Eric’s ship stroked away up the Trent. Just aft of its mast the water barrel was still packed in tightly, its lid roped down. Knut turned away, pleased.
* * *
That night in the hall, with Eric gone, no one sat in the high seat. There was still meat hanging in the cold house, but Knut could see he would have to get more. He sat on his bench eating when three men he knew came up to him.
“Well,” he said. “Looking for someone?” They were Harald’s friends.
The one in the middle, the tallest, glanced at the others and turned back to him. His name was Broom-Orm. “Where’s Prince Harald?”
Knut swallowed a mouthful of roasted goat and tossed the bone down on the floor. He looked up at the tall man. “Weren’t you going to throw me in a cesspit?”
The three shifted around, uneasy, and the man on the left nudged Broom-Orm, who said, “Look, we want to stay here.”
“All right,” Knut said. “Stay. I’m in command now.”
“Is Harald gone?”
“He’s not dead. If you owe him anything you still do.”
“Is he in Gainsburgh?”
Knut drank the last of the ale in his cup. It was thick with sediment; he had to get some more of that too. He looked from one to the other of the three men.
“Harald is on his way to Denmark.”
They looked at one another. Knut watched them; they were better fighters than Harald. Broom-Orm turned to him and said, with some urgency, “Look, what I did, I’m sorry.”
Knut said, “Yes. I’m sure.” He waved at them. “Go on, you can stay. Live up here from now on. Do what I say.”
One of the others broke into a wide smile and came at him with an open hand, saying, “I’d like to tell you—” Knut frowned at him, drawing his head back, and his friends dragged him off. Knut went for another cup of ale.
Chapter Twenty Three
Where the road from Derby met Ermine Street the great old road ran straight off through the forest, a long, shadowy cavern under the trees. The village was a mile away, but the spy had come down to meet Edmund here. Edmund’s men were waiting in the trees, and Edmund stood with his back to his men so he could watch both ways of the road.
Being this close to Gainsburgh made him uneasy. He had already heard more than he wanted to know. He poked for anything else, anything that might come in useful.
“So you think Sweyn is on his way back to Gainsburgh?”
“He was coming into Nottingham when I left, sir.”
That meant the Viking fleet was only days away. “Who are his closest men?”
The spy chewed his fingernails. “Eric of Lade, but he’s left. Thurbrand Hold, the half Dane from Lindsey. Uhtred of Bamburgh. They went with him into the West. And his son. Sweyn’s son. He’s at Gainsburgh.”
“Harald.”
“No, he went back to Denmark. The younger son. Knut.”
“I never knew there was such a one.” He had heard Harald was a layabout.
“It’s said they fought, the brothers, and the younger won.”
“Knut,” Edmund said, to remember the name. He nodded to the spy. “That’s enough. Stay down and quiet. Thank God for your help, which I will not forget. You’ll be well rewarded when the Danes are beaten.”
“Pray God,” the spy said, and, hurrying off, shied from the riders in the woods and plunged around them into the forest. Edmund went back to his horse.
They went back along the old Roman road, straight as an arrow shot. Edmund let Godwine lead the way. The road stretched south through the forest, shadowy even in daylight, the old broad-headed trees broken only by stretches of fen, broad, quaking green bogs. The summer was coming to an end. On the bogs the grass was blazing gold. Ahead was a village, where Edmund intended to spend the night. After that he did not know what to do.
He brooded on what he had learned. Sweyn had come into the North and brought his fleet up to Gainsburgh without a single man standing against him. Bath and Oxford had submitted. They had planned this, he supposed, or at least had known of it – all the Saxon thegns, whispering in corners, weighing each advantage, probably for years. All this while he had thought only Morcar spoke out against Ethelred, but now he knew they all had, in other ways, turned against the King.
In his mind he saw England like a chessboard, on which Sweyn’s pieces filled one side and moved down along the left onto the other. Edmund’s piece, one piece only, was in the middle. The King’s pieces were in the right-hand side behind Edmund, Thorkel’s Jomsvikings were around the castle of London, and Ethelred himself was the castle of Winchester, already in peril of check.
