We had ridden eastwards, again following the tracks of Haesten’s band, then those hoof-prints had turned south to join a larger burned and beaten path. That path had been made by hundreds of horses, probably thousands, and the smoke trails in the sky suggested that the Danes were journeying south towards the valley of the Temes and the rich pickings of Wessex beyond.
‘There are corpses in the church,’ Osferth told me. His voice was calm, yet I could tell he was angry. ‘Many corpses,’ he said. ‘They must have locked them inside and burned the church around them.’
‘Like a hall-burning,’ I said, remembering Ragnar the Elder’s hall blazing in the night and the screams of the people trapped inside.
‘There are children there,’ Osferth said, sounding angrier. ‘Their bodies shrivelled to the size of babies!’
‘Their souls are with God,’ ?thelflaed tried to comfort him.
‘There’s no pity any more,’ Osferth said, looking at the sky, which was a mix of grey cloud and dark smoke.
Steapa also glanced at the sky. ‘They’re going south,’ he said. He was thinking of his orders to return to Wessex and worrying that I was keeping him in Mercia while a Danish horde threatened his homeland.
‘Or maybe to Lundene?’ ?thelflaed suggested. ‘Maybe south to the Temes, then downriver to Lundene?’ She was thinking the same thoughts as me. I remembered the city’s decayed wall, and Eohric’s scouts watching that wall. Alfred had known the importance of Lundene, which is why he had asked me to capture it, but did the Danes know? Whoever garrisoned Lundene controlled the Temes, and the Temes led deep into Mercia and Wessex. So much trade went through Lundene and so many roads led there and whoever held Lundene held the key to southern Britain. I looked southwards where the great plumes of smoke drifted. A Danish army had passed this way, probably only a day before, but was it their only army? Was another besieging Lundene? Had another already captured the city? I was tempted to ride straight for Lundene to ensure that it would be well defended, but that would mean abandoning the burning trail of the great army. ?thelflaed was watching me, waiting for an answer, but I said nothing. Six of us sat on our horses in the centre of that burned village while my men watered their horses in the pond where the swollen corpse floated. ?thelflaed, Steapa, Finan, Merewalh and Osferth were all looking to me, and I was trying to place myself in the mind of whoever commanded the Danes. Cnut? Sigurd? Eohric? We did not even know that.
‘We’ll follow these Danes,’ I finally decided, nodding towards the smoke in the southern sky.
‘I should join my lord,’ Merewalh said unhappily.
?thelflaed smiled. ‘Let me tell you what my husband will do,’ she said, and the scorn in the word husband was as pungent as the stench from the burning church. ‘He will keep his forces in Gleawecestre,’ she went on, ‘just as he did when the Danes last invaded.’ She saw the struggle on Merewalh’s face. He was a good man, and like all good men he wanted to do his oath-duty, which was to be at his lord’s side, but he knew ?thelflaed spoke the truth. She straightened in her saddle. ‘My husband,’ she said, though this time without any scorn, ‘gave me permission to give orders to any of his followers that I encountered. So now I order you to stay with me.’
Merewalh knew she was lying. He looked at her for an instant, then nodded. ‘Then I shall, lady.’
‘What about the dead?’ Osferth asked, staring at the church. ?thelflaed leaned over and gently touched her half-brother’s arm. ‘The dead must bury their dead,’ she said.
Osferth knew there was no time to give the dead a Christian burial. They must be left here, but the anger was tight in him and he slid from his saddle and walked to the smoking church where small flames licked from the burning timbers. He pulled two charred lengths of wood from the ruin. One was about five feet long, the other much shorter, and he scavenged among the ruined cottages until he found a strip of leather, perhaps a belt, and he used the leather to lash the two pieces of timber together. He made a cross. ‘With your permission, lord,’ he told me, ‘I want my own standard.’
‘The son of a king should have a banner,’ I said.
He rammed the butt of the cross on the ground so that it shed ash, and the crosspiece tilted crookedly. It would have been funny if he had not been so bitterly enraged. ‘This is my standard,’ he said, and called for his servant, a deaf-mute named Hwit, to carry the cross.
We followed the hoof tracks south through more burned villages, past a great hall that was now ashes and blackened rafters, and by fields where cattle lowed miserably because they needed milking. If the Danes had left cows behind then they must already have a vast herd, too big to manage, and they must have collected women and children for the slave markets as well. They were encumbered by now. Instead of being a fast, dangerous, well- mounted army of savage raiders they had become a lumbering procession of captives, wagons, herds and flocks. They would still be spewing out vicious raid parties, but each of those would bring back further plunder to slow the main army even more.
They had crossed the Temes. We discovered that next day when we reached Cracgelad where I had killed Aldhelm, ?thelred’s man. The small town was now a burh, and its walls were of stone, not earth and wood. The fortifications were ?thelflaed’s doing, and she had ordered the work done, not only because the small town guarded a crossing of the Temes, but because she had witnessed a small miracle there; touched, she believed, by a dead saint’s hand. So Cracgelad was now a formidable fortress, with a flooded ditch fronting the new stone wall and it was hardly surprising that the Danes had ignored the garrison and instead had headed for the causeway that led across the marshes on the north bank of the Temes to the Roman bridge, which had been repaired at the same time that Cracgelad’s walls had been rebuilt. We also followed the causeway and stood our horses on the northern bank of the Temes and watched the skies burn above Wessex. So Edward’s kingdom was being ravaged. ?thelflaed might have made Cracgelad into a burh, but the town still flew her husband’s banner of the white horse above its southern gate rather than her flag of the cross-grasping goose. A dozen men now appeared at that gate and walked to join us. One was a priest, Father Kynhelm, and he gave us our first reliable news. ?thelwold, he said, was with the Danes. ‘He came to the gate, lord, and demanded we surrender.’
‘You recognised him?’
‘I’ve never seen him before, lord, but he announced himself and I assume he told the truth. He came with Saxons.’
‘Not Danes?’
Father Kynhelm shook his head. ‘The Danes stayed away. We could see them, but as far as I could tell the men at the gate were all Saxons. A lot of them shouted at us to surrender. I counted two hundred and twenty.’
‘And one woman,’ a man added.
I ignored that. ‘How many Danes?’ I asked Father Kynhelm.
He shrugged. ‘Hundreds, lord, they blackened the fields.’
‘?thelwold’s banner is a stag,’ I said, ‘with crosses for antlers. Was that the only flag?’
‘They showed a black cross as well, lord, and a boar flag.’
‘A boar?’ I said.
‘A tusked boar, lord.’
So Beortsig had joined his masters, which meant that the army plundering Wessex was part Saxon. ‘What answer did you give ?thelwold?’ I asked Father Kynhelm.
‘That we served Lord ?thelred, lord.’
‘You have news of Lord ?thelred?’
‘No, lord.’
‘You have food?’
‘Enough for the winter, lord. The harvest was adequate, God be praised.’
‘What forces do you have?’
‘The fyrd, lord, and twenty-two warriors.’
‘How many fyrd?’
‘Four hundred and twenty, lord.’
‘Keep them here,’ I said, ‘because the Danes will probably be back.’ When Alfred was on his deathbed I had told him that the Northmen had not learned how to fight us, but we had learned how to fight them, and that was true. They had made no attempt to capture Cracgelad, except for a feeble summons for the town to surrender, and if thousands of Danes could not capture one small burh, however formidable its walls, then they had no chance against Wessex’s larger garrisons, and if they could not capture the large burhs and so destroy Edward’s forces inside, then eventually they must retreat. ‘What Danish banners did you see?’ I asked Father Kynhelm.
