Warriors of Ethandun (10 page)

There were two voices, one deeper than the other.

‘Where do we look?'

‘Gunnarr said he was in the western marshes, but you could hide a fleet in here. We need a boat, not a horse. The mounts will break a leg for sure if we ride through this midden.'

‘What do we do?'

‘Find a boat and come back.'

Dan hardly dared to breathe until he was certain that they had ridden out of earshot. It occurred to him that their departure might be a trick, so he waited longer still.

‘You understood them?' Aelfred said accusingly.

Dan nodded.

‘You are a Dane?'

Dan shook his head.

‘Then whom do you serve? The sign on your breast – is it the crest and symbol of your Lord?' Aelfred sounded almost angry, affronted that Dan served some other unknown lord.

Dan tried to find the words to explain without actually explaining. He had been doing a lot of that lately.

‘I have a …' He paused. ‘I have a gift for languages, it is true, but I am not a Dane. I serve no lord here, or rather the Lords I have served are long dead.'

‘You left your Lord to die?'

‘No. Yes … I am not your enemy and I am not on the side of your enemies. I am a stranger here. I am looking for my companion and when I find her – him – I will leave. I am not involved in whatever is going on here.'

Aelfred did not appear satisfied, but turned to more
practical matters.

‘They are looking for someone.'

‘Yes.'

‘Did they say who?'

‘No, but surely if you are King they must be looking for you?'

‘If?' Aelfred's voice took on the edge of steel and Dan found himself worrying again about fighting on the unstable raft. He should be able to beat the King should it come to a fight, but Dan did not want to land in the icy water. He was careful to sound conciliatory.

‘I'm sorry, but I am a stranger here and …' He let his voice tail away. He did not want to get involved in the politics of kings; it was always dangerous. He wanted to find Ursula and get home. He changed tack. ‘I do not doubt that you are a king, but it is strange that you're here without a retinue nor even an armed guard to protect you.'

Aelfred sighed. ‘It was a foolish, prideful whim to want to be alone – away from my family and my advisors and even my priests.' He did not look at Dan. ‘I wanted solitude, time to think … Men I trusted betrayed me and we were lucky to escape with our lives. Now my men are all so fearful.' He paused as if about to say more, but stopped. ‘My responsibilities and my mistakes weigh too heavily on me. I need to be bold and yet …'

‘So did it help to get away?' Dan thought that he should perhaps add some kind of honorific, but before he could think of the right one, Aelfred was already answering.

‘Perhaps you have not heard, but Guthrum and his great heathen army attacked us as we celebrated Twelfth Night.' His face as he turned towards Dan was full of pain. He appeared surprised when Dan shook his head. ‘You must truly be a stranger if you have not heard this bitter tale. My trusted ealdorman, Wulfhere of Wiltshire, and other ealdormen of Hampshire and Dorset, men who have benefited greatly from my gift-giving …' His voice shook and he took a moment to calm himself. ‘These men conspired with my archbishop, Aethelred, who has accused me of much evil, to usurp my place upon the throne of Wessex and replace me with my brother's child – a pawn and client king who will lend Guthrum and his Danish heathens legitimacy while they ransack my kingdom, my people, and undo all that my grandfather and father have achieved.' His voice dropped to a whisper and he shook his head angrily. ‘I was so foolish. I did not see it coming. I believed that all right-thinking men would choose Christian freedom over subordination to heathen pirates. But I was wrong. The Danes have wealth enough to buy the services of a puppet king. They have done it in Mercia and Northumbria. I had not thought the ealdormen who have served my family would let them do it here. For now I have no kingdom but this.'

He stretched out his hand to encompass the grey river, now bright with sunlight dappling the wind-rippled surface. The mist had gone as if it had never been and the sun shone from a clear sky; the windswept wilderness looked wild and eerily beautiful. Aelfred seemed to think so too because he added, ‘And this is better than nothing,
is it not?' He grinned and suddenly looked different: bolder and a good deal less ill. ‘All I can say is that I'm not ready to give up. I may have been foolish, vain, ungodly and complacent, but with God's help I may not yet be defeated.'

