He had promised to protect me, but that was before he had been reunited with his master. The Danes looked happy. Why should they mind two Saxons fighting? Harald, though, still hesitated, and then the weary, feeble voice sounded from the doorway at the back of the hall.
'Let them fight, Harald, let them fight.' Odda the Elder, swathed in a wolf-skin blanket, stood at the door. He held a crucifix. 'Let them fight,' he said again, 'and God will guide the victor's arm.'
Harald looked at me. I nodded. I did not want to fight, but a man cannot back down from combat.
What was I to do? Say that to expect God to indicate a course of action through a duel was nonsense?
To appeal to Harald? To claim that everything Odda had said was wrong and that Alfred would win? If I had refused to fight I was granting the argument to Odda, and in truth he had half convinced me that Alfred was doomed, and Harald, I am sure, was wholly convinced. Yet there was more than mere pride making me fight in the hall that day. There was a belief, deep in my soul, that somehow Alfred would survive. I did not like him, I did not like his god, but I believed fate was on his side.
So I nodded again, this time to Steapa. 'I do not want to fight you,' I said to him, 'but I have given an oath to Alfred, and my sword says lie will win and that Danish blood will dung our fields.'
Steapa said nothing. He just flexed his huge arms, then waited as one of Odda's men went outside and returned with two swords. No shields, just swords. He had taken a pair of blades at random from the pile and he offered them to Steapa first who shook his head, indicating that I should have the choice. I closed my eyes, groped, and took the first hilt that I touched. It was a heavy sword, weighted towards its tip. A slashing weapon, not a piercing blade, and I knew I had chosen wrong. Steapa took the other and scythed it through the air so that the blade sang.
Svein, who had betrayed little emotion so far, looked impressed, while Odda the Younger smiled.
'You can put the sword down,' he told me, 'and thus yield the argument to me.'
Instead I walked to the clear space beside the hearth. I had no intention of attacking Steapa, but would let him come to me. I felt weary and resigned. Fate is inexorable.
'For my sake,' Odda the Elder spoke behind me, 'make it fast.'
'Yes, lord,' Steapa said, and he took a step towards me and then turned as fast as a striking snake and his blade whipped in a slash that took Odda the Younger's throat. The sword was not as sharp as it could have been, so that the blow drove Odda down, but it also ripped his gullet open so that blood spurted a blade's length into the air, then splashed into the fire where it hissed and bubbled.
Odda was on the floor-rushes now, his legs twitching, his hands clutching at his throat that still pumped blood. He made a gargling noise, turned on his back and went into a spasm so that his heels drummed against the floor and then, just as Steapa stepped forward to finish him, he gave a last jerk and was dead.
Steapa drove the sword into the floor, leaving it quivering there.
'Alfred rescued me,' he announced to the hall. 'Alfred took me from the Danes. Alfred is my king.'
'And he has our oaths,' Odda the Elder added, 'and my son had no business making peace with the pagans.'
The Danes stepped back. Svein glanced at me, for I was still holding a sword, then he looked at the boar spears leaning against the wall, judging whether he could snatch one before I attacked him. I lowered the blade.
'We have a truce,' Harald said loudly.
'We have a truce,' I told Svein in Danish.
Svein spat on the bloody rushes, then he and his standard-bearer took another cautious backwards pace.
'But tomorrow,' Harald said, 'there will be no truce, and we shall come to kill you.'
The Danes rode from Ocmundtun. And next day they also went from Cridianton. They could have stayed if they wished. There were more than enough of them to defend Cridianton and make trouble in the shire, but Svein knew he would be besieged and, man by man, worn down until he had no force at all, and so he went north, going to join Guthrum, and I rode to Oxton. The land had never looked more beautiful, the trees were hazed with green and bullfinches were feasting on the first tight fruit buds, while anemones, stitchwort and white violets glowed in sheltered spots. Lambs ran from the buck hares in the pastures. The sun shimmered on the wide sea-reach of the Uisc and the sky was full of lark song beneath which the foxes took lambs, magpies and jays feasted on other birds' eggs, and ploughmen impaled crows at the edges of the fields to ensure a good harvest.
'There'll be butter soon,' a woman told me. She really wanted to know if I was returning to the estate, but I was not. I was saying farewell. There were slaves living there, doing their jobs, and I assured them Mildrith would appoint a steward sooner or later, then I went to the hall and I dug beside the post and found my hoard untouched. The Danes had not come to Oxton. Wirken, the sly priest of Exanmynster, heard 1 was at the hall and rode a donkey up to the estate. He assured me he had kept a watchful eye on the place, and doubtless he wanted a reward.
'It belongs to Mildrith now,' I told him.
'The Lady Mildrith? She lives?'
'She lives,' I said curtly, 'but her son is dead.'
'God rest his poor soul,' Wirken said, making the sign of the cross. I was eating a scrap of ham and he looked at it hungrily, knowing I broke the rules of Lent. He said nothing, but I knew he was cursing me for a pagan.
'And the Lady Mildrith,' I went on, 'would live a chaste life now. She says she will join the sisters in Cridianton.'
'There are no sisters in Cridianton,' Wirken said. 'They're all dead. The Danes saw to that before they left.'
'Other nuns will settle there,' I said. Not that I cared, for the fate of a small nunnery was none of my business. Oxton was no longer my business. The Danes were my business, and the Danes had gone north and I would follow them.
For that was my life. That spring I was twenty-one years old and for half my life I had been with armies. I was not a farmer. I watched the slaves tearing the couch-grass from the home fields and knew the tasks of farming
