LITMIR.BIZ

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now, as we rounded the eastern tip of Caninga, I could see Sigefrid’s camp crowning that hill. It was a green hill, and his walls, made of earth and topped with a timber palisade, lay like a brown scar on its domed summit. The slope from his southern wall was precipitous, dropping to where a crowd of ships lay canted on the mud exposed by low tide. The Hothlege’s mouth was guarded by a ship that blocked the channel. She lay athwart the waterway, held against the tides by chains at stem and stern. One chain led to a massive post sunk on Caninga’s shore, while the other was attached to a tree that grew lonely on the smaller island that formed the northern bank of the channel’s mouth. ‘Two-Tree Island,’ the fisherman saw where I was looking and named the islet.

      ‘But there’s only one tree there,’ I pointed out.

      ‘In my father’s day there were two, lord.’

      The tide had turned. The flood had begun, and the great waters were surging into the estuary so that our three ships were being carried towards the enemy’s camp. ‘Turn!’ I shouted to Ralla, and saw the relief on his face, ‘but put the dragon’s head back first!’

      And so Sigefrid’s men saw the dragon’s head replaced, and the eagle’s beaked head put high on Sea-Eagle’s stem, and they must have known something was wrong, not just because we displayed our beasts, but because we turned our ships and Ralla cut the smaller cargo boat loose. And, as they watched from their high fort, they would have seen my banner unfurled from Sea-Eagle’s mast. Gisela and her women had made that flag of the wolf’s head, and I flew it so that the watching men would know who had killed the Sea-Eagle’s crew.

      Then we rowed away, pulling hard against that flooding tide. We turned south and west about Caninga, then let the strong new tide carry us upriver towards Lundene.

      And the cargo ship, its hold filled with blood-laced gull-pecked corpses, rode the same tide up the creek to bump against the longship moored athwart the channel.

      I had three fighting ships now while my cousin possessed fifteen. He had moved those captured boats upriver where, for all I knew, they rotted. If I had possessed ten more ships and had the crews to man them I could have taken Beamfleot, but all I had was three ships and the creek beneath the high fort was crammed with masts.

      Still, I was sending a message.

      That death was coming to Beamfleot.

      Death visited Hrofeceastre first. Hrofeceastre was a town close to Lundene on the southern bank of the Temes estuary in the old kingdom of Cent. The Romans had made a fort there, and now a sizeable town had grown in and around the old stronghold. Cent, of course, had long been a part of Wessex and Alfred had ordered the town’s defences to be strengthened, which was easily done for the old earth walls of the Roman fort still stood, and all that had to be added was a deepening of the ditch, the making of an oak palisade and the destruction of some buildings that were outside and too close to the ramparts. And it was well that the work had been completed because, early that summer, a great fleet of Danish ships came from Frankia. They found refuge in East Anglia, from where they sailed south, rode the tide up the Temes and then beached their ships on the River Medwæg, the tributary on which Hrofeceastre stood. They had hoped to storm the town, sacking it with fire and terror, but the new walls and the strong garrison defied them.

      I had news of their coming before Alfred. I sent a messenger to tell him of the attack and, that same day, took Sea-Eagle down the Temes and up the Medwæg to find that I was helpless. At least sixty warships were beached on the river’s muddy bank, and two others had been chained together and moored athwart the Medwæg to deter any attack by West Saxon ships. On shore I could see the invaders throwing up an earthen embankment, suggesting that they intended to ring Hrofeceastre with their own wall.

      The leader of the invaders was a man called Gunnkel Rodeson. I learned later he had sailed from a lean season in Frankia in hope of taking the silver reputed to be in Hrofeceastre’s big church and monastery. I rowed away from his ships and, in a brisk south-east wind, hoisted Sea-Eagle’s sail and crossed the estuary. I hoped to find Beamfleot deserted, but though it was obvious that many of Sigefrid’s ships and men had gone to join Gunnkel, sixteen vessels remained and the fort’s high wall still bristled with men and spear-points.

      And so we went back to Lundene.

      ‘Do you know Gunnkel?’ Gisela asked me. We spoke in Danish as we almost always did.

      ‘Never heard of him.’

      ‘A new enemy?’ she asked, smiling.

      ‘They come from the north endlessly,’ I said. ‘Kill one and two more sail south.’

      ‘A very good reason to stop killing them, then,’ she said. That was as close as Gisela ever came to chiding me for killing her own people.

      ‘I am sworn to Alfred,’ I said in bleak explanation.

      Next day I woke to find ships coming through the bridge. A horn alerted me. The horn was blown by a sentry on the walls of a small burh I was building at the bridge’s southern end. We called that burh Suthriganaweorc, which simply meant the southern defence, and it was being built and guarded by men of the Suthrige fyrd. Fifteen warships were coming downstream, and they rowed through the gap at high water when the tumult in the broken middle was at its calmest. All fifteen ships came through safely and the third, I saw, flew my cousin Æthelred’s banner of the prancing white horse. Once below the bridge the ships rowed for the wharves where they tied up three abreast. Æthelred, it seemed, was returning to Lundene. At the beginning of summer he had taken Æthelflaed back to his estates in western Mercia, there to fight against the Welsh cattle thieves who loved riding into Mercia’s fat lands. Now he was back.

      He went to his palace. Æthelflaed, of course, was with him for Æthelred refused to allow her out of his sight, though I do not think that was love. It was jealousy. I half expected to receive a summons to his presence, but none came and, next morning, when Gisela walked to the palace, she was turned away. The Lady Æthelflaed, she was informed, was unwell. ‘They weren’t rude to me,’ she said, ‘just insistent.’

      ‘Maybe she is unwell?’ I suggested.

      ‘Even more reason to see a friend,’ Gisela said, staring through the open shutters to where the summer sun splattered the Temes with glinting silver. ‘He has put her in a cage, hasn’t he?’

      We were interrupted by Bishop Erkenwald, or rather by one of his priests, who announced the bishop’s imminent arrival. Gisela, knowing that Erkenwald would never speak openly in front of her, went to the kitchens while I greeted him at my door.

      I never liked that man. In time we were to hate each other, but he was loyal to Alfred and he was efficient and he was conscientious. He did not waste time with small talk, but told me he had issued a writ for raising the local fyrd. ‘The king,’ he said, ‘has ordered the men of his bodyguard to join your cousin’s ships.’

      ‘And me?’

      ‘You will stay here,’ he said brusquely, ‘as will I.’

      ‘And the fyrd?’

      ‘Is for the city’s defence. They replace the royal troops.’

      ‘Because of Hrofeceastre?’

      ‘The king is determined to punish the pagans,’ Erkenwald said, ‘but while he is doing God’s work at Hrofeceastre there is a chance that other pagans will attack Lundene. We will prevent any such attack succeeding.’

      No pagans did attack Lundene, and so I sat in the city while the events at Hrofeceastre unfolded and, strangely, those events have become famous. Men often come to me these days and they ask me about Alfred for I am one of the few men alive who remember him. They are all churchmen, of course, and they want to hear of his piety, of which I pretend to know nothing, and some, a few, ask about his wars. They know of his exile in the marshes and the victory at Ethandun, but they also want to hear of Hrofeceastre. That is strange. Alfred was to gain many victories over his enemies and Hrofeceastre was undoubtedly one of them, but it was not the great triumph that men now believe it to have

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