The Edge on the Sword

by Rebecca Tingle

  Perhaps the rain helped them pull even further ahead of their enemies. Flæd’s spent company seemed to be completely alone when it slithered onto a soaked path. The path widened as it approached the sloping embankment. This is an earthwork fortress, Flæd thought. They had reached the trench, from which ancient people had piled up soil and rock to make the mounded defense. Flæd could see that far more recently someone had thrown a flimsy wooden bridge across the gap, which was deeper than the height of a man, and at least as wide as two wagons with teams. Now she and her men struggled over the bridge and through a gap in the wall where a gate might once have stood. They had entered the circular fortress, and as far as she could see, Flæd realized with a sinking heart, it was deserted. Where were the defenders she had hoped for?

  When all the horses and the wagon stood within the walls, the retainers led by Dunstan heaved the makeshift bridge onto its side and pulled it across the single entryway of the ancient stronghold. The horses hung their heads, winded and dripping as rain continued to drench them. Flæd covered her wounded man as best she could, and then crawled up the wall to join the rest of her group, who were now huddled atop the wall to see who would follow them.

  On the bare hillside below a figure appeared, then another. In a few seconds fifteen men had emerged from the trees to stand staring at the mound where their quarry had fled like rabbits to a warren.

  “We have been running from a band of men on foot,” Dunstan said, disgusted.

  “We ran because they killed two of our company”—Flæd shuddered—“and they could have killed more. Why didn’t they?”

  “They were moving us like sheep,” a shivering thane offered, “shooting warning arrows from one side, then from another, as if they had someplace they wanted us to go. Not here, I’d wager, but someplace.” The raiders were pointing at the fortress now. Flæd and her men watched as the small figures huddled together for a moment, then set out in their group toward the hill. At the base of the rise the group spread out again into a kind of half-circle, sweeping the terrain in search of the way Flæd and her men had taken. In all too short a time the enemy party had found fresh hoofprints and wheel ruts on the trail the West Saxons had used. The raiders started following the track up the hill.

  “They’re coming!” hissed one of the drivers.

  “Nearly twice as many as our number!” another man groaned. “She said there’d be a garrison here,” he said accusingly, “with armed men to help us, and a defended fortress. But there’s nobody, just our company of seven men—one too badly wounded to rise—and a girl, trapped, and only a few sticks across the gate.”

  Flæd barely took note of her man’s complaint. She was looking at the band of raiders, who were drawing nearer and nearer. She could see faces now—hard fighters, she thought to herself as she surveyed their scars and took in their pinched, mercenary expressions. Soon the trench with its steep sides would be all that separated the enemy from the pitiful barrier her people had thrown across the fortress entryway. The trench would not be enough to stop them.

  “Best get to the horses,” one man muttered. A few of the thanes turned with him to go down.

  “Wait,” Flæd said, looking along the wall to the entrance. “Can we stand at the top there?” she asked Dunstan, who eyed the ragged gateway dubiously.

  “Two of us could, maybe,” he said, waiting to hear what she would say next.

  “Dunstan, and you”—she chose the man who had complained—“let’s go around to the gate. You others, assemble below.” She forced a note of authority into her voice, and it seemed to work.

  Crawling to stay out of the raiders’ sight, Flæd and her two men made their way along the wall. As they neared the gap, Flæd hung back and looked down to see how far the raiders had come. Five had slid to the bottom of the trench already, and one was scrabbling for a hold on the slope just below the opening.

  “Hurry!” she breathed to her thanes, who were poised at the end of the crumbling rampart. “Push the loose stones over!” The two men threw their shoulders against the weak place, and scrambled back to crouch with her as the wet earth and rock rushed down. They heard the cries of the raiders, and when Flæd, Dunstan, and the other man cautiously looked over the sheltering ledge, they saw the members of the raiding party pulling their companions up out of the trench, backing off. One figure lay still in the ditch, half buried in the wreckage. Flæd turned her face away, feeling dazed. One enemy less to threaten her men. One fewer adversary in the battle to come.

