The Edge of Light (37 page)

Alfred waited until he could hear the war cries of the pursuing Danes before he mounted Nugget and galloped off after his men.

The Danes returned to the meadow, triumphant in the knowledge of a nearly total victory. Alfred’s army had been decimated in the pretend retreat. It was not until half an hour after they had begun the grim work of counting the dead and wounded that word came to Halfdan that they were missing hundreds of their horses.

“Alfred cut the hobbles and let them go,” Guthrum said to Erlend with faint scorn. “I did not see him among those pursuing us. He must have been busying himself with the horses. It is a nuisance, of course, but we will catch them. The sound of grain in a bucket will bring them running quickly enough.”

It was not until the bridles were missed that the Danes realized what had really happened.

“He stole our horses! Over five hundred of them!” Guthrum was scornful no longer. “We beat him into the ground, but he has five hundred of our horses! Name of the Raven, but he is a resourceful bastard.”

“He is clever,” Erlend said with narrow-eyed intensity. He was standing beside his uncle in the midst of their scattered belongings.

Guthrum pushed his bloody hand through the evenly cut bangs on his forehead. “We lost two jarls in the initial surprise attack. Two jarls and near a thousand men. We should have posted a guard to the east.” His brilliant blue stare was directed at Erlend. “You were the one to say he would try to defend Wilton, Nephew.”

Erlend was only too well aware of his own advice. “You outnumbered him over four-to-one,” he said. His eyes were very green. “None of you expected him to attack.”

After a minute: “That is so,” came the somewhat grudging reply. “It seems this Alfred is an opponent worthy of the name.”

“It might have been wiser,” said Erlend grimly, “to have left them Ethelred.”

“We must have a mounted fyrd,” Alfred said to Elswyth. “The Danes can move so much faster than we; it is one of their greatest advantages.”

It was a warm and hazy July day. Alfred had been away from Dorchester for weeks, and upon his return he and Elswyth had taken their horses and ridden out alone to Maiden Castle for the afternoon. “Do you mean a cavalry, like the Romans?” she asked. They had left their own horses to graze and were stretched out side by side on the grassy hillside where once those very Romans had defeated the native Britons, centuries before the Saxons had ever set a foot on English soil.

“No. The Danes do not fight from horseback, nor has it ever been a tradition of the Anglo-Saxons to do thus. But the Danes travel by horseback. And they move their supplies by river. We cannot hope to keep up with them, Elswyth, unless we learn to imitate them.” He punched the grass beside him. “They moved from Wilton back to Reading in a day and a half! It would have taken us three times that long, with our supplies traveling by ox wain.”

“They are also reinforced by ship,” Elswyth said. “How many more troops sailed into Reading this spring from Denmark? You need to be able to stop them on the sea as well as on the land, Alfred.”

“We have no ships!” he cried in frustration.

She shrugged. “You will have to build them.”

“We do not have the time to build ships,” he said. His voice was quiet now. Quiet and bitter.

She turned her head and looked at him. He was thinner, she thought, thinner and harder. He himself had been in the field almost constantly this spring and summer, leading his own hearthband and small groups from the shire fyrds on flying raids against the Danes, who had settled in at Wilton for a month before finally returning this last week to their base at Reading.

“They pillaged the country around Wilton pretty thoroughly,” she said now, “but they did not try to come further south.”

“Yet.”

She continued to regard him for a minute in silence. He was very tan, and his hair had streaks of blond amongst its usually darker gold. She said at last, her voice carefully neutral, “You know that you should buy them off”

“No!
I will not stoop to Burgred’s level!” His usually controlled voice rasped raw with unsuppressed emotion.

She propped her chin on her updrawn knees. The day was very warm and they both were wearing short sleeves. His muscular forearms were as brown as his face. There was a pulse beating against the skin of his throat. She could see it clearly in the open collar of his shirt. “Wessex is exhausted,” she said. “You yourself have just said that you need to reorganize, to change the way you have been fighting. You need time to do that. Buy the Danes off for now, Alfred.”

