The Forever Queen (46 page)

It was a good plan and it worked well, better than Edmund had expected.

The last few days of the siege had been Hell on earth for the Londoners. Cnut, as soon as he arrived, attempted an assault that should have worn down the most stoic of defenders, but London, rallying to Emma’s insistence that Edmund was coming, did not give in, despite all Cnut had to throw at its walls and gateways: battering rams and towers, fire carts and burning ships. The walls held, the gateways shuddered, but did not break. The bridge remained firm. Nor had the lengthy blockade been successful—if the idea had been to starve London into submission, it had not worked. With Cnut fighting in Wessex, discipline had been lax, particularly at night, after the ale skins had been passed from hand to hand and the Danes had slept sound and drunk. All too easy for Edmund’s messengers to reach the Queen with news.

Cnut’s cursing had no effect on the men, for their own expletives were on the same level of profanity as his. It was utterly unbelievable this Edmund Ironside had done it again, had managed a surprise attack, even with numerous scouts sent to patrol the northern marshes! No amount of filthy language would save the situation, however, for the area of a siege was not suited to open fighting. Cnut’s only option was to disband, take to the ships, and flee. Except that, too, was not so easy. The Londoners were manning the bridge, in turn blockading the Danes. Any ship that tried to escape between the wooden uprights and duck under the boarding of the walkway would never reach the other side. Londoners knew how to stop a ship going under their bridge, the most effective deterrent being fired pitch tipped through the metal sluice holes. Every sailor’s fear, fire.

Cursing, unable to run towards the sea, Cnut ordered the ships upriver, clinging to the southern bank, ensuring his best and most experienced men remained behind to hold the ford at Thorney. He could not be allowing Edmund to cross behind them, not until he could reposition on his own terms at a place of his own choosing. He chose well. The next most suitable fording place was Brent Ford.

Hand-to-hand fighting. No niceties or opportunity for leisurely decision-making. Cnut himself was in the affray, using his axe, his feet, fists, anything and everything. Close-quarter combat and chaos. Weapons clashing, men grunting, shouting, and screaming. The stink of sweat, blood, and urine. The numbers evenly matched—again Cnut cursed Edmund for his ability; his men were fresh and eager, with much to gain, little to lose. The Danes were tired and were fighting for survival.

Several thoughts skimmed through Cnut’s mind as he met, head on, with one opponent after another. Tactics, plans, all intermingled alongside idle thoughts as he hacked and slashed and fought to live. Who would care for his daughter, Ragnhilda, if he were killed here? A damned stupid thought, one he drove instantly aside. Another thought. His death would irritate Ælfgifu; she would have no hope of installing either of her sons above Edmund or the offspring of Emma of Normandy. She was there, in London, Emma; he had seen her himself as she stood on the wall rampart looking down at his army. Cnut had even fancied he had seen a smile of triumph on her face. That had been this morning…this morning! God take the bitch! She had known! London had known Edmund was in position, ready to break the siege!

He struck out with his axe, using it two-handed in the figure-of-eight swing that brought it down and up in one flowing movement. It struck home, cleaving through a man’s shoulder, taking the arm off in one single slice. The man screamed, blood pumped in a fountain from the severed stump. Cnut, barely giving the dying man a second glance, merely stepped over him and aimed for the next man. The haft split; he dropped it, used his sword instead. He had ordered one tactic only: to avoid a long, drawn-out fight. That was not for here, not for this place. He would need more men to defeat Edmund in a decisive battle, men he would have to draw from Northumbria and Mercia. The tactic here was to kill or mortally wound as many English as possible, and to thrust through, directly and as rapidly as possible, to this bastard of a man who was calling himself King of England.

A good tactic, but one difficult to achieve, for the other side was trying the selfsame thing.

