The Pale Horseman by Bernard Cornwell

  Or what had been a farmstead. Now it was wet ashes in a green place, a deep green place where narrow pastures were shadowed by tall trees on which the very first haze of spring was just showing. Flowers were thick along the pasture edges, but there were none where the few small buildings had stood. There were only embers and the black smear of ash in mud, and Steapa, abandoning his horse, walked among the ashes. He had lost his great sword when the Danes captured him at Cippanhamm, so now he carried a huge war ax and he prodded the wide blade into the dark piles.

  I rescued his horse, tied both beasts to the scorched trunk of an ash that had once grown by the farmyard, and watched him. I said nothing, for I sensed that one word would release all his fury. He crouched by the skeleton of a dog and just stared at the fire-darkened bones for a few minutes, then reached out and stroked the bared skull. There were tears on Steapa’s face, or perhaps it was the rain that fell softly from low clouds.

  A score of people had once lived there. A larger house had stood at the southern end of the settlement and I explored its charred remains, seeing where the Danes had dug down by the old posts to find hidden coins. Steapa watched me. He was by one of the smaller patches of charred timbers and I guessed he had grown up there, in a slave hovel. He did not want me near him, and I pointedly stayed away, wondering if I dared suggest to him that we ride on. But he began digging instead, hacking the damp red soil with his huge war ax and scooping the earth out with bare hands until he had made a shallow grave for the dog. It was a skeleton now. There were still patches of fur on the old bones, but the flesh had been eaten away so that the ribs were scattered, so this had all happened weeks before. Steapa gathered the bones and laid them tenderly in the grave.

  That was when the people came. You can ride through a landscape of the dead and see no one, but they will see you. Folk hide when enemies come. They go up into the woods and they wait there, and now three men came from the trees.

  “Steapa,” I said. He turned on me, furious that I had interrupted him, then saw I was pointing westward.

  He gave a roar of recognition and the three men, who were holding spears, ran toward him. They dropped their weapons and they hugged the huge man, and for a time they all spoke together, but then they calmed down and I took one aside and questioned him. The Danes had come soon after Yule, he told me. They had come suddenly, before anyone was even aware that there were pagans in Defnascir. These men had escaped because they had been felling a beech tree in a nearby wood, and they had heard the slaughter. Since then they had been living in the forests, scared of the Danes who still rode about Defnascir in search of food. They had seen no Saxons.

  They had buried the folk of the farm in a pasture to the south, and Steapa went there and knelt in the wet grass. “His mother died,” the man told me. He spoke English with such a strange accent that I continually had to ask him to repeat himself, but I understood those three words. “Steapa was good to his mother,” the man said. “He brought her money. She was no slave any more.”

  “His father?”

  “He died long time back. Long time.”

  I thought Steapa was going to dig up his mother, so I crossed and stood in front of him. “We have a job to do,” I said.

  He looked up at me, his harsh face expressionless.

  “There are Danes to kill,” I said. “The Danes who killed folk here must be killed themselves.”

  He nodded abruptly, then stood, towering over me again. He cleaned the blade of his ax and climbed into his saddle. “There are Danes to kill,” he said and, leaving his mother in her cold grave, we went to find them.

  TEN

  We rode south. We went cautiously, for folk said the Danes were still seen in this part of the shire, though we saw none. Steapa was silent until, in a river meadow, we rode past a ring of stone pillars, one of the mysteries left behind by the old people. Such rings stand all across England and some are huge, though this one was a mere score of lichen-covered stones, none taller than a man, standing in a circle some fifteen paces wide. Steapa glanced at them, then astonished me by speaking. “That’s a wedding,” he said.

  “A wedding?”

  “They were dancing,” he growled, “and the devil turned them to stone.”

  “Why did the devil do that?” I asked cautiously.

  “Because they wed on a Sunday, of course. Folk never should wed on a Sunday, never! Everyone knows that.” We rode on in silence, then, surprising me again, he began to talk about his mother and father and how they had been serfs of Odda the Elder. “But life was good for us,” he said.