He saw no way out of this. He thought he would have to make peace with his father. The idea left a sour taste in his mouth. He could not bear to see his father again after Morcar’s murder. He knew Godwine also would not endure it.
Then, ahead of them, a horse neighed.
He flung his hand up, jerking his horse to a stop, and swung down fast enough to get his hand on the horse’s muzzle and pull its head down so it could not neigh back. He looked up at Godwine, who had wheeled around on the road, his eyes sharp, looking for orders. Edmund said, “Off the road,” and led his horse quickly into the forest.
The other men followed. Back among the trees, knee-deep in mast, they stood by their horses and watched a stream of horsemen pass along the road they had just left. The riders up there were strung out for over a mile and moving fast, and Edmund could not keep count of them. Every time he thought they had all passed by, another group came along. He got close enough to hear them calling to one another in dansker.
His hair prickled up. This was a lot of men, but not really an army. A raiding army: the Jomsvikings. Going north. Going, he thought, to Gainsburgh. Just as Sweyn was to arrive in Gainsburgh.
There was only one way to understand this. He went back to Godwine, waiting nervously with the rest of the men in the woods. “Come on,” he said. “I think this is Thorkel the Tall, abandoning my father for Sweyn.”
Godwine said, “We could ambush them.”
Edmund laughed. “No, much better. We can get London from them. Let’s go, we haven’t much time.”
* * *
In Winchester, even the oak leaves were changing color, and the days were shorter and colder. The news from the north was worse every day. Emma slept, but the Lady could not leave her to forage or to hunt. If Ethelred found her body empty, he might run mad; he could do anything.
There was no prey anyway. Sweyn was taking England without any fighting. The Lady was baffled. So many people around her, coming in and out all the time, tiptoeing around the chamber behind the curtains, kept her jittery and scattered. Now they were moving. The slaves were packing up chests and baskets. She had not been paying much attention. Ethelred was so annoying, a fat old man, grey faced, his hands on her constantly.
She had made a mistake being a Christian. She could not be a woman on her own; she needed this man, and now he was failing.
“We’re going to Normandy,” he said to her in the morning. He sat down heavily on the bed, breathing hard. “I’ve decided. My lord Eadric here will make the final arrangements. Get your whole household down with us, dear, never fear.”
Eadric Streona, lord of Mercia, stood twisted by the wall, his hands wringing. Clearly he was less than happy with this. The Queen straightened, paying more attention.
“You’re fleeing? You’ll leave England to the Danes?”
Streona oozed his way forward, his knees bending as if he bowed and walked at the same time. “Sir, if you leave, that will be the end of it. Sweyn will be King of the English.”
Ethelred lurched in his place, like a rock shifting in the rain. “God’s eyes, it’s just to Normandy. I will get Richard to help me. He will, for Emma’s sake.” He smiled at his wife.
“Sir—” Streona came up and kneeled before him. “You are leaving us all to Sweyn. Me, your son Edmund, all your people—”
The King’s face did not chan
ge. The skin of his cheeks was thick and grainy. His eyes were red veined, yellowish, his mouth damp in the great, stained thicket of his whiskers. She shuddered when she imagined that mouth pressed to her face.
He said, “Let that traitor Edmund try to be King. The Normans are sending me a ship. It will arrive in Portsmouth in a week or so. My sons are already across the sea. My real sons.” He turned again to Emma; he never took his eyes from her for long, and he leaned out to kiss her cheek.
The Lady slid away out of his reach. The boys were good currency. She was glad to have gotten them to Normandy. Emma said, “We shall go to Rouen. It’s very pretty there.”