Dan found himself grinning back. What he did not need was to get involved in a hopeless fight against the odds, against enemies not his own, for a king with no assets beyond a cheerful grin, but he could feel himself becoming more involved by the second. Aelfred's tale was bound to be more complicated than his simple summary, but Dan could sense the truth in what he said.

Without saying a word, he and Aelfred manoeuvred the raft away from the bank and Dan started punting the King back to his men.

The sunshine seemed to cheer Aelfred up and he started to talk, or rather to ask questions – about Dan's companion, about Dan's own origins. Dan was as cagey as possible and decided to refer to Ursula as if she were a man. He thought it would be simpler that way. He would describe her as his male companion, his comrade-in-arms, and if she had any magic in this world he knew that she would be able to play the part of a male warrior – she had done it so many times already. The difficulty was that he could not then ask Aelfred for his help in finding a tall blonde woman who may have shown signs of magical power.

‘I do not understand how you separated,' Aelfred said. ‘Surely you must have some idea as to where he went?' Dan shook his head. He did not want to embroider a lie. He wanted to say as little as possible and lapsed into a moody silence. She could be anywhere. Perhaps if she had magic she might be able to find him – if she wanted to. The thought that she might not want to ate away at him. She had not been herself when she ran through the Veil.
He had no idea what she might do, and with Ursula anything was possible.

After a while the river narrowed to nothing and Dan and Aelfred had to carry the raft between them and make their way over bogland. They had to stop often while the King dry-retched. He walked like a man in agony.

‘Should I not go on ahead to fetch help?' Dan asked. His arms ached from the punting and the raft carrying. Although he was gym fit and strong he was not used to continuous hard physical work. Aelfred was breathing in shallow bursts and his face had turned grey with fatigue and pain. ‘No. You will be killed. I must come with you or they may think you kidnapped me.'

‘You didn't leave without telling anyone?' Dan asked, unable to keep the incredulity from his voice. In his experience kings were not inclined to wander hostile territory on their own. Aelfred bent double with some kind of stomach cramp.

‘Yes. May God forgive me. I had not planned on being away so long. I lost my way.' His face creased as another wave of pain convulsed him.

‘This is stupid,' Dan said. ‘If you lie on the raft, I can perhaps pull you across the marsh.'

‘No. I am all right. The pain will … pass … in a moment.' But Dan had already unstrapped his sword belt and the leather belt that held up his school trousers and was trying to come up with a way of securing both to the bindings of the raft. The King took off his own belt that held his seax. ‘Keep your sword belt. We do not know that the Danes have gone and you may need your blade in a
hurry. If I am lying on the raft, I need not sheathe my seax – I can hold it in readiness.' Dan did not argue.

The problem for Dan was not so much that the King was too heavy, but that getting a good enough grip on the belts to get the raft moving was very difficult. Dan tried walking backwards and pulling the raft, then he tried walking forwards, dragging the raft, and neither way worked well. He took off his sweatshirt and tied that to the belts to make them easier to hold, but the knots kept coming undone. He wasted quite a bit of energy cursing under his breath.

The King did not complain as Dan jolted and dragged him across the uneven terrain. A couple of times Aelfred almost fell off, but he gripped the wood of the raft with a long claw-like hand and smiled at the craziness of it.

‘It is not exactly a king's progress,' Dan said through gritted teeth. His hair was plastered to his head with sweat and his muscles were trembling in revolt at the unnatural movement.

‘But it is progress and for that we must thank God.' Aelfred responded.

Dan had little idea of how long he struggled with the raft but when the sun was quite high in the sky he had to stop.

‘I'm sorry,' he said, ‘I have to rest.' He slumped on the damp ground exhausted.

‘That is fine. This is Athelney, my stronghold. My men are here now,' Aelfred said, and suddenly his seax was pointed Dan's way and three armed men emerged from behind low bushes all around him.

‘What are you doing?' Dan asked, outraged.

‘I'm sorry, I do not know your loyalties. You speak Danish. For all I know you could be a spy.'

‘I saved your life. I've just dragged you for miles …'

Aelfred looked unhappy. ‘It grieves me, it truly does, but there is more at stake here than my desire alone. We are on the brink of destruction. I cannot risk all on a stranger I happened upon in a swineherd's cottage.'