“When I accepted the crown, I told the witan that I would never give up.” He reached for a small rock and threw it down the hill. After it had bounced to the bottom and lay still, he said, “How can I sue for peace, Elswyth? It is impossible.” He picked up another rock and threw it after the first.

“The Danes have not beaten you,” she said. “You are still king, you still have an army in the field. Buy them off and Wessex will still be an independent kingdom. The Danes could not do to you what they did to Northumbria and East Anglia. The folk of Wessex know that well. Their spirit is not broken. They will understand, if you buy a peace, that it is only for a while, that you are buying time to prepare for the future.”

“I sneered at Burgred when he bought a peace at Nottingham,” he said. She had scarcely ever heard him sound so bitter. “And now you suggest I do the same thing myself?”

She said, “It sounds to me like your pride is getting in the way of your good sense.”

There was a reverberating silence. Then, with a fierce lithe movement, Alfred jumped to his feet. He turned his back on her and threw another rock. It arced out into the air, soaring with the force with which it had been thrown, and Elswyth laughed. “Alfred, stop being so dramatic. Cry a peace. Collect more horses for your fyrds. Build some ships. Then, when they come back, we will be ready for them.”

He turned to stare at her. His eyes were blazing. “It is not funny!” He was furious.

“The situation is not funny,” she said. “You are.” Then, impatiently: “For heaven’s sake, Alfred, no one is like to confuse you with that fat slug Burgred. They are far more like to praise your good sense. Stop taking the situation so personally.”

An odd, arrested look came over his face. He said slowly, “I remember what my father said to me once. It was when he resigned his kingdom to my brother Ethelbald without a fight. He said, ‘A true king is one who ever sets the good of his kingdom above his own personal ambition.’“

“Very good advice,” Elswyth said.

“I thought then that he was wrong, that he should have fought.”

“The Bible says that there is a season for everything,” Elswyth said. “A season for fighting and a season for peace. I think Wessex needs a season of peace, Alfred. Even if it hurts your pride to sue for it.”

Another silence fell, this one of a considering sort. He turned away from her again and stared off toward the north. “There are other things that need to be done,” he said. “We need to start to build fortifications for our people to shelter within. They are too vulnerable, left alone on their farms.”

She did not say anything, but her dark blue eyes never left the back of his head. “We need a better system of communication, also,” he said.

Silence fell again. The birds circled overhead, the insects buzzed. A white cloud very briefly blocked the sun. Alfred turned at last and looked at his wife, “You are right,” he said. His voice was quiet, but the bitterness had gone. “I must sue for peace.”

“You knew it all along,” she said. “You just needed a push.”

He held out his arms and she jumped to her feet and went to him. “I hate it as much as you do,” she said, her arms locked about his waist, her cheek against his shoulder. “I want them dead, every last one of them. But you cannot keep an army in the field long enough to finish the task.”

“Not this year,” he agreed with a sigh. “But I will never give up, Elswyth. They will have to kill me first.”

“We will none of us give up,” she answered, tightening her arms. “I am not so good a Christian as you, Alfred, but I can see that if we allow the Danes to triumph, we will have plunged England back into the pagan dark. We cannot allow that to happen.”

His mouth was pressed against the top of her head. “No.” His voice sounded muffled.

“You will have to teach many of the ceorls to ride,” she said. “I will be glad to help with that.”

He looked down into her face, and his own suddenly blazed with laughter. “The poor ceorls! The minute one jabs a horse’s mouth with the bit, you will murder him.”

“I certainly will.” Her blue eyes were filled with zeal
.
“You will have to break horses to pull supply wagons too. As you said, the oxen are too slow.”

“And will you help with that?”

“Certainly.” She grinned at him. “It is going to be fun.”

He bent his head and kissed her. Hard. “Elswyth,” he said, “I love you.”

“Not as much as I love you.”

“I do too.” They began to walk toward their grazing horses.

“How much do you love me?” she asked, beginning a familiar game which kept them occupied most of the way back to Dorchester.

There was no opposition to Alfred’s decision to sue for peace. As Elswyth had said, Wessex was exhausted. Exhausted, but not defeated. If the West Saxons had not triumphed, then neither had the Danes. In the eight engagements fought during 871, the Danes had lost one king, nine jarls, and thousands of soldiers. When Alfred proposed a peace, Halfdan accepted.

