The Pale Horseman by Bernard Cornwell
“He—” Beocca began.
I turned on him, silencing him. “Who rescued the bastard? Who burned Svein’s ships? Who, in the name of your luckless god, killed Ubba? And you still don’t trust me?”
Beocca was trying to calm me now, making flapping gestures. “I fear you are a pagan,” he said, “and your woman is assuredly a pagan.”
“My woman healed Edward,” I snarled. “Does that mean nothing?”
“It could mean,” he said, “that she did the devil’s work.”
I was astonished into silence by that.
“The devil does his work in the land,” Beocca said earnestly, “and it would serve the devil well if Wessex was to vanish. The devil wants the king dead. He wants his own pagan spawn all across England! There is a greater war, Uhtred. Not the fight between Saxon and Dane, but between God and the devil, between good and evil! We are part of it!”
“I’ve killed more Danes than you can dream of,” I told him.
“But suppose,” he said, pleading with me now, “that your woman has been sent by the devil? That the evil one allowed her to heal Edward so that the king would trust her? And then, when the king, in all innocence, goes to spy on the enemy, she betrays him!”
“You think she would betray him?” I asked sourly. “Or do you mean I might betray him?”
“Your love of the Danes is well known,” Beocca said stiffly, “and you spared the men on Palfleot.”
“So you think I can’t be trusted?”
“I trust you,” he said, without conviction. “But other men?” He waved his palsied hand in an impotent gesture. “But if Iseult is here—” He shrugged, not ending the thought.
“So she’s to be a hostage,” I said.
“A surety, rather.”
“I gave the king my oath,” I pointed out.
“And you have sworn oaths before, and you are known as a liar, and you have a wife and child, yet live with a pagan whore, and you love the Danes as you love yourself, and do you really think we can trust you?” This all came out in a bitter rush. “I have known you, Uhtred,” he said, “since you crawled on Bebbanburg’s rush floors. I baptized you, taught you, chastised you, watched you grow, and I know you better than any man alive and I do not trust you.” Beocca stared at me belligerently. “If the king does not return, Uhtred, then your whore will be given to the dogs.” He had delivered his message now, and he seemed to regret the force of it for he shook his head. “The king should not go. You’re right. It’s a madness. It is stupidity! It is”—he paused, searching for a word, and came upon one of the worst condemnations in his vocabulary—“it is irresponsible! But he insists, and if he goes then you must also go, for you’re the only man here who can pass as a Dane. But bring him back, Uhtred, bring him back, for he is dear to God and to all Saxons.”
Not to me, I thought, he was not dear to me. That night, brooding on Beocca’s words, I was tempted to flee the swamp, to go away with Iseult, find a lord, give Serpent-Breath a new master, but Ragnar had been a hostage and so I had no friend among my enemies, and if I fled I would break my oath to Alfred and men would say Uhtred of Bebbanburg could never be trusted again and so I stayed. I tried to persuade Alfred not to go to Cippanhamm. It was, as Beocca had said, irresponsible, but Alfred insisted. “If I stay here,” he said, “men will say I hid from the Danes. Others face them, but I hide? No. Men must see me, must know that I live, and know that I fight.” For once Ælswith and I were in agreement, and we both tried to keep him in Æthelingæg, but Alfred would not be dissuaded. He was in a strange mood, suffused with happiness, utterly confident that God was on his side, and, because his sickness had abated, he was full of energy and confidence.
He took six companions. The priest was a young man called Adelbert who carried a small harp wrapped in leather. It seemed ridiculous to take a harp to the enemy, but Adelbert was famed for his music and Alfred blithely said that we should sing God’s praises while we were among the Danes. The other four were all experienced warriors who had been part of his royal guard. They were called Osferth, Wulfrith, Beorth, and Egwine, the last of whom swore to Ælswith that he would bring the king home, which made Ælswith throw a bitter glance at me. Whatever favor I had gained by Iseult’s cure of Edward had evaporated under the influence of the priests.
