The Pale Horseman (21 page)

'One boat left,' Leofric said. 'Room for us. You'll have to run like hell.'

'I'll stay here,' I shouted, but in Danish. 'I'm enjoying myself.' Then there was a stir
on the path as a man came to the front rank of the Danes and the others edged aside to give him
room.

He was in chain mail and had a silvered helmet with a raven's wing at its crown, but as he
came closer he took the helmet off and I saw the gold-tipped bone in his hair. It was Guthrum
himself. The bone was one of his mother's ribs and he wore it out of love for her memory. He
stared at me, his gaunt face sad, and then looked down at the men we had killed.

'I shall hunt you like a dog, Uhtred Ragnarson,' he said, ‘and I shall kill you like a
dog.'

'My name,' I said, 'is Uhtred Uhtredson.'

'We have to run,' Leofric hissed at me.

The snow whirled above the swamp, thick enough now so that I could hardly see the ridge top
from where we had glimpsed the pigeons circling.

'You are a dead man, Uhtred,' Guthrum said.

'I never met your mother,' I called to him, 'but I would have liked to meet her.'

His face took on the reverent look that any mention of his mother always provoked. He
seemed to regret that he had spoken so harshly to me for he made a conciliatory
gesture.

'She was a great woman,' he said.

I smiled at him. At that moment, looking back, I could have changed sides so easily and
Guthrum would have welcomed me if I had just given his mother a compliment, but I was a
belligerent young man and the battle joy was on me.

'I would have spat in her ugly face,' I told Guthrum, 'and now I piss on your mother's soul,
and tell you that the beasts of Nifiheim are humping her rancid bones.'

He screamed with rage and they all charged, some splashing through the shallows, all
desperate to reach me and avenge the terrible insult, but Leofric and I were running like
hunted boars, and we charged through the reeds and into the water and hurled ourselves onto
the last punt. The first two were gone, but the third had waited for us and, as we sprawled on
its damp boards, the man with the pole pushed hard and the craft slid away into the black
water. The Danes tried to follow, but we were going surprisingly fast, gliding through the
snowfall, and Guthrum was shouting at me and a spear was thrown, but the marsh man poled again
and the spear plunged harmlessly into the mud.

'I shall find you!' Guthrum shouted.

'Why should I care?' I called back. 'Your men only know how to die!' I raised
Serpent-Breath and kissed her sticky blade, 'and your mother was a whore to dwarves!'

'You should 'have let that one man live,' a voice said behind me, 'because I wanted to
question him.'

The punt only contained the one passenger besides Leofric and myself, and that one man
was the priest who had carried a sword and now he was sitting in the punt's flat bow, frowning
at me.

'There was no need to kill that man,' he said sternly and I looked at him with such fury that
he recoiled. Damn all priests, I thought. I had saved the bastard's life and all he did was
reprove me, and then I saw that he was no priest at all.

It was Alfred.

The punt slid over the swamp, sometimes gliding across black water, sometimes rustling
through grass or reeds. The man poling it was a bent, dark-skinned creature with a massive
beard, otter skin clothes and a toothless mouth. Guthrum's Danes were far behind now,
carrying their dead back to firmer ground.

'I need to know what they plan to do,' Alfred complained to me. 'The prisoner could have
told us.'

He spoke more respectfully. Looking back I realised I had frightened him for the front
of my mail coat was sheeted in blood and there was more blood on my face and helmet.

'They plan to finish Wessex,' I said curtly. 'You don't need a prisoner to tell you
that.'

'Lord,' he said.

I stared at him.

'I am a king!' he insisted. 'You address a king with respect.'

'A king of what?' I asked.

'You're not hurt, lord?' Leofric asked Alfred.

'No, thank God. No.' He looked at the sword he carried. 'Thank God.' I saw he was not
wearing priest's robes, but a swathing black cloak. His long face was very pale. 'Thank you,
Leofric,' he said, then looked up at me and seemed to shudder. We were catching up with the
other two punts and I saw that Ælswith, pregnant and swathed in a silver fox-fur cloak, was
in one. Iseult and Eanflaed were also in that punt while the priests were crowded onto the
other and I saw that Bishop Alewold of Exanceaster was one of them.

