LITMIR.BIZ

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      ‘Yes,’ Mildrith said, refusing to meet my eyes. A more sensible man would have explored Mildrith’s circumstances before the marriage contract was made, but I had just seen marriage as a route to the fleet. So now I had the fleet, I had the debt and I had the girl, and I also had a new enemy, Odda the Younger, who had plainly wanted Mildrith for himself, though his father, wisely, had refused to saddle his family with the crippling debt, nor, I suspected, did he want his son to marry beneath him.

      There is a hierarchy among men. Beocca liked to tell me it reflected the hierarchy of heaven, and perhaps it does, but I know nothing of that, but I do know how men are ranked. At the top is the king, and beneath him are his sons, and then come the Ealdormen who are the chief nobles of the land and without land a man cannot be noble, though I was, because I have never abandoned my claim to Bebbanburg. The king and his Ealdormen are the power of a kingdom, the men who hold great lands and raise the armies, and beneath them are the lesser nobles, usually called reeves, and they are responsible for law in a lord’s land, though a man can cease to be a reeve if he displeases his lord. The reeves are drawn from the ranks of thegns, who are wealthy men who can lead followers to war, but who lack the wide holdings of noblemen like Odda or my father. Beneath the thegns are the ceorls, who are all free men, but if a ceorl loses his livelihood then he could well become a slave, which is the bottom of the dungheap. Slaves can be, and often are, freed, though unless a slave’s lord gives him land or money he will soon be a slave again. Mildrith’s father had been a thegn, and Odda had made him a reeve, responsible for keeping the peace in a wide swathe of southern Defnascir, but he had also been a thegn of insufficient land, whose foolishness had diminished the little he possessed, and so he had left Mildrith impoverished which made her unsuitable as a wife for an Ealdorman’s son, though she was reckoned good enough for an exiled lord from Northumbria. In truth she was just another pawn on Alfred’s chessboard and he had only given her to me so that I became responsible for paying the church a vast sum.

      He was a spider, I thought sourly, a priestly-black spider spinning sticky webs, and I thought I had been so clever when I talked to him in the hall at Cippanhamm. In truth I could have prayed openly to Thor before pissing on the relics of Alfred’s altar and he would still have given me the fleet because he knew the fleet would have little to do in the coming war, and he had only wanted to trap me for his future ambitions in the north of England. So now I was trapped, and the bastard Ealdorman Odda had carefully let me walk into the trap.

      The thought of Defnascir’s Ealdorman prompted a question from me. ‘What bride price did Odda give you?’ I asked Mildrith.

      ‘Fifteen shillings, lord.’

      ‘Fifteen shillings?’ I asked, shocked.

      ‘Yes, lord.’

      ‘The cheap bastard,’ I said.

      ‘Cut the rest out of him,’ Leofric snarled. A pair of very blue eyes looked at him, then at me, then vanished under the cloak again.

      Her twelve hides of land, that were now mine, lay in the hills above the River Uisc’s sea-reach, in a place called Oxton which simply means a farm where oxen are kept. It was a shieling, as the Danes would say, a farmstead, and the house had a thatch so overgrown with moss and grass that it looked like an earth mound. There was no hall, and a nobleman needs a hall in which to feed his followers, but it did have a cattle shed and a pig shed and land enough to support sixteen slaves and five families of tenants, all of whom were summoned to greet me, as well as half a dozen household servants, most of whom were also slaves, and they welcomed Mildrith fondly for, since her father’s death, she had been living in the household of Ealdorman Odda’s wife while the farmstead was managed by a man called Oswald who looked about as trustworthy as a stoat.

      That night we made a meal of peas, leeks, stale bread and sour ale, and that was my first marriage feast in my own house which was also a house under threat of debt. Next morning it had stopped raining and I breakfasted on more stale bread and sour ale, and then walked with Mildrith to a hilltop from where I could stare down at the wide sea-reach that lay across the land like the flattened grey blade of an axe. ‘Where do these folk go,’ I asked, meaning her slaves and tenants, ‘when the Danes come?’

      ‘Into the hills, lord.’

      ‘My name is Uhtred.’

      ‘Into the hills, Uhtred.’

      ‘You won’t go into the hills,’ I said firmly.

      ‘I won’t?’ Her eyes widened in alarm.

      ‘You will come with me to Hamtun,’ I said, ‘and we shall have a house there so long as I command the fleet.’

      She nodded, plainly nervous, and then I took her hand, opened it, and poured in thirty-three shillings, so many coins that they spilt onto her lap. ‘Yours, wife,’ I said.

      And so she was. My wife. And that same day we left, going eastwards, man and wife.

      The story hurries now. It quickens like a stream coming to a fall in the hills and, like a cascade foaming down jumbled rocks, it gets angry and violent, confused even. For it was in that year, 876, that the Danes made their greatest effort yet to rid England of its last kingdom, and the onslaught was huge, savage and sudden.

      Guthrum the Unlucky led the assault. He had been living in Grantaceaster, calling himself King of East Anglia, and Alfred, I think, assumed he would have good warning if Guthrum’s army left that place, but the West Saxon spies failed and the warnings did not come, and the Danish army was all mounted on horses, and Alfred’s troops were in the wrong place and Guthrum led his men south across the Temes and clear across all Wessex to capture a great fortress on the south coast. That fortress was called Werham and it lay not very far west of Hamtun, though between us and it lay a vast stretch of inland sea called the Poole. Guthrum’s army assaulted Werham, captured it, raped the nuns in Werham’s nunnery, and did it all before Alfred could react. Once inside the fortress Guthrum was protected by two rivers, one to the north of the town and the other to the south. To the east was the wide placid Poole and a massive wall and ditch guarded the only approach from the west.

      There was nothing the fleet could do. As soon as we heard that the Danes were in Werham we readied ourselves for sea, but no sooner had we reached the open water than we saw their fleet and that ended our ambitions.

      I have never seen so many ships. Guthrum had marched across Wessex with close to a thousand horsemen, but now the rest of his army came by sea and their ships darkened the water. There were hundreds of boats. Men later said three hundred and fifty, though I think there were fewer, but certainly there were more than two hundred. Ship after ship, dragon prow after serpent head, oars churning the dark sea white, a fleet going to battle, and all we could do was slink back into Hamtun and pray that the Danes did not sail up Hamtun Water to slaughter us.

      They did not. The fleet sailed on to join Guthrum in Werham, so now a huge Danish army was lodged in southern Wessex, and I remembered Ragnar’s advice to Guthrum. Split their forces, Ragnar had said, and that surely meant another Danish army lay somewhere to the north, just waiting to attack, and when Alfred went to meet that second army, Guthrum would erupt from behind Werham’s walls to attack him in the rear.

      ‘It’s the end of England,’ Leofric said darkly. He was not much given to gloom, but that day he was downcast. Mildrith and I had taken a house in Hamtun, one close to the water, and he ate with us most nights we were in the town. We were still taking the ships out, now in a flotilla of twelve, always in hope of catching some Danish ships unawares, but their raiders only sallied out of the Poole in large numbers, never fewer than thirty ships, and I dared not lose Alfred’s navy in a suicidal attack on such large forces. In the height of the summer a Danish force came to Hamtun’s water, rowing almost to our anchorage, and we lashed our ships together, donned armour, sharpened weapons and waited for their attack. But they were no more minded for battle than we were. To reach us they would have to negotiate a mud-bordered channel and they could only put two ships abreast in that place and so they were content to jeer at us from the open water and then leave.

      Guthrum waited in Werham and what he waited for, we later learned, was for Halfdan

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