LITMIR.BIZ

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blade, ‘and your mother was a whore to dwarves!’

      ‘You should have let that one man live,’ a voice said behind me, ‘because I wanted to question him.’ The punt only contained the one passenger besides Leofric and myself, and that one man was the priest who had carried a sword and now he was sitting in the punt’s flat bow, frowning at me. ‘There was no need to kill that man,’ he said sternly and I looked at him with such fury that he recoiled. Damn all priests, I thought. I had saved the bastard’s life and all he did was reprove me, and then I saw that he was no priest at all.

      It was Alfred.

      The punt slid over the swamp, sometimes gliding across black water, sometimes rustling through grass or reeds. The man poling it was a bent, dark-skinned creature with a massive beard, otterskin clothes and a toothless mouth. Guthrum’s Danes were far behind now, carrying their dead back to firmer ground. ‘I need to know what they plan to do,’ Alfred complained to me. ‘The prisoner could have told us.’

      He spoke more respectfully. Looking back I realised I had frightened him for the front of my mail coat was sheeted in blood and there was more blood on my face and helmet.

      ‘They plan to finish Wessex,’ I said curtly. ‘You don’t need a prisoner to tell you that.’

      ‘Lord,’ he said.

      I stared at him.

      ‘I am a king!’ he insisted. ‘You address a king with respect.’

      ‘A king of what?’ I asked.

      ‘You’re not hurt, lord?’ Leofric asked Alfred.

      ‘No, thank God. No.’ He looked at the sword he carried. ‘Thank God.’ I saw he was not wearing priest’s robes, but a swathing black cloak. His long face was very pale. ‘Thank you, Leofric,’ he said, then looked up at me and seemed to shudder. We were catching up with the other two punts and I saw that Ælswith, pregnant and swathed in a silver fox-fur cloak, was in one. Iseult and Eanflæd were also in that punt while the priests were crowded onto the other and I saw that Bishop Alewold of Exanceaster was one of them.

      ‘What happened, lord?’ Leofric asked.

      Alfred sighed. He was shivering now, but he told his story. He had ridden from Cippanhamm with his family, his bodyguard and a score of churchmen to accompany the monk Asser on the first part of his journey. ‘We had a service of thanksgiving,’ he said, ‘in the church at Soppan Byrg. It’s a new church,’ he added earnestly to Leofric, ‘and very fine. We sang psalms, said prayers, and Brother Asser went on his way rejoicing.’ He made the sign of the cross. ‘I pray he’s safe.’

      ‘I hope the lying bastard’s dead,’ I snarled.

      Alfred ignored that. After the church service they had all gone to a nearby monastery for a meal, and it was while they were there that the Danes had come. The royal group had fled, finding shelter in nearby woods while the monastery burned. After that they had tried to ride east into the heart of Wessex but, like us, they had constantly been headed off by patrolling Danes. One night, sheltering in a farm, they had been surprised by Danish troops who had killed some of Alfred’s guards and captured all his horses and ever since they had been wandering, as lost as us, until they came to the swamp. ‘God knows what will happen now,’ Alfred said.

      ‘We fight,’ I said. He just looked at me and I shrugged. ‘We fight,’ I said again.

      Alfred stared across the swamp. ‘Find a ship,’ he said, but so softly that I hardly heard him. ‘Find a ship and go to Frankia.’ He pulled the cloak tighter around his thin body. The snow was thickening as it fell, though it melted as soon as it met the dark water. The Danes had vanished, lost in the snow behind. ‘That was Guthrum?’ Alfred asked me.

      ‘That was Guthrum,’ I said. ‘And he knew it was you he pursued?’

      ‘I suppose so.’

      ‘What else would draw Guthrum here?’ I asked. ‘He wants you dead. Or captured.’

      Yet, for the moment, we were safe. The island village had a score of damp hovels thatched with reeds and a few storehouses raised on stilts. The buildings were the colour of mud, the street was mud, the goats and the people were mud-covered, but the place, poor as it was, could provide food, shelter and a meagre warmth. The men of the village had seen the refugees and, after a discussion, decided to rescue them. I suspect they wanted to pillage us rather than save our lives, but Leofric and I looked formidable and, once the villagers understood that their king was their guest, they did their clumsy best for him and his family. One of them, in a dialect I could scarcely understand, wanted to know the king’s name. He had never heard of Alfred. He knew about the Danes, but said their ships had never reached the village, or any of the other settlements in the swamp. He told us the villagers lived off deer, goats, fish, eels and wildfowl, and they had plenty of food, though fuel was scarce.

      Ælswith was pregnant with her third child, while her first two were in the care of nurses. There was Edward, Alfred’s heir, who was three years old and sick. He coughed, and Ælswith worried about him, though Bishop Alewold insisted it was just a winter’s cold. Then there was Edward’s elder sister, Æthelflaed, who was now six and had a bright head of golden curls, a beguiling smile and clever eyes. Alfred adored her, and in those first days in the swamp, she was his one ray of light and hope. One night, as we sat by a small, dying fire and Æthelflaed slept with her golden head in her father’s lap, he asked me about my son.

      ‘I don’t know where he is,’ I said. There were only the two of us, everyone else was sleeping, and I was sitting by the door staring across the frost-bleached marsh that lay black and silver under a half-moon.

      ‘You want to go and find him?’ he asked earnestly.

      ‘You truly want me to do that?’ I asked. He looked puzzled. ‘These folk are giving you shelter,’ I explained, ‘but they’d as soon cut your throats. They won’t do that while I’m here.’

      He was about to protest, then understood I probably spoke the truth. He stroked his daughter’s hair. Edward coughed. He was in his mother’s hut. The coughing had become worse, much worse, and we all suspected it was the whooping cough that killed small children. Alfred flinched at the sound. ‘Did you fight Steapa?’ he asked.

      ‘We fought,’ I said curtly, ‘the Danes came, and we never finished. He was bleeding, I was not.’

      ‘He was bleeding?’

      ‘Ask Leofric. He was there.’

      He was silent a long time, then, softly, ‘I am still king.’

      Of a swamp, I thought, and said nothing.

      ‘And it is customary to call a king “lord”,’ he went on.

      I just stared at his thin, pale face that was lit by the dying fire. He looked so solemn, but also frightened, as if he were making a huge effort to hold onto the shreds of his dignity. Alfred never lacked for bravery, but he was not a warrior and he did not much like the company of warriors. In his eyes I was a brute; dangerous, uninteresting, but suddenly indispensable. He knew I was not going to call him lord, so he did not insist. ‘What do you notice about this place?’ he asked.

      ‘It’s wet,’ I said.

      ‘What else?’

      I looked for the trap in the question and found none. ‘It can only be reached by punts,’ I said, ‘and the Danes don’t have punts. But when they do have punts it’ll need more than Leofric and me to fight them off.’

      ‘It doesn’t have a church,’ he said.

      ‘I knew I liked it,’ I retorted.

      He ignored that. ‘We know so little of our own kingdom,’ he said in wonderment. ‘I thought there were churches everywhere.’ He closed his eyes for a few heartbeats, then looked at me plaintively. ‘What should I do?’

      I had told him to fight, but I could see no fight in

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