'What are our forces now?' Alfred asked us.
'We have over a hundred men,' Egwine said brightly.
'Of whom only sixty or seventy are fit to fight,' I said. There had been an outbreak of sickness, men vomiting and shivering and hardly able to control their bowels. Whenever troops gather such sickness seems to strike.
'Is that enough?' Alfred asked.
'Enough for what, lord?' Egwine was not quick-witted.
'Enough to get rid of Svein, of course,' Alfred said, and again there was silence because the question was absurd.
Then Egwine straightened his shoulders. 'More than enough, lord.'
?lswith bestowed a smile on him.
'And how would you propose doing it?' Alfred asked.
'Take every man we have, lord,' Egwine said, 'every fit man, and attack them. Attack them!'
Beocca was not writing. He knew when he was hearing nonsense and he was not going to waste scarce ink on bad ideas.
Alfred looked at me. 'Can it be done?'
'They'll see us coming,' I said, 'they'll be ready.'
'March inland,' Egwine said, 'come from the hills.'
Again Alfred looked at me.
'That will leave ?thelingaeg undefended,' I said, 'and it will take at least three days, at the end of which our men will be cold, hungry and tired, and the Danes will see us coming when we emerge from the hills, and that'll give them time to put on armour and gather weapons. And at best it will be equal numbers. At worst?' I just shrugged. After three or four days the rest of Svein's forces might have returned and our seventy or eighty men would be facing a horde.
'So how do you do it?' Alfred asked.
'We destroy their boats,' I said.
'Go on.'
'Without boats,' I said, 'they can't come up the rivers. Without boats, they're stranded.'
Alfred nodded. Beocca was scratching away again.
'So how do you destroy the boats?' the king asked.
I did not know. We could take seventy men to fight their seventy, but at the end of the fight, even if we won, we would be lucky to have twenty men still standing. Those twenty could burn the boats, of course, but I doubted we would survive that long. There were scores of Danish women at Cynuit and, if it came to a fight, they would join in and the odds were that we would be defeated.
'Fire,' Egwine said enthusiastically. 'Carry fire in punts and throw the fire from the river.'
'There are ship-guards,' I said tiredly, 'and they'll be throwing spears and axes, sending arrows, and you might burn one boat, but that's all.'
'Go at night,' Egwine said.
'It's almost a full moon,' I said, 'and they'll see us coming. And if the moon is clouded we won't see their fleet.'
'So how do you do it?' Alfred demanded again.
'God will send fire from heaven,' Bishop Alewold said, and no one responded.
Alfred stood. We all got to our feet. Then he pointed at me.
'You will destroy Svein's fleet,' he said, 'and I would know how you plan to do it by this evening. If you cannot do it then you,' he pointed to Egwine, 'will travel to Defnascir, find Ealdorman Odda and tell him to bring his forces to the river mouth and do the job for us.'
'Yes, lord,' Egwine said.
'By tonight,' Alfred said to me coldly, and then he walked out.
He left me angry. He had meant to leave me angry. I stalked up to the newly-made fort with Leofric and stared across the marshes to where the clouds heaped above the Saefern.
'How are we to burn twenty-four ships?' I demanded.
'God will send fire from heaven,' Leofric said, 'of course.'
'I'd rather he sent a thousand troops.'
'Alfred won't summon Odda,' Leofric said. 'He just said that to annoy you.'
'But he's right, isn't he?' I said grudgingly. 'We have to get rid of Svein.'
'How?'
I stared at the tangled barricade that Haswold had made from felled trees. The water, instead, of flowing downstream, was coming upstream because the tide was on the flood and so the ripples ran eastwards from the tangled branches.
