The Burning Land (6 page)

I had been thinking about the country to the north of Æscengum. War is not just about men, nor even about supplies, it is also about the hills and valleys, the rivers and marshes, the places where land and water will help defeat an enemy. I had traveled through Fearnhamme often enough on my journeys from Lundene to Wintanceaster, and wherever I traveled I noted how the
land lay and how it might be used if an enemy was near. “There’s a hill just north of the river at Fearnhamme,” I said.

“There is! I know it well,” one of the monks standing to Alfred’s right said, “it has an earthwork.”

I looked at him, seeing a red-faced, hook-nosed man. “And who are you?” I asked coldly.

“Oslac, lord,” he said, “the abbot here.”

“The earthwork,” I asked him, “is it in good repair?”

“It was dug by the ancient folk,” Abbot Oslac said, “and it’s much overgrown with grass, but the ditch is deep and the bank is still firm.”

There were many such earthworks in Britain, mute witnesses to the warfare that had rolled across the land before we Saxons came to bring still more. “The bank’s high enough to make defense easy?” I asked the abbot.

“You could hold it forever, given enough men,” Oslac said confidently. I gazed at him, noting the scar across the bridge of his nose. Abbot Oslac, I decided, had been a warrior before he became a monk.

“But why invite Harald to besiege us there?” Alfred asked, “when we have Æscengum and its walls and its storehouses?”

“And how long will those storehouses last, lord?” I asked him. “We have enough men inside these walls to hold the enemy till Judgment Day, but not enough food to reach Christmas.” The burhs were not provisioned for a large army. The intent of the walled towns was to hold the enemy in check and allow the army of household warriors, the trained men, to attack the besiegers in the open country outside.

“But Fearnhamme?” Alfred asked.

“Is where we shall destroy Harald,” I said unhelpfully. I looked at Æthelred. “Order your men to Fearnhamme, cousin, and we’ll trap Harald there.”

There was a time when Alfred would have questioned and tested my ideas, but that day he looked too tired and too sick to argue, and he plainly did not have the patience to listen to other men challenging my plans. Besides, he had learned to trust me when it came to
warfare, and I expected his assent to my vague proposal, but then he surprised me. He turned to the churchmen and gestured that one of them should join him, and Bishop Asser took the elbow of a young, stocky monk and guided him to the king’s chair. The monk had a hard, bony face and black tonsured hair as bristly and stiff as a badger’s pelt. He might have been handsome except his eyes were milky, and I guessed he had been blind from birth. He groped for the king’s chair, found it and knelt beside Alfred, who laid a fatherly hand on the monk’s bowed head. “So, Brother Godwin?” he asked gently.

“I am here, lord, I am here,” Godwin said in a voice scarce above a hoarse whisper.

“And you heard the Lord Uhtred?”

“I heard, lord, I heard.” Brother Godwin raised his blind eyes to the king. He said nothing for a while, but his face was twisting all that time, twisting and grimacing like a man possessed by an evil spirit. He started to utter a choking noise, and what astonished me was that none of this alarmed Alfred, who waited patiently until, at last, the young monk regained a normal expression. “It will be well, lord King,” Godwin said, “it will be well.”

Alfred patted Brother Godwin’s head again and smiled at me. “We shall do as you suggest, Lord Uhtred,” he said decisively. “You will direct your men to Fearnhamme,” he spoke to Æthelred, then looked back to me, “and my son,” he went on, “will command the West Saxon forces.”

“Yes, lord,” I said dutifully. Edward, the youngest man in the church, looked embarrassed, and his eyes flicked nervously from me to his father.

“And you,” Alfred turned to look at his son, “will obey the Lord Uhtred.”

Æthelred could contain himself no longer. “What guarantees do we have,” he asked petulantly, “that the heathens will go to Fearnhamme?”

“Mine,” I said harshly.

“But you cannot be certain!” Æthelred protested.

“He will go to Fearnhamme,” I said, “and he will die there.”

I was wrong about that.

Messengers rode to Æthelred’s men at Silcestre, ordering them to march on Fearnhamme at first light next morning. Once there they were to occupy the hill that stands just north of the river. Those five hundred men were the anvil, while the men at Æscengum were my hammer, but to lure Harald onto the anvil would mean dividing our forces, and it is a rule of war not to do that. We had, at my best estimate, about five hundred men fewer than the Danes, and by keeping our army in two parts I was inviting Harald to destroy them separately. “But I’m relying on Harald being an impulsive fool, lord,” I told Alfred that night.

