“He wanted to pray,” I said.
“He would have you eat with him.”
I drank some ale. “If I live to be a hundred, father,” I began.
“I pray you live longer than that,” Beocca said. “I pray you live as long as Methuselah.”
I wondered who that was. “If I live to be a hundred,” I said again, “I hope never to eat with Alfred again.”
He shook his head sadly, but agreed to sit with us and take a pot of ale. He reached over and pulled at the leather thong half hidden by my jerkin and so revealed the hammer. He tutted. “You lied to me, Uhtred,” he said sadly. “When you ran away from Father Willibald we made enquiries. You were never a prisoner! You were treated as a son!”
“I was,” I agreed.
“But why did you not come to us then? Why did you stay with the Danes?”
I smiled. “What would I have learned here?” I asked. He began to answer, but I stilled him. “You would have made me a scholar, father,” I said, “and the Danes made me a warrior. And you will need warriors when they come back.”
Beocca understood that, but he was still sad. He looked at Brida. “And you, young lady, I hope you did not lie?”
“I always tell the truth, father,” she said in a small voice, “always.”
“That is good,” he said, then reached over again to hide my amulet. “Are you a Christian, Uhtred?” he asked.
“You baptized me yourself, father,” I said evasively.
“We will not defeat the Danes unless we hold the faith,” he said earnestly, then smiled, “but will you do what Alfred wants?”
“I don’t know what he wants. He ran off to wear out his knees before he could tell me.”
“He wants you to serve on one of the ships he’s building,” he said. I just gaped at him. “We’re building ships, Uhtred,” Beocca went on enthusiastically, “ships to fight the Danes, but our sailors are not fighters. They’re, well, sailors! And they’re fishermen, of course, and traders, but we need men who can teach them what the Danes do. Their ships raid our shore incessantly. Two ships come? Three ships? Sometimes more. They land, burn, kill, take slaves, and vanish. But with ships we can fight them.” He punched his withered left hand with his right and winced with the pain. “That’s what Alfred wants.”
I glanced at Brida who gave a small shrug as if to say that she thought Beocca was telling the truth. I thought of the two Æthelreds, younger and older, and their dislike of me. I remembered the joy of a ship on the seas, of the wind tearing at the rigging, of the oars bending and flashing back the sun, of the songs of the rowers, of the heartbeat of the steering oar, of the seethe of the long green water against the hull. “Of course I’ll do it,” I said.
“Praise God,” Beocca said. And why not?
I met Æthelflaed before I left Wintanceaster. She was three or four years old, I suppose, and full of words. She had bright gold hair. She was playing in the garden outside Alfred’s study and I remember she had a rag doll and Alfred played with her and Ælswith worried he was making her too excited. I remember her laugh. She never lost that laugh. Alfred was good with her for he loved his children. Most of the time he was solemn, pious, and very selfdisciplined, but with small children he became playful and I almost liked him as he teased Æthelflaed by hiding her rag doll behind his back. I also remember how Æthelflaed ran over to Nihtgenga and fondled him and Ælswith called her back. “Dirty dog,” she told her daughter, “you’ll get fleas or worse. Come here!” She gave Brida a very sour look and muttered,
“Scrætte!” That means prostitute and Brida pretended not to have heard, as did Alfred. Ælswith ignored me, but I did not mind because Alfred had summoned a palace slave who laid a helmet and a mail coat on the grass. “For you, Uhtred,” Alfred said.
The helmet was bright iron, dented on the crown by the blow of a weapon, polished with sand and vinegar, and with a faceplate in which two eyeholes stared like the pits of a skull. The mail was good, though it had been pierced by a spear or sword where the owner’s heart had been, but it had been expertly repaired by a good smith and it was worth many pieces of silver. “They were both taken from a Dane at Æsc’s Hill,” Alfred told me. Ælswith watched disapprovingly.
“Lord,” I said, and went on one knee and kissed his hand.
“A year’s service,” he said, “is all I ask of you.”
