“That’s crazy,” Finan said as we reached the crest. “They could have killed a score of us.”
“They’re confident,” I said. “They must know the walls of their fort will stop us.”
“Or else they don’t know their business,” Finan said.
“When did you last meet a Dane who didn’t know how to fight?”
We sent men to scout the surrounding trees as we approached the old hall at Thunresleam, but still no enemy appeared. We had been to this hall years before, back when we had negotiated with the Norsemen, Sigefrid and Erik, and afterward we had fought a bitter battle in the creek beneath the fort. Those events seemed so distant now and both Sigefrid and Erik were dead. Haesten had survived that long ago fight, and now I had come to oppose him again, though none of us knew whether Haesten himself had returned to Beamfleot. Rumor said he was still ravaging Mercia, which implied he was confident that Beamfleot’s garrison could protect itself.
The oak-beamed hall at Thunresleam would be at the center of my camp. It had once been a magnificent building, but it had been abandoned many years before and the pillars were rotting and the thatch was black, damp and sagging. The great beams were thick with bird droppings while the floor was a mass of weeds. Just outside the hall was a stone pillar about the height of a man. There was a hole through the stone that was filled with pebbles and scraps of cloth, the votive offerings left by the local folk who had fled our arrival. Their village was a mile eastward and I knew it had a church, but the Christians of Thunresleam understood that their high place and old hall were sacred to Thor and so they still came and sent prayers to that older god. Mankind can never be too safe. I might not like the Christian god, but I do not deny his existence and, at hard moments in my life, I have sent prayers to him as well as to my own gods.
“Shall we make a palisade?” Weohstan asked me.
“No.”
He stared at me. “No?”
“Clear out as many trees as you can,” I ordered him, “but no palisade.”
“But…”
“No palisade!”
I was taking a risk, but if I made a palisade I would give my men a place of safety and I knew how reluctant men were to abandon such security. I had often noticed how a bull, brought for entertainment to some feast, will adopt a patch of land as its refuge and defend it self from the attacking dogs with a terrible ferocity so long as it stays in its chosen refuge, but goad the bull out and it loses confidence and the dogs sense the vulnerability and attack with a renewed savagery. I did not want my men to feel safe. I wanted them nervous and alert. I wanted them to know that safety lay not in a fort of their own making, but in capturing the enemy’s fort. And I wanted that capture to be quick.
I ordered ?lfwold’s men to cut trees to the west, clearing the woods back to the hill’s edge and beyond so we could see far across the country toward Lundene. If the Danes brought men back from Mercia I wanted to see them. I put Osferth in charge of our sentries. Their job was to make a screen between us and Beamfleot to warn of any sally by the Danes. Those sentries were in the woods, hidden from the old high fort, and if the Danes came I expected to fight them among the trees. Osferth’s men would slow them until my whole force could be brought against the attackers, and I ordered that every man was to sleep wearing his mail coat and with his weapons close by.
I asked ?lfwold to protect our northern and western flanks. His men would watch for the approach of our supplies and guard against reinforcements coming from Haesten’s men who still smeared the far horizon with smoke. Then, those orders given, I took fifty men to explore the country about our encampment that rang with the sound of axes biting into trees. Finan, Pyrlig, and Osferth accompanied me, as did ?thelfl?d who ignored all my advice to stay out of danger.
We went first to the village of Thunresleam. It was a straggle of thick-thatched cottages built about the scorched and collapsed ruin of a church. The villagers had fled when we climbed the hill, but a few braver souls now appeared from the woods beyond their small fields where the first shoots of wheat, barley, and rye greened the furrows. They were Saxons and the first to approach us were led by a burly peasant with matted brown hair, one eye, and work-blackened hands. He looked up at ?lfwold’s banner that showed the Christian cross. I had borrowed the banner to make it clear we were not Danes, and the cross evidently reassured the one-eyed man who knelt to us and beckoned for his companions to kneel. “I am Father Heahberht,” he said.
He told me he was priest to the village and to two other settlements farther east. “You don’t look like a priest,” I said.
“If I did, lord, I’d be dead,” he said, “the witch in the fort kills priests.”
I glanced southward, though from here the old fort on the hill was not visible. “The witch?”
“She is called Skade, lord.”
“I know Skade.”
“She burned our church, lord.”
“And she took the girls, lord,” a woman said tearfully, “even the young ones. She took my daughter and she was only ten years old, lord.”
“Why did she do…” ?thelfl?d began the question, then abruptly stopped as she realized the answer was obvious.
“Have they abandoned the old fort?” I asked. “The one on the hill?”
“No, lord,” Father Heahberht answered, “they use it to keep watch. And we have to take food there, lord.”
“How many men there?”
“About fifty, lord. They keep the horses there, too.”
I did not doubt that the priest told the truth, but the Danes had seen us coming and I reckoned the old fort would have been reinforced by now. “How many men are in the new fort?” I asked.
“They won’t let us near the new fort, lord,” Father Heahberht said, “but I’ve watched it from the hill at H?thlegh, lord, and I could not count all the men inside.” He looked up at me nervously. His dead eye was milky white and ulcerated. He was shivering with fear, not because he thought we were an enemy like the Danes, but because we were lords. He forced himself to speak as calmly as he could. “They number in their hundreds, lord. Three thousand men rode west, lord, but they left all their wives and children in Beamfleot.”
“You counted the ones who left?”
“I tried, lord.”
“Their wives and children are here?” ?thelfl?d asked.
“They live on the beached boats, lady,” Heahberht said.
The priest was an observant man and I rewarded him with a silver coin. “So who commands in the new fort?” I asked him. “Haesten himself?”
Father Heahberht shook his head. “Skade does, lord.”
“Skade! She’s in command?”
“We’re told so, lord.”
“Haesten hasn’t returned?” I asked.
“No, lord,” Heahberht said, “not that we’ve heard.” He told us how Haesten had started building his new fort as soon as his fleet arrived from Cent. “They made us cut oak and elm for them, lord.”
“I need to see this new fort,” I said and I gave Heahberht another coin before kicking my horse between two of the cottages and onto a field of growing barley. I was thinking of Skade, of her cruelties, of her desperate lust to be a ruler. She could order men by the pure strength of her will, but did she have the skills to deploy them in battle? Yet Haesten was no fool, he would not have left her in command if he doubted her ability, and I did not doubt that he had also left her sufficient troops and competent advisers. I kicked the horse again, riding south now into the trees. My men followed. I rode recklessly, careless that the Danes might have men in the woods, though we saw none. I sensed that Skade’s garrison was content to stay behind its walls, confident in their ability to resist any attack.
We reached the edge of that high ground where the land dropped steeply to the web of creeks and inlets that threaded the marsh. Beyond that was the wide Temes, its southern shore just visible in the distant haze. Four ships idled in the middle of that great spread of light-reflecting water. They were Danes patrolling for prey and watching for any Saxon warships coming downstream from Lundene.
And to my right I could see Caninga and its creek, and the great fleet of boats beached on Caninga’s shore.