Streona stood up, summoning more arguments. The Lady watched him from the corner of her eye while Emma told Ethelred the glories of Rouen. She knew why Streona was so itchy. If the King left, he was thrown down. He was close to Thorkel, but Edmund mistrusted him, everybody else in England hated him, and Sweyn knew nothing of him save what the gossips said, and he had been involved anyway in Saint Brice’s Day.
The Lady turned her attention away. Emma was uncomfortable, and that made her balky and whiny. All the household was jumbled, and their coarse, noisy feelings clogged the Lady’s senses. She could rest until they reached Normandy, where new possibilities would unfold. She turned her back on Streona and Emma and Ethelred and their jabber.
* * *
Streona paced back and forth, back and forth, his arms swinging. He had given everything for Ethelred, and now the King was letting him down, and it made him angry, the more angry because he was panicking, the ground under him suddenly steep and slippery. He could go to Normandy, but he had no friends there. Emma was not smiling on him anymore. He looked around the hall: the fire banked, the torches put down, except for one at the far end near the piss pot. People slept on the floor, on the benches, making the air foul with their breath.
He had worked so hard to make himself great, done such things for Ethelred that might damn his soul, and now it was all tipping into the hands of Sweyn Tjugas. He went up and down the floor again. With each step this grew clearer. If everything he had was going to Sweyn, then he should go there also.
In fact, he realized that, for a while anyway, he had something valuable to offer Sweyn. But he had to hurry.
He went out and found himself a horse. Before the sun rose, he was on his way to Gainsburgh.
* * *
Knut said, “Just down street. Just walk.” He had bought one of the bread girl’s loaves and was tossing it from hand to hand. “You, me, walk, street to end.”
She giggled at him. She gave him a look from under her eyelashes, and he smiled at her.
She said, “I can’t walk with you.”
Then the two women on either side were gabbling at her in Saxon and shooing at him. He stood his ground, ready to argue. The girl gave him another look through her lashes, and he almost climbed out of his drawers. He wanted to bury his hands in that long brown hair. The thought itself was giving him a long sword. Then one of the women pushing at him was shouting, “Drake! Drake!” and pointing behind him.
He twisted around. A big dragon was coming down the river from the south. The girl went out of his mind like a dream, and he strode down to the riverbank. As he ate the loaf he watched them come in, first the one ship, and then three hard after, and then a long wait, and finally a steady stream of them. By noon all the bank was thick with ships and people.
Sweyn Tjugas’s ship rowed in with pennants floating from the mast and a crown on the dragon’s head, and when everybody let out his name in a bellow the King stood and waved his hand in greeting.
His ship was led into the bar, and he came up the bank. He saw Knut at once and looked around.
“Where is Harald?”
Knut said, “He went with Eric.” That seemed too blank. “Something about somebody named Olaf.”
Sweyn gave him a keen look and a smile. “Well, then, I’m glad to see you, as I said before.” He stretched out his arm and laid his hand on Knut’s shoulder.
Knut swelled, pleased, but before he could enjoy this, Sweyn said, “And see who has come with me.” He waved behind him.
Knut saw, and his face stiffened. Thurbrand had gotten off the King’s ship too, the moth-eaten gnome, but now coming ashore was another man.
Older, tall and dark, eyes still small and mean behind the axe blade of his nose. The Jomsviking Thorkel the Tall.
Knut gave the Jomsviking one furious glare and swung in behind the King as Sweyn climbed up the last of the bank onto the market street. The rest of his men streamed after him. The King came out into the middle of the street and looked around, unpinning his cloak in the sun. He said, “It looks well-kept here.”
Knut glanced over his shoulder. Thorkel had stopped in the crowd behind them. He spoke to his father’s ear. “So what is he here for, then? Has he sold Ethelred to you? Are you hiring him on?”
Sweyn stopped and faced him, his eyes cold. “What are you asking me? This is nothing you have a voice in, anyway. Who do you think you’ve become here?”
“Are you hiring him?”
“He has wisely come to submit to me, bringing London with him, which he holds.”
Knut said, “He betrayed you to Ethelred, and Ethelred to you, and now you’re giving him another round.”