***

Edward and Alfred were ordered to stay with the ponies. It was not an order Edward had any inclination to break. He had hated these last months; each morning had felt sick, each night had piddled his bedding. Thank God it was only bracken or hay or straw; had it been the linen he was used to, he would never have stopped Alfred from laughing. Alfred, along with the other boys, was revelling in all this nightmare horror. He stood there now, perched on the bough of a tree, intently watching the fighting, giving a vivid and lurid commentary on what was happening. Edward squatted beneath the sweep of the low branches, his arms over his head, hands against his ears, his face pushed tight into his knees. He hated the squalor, hated the hardship, and hated his mother for sending him into this fear and danger. What if he were to be killed? Had she thought of that? He had. He thought of it constantly, which was why he wet himself and spewed up his food as soon as he had swallowed it. He stuffed his fingers in his ears, trying to drown out the sounds, tried to curl tighter into a ball like a hedgepig rolling up to defend itself. He was supposedly here to learn how to fight, how to lead. Aye, he had learnt, all right! He had learnt that battle was a foul, evil, stinking thing, that battle was to be avoided at all cost. At all cost!

Something made him look up, some disturbance of the ground, a movement, a shadow in the grass. A man! A man coming towards him—a man with chain-mail armour and an axe. No helmet. Fair hair, a bushed beard. A huge man, an ogre, titan, giant. God save his soul—a Viking!

Edward screamed. The branches caught at his clothing, whipped his face, grabbed his hair as he tried to scramble away, crawling backwards into nettles that bit and stung at his legs and arms. He could hear his brother and the other boys shouting, hear them scrabbling about in the tree. The man kept coming forward, a leer on his face, his axe raised. Edward felt something under his hand, something hard and heavy. A stone. His fingers clamped around it and he was throwing, his full weight and desperation giving the missile momentum. By luck, not aim, it struck home; the man lurched, dropped the axe, his hands going to his face; blood seeped from between his fingers, and with a rattled groan he toppled and crashed to the grass, quite dead.

Alfred was swarming down from the tree and running to Edward, who was sitting, ashen-faced, his stomach heaving. The boys crowded close, some kicking at the dead man with their boots or spitting on him; others stood, thumping Edward between his shoulders, impressed.

“You have killed him, Edward,” Alfred said proudly, scarce believing the evidence of his eyes. “Well done, brother, well done!”

His hands shaking and stinging, Edward could not take it all in. He was going to be sick again any minute. He had killed someone, killed a man. Oh, God’s wonder, what if it was Cnut himself? What would Edmund or his mother say to that? He would be a hero, they would write poems and sagas about him; the monks would write his name in the chronicles they so industriously kept. “In this year, Edward, Ætheling, son of Æthelred, did slay the invader Cnut, with one stone, as did David slay Goliath.” How England would cheer and praise him. And best of all, if this was Cnut, how his mother would love him. The hugs, the kisses, the devotion. All he had ever wanted, and all for the throwing of one stone!

It was not until later, when the men came wearily back to camp, many of them wounded, as many left dead down by the river, that Edward realised the truth. It had not been Cnut. Cnut had gone, had sailed on upriver. Depleted of so many, Edmund had not been able to follow; the end would have to come another day.

The man Edward had killed had been a rough-necked nobody, a whore-born deserter who had fled from his Danish army with the idea of taking what he could carry and getting as far away as possible. Tired men praised Edward, some ruffled his hair; Edmund squeezed his shoulder, said he would make a fine warrior some day. Beyond that, nothing. They were all too damned weary to notice, and his mother, Emma, was never told of it.

September 1016—Otford, Kent

After a great effort and some brilliant successes, Edmund failed to pursue the fleeing Danes, because he did not have the men to make that final demanding push. Too many years of apathy, too cynical a view of leadership, had soured the English from Ealdorman to churl. No one was willing to drop everything, take up their weapons, and come out and fight beyond the service of their compulsory duty.

He could have followed Cnut up the Thames, trapped him in the shallower waters, and dealt with him there. Could have, but his men were dead on their feet. He had to let them go, bid them return to their farms and their villages of Essex and Hertford-Shire, to rest, recover, gather in the harvest, and join him again at the next meeting with these poxed Danes.

Cnut had blessed God for the reprieve. He had moored his ships as far up the Thames as they could sail, had fortified a camp, and settled there to lick his wounds. But before mid-July, he found the audacity to squat outside London again, renewing his uncompleted siege. Within the week, had realised, dismally, it was a mistake to attempt to pick up where he had left off, for the strategy was untenable.

