The Pale Horseman (26 page)

He sniffed at that insult, then looked disapprovingly at Iseult. ‘You have news of your
wife?'

'None.'

Beocca had some news, though none of Mildrith. He had fled south in front of the invading
Danes, getting as far as Dornwaraceaster in Thornsaeta where he had found refuge with some
monks. The Danes had come, but the monks had received warning of their approach and had
hidden in an ancient fort that lay near the town. The Danes had sacked Dornwaraceaster,
taking silver, coins and women, then they had moved eastwards and shortly after that
Huppa, the Ealdorman of Thornsaeta, had come to the town with fifty warriors. Huppa had
set the monks and townspeople to mending the old Roman walls.

'The folk there are safe for the moment,' Beocca told me, 'but there is not sufficient
food if the Danes return and lay siege.'

Then Beocca had heard that Alfred was in the great swamps and Beocca had travelled alone,
though on his last day of walking he had met six soldiers going to Alfred and so he had
finished his journey with them. He brought no news of Wulfhere, but he had been told that Odda
the Younger was somewhere on the upper reaches of the Uisc in an ancient fort built by the
old people. Beocca had seen no Danes on his journey.

'They raid everywhere,' he said gloomily, 'but God be praised we saw none of them.'

'Is Dornwaraceaster a large place?' I asked.

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'Large enough. It had three fine churches, three!'

'A market?'

'Indeed, it was prosperous before the Danes came.'

'Yet the Danes didn't stay there?'

'Nor were they at Gifle,' he said, ‘and that's a goodly place.'

Guthrum had surprised Alfred, defeated the forces at Cippanhamm and driven the king
into hiding, but to hold Wessex he needed to take all her walled towns, and if Beocca could
walk three days across country and see no Danes then it suggested Guthrum did not have the men
to hold all he had taken. He could bring more men from Mercia or East Anglia, but then those
places might rise against their weakened Danish overlords, so Guthrum had to be hoping that
more ships would come from Denmark. In the meantime, we learned, he had garrisons in Bafium,
Readingum, Maerlebeorg and Andefera, and doubtless he held other places, and Alfred
suspected, rightly as it turned out, that most of eastern Wessex was in Danish hands, but
great stretches of the country were still free of the enemy. Guthrum's men were making raids
into those stretches, but they did not have sufficient force to garrison towns like
Wintanceaster, Gifle or Dornwaraceaster.

In the early summer, Alfred knew, more ships would bring more Danes, so he had to strike
before then, to which end, on the day after Beocca arrived, he summoned a council.

There were now enough men on Æthelingaeg for a royal formality to prevail. I no longer
found Alfred sitting outside a hut in the evening, but instead had to seek an audience with
him. On the Monday of the council he gave orders that a large house was to be made into a
church, and the family that lived there was evicted and some of the newly-arrived soldiers
were ordered to make a great cross for the gable and to carve new windows in the walls. The
council itself met in what had been Haswold's hall, and Alfred had waited till we were
assembled before making his entrance, and we had all stood as he came in and waited as he
took one of the two chairs on the newly-made dais. Ælswith sat beside him, her pregnant
belly swathed in the silver fur cloak that was still stained with Haswold's blood.

We were not allowed to sit until the Bishop of Exanceaster said a prayer, and that took
time, but at last the king waved us down. There were six priests in the half circle and six
warriors. I sat beside Leofric, while the other four soldiers were newly-arrived men who
had served in Alfred's household troops. One of those was a grey-bearded man called Egwine
who told me he had led a hundred men at Uisc's Hill and plainly thought he should now lead all
the troops gathered in the swamp. I knew he had urged his case with the king and with Beocca
who sat just below the dais at a rickety table on which he was trying to record what was said
at the council. Beocca was having difficulties for his ink was ancient and faded, his
quill kept splitting and his parchments were wide margins torn from a missal, so he was
unhappy, but Alfred liked to reduce arguments to writing.

The king formally thanked the bishop for his prayer, then announced, sensibly enough,
that we could not hope to deal with Guthrum until Svein was defeated. Svein was the
immediate threat for, though most of his men had gone south to raid Defnascir, he still had
the ships with which to enter the swamp. 'Twenty-four ships,' Alfred said, raising an
eyebrow at me.