The King shot a sideways look at him and made a shake of his head. Beside him, Thurbrand was smiling through his thicket of teeth. Sweyn said, “He is a Jomsviking. They fight for money. Very well.” Something struck him with amusement, the big golden head tossing with a quirky laugh, and he flipped back a long part of his moustache. “Then you can go with him, Knut, to take control of the garrisons there in London. To keep watch on him for me.”
Knut was too angry to think. His cheeks were stiff. He remembered being little and frightened and kicked around in the Jomsburg and still little and frightened going up a strange river to be abandoned to an even stranger man. Now here was Thorkel again.
And worse, this put battling Harald in a different light. He began to see his father juggling this, as he had played Jorvik against Thurbrand, Thurbrand against Uhtred, Harald against him, now him against Thorkel.
He had to say something. He said, “Yes, sir.”
Sweyn was watching him steadily. “Good. That’s more what I want to hear from you.” To Thurbrand, he said, “I forgot what a green stick he is.”
“They’re all honor ridden at that age,” Thurbrand said. “A few more years on him, he’ll season.” Knut simmered behind them, humiliated, fighting down his temper. Anger just got in the way, but it was hard.
He had stopped being angry, except at Thorkel, by the next dawn, when he and the Jomsviking chief started south on horseback toward London. Thorkel had brought a good four hundred men of his army with him, which slowed them down. Knut rode near the front, out of the dust, and as fast as he could without distancing Thorkel. They went straight down Ermine Street, the old Roman road, and in a few days they met the first Jomsvikings coming north.
“Edmund has London.”
Thorkel’s jaw dropped; he turned and stared ahead of them as if he could raise up the city out of the air. “He hasn’t got enough men.”
“He came in gate by gate and took each garrison piecemeal. Except most of us escaped.”
Fled – when they saw they were being cut down, while their leader collected the fees, which they would be paid whether they fought or not. Knut turned and glared at Thorkel. Boiling words seethed in his throat, and he was ready to pour them all over his one-time foster father when another horseman galloped up with word even more important: King Ethelred had deserted his throne and fled the kingdom.
Chapter Twenty Four
Ethelred had lied; when they swept out of Winchester onto the road south, the Lady discovered he had not brought all her women; he had brought only three, the rest to come later, he said. So far from their bodies, their souls were feeble, and so she was enfeebled too: She hated him for this. In Portsmouth th
ey went to a townhouse, and, just as they were dismounting in the courtyard, armed men surrounded them. Still furious, buried deep in Emma, she chose not to help him.
“Sir! You are to come with us now, sir, you and your lady-wife.”
There followed several moments of Ethelred offering the leader various bribes.
The leader was a scrawny-looking man with hair like red wool and awful teeth. Who took none of the bribes.
Then, from among the soldiers, a dark-eyed woman stepped forward in a dirty coif and a stained apron. Still sulking and inward, the Lady took no notice, until Ethelred screamed.
Then coming all awake she rose up through Emma and saw Arre, her soul naked before her, that sweet, glowing light. A rush of greed went through her, and she rushed to sup, but Ethelred seized hold of her.
“Save me! Save me—”
Without all her power, she could not fling him off. His weight dragged her down, his flesh, his carcass. And she could not save him. His face was green-white, mottled, sparkling with sweat, his eyes bulging from his sockets. She gripped him to keep him from pulling her off her feet. He wrestled with death only for a moment. She saw the life die in his eyes. She bent and pressed her mouth against his and drew out of him all that was left, heavy and coarse as it was, still life food. But when she straightened, the ghost was gone.
* * *
So, suddenly, she was alone, confined in a body no longer as important as before, at the mercy of these dull strangers. The Dane with the wooly hair, who turned out to be the notorious Thurbrand Hold of Lindsey, took her to Sweyn, who had come into Winchester since the King left it. Fortunately that was closer to where her women were, and she felt stronger with every step.
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