Sword Song

“Guthrum’s territory.”

Steapa paused to pull a scrap of meat from between his teeth. “Guthrum sheltered him there. Alfred doesn’t like it. Thinks Guthrum has to be smacked.”

“Alfred’s going to war with East Anglia?” Gisela asked, surprised.

“No, lady. Just smacking him,” Steapa said, crunching his jaws on some crackling. I reckoned he had eaten half a pig and showed no signs of slowing down. “Guthrum doesn’t want war, lady. But he has to be taught not to shelter pagans. So he’s sending the Lord ?thelred to attack Gunnkel’s camp on the Sture, and while he’s at it to steal some of Guthrum’s cattle. Just smack him.” Steapa gave me a solemn look. “Pity you can’t come.”

“It is,” I agreed.

And why, I wondered, had Alfred chosen ?thelred to lead an expedition to punish Guthrum? ?thelred was not even a West Saxon, though he had sworn an oath to Alfred of Wessex. My cousin was a Mercian, and the Mercians have never been famous for their ships. So why choose ?thelred? The only explanation I could find was that Alfred’s eldest son, Edward, was still a child with an unbroken voice and Alfred himself was a sick man. He feared his own death, and he feared the chaos that could descend on Wessex if Edward took the throne as a child. So Alfred was offering ?thelred a chance to redeem himself for his failure to trap Gunnkel’s ships in the Medw?g, and an opportunity to make himself a reputation large enough to persuade the thegns and ealdormen of Wessex that ?thelred, Lord of Mercia, could rule them if Alfred died before Edward was old enough to succeed.

?thelred’s fleet carried a message to the Danes of East Anglia. If you raid Wessex, Alfred was saying, then we shall raid you. We shall harry your coast, burn your houses, sink your ships, and leave your beaches stinking of death. Alfred had made ?thelred into a Viking, and I was jealous. I wanted to take my ships, but I had been ordered to stay in Lundene, and I obeyed. Instead I watched the great fleet leave Lundene. It was impressive. The largest of the captured warships had thirty oars a side, and there were six of those, while the smallest had banks of twenty. ?thelred was leading almost a thousand men on his raid, and they were all good men; warriors from Alfred’s household and from his own trained troops. ?thelred sailed in one of the large ships that had once carried a great raven’s head, scorched black, on her stem, but that beaked image was gone and now the ship was named Rodbora, which meant “carrier of the cross,” and her stem-post was now decorated with a massive cross and she sailed with warriors aboard, and with priests, and, of course, with ?thelflaed, for ?thelred would go nowhere without her.

It was summer. Folk who have never lived in a town during the summer cannot imagine the stench of it, nor the flies. Red kites flocked in the streets, living off carrion. When the wind was north the smell of the urine and animal dung in the tanners’ pits mixed with the city’s own stench of human sewage. Gisela’s belly grew, and my fear for her grew with it.

I went to sea as often as I could. We took Sea-Eagle and Sword of the Lord down the river on the ebb tide and came back with the flood. We hunted ships from Beamfleot, but Sigefrid’s men had learned their lesson and they never left their creek with fewer than three ships in company. Yet, though those groups of ships hunted prey, trade was at last reaching Lundene, for the merchants had learned to sail in large convoys. A dozen ships would keep each other company, all with armed men aboard and so Sigefrid’s pickings were scanty, but so were mine.

I waited two weeks for news of my cousin’s expedition, and learned its fate on a day when I made my usual excursion down the Temes. There was always a blessed moment as we left the smoke and smells of Lundene and felt the clean sea winds. The river looped about wide marshes where herons stalked. I remember being happy that day because there were blue butterflies everywhere. They settled on the Sea-Eagle and on the Sword of the Lord that followed in our wake. One insect perched on my outstretched finger where it opened and closed its wings.

“That means good luck, lord,” Sihtric said.

“It does?”

“The longer it stays there, the longer your luck lasts,” Sihtric said, and held out his own hand, but no blue butterfly settled there.

“Looks like you’ve no luck,” I said lightly. I watched the butterfly on my finger and thought of Gisela and of childbirth. Stay there, I silently ordered the insect, and it did.

“I’m lucky, lord,” Sihtric said, grinning.

“You are?”

“Ealhswith’s in Lundene,” he said. Ealhswith was the whore whom Sihtric loved.

“There’s more trade for her in Lundene than in Coccham,” I said.

“She stopped doing that,” Sihtric said fiercely.

I looked at him, surprised. “She has?”

“Yes, lord. She wants to marry me, lord.”

He was a good-looking young man, hawk-faced, black-haired and well built. I had known him since he was almost a child, and I supposed that altered my impression of him, for I still saw the frightened boy whose life I had spared in Cair Ligualid. Ealhswith, perhaps, saw the young man he had become. I looked away, watching a tiny trickle of smoke rising from the southern marshes and I wondered whose fire it was and how they lived in that mosquito-haunted swamp. “You’ve been with her a long time,” I said.

“Yes, lord.”

“Send her to me,” I said. Sihtric was sworn to me and he needed my permission to marry because his wife would become a part of my household and thus my responsibility. “I’ll talk to her,” I added.

“You’ll like her, lord.”

I smiled at that. “I hope so,” I said.

A flight of swans beat between our boats, their wings loud in the summer air. I was feeling content, all but for my fears about Gisela, and the butterfly was allaying that worry, though after a while it launched itself from my finger and fluttered clumsily in the southward wake of the swans. I touched Serpent-Breath’s hilt, then my amulet, and sent a prayer to Frigg that Gisela would be safe.

It was midday before we were abreast of Caninga. The tide was low and the mudflats stretched into the calm estuary where we were the only ships. I took Sea-Eagle close to Caninga’s southern shore and stared toward Beamfleot’s creek, but I could see nothing useful through the heat haze that shimmered above the island. “Looks like they’ve gone,” Finan commented. Like me he was staring northward.

“No,” I said, “there are ships there.” I thought I could see the masts of Sigefrid’s ships through the wavering air.

“Not as many as there should be,” Finan said.

“We’ll take a look,” I said, and so we rowed around the island’s eastern tip, and discovered that Finan was right. Over half of Sigefrid’s ships had left the little River Hothlege.

Only three days before there had been thirty-six masts in the creek and now there were just fourteen. I knew the missing ships had not gone upriver toward Lundene, for we would have seen them, and that left only two choices. Either they had gone east and north about the East Anglian coast, or else they had rowed south to make another raid into Cent. The sun, so hot and high and bright, winked reflected dazzling light from the spear-points on the ramparts of the high camp. Men watched us from that high wall, and they saw us turn and hoist our sails and use a small northeast wind that had stirred since dawn to carry us south across the estuary. I was looking for a great smear of smoke that would tell me a raiding party had landed to attack, plunder, and burn some town, but the sky over Cent was clear. We dropped the sail and rowed east toward the Medw?g’s mouth, and still saw no smoke, and then Finan, sharp-eyed and posted in our bows, saw the ships.

Six ships.

I was looking for a fleet of at least twenty boats, not some small group of ships, and at first I took no notice, assuming the six were merchant ships keeping company as they rowed toward Lundene, but then Finan came hurrying back between the rowers’ benches. “They’re warships,” he said.

I peered eastward. I could see the dark flecks of the hulls, but my eyes were not so keen as Finan’s and I could not make out their shapes. The six hulls flickered in the heat haze. “Are they moving?” I asked.

“No, lord.”

“Why anchor there?” I wondered. The ships were on the far side of the Medw?g’s mouth, just off the point called Scerhnesse, which means “bright headland,” and it was a strange place to anchor for the currents swirled strong off the low point.