Erkenwald picked up the silver chalice into which he had poured a small amount of the dirty water and dribbled the contents onto the newly written words. He scrubbed at the ink with a finger, then held up the parchment to show that the writing had been smeared into oblivion. “It is done,” he said pompously, then nodded at the gray-haired woman. “Do your duty!” he commanded her.
The old, bitter-faced woman stepped to ?thelflaed’s side. The girl shrank away, but Aldhelm seized her by the shoulders. ?thelflaed shrieked in terror, and Aldhelm’s response was to cuff her hard around the head. I thought ?thelred must respond to that assault on his wife by another man, but he evidently approved for he did nothing except watch as Aldhelm took ?thelflaed by her shoulders again. He held her motionless as the old woman stooped to seize the hem of ?thelflaed’s linen shift. “No!” ?thelflaed protested in a wailing, despairing voice.
“Show her to us!” Erkenwald snapped. “Show us her thighs and her belly!”
The woman obediently lifted the shift to reveal ?thelflaed’s thighs.
“Enough!” I shouted that word.
The woman froze. The priests were stooping to gaze at ?thelflaed’s bare legs and waiting for the dress to be lifted to reveal her belly. Aldhelm still held her by the shoulders, while the bishop was gaping toward the shadows at the church door from where I had spoken. “Who is that?” Erkenwald demanded.
“You evil bastards,” I said as I walked forward, my steps echoing from the stone walls, “you filthy earslings.” I remember my anger from that night, a cold and savage fury that had driven me to intervene without thinking of the consequences. My wife’s priests all preach that anger is a sin, but a warrior who does not have anger is no true warrior. Anger is a spur, it is a goad, it overcomes fear to make a man fight, and I would fight for ?thelflaed that night. “She is a king’s daughter,” I snarled, “so drop the dress!”
“You will do as God tells you,” Erkenwald snarled at the woman, but she dared neither drop the hem nor raise it further.
I pushed my way through the stooping priests, kicking one in the arse so hard that he pitched forward onto the dais at the bishop’s feet. Erkenwald had seized his staff, its silver finial curved like a shepherd’s crook, and he swung it toward me, but checked his swing when he saw my eyes. I drew Serpent-Breath, her long steel scraping and hissing on the scabbard’s throat. “You want to die?” I asked Erkenwald, and he heard the menace in my voice and his shepherd’s staff slowly went down. “Drop the dress,” I told the woman. She hesitated. “Drop it, you filthy bitch-hag,” I snarled, then sensed the bishop had moved and whipped Serpent-Breath around so that her blade shimmered just beneath his throat. “One word, bishop,” I said, “just one word, and you meet your god here and now. Gisela!” I called, and Gisela came to the altar. “Take the hag,” I told her, “and take ?thelflaed, and see whether her belly has swollen or whether her thighs have rotted. Do it in decent privacy. And you!” I turned the blade so that it pointed at Aldhelm’s scarred face, “take your hands off King Alfred’s daughter, or I will hang you from Lundene’s bridge and the birds will peck out your eyes and eat your tongue.” He let go of ?thelflaed.
“You have no right…” ?thelred said, finding his tongue.
“I come here,” I interrupted him, “with a message from Alfred. He wishes to know where your ships are. He wishes you to set sail. He wishes you to do your duty. He wants to know why you are skulking here when there are Danes to kill.” I put the tip of Serpent-Breath’s blade into the scabbard and let her fall home. “And,” I went on when the sound of the sword had finished echoing in the church, “he wishes you to know that his daughter is precious to him, and he dislikes things that are precious to him being maltreated.” I invented that message, of course.
?thelred just stared at me. He said nothing, though there was a look of indignation on his jaw-jutting face. Did he believe I came with a message from Alfred? I could not tell, but he must have feared such a message for he knew he had been shirking his duty.
Bishop Erkenwald was just as indignant. “You dare to carry a sword in God’s house?” he demanded angrily.
“I dare do more than that, bishop,” I said. “You’ve heard of Brother J?nberht? One of your precious martyrs? I killed him in a church and your god neither saved him nor stopped my blade.” I smiled, remembering my own astonishment as I had cut J?nberht’s throat. I had hated that monk. “Your king,” I said to Erkenwald, “wants his god’s work done, and that work is killing Danes, not amusing yourself by looking at a young girl’s nakedness.”
