Kings of the North

by Kings of the North (retail) (epub)

  His eyes stared from a face white as lard. His voice was hoarse from the screaming. “I knew they meant to kill Edward. My mother meant to have him killed.”

  Aethelstan realized, startled, that he meant his half brother, murdered thirty years before to make the boy Ethelred sole King. The first taint on him, when he was only ten years old: where his life had twisted out of true. “That was so long ago. You were a child, sir.”

  “I knew she meant to do it.”

  “Papa—” Aethelstan laid his hand on his father’s knee. The older man’s suffering moved him to tenderness. He said, “Think of the baby, Papa. You’ll be a father again.”

  “I can’t sleep,” Ethelred said. He picked up the pillow, started it toward his mouth, and lowered it to his knees. His eyes were bleary with exhaustion. “Every time I sleep—”

  Aethelstan rose, turned, and waved to the physician to leave. Three of his father’s house carls stood by the door, armed and mailed, as if they could drive their swords through a ghost or a nightmare.

  “Get me the highest priest in the minster. Bring him here.”

  “My lord.” One of the Normans left. That, they were good for: They took orders well. He paced across the room, uneasy. His father had been ailing, off and on, since Saint Brice’s Day. Haunted. The door opened, and the priest came in.

  This was no mere priest but Alphege, the archbishop of Canterbury, his robes splendid, immaculate; his gold and ivory crozier in his hand; his miter looming up like a church steeple. He was a tall, fleshy man with a constant sniffing frown on his face, as if all he saw was sin, all he expected to see was sin everywhere, and it gave him a certain satisfaction. There was a council in Westminster, which was why he was here.

  He came into the room, glanced once at Aethelstan, and turned to the King.

  “My lord King.” His voice was clear and strong. “God be thanked I am here. Tell me what befalls you.”

  Ethelred barely mumbled something, his eyelids sagging, and sleep coming on him against his will. Alphege walked around his bed, the staff tapping the floor. Aethelstan watched his father’s head nod, fall to his breast, and then jerk up again, the eyes bulging like knobs from his skull, his hair bristling.

  The archbishop came around before him. “The room is full of demons. And who knows but you deserve them, my lord King.”

  Ethelred reached out toward him with both hands, the pillow on his knees. “Help me. For God’s sake, Father, for the love of sweet Jesus Christ—”

  “As you helped the pleading victims of your soldiers?” Alphege said. “Say your prayers. Beg God’s forgiveness. And leave London.”

  He went around the bed again, murmuring under his breath and making signs with his hands. Aethelstan stepped back; the air around him felt busy. He glanced at the Normans. Alphege went to the window and pushed the shutter wider.

  He came back toward Ethelred. “Out of pity I have asked our Lord Jesus Christ to dispel the demons. But they will come back, because you are a fertile ground for them, Ethelred, and you have no true faith in God. You should keep moving. Because it will not stay peaceful wherever you are.”

  He turned and went to the door; he paused, before Aethelstan, and the prince thought for a moment that the archbishop would speak to him or at least give him a blessing, but Alphege only shook his head and went on. Aethelstan cast another look at his father, who had curled up on the bed, fast asleep and snoring, and Aethelstan left.

  * * *

  The court moved down to Winchester. Aethelstan went to see that his horses were stabled, and in the dusty lane outside the barn he found Morcar of Derby waiting for him.

  Morcar’s long, sad face was intent. He said, “I understand the Queen is with child.”

  Aethelstan nodded. He looked around them, to see who was watching. The sun came through the leaves of the trees along the lane, dappling the ground.

  Morcar said, “Have you thought about what this means for you and your brothers, if she bears a male child?”

  Aethelstan turned to him, angry. “I am my father’s heir. Do you think he would throw me over for an infant?”

  Morcar’s hound face watched him steadily. The moving shadows of the leaves dappled him. “Not Ethelred, perhaps. The Queen is another matter.”

  “The Queen does not rule my father,” Aethelstan said sharply. He was taking a strong dislike to Morcar.

  “Does your father rule himself?”

  The prince reared back and cocked his arm, as if to strike. Morcar stood solidly where he was, his drooping eyes steady. Aethelstan lowered his hand to his side.

