The Pale Horseman

by Bernard Cornwell

  I left Leofric to command the garrison at Æthelingæg and took Iseult back to Alfred’s refuge. She was silent and I thought her sunk in misery, but then she suddenly laughed. “Look!” She pointed at the dead man’s blood matted and sticky in Ælswith’s fur.

  She still had Wasp-Sting. That was my short sword, a saxe, and it was a wicked blade in a close fight where men are so crammed together that there is no room to swing a long sword or an ax. She trailed the blade in the water, then used the hem of Ælswith’s fur to scrub the diluted blood from the steel. “It is harder than I thought,” she said, “to kill a man.”

  “It takes strength.”

  “But I have his soul now.”

  “Is that why you did it?’

  “To give life,” she said, “you must take it from somewhere else.” She gave me back Wasp-Sting.

  Alfred was shaving when we returned. He had been growing a beard, not for a disguise, but because he had been too low in spirits to bother about his appearance, but when Iseult and I reached his refuge he was standing naked to the waist beside a big wooden tub of heated water. His chest was pathetically thin, his belly hollow, but he had washed himself, combed his hair, and was now scratching at his stubble with an ancient razor he had borrowed from a marshman. His daughter, Æthelflaed, was holding a scrap of silver that served as a mirror. “I am feeling better,” he told me solemnly.

  “Good, lord,” I said. “So am I.”

  “Does that mean you’ve killed someone?”

  “She did.” I jerked my head at Iseult.

  He gave her a speculative look. “My wife,” he said, dipping the razor in the water, “was asking whether Iseult is truly a queen.”

  “She was,” I said, “but that means little in Cornwalum. She was queen of a dung heap.”

  “And she’s a pagan?”

  “It was a Christian kingdom,” I said. “Didn’t Brother Asser tell you that?”

  “He said they were not good Christians.”

  “I thought that was for God to judge.”

  “Good, Uhtred, good!” He waved the razor at me, then stooped to the silver mirror and scraped at his upper lip. “Can she foretell the future?”

  “She can.”

  He scraped in silence for a few heartbeats. Æthelflaed watched Iseult solemnly. “So tell me,” Alfred said, “does she say I will be king in Wessex again?”

  “You will,” Iseult said tonelessly, surprising me.

  Alfred stared at her. “My wife,” he said, “says that we can look for a ship now that Edward is better. Look for a ship, go to Frankia, and perhaps travel on to Rome. There is a Saxon community in Rome.” He scraped the blade against his jawbone. “They will welcome us.”

  “The Danes will be defeated,” Iseult said, still tonelessly, but without a quiver of doubt in her voice.

  Alfred rubbed his face. “The example of Boethius tells me she’s right,” he said.

  “Boethius?” I asked. “Is he one of your warriors?”

  “He was a Roman, Uhtred,” Alfred said in a tone that chided me for not knowing, “and a Christian and a philosopher and a man rich in book learning. Rich indeed!” He paused, contemplating the story of Boethius. “When the pagan Alaric overran Rome,” he went on, “and all civilization and true religion seemed doomed, Boethius alone stood against the sinners. He suffered, but he won through, and we can take heart from him. Indeed we can.” He pointed the razor at me. “We must never forget the example of Boethius, Uhtred, never.”

  “I won’t, lord,” I said, “but do you think book learning will get you out of here?”

  “I think,” he said, “that when the Danes are gone, I shall grow a proper beard. Thank you, my sweet.” This last was to Æthelflaed. “Give the mirror back to Eanflæd, will you?”

  Æthelflaed ran off and Alfred looked at me with some amusement. “Does it surprise you that my wife and Eanflæd have become friends?”

  “I’m glad of it, lord.”

  “So am I.”

  “But does your wife know Eanflæd’s trade?” I asked.

  “Not exactly,” he said. “She believes Eanflæd was a cook in a tavern. Which is truth enough. So we have a fort at Æthelingæg?”

  “We do. Leofric commands there and has forty-three men.”

