I did not go to Æthelflaed's funeral.
She was buried in Gleawecestre in the same vault as her husband, whom
she had hated.
Her brother, King Edward of Wessex, was chief mourner and, when the
rites were done and Æthelflaed's corpse had been walled up, he stayed in
Gleawecestre. His sister's strange banner of the holy goose was lowered over
the palace, and the dragon of Wessex was hoisted in its place. The message
could not have been plainer. Mercia no longer existed. In all the British lands
south of Northumbria and east of Wales there was only one kingdom and one
king. Edward sent me a summons, demanding I travel to Gleawecestre and
swear fealty to him for the lands I owned in what had been Mercia, and the
summons bore his name followed by the words Anglorum Saxonum Rex. King
of the Angles and the Saxons. I ignored the document.
Within a year a second document reached me, this one signed and sealed
in Wintanceaster. By the grace of God, it told me, the lands granted to me by
Æthelflaed of Mercia were now forfeited to the bishopric of Hereford, which,
the parchment assured me, would employ said lands to the furtherance of
God's glory. "Meaning Bishop Wulfheard will have more silver to spend on
his whores," I told Eadith.
"Maybe you should have gone to Gleawecestre?" she suggested.
"And swear loyalty to Edward?" I spat the name. "Never. I don't need
Wessex and Wessex doesn't need me."
"So what will you do about the estates?" she asked.
"Nothing," I said. What could I do? Go to war against Wessex? It annoyed
me that Bishop Wulfheard, an old enemy, had taken the land, but I had no
need of Mercian lands. I owned Bebbanburg. I was a Northumbrian lord, and
owned all that I wanted. "Why should I do anything?" I growled at Eadith.
"I'm old and I don't need trouble."
"You're not old," she said loyally.
"I'm old," I insisted. I was over sixty, I was ancient.
"You don't look old."
"So Wulfheard can plow his whores and let me die in peace. I don't care if
I never see Wessex or Mercia ever again."
Yet a year later I was in Mercia, mounted on Tintreg, my fiercest stallion,
and wearing a helmet and mail, with Serpent-Breath, my sword, slung at my
left hip. Rorik, my servant, carried my heavy iron-rimmed shield, and behind
us were ninety men, all armed, and all mounted on war horses.
"Sweet Jesus," Finan said beside me. He was gazing at the enemy in the
valley beneath us. "Four hundred of the bastards?" He paused. "At least four
hundred. Maybe five?"
I said nothing.
It was late on a winter's afternoon, and bitterly cold. The horses' breath
misted among the leafless trees that crowned the gentle ridge from where we
watched our enemy. The sun was sinking and hidden by clouds, which meant
no betraying sparks of light could be reflected from our mail or weapons.
Away to my right, to the west, the River Dee lay flat and gray as it widened
toward the sea. On the lower ground in front of us was the enemy and, beyond
them, Ceaster.
"Five hundred," Finan decided.
"I never thought I'd see this place again," I said. "Never wanted to see it
again."
"They broke the bridge," Finan said, peering far to the south.
"Wouldn't you, in their place?"
The place was Ceaster, and our enemy was besieging the city. Most of that
enemy was to the east of the city, but smoking campfires betrayed plenty to
the city's north. The River Dee flowed just south of the city walls, then turned
north toward its widening estuary, and by breaking the central span of the
ancient Roman bridge, the enemy had ensured that no relief force could come
from the south. If the city's small garrison was to fight its way out of the trap
they would need to come north or east where the enemy was strongest. And
that garrison was small. I had been told, though it was nothing more than a
guess, that fewer than a hundred men held the city.
Finan must have been thinking the same thing. "And five hundred men
couldn't take the city?" he said derisively.
"Nearer six hundred?" I suggested mildly. It was hard to estimate the enemy because many of the folk in the besiegers' encampment were women
and children, but I thought Finan's guess was low. Tintreg lowered his head
and snorted. I patted his neck, then touched Serpent-Breath's hilt for luck. "I
wouldn't want to assault those walls," I said. Ceaster's stone walls had been
built by the Romans, and the Romans had built well. And the city's small
garrison, I thought, had been well led. They had repelled the early assaults,
and so the enemy had settled down to starve them out.
"So, what do we do?" Finan asked.
"Well, we've come a long way," I said.
"So?"
"So it seems a pity not to fight." I gazed at the city. "If what we were told
is true, then the poor bastards in the city will be eating rats by now. And that
lot?" I nodded down to the campfires. "They're cold, they're bored, and
they've been here too long. They got bloodied when they attacked the walls,
so now they're just waiting."
I could see the thick barricades that the besiegers had made outside
Ceaster's northern and eastern gates. Those barricades would be guarded by
the enemy's best troops, posted there to stop the garrison sallying out or
trying to escape. "They're cold," I said again, "they're bored, and they're
useless."
Finan smiled. "Useless?"
