'I remember a story,' I said, 'from when I was a small child.' I paused, trying to recall the tale which, I assume, had been told to me by Beocca. 'The Christian god divided a sea, isn't that right?'
'Moses did,' Leofric said.
'And when the enemy followed,' I said, 'they were drowned.'
‘Clever,' Leofric said.
‘So that's how we'll do it,' I said.
‘How?'
But instead of telling him I summoned the marsh men and talked with them, and by that night I had my plan and, because it was taken from the scriptures, Alfred approved it readily. It took another day to get everything ready. We had to gather sufficient punts to carry forty men and I also needed Eofer, the simpleminded archer. He was unhappy, not understanding what I wanted, and he gibbered at us and looked terrified, but then a small girl, perhaps ten or eleven years old, took his hand and explained that he had to go hunting with us.
'He trusts you?' I asked the child.
'He's my uncle,' she said. Eofer was holding her hand and he was calm again.
‘Does Eofer do what you tell him?'
She nodded, her small face serious, and I told her she must come with us to keep her uncle happy.
We left before the dawn. We were twenty marsh men, skilled with boats, twenty warriors, a simpleminded archer, a child and Iseult. Alfred, of course, did not want me to take Iseult, but I ignored him and he did not argue. Instead he watched us leave, then went to ?thelingaeg's church that now boasted a newly-made cross of alder- wood nailed to its gable.
And low in the sky above the cross was the full moon. She was low and ghostly pale, and as the sun rose she faded even more, but as the ten punts drifted down the river I stared at her and said a silent prayer to Hoder because the moon is his woman and it was she who must give us victory. Because, for the first time since Guthrum had struck in a winter's dawn, the Saxons were fighting back.
Eig
i ht
Before the Pedredan reaches the sea it makes a great curve through the swamp, a curve that is almost three-quarters of a circle and on the inside of the bank where the curve begins there was another tiny settlement; just a half-dozen hovels built on stilts sunk into a slight rise in the ground.
The settlement was called Palfleot, which means the place with the stakes, for the folk who had once lived- there had staked eel and fish traps in the nearby streams, but the Danes had driven those folk away and burned their houses, so that Palfleot was now a place of charred pilings and blackened mud.
We landed there, shivering in the dawn. The tide was falling, exposing the great banks of sand and mud across which Iseult and I had struggled, while the wind was coming from the west, cold and fresh, hinting of rain, though for now there was a slanting sunlight throwing long shadows of marram grass and reeds across the marshes. Two swans flew south and I knew they were a message from the gods, but what their message was I could not tell.
The punts pushed away, abandoning us. They were now going north and east, following intricate waterways known only to the marsh men. We stayed for a while in Palfleot, doing nothing in particular, but doing it energetically so that the Danes, a long way off across the great bend in the river, would be sure to see us. We pulled down the blackened timbers and Iseult, who had acute eyesight, watched the place where the Danish ships' masts showed as scratches against the western clouds.
'There's a man up a mast,' she said after a while, and I stared, saw the man clinging to the mast top and knew we had been spotted.
The tide was falling, exposing more mud and sand, and now that I was sure we had been seen we walked across the drying expanse that was cradled by the river's extravagant bend.
As we drew closer I could see more Danes in their ships' rigging. They were watching us, but would not yet be worried for they outnumbered my few forces and the river lay between us and them, but whoever commanded in the Danish camp would also be ordering his men to arm themselves. He would want to be ready for whatever happened, but I also hoped he would be clever.
I was laying a trap for him, and for the trap to work he had to do what I wanted him to do, but at first, if he was clever, he would do nothing. He knew we were impotent, separated from him by the Pedredan, and so he was content to watch as we closed on the river's bank opposite his grounded ships and then slipped and slid down the steep muddy bluff that the ebbing tide had exposed.
The river swirled in front of us, grey and cold.
There were close to a hundred Danes watching now. They were on their grounded boats, shouting insults. Some were laughing, for it seemed clear to them that we had walked a long way to achieve nothing, but that was because they did not know Eofer's skills.
I called the big bowman's niece to my side. 'What I want your Uncle Eofer to do,' I explained to the small girl, 'is kill some of those men.'
'Kill them?' She stared up at me with wide eyes.
'They're bad men,' I said, 'and they want to kill you.'
She nodded solemnly, then took the big man by the hand and led him to the water's edge where he sank up to his calves in the mud. It was a long way across the river and I wondered, pessimistically, if it was too far for even his massive bow, but Eofer strung the great stave and then waded into the Pedredan until he found a shallow spot which meant he could go even farther into the river and there he took an arrow from his sheaf, put it on the string and hauled it back. He made a grunting noise as he released and I watched the arrow twitch off the cord, then the fledging caught the air and the arrow soared across the stream and plunged into a group of Danes standing on the steering platform of a ship. There was a cry of anger as the arrow cut down. It did not hit any of the group, but Eofer's next arrow struck a man in his shoulder, and the Danes hurried back from their vantage point by the ship's sternpost. Eofer, who was compulsively nodding his shaggy head and making small animal noises, turned his aim to another ship. He had extraordinary strength. The distance was too great for any accuracy, but the danger of the long white-fledged arrows drove the Danes back and it was our turn to jeer at them. One of the Danes fetched a bow and tried to shoot back, but his arrow sliced into the river twenty yards short and we taunted