“You have it, lord,” I said, and sealed that promise with another kiss on his inkstained knuckles. I was dazzled. The two pieces of armor were rare and valuable, and I had done nothing to deserve such generosity, unless to behave boorishly is to deserve favors. And Alfred had been generous, though a lord should be generous. That is what a lord is, a giver of rings, and a lord who does not distribute wealth is a lord who will lose the allegiance of his men, yet even so I had not earned the gifts, though I was grateful for them. I was dazzled by them and for a moment I thought Alfred a great and good and admirable man. I should have thought a moment longer. He was generous, of course, but Alfred, unlike his wife, was never grudging with gifts, but why give such valuable armor to a halffledged youth? Because I was useful to him. Not very useful, but still of use. Alfred sometimes played chess, a game for which I have small patience, but in chess there are pieces of great value and pieces of little worth, and I was one of those. The pieces of great value were the lords of Mercia who, if he could bind them to him, would help Wessex fight the Danes, but he was already looking beyond Mercia into East Anglia and Northumbria and he had no Northumbrian lords in exile except me, and he foresaw a time when he would need a Northumbrian to persuade the northern folk to accept a southern king. If I had been really valuable, if I could have brought him the allegiance of folk nearer his frontier, then he would have given me a noble West Saxon wife, for a woman of high birth is the greatest gift a lord can bestow, but a helmet and a coat of mail were sufficient for the distant idea of Northumbria. I doubt he thought I could deliver that country to him, but he did see that one day I might be useful in its delivery and so he bound me to him with gifts and made the bonds acceptable with flattery. “None of my men has fought on shipboard,” he told me,
“so they must learn. You might be young, Uhtred, but you have experience which means you know more than they do. So go and teach them.”
Me? Know more than his men? I had sailed inWindViper, that was all, but I had never fought from a ship, though I was not going to tell Alfred that. Instead I accepted his gifts and went south to the coast, and thus he had tucked away a pawn that might one day be useful. To Alfred, of course, the most valuable pieces on the board were his bishops who were supposed to pray the Danes out of England, and no bishop ever went unfed in Wessex, but I could not complain for I had a coat of mail, a helmet of iron, and looked like a warrior. Alfred loaned us horses for our journey and he sent Father Willibald with us, not as a guardian this time, but because he insisted that his new ships’ crews must have a priest to look after their spiritual needs. Poor Willibald. He used to get sick as a dog every time a ripple touched a ship, but he never abandoned his responsibilities, especially toward me. If prayers could make a man into a Christian then I would be a saint ten times over by now.
Destiny is all. And now, looking back, I see the pattern of my life’s journey. It began in Bebbanburg and took me south, ever southward, until I reached the farthest coast of England and could go no farther and still hear my own language. That was my childhood’s journey. As a man I have gone the other way, ever northward, carrying sword and spear and ax to clear the path back to where I began. Destiny. The spinners favor me, or at least they have spared me, and for a time they made me a sailor. I took my mail coat and helmet in the year 874, the same year that King Burghred fled to Rome, and Alfred expected Guthrum to come in the following spring, but he did not, nor in the summer, and so Wessex was spared an invasion in 875. Guthrum should have come, but he was a cautious man, ever expecting the worst, and he spent a full eighteen months raising the greatest army of Danes that had e
ver been seen in England. It dwarfed the Great Army that had marched to Readingum, and it was an army that should have finished Wessex and granted Guthrum’s dream of slaughtering the last Englishman in England. Guthrum’s host did come in time and when that time came the three spinners cut England’s threads one by one until she dangled by a wisp, but that story must wait and I mention it now only to explain why we were given time to prepare ourselves.
And I was given toHeahengel. So help me, that was the ship’s name. It means Archangel. She was not mine, of course. She had a shipmaster called Werferth who had commanded a tubby boat that had traded across the sea before he was persuaded to steerHeahengel, and her warriors were led by a grim old beast called Leofric. And me? I was the turd in the butter churn. I was not needed. All Alfred’s flattering words about me teaching his sailors how to fight were just that, mere words. But he had persuaded me to join his fleet, and I had promised him a year, and here I was in Hamtun, which was a fine port at the head of a long arm of the sea. Alfred had ordered twelve ships made, and their maker was a shipwright who had been an oarsman on a Danish boat before escaping in Frankia and making his way back to England. There was not much about ship fighting that he did not know, and nothing I could teach anyone, but ship fighting is a very simple affair. A ship is a scrap of land afloat. So a ship fight is a land fight at sea. Bang your boat alongside the enemy, make a shield wall, and kill the other crew. But our shipwright, who was a cunning man, had worked out that a larger ship gave its crew an advantage because it could hold more men and its sides, being higher, would serve as a wall, and so he had built twelve big ships, which at first looked odd to me for they had no beast heads at their prows or sterns, though they did all have crucifixes nailed to their masts. The whole fleet was commanded by Ealdorman Hacca, who was brother to the ealdorman of Hamptonscir, and the only thing he said when I arrived was to advise me to wrap my mail coat in an oiled sack so it would not rust. After that he gave me to Leofric.
