The Edge on the Sword

by Rebecca Tingle

  Flæd trembled with shame as she said these things. It had been an awful choice to abuse the trust of the man who had dutifully cared for her, who had even tried to soften the burden of his watching with small acts of kindness. But it was worst of all to acknowledge that even after he had saved her, she had continued with her lie.

  “Now you know how I wronged you,” she said, trying in vain to see his face. “I am even more sorry,” she quavered, “because of what you have already suffered.” Flæd paused, able to discern no reaction from her warder in the gloom. Then she told him what she had learned that night about his past.

  When she had finished, there was a long silence. At last Flæd got to her feet with a deep sense of failure. “The king knows that I am to blame,” she said hopelessly. “I will be sorry to see you go.” She turned to pass through the doorway.

  “Lady.” His voice stopped her, rough as broken stone in the blackness. “Before you spoke, I knew I should ask the king’s pardon, and offer my poor services again.” His voice became a grating whisper. “I couldn’t save my wife—she died a slave before they set me free. The Danes killed my son, and no one can tell me what happened to my two daughters. I don’t want,” he said with anguish in his hoarse tone, “to lose another person I have promised to protect.”

  There was a rattle above them as a serving woman unfastened the shutters of a window and pushed them open. Light and children’s voices filtered tranquilly into the street. Flæd reached a hand out to the Mercian and braced herself against the doorjamb to help the large man rise.

  “How could any enemy harm me,” she said, clasping his hand firmly, “as long as I stay with you?”

  III

  Summer

  12

  The King’s Council

  “THE DAGGER IS DANISH.”

  “The workmanship of the hilt is very like that of the North Welsh craftsmen,” Asser announced, turning the knife to look at either side, “but something is not right….”

  “Look at the blade,” Red said, taking the dagger from him and holding it in a square of light from the council chamber window. He ran his finger carefully along the knife’s short edge to the weapon’s point. “Its shape is English or Welsh, but look here.” He indicated a cloudy mark on the metal just where the blade met the hilt. Asser peered closely at the spot, and then raised his eyes to the king, concern written on his features.

  “It is a craftmark,” he told Alfred, “nearly scraped away, but there nonetheless. The mark may show the form of some letter, or perhaps another kind of symbol, but this is no English or Welsh character.”

  “But the men the envoy has described—their faces and their clothes—sound Welsh, perhaps, or even Mercian.”

  Listening, Flæd sighed. They had been through this conversation again and again with her father’s advisors, and it always ended in confusion. No one could say for certain who the attackers had been.

  “If you had brought back the body—”

  “The girl’s safety was more important. We sent a cart….”

  “And the body was gone. We have heard.”

  Suddenly Flæd was impatient. She had sat quietly in her father’s chambers, cowed at first by the barrage of questions flung at her warder. But these men were accomplishing nothing. They had never even asked her what she saw when she was alone with her abductors.

  “One of them spoke English,” she said. The men’s faces turned toward her in surprise. “He only spoke it to me. I did not recognize the language they spoke to each other.”

  “The words I heard were Danish.” Red spoke up again. “I learned some of their speech during my time in the Danelaw.”

  “They threatened me,” Flæd went on. “The Mercian envoy may have understood what they said.” Her warder pressed his lips together and nodded.

  “They planned to…to hurt her, then take her away.”

  “What, then?” a young thane wanted to know. “Why steal the king’s daughter? To offend Ethelred? To start another war?”

  “We cannot say exactly what these…strangers intended,” Asser’s nasal voice broke in, “but we must seriously consider the possibility of a new threat from the west.”

  “Perhaps an alliance of Danes and Welshmen,” Alfred said thoughtfully, raising an eyebrow at Asser, who was himself Welsh. “I do not think Guthrum”—he named the Danish leader with whom he had drawn up the great treaty one year earlier—“would break his pact with me. But not all his people will be governed by him. Some may have found allies—or at least stolen clothing and equipment, I suppose—across the western border.” He addressed the gathering: “We have seen no others after these three?”