  “It was?”

  “Plowing, sowing, weeding, harvest, threshing.”

  “But Ealdorman Odda didn’t live back there,” I said, jerking my thumb toward Steapa’s destroyed homestead.

  “No! Not him!” Steapa was amused I should even ask such a question. “He wouldn’t live there, not him! Had his own big hall. Still does. But he had a steward there. Man to give us orders. He was a big man! Very tall!”

  I hesitated. “But your father was short?”

  Steapa looked surprised. “How did you know that?”

  “I just guessed.”

  “He was a good worker, my father.”

  “Did he teach you to fight?”

  “He didn’t, no. No one did. I just learned myself.”

  The land was less damaged the farther south we went. And that was strange, for the Danes had come this way. We knew that, for folk said the Danes were still in the southern part of the shire, but life suddenly seemed normal. We saw men spreading dung on fields, and other men ditching or hedging. There were lambs in the pastures. To the north the foxes had become fat on dead lambs, but here the shepherds and their dogs were winning that ceaseless battle.

  And the Danes were in Cridianton.

  A priest told us that in a village hard under a great oak-covered hill beside a stream. The priest was nervous because he had seen my long hair and arm rings and he presumed I was a Dane, and my northern accent did not persuade him otherwise, but he was reassured by Steapa. The two talked, and the priest gave his opinion that it would be a wet summer.

  “It will,” Steapa agreed. “The oak greened before the ash.”

  “Always a sign,” the priest said.

  “How far is Cridianton?” I broke into the conversation.

  “A morning’s walk, lord.”

  “You’ve seen the Danes there?” I asked.

  “I seen them, lord, I have,” he said.

  “Who leads them?”

  “Don’t know, lord.”

  “They have a banner?” I asked.

  He nodded. “It hangs on the bishop’s hall, lord. It shows a white horse.”

  So it was Svein. I did not know who else it could have been, but the white horse confirmed that Svein had stayed in Defnascir rather than try to join Guthrum. I twisted in the saddle and looked at the priest’s village that was unscarred by war. No thatch had been burned, no granaries emptied, and the church was still standing. “Have the Danes come here?” I asked.

  “Oh yes, lord, they came. Came more than once.”

  “Did they rape? Steal?”

  “No, lord. But they bought some grain. Paid silver for it.”

  Well-behaved Danes. That was another strange thing. “Are they besieging Exanceaster?” I asked. That would have made a sort of sense. Cridianton was close enough to Exanceaster to give most of the Danish troops shelter while the rest invested the larger town.

  “No, lord,” the priest said, “not that I know of.”

  “Then what are they doing?” I asked.

  “They’re just in Cridianton, lord.”

  “And Odda is in Exanceaster?”

  “No, lord. He’s in Ocmundtun. He’s with Lord Harald.”

  I knew the shire reeve’s hall was in Ocmundtun, which lay beneath the northern edge of the great moor. But Ocmundtun was also a long journey from Cridianton and no place to be if a man wanted to harry the Danes.

&nbs
p; I believed the priest when he said Svein was at Cridianton, but we still rode there to see for ourselves. We used wooded, hilly tracks and came to the town at midafternoon and saw the smoke rising from cooking fires, then saw the Danish shields hanging from the palisade. Steapa and I were hidden in the high woods and could see men guarding the gate, and other men standing watch in a pasture where forty or fifty horses were grazing on the first of the spring grass. I could see Odda the Elder’s hall where I had been reunited with Mildrith after the fight at Cynuit, and I could also see a triangular Danish banner flying above the larger hall that was the bishop’s home. The western gate was open, though well guarded, and despite the sentries and the shields on the wall the town looked like a place at peace, not at war. There should be Saxons on this hill, I thought, Saxons watching the enemy, ready to attack. Instead the Danes were living undisturbed. “How far to Ocmundtun?” I asked Steapa.

  “We can make it by nightfall.”

  I hesitated. If Odda the Younger was at Ocmundtun, then why go there? He was my enemy and sworn to my death. Alfred had given me a scrap of parchment on which he had written words commanding Odda to greet me peaceably, but what force did writing have against hatred?

