Conqueror (20 page)

But in that moment Cynewulf saw Aebbe fall under the crush of the mob. He pulled at the Moor, but Ibn Zuhr’s grip was strong, and he couldn’t reach her.

One older man, a bovine brute in a coat of thick chain-mail, stood on a table and pointed to Alfred’s throne. He spoke Danish, a tongue too many English had been forced to learn, and Cynewulf heard clearly what he called.
‘There he is! The King! Follow me, Egil son of Egil!
Follow me!’ He went thundering down the tabletop, a mob behind him, scattering plates and cups as he went. He was like a bull, Cynewulf thought, horrified, a huge and heavy animal, not something human at all. And he was heading for the King.

Arngrim leapt up to face him. Without armour or helmet, armed with only the boar-spear, the thegn stood his ground on the tabletop. The assault was reduced to this fundamental essence, two men, one roaring forward, the other standing calm and resolute as a rock.

With his last pace Egil swung his bloody axe.

Arngrim ducked and slashed with his spear, aiming for the Dane’s hip beneath his mail shirt.

Egil’s axe deflected the spear’s tip but its shaft slammed against his rib. Egil lost his balance and fell with a crash off the table into the churning crowd. In an instant he was on his feet, laying about him again, hacking through people as if through a bank of seaweed.

For an instant his eyes met Arngrim’s. Cynewulf had been around warriors enough to understand the bleak promise in that gaze, a pact that could only be resolved in death.

But Cynewulf reached up and grabbed Arngrim’s arm. ‘Never mind him. The King! Save the King!’

Arngrim jumped to the floor and snatched a sword from a pile of armour on a bench. ‘Get him out of here, Moor.’

‘But Aebbe—’

‘She is lost. For now, the King.’ He yelled, ‘Englishmen, with me!’ And, sword raised, he ran down the hall towards the throne.

Alfred was struggling amid a mass of panicking warriors and priests, through which Northmen were hacking to get to him. Arngrim, huge amid the chaos, screamed for discipline. Gradually a bank of fighting men built up before the King.

And there was a stink of smoke. Cynewulf realised that the Danes had torched the building. As Ibn Zuhr dragged him away, Cynewulf was overwhelmed by the stench of blood and fear and death, dizzy at this sudden catastrophe - and bewildered by the loss of Aebbe.

His gut pressed to the cold earth, his face smeared with dank river-bottom mud, Arngrim crawled like a snake along the eroded ridge. He felt very exposed. This January morning, nature offered little cover, the trees bare, the undergrowth withered. He even tried to breathe shallowly, to avoid the steam of his lungs rising up and betraying him.

He reached the brow of the ridge, and overlooked the Danes’ encampment.

The camp was set out like a letter ‘D’, with a half-circle of palisades and ditches pressed against a stretch of river bank. Arngrim could see tents of leather and sail-cloth, threads of smoke rising up from fires, horses corralled loosely. The ships had been hauled up on to the mud, their shallow draughts having enabled them to navigate even this far inland. The Danes always built their camps this way. They rode to battle on plundered horses and fought on foot, but they always preferred not to be too far away from their ships. Indeed it was said that you could wound a Dane more deeply by burning his ship than by striking down his son.

The warriors went about their business amid heaps of English treasure, extracted from the burned ruins of Alfred’s hall. There were gangs of captives too, thegns, perhaps even ealdormen, great men of the kingdom of Wessex sitting in their own shit and tied together with lengths of rope like cattle. The Danes ignored the English save to prod them with their swords or piss on them, or they would pluck out a girl or a woman to be dragged into one of the tents.

Arngrim was close enough to hear scraps of the Danes’ conversation. There was talk of taking the booty and captives back to Eoforwic - which the Danes called
Jorvik
, a captured town which was becoming a major market for the Danes. Meanwhile they were planning to use Cippanhamm as their base in Wessex for the rest of the winter. This riverside camp would serve as their river port, and a shelter for the ships. The assault on Cippanhamm was a classic example of the Vikings’ way of working, Amgrim reflected, as every English thegn had learned from hard experience: surprise, attacks at night, the use of forests for cover, the ability to throw up rapid fortifications, their willingness to move into English settlements and use them as bases.