  “A messenger will bring word of any such sighting,” the leader of the royal guard replied.

  “What do you make of this, Asser?” Alfred asked, motioning for the bishop to join him at the table. “Are there indeed those among the Welsh who would be Danish allies and bring war to us again?”

  Asser folded his hands in front of him. “There are some among the northern Welsh,” he replied, “who might wish it so.” The bishop looked up sharply from beneath his lowered brows. “Should we not assemble a heavier guard for Lady Æthelflæd? Two to four armed retainers to watch over her until she travels to Mercia?” In her corner Flæd gave a little gasp of dismay.

  “King Alfred, a suggestion,” said Red. The king waved her guardian to him, and listened as the envoy spoke quietly into his ear. Moving as close to them as she could, Flæd missed the first words that Red said.

  “How long?” she heard her father ask in a low voice.

  “Several weeks. I think we have some time before they try again.”

  “You believe she would be safe?”

  “She will not leave me again,” Red said with a certainty that made Flæd blush. “I have seen guards corrupted. This way is best.”

  When Flæd and Red emerged from Alfred’s council chambers, the late sunshine of a summer evening filled the street. They walked a little way without speaking.

  “What did you say to the king?” Flæd finally asked.

  “Wait and see,” Red answered.

  The next day when Flæd looked up from her Latin translation, she saw with a little shock that her warder had disappeared. In his place sat a young guard she recognized as a sentry from her father’s council chambers. But where was Red? Flæd had turned very little of her Latin epistle into English by the time the Mercian envoy reappeared and sent the other guard on his way.

  “Lady”—Father John touched her shoulder—“I have been instructed to let you go with the Mercian envoy this afternoon.” He looked down at her work. “I see you have your mind on other things today. Well, bring a finished translation in the morning.” Gathering up her writing, Flæd began walking toward the door. Edward hissed as she passed him.

  “He left you today,” he said with amazement. “Flæd, where are you going?”

  “I don’t know,” Flæd said with an excited shrug. Edward scowled, and turned back to his tablet.

  “Where were you?” Flæd demanded when she reached the scriptorium entrance.

  “Went to see the smith,” Red replied mysteriously. “Follow me.” After a second’s pause Flæd hurried after the Mercian envoy, who strode on until they had passed through the gates of the burgh wall. Here he turned and went along the wall until they reached an outcropping at the base of a watch shelter. No guards had been posted here yet, and the place looked deserted to Flæd as she watched her warder poke among the piled stones. He drew out a battered sword of medium length, a leather cap not unlike the one he himself often wore, and a heap of grey metal links which, when held up, proved to be a boy-size shirt of ring mail.

  “I told the smith these were for the king’s child. He thought I meant Edward,” Red told Flæd, “but they will fit you. Let’s get started.” With a grin Flæd wedged the parchment she had been carrying into a niche of the wall, and began pulling the heavy mail shirt over her tunic.

  13
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  Battle Lessons

  IN THE DAYS THAT FOLLOWED, RED WOULD ADD A DAGGER AND two old shields to the collection of equipment stored in the wall. He brought Flæd to the place every afternoon and, one by one, showed her the use of each weapon. One shield was slightly concave, like a very shallow dish, and Flæd learned that she could use its shape to catch the tip of an opponent’s weapon (Red generally used a peeled green staff about the length of a large sword) and push it away from her body, throwing her adversary off balance. The other shield, which had a rounded boss at its center, could turn direct blows into glancing ones—it cast the enemy’s weapon away, instead of carrying it. Flæd learned how to position both sorts of shields for various kinds of sword attack, and for the close, vicious assault of a dagger. She learned to keep a shield above her head to protect herself from missiles (usually clods of earth in their practices) while fending off Red’s frontal approach with her sword. She learned to move quickly and silently in the surprisingly heavy mail shirt. She learned to shake away the sweat which trickled into her eyes from beneath the leather cap without breaking her concentration from two-handed combat.

