Part 22 (1/2)

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

”It is, sister.”

”Have manners vanished from the surface of G.o.d'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 a.s.sumed 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 aethelflaed?” 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 G.o.d,” 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.”

”You think we're a tavern?” she demanded.

”You won't leave again, will you?” Stiorra was asking insistently.

”No,” I said, ”no, no, no,” and then I stopped talking because aethelflaed had appeared in a doorway, framed there by the darkness behind and even on that drab gray day it seemed to me that, though she was dressed in a cloak and hood of coa.r.s.e brown weave, she glowed.

And I remembered Iseult's prophecy made so many years ago, made when aethelflaed was no older than Stiorra, a prophecy made when Wess.e.x was at its weakest, when the Danes had overrun the country and Alfred was a fugitive in the marshes. Iseult, that strange and lovely woman, dark as shadows, had promised me that Alfred would give me power and that my woman would be a creature of gold.

And I stared at aethelflaed and she stared back, and I knew the promise I had made to my daughter was one I would keep. I would not leave.

I put my children down, warning them to stay away from the horses' hooves, and I walked across the puddled courtyard, oblivious of the nuns who had crept out to watch our arrival. I planned to bow to aethelflaed. She was, after all, a king's daughter and the wife of Mercia's ruler, but her face was at once tearful and happy and I did not bow. I held out my arms and she came to me, and I felt her body trembling as I held her close. Maybe she could feel my heart beating, for it seemed to me as loud as a great drumbeat. ”You've come,” she said.

”Yes.”

”I knew you would.”

I pushed back her hood to see her hair, as golden as mine. I smiled. ”A creature of gold,” I said.

”Foolish man,” she said, smiling.

”What happens now?” I asked her.

”I imagine,” she said, stepping gently away from me and pulling the hood back over her hair, ”that my husband will try to kill you.”

”And he can summon?” I asked, then paused to think, ”fifteen hundred trained warriors?”

”At least that many.”

”Then I see no difficulty,” I said lightly. ”I have at least forty men.”

And that afternoon the first of the Mercian warriors came.

They arrived in groups, ten or twenty at a time, riding from the north and making a loose cordon about the nunnery. I watched them from the bell-tower, counting over a hundred warriors, and still more came. ”The thirty men in the village,” I asked aethelflaed, ”they were here to keep you from leaving?”

”They were supposed to stop food reaching the nunnery,” she said, ”though they weren't very effective. Supplies came across the river by boat.”

”They wanted to starve you?”

”My husband thought that would make me leave. Then I'd have to go back to him.”

”Not to your father?”

She grimaced. ”He would have sent me back to my husband, wouldn't he?”

”Would he?”

”Marriage is a sacrament, Uhtred,” she said almost wearily, ”it is sanctified by G.o.d, and you know my father won't offend G.o.d.”

”So why didn't aethelred just drag you back?”

”Invade a nunnery? My father would disapprove of that!”

”He would,” I said, watching a larger group of hors.e.m.e.n appear to the north.

”They thought my father would die at any moment,” she said, and I knew she spoke of my cousin and his friend, Aldhelm, ”and they were waiting for that.”

”But your father lives.”

”He recovers,” aethelflaed said, ”G.o.d be thanked.”

”And here comes trouble,” I said, because the new band of hors.e.m.e.n, at least fifty in number, rode beneath a banner, suggesting that whoever commanded the troops guarding the nunnery was coming himself. As the hors.e.m.e.n drew nearer, I saw the banner displayed a cross made of two big-bladed war axes. ”Whose badge is that?”

”Aldhelm's,” aethelflaed said flatly.

Two hundred men ringed the monastery now, and Aldhelm, riding a tall black stallion, placed himself fifty paces from the nunnery gates. He had a bodyguard of two priests and a dozen warriors. The warriors carried s.h.i.+elds that bore their lord's crossed-ax badge, and those grim men gathered just behind him and, like their lord, gazed in silence at the closed gates. Did Aldhelm know I was inside? He might have suspected, but I doubt he had any certainty. We had ridden fast through Mercia, keeping to the eastern half where the Danes were strongest, so few men in Saxon Mercia would realize I had come south. Yet perhaps Aldhelm suspected I was there, for he made no attempt to enter the nunnery, or else he was under orders not to offend his G.o.d by committing sacrilege. Alfred might forgive aethelred for making aethelflaed unhappy, but he would never forgive an insult to his G.o.d.

I went down to the courtyard. ”What's he waiting for?” Finan asked me.

”Me,” I said.

I dressed for war. I dressed in s.h.i.+ning mail, sword-belted, booted, with my wolf-crested helmet and my s.h.i.+eld with the wolf badge, and I chose to carry a war ax as well as my two scabbarded swords. I ordered one leaf of the convent gate to be opened, then walked out alone. I did not ride because I had not been able to buy a battle-trained stallion.

I walked in silence and Aldhelm's men watched me. If Aldhelm had possessed a sc.r.a.p of courage he should have ridden at me and chopped me down with the long sword hanging at his waist, and even without courage he could have ordered his personal guard to cut me down, but instead he just stared at me.

I stopped a dozen paces from him, then leaned the battle-ax on my shoulder. I had pushed open the hinged cheek-plates of my helmet so Aldhelm's men could see my face. ”Men of Mercia!” I shouted so that not only Aldhelm's men could hear me, but the West Saxon troops across the river. ”Any day now Jarl Haesten will lead an attack on your country! He comes with thousands of men, hungry men, spear-Danes, sword-Danes, Danes who would rape your wives, enslave your children, and steal your lands. They will make a greater army than the horde of warriors you defeated at Fearnhamme! How many of you were at Fearnhamme?”