“Show me your hands,” Leofric ordered. I did and he sneered. “You’ll have blisters soon, earsling.”
That was his favorite word,earsling . It means “arseling.” That was me, though sometimes he called me Endwerc, which means a pain in the arse, and he made me an oarsman, one of the sixteen on the bæcbord, which is the lefthand side of the ship as you look forward. The other side is the steorbord, for it is on that side that the steering oar is rigged. We had sixty warriors aboard, thirtytwo rowed at a time unless the sail could be hoisted, and we had Werferth at the steering oar and Leofric snarling up and down telling us to pull harder.
All autumn and winter we rowed up and down Hamtun’s wide channel and beyond in the Solente, which is the sea south of the island called Wiht, and we fought the tide and wind, hammeringHeahengel through short, cold waves until we had become a crew and could make her leap across the sea. To my surprise, I found thatHeahengel was a fast ship. I had thought that, being so much bigger, she would be slower than the Danish ships, but she was fast, very fast, and Leofric was turning her into a lethal weapon. He did not like me and though he called me earsling and Endwerc I did not face him down because I would have died. He was a short, wide man, muscled like an ox, with a scarred face, a quick temper, and a sword so battered that its blade was slim as a knife. Not that he cared, for his preferred weapon was the ax. He knew I was an ealdorman, but did not care, nor did he care that I had once served on a Danish boat. “The only thing the Danes can teach us, earsling,” he told me, “is how to die.”
He did not like me, but I liked him. At night, when we filled one of Hamtun’s taverns, I would sit near him to listen to his few words, which were usually scornful, even about our own ships. “Twelve,” he snarled, “and how many can the Danes bring?”
No one answered.
“Two hundred?” he suggested. “And we have twelve?”
Brida beguiled him one night into talking about his fights, all of them ashore, and he talked of Æsc’s Hill, how the Danish shield wall had been broken by a man with an ax, and it was obviously Leofric himself who had done that, and he told how the man had held the ax halfway up its shaft because that made it quicker to recover from the blow, though it diminished the force of the weapon, and how the man had used his shield to hold off the enemy on his left, killed the one in front, then the one to the right, and then had slipped his hand down the ax handle to start swinging it in terrible, flashing strokes that carved through the Danish lines. He saw me listening and gave me his usual sneer. “Been in a shield wall, earsling?”
I held up one finger.
“He broke the enemy shield wall,” Brida said. She and I lived in the tavern stables and Leofric liked Brida though he refused to allow her on boardHeahengel because he reckoned a woman brought ill luck to a ship. “He broke the wall,” Brida said. “I saw it.”
He gazed at me, not sure whether to believe her. I said nothing. “Who were you fighting,” he asked after a pause, “nuns?”
“Welshmen,” Brida said.
“Oh, Welshmen! Hell, they die easy,” he said, which was not true, but it let him keep his scorn of me, and the next day, when we had a practice fight with wooden staves instead of real weapons, he made sure he opposed me and he beat me to the ground as if I was a yapping dog, opening a cut on my skull and leaving me dazed. “I’m not a Welshman, earsling,” he said. I liked Leofric a lot. The year turned. I became eighteen years old. The great Danish army did not come, but their ships did. The Danes were being Vikings again, and their dragon ships came in ones and twos to harry the West Saxon coast, to raid and to rape and to burn and to kill, but this year Alfred had his own ships ready. So we went to sea.