  Flæd had felt her arms and back growing stronger with each day of practice with the shields. On the day when Red passed the sword into her hand, however, she knew she was still far too weak for true combat. Her boy’s weapon was heavy enough to drag her off balance with every stroke, and she could not keep its blunted tip at the level of a man’s torso for more than a few seconds. Red brought a post which had been used to brace the unfinished wall and planted it in the middle of their practice ground. He made Flæd hack away at the wood for two full weeks before he ever let her raise her blade against him in practice.

  One day Red told Flæd to whistle for the pair of grey horses, which came now whenever she called them even without the bribe of sweet food. He had brought a bridle for each, and he looped the reins of one around Oat’s neck as the horse nibbled Flæd’s braid.

  “See how he feels about a bit in his mouth,” Red told her, as he turned to throw the reins of the other bridle across the lowered neck of Apple, who had submitted his forelock for a scratch. Neither of the greys was pleased to feel metal over his tongue after so many months. But after a few head tosses, the bridled horses came with the humans a little way out into the pasture.

  “Your friends have grown soft,” Red said, running his hand along Apple’s sleek coat. “Strange that no one brought them into the burgh this summer. Well, the two of us will give them some work,” Red cupped his hand to support Flæd’s knee, and tossed her onto Oat’s back. He took Apple’s reins and mounted the other horse himself. “Watch carefully,” he told her. “Try to do what I do.”

  Red and Flæd rode side by side. At Red’s instruction, they urged their horses into a gallop, and the Mercian leaned to one side and executed a sweeping motion of his sword arm, as if striking at a man on foot with an imaginary blade. Flæd saw him do this, and when he shouted to her, she extended her sword arm and leaned out to mimic Red’s motion. Oat veered right, following the pressure of Flæd’s near leg and the tug upon his bit as she bent down, and Flæd was nearly thrown. Clutching at Oat’s mane and abruptly drawing in his head, she saved herself from a fall, but both she and the horse were breathing hard and rolling their eyes when Red circled back to them.

  “Keeping your seat is more important than making your stroke,” Red said to her, and before Flæd could tell him that this seemed obvious, he curtly described how she must sit the horse as evenly from the waist down as if she were riding in the usual upright way. Her torso and arm must move separately from the rest of her. When Flæd had listened to this, she urged Oat into a gallop again, and with Red on Apple alongside them shouting corrections, made the leaning stroke without causing a break in her horse’s stride. Red had her repeat the exercise twice again, and then asked for the same movement on her opposite side. Flæd did this, more awkwardly, again three times before she and Red returned to the wall.

  “Would this not be more easily done from a saddle?” Flæd asked dubiously.

  “Yes,” Red said briskly, “so you must learn without one.”

  Red did not bring a saddle to the pasture until more than a week had passed and Flæd could make those two strokes, as well as five others, while holding her practice sword in either hand. From the saddle the exercises were easier at first, until Red began to insist that she reach even further down or out for each imaginary attacker. By the end of three weeks the horses, too, had developed new skills—pivoting and stopping rapidly, ignoring the flash of a blade beside their heads, responding to several new spoken commands.

  Red extended their lessons, asking again and again for the maneuvers he had taught her, and watching from horseback as he cantered alongside his laboring student on the long summer afternoons. On fair days the light would stay in the sky well into the evenings, and a few times Red insisted that Flæd continue their drills until long after the day’s last prayers and meal had finished. It was almost dark one night when Flæd dismounted after a final galloping pass. Tonight Apple and Oat walked instead of trotting when they were sent off to the herd. Flæd saw Red looking after the two greys with approval, and noted the muscles that had begun to appear beneath their dappled coats. In the dusk she stumbled, catching her foot in a little hole beneath the grass. She suddenly realized how very tired she was. She felt the way the horses had looked, as if she had just enough strength left to make her way home.