The king had joined me on Æscengum’s eastern rampart. He had arrived with his usual entourage of priests, but had waved them away so he could talk with me privately. He stood for a moment just staring at the distant dull glow of fires where Harald’s men had sacked villages and I knew he was lamenting all the burned churches. “Is he an impulsive fool?” he inquired mildly.

“You tell me, lord,” I said.

“He’s savage, unpredictable, and given to sudden rages,” the king said. Alfred paid well for information about the northmen and kept meticulous notes on every leader. Harald had been pillaging in Frankia before its people bribed him to leave, and I did not doubt that Alfred’s spies had told him everything they could discover about Harald Bloodhair. “You know why he’s called Bloodhair?” Alfred asked.

“Because before every battle, lord, he sacrifices a horse to Thor and soaks his hair in the animal’s blood.”

“Yes,” Alfred said. He leaned on the palisade. “How can you be sure he’ll go to Fearnhamme?” he asked.

“Because I’ll draw him there, lord. I’ll make a snare and pull him onto our spears.”

“The woman?” Alfred asked with a slight shudder.

“She is said to be special to him, lord.”

“So I hear,” he said. “But he will have other whores.”

“She’s not the only reason he’ll go to Fearnhamme, lord,” I said, “but she’s reason enough.”

“Women brought sin into this world,” he said so quietly I almost did not hear him. He rested against the oak trunks of the parapet and gazed toward the small town of Godelmingum that lay just a few miles eastward. The people who lived there had been ordered to flee, and now the only inhabitants were fifty of my men who stood sentinel to warn us of the Danish approach. “I had hoped the Danes had ceased wanting this kingdom,” he broke the silence plaintively.

“They’ll always want Wessex,” I said.

“All I ask of God,” he went on, ignoring my truism, “is that Wessex should be safe and ruled by my son.” I answered nothing to that. There was no law that decreed a son should succeed his father as king, and if there had been then Alfred would not be Wessex’s ruler. He had succeeded his brother, and that brother had a son, Æthelwold, who wanted desperately to be king in Wessex. Æthelwold had been too young to assume the throne when his father died, but he was in his thirties now, a man in his ale-sozzled prime. Alfred sighed, then straightened. “Edward will need you as an adviser,” he said.

“I should be honored, lord,” I said.

Alfred heard the dutiful tone in my voice and did not like it. He stiffened, and I expected one of his customary reproofs, but instead he looked pained. “God has blessed me,” he said quietly. “When I came to the throne, Lord Uhtred, it seemed impossible that we should resist the Danes. Yet by God’s grace Wessex lives. We have churches, monasteries, schools, laws. We have made a country where God dwells, and I cannot believe it is God’s will that it should vanish when I am called to judgment.”

“May that be many years yet, lord,” I said as dutifully as I had spoken before.

“Oh, don’t be a fool,” he snarled with sudden anger. He shuddered, closed his eyes momentarily, and when he spoke again his voice was low and wan. “I can feel death coming, Lord Uhtred. It’s
like an ambush. I know it’s there and I can do nothing to avoid it. It will take me and it will destroy me, but I do not want it to destroy Wessex with me.”

“If it’s your God’s will,” I said harshly, “then nothing I can do nor anything Edward can do will stop it.”

“We’re not puppets in God’s hands,” he said testily. “We are his instruments. We earn our fate.” He looked at me with some bitterness for he had never forgiven me for abandoning Christianity in favor of the older religion. “Don’t your gods reward you for good behavior?”

“My gods are capricious, lord.” I had learned that word from Bishop Erkenwald who had intended it as an insult, but once I had learned its meaning I liked it. My gods are capricious.

“How can you serve a capricious god?” Alfred asked.

“I don’t.”

“But you said…”

“They are capricious,” I interrupted him, “but that’s their pleasure. My task is not to serve them, but to amuse them, and if I do then they will reward me in the life to come.”

“Amuse them?” He sounded shocked.

“Why not?” I demanded. “We have cats, dogs, and falcons for our pleasure, the gods made us for the same reason. Why did your god make you?”

