Part 3 (1/2)
”And I have five hundred men at Silcestre,” aethelred said, as though that made all the difference.
”And what are they doing there?” I asked, ”p.i.s.sing in the Temes while we fight?”
aethelflaed grinned, while her brother Edward looked affronted. Dear Father Beocca, who had been my childhood tutor, gave me a long-suffering look of reproof. Alfred just sighed. ”Lord aethelred's men can harry the enemy while they besiege us,” he explained.
”So our victory, lord,” I said, ”depends on Harald attacking us here? On Harald allowing us to kill his men while they try to cross the wall?” Alfred did not answer. A pair of sparrows squabbled among the rafters. A thick beeswax candle on the altar behind Alfred guttered and smoked and a monk hurried to trim the wick. The flame grew again, its light reflected from a high golden reliquary that seemed to contain a withered hand.
”Harald will want to defeat us.” Edward made his first tentative contribution to the discussion.
”Why?” I asked, ”when we're doing our best to defeat ourselves?” There was an aggrieved murmur from the courtiers, but I overrode it. ”Let me tell you what Harald will do, lord,” I said, speaking to Alfred. ”He'll take his army north of us and advance on Wintanceaster. There's a lot of silver there, all conveniently piled in your new cathedral, and you've brought your army here so he won't have much trouble breaking through Wintanceaster's walls. And even if he does besiege us here,” I spoke even louder to drown Bishop a.s.ser's angry protest, ”all he needs do is surround us and let us starve. How much food do we have here?”
The king gestured to a.s.ser, requesting that he stop spluttering. ”So what would you do, Lord Uhtred?” Alfred asked, and there was a plaintive note in his voice. He was old and he was tired and he was ill, and Harald's invasion seemed to threaten all that he had achieved.
”I would suggest, lord,” I said, ”that Lord aethelred order his five hundred men to cross the Temes and march to Fearnhamme.”
A hound whined in a corner of the church, but otherwise there was no sound. They all stared at me, but I saw some faces brighten. They had been wallowing with indecision and had needed the sword stroke of certainty.
Alfred broke the silence. ”Fearnhamme?” he asked cautiously.
”Fearnhamme,” I repeated, watching aethelred, but his pale face displayed no reaction, and no one else in the church made any comment.
I had been thinking about the country to the north of aescengum. War is not just about men, nor even about supplies, it is also about the hills and valleys, the rivers and marshes, the places where land and water will help defeat an enemy. I had traveled through Fearnhamme often enough on my journeys from Lundene to Wintanceaster, and wherever I traveled I noted how the land lay and how it might be used if an enemy was near. ”There's a hill just north of the river at Fearnhamme,” I said.
”There is! I know it well,” one of the monks standing to Alfred's right said, ”it has an earthwork.”
I looked at him, seeing a red-faced, hook-nosed man. ”And who are you?” I asked coldly.
”Oslac, lord,” he said, ”the abbot here.”
”The earthwork,” I asked him, ”is it in good repair?”
”It was dug by the ancient folk,” Abbot Oslac said, ”and it's much overgrown with gra.s.s, but the ditch is deep and the bank is still firm.”
There were many such earthworks in Britain, mute witnesses to the warfare that had rolled across the land before we Saxons came to bring still more. ”The bank's high enough to make defense easy?” I asked the abbot.
”You could hold it forever, given enough men,” Oslac said confidently. I gazed at him, noting the scar across the bridge of his nose. Abbot Oslac, I decided, had been a warrior before he became a monk.
”But why invite Harald to besiege us there?” Alfred asked, ”when we have aescengum and its walls and its storehouses?”
”And how long will those storehouses last, lord?” I asked him. ”We have enough men inside these walls to hold the enemy till Judgment Day, but not enough food to reach Christmas.” The burhs were not provisioned for a large army. The intent of the walled towns was to hold the enemy in check and allow the army of household warriors, the trained men, to attack the besiegers in the open country outside.
”But Fearnhamme?” Alfred asked.
”Is where we shall destroy Harald,” I said unhelpfully. I looked at aethelred. ”Order your men to Fearnhamme, cousin, and we'll trap Harald there.”
There was a time when Alfred would have questioned and tested my ideas, but that day he looked too tired and too sick to argue, and he plainly did not have the patience to listen to other men challenging my plans. Besides, he had learned to trust me when it came to warfare, and I expected his a.s.sent to my vague proposal, but then he surprised me. He turned to the churchmen and gestured that one of them should join him, and Bishop a.s.ser took the elbow of a young, stocky monk and guided him to the king's chair. The monk had a hard, bony face and black tonsured hair as bristly and stiff as a badger's pelt. He might have been handsome except his eyes were milky, and I guessed he had been blind from birth. He groped for the king's chair, found it and knelt beside Alfred, who laid a fatherly hand on the monk's bowed head. ”So, Brother G.o.dwin?” he asked gently.