  “And we have twenty-eight here. The very hosts of Midian!” He was evidently amused. “So we shall move there.”

  “Maybe in a week or two.”

  “Why wait?” he asked.

  I shrugged. “This place is deeper in the swamp. When we have more men, when we know we can hold Æthelingæg, that is the time for you to go there.”

  He pulled on a grubby shirt. “Your new fort can’t stop the Danes?”

  “It will slow them, lord. But they could still struggle through the marsh.” They would find it difficult, though, for Leofric was digging ditches to defend Æthelingæg’s western edge.

  “You’re telling me Æthelingæg is more vulnerable than this place?”

  “Yes, lord.”

  “Which is why I must go there,” he said. “Men can’t say their king skulked in an unreachable place, can they?” He smiled at me. “They must say he defied the Danes. That he waited where they could reach him, that he put himself into danger.”

  “And his family?” I asked.

  “And his family,” he said firmly. He thought for a moment. “If they come in force they could take all the swamp, isn’t that true?”

  “Yes, lord.”

  “So no place is safer than another. But how large a force does Svein have?”

  “I don’t know, lord.”

  “Don’t know?” It was a reproof, gentle enough, but still a reproof.

  “I haven’t gone close to them, lord,” I explained, “because till now we’ve been too weak to resist them, and so long as they leave us undisturbed then so long do we leave them undisturbed. There’s no point in kicking a wild bees’ nest, not unless you’re determined to get the honey.”

  He nodded acceptance of that argument. “But we need to know how many bees there are, don’t we?” he said. “So tomorrow we shall take a look at our enemy. You and me, Uhtred.”

  “No, lord,” I said firmly. “I shall go. You shouldn’t risk yourself.”

  “That is exactly what I need to do,” he said, “and men must know I do it for I am the king, and why would men want a king who does not share their danger?” He waited for an answer, but I had none. “So let’s say our prayers,” he finished. “Then we shall eat.”

  It was fish stew. It was always fish stew.

  And next day we went to find the enemy.

  There were six of us: the man who poled the punt, Iseult and I, two of the newly arrived household troops, and Alfred. I tried once again to make him stay behind, but he insisted. “If anyone should stay,” he said, “it is Iseult.”

  “She comes,” I said.

  “Evidently.” He did not argue, and we all climbed into a large punt and went westward, and Alfred stared at the birds, thousands of birds. There were coots, moorhens, dabchicks, ducks, grebes, and herons, while off to the west, white against the sullen sky, was a cloud of gulls.

  The marshman slid us silent and fast through secret channels. There were times when he seemed to be taking us directly into a bank of reeds or grass, yet the shallow craft would slide through into another stretch of open water. The incoming tide rippled through the gaps, bringing fish to the hidden nets and basket traps. Beneath the gulls, far off to the west, I could see the masts of Svein’s fleet that had been dragged ashore on the coast.

  Alfred saw them, too. “Why don’t they join Guthrum?”

  “Because Svein doesn’t want to take Guthrum’s orders,” I said.

  “You know that?”

  “He told me so.”

  Alfred paused, perhaps thinking of my trial in front of the witan. He gave me a rueful look. “What sort of man is he?”

  “Formidable.”

  “So why hasn’t he attacked us here
?”

  I had been wondering the same thing. Svein had missed a golden chance to invade the swamp and hunt Alfred down. So why had he not even tried? “Because there’s easier plunder elsewhere,” I suggested, “and because he won’t do Guthrum’s bidding. They’re rivals. If Svein takes Guthrum’s orders, then he acknowledges Guthrum as his king.”

  Alfred stared at the distant masts that showed as small scratches against the sky. Then I mutely pointed toward a hill that reared steeply from the western water flats and the marshman obediently went that way, and when the punt grounded we clambered through thick alders and past some sunken hovels where sullen folk in dirty otter fur watched us pass. The marshman knew no name for the place, except to call it Brant, which meant steep, and it was steep. Steep and high, offering a view southward to where the Pedredan coiled like a great snake through the swamp’s heart. And at the river’s mouth, where sand and mud stretched into the Sæfern Sea, I could see the Danish ships.