  “He won’t kill you,” Steapa said, surprising me again. He had evidently guessed my thoughts. “He won’t kill you,” he said again.

  “Why not?”

  “Because I won’t bide him killing you,” Steapa said and turned his horse west.

  We reached Ocmundtun at dusk. It was a small town built along a river and guarded by a high spur of limestone on which a stout palisade offered a refuge if attackers came. No one was on the limestone spur now and the town, which had no walls, looked placid. There might be war in Wessex, but Ocmundtun, like Cridianton, was evidently at peace. Harald’s hall was close to the fort on its hill and no one challenged us as we rode into the forecourt where servants recognized Steapa. They greeted him warily, but then a steward came from the hall door and, seeing the huge man, clapped his hands twice in a sign of delight. “We heard you were taken by the pagans,” the steward said.

  “I was.”

  “They let you go?”

  “My king freed me,” Steapa growled as though he resented the question. He slid from his horse and stretched. “Alfred freed me.”

  “Is Harald here?” I asked the steward.

  “My lord is inside.” The steward was offended that I had not called the reeve “lord.”

  “Then so are we,” I said, and led Steapa into the hall. The steward flapped at us because custom and courtesy demanded that he seek his lord’s permission for us to enter the hall, but I ignored him.

  A fire burned in the central hearth and dozens of rushlights stood on the platforms at the hall’s edges. Boar spears were stacked against the wall on which hung a dozen deerskins and a bundle of valuable pine marten pelts. A score of men were in the hall, evidently waiting for supper, and a harpist played at the far end. A pack of hounds rushed to investigate us and Steapa beat them off as we walked to the fire to warm ourselves. “Ale,” Steapa said to the steward.

  Harald must have heard the noise of the hounds, for he appeared at a door leading from the private chamber at the back of the hall. He blinked when he saw us. He had thought the two of us were enemies, then he had heard that Steapa was captured, yet here we were, side by side. The hall fell silent as he limped toward us. It was only a slight limp, the result of a spear wound in some battle that had also taken two fingers of his sword hand. “You once chided me,” he said, “for carrying weapons into your hall. Yet you bring weapons into mine.”

  “There was no gatekeeper,” I said.

  “He was having a piss, lord,” the steward explained.

  “There are to be no weapons in the hall,” Harald insisted.

  That was customary. Men get drunk in the hall and can do enough damage to one another with the knives we use to cut meat, and drunken men with swords and axes can turn a supper table into a butcher’s yard. We gave the steward our weapons. I hauled off my mail coat and told the steward to hang it on a frame to dry, then have a servant clean its links.

  Harald formally welcomed us when our weapons were gone. He said the hall was ours and that we should eat with him as honored guests. “I would hear your news,” he said, beckoning a servant who brought us pots of ale.

  “Is Odda here?” I demanded.

  “The father is, yes. Not the son.”

  I swore. We had come here with a message for Ealdorman Odda, Odda the Younger, only to discover that it was the wounded father, Odda the Elder, who was in Ocmundtun. “So where is the son?” I asked.

  Harald was offended by my brusqueness, but he remained courteous. “The ealdorman is in Exanceaster.”

  “Is he besieged there?”

  “No.”

  “And the Danes are in Cridianton?”

  “They are.”

  “And are they besieged?” I knew the answer to that, but wanted to hear Harald admit it.

  “No,” he said.

  I let the ale pot drop. “We come from the king,” I said. I was supposedly speaking to Harald, but I strode down the hall so that the men on the platforms could hear me. “We come from Alfred,” I said, “and Alfred wishes to know why there are Danes in Defnascir. We burned their ships, we slaughtered their ship guards, and we drove them from Cynuit, yet you allow them to live here? Why?”

  No one answered. There were no women in the hall, for Harald was a widower who had not remarried, and so the supper guests were all his warriors or else thegns who led men of their own. Some looked at me with loathing, for my words imputed cowardice to them, while others looked down at the floor. Harald glanced at Steapa as if seeking the big man’s support, but Steapa just stood by the fire, his savage face showing nothing. I turned back to stare at Harald. “Why are there Danes in Defnascir?” I demanded.

