‘You’re not speaking,’ Benedetta said accusingly, ‘you’re not answering me.’
I stood and picked up the sword that I would carry to the fight and felt the sharp loss of the sword I wished I was carrying. I pushed the blade into its scabbard. ‘It’s time to go.’
‘But you—’ she began.
‘I swore an oath,’ I interrupted her harshly, ‘and I lost a sword.’
‘And what of me?’ she asked, almost crying. ‘What of Alaina?’
I stooped and looked into her beautiful face. ‘I will come for you,’ I said, ‘and for the children. When it’s over we’ll all go north.’
I thought of Eadith in Bebbanburg and thrust that uncomfortable thought away. For a heartbeat I was tempted to touch Benedetta’s cheek, to assure her I would come back, but instead I turned away.
Because it was time to fight.
Or it was time, rather, to ride the pilgrim road again, to cross the great road, and so to the River Ligan, and that meant passing the hilltop where Waormund had humiliated me. I could barely bring myself to look up the slope to the hedgerow, nor look at the dry ruts in the road that had lacerated me. I hurt. Finan rode to my right with his battered helmet hanging from his saddle pommel and a broad-brimmed rye straw hat shading his eyes from the rising sun. Wihtgar, with whom Finan seemed to have struck up a friendship, rode beyond Finan, and the two were arguing about horses, Wihtgar maintaining that a gelding could outrun a stallion any day, to which Finan, of course, retorted that the horses of Ireland were so swift, so brave, that no horse in the world could outrun them, though he allowed that Sleipnir might. Wihtgar had never heard of Sleipnir, so Finan had to explain that Sleipnir was Thor’s horse and ran on eight legs, to which Wihtgar retorted that Sleipnir’s dam must have been a spider, which made them both laugh.
In truth I knew Finan was talking to distract me. He had deliberately said Sleipnir was Thor’s horse when he knew full well he was Odin’s stallion, and he was thus inviting me to correct him. I kept silent.
Merewalh had ridden first, but he and his two hundred men had turned south on the great road and were long out of sight when we crossed and kept riding eastwards. We numbered one hundred and eighty men, of whom sixty were Brihtwulf’s troops, led by Brihtwulf himself, and by Wihtgar, who was his most experienced warrior. A dozen servants, brought to take the horses back to Werlameceaster, accompanied us with packhorses on which we had loaded barrels of ale and boxes of oatcakes. My few men, all on captured West Saxon horses, rode behind me, but the rest of the troops were Mercians who had wanted to come with us, inspired or convinced by Father Oda’s sermon. The priest was also with us, though I had not wanted his company. ‘You’re a priest,’ I had told him, ‘and we need warriors.’
‘You need the living Christ at your side,’ he had responded fiercely, ‘and you need more.’
‘More gods?’ I had needled him.
‘You need an East Anglian,’ he had ignored my taunt. ‘You’re pretending to be Æthelhelm’s men and you know nothing of his eastern estates, nothing of his tenants. I do.’
He had been right, and so he rode with us though he refused both a mail coat and a weapon. I carried a long plain sword with an ash handle. The blade, which Merewalh had given me, had no name. ‘But it’s a fine sword, lord,’ he had assured me, and so it was, but it was no Serpent-Breath.
Once at the Ligan we turned south. Wihtgar had sent scouts ahead who came back to say there were no red-cloaked troops at the village where the ford crossed the Ligan. ‘No ship either,’ one of the scouts reported. I had supposed that the ship in which Waormund had been pursuing us would be grounded at the ford, and so it probably had been, but she was evidently gone. ‘Did you cross the ford?’ I asked.
‘No, lord. We did what we were told to do. Look for the enemy in the village. We were told they left two days ago.’
That, if true, was a relief. I did not mind if Merewalh’s two hundred men were discovered by Æthelhelm’s forces, indeed we wanted them to be discovered. We wanted the troops garrisoning Lundene to be watching northwards, watching Merewalh, while my smaller force went southwards. But to go southwards we needed ships and we needed to stay unseen.
We splashed across the ford to the Ligan’s East Anglian bank, then turned south again, riding to the big timber yard where, on our voyage upriver in Brimwisa, I had seen four barges being loaded with split timbers.
Three of the barges were still there. They were flat-bottomed, made for river work, with a wide beam, a blunt prow, and a steering-oar with a blade the size of a small barn door. All three possessed masts, but the masts were stepped, lying lengthwise in the wide flat bellies of the craft
