have got hold of him. What I ought to do,” he went on gloomily, “is slit the bastard’s gizzard.”
“Say that to anyone but me,” I said, “and you’ll be hanged.”
“I could run off and join the Danes,” he suggested.
“You could,” I said, “and they’d welcome you.”
“Then use me?” he asked, showing that he was not entirely a fool. I nodded. “You’ll be like Egbert or Burghred, or that new man in Mercia.”
“Ceolwulf.”
“King at their pleasure,” I said. Ceolwulf, a Mercian ealdorman, had been named king of his country now that Burghred was on his knees in Rome, but Ceolwulf was no more a real king than Burghred had been. He issued coins, of course, and he administered justice, but everyone knew there were Danes in his council chamber and he dared do nothing that would earn their wrath. “So is that what you want?” I asked. “To run off to the Danes and be useful to them?”
He shook his head. “No.” He traced a pattern on the table with spilled ale. “Better to do nothing,” he suggested.
“Nothing?”
“If I do nothing,” he said earnestly, “then the bastard might die. He’s always ill! He can’t live long, can he? And his son is just a baby. So if he dies I’ll be king! Oh, sweet Jesus!” This blasphemy was uttered because two priests had entered the tavern, both of them in ?thelwold’s entourage, though they were more like jailers than courtiers and they had come to find him and take him off to his bed. Beocca did not approve of my friendship with ?thelwold. “He’s a foolish creature,” he warned me.
“So am I, or so you tell me.”
“Then you don’t need your foolishness encouraged, do you? Now let us read about how the holy Swithun built the town’s East Gate.”
By the Feast of the Epiphany I could read as well as a clever twelveyearold, or so Beocca said, and that was good enough for Alfred who did not, after all, require me to read theological texts, but only to decipher his orders, should he ever decide to give me any, and that, of course, was the heart of the matter. Leofric and I wanted to command troops, to which end I had endured Beocca’s teaching and had come to appreciate the holy Swithun’s skill with trout, seagulls, and broken eggs, but the granting of those troops depended on the king, and in truth there were not many troops to command. The West Saxon army was in two parts. The first and smaller part was composed of the king’s own men, his retainers who guarded him and his family. They did nothing else because they were professional warriors, but they were not many and neither Leofric nor I wanted anything to do with them because joining the household guard would mean staying in close proximity to Alfred, which, in turn, would mean going to church.
The second part of the army, and by far the largest, was the fyrd, and that, in turn, was divided among the shires. Each shire, under its ealdorman and reeve, was responsible for raising the fyrd that was supposedly composed of every ablebodied man within the shire boundary. That could raise a vast number of men. Hamptonscir, for example, could easily put three thousand men under arms, and there were nine shires in Wessex capable of summoning similar numbers. Yet, apart from the troops who served the ealdormen, the fyrd was mostly composed of farmers. Some had a shield of sorts, spears and axes were plentiful enough, but swords and armor were in short supply, and worse, the fyrd was always reluctant to march beyond its shire borders, and even more reluctant to serve when there was work to be done on the farm. At ?sc’s Hill, the one battle the West Saxons had won against the Danes, it had been the household troops who had gained the victory. Divided between Alfred and his brother, they had spearheaded the fighting while the fyrd, as it usually did, looked menacing, but only became engaged when the real soldiers had already won the fight. The fyrd, in brief, was about as much use as a hole in a boat’s bottom, but that was where Leofric could expect to find men. Except there were those ships’ crews getting drunk in Hamtun’s winter taverns and those were the men Leofric wanted, and to get them he had to persuade Alfred to relieve Hacca of their command, and luckily for us Hacca himself came to Cippanhamm and pleaded to be released from the fleet. He prayed daily, he told Alfred, never to see the ocean again. “I get seasick, lord.”
Alfred was always sympathetic to men who suffered sickness because he was so often ill himself, and he must have known that Hacca was an inadequate commander of ships, but Alfred’s problem was how to replace him. To which end he summoned four bishops, two abbots, and a priest to advise him, and I learned from Beocca that they were all praying about the new appointment. “Do something!” Leofric snarled at me.
“What the devil am I supposed to do?”
“You have friends who are priests! Talk to them. Talk to Alfred, earsling.” He rarely called me that anymore, only when he was angry.
“He doesn’t like me,” I said. “If I ask him to put us in charge of the fleet, he’ll give it to anyone but us. He’ll give it to a bishop, probably.”
“Hell!” Leofric said.
In the end it was Eanfl?d who saved us. The redhead was a merry soul and had a particular fondness for Leofric, and she heard us arguing and sat down, slapped her hands on the table to silence us, and then asked what we were fighting about. Then she sneezed because she had a cold.
“I want this useless earsling,” Leofric jerked his thumb at me, “to be named commander of the fleet, only he’s too young, too ugly, too horrible, and too pagan, and Alfred’s listening to a pack of bishops who’ll end up naming some wizened old fart who doesn’t know his prow from his prick.”
“Which bishops?” Eanfl?d wanted to know.
“Scireburnan, Wintanceaster, Winburnan, and Exanceaster,” I said. She smiled, sneezed again, and two days later I was summoned to Alfred’s presence. It turned out that the Bishop of Exanceaster was partial to redheads.
Alfred greeted me in his hall, a fine building with beams, rafters, and a central stone hearth. His guards watched us from the doorway where a group of petitioners waited to see the king, and a huddle of priests prayed at the hall’s other end, but the two of us were alone by the hearth where Alfred paced up and down as he talked. He said he was thinking of appointing me to command the fleet. Just thinking, he stressed. God, he went on, was guiding his choice, but now he must talk with me to see whether God’s advice chimed with his own intuition. He put great store by intuition. He once lectured me about a man’s inner eye and how it could lead us to a higher wisdom, and I dare say he was right, but appointing a fleet commander did not need mystical wisdom, it needed finding a raw fighter willing to kill some Danes. “Tell me,” he went on, “has learning to read bolstered your faith?”
“Yes, lord,” I said with feigned eagerness.
“It has?” He sounded dubious.
“The life of Saint Swithun,” I said, waving a hand as if to suggest it had overwhelmed me, “and the stories of Chad!” I fell silent as if I could not think of praise sufficient for that tedious man.
“The blessed Chad!” Alfred said happily. “You know men and cattle were cured by the dust of his corpse?”
“A miracle, lord,” I said.
“It is good to hear you say as much, Uhtred,” Alfred said, “and I rejoice in your faith.”
”It gives me great happiness, lord,” I replied with a straight face.
“Because it is only with faith in God that we shall prevail against the Danes.”
“Indeed, lord,” I said with as much enthusiasm as I could muster, wondering why he did not just name me commander of the fleet and be done with it.
But he was in a discursive mood. “I remember when I first met you,” he said, “and I was struck by your childlike faith. It was an inspiration to me, Uhtred.”
“I am glad of it, lord.”
“And then”—he turned and frowned at me—“I detected a lessening of faith in you.”
“God tries us, lord,” I said.
“He does! He does!” He winced suddenly. He was always a sick man. He had collapsed in pain at his wedding, though that might have been the horror of realizing what he was marrying, but in truth he was prone to bouts of sudden griping agony. That, he had told me, was better than his first illness, which had been an affliction of ficus, which is a real endwerc, so painful and bloody that at times he had been unable to sit, and sometimes that ficus came back, but most of the time he suffered from the pains in his belly.
“God does try us,” he went on, “and I think God was testing you. I would like to think you have survived the