  The enemy band was clustered together again. Flæd held her breath, wondering what they would do next, wondering how she would find another way to discourage them. And then the raiders were leaving the open ground, fading back into the trees. Flæd began to breathe again, but she would not let herself relax. Some raiders would stay, she felt certain, to watch for any movement from the fortress. They know we’re here, she thought, and they know we’re tired. The others would rejoin a larger force nearby—she believed there must be others massing not far off to finish off her little group—and no one would be able to stop them the way she had thwarted that lone messenger running north two nights ago.

  Two nights—it seemed far longer since that first attack. Flæd skittered down the embankment with her two thanes and met the others, who had gathered in the rain by the horses. She looked around at her bedraggled company. Two had fresh blood on their clothes from arrows which had grazed them in the meadow. The two-day-old gash on one driver’s face had swollen unhealthily. Most looked at her with dull eyes, and she remembered, moving her stiff jaw, that she herself must have ugly bruises where Apple had kicked her chin. We don’t look good to each other, she decided with an exhausted frown.

  “The man in the wagon needs your help,” she said to the driver who knew something of healing, the one who had tried to save Red. “The rest of us will try to find some shelter.”

  The fortress was very old—perhaps even older than Roman times, Flæd guessed—but it had been used much more recently. She could see signs of repair on the circular wall, and there was the new bridge which they had taken up behind them. Someone had cleared out a few of the structure’s rooms, which were cavelike hovels made of earth and wood, built so that they leaned against the wall. Flæd and her men huddled in these rooms until the rain stopped.

  The more she saw of this place, the more certain Flæd felt that this was one of the ancient fortresses which Alfred had decided to use as part of his own defenses. But if this were true, peasant workers as well as a group of armed fighters should still be living here, finishing the repairs, and keeping watch. Where were those people loyal to Alfred and Ethelred, Flæd thought with bitter discouragement, slumped in a dirty corner of the room where the driver was tending her wounded man. Perhaps they had found another settlement, or another fortress—some easier place to live. Disloyalty and weakness had spoiled her father’s fine plan.

  It’s not fair, Flæd thought—there should have been protection for us here. It felt even worse to know that at least some of her men still blamed her for their predicament. I sent the scouts to find the river and then followed them there, the girl acknowledged. I let the raiders drive us here, and I sent my men up into this fortress, where our enemies can now keep us trapped until they decide what to do with us. All Father John’s instruction in history, all Red’s teaching—what was it for? So that I could lead us here to die?

  “It is our duty to keep ourselves sharp, or strong, to make ourselves ready for whatever task comes to us. “ The edge on the sword. Red’s final lesson ran mockingly through her mind. “…if someone makes a choice for us, and we don’t like it—maybe we even hate it …” What if I hate my own choices, Flæd wondered with a bitter smile.

  So she and her men would have to find a way to save themselves, she thought hopelessly as she got to her feet. She could hear the drip of the rain lessening, and as she stepped from foot to foot, forcing the blood back into her legs, she decided to search out Dunstan again. Togeth
er, she thought, stepping out of the little cell and calling his name, they would have to figure out what to do.

  “Dunstan,” she called again as she struggled around a pile of debris opposite the fort’s entrance. Then she stopped, staring at the curve of the wall—a little deeper here, it marred the circle of the fortress with an irregularity.

  “Lady?” Her dutiful thane strode to meet her.

  “Get the others,” she said almost frantically, “anyone fit enough to lift and carry. There’s something here.”

  They uncovered the passageway just before dark. Flæd had made her men search these ruins of what she thought had once been stables, moving the rocks until they exposed the echoing hole she had hoped to find. With eight of them working to move the rubble, they were soon able to carry a torch into the space behind it, which proved broad enough for four men or two horses to walk abreast, and tall enough for a crouched rider to pass through.

