Conqueror (23 page)

Arngrim whispered sternly. ‘In the spring - after Easter perhaps - when the weather turns, and the fyrd can be raised, the West Saxons will rally to their King.’

‘If he still lives,’ Cynewulf muttered, determinedly gloomy.

‘He must live,’ Ibn Zuhr said. ‘If not, there would be no raids. The nobles would be submitting to Guthrum, seeking to find the best positions they can in a new Dane-land.’

‘Alfred must live,’ Amgrim whispered. ‘And he must prevail.’ He reached out and clasped Cynewulf’s shoulder, hard enough to hurt. ‘And you, priest, have dragged us across the country in pursuit of a dream you believe will inspire Alfred to victory. Don’t lose your courage now!’ Cynewulf heard him moving in the dark, burying what was left of the rabbit carcass. ‘No more talk. We must try to sleep.’

They huddled together for warmth, shifting, nudging each other, trying to find a comfortable position on the hard ground.

Cynewulf felt the warm mass of Aebbe behind him, her belly pressed against his back, her bent knees against his thighs, the whisper of her breath on his neck. Suspicious of all men, she stayed closer to the priest than to Arngrim or Ibn Zuhr, as if she distrusted him the least. Once such a presence would have filled him with helplessly sinful thoughts. But the harm that had been done to her by other men seemed to have scoured the last of his youthful lust from his body. Perhaps it made him a better priest, he thought, if, he felt wistfully, less of a man.

Her breath soon settled into the gentle rhythms of sleep. Since they had set off from Jorvik she had spoken not a single word.

It was a murky noon, two days later, when they returned to the boggy ground to which Alfred had fled, on that dismal night after the Twelve Days assault.

Before they found Aethelingaig, others found them. A party of a dozen men came riding over the broken ground, the legs of their horses heavy with mud. They had their cloaks thrown back, so their swords and axes were exposed.

Arngrim had his party dismount. ‘Stand apart. Drop your cloaks to the ground. Keep your hands empty.’

Cynewulf’s heart thumped as he complied. ‘Are they Danes?’

‘West Saxons. I think I recognise the lead man. That’s not to say they won’t run us through if we give them cause.’

The leader, a burly young fellow with a thick black beard, drew his sword and pointed it at Amgrim’s chest. He called out, speaking in Danish,
‘Who are you? What is your business here?’

Arngrim answered in his own tongue, ‘I am English. So are my companions, save the Moor, who is my slave. I am Arngrim, son of Arngrim, thegn to Alfred. I think I know you.’

The man’s eyes narrowed. ‘My name is Ordgar.’

‘Yes. You are Aethelnoth’s man.’ He glanced back at the priest.

‘Aethelnoth is the ealdorman of the shire. If he is still supporting the King, it is good news.’

Ordgar kept his blade pointing square at Arngrim’s chest. ‘Why do you come to this place?’

‘We seek the King. The Danes took this woman.’ He indicated Aebbe. ‘We have brought her back.’

Ordgar frowned, suspicious again. ‘Why?’

Arngrim hesitated. ‘It may be best if you hear it from the King. We were with Alfred in his hall, during the Twelve Nights. We were there when the Danes raided. I myself stood before their leader—’

‘Egil. I remember you.’ Ordgar lowered his sword, and Cynewulf let out a breath. ‘Men still talk of you that night, Arngrim son of Arngrim. You stood your ground.’

Arngrim grinned. ‘Actually I stood on a table. We have been away some weeks. What is the news?’

‘Not good. Guthrum has occupied much of Wessex. He is stretched thin, and Alfred’s assaults keep the Force pinned down. But they take animals - they even slaughter the pregnant ewes - they turn folk out of their cottages and feed the thatch to their horses.’

‘It will be a hungry summer.’

‘Yes. And there has been treachery. Aethelwold has allied with the Danes.’ Aethelwold, another ealdorman, was Alfred’s nephew, the son of one of his dead brothers. ‘And there is news of another Danish Force, under Ubba, coming from the west.’

To Cynewulf this was scarcely believable.
‘Another?’

‘A
thousand men or more, judging by the number of ships. Evidently Ubba and Guthrum mean to crush Alfred and Wessex between the two of them. Ealdorman Odda is preparing to stand against them. But ...’

