'Your wife nurses him well,' he finished awkwardly.
'He's her godfather,' I said.
'So he is.'
'It is good to see her,' I said, not because I meant it, but because it was the proper thing to say and I could think of nothing else. 'And it will be good to see my son,' I added with more warmth.
'Your son.' Harald said flatly.
'He's here, isn't he?'
'Yes.' Harald flinched. He turned away to look at the moon and I thought he would say no more, but then he summoned his courage and looked back to me. 'Your son, Lord Uhtred,' he said, 'is in the churchyard.'
It took a few heartbeats for that to make sense, and then it did not make any sense at all, but left me confused. I touched my hammer amulet. 'In the churchyard?'
'It is not my place to tell you.'
'But you will tell me,' I said, and my voice sounded like Steapa's growl.
Harald stared at the moon-touched river, silver-white beneath the black trees. 'Your son died,' he said. He waited for my response, but I neither moved nor spoke. 'He choked to death.'
'Choked?'
'A pebble,' Harald said. 'He was just a baby. He must have picked the pebble up and swallowed it.'
'A pebble?' I asked.
'A woman was with him, but ...' Harald's voice tailed away. 'She tried to save him, but she could do nothing. He died.'
'On Saint Vincent's Day,' I said.
'You knew?'
'No,' I said, 'I didn't know.' But Saint Vincent's Day had been the day when Iseult drew Alfred's son, the ?theling Edward, through the earth. And somewhere, Iseult had told me, a child must die so that the king's heir, the ?theling, could live.
And it had been my child. Uhtred the Younger. Whom I had hardly known. Edward had been given breath and Uhtred had twitched and fought and gasped and died.
'I'm sorry,' Harald said. 'It was not my place to tell you, but you needed to know before you saw Mildrith again.'
'She hates me,' I said bleakly.
'Yes,' he said, 'she does.' He paused. 'I thought she would go mad with grief, but God has preserved her. She would like ...'
'Like what?'
'To join the sisters at Cridianton. When the Danes leave. They have a nunnery there, a small house.'
I did not care what Mildrith did. 'And my son is buried here?'
'Under the yew tree,' he turned and pointed, 'beside the church.'
So let him stay there, I thought. Let him rest in his short grave to wait the chaos of the world's ending.
'Tomorrow,' I said, 'we raise the fyrd.'
Because there was a kingdom to save.
Priests were summoned to Harald's hall and the priests wrote the summons for the fyrd. Most thegns could not read, and many of their priests would probably struggle to decipher the few words, but the messengers would tell them what the parchments said. They were to arm their men and bring them to Ocmundtun, and the wax seal on the summons was the authority for those orders. The seal showed Odda the Elder's badge of a stag.
‘It will take a week,' Harald warned me, 'for most of the fyrd to reach here, and the Ealdorman will try to stop it happening at all.'
'What will he do?'
'Tell the thegns to ignore it, I suppose.'
'And Svein? What will he do?'
'Try to kill us?'
'And he has eight hundred men who can be here tomorrow.' I said.
‘And I have thirty men,' Harald said bleakly.
'But we do have a fortress,' I said, pointing to the limestone ridge with its palisade.
I did not doubt that the Danes would come. By summoning the fyrd we threatened their safety, and Svein was not a man who would take a threat lightly, and so, while the messages were carried north and south, the townsfolk were told to take their valuables up to the fort beside the river. Some men were set to strengthening the palisade, others took livestock up onto the moor so the beasts could not be taken by the Danes, and Steapa went to every nearby settlement and demanded that men of fighting age go to Ocmundtun with any weapon they possessed, so that by that afternoon the fort was manned by over eighty men. Few were warriors, most had no weapons other than an axe, but from the foot of the hill they looked formidable enough. Women carried food and water to the fort, and most of the town reckoned to sleep up there, despite the rain, for fear that the Danes would come in the night.
