what we were about to eat, and then at last we sat, but what a disappointment that supper was! No pork, no beef, no mutton, not a thing a man might want to eat, but only curds, leeks, soft eggs, bread, diluted ale and barley boiled into a gelid broth as palatable as frogspawn. Alfred kept saying how good it was, but in the end he did confess that he was afflicted with terrible pains in his belly and that this pap-like diet kept the agony at bay.
‘The king is a martyr to meat,’ Beocca explained to me. He was one of the three priests at the high table, another of whom was a bishop who had no teeth and mashed his bread into the broth with a candle stick, and there were also two Ealdormen and, of course, Ælswith who did much of the talking. She was opposing the notion of allowing the Danes to stay in Readingum, but in the end Alfred said he had no choice and that it was a small concession to make for peace, and that ended the discussion. Ælswith did rejoice that her husband had negotiated the release of all the young hostages held by Halfdan’s army, which Alfred had insisted on for he feared those young ones would be led away from the true church. He looked at me as he spoke about that, but I took little notice, being far more interested in one of the servants who was a young girl, perhaps four or five years older than me, who was startlingly pretty with a mass of black-ringleted hair and I wondered if she was the girl who Alfred kept close so he could thank God for giving him the strength to resist temptation. Later, much later, I discovered she was the same girl. Her name was Merewenna and I thanked God, in time, for not resisting temptation with her, but that lies far ahead in my tale, and for now I was at Alfred’s disposal or, rather, at Ælswith’s.
‘Uhtred must learn to read,’ she said. What business it was of hers I did not know, but no one disputed her statement.
‘Amen,’ Beocca said.
‘The monks at Winburnan can teach him,’ she suggested.
‘A very good idea, my lady,’ Beocca said, and the toothless bishop nodded and dribbled his approval.
‘Abbot Hewald is a very diligent teacher,’ Ælswith said. In truth Abbot Hewald was one of those bastards who would rather whip the young than teach them, but doubtless that was what Ælswith meant.
‘I rather think,’ Alfred put in, ‘that young Uhtred’s ambition is to be a warrior.’
‘In time, if God wills it, he will be,’ Ælswith said, ‘but what use is a soldier who cannot read God’s word?’
‘Amen,’ Beocca said.
‘No use at all,’ Alfred agreed. I thought teaching a soldier to read was about as much use as teaching a dog to dance, but said nothing, though Alfred sensed my scepticism. ‘Why is it good for a soldier to read, Uhtred?’ he demanded of me.
‘It is good for everyone to read,’ I said dutifully, earning a smile from Beocca.
‘A soldier who reads,’ Alfred said patiently, ‘is a soldier who can read orders, a soldier who will know what his king wants. Suppose you are in Northumbria, Uhtred, and I am in Wessex, how else will you know my will?’
That was breathtaking, though I was too young to realise it at the time. If I was in Northumbria and he was in Wessex then I was none of his damned business, but of course Alfred was already thinking ahead, far ahead, to a time when there would be one English kingdom and one English king. I just gaped at him and he smiled at me. ‘So Winburnan it is, young man,’ he said, ‘and the sooner you are there, the better.’
‘The sooner?’ Ælswith knew nothing of this suggested haste and was sharply suspicious.
‘The Danes, my dear,’ Alfred explained, ‘will look for both children. If they discover they are here they may well demand their return.’
‘But all hostages are to be freed,’ Ælswith objected, ‘you said so yourself.’
‘Was Uhtred a hostage?’ Alfred asked softly, staring at me. ‘Or was he in danger of becoming a Dane?’ He left the questions hanging, and I did not try to answer them. ‘We must make you into a true Englishman,’ Alfred said, ‘so you must go south in the morning. You and the girl.’
‘The girl doesn’t matter,’ Ælswith said dismissively. Brida had been sent to eat with the kitchen slaves.
‘If the Danes discover she’s Edmund’s bastard,’ one of the Ealdormen observed, ‘they’ll use her to destroy his reputation.’
‘She never told them that,’ I piped up, ‘because she thought they might mock him.’
‘There’s some good in her then,’ Ælswith said grudgingly. She helped herself to one of the soft-boiled eggs. ‘But what will you do,’ she demanded of her husband, ‘if the Danes accuse you of rescuing the children?’
‘I shall lie, of course,’ Alfred said. Ælswith blinked at him, but the bishop mumbled that the lie would be for God and so forgivable.
I had no intention of going to Winburnan. That was not because I was suddenly avid to be a Dane, but it had everything to do with Serpent-Breath. I loved that sword, and I had left it with Ragnar’s servants, and I wanted her back before my life took whatever path the spinners required of me and, to be sure, I had no wish to give up life with Ragnar for the scant joys of a monastery and a teacher. Brida, I knew, wished to go back to the Danes, and it was Alfred’s sensible insistence that we be removed from Baðum as soon as possible that gave us our opportunity.
We were sent away next morning, before dawn, going south into a hilly country and escorted by a dozen warriors who resented the job of taking two children deep into the heartland of Wessex. I was given a horse, Brida was provided with a mule, and a young priest called Willibald was officially put in charge of delivering Brida to a nunnery and me to Abbot Hewald. Father Willibald was a nice man with an easy smile and a kind manner. He could imitate bird calls and made us laugh by inventing a conversation between a quarrelsome fieldfare with its chack-chack call and a soaring skylark, then he made us guess what birds he was imitating, and that entertainment, mixed in with some harmless riddles, took us to a settlement high above a soft-flowing river in the heavily wooded countryside. The soldiers insisted on stopping there because they said the horses needed a rest. ‘They really need ale,’ Willibald told us, and shrugged as if it was understandable.
It was a warm day. The horses were hobbled outside the hall, the soldiers got their ale, bread and cheese, then sat in a circle and threw dice and grumbled, leaving us to Willibald’s supervision, but the young priest stretched out on a half-collapsed haystack and fell asleep in the sunlight. I looked at Brida, she looked at me, and it was as simple as that. We crept along the side of the hall, circled an enormous dungheap, dodged through some pigs that rooted in a field, wriggled through a hedge and then we were in woodland where we both started to laugh. ‘My mother insisted I call him uncle,’ Brida said in her small voice, ‘and the nasty Danes killed him,’ and we both thought that was the funniest thing we had ever heard, and then we came to our senses and hurried northwards.
It was a long time before the soldiers searched for us, and later they brought hunting dogs from the hall where they had purchased ale, but by then we had waded up a stream, changed direction again, found higher ground, and hidden ourselves. They did not find us, though all afternoon we could hear the hounds baying in the valley. They must have been searching the riverbank, thinking we had gone there, but we were safe and alone and high.
They searched for two days, never coming close, and on the third day we saw Alfred’s royal cavalcade riding south on the road under the hill. The meeting at Baðum was over, and that meant the Danes were retreating to Readingum and neither of us had any idea how to reach Readingum, but we knew we had travelled west to reach Baðum, so that was a start, and we knew we had to find the River Temes, and our only two problems were food and the need to avoid being caught.
That was a good time. We stole milk from the udders of cows and goats. We had no weapons, but we fashioned cudgels from fallen branches and used them to threaten some poor old man who was patiently digging a ditch and had a small sack with bread and pease pudding for his meal, and we stole that, and we caught fish with our hands, a trick that Brida taught me, and