  They were grounded on the far bank of the Pedredan in the same place that Ubba had grounded his ships before meeting his death in battle. From there Svein could easily row to Æthelingæg, for the river was wide and deep, and he would meet no challenge until he reached the river barrier beside the fort where Leofric waited. I wanted Leofric and his garrison to have some warning if the Danes attacked, and this high hill offered a view of Svein’s camp, but was far enough away so that it would not invite an attack from the enemy. “We should make a beacon here,” I said to Alfred. A fire lit here would give Æthelingæg two or three hours’ warning of a Danish attack.

  He nodded but said nothing. He stared at the distant ships, but they were too far off to count. He looked pale, and I knew he had found the climb to the summit painful, so now I urged him downhill to where the hovels leaked smoke. “You should rest here, lord,” I told him. “I’m going to count ships. But you should rest.”

  He did not argue and I suspected his stomach pains were troubling him again. I found a hovel that was occupied by a widow and her four children, and I gave her a silver coin and said her king needed warmth and shelter for the day, and I do not think she understood who he was, but she knew the value of a shilling and so Alfred went into her house and sat by the fire. “Give him broth,” I told the widow, whose name was Elwide, “and let him sleep.”

  She scorned that. “Folk can’t sleep while there’s work!” she said. “There are eels to skin, fish to smoke, nets to mend, traps to weave.”

  “They can work,” I said, pointing to the two household troops, and I left them all to Elwide’s tender mercies while Iseult and I took the punt southward and, because the Pedredan’s mouth was only three or four miles away and because Brant was such a clear landmark, I left the marshman to help skin and smoke eels.

  We crossed a smaller river and then poled through a long mere broken by marram grass and by now I could see the hill on the Pedredan’s far bank where we had been trapped by Ubba, and I told Iseult the story of the fight as I poled the punt across the shallows. The hull grounded twice and I had to push it into deeper water until I realized the tide was falling fast and so I tied the boat to a rotting stake. Then we walked across a drying waste of mud and sea lavender toward the Pedredan. I had grounded farther from the river than I had wanted, and it was a long walk into a cold wind, but we could see all we needed once we reached the steep bank at the river’s edge. The Danes could also see us. I was not in mail, but I did have my swords, and the sight of me brought men to the farther shore, where they hurled insults across the swirling water. I ignored them. I was counting ships and saw twenty-four beast-headed boats hauled up on the strip of ground where we had defeated Ubba the year before. Ubba’s burned ships were also there, their black ribs half buried in the sand where the men capered and shouted their insults.

  “How many men can you see?” I asked Iseult.

  There were a few Danes in the half-wrecked remnants of the monastery where Svein had killed the monks, but most were by the boats. “Just men?” she asked.

  “Forget the women and children,” I said. There were scores of women, mostly in the small village that was a small way upstream.

  She did not know the English words for the bigger numbers, so she gave me her estimate by opening and closing her fingers six times. “Sixty?” I said, and nodded. “At most seventy. And there are twenty-four ships.” She frowned, not understanding the point I made. “Twenty-four ships,” I said, “means an army of what? Eight hundred? Nine hundred men? So those sixty or seventy men are the ship guards. And the others? Where are the others?” I asked the question of myself, watching as five of the Danes dragged a small boat to the river’s edge. They planned to row across and capture us, but I did not intend to stay that long. “The others,” I answered my own question, “have gone south. They’ve left their women behind and gone raiding. They’re burning, killing, getting rich. They’re raping Defnascir.”

  “They’re coming,” Iseult said, watching the five men clamber into the small boat.

  “You want me to kill them?”

  “You can?” She looked hopeful.

  “No,” I said, “so let’s go.”