  “The King is better now that we are gone from London.”

  “A man who sees ghosts everywhere.”

  “I will not hear this, my lord. The kingdom is wracked enough with troubles.”

  Morcar shrugged one shoulder. “You are a noble son, my prince. But they say that Jomsvikings have been seen off the coast. And now Sweyn Forkbeard has made peace with the Trondejarl in Sweden and is ready to come at us again. Can your father lead his army into war?”

  “We shall be ready for Sweyn Forkbeard,” Aethelstan said. “The King has a pact with Normandy, which will keep the Danes out of the narrow sea. And the Norman duke has sent him more soldiers. If Sweyn tries to take a bite of England, he may find too much in his mouth to swallow.” He fixed the thegn of Derby with a hard look. “Will you fight for England, Morcar?”

  “I will fight for my lands,” Morcar said. “For the Five Burhs. And for my life. Against any who threaten us.” His lips twitched in a bad smile. “That includes your father, sir. Good day.”

  * * *

  Emma said, “You are sleeping without dreams, my husband.”

  “Soundly as a corpse,” he said. He smoothed her cheek with his fingers. She had come down to Winchester at last, with two midwives to attend her and a pile of new clothes. She was the prettiest little thing in his kingdom, and he could not wait to get her into bed. “We shall feast tonight. I shall raise cup after cup to my new prince.”

  She let him fondle her belly, which was beginning to swell beneath her belt. She said, “He is only a little prince. Aethelstan is the true prince. We know our place. My little prince and I.” She simpered.

  Ethelred kissed her ear, thinking he knew her place also, and there was all the rest of the morning to have her there before the feast began. He felt airy, almost breathless, with relief; he had not seen the ghost for almost a week now. Perhaps she only haunted London. He would never go to London again. He gathered his wife into his arms.

  “Come,” he said. “Let us make merry while we can.”

  * * *

  The Queen came into the hall on the arm of the King, and all through the vast, drafty space the crowds of people bowed in a noisy fluttering of sleeves and doffed hats. The men peered at her, their noses ruffled. It was not common for a Saxon to have his wife beside him, and some were put off.

  The air was already warm. Smoke wreathed the beams of the ceiling. She let Ethelred settle her in the left side of the high seat, with some jokes that soon she would be too large for that, and bring her a cup of wine. Her thighs were still slippery with his seed. She glanced quickly around the room.

  She was hoping the ghost Arre would appear. Shorn of her body, Arre would be easy prey, even in a crowd. An interesting woman, a great soul – although, since she was dead, much weaker than she would have been, had she been taken alive.

  The Queen sat at the high end, and on either side down the hall were long, stout tables. Ethelred’s court stood behind them, waiting for its signal to sit down on the benches. Eadric Streona was at the very top of the long table to the right, his hands clasped behind his back, shorn like a Norman with clipped hair and no beard. Down beyond them, others of Ethelred’s lords, Uhtred, Morcar, Sigeferth, Leofwine, Eadwy, Alfgar, on and on, still wore their hair long and flowing, their beards combed smooth on their chests. She caught them looking at her disapprovingly and laughed, scornful.

 
Ethelred settled himself beside her in the high seat, and she bent to let him kiss her cheek. Looking past him, she saw the prince Aethelstan behind the front table, waiting with his carls for permission to sit, and young Edmund.

  Flanked by musicians with drums and horns, three men in fantastic hats were marching up the center of the hall to deliver a speech of welcome to the King. She had to seem interested, which meant giving the stupid girl Emma more room than was comfortable. Ethelred spoke to Emma, and she gave her husband a beaming look.

  “I am so glad you’re sleeping well again. I missed you so much.”

  Ethelred kissed her. The Lady let this continue a while. Idle, she turned inward. She was still annoyed that Raef had escaped her on his way to Jorvik. Biting him had not worked as it usually did. Then in his more straightforward effort Streona had failed. She was tempted to get rid of him. But Raef was far away now, out of her reach, still a stupid man, still afraid of his power, and slow to use it, and so she need not fear him.

  She would get the war going and feast again.

