The Edge on the Sword

by Rebecca Tingle

  “Lady,” said the Mercian, “are you hurt?” The fierceness in his tone startled her. Suddenly she remembered the tear streaks on her face.

  “It’s nothing,” Flæd said quickly, scrubbing at her cheeks with a dirty hand. “It was only…only a poem I once read. I was thinking about it today.” She found herself telling him the story of the hero, of the monsters he had killed, and of the poem’s last words, which had seemed so strange to her.

  “I heard that poem,” Red said slowly, “sung in a great hall for a king who was a warrior like your monster killer—he had fought his enemies for many years. But in the end”—the Mercian had begun to toy with the heavy band of metal on his wrist—“that king deserted his people.” Red said nothing for such a long time that Flæd began to think their conversation had ended. Then he spoke again. “If war struck this place, would your father leave your sisters, your youngest brother, or Edward in danger?”

  Flæd shook her head, upset by the suggestion. “He would die first, and so would I,” she said with heat.

  “A king must take care of his people as well as your father takes care of his children,” Red said, “the way we all try to protect our families—even,” he added, almost in a whisper, “when we can’t.”

  That night, as Flæd and Edward sat together in a dark corner of the kitchen, she decided to explain at last how she had taken the great codex. “You read it without me, Flæd?” he cried, forgetting to speak softly in his disappointment. Because you refused to come with me, Flæd remembered, but she spoke gently to her brother, soothing him.

  “There are many other poems in the book,” she whispered, “stories of saints and strange beasts and other heroes. Tomorrow I’ll bring it back, and you and I will find another time to read it.” A little sulky, Edward agreed. “Shall I tell you the rest of the story?” Flæd said, poking his rib.

  “All right.” Edward squirmed, batting at her hand. So she told him, and Edward’s eyes widened in the dim light.

  “A dragon,” he echoed when she described the last monster. “I’d like to find a dragon’s barrow, and kill the dragon, and take the gold.”

  “Then what would you do?” Flæd asked, skeptically.

  “I would build a great hall, and cover the roof and the walls with gold, and hang golden horns above the door, and I would sit on a high seat decorated with twisted gold, and drink from a golden cup.”

  “Very fine,” Flæd said with a smile. “And what about the dragon?”

  “What about it?”

  “The dragon’s body. What would you do with the stinking thing?”

  “Wulf and I would drag it into the sea,” Edward decided. “Or into the river,” he added, “if we found one to kill around here.”

  Flæd nodded seriously. She finished the story for her brother, reciting the poem’s last lines of praise for the king. Edward listened, and then added his own resolution.

  “In my golden hall we will also give out treasure to everyone in the kingdom,” he said with satisfaction.

  “We?” Flæd asked.

  “Wulf and I,” Edward said, and Flæd laughed for the first time since Red had come.

  Back in her own quarters Flæd rolled her ruined shift and tunic into a tight ball and squeezed them into the space beside her bed, next to the wad of yesterday’s clothes. The serving women, she felt sure, would not be happy to find these little bundles, but she wanted the clothes to stay hidden until tomorrow at least, when she hoped to return the book safely to its shelf. Not everyone would accommodate her strange project as her warder had done, Flæd suspected, and it would be better if the serving women knew nothing until it was finished. In her sleeping shift she brushed her hair and braided it again. As she bound the end of the plait, she heard low voices outside her door, and then a soft tap on the door frame.

  “Lady,” came Red’s voice through the cloth hanging, “the bishop wants a word with you.”

  Asser? Flæd had not seen her former tutor for several weeks. She threw a woolen blanket around her shoulders and came to the door.

  “My lady Æthelflæd,” Bishop Asser said with a nod, “I am sorry if I have disturbed you. Today your father told me that from now on your lessons should include readings from the great poetic codex in our scriptorium. He apologizes for neglecting to mention this to your tutors sooner. And I apologize,” the Bishop added, “for underestimating your talents. I should never be too busy to recognize a gifted scholar.”

  “I—I thank you,” stammered Flæd. “I…I know the great book.”