  We started back across the long expanse of mud and sand. It looked smooth, but there were runnels cutting through and the tide had turned and the sea was sliding back into the land with surprising speed. The sun was sinking, tangling with black clouds, and the wind pushed the flood up the Sæfern and the water gurgled and shivered as it filled the small creeks. I turned to see that the five Danes had abandoned their chase and gone back to the western bank where their fires looked delicate against the evening’s fading light. “I can’t see the boat,” Iseult said.

  “Over there,” I said, but I was not certain I was right because the light was dimming and our punt was tied against a background of reeds, and now we were jumping from one dry spot to another, and the tide went on rising and the dry spots shrank and then we were splashing through the water and still the wind drove the tide inland.

  The tides are big in the Sæfern. A man could make a house at low tide, and by high it would have vanished beneath the waves. Islands appear at low tide, islands with summits thirty feet above the water, and at the high tide they are gone, and this tide was pushed by the wind and it was coming fast and cold and Iseult began to falter so I picked her up and carried her like a child. I was struggling and the sun was behind the low western clouds and it seemed now that I was wading through an endless chill sea, but then, perhaps because the darkness was falling, or perhaps because Hoder, the blind god of the night, favored me, I saw the punt straining against its tether.

  I dropped Iseult into the boat and hauled myself over the low side. I cut the rope, then collapsed, cold and wet and frightened, and let the punt drift on the tide.

  “You must get back to the fire,” Iseult chided me. I wished I had brought the marshman now for I had to find a route across the swamp and it was a long, cold journey in the day’s last light. Iseult crouched beside me and stared far across the waters to where a hill reared up green and steep against the eastern land. “Eanflæd told me that hill is Avalon,” she said reverentially.

  “Avalon?”

  “Where Arthur is buried.”

  “I thought you believed he was sleeping.”

  “He does sleep,” she said fervently. “He sleeps in his grave with his warriors.” She gazed at the distant hill that seemed to glow because it had been caught by the day’s last errant shaft of sunlight spearing from the west beneath the furnace-glowing clouds. “Arthur,” she said in a whisper. “He was the greatest king who ever lived. He had a magic sword.” She told me tales of Arthur, how he had pulled his sword from a stone, and how he had led the greatest warriors to battle, and I thought that his enemies had been us, the English Saxons, yet Avalon was now in England, and I wondered if, in a few years, the Saxons would recall their lost kings and claim they were great and all the while the Danes would rule us. When the sun vanished Iseult was singing softly in her own
tongue, but she told me the song was about Arthur and how he had placed a ladder against the moon and netted a swath of stars to make a cloak for his queen, Guinevere. Her voice carried us across the twilit water, sliding between reeds, and behind us the fires of the Danish ship guards faded in the encroaching dark, and far off a dog howled and the wind sighed cold and a spattering of rain shivered the black mere.

  Iseult stopped singing as Brant loomed. “There’s going to be a great fight,” she said softly and her words took me by surprise and I thought she was still thinking of Arthur and imagining that the sleeping king would erupt from his earthy bed in gouts of soil and steel. “A fight by a hill,” she went on, “a steep hill, and there will be a white horse and the slope will run with blood and the Danes will run from the Sais.”

  The Sais were us, the Saxons. “You dreamed this?” I asked.

  “I dreamed it,” she said.

  “So it is true?”

  “It is fate,” she said, and I believed her, and just then the bow of the punt scraped on the island’s shore.

  It was pitch dark, but there were fish-smoking fires on the beach, and by their dying light we found our way to Elwide’s house. It was made of alder logs thatched with reeds and I found Alfred sitting by the central hearth where he stared absently into the flames. Elwide, the two soldiers, and the marshman were all skinning eels at the hut’s farther end where three of the widow’s children were plaiting willow withies into traps and the fourth was gutting a big pike.

  I crouched by the fire, wanting its warmth to bring life to my frozen legs.

  Alfred blinked as though he was surprised to see me. “The Danes?” he asked.

  “Gone inland,” I said. “Left sixty or seventy men as ship guards.” I crouched by the fire, shivering, wondering if I would ever be warm again.