  Wind whipped around the hill, and they could hear it moaning over the tunnel’s exit. It was a very old place—as old as the original defenses, Flæd guessed. Only a few paces further on they no longer needed the torch. Twilight filtered through branches growing thick and undisturbed over the passage’s outlet. Shielding her face with one arm, Flæd pushed through the brush until she could worm her head and shoulders out into the open. She found herself on the opposite side of the hill from the fortress gate, well beyond the encircling trench. Father John had described such things to her when she had asked about the earthwork defenses of the Danish wars. The oldest ones, he told her, had been designed to give the fort’s defenders a chance to leave a siege. Just as she had thought, this was another way out.

  When she scuffled back into the tunnel she found her retainers clustered around one of the watchmen from the wall.

  “Lady”—he stepped up to her—“we have seen firelight in the woods. It may be the enemy camp.”

  “Show me,” Flæd said.

  From atop the wall Flæd easily spotted the fires her men had seen—not even stars shone tonight from the sky filled with clouds, and apart from one or two little blazes lit by her own company inside the fortress for drying their gear and cooking, these were the only lights in the black landscape. There were far too many fires for this to be simply a camp set up by the fifteen raiders who had pursued them here. As Flæd had suspected, they had summoned a larger force.

  Flæd climbed down and made her way to one of the West Saxon campfires. She tried to consider all the things she and her men had discovered this evening—the hidden passageway out of the fort, the campsite where their enemies waited—she knew that finding these places could help them survive this predicament. But despite her efforts she could not see how. Instead, her mind began to fill with thoughts of her mother and father, Edward and the little children, her books, her corner in the scriptorium with Father John, and everything that had made up her quiet, happy life. What was she doing on a hill in this alien place, with a group of men who were half protecting her, half depending on her for protection? She was trying to stay alive so that she could marry a stranger—a man who, however worthy, did not seem worth what she had been forced to give up.

  I miss Red, she thought miserably as she nursed a cup of hot water someone had put into her hands as she hunkered by the fire. More than anyone right at this moment, I miss Red. He wouldn’t have let us run like witless animals from the raiders. He would know what we should do now, in these hours before the enemy hunts us down.

  Flæd hid her face in the crook of her elbow. Red wouldn’t want me to cry, she told herself. He would say, “You will never be as strong as a larger man you meet in battle…you are smaller, quicker, and lighter…find a way to beat me.” She pictured Red in the meadow, waiting for her. “If you can fool me, you’d fool them.”

  Surprise. Stealth. Unbalancing her enemy. These were the ways Red had taught her to save herself, and to win. Flæd tried to think. How could she surprise the enemy she faced now? An enemy who knew exactly where she was and how many men were with her? What would they expect her to do, and what could she do instead?

  Flæd sat while her fire burned down to a ghostly flame wandering over red coals. In her mind a plan was forming, fashioned out of the day’s latest discoveries and its early violence and, of all things, out of poetry. Could I really do such a thing? she asked herself as she mulled over one grisly possibility. When she finally stood up, she had decided. She saw Dunstan across the yard tending his horse, and went toward him. Her first challenge would be to convince Dunstan that she could stay alive if she carried out her plan. And after I convince Dunstan, she thought grimly, I must convince myself.

  It would have been difficult for anyone to recognize the thing that emerged from the tunnel an hour later. Mud blackened its face. Leaves and twigs bristled from filthy hair and tattered clothes. Make me look like nothing human, Flæd had told them, like a monster wandering in from the night. Like a monster’s mother, she thought to herself now, a monster woman standing at the edge of her pool.

  Behind her came the sound of soft cursing as Dunstan wriggled through the branches to join her. She had instructed her men to clear the dead brush and leave only a screen of growth to hide the secret exit, but the job was not finished yet. Dunstan had insisted upon coming with her through the tunnel, and was now scratched by branches and bruised from his crawl over the tunnel’s rubble. Dunstan was beginning to pay for his stubbornness, Flæd realized with a perverse glimmer of satisfaction.

  “This is foolish, Lady, as I have said,” he murmured as he reached her side and gazed at the distant campfires.

  “We need to know what they are planning. And we need to weaken them in whatever way we can. I have the most woodcraft of any member of our party. Only I have a chance to go among them undiscovered,” Flæd repeated firmly.

  “I will watch from the edge of their camp,” he insisted.