  “I have asked Father John to bring it to your table in the morning.”

  “Tomorrow?” Flæd asked in a panic.

  “Yes, the planting is nearly done, and Father John can be spared from the fields. I am sorry,” he finished with a ghost of a smile, “that your holiday has ended so soon. Sleep well, Lady Æthelflæd.”

  Asser walked on, and Flæd stood stricken by the doorway.

  “Lady, what troubles you?” Red asked softly.

  “I…I am weary from our long day,” she replied miserably. “Good night.”

  Flæd went back into the darkness of her room and slumped onto her bed. She looked up at her shuttered window. No, she could not escape that way. Her warder would be ready if she tried such a thing again. And she was sure he would not allow a midnight trip to the marsh. Tomorrow would bring shame, and perhaps punishment. She would have to tell them, and bear the consequences.

  Flæd slept fitfully that night, and dreamt of her father on his high seat, eyeing her with disappointment. On either side of him the carved dragons spat out their tails and hissed in her direction, their ruby eyes balefully agleam. “Thiefffff,” the dragons whispered to her father. “Thiefffff…”

  In the morning she had no stomach for breakfast. She dressed slowly and sat in her room until it was time to leave for the scriptorium. Reluctantly she crossed the burgh and entered the stone building, eyes on the floor as she walked toward the table where Father John and Edward waited.

  “Lady,” Father John called out, and she looked up guiltily. Then she stared. The great codex lay open on the table. “A special text today,” Father John was saying. “Edward tells me you both know the story of the monster slayer. I thought we might start instead with some riddles.” Flæd stood motionless for another long moment, then forced herself to walk the remaining distance to the table. She seated herself on the bench beside them with a thump, eyes still fixed on the book. She put out a hand to touch the thing. Yes, this was certainly the same beautiful vellum of the volume she had hidden in the marsh, the same elegant script.

  “I am glad your father suggested this collection for our lessons,” John was saying. “The book seems rather dusty from staying too long on its shelf.” He leaned forward to brush his hand across the page. Edward looked at Flæd, quirking his dark eyebrows into a question. Flæd could only shrug her shoulders in return.

  That morning they read riddles, and Flæd tried to concentrate on the short, twisting poems, working out their solutions. “Wind” was the answer to one, “Shield” to another, and “Cock and Hen” was the answer to a brief and bawdy poem whose scrambled rune letters spelled out the names of the two creatures.

  By the time of the midday meal Flæd suspected that she had found a solution to another of the day’s mysteries. Leaving Edward and John at their table, she carried dark bread and cheese to the corner where her warder sat. The man looked haggard, accepting the food with a nod, and beginning to eat hungrily as she sat down beside him.

  “You knew about the book?” she asked him abruptly.

  For a moment he stopped eating, and then said simply, “I guessed.”

  “You found the fallen tree in the marsh?”

  “I watched from the top of a tree yesterday. You weren’t as careful. One of your father’s guards sat at your door last night instead of me.” He waited for a moment in silence, and then began tearing at the bread again. A slow grin spread across Flæd’s face.

 
“You had no sleep, and no breakfast?” she asked.

  “None,” he agreed, returning her smile.

  8

  A Mound on the Plain

  WITH A CRY OF FRUSTRATION FLÆD FELT THE NIB OF HER QUILL give way and watched another blot spread across her scrap of vellum. Her little piece of parchment had begun to look like the skin of a blighted fruit. Glumly she gazed at the feather pen’s frayed point.

  “Four pens ruined in a day,” Father John intoned, appearing at her shoulder. He shook his head. “Surely, my lady, you can do better than that.” He glanced sideways at her as her shoulders slumped forward, then continued, “I ruined seven on my first day.”

  Catlike, John sidestepped the quill his pupil tried to fling in his direction as she attempted not to smile. He seated himself smoothly beside Edward at the other end of the bench. “You will have noticed,” he lectured, “the many differences between quill and stylus. By this latest experiment you have revealed another: A feather is an even less effective missile than a stick.”