We dressed for war in mail and helmets, while Alfred insisted on wearing a fine blue cloak, trimmed with fur, which made him conspicuous, but he wanted folk to see a king. The best horses were selected, one for each of us and three spare mounts, and we swam them across the river, then followed log roads until we came at last to firm ground close to the island where Iseult said Arthur was buried. I had left Iseult with Eanflæd who shared quarters with Leofric.
It was February now. There had been a spell of fine weather after the burning of Svein’s fleet and I had thought we should travel then, but Alfred insisted on waiting until the eighth day of February, because that was the Feast of Saint Cuthman, a Saxon saint from East Anglia, and Alfred reckoned that must be a propitious day. Perhaps he was right, for the day turned out wet and bitterly cold, and we were to discover that the Danes were reluctant to leave their quarters in the worst weather. We went at dawn and by midmorning we were in the hills overlooking the swamp, which was half hidden by a mist thickened by the smoke from the cooking fires of the small villages. “Are you familiar with Saint Cuthman?” Alfred asked me cheerfully.
“No, lord.”
“He was a hermit,” Alfred said. We were riding north, keeping on the high ground with the swamp to our left. “His mother was crippled and so he made her a wheelbarrow.”
“A wheelbarrow? What could a cripple do with a wheelbarrow?”
“No, no, no! He pushed her about in it! So she could be with him as he preached. He pushed her everywhere.”
“She must have liked that.”
“There’s no written life of him that I know of,” Alfred said, “but we must surely compose one. He could be a saint for mothers.”
“Or for wheelbarrows, lord.”
We saw our first evidence of the Danes just after midday. We were still on the high ground, but in a valley that sloped to the marshes we saw a substantial house with limewashed walls and thick thatch. Smoke came from the roof, while in a fenced apple orchard were a score of horses. No Dane would ever leave such a place unplundered, which suggested the horses belonged to them and that the farm was garrisoned. “They’re there to watch the swamp,” Alfred suggested.
“Probably.” I was cold. I had a thick woolen cloak, but I was still cold.
“We shall send men here,” Alfred said, “and teach them not to steal apples.”
We stayed that night in a small village. The Danes had been there and the folk were frightened. At first, when we rode up the rutted track between the houses, they hid, thinking we were Danes, but when they heard our voices they crept out and stared at us as if we had just ridden down from the moon. Their priest was dead, killed by the pagans, so Alfred insisted that Adelbert hold a service in the burned-out remnants of the church. Alfred himself acted as precentor, accompanying his chanting with the priest’s small harp. “I learned to play as a child,” he told me. “My stepmother insisted, but I’m not very good.”
“You’re not,” I agreed, which he did not like.
“There is never enough time to practice,” he complained.
We lodged in a peasant’s house. Alfred, reckoning that the Danes would have taken the harvest from wherever we visited, had laden the spare horses with smoked fish, smoked eels, and oatcakes, so we provided most of the food and, after we had eaten, the peasant couple knelt to me and the woman tentatively touched the skirt of my mail coat. “My children,” she whispered, “there are two of them. My daughter is about seven years old and my boy is a little older. They are good children.”
“What of them?” Alfred intervened.
“The pagans took them, lord,” the woman said. She was crying. “You can find them, lord?” she said, tugg
I promised to try, but it was an empty promise for the children would have long gone to the slave market and, by now, would either be working on some Danish estate or, if they were pretty, sent overseas where heathen men pay good silver for Christian children.
We learned that the Danes had come to the village shortly after Twelfth Night. They had killed, captured, stolen, and ridden on southward. A few days later they had returned, going back northward, driving a band of captives and a herd of captured horses laden with plunder. Since then the villagers had seen no Danes except for the few on the swamp’s edge. Those Danes, they said, caused no trouble, perhaps because they were so few and dared not stir up the enmity of the country about them. We heard the same tale in other villages. The Danes had come, they had pillaged, then had gone back north.