”I am here, lord, I am here,” G.o.dwin said in a voice scarce above a hoa.r.s.e whisper.
”And you heard the Lord Uhtred?”
”I heard, lord, I heard.” Brother G.o.dwin raised his blind eyes to the king. He said nothing for a while, but his face was twisting all that time, twisting and grimacing like a man possessed by an evil spirit. He started to utter a choking noise, and what astonished me was that none of this alarmed Alfred, who waited patiently until, at last, the young monk regained a normal expression. ”It will be well, lord King,” G.o.dwin said, ”it will be well.”
Alfred patted Brother G.o.dwin's head again and smiled at me. ”We shall do as you suggest, Lord Uhtred,” he said decisively. ”You will direct your men to Fearnhamme,” he spoke to aethelred, then looked back to me, ”and my son,” he went on, ”will command the West Saxon forces.”
”Yes, lord,” I said dutifully. Edward, the youngest man in the church, looked embarra.s.sed, and his eyes flicked nervously from me to his father.
”And you,” Alfred turned to look at his son, ”will obey the Lord Uhtred.”
aethelred could contain himself no longer. ”What guarantees do we have,” he asked petulantly, ”that the heathens will go to Fearnhamme?”
”Mine,” I said harshly.
”But you cannot be certain!” aethelred protested.
”He will go to Fearnhamme,” I said, ”and he will die there.”
I was wrong about that.
Messengers rode to aethelred's men at Silcestre, ordering them to march on Fearnhamme at first light next morning. Once there they were to occupy the hill that stands just north of the river. Those five hundred men were the anvil, while the men at aescengum were my hammer, but to lure Harald onto the anvil would mean dividing our forces, and it is a rule of war not to do that. We had, at my best estimate, about five hundred men fewer than the Danes, and by keeping our army in two parts I was inviting Harald to destroy them separately. ”But I'm relying on Harald being an impulsive fool, lord,” I told Alfred that night.
The king had joined me on aescengum's eastern rampart. He had arrived with his usual entourage of priests, but had waved them away so he could talk with me privately. He stood for a moment just staring at the distant dull glow of fires where Harald's men had sacked villages and I knew he was lamenting all the burned churches. ”Is he an impulsive fool?” he inquired mildly.
”You tell me, lord,” I said.
”He's savage, unpredictable, and given to sudden rages,” the king said. Alfred paid well for information about the northmen and kept meticulous notes on every leader. Harald had been pillaging in Frankia before its people bribed him to leave, and I did not doubt that Alfred's spies had told him everything they could discover about Harald Bloodhair. ”You know why he's called Bloodhair?” Alfred asked.
”Because before every battle, lord, he sacrifices a horse to Thor and soaks his hair in the animal's blood.”
”Yes,” Alfred said. He leaned on the palisade. ”How can you be sure he'll go to Fearnhamme?” he asked.
”Because I'll draw him there, lord. I'll make a snare and pull him onto our spears.”
”The woman?” Alfred asked with a slight shudder.
”She is said to be special to him, lord.”
”So I hear,” he said. ”But he will have other wh.o.r.es.”
”She's not the only reason he'll go to Fearnhamme, lord,” I said, ”but she's reason enough.”
”Women brought sin into this world,” he said so quietly I almost did not hear him. He rested against the oak trunks of the parapet and gazed toward the small town of G.o.delmingum that lay just a few miles eastward. The people who lived there had been ordered to flee, and now the only inhabitants were fifty of my men who stood sentinel to warn us of the Danish approach. ”I had hoped the Danes had ceased wanting this kingdom,” he broke the silence plaintively.
”They'll always want Wess.e.x,” I said.
”All I ask of G.o.d,” he went on, ignoring my truism, ”is that Wess.e.x should be safe and ruled by my son.” I answered nothing to that. There was no law that decreed a son should succeed his father as king, and if there had been then Alfred would not be Wess.e.x's ruler. He had succeeded his brother, and that brother had a son, aethelwold, who wanted desperately to be king in Wess.e.x. aethelwold had been too young to a.s.sume the throne when his father died, but he was in his thirties now, a man in his ale-sozzled prime. Alfred sighed, then straightened. ”Edward will need you as an adviser,” he said.
”I should be honored, lord,” I said.
Alfred heard the dutiful tone in my voice and did not like it. He stiffened, and I expected one of his customary reproofs, but instead he looked pained. ”G.o.d has blessed me,” he said quietly. ”When I came to the throne, Lord Uhtred, it seemed impossible that we should resist the Danes. Yet by G.o.d's grace Wess.e.x lives. We have churches, monasteries, schools, laws. We have made a country where G.o.d dwells, and I cannot believe it is G.o.d's will that it should vanish when I am called to judgment.”