  Sighing, Flæd turned back to the irregular page of writing in front of her. The parchment had never been a thing of beauty. Holes and scars marked the surface of the thin animal hide, which had been cured not to white perfection, but to the hue of tallow. The edge of the sheepskin had spoiled the squaring of the page, so instead of four corners the page showed just three, and one ragged diagonal side. Father John had deposited a handful of quills by her place at the table that morning. With small, sharp knives the two of them had shaped the quill points, and then he had left her alone with ink and a passage of religious history to copy.

  It was past the eighth hour, and Flæd bit her lip with concentration as she leaned over her work. She dipped the last of her prepared quills gingerly into the ink. Three characters later Flæd stopped, watching the ink of an s’s long tail bleed into the m and the o which had preceded it.

  “For a moment I felt certain that blot spelled mos,” Father John announced, looking over her shoulder again. “Yes, Mos, the Latin word meaning ‘custom.’ Surely the custom of our own classroom would permit an early finish to a day filled with such, er, diligent application of the pen. Read a passage of the Chronicle before you come tomorrow.”

  With relief Flæd cleared away her things and left the scriptorium along with Edward and Wulf. The three of them trudged through the dusty street toward their quarters, with Wulf frisking back once to touch his nose to the hand of the warder, who walked behind them.

  “Come fishing with us, Flæd,” Edward said. Flæd almost stopped walking in surprise. Edward had not invited her to join him for a ramble in weeks—ever since the grim little walk they had taken to the riverbank. She had tried to resign herself to their new relationship—together in the classroom, conversations at meals, but no real time to themselves.

  “You know I can’t come alone,” she said, lowering her voice.

  Edward glanced back at Red. “I forget about him now, most of the time,” he said softly to her. “It doesn’t matter if he’s with us. Come to the river.” Flæd felt a lump rising in her throat. This is the best we can do, Edward seemed to be saying. But it was good—it was better than simply missing him each afternoon. Flæd pretended to brush a fly from her face, hoping her brother would not see her emotion. I’d better do the reading Father John wants first, she told herself. We might stay awhile at the river.

  “You go ahead and see if the fish are hungry,” Flæd told him, stopping between their father’s council chamber and the family’s buildings. “I’ll do Father John’s lesson as fast as I can, and then I’ll meet you.” Edward made a good-natured face at his sister. He would have rushed through such studying at breakfast, his look seemed to say. Flæd gave him a mock scowl in return, and ducked into her quarters. Grabbing her volume of the Chronicle, she found the passage where she had left off and started to read. But she could hardly concentrate on the words. Edward is waiting for me—the thought circled cheerfully in her mind like Wulf chasing his tail. With a sigh of impatience, she closed the book, tucked it under her arm, and hurried out toward the meadow.

  At the burgh wall Flæd seated herself in the sun where it glowed upon the sandy stone blocks. In the distance she could see two small figures, Edward and Wulf, making their way along the riverbank toward the place where they planned to fish. The tiny Edward raised his arm to point at something ahead of them, and the tiny Wulf loped forward, veering out into the meadow.

  A little sound made Flæd turn her head, and she saw her warder crouching down against the wall a short way off. Flæd’s spirits dimmed. It was easy for Edward to say he didn’t care about the Mercian envoy’s company. Despite her guardian’s favors, Flæd felt more and more restless as the days of protection continued with no sign of any danger.

  It was worse when she tried to understand what she was waiting for. Ethelred remained a faceless name to her, Mercia was an outline on a map, and Lunden was a dot inside it. She had watched her mother these past weeks, trying to imagine how she must have felt when she came from Mercia to marry Alfred. Ealhswith and Alfred must have thought their daughter would learn to accept her betrothal, the way they had settled into their lives with each other. Well, Flæd thought with a quiver of fear and stubbornness, I haven’t.

  Think about something else, Flæd told herself, ducking her head unhappily and opening her book. She had been reading about the constant threat of Danish settlers, who seized English land for themselves and their families. Today Flæd read the entry for the year 871. Alfred and his brother met the enemy at Readingas. The Danes had occupied an earthwork—a great mounded wall of earth fronted by a broad trench deeper than a man was tall—to protect themselves in the flat land between two rivers. Nine times Alfred and his brother rode to battle that season, the Chronicle stated. Nine times they faced the Danes in their earthwork defenses, and gained only a single victory.

