“Thank God,” she said.
Stiorra was telling me of her adventures, and Osbert, my youngest, had run to me and was trying to climb my leg. Uhtred, my eldest son, was nowhere to be seen. I picked up Osbert and shouted for Finan to bring the other men inside. “I don’t know how long we’re staying,” I told the Abbess Werburgh, “but the horses need stabling and food.”
“You think we’re a tavern?” she demanded.
“You won’t leave again, will you?” Stiorra was asking insistently.
“No,” I said, “no, no, no,” and then I stopped talking because ?thelfl?d had appeared in a doorway, framed there by the darkness behind and even on that drab gray day it seemed to me that, though she was dressed in a cloak and hood of coarse brown weave, she glowed.
And I remembered Iseult’s prophecy made so many years ago, made when ?thelfl?d was no older than Stiorra, a prophecy made when Wessex was at its weakest, when the Danes had overrun the country and Alfred was a fugitive in the marshes. Iseult, that strange and lovely woman, dark as shadows, had promised me that Alfred would give me power and that my woman would be a creature of gold.
And I stared at ?thelfl?d and she stared back, and I knew the promise I had made to my daughter was one I would keep. I would not leave.
I put my children down, warning them to stay away from the horses’ hooves, and I walked across the puddled courtyard, oblivious of the nuns who had crept out to watch our arrival. I planned to bow to ?thelfl?d. She was, after all, a king’s daughter and the wife of Mercia’s ruler, but her face was at once tearful and happy and I did not bow. I held out my arms and she came to me, and I felt her body trembling as I held her close. Maybe she could feel my heart beating, for it seemed to me as loud as a great drumbeat. “You’ve come,” she said.
“Yes.”
“I knew you would.”
I pushed back her hood to see her hair, as golden as mine. I smiled. “A creature of gold,” I said.
“Foolish man,” she said, smiling.
“What happens now?” I asked her.
“I imagine,” she said, stepping gently away from me and pulling the hood back over her hair, “that my husband will try to kill you.”
“And he can summon?” I asked, then paused to think, “fifteen hundred trained warriors?”
“At least that many.”
“Then I see no difficulty,” I said lightly. “I have at least forty men.”
And that afternoon the first of the Mercian warriors came.
They arrived in groups, ten or twenty at a time, riding from the north and making a loose cordon about the nunnery. I watched them from the bell-tower, counting over a hundred warriors, and still more came. “The thirty men in the village,” I asked ?thelfl?d, “they were here to keep you from leaving?”
“They were supposed to stop food reaching the nunnery,” she said, “though they weren’t very effective. Supplies came across the river by boat.”
“They wanted to starve you?”
“My husband thought that would make me leave. Then I’d have to go back to him.”
“Not to your father?”
She grimaced. “He would have sent me back to my husband, wouldn’t he?”
“Would he?”
“Marriage is a sacrament, Uhtred,” she said almost wearily, “it is sanctified by God, and you know my father won’t offend God.”
“So why didn’t ?thelred just drag you back?”
“Invade a nunnery? My father would disapprove of that!”
“He would,” I said, watching a larger group of horsemen appear to the north.
“They thought my father would die at any moment,” she said, and I knew she spoke of my cousin and his friend, Aldhelm, “and they were waiting for that.”
“But your father lives.”
“He recovers,” ?thelfl?d said, “God be thanked.”
“And here comes trouble,” I said, because the new band of horsemen, at least fifty in number, rode beneath a banner, suggesting that whoever commanded the troops guarding the nunnery was coming himself. As the horsemen drew nearer, I saw the banner displayed a cross made of two big-bladed war axes. “Whose badge is that?”
“Aldhelm’s,” ?thelfl?d said flatly.
Two hundred men ringed the monastery now, and Aldhelm, riding a tall black stallion, placed himself fifty paces from the nunnery gates. He had a bodyguard of two priests and a dozen warriors. The warriors carried shields that bore their lord’s crossed-ax badge, and those grim men gathered just behind him and, like their lord, gazed in silence at the closed gates. Did Aldhelm know I was inside? He might have suspected, but I doubt he had any certainty. We had ridden fast through Mercia, keeping to the eastern half where the Danes were strongest, so few men in Saxon Mercia would realize I had come south. Yet perhaps Aldhelm suspected I was there, for he made no attempt to enter the nunnery, or else he was under orders not to offend his god by committing sacrilege. Alfred might forgive ?thelred for making ?thelfl?d unhappy, but he would never forgive an insult to his god.
I went down to the courtyard. “What’s he waiting for?” Finan asked me.
“Me,” I said.
I dressed for war. I dressed in shining mail, sword-belted, booted, with my wolf-crested helmet and my shield with the wolf badge, and I chose to carry a war ax as well as my two scabbarded swords. I ordered one leaf of the convent gate to be opened, then walked out alone. I did not ride because I had not been able to buy a battle- trained stallion.
I walked in silence and Aldhelm’s men watched me. If Aldhelm had possessed a scrap of courage he should have ridden at me and chopped me down with the long sword hanging at his waist, and even without courage he could have ordered his personal guard to cut me down, but instead he just stared at me.
I stopped a dozen paces from him, then leaned the battle-ax on my shoulder. I had pushed open the hinged cheek-plates of my helmet so Aldhelm’s men could see my face. “Men of Mercia!” I shouted so that not only Aldhelm’s men could hear me, but the West Saxon troops across the river. “Any day now Jarl Haesten will lead an attack on your country! He comes with thousands of men, hungry men, spear-Danes, sword-Danes, Danes who would rape your wives, enslave your children, and steal your lands. They will make a greater army than the horde of warriors you defeated at Fearnhamme! How many of you were at Fearnhamme?”
Men glanced at each other, but none raised a hand or shouted that they had been present at that great victory.
“You’re ashamed of your triumph?” I asked them. “You made a slaughter that will be remembered so long as men live in Mercia! And you are ashamed of it? How many of you were at Fearnhamme?”
Some found their courage then and lifted their arms, and one man cheered, and suddenly most of them were cheering. They cheered themselves. Aldhelm, confused, raised a hand to call for silence, but they ignored him.
“And who,” I bellowed louder, “do you want to lead you against the Jarl Haesten who comes here with Vikings and pirates, with killers and slavers, with spears and axes, with murder and fire? It was the Lady ?thelfl?d who encouraged you to victory at Fearnhamme, and you want her locked in a nunnery? She begged me to come and fight with you again, and here I am, and you greet me with swords? With spears? So who do you want to lead you against Jarl Haesten and his killers?” I let that question hang for a few heartbeats, then I leveled the ax so it pointed at Aldhelm. “Do you want him?” I shouted, “or me?”
What a fool that man was. At that moment, in the remnants of rain that spat out of the west, he should have killed me fast, or else he should have embraced me. He could have leaped from his saddle and offered me friendship, and so pretended an alliance that would buy him the time during which he could arrange my death by stealth, but instead he showed fear. He was a coward, he had always been a coward, brave only when faced by the weak, and the fear was on his face, it was in his hesitation, and it was not till one of his followers leaned and whispered in his ear that he found his voice. “This man,” he called, pointing at me, “is outlawed from Wessex.”
That was news to me, but it was not surprising. I had broken my oath to Alfred, so Alfred would have little choice but to declare me outlaw and thus prey to anyone with the courage to capture me. “So I’m an outlaw!” I