Amgrim did not see the Danes’ leader, the petty king Guthrum. Nor did he spy Egil, the brutish leader of the war band.

‘Hsst
!
Hsst!’

The call was loud enough to make Amgrim flinch. He looked back to the ragged copse at the bottom of this low ridge, where he had left Ibn Zuhr and Cynewulf. There was no sign of the Moor, but Cynewulf was standing in the open air, his habit streaked with dirt, filthy hair standing up around his tonsured scalp.

Furious, Arngrim waved him back. With one last glimpse down at the Danes he slithered on his belly down the ridge.

He met the others in the gloom of the forest. ‘By Woden’s eyes, what are you doing? Do you long for death, priest?’

Cynewulf, agitated, struggled for self-control. ‘Oh, yes I do, you pagan oaf. I long to be free of the trials of this life, and to enter the peace of God which is forever beyond your hell-born understanding. But not today, not today. I must know.
Is she there?’

‘Aebbe? I did not see her. But she must be among the captives.’ He described what he had seen of the camp.

‘I don’t understand,’ Ibn Zuhr said, ‘why they
want
all this plunder.’

Arngrim knew it was a sensible point. ‘Among the Northmen the worth of a war leader is measured by the wealth he wins, and can give to those who follow him. We know this because long ago it was the same with us - and still is.’ He raised an arm heavy with silver rings, most of them given him by Alfred.

‘As for Aebbe, perhaps they have killed her already,’ Cynewulf said gloomily.

‘I doubt she is dead. Her youth and beauty will keep her alive.’

‘The heathens will abuse her.’

‘Perhaps. But they will not kill her.’ Not unless, Amgrim told himself, she fights back too hard.

Ibn Zuhr seemed fascinated by the priest’s distress. ‘You are agitated by the plight of this Aebbe because of the information she holds. But what of the other captives? You are a priest of the Christians. I do not understand how a Christian can accept slavery - yet your society could not function without slaves.’

Cynewulf said, ‘The Church tolerates slavery as a necessary evil, and an appropriate punishment for certain crimes. But the Church is concerned by the slave-taking by Danes, by heathens. And indeed by Moors. For the Church requires that all its devotees have the freedom to pursue their faith.’

‘How enlightened,’ Ibn Zuhr said dryly.

Arngrim valued Ibn Zuhr, but sometimes he pushed his luck. ‘You ask barbed questions, Moor. Just remember you are a slave. Anyhow we’re here to deal with the Danes, not debate philosophy.’

‘How many in the camp?’ Cynewulf asked.

‘Hundreds. Not thousands.’ In fact this was only a fraction of the original Danish force which had landed a dozen years ago; the rest had settled down to colonise the kingdoms they had shattered in the east and north.

‘Hundreds.’ Cynewulf shook his head. ‘How is it that we fall like straw men before mere hundreds?’

‘Few of us are warriors,’ Arngrim said. ‘The thegns are raised to fight. But the fyrd are farmers. And when the harvest is due they melt away anyhow. These Danes are blooded warriors. They do not fear a failed harvest for they simply steal food. What is worse, their war has become focused here, in Wessex, for the Danes have finished with the rest of England, save to farm it. It is only here that glory and booty may still be found, and so it is here that the hungriest warriors will come.’

Ibn Zuhr said, ‘Every breath we take here we risk discovery, and an unpleasant fate. We must return to the King’s camp with this intelligence.’

‘But Aebbe—’

Arngrim grabbed the priest’s arm. ‘Perhaps we will be able to save her. But not today, cousin. The Danes are too strong.’

Ibn Zuhr nodded. ‘We will go back the way we came. Follow me.’ Moving silent as a cat, he crept through the forest, following a trail visible only to his own dark-adapted eyes, away from the Danish camp.

To the west of Cippanhamm there was a bank of forest, through which the King and his chastened party had retreated that dark night after the Twelve Days assault. Beyond this the ground rose to become boggy moorland where only a few stunted sheep browsed around heather-thatched hovels. During the retreat some of the thegns had begun to complain as the chill ice-crusted mud of the moorland weighed down their steps. But Arngrim and others, leading the grim flight, had known that the King would be as safe in this wilderness as anywhere else, for the Danes would be reluctant to move away from open water. Even the walled towns weren’t safe; Escanceaster, for example, had been taken by the Danes the previous year.

