The Burning Land (31 page)

“Women brought sin into this world,” Pyrlig said, “and by God they do keep it bubbling. But I can’t imagine a world without them, can you?”

“She wants me to go to her?”

“Yes,” Pyrlig said, “and she sent me to fetch you. She also told me to tell you something else. That if you cannot keep the oath then she releases you from it.”

“So I don’t have to go,” I said.

“No.”

“But I made the oath.”

“Yes.”

To Æthelflæd. I had escaped Alfred and felt nothing but relief at the freedom I had found, and now his daughter summoned me. And Pyrlig was right. Some oaths are made with love, and those we cannot break.

All winter I had felt like a steersman in a fog, tideswept to nowhere, windblown to no harbor, lost, but now it was as though the fog lifted. The Fates had shown me the landmark I had sought, and if it was not the landmark I had wished for, it still gave my ship direction.

I had indeed sworn an oath to Æthelflæd. Almost every promise I had ever made to her father had been wrung from me, sometimes forced from me, but so was the oath I swore to Æthelflæd. The promise to serve her had been her price for giving me men to help in the desperate assault on Lundene, and I remembered resenting that price, but I had still knelt to her and given her the vow.

I had known Æthelflæd since she was a child, the one child of Alfred’s who had mischief and life and laughter, and I had seen those qualities curdled by the marriage to my cousin. And in the months and years after the oath I had come to love her, not as I loved Gisela who was a friend to Æthelflæd, but as a sparkling girl whose light was being doused by the cruelty of men. And I had served her. I had protected her. And now she asked me to protect her again, and the request filled me with indecision. I busied the next few days with activity, hunting and practicing weapons, and Finan, who often sparred sword-to-sword with me, stepped back one day and asked if I was trying to kill him. “I’m sorry,” I said.

“It’s the Welsh priest, isn’t it?” he asked.

“It’s fate,” I said.

“And where’s fate taking us, lord?” he asked.

“South,” I said, “south,” and I hated that word. I was a northerner, Northumbria was my country, yet the spinners were taking me south.

“To Alfred?” Finan asked in disbelief.

“No,” I said, “to Æthelflæd,” and as I said her name I knew I could delay no longer.

So, a week after Haesten left, I went to Ragnar and I lied to him because I did not want him to see my betrayal. “I’m going to protect my children,” I told him.

“Haesten surely won’t kill them,” he tried to reassure me.

“But Skade will.”

He thought about that, then nodded. “True.”

“Or she’ll sell them into slavery,” I said bleakly. “She hates me.”

“Then you must go,” he said. And so I rode from Dunholm, and my men came with me because they were oath-sworn, and their
families came too and because of that Ragnar knew I was riding away for good. He had watched my men load packhorses with mail and weapons, and he had gazed at me, hurt and puzzled. “Are you going to Wessex?” he asked.

“No,” I promised him, and I spoke truthfully.

Brida knew it. “Then where?” she demanded angrily.

“To my children.”

“You’ll bring them back here?” Ragnar had asked eagerly.

“There is a friend,” I avoided answering his question, “who has the care of my children, and she is in trouble.”

Brida cut through my evasions. “Alfred’s daughter?” she asked scornfully.

“Yes.”

“Who hates the Danes,” Brida said.

“She has pleaded for my help,” I spoke to Ragnar, “and I cannot refuse her.”

“Women weaken you,” Brida snarled at me. “What of your promise to sail with Ragnar?”

“I made no such promise,” I snapped back at her.

“We need you!” Ragnar pleaded.

“Me and my half-crew?”

“If you don’t help destroy Wessex,” Brida said, “you will get no share in Wessex’s wealth, and without that, Uhtred, you have no hopes of Bebbanburg.”

“I am riding to find my children,” I said obstinately, and both Ragnar and Brida knew that was a half-truth at best.

“You were always a Saxon before you were a Dane,” Brida said derisively. “You want to be a Dane, but you don’t have the courage.”

“You may be right,” I admitted.

“We should kill you now,” Brida said, and she meant it.

Ragnar laid a hand on Brida’s arm to silence her, then embraced me. “You are my brother,” he said. He held me close for an instant. He knew, and I knew, that I was going back to the Saxons, that we would forever be on opposing sides, and all I could do was promise that I would never fight against him.

“And will you betray our plans to Alfred?” Brida demanded. Ragnar might make his peace with my departure, but Brida was ever unforgiving.

“I hate Alfred,” I said, “and wish you joy in toppling his kingdom.”