But on our third day we at last saw a force of the enemy riding on the Roman road that cuts straight westward across the hills from Baðum. There were close to sixty of them, and they rode hard in front of dark clouds and the gathering night. “Going back to Cippanhamm,” Alfred said. It was a foraging party, and their packhorses carried nets stuffed with hay to feed their warhorses, and I remembered my childhood winter in Readingum, when the Danes first invaded Wessex, and how hard it had been to keep horses and men alive in the cold. We had cut feeble winter grass and pulled down thatch to feed our horses that still became skeletal and weak. I have often listened to men declare that all that is needed to win a war is to assemble men and march against the enemy, but it is never that easy. Men and horses must be fed, and hunger can defeat an army much faster than spears. We watched the Danes go north, then turned aside to a half-ruined barn that offered us shelter for the night.
It began to snow that night, a relentless soft snow, silent and thick, so that by dawn the world was white under a pale blue sky. I suggested we waited till the snow had thawed before we rode further, but Egwine, who came from this part of the country, said we were only two or three hours south of Cippanhamm and Alfred was impatient. “We go,” he insisted. “We go there, look at the town, and ride away.”
So we rode north, our hooves crunching the newly fallen snow, riding through a world made new and clean. Snow clung to every twig and branch while ice skimmed the ditches and ponds. I saw a fox’s trail crossing a field and thought that the spring would bring a plague of the beasts, for there would have been no one to hunt them, and the lambs would die bloodily and the ewes would bleat pitifully.
We came in sight of Cippanhamm before midday, though the great pall of smoke, made by hundreds of cooking fires, had shown in the sky all morning. We stopped south of the town, just where the road emerged from a stand of oaks, and the Danes must have noticed us, but none came from the gates to see who we were. It was too cold for men to stir themselves. I could see guards on the walls, though none stayed there long, retreating to whatever warmth they could find between their short forays along the wooden ramparts. Those ramparts were bright with round shields painted blue and white and bloodred and, because Guthrum’s men were there, black. “We should count the shields,” Alfred said.
“It won’t help,” I said. “They carry two or three shields each and hang them on the walls to make it look as if they have more men.”
Alfred was shivering and I insisted we find some shelter. We turned back into the trees, following a path that led to the river, and a mile or so upstream we came across a mill. The millstone had been taken away, but the building itself was whole and it was well made, with stone walls and a turf roof held up by stout rafters. There was a hearth in a room where the miller’s family had lived, but I would not let Egwine light a fire in case the trickle of smoke brought curious Danes from the town. “Wait till dark,” I said.
“We’ll freeze by then,” he grumbled.
“Then you shouldn’t have come,” I snapped.
“We have to get closer to the town,” Alfred said.
“You don’t,” I said. “I do.” I had seen horses paddocked to the west of the walls and I reckoned I could take our best horse and ride about the town’s western edge and count every horse I saw. That would give a rough estimate of the Danish numbers, for almost every man would have a horse. Alfred wanted to come, but I shook my head. It was pointless for more than one man to go, and sensible that the one man who did go should speak Danish, so I told him I would see him back in the mill before nightfall and then I rode north. Cippanhamm was built on a hill that was almost encircled by the river, so I could not ride clear around the town, but I went as close to the walls as I dared and stared across the river and saw no horses on its farther bank, which suggested that the Danes were keeping their beasts on the western side of the town. I went there, keeping in the snowy woods, and though the Danes must have seen me, they could not be bothered to ride into the snow to chase one man, and so I was able to find the paddocks where their horses shivered. I spent the day counting. Most of the horses were in fields beside the royal compound and there were hundreds of them. By late afternoon I had estimated that there were twelve hundred, and those were only the ones I could see, and the best horses would be in the town, but my reckoning was good enough. It would give Alfred an idea of how large Guthrum’s force was. Say two thousand men? And elsewhere in Wessex, in the towns the Danes had occupied, there must be another thousand. That was a strong force, but not quite strong enough to capture all the kingdom. That would have to wait until spring when reinforcements would come from Denmark or from the three conquered kingdoms of England. I rode back to the watermill as dusk fell. There was a frost and the air was still. Three rooks flew across the river as I dismounted. I reckoned one of Alfred’s men could rub my horse down; all I wanted was to find some warmth and it was plain Alfred had risked lighting a fire, for smoke was pouring out of the hole in the turf roof.