“To be His servant,” he said firmly. “If I’m God’s cat then I must catch the devil’s mice. That is duty, Lord Uhtred, duty.”

“While my duty,” I said, “is to catch Harald and slice his head off. That, I think, will amuse my gods.”

“Your gods are cruel,” he said, then shuddered.

“Men are cruel,” I said, “and the gods made us like themselves, and some of the gods are kind, some are cruel. So are we. If it amuses the gods then Harald will slice my head off.” I touched the hammer amulet.

Alfred grimaced. “God made you his instrument, and I do not know why he chose you, a pagan, but so he did and you have served me well.”

He had spoken fervently, surprising me, and I bowed my head in acknowledgment. “Thank you, lord.”

“And now I wish you to serve my son,” he added.

I should have known that was coming, but somehow the request took me by surprise. I was silent a moment as I tried to think what to say. “I agreed to serve you, lord,” I said finally, “and so I have, but I have my own battles to fight.”

“Bebbanburg,” he said sourly.

“Is mine,” I said firmly, “and before I die I wish to see my banner flying over its gate and my son strong enough to defend it.”

He gazed at the glow of the enemy fires. I was noticing how scattered those fires were, which told me Harald had not yet concentrated his army. It would take time to pull those men together from across the ravaged countryside, which meant, I thought, that the battle would not be fought tomorrow, but the next day. “Bebbanburg,” Alfred said, “is an island of the English in a sea of Danes.”

“True, lord,” I said, noting how he used the word “English.” It embraced all the tribes who had come across the sea, whether they were Saxon, Angle, or Jute, and it spoke of Alfred’s ambition, that he now made explicit.

“The best way to keep Bebbanburg safe,” he said, “is to surround it with more English land.”

“Drive the Danes from Northumbria?” I asked.

“If it is God’s will,” he said, “then I will wish my son to do that great deed.” He turned to me, and for a moment he was not a king, but a father. “Help him, Lord Uhtred,” he said pleadingly. “You are my
dux bellorum
, my lord of battles, and men know they will win when you lead them. Scour the enemy from England, and so take your fortress back and make my son safe on his God-given throne.”

He had not flattered me, he had spoken the truth. I was the warlord of Wessex and I was proud of that reputation. I went into battle glittering with gold, silver, and pride, and I should have known that the gods would resent that.

“I want you,” Alfred spoke softly but firmly, “to give my son your oath.”

I cursed inwardly, but spoke respectfully. “What oath, lord?”

“I wish you to serve Edward as you have served me.”

And thus Alfred would tie me to Wessex, to Christian Wessex that lay so far from my northern home. I had spent my first ten years in Bebbanburg, that great rock-fastness on the northern sea, and when I had first ridden to war the fortress had been left in the care of my uncle, who had stolen it from me.

“I will swear an oath to you, lord,” I said, “and to no one else.”

“I already have your oath,” he said harshly.

“And I will keep it,” I said.

“And when I’m dead,” he asked bitterly, “what then?”

“Then, lord, I shall go to Bebbanburg and take it, and keep it, and spend my days beside the sea.”

“And if my son is threatened?”

“Then Wessex must defend him,” I said, “as I defend you now.”

“And what makes you think you can defend me?” He was angry now. “You would take my army to Fearnhamme? You have no certainty that Harald will go there!”

“He will,” I said.

“You can’t know that!”

“I shall force it on him,” I said.

“How?” he demanded.

“The gods will do that for me,” I said.

“You’re a fool,” he snapped.

“If you don’t trust me,” I spoke just as forcibly, “then your son-in-law wants to be your lord of battles. Or you can command the army yourself? Or give Edward his chance?”

He shuddered, I thought with anger, but when he spoke again his voice was patient. “I just wish to know,” he said, “why you are so sure that the enemy will do what you want.”

“Because the gods are capricious,” I said arrogantly, “and I am about to amuse them.”

“Tell me,” he said tiredly.

“Harald is a fool,” I said, “and he is a fool in love. We have his woman. I shall take her to Fearnhamme, and he will follow because he is besotted with her. And even if I did not have his woman,” I went on, “he would still follow me.”

I had thought he would scoff at that, but he considered my words quietly, then joined his hands prayerfully. “I am tempted to doubt you, but Brother Godwin assures me you will bring us victory.”

“Brother Godwin?” I had wanted to ask about the strange blind monk.