There, I have written it, and it hurt me to write it because the memory of that parting is so painful. Brida hated me at that moment, and Ragnar was saddened, and I was a coward. I hid behind the fate of my children and betrayed my friendship. All winter Ragnar had sheltered me and fed my men, and now I deserted him. He had been happy with me at his side, and he was unhappy at the prospect of fighting Wessex, but he had thought he and I would wage that war together. Now I left him. He allowed me to leave him. Brida truly would have killed me that day, but Ragnar forgave me. It was a clear spring day. It was the day my life changed. Wyrd bið ful ãræd.

So we rode south and for a long time I could not speak. Father Pyrlig sensed my mood and said nothing till at last I broke the morose silence. “You say my cousin’s sick in the mind?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said, “and no.”

“Thank you for making it so plain,” I said.

He half smiled. He rode beside me, eyes narrowed against the day’s sun. “He’s not mad as poor Guthred is mad,” he said after a while, “he doesn’t have visions or talk to the angels or chew the rushes. He’s angry that he’s not a king. Æthelred knows that when he dies Mercia will fall to Wessex. That’s what Alfred wants, and what Alfred wants he usually gets.”

“So why does Æthelflæd send for me?”

“Your cousin hates his wife,” Pyrlig said, his voice low so it would not carry to Finan and Sihtric who rode close behind. A dog harried sheep out of our path, obeying the shrill whistle of a shepherd on a farther hill. Pyrlig sighed. “Every time he sees Æthelflæd,” he went on, “he feels the chains that Alfred has hung on him. He would be king, and he cannot be king because Alfred will not allow it.”

“Because Alfred wants to be King of Mercia?”

“Alfred wants to be King of England,” Pyrlig said, “and if he can
not boast that title, then he would have his son wear that crown. And so there cannot be another Saxon king. A king is God’s anointed, a king is sacred, so there must be no other anointed king to obstruct the path.”

“And Æthelred resents that,” I said.

“He does, and he would punish his wife.”

“How?”

“By divorcing her.”

“Alfred wouldn’t stand for it,” I said dismissively.

“Alfred is a sick man. He could die at any moment.”

“Divorcing her,” I said, “which means…” I paused. Æthelflæd, of course, had told me of her husband’s ambitions before, but I still found them scarcely credible. “No, he wouldn’t do that!”

“He tried when we all thought Alfred lay dying,” Pyrlig said, “and Æthelflæd got word of what was to happen and took refuge in a nunnery at Lecelad.”

“On the border of Wessex?”

Pyrlig nodded. “So she can flee to her father if they try again, which they will.”

I swore softly. “Aldhelm?” I asked.

“The Lord Aldhelm,” Pyrlig agreed.

“Æthelred will force her to Aldhelm’s bed?” I asked, my voice rising with incredulity.

“That would be the Lord Æthelred’s pleasure,” Pyrlig said drily, “and doubtless Lord Aldhelm’s greater pleasure. And when it is done Æthelred can offer the church proof of adultery, confine her to a nunnery and the marriage is over. Then he’s free to marry again, beget an heir, and as soon as Alfred dies he can call himself king.”

“So who protects her?” I asked, “and who protects my children?”

“Nuns.”

“No man protects her?”

“Her husband is the giver of gold, not she,” Pyrlig said. “Men love her, but she has no wealth to give them.”

“She does now,” I said savagely, and dug my spurs into the horse I had purchased in Dunholm. I did not have much wealth left. I had purchased more than seventy horses to make this journey
possible, and the little silver that remained was packed into two saddlebags, but I had Serpent-Breath and I had Wasp-Sting and now, because the three spinners had twisted my life yet again, I had a purpose. I would go to Æthelflæd.

Lecelad was a straggle of hovels built along the northern bank of the Temes where the Lec, a boggy stream, flowed into the river. A watermill stood where the stream emptied itself, and next to it was a wharf where a handful of small, leaking boats was tied. At the eastern end of the village street, which was a collection of mud-colored puddles, was the convent. It was surrounded by a palisade built, I suspected, to keep the nuns in rather than their enemies out, and over that rain-darkened wall reared a gaunt and ugly church made of timber and wattle. The bell-tower scraped the low clouds as rain seethed from the west. On the far side of the Temes was a wooden landing stage and above it, on the bank, a group of men who sheltered beneath a makeshift awning propped on poles. They were all in mail, their spears stacked against a willow. I stepped onto the wharf, cupped my hands, and shouted at them. “Who do you serve?”