  “Because they are welcome here,” a voice said behind me.

  I turned to see an old man standing in the door. White hair showed beneath the bandage that swathed his head, and he was so thin and so weak that he had to lean on the door frame for support. At first I did not recognize him, for when I had last spoken to him he had been a big man, well built and vigorous, but Odda the Elder had taken an ax blow to the skull at Cynuit and he should have died from such a wound, yet somehow he had lived, and here he was, though now he was skeletal, pale, haggard, and feeble. “They are here,” Odda said, “because they are welcome. As are you, Lord Uhtred, and you, Steapa.”

  A woman was tending Odda the Elder. She had tried to pull him away from the door and take him back to his bed, but now she edged past him into the hall and stared at me. Then, seeing me, she did what she had done the very first time she saw me. She did what she had done when she came to marry me. She burst into tears.

  It was Mildrith.

  Mildrith was robed like a nun in a pale gray dress, belted with rope, over which she wore a large wooden cross. She had a close-fitting gray bonnet from which strands of her fair hair escaped. She stared at me, burst into tears, made the sign of the cross, and vanished. A moment later Odda the Elder followed her, too frail to stand any longer, and the door closed.

  “You are indeed welcome here,” Harald said, echoing Odda’s words.

  “But why are the Danes welcome here?” I asked.

  Because Odda the Younger had made a truce. Harald explained it as we ate. No one in this part of Defnascir had heard how Svein’s ships had been burned at Cynuit. They only knew that Svein’s men, and their women and children, had marched south, burning and plundering, and Odda the Younger had taken his troops to Exanceaster, which he had prepared for a siege, but instead Svein had offered to talk. The Danes, quite suddenly, had stopped raiding. Instead they had settled in Cridianton and sent an embassy to Exanceaster, and Svein and Odda had made their private peace.

  “We sell them horses,” Harald said, “and they pay well for them. Twenty shillings a stallion, fifteen a mare.”

  ??
?You sell them horses,” I said flatly.

  “So they will go away,” Harald explained.

  Servants threw a big birch log onto the fire. Sparks exploded outward, scattering the hounds who lay just beyond the ring of hearth stones.

  “How many men does Svein lead?” I asked.

  “Many,” Harald said.

  “Eight hundred?” I asked. “Nine?” Harald shrugged. “They came in twenty-four ships,” I went on, “only twenty-four. So how many men can he have? No more than a thousand, and we killed a few, and others must have died in the winter.”

  “We think he has eight hundred,” Harald said reluctantly.

  “And how many men in the fyrd? Two thousand?”

  “Of which only four hundred are seasoned warriors,” Harald said. That was probably true. Most men of the fyrd are farmers, while every Dane is a sword warrior, but Svein would never have pitted his eight hundred men against two thousand. Not because he feared losing, but because he feared that in gaining victory he would lose a hundred men. That was why he had stopped plundering and made his truce with Odda, because in southern Defnascir he could recover from his defeat at Cynuit. His men could rest, feed, make weapons, and get horses. Svein was husbanding his men and making them stronger. “It was not my choice,” Harald said defensively. “The ealdorman ordered it.”

  “And the king,” I retorted, “ordered Odda to drive Svein out of Defnascir.”

  “What do we know of the king’s orders?” Harald asked bitterly, and it was my turn to give him news, to tell how Alfred had escaped Guthrum and was in the great swamp.

  “And sometime after Easter,” I said, “we shall gather the shire fyrds and we shall cut Guthrum into pieces.” I stood. “There will be no more horses sold to Svein.” I said it loudly so that every man in the big hall could hear me.

  “But—” Harald began, then shook his head. He had doubtless been about to say that Odda the Younger, Ealdorman of Defnascir, had ordered the horses to be sold, but his voice trailed away.

  “What are the king’s orders?” I demanded of Steapa.