They were all crouched about the small fire and I joined them, stretching my hands to the flames. “Two thousand men,” I said, “more or less.”
No one answered.
“Didn’t you hear me?” I asked, and looked around the faces.
There were five faces. Only five.
“Where’s the king?” I asked.
“He went,” Adelbert said helplessly.
“He did what?”
“He went to the town,” the priest said. He was wearing Alfred’s rich blue cloak and I assumed Alfred had taken Adelbert’s plain garment.
I stared at him. “You let him go?”
“He insisted,” Egwine said.
“How could we stop him?” Adelbert pleaded. “He’s the king!”
“You hit the bastard, of course,” I snarled. “You hold him down till the madness passes. When did he go?”
“Just after you left,” the priest said miserably, “and he took my harp,” he added.
“And when did he say he’d be back?”
“By nightfall.”
“It is nightfall,” I said. I stood and stamped out the fire. “You want the Danes to come and investigate the smoke?” I doubted the Danes would come, but I wanted the damned fools to suffer. “You.” I pointed to one of the four soldiers. “Rub my horse down. Feed it.”
I went back to the door. The first stars were bright and the snow glinted under a sickle moon.
“Where are you going?” Adelbert had followed me.
“To find the king, of course.”
If he lived. And if he did not, then Iseult was dead.
I had to beat on Cippanhamm’s western gate, provoking a disgruntled voice from the far side demanding to know who I was.
“Why aren’t you up on the ramparts?” I asked in return.
The bar was lifted and the gate opened a few inches. A face peered out, then vanished as I pushed the gate hard inward, banging it against the suspicious guard. “My horse went lame,” I said, “and I’ve walked here.”
He recovered his balance and pushed the gate shut. “Who are you?” he asked again.
“Messenger from Svein.”
“Svein!” He lifted the bar and dropped it into place. “Has he caught Alfred yet?”
“I’ll tell Guthrum that news before I tell you.”
“Just asking,” he said.
“Where is Guthrum?” I asked. I had no intention of going anywhere near the Danish chieftain for, after my insults to his dead mother, the best I could hope for was a swift death, and the likelihood was a very slow one.
“He’s in Alfred’s hall,” the man said, and pointed south. “That side of town, so you’ve still farther to walk.” It never occurred to him that any messenger from Svein would never ride alone through Wessex, that such a man would come with an escort of fifty or sixty men, but he was too cold to think, and besides, with my long hair and my thick arm rings I looked like a Dane. He retreated into the house beside the gate where his comrades were clustered around a hearth and I walked on into a town made strange. Houses were missing, burned in the first fury of the Danish assault, and the large church by the marketplace on the hilltop was nothing but blackened beams touched white by the snow. The streets were frozen mud, and only I moved there, for the cold was keeping the Danes in the remaining houses. I could hear singing and laughter. Light leaked past shutters or glowed through smoke holes in low roofs. I was cold and I was angry. There were men here who could recognize me, and men who might recognize Alfred, and his stupidity had put us both in danger. Would he have been mad enough to go back to his own hall? He must have guessed that was where Guthrum would be living and he would surely not risk being recognized by the Danish leader, which suggested he would be in the town rather than the royal compound.
I was walking toward Eanflæd’s old tavern when I heard the roars. They were coming from the east side of town and I followed the sound, which led me to the nunnery by the river wall. I had never been inside the convent, but the gate was open and the courtyard inside was lit by two vast fires that offered some warmth to the men nearest the flames. And there were at least a hundred men in the courtyard, bellowing encouragement and insults at two other men who were fighting in the mud and melted snow between the fires. They were fighting with swords and shields, and every clash of blade against blade or of blade against wood brought raucous shouts. I glanced briefly at the fighters, then searched for faces in the crowd. I was looking for Haesten, or anyone else who might recognize me, but I saw no one, though it was hard to distinguish faces in the flickering shadows. There was no sign of any nuns and I assumed they had fled, were dead, or had been taken away for the conquerors’ amusement.