But if even Alfred’s nephew had deserted him, nobody could be relied on; Ordgar left this conclusion unsaid.

Ordgar sheathed his sword. ‘I will bring you to the King. But be careful how you behave. It is not only Danes who have tried to slaughter the King, but English too, men of our blood, who have sold their souls. It is a dangerous time, and men are cautious.’

They rode further west, into the half-drowned land. A mist lingered, even in the middle of the day, a low clinging dampness that stank of rot. At last they came to a place where open water glimmered in pale sheets, and the only scraps of dry land were islands that thrust out of the murk. Punts had been hauled up out of the water on to the dry land.

Here Ordgar had them dismount. ‘That’s the end for the horses,’ he said.

They clambered into punts, Cynewulf and Aebbe together in one, Arngrim and Ibn Zuhr in a second, each with one of Ordgar’s men. Two more punts followed them, so they were a little flotilla with no less than nine armed men, including Arngrim. Cynewulf had never liked water, and he clung to the sides of the punt as the thick green marshwater lapped into the low hull, and reeds scraped against the bottom. But even the Danes’ famous shallow-draught ships could not penetrate this clinging morass.

The light was already fading when Aethelingaig loomed out of the mist. Cynewulf saw punts and other shallow boats coming and going from the island. He imagined them carrying instructions from the King to his supporters in the country, and bringing back information about the movements of the Danes. As they neared the island a huge crane flapped from the still water into the darksome sky.

In the weeks Cynewulf had been away, Alfred had managed to organise his burh a little better. He had added to the natural protection of the flooded landscape with a ditch, an earthen bank and a palisade. Even before they got to the ditch they passed pits filled with sharpened stakes, and others stuffed with dried reeds which could be set alight in case of attack.

Inside the camp there seemed to have been some effort to drain the land, for the ground was firmer underfoot. Leather tents sat in rows, and there were even a few permanent buildings, posts stuck in the ground with walls of mud and reed thatches. There were some women and children around, including, presumably, the family of the King himself. But most of the men wore mail shirts and carried swords and axes, and more weapons and shields were stacked up near the fence. This was a place ready for combat; no matter how devious the Danes were, they would not find Alfred unprepared again.

Cynewulf felt his spirits rise a bit. This was scarcely Eoforwic, as Arngrim remarked dryly. But in this burh, this fortified place, there was no sense of the panic of that night of flight.

But Ibn Zuhr sniffed at air that stank of pond rot. ‘So this petty island is all that is left of England.’

‘It is enough,’ Arngrim snapped. ‘I’ll hear no more from you, Moor. Fetch us food, fresh clothes, find us somewhere to rest. And then we would talk with the King. Organise it.’

The Moor, his eyes downcast, obeyed.

Alfred, King of Wessex, sat on his giving-throne, priests and clerks at his elbow. He was reading a book. As always his clerks recorded everything that came to pass, and the priests murmured prayers.

Cynewulf, with Arngrim, Aebbe and Ibn Zuhr, sat on a mead bench and waited for the King’s attention. Cynewulf saw how Alfred picked out the letters in his book with a moving finger, and mouthed the words. Orphaned young, his education neglected by the older brothers who raised him, this most scholarly of kings had been almost grown before he learned to read English or Latin.

This ‘hall’ was a hovel constructed of the skinny trunks and limp branches of willow trees, plastered with marsh-bottom mud. But the King put on an impressive show. The walls were draped with hangings that glittered with golden thread. The King’s giving-throne had been loaned to him by his sound supporter Aethelnoth. Alfred himself was dressed in leather and a mail shirt, but he glistened with jewellery, shoulder-brooches and pendants and rings and arm bands.

For a king, image was all. And so he wore his jewels and said his prayers, here in the middle of the bog, even while the Danes skulked through the thickets to assassinate him.

Cynewulf, whispering, remarked on this to Arngrim.

Arngrim bluffly murmured, ‘Oh, I believe in Alfred. He may babble on about God, but he is the descendant of Woden after all, and he has a deeper wisdom than any priest. Think about his name.’

Alfred -
Aelf-red -
the wisdom of the elves.

Cynewulf was startled. He hissed, ‘Arngrim, the Menologium. There is a line in the ninth stanza that talks of elf-wisdom—’

‘Not now,’ Arngrim said.

