'Then we must remake it,' I said.
'Does that mean you won't join the Danes?'
'I'm a Saxon,' I said.
Leofric half smiled at that. He undid his breeches and had a piss. 'If your friend Ragnar was alive,'
he asked, watching the steam rise from his urine, 'would you still be a Saxon?'
'He's dead, isn't he?' I said bleakly, 'sacrificed to Guthrum's ambition.'
'So now you're a Saxon?'
'I'm a Saxon,' I said again, sounding more certain than I felt, for I did not know what the future held. How can we? Perhaps Iseult had told the truth and Alfred would give me power and I would lead a shining horde and have a woman of gold, but I was beginning to doubt Iseult's powers. Alfred might already be dead and his kingdom was doomed, and all I knew at that moment was that the land stretched away south to a snow-covered ridge line, and there it ended in a strange empty brightness.
The skyline looked like the world's rim, poised above an abyss of pearly light.
'We'll keep going south,' I said. There was nothing else to do except walk towards the brightness.
We did. We followed a sheep track to the ridge top and there I saw that the hills fell steeply away, dropping to the vast marshes of the sea. We had come to the great swamp, and the brightness I had seen was the winter light reflecting from the long meres and winding creeks.
'What now?' Leofric asked, and I had no answer and so we sat under the berries of a wind-bent yew and stared at the immensity of bog, water, grass and reeds. This was the vast swamp that stretched inland from the Saefern, and if I was to reach Defnascir I either had to go around it or try to cross it. If we went around it then we would have to go to the Roman road, and that was where the Danes were, but if we tried to cross the swamp we would face other dangers. I had heard a thousand stories of men being lost in its wet tangles. It was said there were spirits there, spirits that showed at night as flickering lights, and there were paths that led only to quicksands or to drowning pools, but there were also villages in the swamp, places where folk trapped fish and eels. The people of the swamp were protected by the spirits and by the sudden surges in the tide that could drown a road in an eyeblink.
Now, as the last snows melted from the reed-banks, the swamp looked like a great stretch of waterlogged land, its streams and meres swollen by the winter rains, but when the tide rose it would resemble an inland sea dotted with islands. We could see one of those islands not so far off and there was a cluster of huts on that speck of higher ground, and that would be a place to find food and warmth if we could ever reach it. Eventually we might cross the whole swamp, finding a way from island to island, but it would take far longer than a day, and we would have to find refuge at every high tide. I gazed at the long, cold stretches of water, almost black beneath the leaden clouds that came from the sea and my spirits sank for I did not know where we were going, or why, or what the future held.
It seemed to get colder as we sat, and then a light snow began drifting from the dark clouds. Just a few flakes, but enough to convince me that we had to find shelter soon. Smoke was rising from the nearest swamp village, evidence that some folk still lived there. There would be food in their hovels and a meagre warmth.
'We have to get to that island,' I said, pointing.
But the others were staring westwards to where a flock of pigeons had burst from the trees at the foot of the slope. The birds rose and flew in circles.
'Someone's there,' Leofric said.
We waited. The pigeons settled in the trees higher up the hill.
'Maybe it's a boar?' I suggested.
'Pigeons won't fly from a boar,' Leofric said. 'Boars don't startle pigeons, any more than stags do.
There are folk there.'
The thought of boars and stags made me wonder what had happened to my hounds. Had Mildrith abandoned them? I had not even told her where I had hidden the remains of the plunder we had taken off the coast of Wales. I had dug a hole in a corner of my new hall and buried the gold and silver down by the poststone, but it was not the cleverest hiding place and if there were Danes in Oxton then they were bound to delve into the edges of the hall floor, especially if a, probing spear found a place where the earth had been disturbed.
A flight of ducks flew overhead. The snow was falling harder, blurring the long view across the swamp.
'Priests,' Leofric said.
There were a half-dozen men off to the west. They were robed in black and had come from the trees to walk along the swamp's margin, plainly seeking a path into its tangled vastness, but there was no obvious track to the small village on its tiny island and so the priests came nearer to us, skirting the ridge's foot. One of them was carrying a long staff and, even at a distance, 1 could see a glint at its head and I suspected it was a bishop's staff, the kind with a heavy silver cross. Another three carried heavy sacks.
'You think there's food in those bundles?' Leofric asked wistfully.
'They're priests,' I said savagely. 'They'll be carrying silver.'
'Or books,' Eanflaed suggested. 'Priests like books.'
'It could be food,' Leofric said, though not very convincingly.
A group of three women and two children now appeared. One of the women was wearing a swathing cloak of silver fur, while another carried the smaller child. The women and children were not far behind the priests, who waited for them and then they all walked eastwards until they were beneath us and there they discovered some kind of path twisting into the marshes. Five of the priests led the women into the swamp while the sixth man, evidently younger than the others, hurried back westwards.
'Where's he going?' Leofric asked.
Another skein of ducks flighted low overhead, skimming down the slope to the long meres of the swamp. Nets, I thought. There must be nets in the swamp villages and we could trap fish and wildfowl.
We could eat well for a few days. Eels, duck, fish, geese. If there were enough nets we could even trap deer by driving them into the tangling meshes.