'What happened, lord?' Leofric asked.

Alfred sighed. He was shivering now, but he told his story. He had ridden from
Cippanhamm with his family, his bodyguard and a score of churchmen to accompany the monk
Asser on the first part of his journey. 'We had a service of thanksgiving,' he said, 'in the
church at Soppan Byrg. It's a new church,' he added earnestly to Leofric, 'and very fine. We
sang psalms, said prayers, and Brother Asser went on his way rejoicing.' He made the sign of
the cross. 'I pray he's safe.'

'I hope the lying bastard's dead,' I snarled.

Alfred ignored that. After the church service they had all gone to a nearby monastery for
a meal, and it was while they were there that the Danes had come. The royal group had fled,
finding shelter in nearby woods while the monastery burned. After that they had tried to ride
east into the heart of Wessex but, like us, they had constantly been headed off by
patrolling Danes. One night, sheltering in a farm, they had been surprised by Danish troops
who had killed some of Alfred's guards and captured all his horses and ever since they had
been wandering, as lost as us, until they came to the swamp.

'God knows what will happen now,' Alfred said.

'We fight,' I said. He just looked at me and I shrugged. 'We fight,' I said again.

Alfred stared across the swamp. 'Find a ship,' he said, but so softly that I hardly heard
him. 'Find a ship and go to Frankia.' He pulled the cloak tighter around his thin body. The snow
was thickening as it fell, though it melted as soon as it met the dark water.

The Danes had vanished, lost in the snow behind.

'That was Guthrum?' Alfred asked me.

'That was Guthrum,' I said. 'And he knew it was you he pursued?'

'I suppose so.'

'What else would draw Guthrum here?' I asked. 'He wants you dead. Or captured.'

Yet, for the moment, we were safe. The island village had a score of damp hovels thatched
with reeds and a few storehouses raised on stilts. The buildings were the colour of mud, the
street was mud, the goats and the people were mud-covered, but the place, poor as it was,
could provide food, shelter and a meagre warmth. The men of the village had seen the refugees
and, after a discussion, decided to rescue them. I suspect they wanted to pillage us
rather than save our lives, but Leofric and I looked formidable and, once the villagers
understood that their king was their guest, they did their clumsy best for him and his
family. One of them, in a dialect I could scarcely understand, wanted to know the king's
name. He had never heard of Alfred. He knew about the Danes, but said their ships had never
reached the village, or any of the other settlements in the swamp. He told us the villagers
lived off deer, goats, fish, eels and wildfowl, and they had plenty of food, though fuel was
scarce.

Ælswith was pregnant with her third child, while her first two were in the care of nurses.
There was Edward, Alfred's heir, who was three years old and sick. He coughed, and Ælswith
worried about him, though Bishop Alewold insisted it was just a winter's cold. Then there
was Edward's elder sister, Æthelflaed, who was now six and had a bright head of golden curls,
a beguiling smile and clever eyes. Alfred adored her, and in those first days in the swamp,
she was his one ray of light and hope. One night, as we sat by a small, dying fire and
Æthelflaed slept with her golden head in her father's lap, he asked me about my son.

'I don't know where he is,' I said. There were only the two of us, everyone else was
sleeping, and I was sitting by the door staring across the frost-bleached marsh that lay
black and silver under a halfmoon.

'You want to go and find him?' he asked earnestly.

'You truly want me to do that?' I asked. He looked puzzled.

'These folk are giving you shelter,' I explained, 'but they'd as soon cut your throats.
They won't do that while I'm here.'

He was about to protest, then understood I probably spoke the truth. He stroked his
daughter's hair. Edward coughed. He was in his mother's hut. The coughing had become worse,
much worse, and we all suspected it was the whooping cough that killed small children.
Alfred flinched at the sound.

'Did you fight Steapa?' he asked.

‘We fought,' I said curtly, 'the Danes came, and we never finished. He was bleeding, I was
not.'

'He was bleeding?'

'Ask Leofric. He was there.'

He was silent a long time, then, softly, 'I am still king.'

Of a swamp, I thought, and said nothing.

'And it is customary to call a king “lord”,' he went on.

I just stared at his thin, pale face that was lit by the dying fire.

