A Hero's throne

meet her furious gaze. “Can you blame him for turning to others? When we suffered constant invasions from a hostile, foreign enemy? Every day my husband hoped the ground beneath our feet would crack open like the shell of an egg and Ealdstan’s warriors would chase the Danes out forever.”

Emma lowered herself onto a bench. “Yet here we are. He is dead, and I am married to a barbarian king. Where were you?”

The fire continued to crack as Ealdstan turned to face her. “I thought that prayers and counsel might be enough.”

“The women of this land know the strength of prayer in preventing their loved ones from being slaughtered.”

“Yet here we find ourselves. What is to be done?”

Emma massaged her right leg. “You are deeply invested in this land; at one time you had the kings under your hand, and now they will not let you in the door. And you sit like a dog, shut out in the cold, waiting to be allowed back into the warmth, or at least thrown a bone.”

Ealdstan’s face did not change, and yet she fancied something burned underneath his skin. Good, thought Emma. Let him burn.

“And the only reproach I have against my husband, and all of his fathers back to??elstan, is that they didn’t take a stick to your hind legs and beat you out of the door.”

Ealdstan hardened his jaw and tilted his head back. “You drew me here to insult me, is that it? Abuse your betrayer?”

Emma grinned. “We are all of us traitors now. All of us left standing. Betrayal has become the price of life today. Do I chide? No, I show you plain the world around you.”

“I need not schooling,” Ealdstan said, rising. “I need not-”

“I drew you here to deal,” Emma said, breaking in. “I believe you seek to make reparation-so do I. The song of this land has not yet been sung and it can be made great again. I see this isle as the seat of an Empire of the North, an empire that unites several strong races together against all the heathen who would stand against us.”

“A great dream. An ambitious dream. How do you see me in this dream?”

“You shall be the power behind the throne-a guiding hand for the ages. The commander of an army of light against the world of darkness.”

Ealdstan’s eyes turned downward and Emma fancied she saw some emotion ripple across his forehead, but it could simply have been the firelight.

“The Norsemen are strong,” she continued, “but their heads are easily turned. They are not the stuff that empires are made of. The army that defeated this land have been paid off and are gone-drinking the long nights away back in Sweden and Norway, where there is infighting and threat from all the kingdoms around them. They have no desire to rule, only to fight.”

“So why then shall-”

“But the Normans, on the other hand, are strong leaders-strong rulers. My sons,? lfred and Eadweard, are in Normandy now, with my relatives. They are creating bonds of trust and goodwill that will nourish the seeds that will grow this great nation into a might to rival even Karolus Magnus’s new Roman Empire.”

“Can they yet stand against kings?”

Emma tilted her head. “Not yet; the storm will rage but awhile longer before their time comes to stand. And in this time of uncertainty, others shall try their footing and invariably fall, to be caught beneath the waves. . But their downward turn will offer us an upward turn.”

Ealdstan stroked his beard and pondered on this. When his eye turned fully upon her again, the sharp flash was in them once more. “I feel I should apologise. I feel I have judged you awrong,” he said.

She smiled a sly smile. “Everyone does.”

IV

“The Cornish knights are proud and fierce fighters,” Ecgbryt told him. “We will need their spears and long arms. They are kin with the giants, you know? The oldest peoples of these lands-even of the Welsh and Picti.”

Alex raised his flashlight around to look at all the stunning stalactites hanging above them. Some of them must have been twenty feet long. He was looking up, jaw hanging open, when his foot slipped and he splashed into a pool of water up to his knee. It had probably been undisturbed for hundreds of years and felt as cold as ice. “Could we not have driven a little closer to it overland?” he asked, shaking his sodden leg. They had driven to a boutique- filled village called Honiton, near Exeter, and started their trip from there. The drive had probably saved them days, but in the race they were on, every hour counted.

“I judge not. The Eastern tip’s tunnels were ancient even to the Celt peoples. They are hard to access from the surface-hard, at least, in one sense. There are many, many entrances and they form a true maze to get past. This path is the same as what you would call ‘the back door.’”

Alex swore.

“Slipping again? I do not understand why you have your light turned up so high. Meotodes meahte, but it is dazzling.”

“But why start in Cornwall, exactly?” Alex asked, stomping his foot.

Ecgbryt considered awhile before answering. “Ni?ergeard has been occupied for many years, its people captive, and possibly many of its secrets have been spilled from unwilling lips. You know how many chambers have already been discovered-it would not be worth holding out hope that those nearest the city would be untouched. However, this end of the island is densely packed with obscured places and mysteries that were kept even before Ealdstan’s time, I wist. Although there are not many knights here-the Dumnonians have ever been independent- they will be well hidden. And hardy, as I have said. Did I tell you they came from giant stock?”

“Aye. You mentioned that,” Alex said. “But it’s so out of the way. Why corner ourselves like this? What’s so special over there?”

“The Cornish kingdom,” Ecgbryt continued and Alex didn’t correct him, “is one of the thin places of this island. If anything were to leak through, this is one of the places it would first occur. We may be able to judge the extent of this island’s peril by what we find there. In any case, Cornwall is not a corner. We will need to pass through it to get to Llyonesse and points beyond.”

“Llyonesse, the sunken land?”

“Swa swa. Just so.”

They came upon their first sleeping chamber after a couple more miles. It was not hidden by any illusion or enchanted wall; it simply lay at the centre of a labyrinth made of black stone that ate the light cast by the lanterns and made it hard to tell wall from opening. Ecgbryt insisted all through the maze that he knew the path, but he led them to many dead ends before they found the sleeping circle of knights.

Or at least, what had once been the circle of knights.

On sixteen black stone tables lay sixteen white corpses, each of them held down by a web of metal chains and manacles that ran beneath the tables.

“They are all dead,” Ecgbryt said, casting his eyes over the scene. “Not one of them escaped.”

“They were stripped of their weapons,” Alex observed, examining them closer. “Then tied-quickly and skilfully, if it was done without waking them from even an enchanted sleep.”

“Here is the horn,” said Ecgbryt, walking to the centre of the ring. He looked around with baleful eyes. “Trussed like snared fowl and then awoken from their immortal slumber. They died of starvation? Or thirst? Did the yfelgopes watch them suffer? Did they torture them?”

“There don’t appear to be any wounds, apart from dried blood on the manacles,” Alex said with a sigh. “Some nearly pulled their hands and feet off trying to escape.”

“Swa swa. They would have done it if they could,” Ecgbryt said. “They were valiant warriors all, and not a one would hesitate to sacrifice life or limb for another.”

“Well, they are dead, and their spirits have left this place.” Alex thought of the massacred Scottish knights of