“This is God’s work!” ?thelred shouted at me.
I wanted to kill him then. I felt the twitch as my hand went to Serpent-Breath’s hilt, but just then the hag came back. “She’s…” the woman started, then fell silent as she saw the look of hatred I was giving ?thelred.
“Speak, woman!” Erkenwald commanded.
“She shows no signs, lord,” the woman said grudgingly. “Her skin is unmarked.”
“Belly and thighs?” Erkenwald pressed the woman.
“She is pure,” Gisela spoke from a recess at the side of the church. She had an arm around ?thelflaed and her voice was bitter.
Erkenwald seemed discomfited by the report, but drew himself up and grudgingly acknowledged that ?thelflaed was indeed pure. “She is evidently undefiled, lord,” he said to ?thelred, pointedly ignoring me. Finan was standing behind the watching priests, his presence a threat to them. The Irishman was smiling and watching Aldhelm who, like ?thelred, wore a sword. Either man could have tried to cut me down, but neither touched their weapon.
“Your wife,” I said to ?thelred, “is not undefiled. She’s defiled by you.”
His face jerked up as though I had slapped him. “You are…” he began.
I unleashed the anger then. I was much taller and broader than my cousin, and I bullied him back from the altar to the side wall of the church, and there I spoke to him in a hiss of fury. Only he could hear what I said. Aldhelm might have been tempted to rescue ?thelred, but Finan was watching him, and the Irishman’s reputation was enough to ensure that Aldhelm did not move. “I have known ?thelflaed since she was a small child,” I told ?thelred, “and I love her as if she was my own child. Do you understand that, earsling? She is like a daughter to me, and she is a good wife to you. And if you touch her again, cousin, if I see one more bruise on ?thelflaed’s face, I shall find you and I shall kill you.” I paused, and he was silent.
I turned and looked at Erkenwald. “And what would you have done, bishop,” I sneered, “if the Lady ?thelflaed’s thighs had rotted? Would you have dared kill Alfred’s daughter?”
Erkenwald muttered something about condemning her to a nunnery, not that I cared. I had stopped close beside Aldhelm and looked at him. “And you,” I said, “struck a king’s daughter.” I hit him so hard that he spun into the altar and staggered for balance. I waited, giving him a chance to fight back, but he had no courage left so I hit him again and then stepped away and raised my voice so that everyone in the church could hear. “And the King of Wessex orders the Lord ?thelred to set sail.”
Alfred had sent no such orders, but ?thelred would hardly dare ask his father-in-law whether he had or not. As for Erkenwald, I was sure he would tell Alfred that I had carried a sword and made threats inside a church, and Alfred would be angry at that. He would be more angry with me for defiling a church than he would be with the priests for humiliating his daughter, but I wanted Alfred to be angry. I wanted him to punish me by dismissing me from my oath and thus releasing me from his service. I wanted Alfred to make me a free man again, a man with a sword, a shield, and enemies. I wanted to be rid of Alfred, but Alfred was far too clever to allow that. He knew just how to punish me.
He would make me keep my oath.
It was two days later, long after Gunnkel had fled from Hrofeceastre, that ?thelred at last sailed. His fleet of fifteen warships, the most powerful fleet Wessex had ever assembled, slid downriver on the ebb tide, propelled by an angry message that was delivered to ?thelred by Steapa. The big man had ridden from Hrofeceastre, and the message he carried from Alfred demanded to know why the fleet lingered while the defeated Vikings fled. Steapa stayed that night at our house. “The king is unhappy,” he told me over supper, “I’ve never seen him so angry!” Gisela was fascinated by the sight of Steapa eating. He was using one hand to hold pork ribs that he flensed with his teeth, while the other fed bread into a spare corner of his mouth. “Very angry,” he said, pausing to drink ale. “The Sture,” he added mysteriously, picking up a new slab of ribs.
“The Sture?”
“Gunnkel made a camp there, and Alfred thinks he’s probably gone back to it.”
The Sture was a river in East Anglia, north of the Temes. I had been there once and remembered a wide mouth protected from easterly gales by a long spit of sandy land. “He’s safe there,” I said.
“Safe?” Steapa asked.