'Twenty-four, lord,' I confirmed.

'So, when his men are assembled, he can muster near a thousand men.' Alfred let that
figure linger awhile. Beocca frowned as his split quill spattered ink on his tiny patch of
parchment.

'But a few days ago,' Alfred went on, 'there were only seventy ship-guards at the mouth
of the Pedredan.'

'Around seventy,' I said. 'There could be more we didn't see.'

'Fewer than a hundred, though?'

'I suspect so, lord.'

'So we must deal with them,' Alfred said, 'before the rest return to their ships.'

There was another silence. All of us knew how weak we were. A few men arrived every day,
like the half-dozen who had come with Beocca, but they came slowly, either because the news
of Alfred's existence was spreading slowly, or else because the weather was cold and men
do not like to travel on wet, cold days.

Nor were there any thegns among the newcomers, not one. Thegns were noblemen, men of
property, men who could bring scores of well armed followers to a fight, and every shire had
its thegns who ranked just below the reeve and ealdorman, who were themselves thegns.
Thegns were the power of Wessex, but none had come to Æthelingaeg.

Some, we heard, had fled abroad, while others tried to protect their property. Alfred, I
was certain, would have felt more comfortable if he had a dozen thegns about him, but
instead he had me and Leofric and Egwine.

'What are our forces now?' Alfred asked us.

'We have over a hundred men,' Egwine said brightly.

'Of whom only sixty or seventy are fit to fight,' I said. There had been an outbreak of
sickness, men vomiting and shivering and hardly able to control their bowels. Whenever
troops gather such sickness seems to strike.

'Is that enough?' Alfred asked.

'Enough for what, lord?' Egwine was not quick-witted.

'Enough to get rid of Svein, of course,' Alfred said, and again there was silence because
the question was absurd.

Then Egwine straightened his shoulders. 'More than enough, lord.'

Ælswith bestowed a smile on him.

'And how would you propose doing it?' Alfred asked.

'Take every man we have, lord,' Egwine said, 'every fit man, and attack them. Attack
them!'

Beocca was not writing. He knew when he was hearing nonsense and he was not going to
waste scarce ink on bad ideas.

Alfred looked at me. 'Can it be done?'

'They'll see us coming,' I said, 'they'll be ready.'

'March inland,' Egwine said, 'come from the hills.'

Again Alfred looked at me.

'That will leave Æthelingaeg undefended,' I said, 'and it will take at least three days,
at the end of which our men will be cold, hungry and tired, and the Danes will see us coming
when we emerge from the hills, and that'll give them time to put on armour and gather weapons.
And at best it will be equal numbers. At worst?' I just shrugged. After three or four days the
rest of Svein's forces might have returned and our seventy or eighty men would be facing a
horde.

'So how do you do it?' Alfred asked.

'We destroy their boats,' I said.

'Go on.'

'Without boats,' I said, 'they can't come up the rivers. Without boats, they're
stranded.'

Alfred nodded. Beocca was scratching away again.

'So how do you destroy the boats?' the king asked.

I did not know. We could take seventy men to fight their seventy, but at the end of the
fight, even if we won, we would be lucky to have twenty men still standing. Those twenty could
burn the boats, of course, but I doubted we would survive that long. There were scores of
Danish women at Cynuit and, if it came to a fight, they would join in and the odds were that
we would be defeated.

'Fire,' Egwine said enthusiastically. 'Carry fire in punts and throw the fire from the
river.'

'There are ship-guards,' I said tiredly, 'and they'll be throwing spears and axes,
sending arrows, and you might burn one boat, but that's all.'

'Go at night,' Egwine said.

'It's almost a full moon,' I said, 'and they'll see us coming. And if the moon is clouded
we won't see their fleet.'

'So how do you do it?' Alfred demanded again.

'God will send fire from heaven,' Bishop Alewold said, and no one responded.

Alfred stood. We all got to our feet. Then he pointed at me.

'You will destroy Svein's fleet,' he said, 'and I would know how you plan to do it by this
evening. If you cannot do it then you,' he pointed to Egwine, 'will travel to Defnascir,
find Ealdorman Odda and tell him to bring his forces to the river mouth and do the job for
us.'