  Flæd thought of her father, only a few years beyond his twentieth winter, riding exhausted into skirmish after skirmish. Secure behind their earthwork, the Danes held fast, and Alfred’s brother died before the winter came again. Young and battle-weary, Alfred became the king of the battered West Saxon kingdom. “And in that year,” the Chronicle’s entry finished bleakly, “were slain nine earls and one king.”

  Flæd closed the book. Father John would be satisfied with this much reading—she had done her duty. She looked out over the meadow again. She could no longer see Wulf and Edward, but now she wanted very much to be with them, to sit with them on the grassy riverbank watching for the quick brown and silver fish. Hefting herself to her feet, she set out across the meadow with her book.

  In the center of the broad pasture Flæd could see a little band of horses, their heads lowered to the tender spring grass. As she drew closer she could hear the sound of their blunt teeth tearing at the short blades. Flæd knew many of these horses. Some belonged to the retainers who lived in this burgh with the royal family, and others were owned by the royal family itself. Flæd approached the little group. The horse nearest to her raised its head to watch her coming. Then it turned and with the other horses began moving away. Flæd stopped, and the horses started to graze again, eyeing her.

  What was bothering them? In the center of the herd a dun horse looked up and snorted at something behind her. She glanced back. Red stood a little distance away, unable to blend into a shadow or fade back against a wall in this wide open pasture. Flæd groaned. What could possibly endanger her out here? Trying to conceal her impatience, she walked back to him.

  “The horses don’t know you,” Flæd told her warder. “They’re nervous. Will you wait here? I’ll just go to the horses, and then come back.” Red looked around them for a long moment. No other human figures were visible in the vast open stretch of land. Then he nodded.

  “I will keep the book for you, Lady,” he offered. He was right—she ought not to risk the valuable thing among the animals. Flæd handed him the volume, then turned to approach the horses once again. This tim
e they gathered around her, whickering softly and brushing her arms and hands with whiskery mouths. She patted their shaggy sides, and a few long winter hairs floated away. “Jewel-bright,” she said softly, remembering the name of the mare with the white star between her eyes. She scratched the fuzzy hollow between the mare’s jawbones. “Gold-friend,” she greeted the big dun gelding, leader of the little herd, who bumped her shoulder with his nose when she turned aside to smooth another horse’s mane.

  When the horses were sure she had brought nothing for them to eat, they returned to their forage. She looked around her and thought she understood why they had chosen this little rise for their grazing site. From this high place every inch of the pasture was visible. Flæd was surprised to find a slight bowl worn into the surface of the earth at the peak of the hill. The ground was very dry, almost sandy. The horses have used this place as a wallow, she thought to herself, hallowing it out as they roll in the dust. As if to prove her point, a sorrel yearling knelt down and began to roll, kicking his legs in ridiculous pleasure as he eased the itch of his first winter coat.

  Descending from the mound she looked back. No sign of the depression at its crest was visible from the pasture below. It hides the horses’ clumsy baths, she thought to herself.

  Flæd’s spirits sank as she returned to her warder. Duty brings me back, she sighed, as surely as duty kept my father on the plain at Readingas where the Danish earthwork defeated him so many times. No wonder her father had begun to use fortifications himself after such a crushing blow. She imagined the Danish horde, massed safely behind their protective wall. They would have been able to look down on the West Saxon armies and watch them come from a great distance off. Danish sentries lying flat at the top of the fortification must have been nearly invisible….

  All at once Flæd was no longer thinking of her father. Earthwork. A place from which to see, but not be seen. Her mind tumbled over the beginnings of an idea that had just come to her. She would need to ask Father John more about that passage in the Chronicle she had read. She would need some way to cross an open space undetected. And here was the most difficult thing: Absolutely no one must suspect her until the moment she carried out her plan.