Despite the finery the foetid stink of the swamp penetrated even this royal cabin. Alfred looked shrivelled, and as he tired he coughed into a handkerchief, which Cynewulf saw was spotted with blood.

Ibn Zuhr murmured to his master, ‘The King is ill.’

‘Is there anything you can do for him, Moor?’

Ibn Zuhr shook his head. ‘It is the foul air,’ he said softly. ‘If he could get away from that, perhaps his condition would improve.’

The King looked up, disturbed by their talk. He closed his book with a sigh. ‘I’m sorry for keeping you waiting, Arngrim. It’s just that I get lost in words.’ He held up the book. ‘We are short of parchment, you know. Some of my thegns would have me tear up my books to keep the orders flowing out of here. Books, sacrificed to the needs of war - a terrible thing. But not this one; next to the Bible it is the one book I could not live without, I think.
De Consolatione Philosophiae - The Consolation of Philosophy,
by Boethius. Have you heard of it?’

‘I’m not what you would call a book-reader, lord,’ Arngrim growled.

Ibn Zuhr coughed. ‘Master, if I may?’

Cynewulf was astonished at the gall of a slave daring to speak before a king. But Alfred waved for the Moor to speak.

Ibn Zuhr said clearly, ‘Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius. A Roman scholar who died some four centuries ago. He was a senator, indeed a consul. But he lived through the expulsion of the last western emperor, and served under Theodoric the Ostrogoth, King of Italy. He translated Aristotle. He wrote extensively on the Arian heresy ...’

Arngrim rumbled like a wolf. ‘Lord, I am not sure if the frozen thoughts of a long-dead Roman are much help to us now.’

‘That is the fallacy of the illiterate,’ Alfred snapped. ‘And it is why, dear Arngrim, I hold you no closer.’

Cynewulf could sense Arngrim’s irritation.

‘How did Boethius die, slave?’

Ibn Zuhr said, ‘He was executed. I believe he was suspected of intriguing with the East Roman Emperor against King Theodoric.’

‘Yes, yes. And while he was in prison, even while he waited for death, he wrote this, his masterwork. What a consolation Boethius’s philosophy is to me now, with his talk of grades of being beyond the human, and his dream of a
summum bonum,
a highest good that controls and orders the universe. Even in an age of catastrophe - even while waiting for his own unjust execution at the hands of a barbarian king - he kept working. Perhaps this is the course I should take, do you think? Perhaps I should go into exile, like the wretched King Burghred of Mercia. Or I should lock myself away in a monastery, and write like Bede. For I sometimes think it is books I love above all else, save my children.’

This talk of giving up, delivered in a feeble voice by an ill man, alarmed Cynewulf. Perhaps they hadn’t come a moment too soon.

Arngrim apparently felt the same way. He said carefully, ‘You speak of Rome’s catastrophe in Boethius’s time. If you were to turn away from your duty now, lord, it would be an English catastrophe of no less magnitude.’

Alfred snorted. ‘I would think you were flattering me, Arngrim, if I did not respect you too much.’

‘It is sincere, lord.’

‘And, lord,’ Cynewulf said, rising nervously, ‘the reason we have asked to speak to you today is that
we have proof -
proof that you must fight on. Proof that you
must
win.’

Alfred glared at him. ‘Cynewulf, is it? You bring me a prophecy, I hear. You should know me better, if you believe you can deflect me with hints of the
wyrd.
I have plenty of half-converted pagans in my court muttering auguries in my ear.’

‘I am a priest,’ Cynewulf said defiantly. ‘What I bring you is, I believe, a revelation of God’s providence.’

The King snapped, ‘Show me, then.’

Cynewulf sighed. ‘I cannot show you, lord. But I can tell you.’ He turned to Aebbe.

Here was another moment of high tension. Aebbe had not spoken a word since Eoforwic. If she refused to speak now, all would be lost.

But to his immense relief she stood, faced the King, and, in a clear but harsh voice, began to recite the Menologium of Isolde:

 

Alfred listened for a few lines. Then he ordered the girl to begin again, so he could be sure his clerks wrote down the words accurately. He always had two clerks working together, who took down alternate sentences and then compiled a composite account later.

When she had done, Alfred nodded. ‘And this is what you have brought me, this doggerel?’