before, had used this same track to approach Lecelad. There were too many prints, and those that pointed northward had mostly obliterated the ones going south. That meant whoever had ridden to Lecelad had already ridden away.

“Been and gone,” Father Pyrlig said. He was in his priestly robes, but had a big sword strapped at his waist.

“At least a hundred of them,” Finan said, looking at the hoofprints that spread either side of the track.

I gazed northward, but could see nothing. If the raiding horsemen had still been close I would have seen dust hanging in the air, but the country was calm and green. “Let’s see what the bastards did,” I said, and turned southward.

Whoever had come and gone, and I was certain it was Haesten’s men, they had been swift. I guessed they had arrived at Lecelad at dusk, had done whatever damage they wanted and then left in the dawn. They knew they were dangerously deep in Saxon Mercia and so they had not lingered. They had struck fast, and even now they were hurrying back to safer ground while we rode into the ever thickening smell of wood smoke. Of wood smoke and of burning flesh.

The convent was gone, or rather it had been reduced to a blazing framework of oak beams that, as we approached, finally collapsed with a great crash that made my stallion rear in fright. Embers
whirled upward in a great gout of wind-billowed smoke. “Oh, dear God,” Æthelflaed said, making the sign of the cross. She was gazing in horror at one section of the convent’s palisade that had been spared the fire, and there, on the timbers, pinioned with widespread arms, was a small naked body. “No!” Æthelflæd said and spurred her horse through the hot ash that had spread from the fire.

“Come back!” I shouted, but Æthelflæd had thrown herself from her saddle to kneel at the foot of the corpse, a woman. It was Werburgh, the abbess, and she had been crucified on the palisade. Her hands and feet were pierced by great dark nails. Her small weight had torn the flesh, sinews, and bones about the great nails so that the wounds were stretched and rivulets of drying blood laced her pitifully thin arms. Æthelflæd was kissing the abbess’s nailed feet and resisted when I tried to pull her away. “She was a good woman, Uhtred,” Æthelflæd protested, and just then Werburgh’s torn right hand ripped itself free of the nail and the corpse lurched and its arm swung down to strike Æthelflæd’s head. Æthelflæd gave a small scream, then seized the ragged bloody hand and kissed it. “She blessed me, Uhtred. She was dead, but she blessed me! Did you see?”