“Lord Æthelnoth!” one of the men shouted back. He did not recognize me. I was swathed in a dark cloak and had a hood over my fair hair.

“Why are you there?” I shouted, but the only reply was a shrug of incomprehension.

That southern bank was West Saxon territory, which was doubtless why Æthelflæd had chosen Lecelad. She could flee into her father’s kingdom at a moment’s notice, though Alfred, who held the bonds of marriage to be sacred, would doubtless be reluctant to offer her refuge for fear of the resultant scandal. Nevertheless I guessed he had ordered Ealdorman Æthelnoth of Sumorsæte to watch the convent, if for no other reason than to report any strange happenings on the river’s Mercian bank. They would have something to report now, I thought.

“Who are you, lord?” the man called back across the river. He
might not have recognized me, but he saw I led a band of horsemen and perhaps the gold of my lavish cloak-brooch glinted in the dull rainy air.

I ignored his question, turning instead to Finan who grinned at me from horseback. “Just thirty men, lord,” he told me. I had sent him to explore the village and find how many men guarded the convent.

“Is that all?”

“There are more in a village to the north,” he said.

“Who commands the thirty?”

“Some poor bastard who almost shit himself when he saw us.”

The thirty men were posted in Lecelad itself, presumably on my cousin’s orders and presumably to make sure Æthelflæd stayed immured in the ugly convent. I hauled myself into the wet, slippery saddle and fiddled my right foot into the stirrup. “Let’s kick this wasp’s nest,” I said.

I led my men eastward past cottages, dunghills, and rooting pigs. Some folk watched us from doorways, while at the street’s end, in front of the convent itself, a straggle of men in leather jerkins and rusted helmets waited, but if they had orders to prevent anyone entering the convent they were in no mood to enforce them. They moved sullenly aside as we approached. I ignored them and they neither demanded my name nor tried to stop us.

I kicked the convent’s gate, spattering rain from its upper edge. My horse whinnied, and I kicked the gate a second time. The Mercian troops watched. One ran into an alley and I suspected he was going to fetch help. “We’ll be fighting someone before this day’s through,” I told Finan.

“I hope so, lord,” he said gloomily, “it’s been much too long.”

A small hatch in the big gate slid open and a woman’s face appeared in the hole. “What do you want?” the face demanded.

“To get out of this rain,” I said.

“The villagers will offer you shelter,” the woman said and began to slide the hatch shut, but I managed to get my toe into the space.

“You can open the gate,” I said, “or you can watch us chop it to splinters.”

“They are friends of the Lady Æthelflæd,” Father Pyrlig intervened helpfully.

The hatch slid fully open again. “Is that you, father?”

“It is, sister.”

“Have manners vanished from the surface of God’s earth?” she asked.

“He can’t help it, sister,” Pyrlig said, “he’s just a brute.” He grinned at me.

“Remove your foot,” the woman demanded crossly, and when I obeyed she closed the hatch and I heard the locking bar being lifted. Then the gate creaked wide.

I climbed out of the saddle. “Wait,” I told my men, and walked into the nunnery’s courtyard. The gaunt church comprised the whole of the southern part, while the other three sides were edged with low timber buildings, thatched with straw, in which I assumed the nuns slept, ate, and spun wool. The nun, who introduced herself as the Abbess Werburgh, bowed to me. “You’re truly a friend of the Lady Æthelflæd?” she asked. She was an elderly woman, so small that she scarcely reached my waist, but she had a fierce face.

“I am.”

Werburgh twitched with disapproval when she noticed the hammer of Thor hanging at my neck. “And your name?” she demanded, but just then a shriek sounded and a child hurtled out of a doorway and pelted across the puddled courtyard.

It was Stiorra, my daughter, and she threw herself at me, wrapping her arms around my neck and her legs around my waist. I was glad it was raining, or else the nun might have thought the drops on my face were tears. They were. “I knew you’d come,” Stiorra said fiercely, “I knew, I knew, I knew.”

“You’re Lord Uhtred?” the abbess asked.

“Yes.”

“Thank God,” she said.

Stiorra was telling me of her adventures, and Osbert, my youngest, had run to me and was trying to climb my leg. Uhtred, my eldest son, was nowhere to be seen. I picked up Osbert and shouted for Finan to bring the other men inside. “I don’t know how long
we’re staying,” I told the Abbess Werburgh, “but the horses need stabling and food.”