CHAPTER EIGHT
We spent the spring, summer, and autumn of the year 875 rowing up and down Wessex’s south coast. We were divided into four flotillas, and Leofric commandedHeahengel, Ceruphin, andCristenlic, which meant Archangel, Cherubim, and Christian. Alfred had chosen the names. Hacca, who led the whole fleet, sailed in theEvangelista, which soon acquired the reputation of being an unlucky ship, though her real ill fortune was to have Hacca on board. He was a nice enough man, generous with his silver, but he hated ships, hated the sea, and wanted nothing more than to be a warrior on dry land, which meant that Evangelista was always on Hamtun’s hard undergoing repairs. But not theHeahengel. I tugged that oar till my body ached and my hands were hard as oak, but the rowing put muscle on me, so much muscle. I was big now, big, tall, and strong, and cocky and belligerent as well. I wanted nothing more than to tryHeahengel against some Danish ship, yet our first encounter was a disaster. We were off the coast of Suth Seaxa, a marvelous coast of rearing white cliffs, and Ceruphin andCristenlic had gone far out to sea while we slid inshore hoping to attract a Viking ship that would pursue us into an ambush sprung by the other two craft. The trap worked, only the Viking was better than us. He was smaller, much smaller, and we pursued him against the falling tide, gaining on him with every dip of our oars, but then he sawCeruphin andCristenlic slamming in from the south, their oar blades flashing back the sunlight and their bow waves seething white, and the Danish shipmaster turned his craft as if she had been mounted on a spindle and, with the strong tide now helping him, dashed back at us.
“Turn into him!” Leofric roared at Werferth who was at the steering oar, but instead Werferth turned away, not wanting to bring on a collision, and I saw the oars of the Danish ship slide into their holes as she neared us and then she ran down our steorbord flank, snapping our oars one by one, the impact throwing the oar shafts back into our rowers with enough force to break some men’s ribs, and then the Danish archers—they had four or five aboard—began loosing their arrows. One went into Werferth’s neck and there was blood pouring down the steering deck and Leofric was bellowing in impotent rage as the Dane, oars slid out again, sped safely away down the fast ebbing tide. They jeered as we wallowed in the waves.
“Have you steered a boat, earsling?” Leofric asked me, pulling the dying Werferth aside.
/> “Yes.”
“Then steer this one.” We limped home with only half our proper oars, and we learned two lessons. One was to carry spare oars and the second was to carry archers, except that Ealdorman Freola, who commanded the fyrd of Hamptonscir, said he could spare no bowmen, that he had too few as it was, and that the ships had already consumed too many of his other warriors, and besides, he said, we should not need archers. Hacca, his brother, told us not to make a fuss. “Just throw spears,” he advised Leofric.
“I want archers,” Leofric insisted.
“There are none!” Hacca said, spreading his hands.
Father Willibald wanted to write a letter to Alfred. “He will listen to me,” he said.
“So you write to him,” Leofric said sourly, “and what happens then?”
“He will send archers, of course!” Father Willibald said brightly.
“The letter,” Leofric said, “goes to his damn clerks, who are all priests, and they put it in a pile, and the pile gets read slowly, and when Alfred finally sees it he asks for advice, and two damned bishops have their say, and Alfred writes back wanting to know more, and by then it’s Candlemas and we’re all dead with Danish arrows in our backs.” He glared at Willibald and I began to like Leofric even more. He saw me grinning. “What’s so funny, Endwerc?” he demanded.
“I can get you archers,” I said.
“How?”
With one piece of Ragnar’s gold, which we displayed in Hamtun’s marketplace and said that the gold coin, with its weird writing, would go to the best archer to win a competition that would be held one week hence. That coin was worth more than most men could earn in a year and Leofric was curious how I had come by it, but I refused to tell him. Instead I set up targets and word spread through the countryside that rich gold was to be had with cheap arrows, and over forty men arrived to test their skill and we simply marched the best twelve on boardHeahengel and another ten each toCeruphin and Cristenlic, then took them to sea. Our twelve protested, of course, but Leofric snarled at them and they all suddenly decided they wanted nothing better than to sail the Wessex coast with him. “For something that dribbled out of a goat’s backside,” Leofric told me, “you’re not completely useless.”
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