He looked so solemn, but also frightened, as if he were making a huge effort to hold onto
the shreds of his dignity. Alfred never lacked for bravery, but he was not a warrior and he
did not much like the company of warriors. In his eyes I was a brute; dangerous,
uninteresting, but suddenly indispensable. He knew I was not going to call him lord, so
he did not insist.

'What do you notice about this place?' he asked.

'It's wet,' I said.

'What else?'

I looked for the trap in the question and found none. 'It can only be reached by punts,' I
said, 'and the Danes don't have punts. But when they do have punts it'll need more than Leofric
and me to fight them off.'

'It doesn't have a church,' he said.

'I knew I liked it,' I retorted.

He ignored that. 'We know so little of our own kingdom,' he said in wonderment. 'I
thought there were churches everywhere.'

He closed his eyes for a few heartbeats, then looked at me plaintively. 'What should I
do?'

I had told him to fight, but I could see no fight in him now, just despair.

'You can go south,' I said, thinking that was what he wanted to hear, 'go south across the
sea.'

'To be another exiled Saxon king,' he said bitterly.

'We hide here,' I said, 'and when we think the Danes aren't watching, we go to the south
coast and find a ship.'

'How do we hide?' he asked. 'They know we're here. And they're on both sides of the
swamp.'

The marsh man had told us that a Danish fleet had landed at Cynuit, which lay at the
swamp's western edge. That fleet, I assumed, was led by Svein and he would surely be
wondering how to find Alfred. The king, I reckoned, was doomed, and his family too. If
Æthelflaed was lucky she would be raised by a Danish family, as I had been, but more probably
they would all be killed so that no Saxon could ever again claim the crown of Wessex.

'And the Danes will be watching the south coast,' Alfred went on.

'They will,' I agreed.

He looked out at the marsh where the night wind rippled the waters, shaking the long
reflection of a winter moon. 'The Danes can't have taken all Wessex,' he said, then flinched
because Edward was coughing so painfully.

'Probably not,’ I agreed.

'If we could find men,' he said, then fell silent.

'What would we do with men?' I asked.

'Attack the fleet,' he said, pointing west. 'Get rid of Svein, if it is Svein at Cynuit,
then hold the hills of Defnascir. Gain one victory and more men will come. We get stronger and
one day we can face Guthrum.'

I thought about it. He had spoken dully, as if he did not really believe in the words he
had said, but I thought they made a perverse kind of sense. There were men in Wessex, men who
were leaderless, but they were men who wanted a leader, men who would fight, and perhaps we
could secure the swamp, then defeat Svein, then capture Defnascir, and so, piece by piece,
take back Wessex. Then I thought about it more closely and reckoned it was a dream. The Danes
had won. We were fugitives.

Alfred was stroking his daughter's golden hair. 'The Danes will hunt us here, won't
they?'

'Yes.'

'Can you defend us?'

'Just me and Leofric?'

'You're a warrior, aren't you? Men tell me it was really you who defeated Ubba.'

‘You knew I killed Ubba?' I asked.

'Can you defend us?'

I would not be deflected. 'Did you know I won your victory at Cynuit?' I demanded.

'Yes,' he said simply.

'And my reward was to crawl to your altar? To be humiliated?' My anger made my voice too
loud and Æthelflaed opened her eyes and stared at me.

'I have made mistakes,' Alfred said, 'and when this is all over, and when God returns
Wessex to the West Saxons, I shall do the same. I shall put on the penitent's robe and submit
myself to God.'

I wanted to kill the pious bastard then, but Æthelflaed was watching me with her big eyes.
She had not moved, so her father did not know she was awake, but I did, so instead of giving
my anger a loose rein I cut it off abruptly. 'You'll find that penitence helps,' I said.

He brightened at that. 'It helped you?' he asked.

'It gave me anger,' I said, 'and it taught me to hate. And anger is good. Hatred is
good.'

'You don't mean that,' he said.

I half drew Serpent-Breath and little Æthelflaed's eyes grew wider.

'This kills,' I said, letting the sword slide back into its fleece-lined scabbard, 'but
anger and hate are what gives it the strength to kill. Go into battle without anger and hate
and you'll be dead. You need all the blades, anger and hate you can muster if we're to
survive.'