LITMIR.BIZ

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I was reluctant to make an oath to an equal. The oath-giver is subservient to the man who accepts the oath. Ragnar would have said I was a friend, he would treat me like a brother, but his assumption that I would give him an oath demonstrated that he still believed I was his follower. I was a lord of Northumbria, but he was a Dane, and to a Dane all Saxons are lesser men, and so he had demanded an oath. If I gave him an oath then he would be generous, but I would be expected to show gratitude, and I could only ever hold Bebbanburg because he allowed me to hold it. I had never thought it all through before, but suddenly, on that cold day, I understood that among the Danes I was as important as my friends, and without friends I was just another landless, masterless warrior. But among the Saxons I was another Saxon, and among the Saxons I did not need another man’s generosity.

      ‘You look thoughtful, Uhtred,’ Alfred interrupted my reverie.

      ‘I was thinking, lord,’ I said, ‘that we need warm food.’ I fed the fire, then went outside to the stream where I knocked away the skim of ice and scooped water into a pot. Steapa had followed me outside, not to talk, but to piss, and I stood behind him. ‘At the witanegemot,’ I said, ‘you lied about Cynuit.’

      He tied the scrap of rope that served as a belt and turned to look at me. ‘If the Danes had not come,’ he said in his growling voice, ‘I would have killed you.’

      I did not argue with that, for he was probably right. ‘At Cynuit,’ I said instead, ‘when Ubba died, where were you?’

      ‘There.’

      ‘I didn’t see you,’ I said. ‘I was in the thick of the battle, but I didn’t see you.’

      ‘You think I wasn’t there?’ he was angry.

      ‘You were with Odda the Younger?’ I asked, and he nodded. ‘You were with him,’ I guessed, ‘because his father told you to protect him?’ He nodded again. ‘And Odda the Younger,’ I said, ‘stayed a long way from any danger. Isn’t that right?’

      He did not answer, but his silence told me I was right. He decided he had nothing more to say to me so started back towards the mill, but I pulled on his arm to stop him. He was surprised by that. Steapa was so big and so strong and so feared that he was unused to men using force on him, and I could see the slow anger burning in him. I fed it. ‘You were Odda’s nursemaid,’ I sneered. ‘The great Steapa Snotor was a nursemaid. Other men faced and fought the Danes and you just held Odda’s hand.’

      He just stared at me. His face, so tight-skinned and expressionless, was like an animal’s gaze, nothing there but hunger and anger and violence. He wanted to kill me, especially after I used his nickname, but I understood something more about Steapa Snotor. He was truly stupid. He would kill me if he was ordered to kill me, but without someone to instruct him he did not know what to do, so I thrust the pot of water at him. ‘Carry that inside,’ I told him. He hesitated. ‘Don’t stand there like a dumb ox!’ I snapped. ‘Take it! And don’t spill it.’ He took the pot. ‘It has to go on the fire,’ I told him, ‘and next time we fight the Danes you’ll be with me.’

      ‘You?’

      ‘Because we are warriors,’ I said, ‘and our job is to kill our enemies, not be nursemaids to weaklings.’

      I collected firewood, then went inside to find Alfred staring at nothing and Steapa sitting beside Hild who now seemed to be consoling him rather than being consoled. I crumbled oatcakes and dried fish into the water and stirred the mess with a stick. It was a gruel of sorts and tasted horrible, but it was hot.

      That night it stopped snowing and next morning we went home.

      Alfred need not have gone to Cippanhamm. Anything he learned there he could have discovered by sending spies, but he had insisted on going himself and he came back more worried than before. He had learned some good things, that Guthrum did not have the men to subjugate all Wessex and so was waiting for reinforcements, but he had also learned that Guthrum was trying to turn the nobility of Wessex to his side. Wulfhere was sworn to the Danes, who else?

      ‘Will the fyrd of Wiltunscir fight for Wulfhere?’ he asked us.

      Of course they would fight for Wulfhere. Most of the men in Wiltunscir were loyal to their lord, and if their lord ordered them to follow his banner to war then they would march. Those men who were in the parts of the shire not occupied by the Danes might go to Alfred, but the rest would do what they always did, follow their lord. And other ealdormen, seeing that Wulfhere had not lost his estates, would reckon that their own future, and their family’s safety, lay with the Danes. The Danes had ever worked that way. Their armies were too small and too disorganised to defeat a great kingdom so they recruited lords of the kingdom, flattered them, even made them into kings, and only when they were secure did they turn on those Saxons and kill them.

      So back in Æthelingæg Alfred did what he did best. He wrote letters. He wrote letters to all his nobility, and messengers were sent into every corner of Wessex to find ealdormen, thegns and bishops, and deliver the letters. I am alive, the scraps of parchment said, and after Easter I shall take Wessex from the pagans, and you will help me. We waited for the replies.

      ‘You must teach me to read,’ Iseult said when I told her about the letters.

      ‘Why?’

      ‘It is a magic,’ she said.

      ‘What magic? So you can read psalms?’

      ‘Words are like breath,’ she said, ‘you say them and they’re gone. But writing traps them. You could write down stories, poems.’

      ‘Hild will teach you,’ I said, and the nun did, scratching letters in the mud. I watched them sometimes and thought they could have been taken for sisters except one had hair black as a raven’s wing and the other had hair of pale gold.

      So Iseult learned her letters and I practised the men with their weapons and shields until they were too tired to curse me, and we also made a new fortress. We restored one of the beamwegs that led south to the hills at the edge of the swamp, and where that log road met dry land we made a strong fort of earth and tree-trunks. None of Guthrum’s men tried to stop the work, though we saw Danes watching us from the higher hills, and by the time Guthrum understood what we were doing the fort was finished. In late February a hundred Danes came to challenge it, but they saw the thorn palisade protecting the ditch, saw the strength of the log wall behind the ditch, saw our spears thick against the sky and rode away.

      Next day I took sixty men to the farm where we had seen the Danish horses. They were gone, and the farm was burned out. We rode inland, seeing no enemy. We found newborn lambs slaughtered by foxes, but no Danes, and from that day on we rode ever deeper into Wessex, carrying the message that the king lived and fought, and some days we met Danish bands, but we only fought if we outnumbered them for we could not afford to lose men.

      Ælswith gave birth to a daughter whom she and Alfred called Æthelgifu. Ælswith wanted to leave the swamp. She knew that Huppa of Thornsæta was holding Dornwaraceaster for the ealdorman had replied to Alfred’s letter saying that the town was secure and, as soon as Alfred demanded it, the fyrd of Thornsæta would march to his aid. Dornwaraceaster was not so large as Cippanhamm, but it had Roman walls and Ælswith was tired of living in the marshes, tired of the endless damp, of the chill mists, and she said her newborn baby would die of the cold, and that Edward’s sickness would come back, and Bishop Alewold supported her. He had a vision of a large house in Dornwaraceaster, of warm fires and priestly comfort, but Alfred refused. If he moved to Dornwaraceaster then the Danes would immediately abandon Cippanhamm and besiege Alfred and starvation would soon threaten the garrison, but in the swamp there was food. In Dornwaraceaster Alfred would be a prisoner of the Danes, but in the swamp he was free, and he wrote more letters, telling Wessex he lived, that he grew stronger and that after Easter, but before Pentecost, he would strike the pagans.

      It rained that late winter. Rain and more rain. I remember standing on the muddy parapet of the new fort and watching the rain just falling and falling. Mail coats rusted, fabrics rotted and food went mouldy. Our boots fell apart and we had no men skilled in making new ones. We slid and

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