‘Not until Archbishop Athelm consecrates me,’ Æthelstan said. The archbishop, who had been held in the palace as a privileged prisoner, sat at the high table. He looked confused, his hands shaking as he ate and drank, but he nodded at Æthelstan’s words. ‘And you will come to the ceremony, Lord Uhtred,’ Æthelstan demanded, meaning that I should attend the solemn moment when the Archbishop of Contwaraburg placed the royal helmet of Wessex on the new king’s head.
‘With your permission, lord King,’ I said. ‘I would go home.’
He hesitated a moment, and then nodded abruptly. ‘You have my permission,’ he said.
I was going home.
In time we heard that Æthelstan was crowned. The ceremony was performed at Cyningestun, on the Temes, where his father had been given the royal helmet of Wessex, but Æthelstan refused the helmet, instead insisting that the archbishop place the emerald crown on his gold-threaded hair. The ealdormen of three kingdoms acclaimed the moment, and Alfred’s dream of one Christian kingdom thus came one step nearer.
And now I sat on Bebbanburg’s high rock, the flame-lit hall behind me and the moon-silvered sea before me, and I thought of the dead. Of Folcbald, killed by a spear thrust in the shield wall by the Crepelgate. Of Sigtryggr, felled by fever and dying in his bed with a sword in his hand. Of his two children, my grandchildren, both dead. Of Eadith who had gone to Eoferwic to care for the children and had caught their plague and now was buried.
‘Why did she go?’ I had asked my son.
‘She thought you would want her to go.’
I had said nothing, just felt guilt. The plague had not reached as far north as Bebbanburg. My son had barred the roads, threatening travellers with death if they tried to come onto our land, and so the sickness had ravaged the land from Lindcolne to Eoferwic, and then spread through the great vale of farms that surrounded the city, but it had been kept from Bebbanburg. The plague had died itself by the time we reached Eoferwic on our journey north.
And Guthfrith was king there, his election supported by the Danish jarls who still ruled much of Northumbria. I had met him briefly. Like his brother Sigtryggr he was a thin, fair-haired man with a handsome face, but unlike Sigtryggr he was sour and suspicious. The night I met him, when he reluctantly feasted me in his great hall, he had demanded my allegiance, had demanded that I swear an oath to him, but he had not demanded it instantly, suggesting that when the feast was over there would be time enough for that brief ceremony. Then he had drunk mead and ale, had demanded more mead, then cheered raucously when one of his men bent a serving girl over a table. ‘Bring her here!’ he shouted. ‘Bring the bitch here!’ But by the time the girl had been dragged to the platform where we ate, Guthfrith was vomiting into the rushes and he slept soon after. We left in the morning, mounted on horses taken from Æthelhelm’s beaten army, and I had sworn no oath.
I had ridden home with my men. With Finan, an Irishman, with Gerbruht, a Frisian, with Immar, a Dane, with Vidarr, a Norseman, and with Beornoth and Oswi, both Saxons. We were seven warriors, but we were brothers too. And with us rode the children we had rescued in Lundene, a dozen of the slaves we had freed from Gunnald’s ship, and Benedetta.
And Eadith was dead.
And I was at home at last, where the sea wind swept across the rock and where I thought of the dead, where I thought of the future, and where I thought of the three kingdoms that were now one and wanted a fourth.
Benedetta sat beside me. Alaina, as ever, was near her. The child crouched, watching as Benedetta took my hand. I gripped hers, maybe too hard, yet she did not complain or take it away. ‘You did not want her dead,’ she said.
‘But I did,’ I spoke softly and bleakly.
‘Then God will forgive you,’ she said, and leaned her head on my shoulder. ‘He made us,’ she added, ‘so He must take us as we are. That is His fate.’
I had come home.
Historical Note
Edward the Elder, as he is now known, died in July 924. He had reigned for twenty-five years, succeeding his father, Alfred, as King of Wessex in 899. In the regnal lists he is usually followed by Æthelstan, but there is plenty of evidence that Ælfweard, half-brother to Æthelstan, ruled Wessex for about a month following his father’s death. If that is true, as for fictional purposes I have plainly assumed it is, then Ælfweard’s death was extremely convenient for Æthelstan who thereby became the king of the three southern kingdoms of Saxon Britain: Wessex, East Anglia, and Mercia.
Much of the novel is fictional. We do not know how Ælfweard died, and his death probably took place at Oxford rather than Lundene, and it took another month before the West Saxons accepted Æthelstan as their new king. He was crowned at Kingston upon Thames that same year and was the first king to insist on being invested with the crown rather than with a helmet. Much of the reluctance to accept Æthelstan as king surely arose from the rumour that Edward had not married his mother, that he was indeed a bastard.
Edward’s reign left much of southern England free of the Viking scourge. King Alfred’s strategy of building burhs, which are heavily fortified towns, had been adopted by Edward and by his sister Æthelflaed in Mercia. East Anglia, which had been a Danish kingdom, was