  More gaudy people were coming up before the King to do a display of welcome. Emma could sit there and smile; the Lady was going from fret to fret.

  Emma chafed her like a coat too small. She would make the best of that, and the best would be good enough. Anyway, now she had captured dozens of useful souls, and she could not easily abandon Emma without losing them.

  There were benefits in Emma. However cramped the space, she had maneuvered the silly girl into a good position. Queen of England, now pregnant, she had Ethelred befuddled and malleable. He rejoiced at the prospect of another Aetheling. He had several heirs already, but they would present no problem to Emma’s son. Aethelstan was the most dangerous, not least because he refused to turn against his father.

  There might not even be an England anyway after another war.

  She looked around the hall at the boisterous men now crowding the benches, so brawny and stout and loud with their own importance. It was the women they disdained whose souls she craved, deeper, more subtle than any man’s, the women’s souls whose inchoate vital force gave her power. The men she only destroyed.

  They had betrayed her, every man she had ever trusted: Bluetooth, Corban, Eadric Streona, on and on. Ethelred would betray her in time. The fury boiled up in her, jumbling everything out of order, out of control, the souls within her stirring and slipping. The will rose in her to align them all at once and blast this place. Combined, so close, she could burn the whole hall back to its fundament, turn wood and stone, flesh and bone to ash in an instant.

  But that would likely mean Emma’s death also, and she would have to start over.

  Ethelred was stroking Emma’s thigh, and the silly girl leaned toward him, giggling, and rubbed her cheek on his. She knew how to beguile him. As she did during the ugly coupling, the Lady turned away. The air of the hall was thick with smoke and the smell of bloody meat. On her left side there sat Uhtred, lord of Bamburgh, whose brawny body had once attracted Emma. Now he watched the Queen with a dour dislike from beneath his shaggy brows. Emma smiled vacantly at him, as if she had forgotten who he was.

  Here, ducky.’ Ethelred held out a bit of roasted lamb on his fingertips, and Emma obediently opened her mouth for the greasy morsel. Streona was chewing on some big bone. Aethelstan frowned down at his hands on the table, Edmund silent behind him, and Uhtred was glaring at Emma, trying to catch her eye. Perhaps he regretted now that he had not smiled back that time. Then a horn blared down by the door.

  Everybody fell still, all at once, and swung that way. Into the crackling silence walked a single man, tall and lean as a lance, with a great hooked nose. Golden rings circled his upper arms and hung from his ears, and a gold clasp held his heavy red cloak fast at his shoulder. At his side hung a long-handled, double-bladed axe. Aethelstan had stood up, in his place, and now Uhtred of Bamburgh rose too, although neither of them were armed.

  The Lady laid her hand on Ethelred’s arm and turned Emma’s wide pleading glance on him. “Who is this?”

  “Thorkel the Tall,” Ethelred said, tautly. “Chief of the Jomsvikings.”

  “Ethelred Edgarsson,” the Viking shouted. He stamped his foot hard on the floor. “I come from the King of the Danes, to tell you you will not wait long for retribution for your wicked murder of the innocent on Saint Brice’s Day.”

  The crowd buzzed with whisperings. Streona leaped up from his place on the bench and came over beside Ethelred, the arm of the high seat between them. He whispered something, and Ethelred pushed at him. The Lady still had her grip on his sleeve; she saw Streona wanted the King to make some show of force, but Ethelred, even without her advice, was refusing that. At least he had some sense.

  He leaned forward.

  “Thorkel Strutharaldsson,” he said, “when will the Danes pay retribution for the innocents they have killed since they first struck at England, long ago?”

  The Queen beamed at him, glad of this war talk. Eadric Streona stood back, his face dark, his eyes shifty, his lips grim.

  The tall Viking before them curled his lip into a sneer. Behind the bone arch of his nose his small eyes were buried deep in their pits. “So it is, Englishman. You have brought the wolf time on you. Know now that Sweyn is released from his oaths to you over the last Danegeld.” He turned and walked out the door.

  The whole hall buzzed; Streona had gone to sit down again, and on the other side Aethelstan was leaning down, talking fiercely to his younger brother Edmund, his face flushed. The Queen turned to Ethelred.