  “Tomorrow,” Red said to her, “I want you to show me your trick of disappearing from a horse’s back.”

  Flæd looked at him in surprise. They had not spoken of Flæd’s second escape after that night when Red had agreed to stay, and since they had begun riding the horses again, she had hardly thought of it. Now she did not know what to say. Before they reached the burgh, Red spoke again.

  “In battle a horse can be your shield. A riderless horse could even go unnoticed.” His voice lowered as they approached the wall. “Danish raiders sit their horses like flies. But I have never seen them vanish like that. If you can fool me,” he rumbled, “you’d fool them.”

  It took Flæd three days to teach Red the skill she had discovered in the pasture that spring. Both of them were thoroughly bruised after the first two afternoons, and Red earned himself nasty scrapes on both elbows when he tried to slip down along Apple’s off side with the horse at a run. The horse pulled up, kicking out in complaint against the extra weight yanking on his mane. “Too heavy and too old to hang by my hands and heels from a horse,” Red pronounced himself. But the fall did nothing to blunt his sharp comments as he watched her practice.

  One morning Flæd woke to the welcome sound of rain on the roof of her quarters. She smiled with relief. No tumbles in the grass today, she thought happily. Maybe my sore shoulder will finally begin to heal. But Red met her at the scriptorium entrance with the mail shirt in his hand.

  “The king has excused you from the classroom,” Red told her, handing her the ring mail and producing a small pouch of hard bread and dry cheese, which he divided between them. “Eat this. We have a long walk ahead.”

  Wearing the mail shirt and carrying a leather satchel which Red had slung over her shoulders (and which felt as if it were filled with lead), Flæd slogged off into the rain behind the Mercian. At first Flæd shivered, but her sodden clothes were hot and sticking to her skin beneath the mail shirt as she labored to keep up with her warder. Following Red, she left the burgh and crossed the pasture to the little wood and the forked ford in the river. The water was only thigh-deep this late in summer, and Flæd did not bother to remove her sopping shoes or kilt up her already dripping skirt before they crossed.

  Instead of turning toward the marsh when they reached the other side, Red headed deeper into the wood, following a path which, Flæd thought impatiently, looked as if it had no nearer destination than the western hills where the sun set each night. Four hours later she found herself slipping ex-haustedly in the hillside mud of the s
ame path, which had indeed taken them to the western hills. The leather strap of the bag she carried had pressed her mail shirt hard against her body until welts had risen on her shoulder and hip beneath her wet clothes. Her hands were swollen from the long walk, and wrinkled with rain. Mud had seeped into her shoes, and the grit had rubbed her toes and heels until even the soft leather felt painful on her feet.

  Flæd had asked Red no questions—it took all the breath she had to keep pace with him. Red in turn had exchanged no words with her, except to call out a direction when their path met another. They had travelled through woodland and across open areas of scrub, skirting marshes and crossing three small streams. As they began to climb the hill, trees closed around them again. The thick trunks of oaks and horse chestnuts crowded close to the winding path, and rain dripped through the thick leaves.

  Flæd slipped again, falling to her knees. She panted on all fours, and willed herself to rock back onto her feet. Then she felt a large hand lifting her under one arm.

  “This way,” said Red, leading her off the path into the bracken. “We’ll make camp.” In a dense ring of trees they found a bit of ground that was almost dry, and Red lit a tiny, smoking fire from the least damp of the twigs and leaves Flæd brought to him. From his pack Red drew two tight rolls of oiled cloth, one of which he spread on the slope at the foot of two trees. The other he secured between two branches a little way above them, blocking the drizzle which made its way through the leaves. A tiny clay cooking pot came next from his satchel, and Red filled this from his waterskin and set it in the sparse coals on one side of the fire. Into the pot he put three small pieces of dried meat, and a handful of hairy leaves he had gathered at the last stream they had crossed. “Comfrey,” he told Flæd, “to keep away the chill.”