With one last, valiant effort, he had thrown all he had into an attack on the city by land and river combined. He failed. Realising the inevitable, as the first dainty edge of morning crept timidly into the eastern sky, his ships had quietly sailed away under London Bridge, the Londoners, this time, allowing them to go.

Instead, he turned to East Anglia to obtain all the supplies he needed—food, beer, horses, weapons—then sailed for the Medway River and Kent, where he waited, hoping to draw the English King Edmund Ironside to him. The prospect of victory, so golden at the start of the year, was rapidly diminishing. Edmund was winning, but all was not lost. As far as Cnut was concerned, the fighting would go on until either he or Edmund lay dead. To the ordinary people—the farmers, the peasants, those who only wanted to bring in and enjoy their harvest—there was little care over which one would win during those dry, balmy days when summer drifted into the first early stirrings of autumn. It only mattered, or so it seemed, to the two leaders themselves, to Cnut and Edmund. And to Emma and Eadric Streona, who had their own reasons for wanting victory.

After skirmished fighting at Otford, where Edmund had managed, somehow—God alone knew how—to overtake Cnut’s Danes and defeat them yet again, the end appeared closer. With a mighty effort, Edmund had driven Cnut’s ships into Sheppey, and he looked, for all the world, as if he was going to achieve the ultimate victory.

Others certainly thought so.

Godwine skidded into Edmund’s tent, his heel scooping up a divot of the worn grass. “We have a visitor, Edmund. Come quick. Now!”

Edmund muttered an oath. He had been asleep, dreaming of some pleasant, appreciable thing; he forgot entirely what it was now that he was so abruptly awake. Groaning, he opened his eyes, did not otherwise move from his cot. He was bone weary. Had he been asleep? It did not feel as if he had. All these months of marching, riding, fighting—thinking. That was as tiring as the physical stuff, the mental energy required, the necessity always to be alert, ready, expecting the unexpected. The one consolation for his aching, throbbing temples: Cnut was probably feeling as numbed as he was.

“Who is it? If it is Emma, send her back to Canterbury; I will not be seeing her. The two boys have returned to her care, and that is final. I will not read another of her letters of protest, nor listen to one more of her sent messengers. Nor to her.” He turned over, pulled the blanket up to his ears, and tried to reach the sleep he had been disturbed from.

Godwine was across the tent in three strides, pulling the blanket away. “Ach, man, it is not the Queen! It is Eadric. Eadric Streona is outside the camp looking sheepish and waving a green branch about his head, hoping we will not shoot an arrow straight through his throat before he has chance to grovel before you.”

Edmund was up on his feet, lacing his tunic. “Streona? Here? God Almighty, are you serious?”

Godwine fetched Edmund’s boots.

“I’ll hang the bastard.” Edmund threatened, buckling on his sword belt. “I will flay him alive, roast him on a spit. Behead him.”

“What, all at once?” Godwine laughed. “And before you hear what he has to say?”

“I do not wish to listen to one word that dog turd cares to mutter. He can explain himself to God, not to me.” Edmund ducked out of the tent, was striding towards the shuttered gateway.

Catching up to him as he took the steps to the rampart walkway two at a time, Godwine said, “Not even if he has come to offer you Mercia?”

That stopped Edmund. “I would have Mercia, but not Streona.”

Godwine spread his hands, half apologetic, half sympathetic. “It is a sorry fact, my Lord King, you may not be able to have the one without the other.”

Edmund walked to the palisade, looked out and over at the solitary man sitting astride his horse beyond arrow range before the gate. Eadric had not come alone, but, prudently, he had left his men arranged in a semicircle some distance behind. They all carried the green-leafed branch of peace, appeared weaponless. Withdrawing behind a pillar, Edmund ordered a servant who had come trotting up behind him to fetch his crown. “And my best mantle. Hurry.”

It was not often he had the chance to parade dressed for a crown-wearing as befitted his status. Since the opportunity had arisen, he would take full advantage of it.

Suitably attired, he stepped out to where Eadric could see him, stood, arms folded, Godwine to his right with his axe provocatively poised over his shoulder.

“So, Eadric, the dog returns to his vomit. What have you to say to me that I ought listen to? I can think of nothing.”

“I come in peace to talk peace. To admit I have been wrong and am ashamed of what I have done.”