the high ground, because they had taken the battle to the Danes after a winter of containment – and because of the courage and intelligence of Arngrim, who had made the crucial break in the skjaldborg.
Cynewulf had his cousin laid out in a tent, on a heap of blankets. He immediately found the main wound. It was a rip in Arngrim's lower belly, made by a blow powerful enough to have cut through his mail. Though one of the King's own physicians fussed around, Cynewulf chased him away. He would have nobody tend his cousin save Ibn Zuhr. Though he had always despised the Moor Cynewulf had no doubt that his foreign medicine was better than anything the King's doctors could muster.
But Ibn Zuhr said there was little he could do. 'The wound is too deep,' he murmured. 'His intestines are gashed too – there will be internal bleeding, infection from the spilled contents of his gut-'
Cynewulf, sickened, said, 'Just do your best, Moor.'
So Ibn Zuhr cleaned his hands in hot water, and made a potion of his obscure herbs, a kind of tea which he had Cynewulf hold under the thegn's nose. This would deepen his unconscious state, the Moor said, while he worked. Then he cleaned out the wound. This was a rough job, as Ibn Zuhr scooped out dirt and dried blood and yellow fat and pus from the cavity, as if gutting a pig. Then he pulled the thegn's organs back into place. He had Cynewulf hold the two ragged sides of the wound together – it was difficult, the flesh was slippery with blood, and the priest needed all his strength – while Ibn Zuhr stitched the wound with a bone needle and gut thread. When it was done he washed the wound with wine, and covered it with a light silken cloth.
The Moor stood back, breathing hard, his arms bloodied to the elbow. 'I have done my best,' he said.
'I believe you,' murmured Cynewulf.
'I don't.' The voice was a gurgle, as if his throat was full of blood. But Arngrim's eyes were open.
'Cousin! You are alive!'
'The gates of the Upperworld are closed to me yet.'
'Does it hurt?'
Arngrim grimaced, as if trying to laugh. 'For a priest you are an idiot, Cynewulf. I half-woke while the Moor was rummaging in my gut. Imagine how that felt. Worse than the Dane's blade.'
'I'm not ready to give you the last rites yet.'
'My sword. And my trophy.'
'Ironsides is here, at the foot of the bed. And the King nailed the Beast's arm to the oak tree.'
Amgrim snorted. 'That will do. Egil lived, I think. But by Woden's eyes I hope the bastard dies of the wound I inflicted on him today. Listen, Cynewulf. When I die – my sword – I promised it to the river-'
'Arngrim, I'm a priest of Christ. I can't perform a pagan ritual.'
'You must,' Arngrim croaked. 'Or my way to the Upperworld will be barred. You are kin, Cynewulf. Isn't human blood more important than an argument between gods? And my family in Brycgstow. Tell my sons how their father died.'
Cynewulf, through tears, had to smile. 'You speak of your sword before your family.'
Arngrim grunted. 'Tell them that too. Make them laugh instead of cry. And don't you go baptising them on the sly, you pious bastard.' He coughed, and groaned as the spasm tore at his wound.
Ibn Zuhr stepped forward. 'You must rest now.' He held a cup full of another of his teas. 'Drink this, and you will sleep a while.' One arm was concealed by his body as he leaned over Arngrim, the other arm raised the cup. Arngrim accepted the drink. But as the liquid touched his lips his eyes widened. Then he fell back into unconsciousness.
Cynewulf stayed with his cousin all night, praying. But the thegn did not wake again.
And as the dawn light broke over a green country that was once again English, Arngrim breathed his last. Cynewulf closed his cousin's mouth and eyes, and wiped his face clean of the last of his blood and sweat.
It was only then, as Cynewulf stood back from his cousin's body, that he noticed the dagger which protruded from Arngrim's side, buried up to the hilt. And he knew how he had finally died, what Ibn Zuhr had done in that moment when he had leaned over Arngrim's body to give him the sleeping potion.
For the rest of the day Cynewulf searched for the Moorish slave, but he had vanished.
That evening Cynewulf rode alone to the river bank, bearing Ironsides. The weapon was so heavy Cynewulf could barely lift it, let alone imagine wielding it in combat.
At the river bank, Cynewulf tethered his horse at a tree. The water lapped peacefully, and birds fluttered away as he walked. He would never have known that yesterday hundreds of men had wilfully murdered each other, not an hour's ride from here.
He walked along the bank until he found an outcropping of rock. He jammed the sword into a break in the rock face, and hauled at its hilt. The mighty blade would barely bend at his pulling, let alone break. Cynewulf told himself there was no shame in using his mind in carrying out this pagan ritual. He found a broken branch about as long as the sword, and with his belt fixed it to Ironsides' hilt. After a couple of false starts, with his whole weight applied to his lever, he managed at last to bend the sword, and break it.
Then, breathing hard, he took the two halves of the sword and hurled them into the river, muttering prayers to God, and to Woden.
XIX
Cynewulf saw Alfred only once more. The King summoned him to Lunden, won back from the Danes.
It was nine years after Ethandune.
'And it will be,' Cynewulf remarked, as his patient horse bore him along the broken Roman road towards Lunden, 'a meeting I would never have imagined could take place, in the darkest hours at Aethelingaig.'
'What's that, Father?' asked Saberht, who rode at his side.
'Oh, nothing, boy, nothing,' Cynewulf said. 'Just talking to myself.'
The novice scratched his tonsure, raggedly cut in a head of thick black hair. Of course, his manner implied, this mumbling dotage was to be expected of a man of Cynewulf's advanced years – nearly forty, by God.
Cynewulf wiped the sweat of an unseasonably warm April day from his brow, and tried to master his irritation. After all, it wasn't the boy's fault he was growing old. The novice, not yet twenty, was as lithe as a stoat, and as randy, as his lurid confessions proved. But he was a good boy who did his best to take care of Cynewulf, even if he did treat the priest as if he were Methuselah's twin.
Of course forty years was well short of the three-score-years-and-ten promised in the Bible. But life was hard in these fallen times, and bodies wore out, even those of priests. In particular Cynewulf's knees ached constantly, no doubt a relic of the long hours he spent on them each day. He embraced such suffering and dedicated it to God.
But in a sense he had been spared. Most of Cynewulf's boyhood friends were dead and gone, and he knew very few people older than himself. Suddenly he found himself lost in a world full of youthful innocents, like Saberht, who knew nothing of the remote past of thirty years ago, or twenty or even ten, the days of Aethelingaig and Ethandune, knew nothing and cared less.
Why, Saberht didn't even fear the Dane. To him the Dane was a spent force who had been defeated by Alfred and now, in the King's latter years, was being beaten steadily back. Oh, the Dane clung on in the north-east, but what was there to fear? So quickly the generations turned, Cynewulf thought, so quickly the past was forgotten.
But Cynewulf had not forgotten, and nor had Alfred.
So Saberht was unafraid of the Dane – but, oddly, he was wary of Lunden.
On this last day of travelling, coming down towards Lunden from the north-through lands taken under Alfred's sway from the Danes just a year ago – they crossed over a ridge of high ground, and Lunden and its river opened up before them. Cynewulf pulled up his horse, breathing hard, and Saberht slowed beside him.
The river snaked lazily across a broad valley, its waters shining like beaten iron. The Roman wall was a great ellipse that hugged the north bank. The city had been abandoned so long ago that mature oak trees sprouted from the foundations of ruined office buildings. But today, smoke rose up from a hundred fires burning within the walls and gathered in a pall. For centuries the English had shunned Lunden's antique walls, but today the old city was no longer empty.