Dan could feel his anger growing. He reached for his sword and he batted Aelfred's seax away easily, knocking it from his grasp with the ringing sound of metal against metal. He did not put his sword to Aelfred's neck, though he was tempted. Instead he turned to face the armed men now running towards him.

‘My Liege – stay back!' one of them called, and Dan was dimly aware of Aelfred hastening away on unsteady feet. Dan knew Aelfred had not recovered his knife and so dismissed him from his mind. He needed to focus on those who could do him harm – Aelfred was weak and unarmed.

The three men checked their pace when they saw the sword in Dan's hand. They carried spears and long knives but not swords. Dan had no shield but the raft and that was too cumbersome to wield. He pulled it up so that it was on end and dragged it backwards to stand by a small tree, the only thing of any size likely to offer his back some small protection from the spears.

There was a kind of joy in losing himself to his dark place of madness. He felt himself slipping away and did not resist … Madness was his only hope and he embraced
it – he let himself fall into the place where he and his sword were one.

The first warrior was a lanky man of around twenty. He charged towards Dan and drove his spear over the top of Dan's makeshift defence. He had to come too close in order to get his spear over the top. Dan, cowering below the wall that the raft had made, sprang up and his powerful upward sword thrust found the unprotected area under the man's arm. He screamed in shock and pain and Dan pulled the spear from his unresisting hand and turned it on the second warrior, who had circled the raft to come upon him from the rear. Dan's speed startled the man who lost his footing on the uneven ground. That instant's loss of concentration as he tried to regain his balance cost him his life. Dan thrust the barbed point of the spear straight at the man's throat and pushed. The man toppled backwards. Dan placed his foot on the man's torso, to give him the necessary leverage, and pulled the spear free. Now that he only had one enemy to defeat, Dan abandoned his position and ran to do battle with the third man.

‘Stop!' King Aelfred staggered from his safe place and screamed at Dan. There was a moment in which Dan might have killed him too, but he was not yet so far gone in his madness that he could not hear and understand. Dan lowered neither his sword nor his spear but he stopped running.

‘There is no need to kill Eadric. They did not intend to kill you, only to take you prisoner.' He was paler than ever and appeared shocked by the swift turn of events.

Dan was breathing heavily and, now that his brain
began to clear, was beginning to wonder why he had allowed his madness the upper hand.

‘Sire, you pointed your knife at me and set three armed men on me – what did you expect me to do? I am a warrior. I fight and I kill.'

‘I can see that,' Aelfred said, ‘and these deaths are also on my conscience. Will you drop your weapons?'

Dan dropped the gore-splattered spear on the ground. He did not much like spears. He wiped his stained sword on the grass, dried it carefully on his sweatshirt and sheathed it.

The remaining enemy let his spear and shield clatter to the ground and by the look on his face, pale beneath his helmet, was not sorry to let it end that way.

‘I made a mistake in trying to take you prisoner,' Aelfred said quietly, ‘and I have no doubt that my men thought you wished me harm.'

‘I did not wish you harm, but attempting to have a man killed is not a good way of encouraging his respect or his loyalty – a true king should know that.'

Aelfred winced visibly: ‘You are right. Please accept my apologies. I still do not have your name and title.'

Dan hesitated. The adrenalin that had sustained him in the fight left him and he felt weak, drained and full of remorse. He had not wanted to kill again. ‘My name is Dan and I have no title,' he lied. In Macsen's world they had called him the Bear Sark, the berserker, but that was not a title he wished to deserve again.

‘I will send men to bring these fallen warriors back for a Christian burial. Dan, let me introduce you to what
remains of my court.'

Dan averted his eyes from the corpses that had been the price of his welcome and followed the sickly King across the marsh.

‘I hope you have not arranged any other surprises,' Dan said. Bright Killer was in its scabbard, but as they progressed across open marshland he unsheathed it. Though he was in control of himself, he was angry at what Aelfred had tried to do and when he was angry his madness lay close by. The guard raised his spear and stepped between the King and Dan, but he looked frightened and Dan knew that the guard's fear would do half his job for him if it came to the fight. A small part of him was strangely content to be back in a world where his gift for brutality did not condemn him.