I could not face Alfred's disappointment. He said nothing about it, but his thin face was pale and set hard as he busied himself deciding where the thousand men should camp, and where our few horses should be pastured. I rode up a high hill that lay to the north of the encampment, taking a score of men including Leofric, Steapa and Father Pyrlig. The hill was steep, though that had not stopped the old people from making one of their strange graves high on the slope. The grave was a long mound and Pyrlig made a wide detour rather than ride past it.
'Full of dragons, it is,' he explained to me.
'You've seen a dragon?' I asked.
'Would I be alive if I had? No one sees a dragon and lives!'
I turned in the saddle and stared at the mound. 'I thought folk were buried there?'
'They are! And their treasures! So the dragon guards the hoard. That's what dragons do. Bury gold and you hatch a dragon, see?'
The horses had a struggle to climb the steep slope, but at its summit We were rewarded by a stretch of firm turf that offered views far to the north. I had climbed the hill to watch for Danes. Alfred might believe that it would be two or three days before we saw them, but I expected their scouts to be close and it was possible that a war- band might try to harass the men camping by the Wilig.
Yet I saw no one. To the north-east were great downs, sheep hills, while straight ahead was the lower ground where the cloud shadows raced across fields and over blossoming mayflower and darkened the bright green new leaves.
'So what happens now?' Leofric asked me.
'You tell me.'
'A thousand men? We can't fight the Danes with a thousand men.'
I said nothing. Far off, on the northern horizon, there were dark clouds.
'We can't even stay here!' Leofric said, 'so where do we go?'
'Back to the swamp?' Father Pyrlig suggested.
'The Danes will bring more ships,' I said, 'and eventually they'll capture the swamp. If they send a hundred ships up the rivers then the swamp is theirs.'
'Go to Defnascir,' Steapa growled.
And the same thing would happen there, I thought. We would be safe for a time in Defnascir's tangle of hills and woods, but the Danes would come and there would be a succession of little fights and bit by bit Alfred would be bled to death. And once the Danes across the sea knew that Alfred was pinned into a corner of Wessex they would bring more ships to take the good land that he could not hold. And that, I thought, was why he had been right to try and end the war in one blow, because he dared not let Wessex's weakness become known.
Except we were weak. We were a thousand men. We were pathetic. We were dreams fallen to earth, and suddenly I began to laugh.
'What is it?' Leofric asked.
'I was thinking that Alfred insisted I learn to read,' I said, 'and for what?'
He smiled, remembering. It was one of Alfred's rules that every man who commanded sizeable bodies of troops must be able to read, though it was a rule he had ignored when he made Leofric commander of his bodyguard. It seemed funny at that moment. All that effort so I could read his orders and he had never sent me one. Not one.
'Reading is useful,' Pyrlig said.
'What for?'
He thought about it. The wind gusted, flapping his hair and beard. 'You can read all those good stories in the gospel-book,' he suggested brightly, 'and the saints' lives! How about those, eh? They're full of lovely things, they are. There was Saint Donwen! Beautiful woman she was, and she gave her lover a drink that turned him into ice.'
'Why did she do that?' Leofric asked.
'Didn't want to marry him, see?' Pyrlig said, trying to cheer us up, but no one wanted to hear more about the frigid Saint Donwen so he turned and stared northwards. 'That's where they'll come from, is it?' he asked.
'Probably,' I said, and then I saw them, or thought I did. There was a movement on the far hills, something stirring in the cloud shadow and I wished Iseult was on the hilltop for she had remarkable eyesight, but she would have needed a horse to climb to that summit and there were no horses to spare for women. The Danes had thousands of horses, all the beasts they had captured from Alfred at Cippanhamm, and all the animals they had stolen across Wessex, and now I was watching a group of horsemen on that far hill. Scouts, probably, and they would have seen us. Then they were gone. It had been a glimpse, no more, and so far away that I could not be sure of what I had seen.
'Or perhaps they won't come at all,' I went on, 'perhaps they'll march around us. Capture Wintanceaster and everywhere else.'
'The bastards will come,' Leofric said grimly, and I thought he was probably right. The Danes would know we were here, they would want to destroy us, and after that all would be easy for them.
Pyrlig turned his horse as if to ride back down to the valley, then paused. 'So it's hopeless, is it?' he asked.
'They'll outnumber us four or five to one,' 1 said.
'Then we must fight harder!'
I smiled. 'Every Dane who comes to Britain, father,' I explained, 'is a warrior. The farmers stay in Denmark, but the wild men come here. And us? We're nearly all farmers and it takes three or four farmers to beat down a warrior.'