The Danish terms were hard for Alfred to swallow. The Vikings were to keep all the plunder they had amassed and be given free passage out of the country. Alfred also had to collect and pay a sum of gold, not near the amount Burgred had pledged, but still enough to hurt Alfred’s pride. He did it, however, and the thanes and ceorls of Wessex paid ungrudgingly.

In September the Danish Great Army left Reading and moved down the River Thames to London, the chief port of Mercia. Alfred sent a small band of thanes under Ethelred of Mercia to keep watch on London, and settled down himself to ready Wessex for when the Danes returned. No one in Wessex had any doubt that they would.

III

THE PEACE

A.D. 872-876

It was a gray-blue February day and the melting snow had turned the road into a quagmire of slush and mud. Erlend pulled his cloak more closely about his shoulders and toiled onward, his head bent a little against the gusting wind. Another day, he thought, and he would be at Wantage.

This new venture into Alfred’s territory had been Erlend’s own idea. The Danes had settled down in London most comfortably this past autumn and winter. There had been scarcely any need to fight. A few simple raids, and the King of Mercia had agreed to exact a general levy from his kingdom in order to keep the peace.

“A mewling coward,” was Guthrum’s opinion of Burgred. “We will milk all the geld from his kingdom, then take the rest by the sword.” He shrugged his big shoulders. “Burgred is a fool.”

“Alfred bought peace also,” Erlend had said.

“Alfred knew what he was about.” The name of the West Saxon king had wiped all the contempt from Guthrum’s face. “That one is no fool. Nor will he be wasting his time while we are busy elsewhere.”

That was when Erlend had offered to take his harp and once again go in disguise into the kingdom of the West Saxons.

“Let the boy go if he wishes to.” Halfdan had shrugged when Guthrum brought the matter before him. “It can do no harm and he may even discover something useful to us. He is of no value to us while we lie here in London. Let him make himself useful elsewhere.”

Guthrum sent out scouts, who discovered that Alfred was at Wantage. Then Guthrum had Erlend sail up the Thames almost to Reading before being put ashore to walk the roads in his guise of wandering harper. Erlend had been walking west along the Thames for almost a full day now, and a short way ahead he would intersect with the old Roman road that went north toward Oxford. He knew, from his previous travels, that he could take the road north for some miles before cutting west again to the royal manor of Wantage.

Erlend had not proposed this new venture to Guthrum on a whim. It was something he had been thinking of all the while the Danes were so comfortably established in London. He knew he could insinuate himself back into Alfred’s camp, and it was a prospect that pleased him. For one thing, he had enjoyed himself thoroughly all the time he was at Wilton; he had felt clever and resourceful, making fools of the enemy while gathering information for his own people. It had been much more satisfying than merely wandering the roads playing his harp for the poor folk of the land.

In fact, Erlend had felt personally affronted by Alfred’s attack on the unprepared Danish camp near Wilton. After all, it was Erlend who had told Halfdan the numbers of Alfred’s army; it was Erlend’s valuable information that had caused the Danes to let down their guard.

Name of the Raven, who would have expected Alfred to attack? He had been outnumbered more than four-to-one!

It was some small comfort to Erlend that the West Saxons had suffered heavy losses in the feigned Danish retreat, but the Danes had also lost many men in that first charge. And then Alfred had taken their precious horses. Nearly five hundred of them!

All the long autumn and winter, while the Danes made merry in London, Erlend had brooded. He felt he had a score to settle with Alfred of Wessex.

And, too, there was one other thing that Erlend held against the King of the West Saxons, It was the way Alfred had taken his kingship at the expense of his younger nephew. It rang all too clearly of the way Asmund had taken Nasgaard from Erlend himself.

For Erlend had not forgotten what he had left behind him in Jutland, nor had he resigned himself to its loss. He had vowed, as he sailed out of sight of Danish land, that one day he would win back his patrimony, that one day Nasgaard would once again be his. It was a vow he intended to keep.