"They're mostly from the fyrd," I said. The fyrd is an army raised from
field laborers, shepherds, common men. They might be brave, but a trained
house-warrior, like the ninety who followed me, was far more lethal.
"Useless," I said again, "and stupid."
"Stupid?" Berg, mounted on his stallion behind me, asked.
"No sentries out here! They should never have let us get this close. They
have no idea we're here. And stupidity gets you killed."
"I like that they're stupid," Berg said. He was a Norseman, young and
savage, frightened of nothing except the disapproval of his young Saxon wife.
"Three hours to sunset?" Finan suggested.
"Let's not waste them."
I turned Tintreg, going back through the trees to the road that led to
Ceaster from the ford of the Mærse. The road brought back memories of
riding to face Ragnall, and of Haesten's death, and now the road was leading
me toward another fight.
Though we looked anything but threatening as we rode down the long,
gentle slope. We did not hurry. We came like men who were finishing a long
journey, which was true, and we kept our swords in their scabbards and our
spears bundled on the packhorses led by our servants. The enemy must have
seen us almost as soon as we emerged from the wooded ridge, but we were
few and they were many, and our ambling approach suggested we came in
peace. The high stone wall of the city was in shadow, but I could make out the
banners hanging from the ramparts. They showed Christian crosses, and I
remembered Bishop Leofstan, a holy fool and a good man, who had been
chosen as Ceaster's bishop by Æthelflaed. She had strengthened and
garrisoned the city-fort as a bulwark against the Norse and Danes who
crossed the Irish Sea to hunt for slaves in the Saxon lands.
Æthelflaed, Alfred's daughter, and ruler of Mercia. Dead now. Her corpse
was decaying in a cold stone vault. I imagined her dead hands clutching a
crucifix in the grave's foul darkness, and remembered those same hands
clawing my spine as she writhed beneath me. "God forgive me," she would
say, "don't stop!"
And now she had brought me back to Ceaster.
And Serpent-Breath was about to kill again.
Æthelflaed's brother ruled Wessex. He had been content to let his sister rule
Mercia, but on her death he had marched West Saxon troops north across the
Temes. They came, he said, to honor his sister at her funeral, but they stayed
to impose Edward's rule on his sister's realm. Edward, Anglorum Saxonum
Rex.
Those Mercian lords who bent their knee were rewarded, but some, a few,
resented the West Saxons. Mercia was a proud land. There had been a time
when the King of Mercia was the most powerful ruler of Britain, when the
kings of Wessex and of East Anglia and the chieftains of Wales had sent
tribute, when Mercia was the largest of all the British kingdoms. Then the
Danes had come, and Mercia had fallen, and it had been Æthelflaed who had
fought back, who had driven the pagans northward and built the burhs that
protected her frontier. And she was dead, moldering, and her brother's troops
now guarded the burh walls, and the King of Wessex called himself king of
all the Saxons, and he demanded silver to pay for the garrisons, and he took
land from the resentful lords and gave it to his own men, or to the church.
Always to the church, because it was the priests who preached to the Mercian
folk that it was their nailed god's will that Edward of Wessex be king in their
land, and that to oppose the king was to oppose their god.
Yet fear of the nailed god did not prevent a revolt, and so the fighting had begun. Saxon against Saxon, Christian against Christian, Mercian against
Mercian, and Mercian against West Saxon. The rebels fought under
Æthelflaed's flag, declaring that it had been her will that her daughter,
Ælfwynn, succeed her. Ælfwynn, Queen of Mercia! I liked Ælfwynn, but she
could no more have ruled a kingdom than she could have speared a charging
boar. She was flighty, frivolous, pretty, and petty. Edward, knowing his niece
had been named to the throne, took care to have her shut away in a convent,
along with his discarded wife, but still the rebels flaunted her mother's flag
and fought in her name.
They were led by Cynlæf Haraldson, a West Saxon warrior whom
Æthelflaed had wanted as a husband for Ælfwynn. The truth, of course, was
that Cynlæf wanted to be King of Mercia himself. He was young, he was
handsome, he was brave in battle, and, to my mind, stupid. His ambition was
to defeat the West Saxons, rescue his bride from her convent, and be crowned.
But first he must capture Ceaster. And he had failed.
"It feels like snow," Finan said as we rode south toward the city.
"It's too late in the year for snow," I said confidently.
"I can feel it in my bones," he said, shivering. "It'll come by nightfall."
I scoffed at that. "Two shillings says it won't."
He laughed. "God send me more fools with silver! My bones are never
wrong." Finan was Irish, my second-in-command, and my dearest friend. His
face, framed by the steel of his helmet, looked lined and old, his beard was
gray. Mine was too, I suppose. I watched as he loosened Soul-Stealer in her
scabbard and as his eyes flicked across the smoke of the campfires ahead. "So
what are we doing?" he asked.
"Scouring the bastards off the eastern side of the city," I said.
"They're thick there."
I guessed that almost two thirds of the enemy were camped on Ceaster's
eastern flank.