'Yes, lord,' Egwine said.

'By tonight,' Alfred said to me coldly, and then he walked out.

He left me angry. He had meant to leave me angry. I stalked up to the newly-made fort with
Leofric and stared across the marshes to where the clouds heaped above the Saefern.

'How are we to burn twenty-four ships?' I demanded.

'God will send fire from heaven,' Leofric said, 'of course.'

'I'd rather he sent a thousand troops.'

'Alfred won't summon Odda,' Leofric said. 'He just said that to annoy you.'

'But he's right, isn't he?' I said grudgingly. 'We have to get rid of Svein.'

'How?'

I stared at the tangled barricade that Haswold had made from felled trees. The water,
instead, of flowing downstream, was coming upstream because the tide was on the flood and
so the ripples ran eastwards from the tangled branches.

'I remember a story,' I said, 'from when I was a small child.' I paused, trying to recall
the tale which, I assume, had been told to me by Beocca. 'The Christian god divided a sea,
isn't that right?'

'Moses did,' Leofric said.

'And when the enemy followed,' I said, 'they were drowned.'

‘Clever,' Leofric said.

‘So that's how we'll do it,' I said.

‘How?'

But instead of telling him I summoned the marsh men and talked with them, and by that night
I had my plan and, because it was taken from the scriptures, Alfred approved it readily. It
took another day to get everything ready. We had to gather sufficient punts to carry
forty men and I also needed Eofer, the simpleminded archer. He was unhappy, not
understanding what I wanted, and he gibbered at us and looked terrified, but then a small
girl, perhaps ten or eleven years old, took his hand and explained that he had to go hunting
with us.

'He trusts you?' I asked the child.

'He's my uncle,' she said. Eofer was holding her hand and he was calm again.

‘Does Eofer do what you tell him?'

She nodded, her small face serious, and I told her she must come with us to keep her uncle
happy.

We left before the dawn. We were twenty marsh men, skilled with boats, twenty warriors, a
simpleminded archer, a child and Iseult. Alfred, of course, did not want me to take Iseult,
but I ignored him and he did not argue. Instead he watched us leave, then went to
Æthelingaeg's church that now boasted a newly-made cross of alder-wood nailed to its
gable.

And low in the sky above the cross was the full moon. She was low and ghostly pale, and as
the sun rose she faded even more, but as the ten punts drifted down the river I stared at her
and said a silent prayer to Hoder because the moon is his woman and it was she who must give us
victory. Because, for the first time since Guthrum had struck in a winter's dawn, the Saxons
were fighting back.

Before the Pedredan reaches the sea it makes a great curve through the swamp, a curve that
is almost three-quarters of a circle and on the inside of the bank where the curve begins
there was another tiny settlement; just a half-dozen hovels built on stilts sunk into a
slight rise in the ground. The settlement was called Palfleot, which means the place with the
stakes, for the folk who had once lived-there had staked eel and fish traps in the nearby
streams, but the Danes had driven those folk away and burned their houses, so that Palfleot was
now a place of charred pilings and blackened mud. We landed there, shivering in the dawn.
The tide was falling, exposing the great banks of sand and mud across which Iseult and I had
struggled, while the wind was coming from the west, cold and fresh, hinting of rain, though
for now there was a slanting sunlight throwing long shadows of marram grass and reeds across
the marshes. Two swans flew south and I knew they were a message from the gods, but what their
message was I could not tell.

The punts pushed away, abandoning us. They were now going north and east, following
intricate waterways known only to the marsh men. We stayed for a while in Palfleot, doing
nothing in particular, but doing it energetically so that the Danes, a long way off
across the great bend in the river, would be sure to see us. We pulled down the blackened
timbers and Iseult, who had acute eyesight, watched the place where the Danish ships' masts
showed as scratches against the western clouds.

'There's a man up a mast,' she said after a while, and I stared, saw the man clinging to the
mast top and knew we had been spotted.

The tide was falling, exposing more mud and sand, and now that I was sure we had been seen
we walked across the drying expanse that was cradled by the river's extravagant bend.