  “So the war will begin again?” She kept her voice small, worried.

  “Don’t fear.” He clapped his big rough hand over hers. “I have done much to prepare for this. Marrying you—” he kissed her forehead, a loud smack—“keeps your brother Normandy on my side. And I have throttled Jor’ck and wasted Man and Wales—”

  She said, “Jor’ck. Wasn’t that Jorvik a Danish kingdom?”

  “Yes, I told you, I have crushed it; no one lives there anymore. It is a habitation for owls.”

  “As long as there’s anything there, it’s a threat to you,” she said. “Did you not tell me how they could winter over there and attack all of East Anglia and the coast—”

  “I’ve blocked up the river,” he said. “I’ve taxed them until they fled. There is no more market, no harbor.”

  “You could send Uhtred up to Northumberland. He could finish Jorvik off on the way.”

  He blinked at her. It was hard sometimes to move him, and since the Arre haunting had begun, harder, as if the ghost had deadened part of his mind. Remorse, thinking backward, the curse of memory, the part of him beyond her reach. She said, slowly, “Send Uhtred to wipe out Jorvik.”

  Ethelred wiped his hand across his mouth. His eyes looked unfocused. “I trust Uhtredhe said. “Rather I would keep him by me.”

  “My lord,” she said, “if you trust him, then send him to keep the Danes out of Jorvik.”

  “Unh,” said Ethelred. His eyes went to the big northerner on his right. “There’s sense in that, I suppose.” The Queen sat back, satisfied.

  He stood up, and the babble in the hall fell to a hush. The King lifted his hands.

  “You all heard Thorkel. Our time has come. Heed me. Aethelstan, my son.”

  Aethelstan leaped to his feet. “Father, command me.”

  “Go summon up all the men you have. Sweyn will attack in the East, because Normandy and I have closed the narrow sea to him. Morcar and Sigeferth, call up the men of the Five Burhs.”

  There was a yell from the crowded hall, like the baying of hounds. Ethelred waved his hands to quiet them.

  “Alfgar, Eadwy, bring all the men of Wessex to follow my dragon banner! Eadric Streona, bring the men of Mercia. We will gather here at Winchester at Whitsuntide, the beginning of the fighting season. And Uhtred of Bamburgh, go to Jorvik and lay it waste, so that Sweyn will find no haven there.”

  Again, they roared, in a high fury, all brag and be
llow, so the hall boomed with their cheers. Aethelstan was already making his way out, a train of other lords close behind him. Eadric Streona and Uhtred rose, calling to their men. Through the uproar, the boy Edmund came up before the throne.

  “Father, command me.”

  Emma laughed. Ethelred said, “Edmund, you are too young for this. Stay here and be a guard for my dear wife.”

  “Father, I want to fight.”

  Ethelred shook his head and waved him off and, turning, bawled to the general ear, “This time we make it ours! Haste! Haste!”

  Edmund was still trying to plead with him. Nobody paid any attention to him. Emma laughed again. “Silly little boy. What could you do?” Edmund turned away, his shoulders hunched.

  Chapter Ten

  At last, in the end of the winter, Raef, Laissa, and Leif forded the river and walked up through dreary, swampy flatlands to the gate of Jorvik. The wall was massively built of grey stone, but no one guarded it, and the wooden gate sagged too badly to close. Inside, the land seemed no different than outside, a broad stretch of grassy slope where sheep grazed. A path wound through it from the gate down toward the river in the distance.

  Along this path stood the ruins of houses, overgrown with vines and brambles, some with walls still standing, many others no more than tumbled stones and broken wood. Sheep and goats grazed in the overgrown gardens. In the distance, the minster raised its squat block head into the sky, but they had walked down the path almost to the river before they came to a place where people lived.

  This was a hovel of sticks and sod on the edge of a cluster of larger wattle and daub huts, where an old dog lay in the sun and looked up as they passed. Some rags hung on a stick to dry. A frayed red hen scuttled out of their way. They walked beneath a spreading old bare-branched oak tree, where Raef remembered a market, and stood by the riverbank.

  “You said there was a city,” Laissa said. “There’s nobody here.”