  “And who will direct our men here?” she asked, trying one more time to make him stay behind.

  “You will, Lady, when I bring you back safely.”

  Flæd could not blunt his determination, and so together they slipped into the trench, circling unseen to the entrance. The body of the fallen raider still lay where their rocks had struck him down. Flæd had been steeling herself for the task she would have to carry out when she reached the dead man. Now, gratefully, she felt Dunstan pulling her back. She waited while he knelt briefly beside the body and drew his sword. Afterward, carrying a new burden, the two of them followed the ditch back around the hill again. Almost invisibly they crept out and away from the fortress. There they waited motionless in the trees until they spotted the first sentry, and then two others.

  It was not difficult, once they had seen these watchers, to pass them. It was easier still to find their way along a well-travelled path running between their hill fort and the camp-fires they had sighted. It was nearly impossible for Flæd, despite her brave words, to take the bundle and step away from Dunstan, beginning her solitary hunt through the camp. But she did.

  24

  Noble River

  “MMMFF!” ÆTHELFLÆD SWALLOWED A YELP AS A ROCK DUG into her ribs. A pair of raiders was striding toward her as she cowered just off the path, and she held her breath, hoping they had not heard her little noise. Fool, she thought to herself, dreading discovery. But the two companions moved on.

  Flæd’s side ached as she eased herself up and scuttled toward the next campfire. She knew she had been extremely fortunate so far. Here in the heart of the raider’s encampment, only one man had seen a small movement when she froze a second too late. He had made a sign which she recognized as a ward against evil (as if he thought me a demon, she remembered), then turned his back and hurried away. If he could have seen the thing I carry beneath this shapeless clothing, she thought, cringing at the bump of the package against her back, he might have shouted to the camp that a being of hell had come among them.

  The fire she was approaching now had at least ten men around it�
��the largest single gathering of raiders she had seen in this camp of around four dozen. She positioned herself in the surrounding shadows, and began to listen.

  Several speakers were engaged in an argument. They raised their voices, interrupting each other, and one man even began to shout until a movement at the edge of the group silenced them all. A person wearing a dark cloak stood up facing the raider who had shouted, beckoning him to come closer. Flæd gasped, then clamped a hand over her own mouth in fear of being heard, and in consternation at what she had seen.

  The figure in the cloak was the man who had led her abduction in the spring. She stared at him as he leaned to address the raider he had summoned. Yes, there was the gaunt face she remembered. There were the dangerous eyes she had stared at when he spoke his few words of English.

  Obeying his leader’s gesture, the quarreling raider held out a sheet of parchment he had been clutching in his hand. The cloaked man jabbed at the page with one finger, saying something in a scornful voice that made the others around the fire laugh nervously. Flæd saw the raider open his mouth, preparing to respond as the cloaked man looked away indifferently.

  Suddenly there was a flicker of metal, and the raider jerked his head to one side with a cry. He tottered before his leader, blood running from a gash beside his ear.

  Like a beast sheathing its claws, the man in the cloak wiped his blade and returned the dagger to his belt. He did not speak again. With a groan the injured man blundered away.

  Flæd stayed hidden as the bleeding raider passed her. When he had gone, she began to back away from the fire. She wanted to find Dunstan and tell him what she had seen, but she had come here to do more than gather information. I have come like a creature of the fens, a shadow in the night, to bring confusion and fear upon my enemies. I have come to show them a sign of death. On the path the raiders used, just beyond the firelight, Flæd placed the burden she and Dunstan had brought with them, and drew off the stained cloth they had used to wrap it. The head of the raider killed at the fortress gate rolled a little, half-opened eyes glinting, the raven crest of its helmet catching the distant light of the fire. The other Danes would know their comrade’s face and his gear—the battle animal he had chosen for the helm’s crest, its singular decoration. We came among you, this act would tell the raiders. We will deal with you as we served your companion. Flæd hardly felt like a person as she turned her face from the gory trophy meant to menace the raiders who had caused Red’s death. I am hate, she thought. 7 am vengeance. I am a monster woman, leaving a head at the edge of her pool.