waited for us in the great hall that was lit with the high candles by which he reckoned the passing time. Wax ran thick down the banded shafts and a servant was trimming the wicks so that the light stayed steady. Alfred had been writing, but he stopped as we entered. ?thelred was also there, as were Brother Asser, Father Beocca, and Bishop Erkenwald.
“Well,” Alfred snapped. It was not anger, but worry that made his voice so sharp.
“She lives,” I said, “she is unharmed, she is treated with the respect due to her rank, she is properly and well guarded, and they will sell her back to us.”
“Thank God,” Alfred said, and made the sign of the cross. “Thank God,” he repeated, and I thought he was going to drop to his knees. ?thelred said nothing, but just stared at me with serpent eyes.
“How much?” Bishop Erkenwald demanded.
“Three thousand pounds of silver and five hundred of gold,” I said, and explained that the first metal had to be delivered by the next full moon and the balance was to be taken downriver one month later. “And the Lady ?thelflaed will not be released until the last coin is paid,” I finished.
Bishop Erkenwald and Brother Asser both winced at the amount of the ransom, though Alfred showed no such reaction. “We will be paying for our own destruction,” Bishop Erkenwald growled.
“My daughter is dear to me,” Alfred said mildly.
“With that money,” the bishop warned, “they will raise thousands of men!”
“And without that money?” Alfred turned to me, “what will happen to her?”
“Humiliation,” I said. In truth ?thelflaed might have found happiness with Erik if the ransom was not paid, but I could hardly say as much. Instead I described the fate that Haesten had suggested so wolfishly. “She’ll be taken to every place where Northmen live,” I said, “and she will be shown naked to mocking crowds.” Alfred winced. “Then,” I went on remorselessly, “she’ll be whored to the highest bidders.”
?thelred gazed at the floor, the churchmen were silent. “It is the dignity of Wessex that is at stake,” Alfred said quietly.
“So men must die for the dignity of Wessex?” Bishop Erkenwald asked.
“Yes!” Alfred was suddenly angry. “A country is its history, bishop, the sum of all its stories. We are what our fathers made us, their victories gave us what we have, and you would make me leave my descendants a tale of humiliation? You want men to tell how Wessex was made a laughing stock to howling heathens? That is a story, bishop, that would never die, and if that tale is told then whenever men think of Wessex they will think of a princess of Wessex paraded naked to pagans. Whenever they think of England, they will think of that!” And that, I thought, was interesting. We rarely used that name in those days; England. That was a dream, but Alfred, in his anger, had lifted a curtain on his dream and I knew then he wanted his army to continue north, ever north, until there was no more Wessex, no more East Anglia, no more Mercia, and no more Northumbria, only England.
“Lord King,” Erkenwald said with unnatural humility, “I do not know if there will be a Wessex if we pay the pagans to raise an army.”
“Raising an army takes time,” Alfred said firmly, “and no pagan army can attack until after the harvest. And once the harvest is gathered we can raise the fyrd. We will have the men to oppose them.” That was true, but most of our men would be untrained farmers, while Sigefrid would bring howling, hungry Northmen who had been bred to the sword. Alfred turned on his son-in-law. “And I will expect the fyrd of southern Mercia to be at our side.”
“It will be, lord,” ?thelred said enthusiastically. There was no sign on his face of the sickness that had assailed him the last time I had seen him in this hall. His color was back, and his jaunty confidence seemed undiminished.
“Maybe this is God’s doing,” Alfred said, speaking again to Erkenwald. “In His mercy He has offered our enemies a chance to gather in their thousands so that we can defeat them in one great battle.” His voice strengthened with that thought. “The Lord is on my side,” he said firmly, “I will not fear!”
“The word of the Lord,” Brother Asser said piously, making the sign of the cross.
“Amen,” ?thelred said, “and amen. We shall defeat them, lord!”
“But before you win that great victory,” I said to ?thelred, taking a malicious pleasure in what I was about to say, “you have a duty to perform. You are to deliver the ransom in person.”
“By God, I will not!” ?thelred said indignantly, then caught Alfred’s eye and subsided back into his chair.
“And you are to kneel to Sigefrid,” I said, twisting the knife.
Even Alfred looked appalled at that. “Sigefrid insists on that condition?” he asked.
“He does, lord,” I said, “even though I argued with him! I appealed, lord, and I argued and I pleaded, but he would not yield.”
?thelred was just staring at me with horror on his face.
“Then so be it,” Alfred said. “Sometimes the Lord God asks more than we can bear, but for His glorious sake we must endure it.”
“Amen,” I said fervently, deserving and receiving a skeptical look from the king.
They talked for as long as it took one of Alfred’s banded candles to burn through two hours’ worth of wax, and it was all wasted talk; talk of how the money was to be raised, and how it was to be transported to Lundene and how it was to be delivered to Beamfleot. I made suggestions while Alfred wrote notes on the margin of his parchment, and it was all useless effort because if I was successful then no ransom would be paid and ?thelflaed would not return and Alfred’s throne would be safe.
And I was to make it all possible.
In one week’s time.
ELEVEN
Darkness. The last light of day was just gone, and a new darkness now shrouded us.
There was moonlight, but the moon was hidden so that the cloud edges were silvered, and beneath that vast sky of silver, black, and starlight, the
Ralla was at the steering-oar. He was a far better seaman than I could ever hope to be, and I trusted him to take us around the river’s sweeping bends in the blackness. Most of the time it was impossible to tell where the water ended and the marshes began, but Ralla seemed unconcerned. He stood with legs spread and one foot tapping the deck in time to the slow beat of the oars. He said little, but now and then made tiny course corrections with the oar’s long loom and never once did a blade touch the shelving mud at the river’s margins. Occasionally the moon would slither out from behind a cloud and the water would suddenly gleam a glittering silver before us. There were red sparks on the banks that came and went, small fires in the marsh hovels.
We were using the last of the ebb to take us downriver. The intermittent sheen of moon on water showed the banks going ever farther apart as the river widened imperceptibly into the sea. I kept glancing northward, waiting to see the glow in the sky that would betray the fires in and around the high camp at Beamfleot.
“How many pagan ships at Beamfleot?” Ralla suddenly asked me.
“Sixty-four a week ago,” I said, “but probably nearer eighty by now. Maybe a hundred or more?”
“And just us, eh?” he asked, amused.
“Just us,” I agreed.
“And there’ll be more ships up the coast,” Ralla said. “I heard they were making a camp at Sceobyrig?”
“They’ve been there a month now,” I said, “and there’s at least fifteen crews there. Probably thirty by now.” Sceobyrig was a desolate spit of mud and muddy land a few miles east of Beamfleot and the fifteen Danish ships had landed there and made a fort of earth walls and wooden posts. I suspected they had chosen Sceobyrig because there was scarcely any room left in Beamfleot’s creek anymore, and because their proximity to Sigefrid’s fleet offered them his protection. Doubtless they paid him silver, and doubtless they hoped to follow him into Wessex to snap up what plunder they could. On the banks of every sea, and in camps upriver, and all across the Northmen’s world, the news was spreading that the kingdom of Wessex was vulnerable and so the warriors were gathering.
“But we’re not going to fight today?” Ralla asked.
“I hope not,” I said, “fighting’s very dangerous.”
Ralla chuckled, but said nothing.
“There shouldn’t be any fighting,” I said, after a pause.