As for the King himself, he seemed shocked to his core by the midwinter truce-breaking treachery of the Danes. With his priests and clerks fluttering around in their spoiled robes, Alfred had walked steadily into the dismal wilderness, looking neither left nor right, giving no orders, allowing himself to be led as passively as a child.

They had come at last to a place where the marshland was tidal, flooded daily by the Sabrina river, and in the sunlight open water shone everywhere, flat and calm and gummy with life.

‘I know this place,’ Arngrim had said. ‘When I was a boy, we hunted here - my cousins and the athelings, Alfred and his older brothers. We called it the Isle of the Princes.’
Aethelingaig.
‘Alfred will remember it.’

‘You have chosen well,’ Cynewulf said.

Aethelingaig was inhabited: indeed people had lived here for a long time. You found your way from island to island along paths, causeways of logs pressed into the mud, ancient and endlessly renewed. The people lived in hovels on stilts, feeding off coots, moorhens, ducks, grebes, and gulls, and in the streams were weirs of brushwood, funnels in which eels and lampreys could be caught. Cynewulf had been told it was possible that these people might be British, clinging to land owned by deep chains of forefathers, land too worthless to have been taken from them by the new English dynasties.

And the people of the marshes were only dimly aware of what was going on outside their watery realm. As the King’s procession passed, one grubby old chap had called, ‘What’s up, are the Romans back?’

Despite the sanctuary of Aethelingaig the flight from Cippanhamm was an utter humiliation, made worse by the fact that the King’s own estate had been taken by the Danes as a base. The very boldness of the Vikings’ strike was daunting, Cynewulf thought. Guthrum’s intention had clearly been to capture or kill Alfred himself. If he had done so, with only children available to occupy the last English throne, Wessex could have been thrown into a succession dispute and fratricidal turmoil - and with a single stroke Guthrum might have won England. The intelligence of the attack, its decisiveness, and the wile with which it had been carried out marked out Guthrum as a formidable leader.

And worse in Cynewulf’s mind was the vision of Egil son of Egil, the Beast from the outer dark who had rampaged through the broken sanctuary of the King’s hall.

‘Yet they failed,’ Arngrim had pointed out to Cynewulf as they discussed this. ‘There is still hope.’

But Alfred could not fight back, not for now; English farmer-armies could not be raised in the depths of winter.

By the time Arngrim and his companions got back to Aethelingaig after their spying expedition, Alfred’s men had had three days to get organised. Around the camp a ditch had been dug out and an earthen bank thrown up. Inside this perimeter turf fires burned smokily, tents had been set up, and latrines and food pits were being dug. Parties had been sent out into the countryside to demand food for the King from the soggy water-folk. Further afield rivers had been blocked with logs to keep the Danes from sailing up.

This toy fortress, scratched out of a sodden moor under a sky like a grey lid, was all that was left of the domain of the King of Wessex.

In the camp the thegns huddled in uneasy groups, poring over bits of parchment, some even scribbling maps in the mud with bits of stick. The King was nowhere to be seen. Arngrim quizzed the thegns, telling what he had learned himself and finding out what else was known.

The news was detailed, surprisingly, since even here the King’s clerks scribbled and jotted constantly. After nearly a century of the Viking catastrophe the monastic system had collapsed and England was left empty of scholars. It was a tragedy for a land that in Bede’s time had been full of books and learning. But to Alfred, the scholar-King, words on parchment were a weapon of war; he knew that it was with words, words, words, endlessly recorded, that the Roman army had mustered the deep collective wisdom that had once enabled it to conquer the world. So Alfred had searched for literate servants from the British nations of the west and north, from Ireland, even from the continent.

Today the news, however painstakingly assembled, was dismal.

There were three principal nations among the Northmen: the Norse, the Swedes and the Danes. It had been the Norse who had first struck at Lindisfarena. They assaulted Britain, Ireland and the Frankish kingdoms. Colonies were planted in Ireland, and on Britain’s offshore islands. Some said the Norse had pushed ever further west, seeking lands beyond the ocean known only to the ancients.

The Swedes, meanwhile, looked east. Using the great continental rivers, even dragging their boats between river courses, they plunged deep into Asia. In the end they had attacked even Constantinople.