“Give me my sword!” Sigefrid was pleading now. He reached for Fear-Giver’s hilt, but I kicked his hand away from Erik’s corpse. “Kill him,” I told Osferth.
We dropped Sigefrid Thurgilson overboard somewhere on the sun-dancing sea beyond Caninga, then turned westward so that the flooding tide could carry us upriver. Haesten had managed to board another of his ships and, for a time, he pursued us, but we had the longer and faster boat, and we drew away from him and, after a time, his ships abandoned the chase and the smoke of Beamfleot receded until it looked like a long low cloud. And ?thelflaed still wept.
“What do we do?” a man asked me. He was one of Erik’s men, the leader now of the twenty-two survivors who had escaped with us.
“Whatever you wish,” I said.
“We hear that your king hangs all Northmen,” the man said.
“Then he will hang me first,” I said. “You will live,” I promised him, “and in Lundene I shall give you a ship and you may go wherever you want.” I smiled. “You can even stay and serve me.”
Those men had laid Erik’s body reverently on a cloak. They pulled Sigefrid’s sword from their lord’s belly and gave it to me, and I in turn handed it to Osferth. “You earned it,” I said, and so he had, for in that welter of death Alfred’s son had fought like a man. Erik held his own sword in his dead hand and I thought he would already be at the feasting hall, waiting for me.
I took ?thelflaed away from her lover’s corpse and led her to the stern and there I held her as she cried in my arms. Her golden hair brushed my beard. She clung to me and cried till she had no more tears, and then she whimpered and hid her face against my bloody mail coat.
“The king will be pleased with us,” Finan said.
“Yes,” I said, “he will.” No ransom would be paid. Wessex was safe. The Northmen had fought and killed each other, and their ships were burning and their dreams were ashes.
I felt ?thelflaed’s body shaking against mine and I stared eastward to where the sun dazzled above the smoke of burning Beamfleot. “You’re taking me back to ?thelred, aren’t you?” she said accusingly.
“I’m taking you to your father,” I said. “Where else can I take you?” She did not answer because she knew there was no choice. Wyrd bi? ful ar?d. “And no one must ever know,” I went on quietly, “about you and Erik.”
Again she did not answer, but now she could not answer. She was sobbing too heavily and I held my arms around her as though I could hide her from the watching men and from the world and from the husband who awaited her.
The long oars dipped, the riverbanks closed on us, and in the west the smoke of Lundene smudged the summer sky.
As I took ?thelflaed home.
HISTORICAL NOTE
There is more fiction in
The records of Alfred’s reign are comparatively rich, partly because the king was a scholar and wanted such records kept, but even so there are mysteries. We know that his forces captured London, but there is controversy over the exact year in which that city was essentially incorporated into Wessex. Legally it remained in Mercia, but Alfred was an ambitious man, and he was evidently determined to keep kingless Mercia subservient to Wessex. With the capture of Lundene he has begun the inexorable northward expansion that will eventually, after Alfred’s death, transmute the Saxon kingdom of Wessex into the land we know as England.
Much of the rest of the story is based on truth. There was a determined Viking attack on Rochester (Hrofeceastre) in Kent that ended in utter failure. That failure vindicated Alfred’s defensive policy of ringing Wessex with burhs that were fortified towns, permanently garrisoned by the fyrd. A Viking chieftain could still invade Wessex, but few Viking armies traveled with siege equipment, and any such invasion thus risked leaving a strong enemy in its rear. The burh system was immaculately organized, a reflection, I suspect, of Alfred’s own obsession with order, and we are fortunate to possess a sixteenth-century copy of an eleventh-century copy of the original document describing the burh’s organization. The Burghal Hildage, as the document is known, prescribes how many men would be needed in each burh, and how those men were to be raised, and it reflects an extraordinary defensive effort. Ancient ruined towns were revived and ramparts rebuilt. Alfred even planned some of those towns and, to this day, if you walk the streets of Wareham in Dorset or Wallingford in Oxford you are following the streets his surveyors laid out and passing property lines that have endured for twelve centuries.
If Alfred’s defensive scheme was a brilliant success, then his first efforts at offensive warfare were less remarkable. I have no evidence that ?thelred of Mercia led the fleet that attacked the Danes in the River Stour, indeed I doubt that foray was any of ?thelred’s business, but other than that the tale is essentially true and the expedition, after its initial success, was overwhelmed by the Vikings. Nor do I have a shred of evidence that ?thelred ever subjected his young wife to the ordeal of bitter water, but anyone fascinated by such ancient and malicious sorcery can find God’s instructions for the ceremony in the Old Testament (Numbers 5).
Alfred the Great, as
