Æthelstan was living in Æthelflaed’s house, but my absence meant that the boy was protected by only six household warriors. Would Æthelhelm dare kill him? I doubted that, but he would certainly dare capture him and have him removed far away so that he could not threaten the ealdorman’s ambitions. And if Penda was right then the men sent to take Æthelstan had a day’s start on us. But Æthelhelm had plainly been frightened I was going to Cirrenceastre, or perhaps Fagranforda, which suggested his men might still be there, and that was why I had muttered the nonsense about dying on the hills. When I die I want it to be in a girl’s warm bed, not on some rainswept Mercian hilltop.
I dared not hurry. People watched us from the walls of Gleawecestre, so we travelled painfully slowly, as if the men did not want to jolt a wagon in which a man lay dying. We could not abandon that pretence until we reached the beech woods on the steep slope that climbed to the hills where sheep would keep the pale grass short all summer, and once among those trees and thus safely hidden from curious eyes, I climbed off the cart and onto my horse’s back. I left Godric Grindanson, my son’s servant boy, to bring the cart, while the rest of us spurred ahead. ‘Osferth!’ I called.
‘Lord?’
‘Don’t stop in Cirrenceastre,’ I told him. ‘Ride on with two men and make sure Father Cuthbert’s safe. Get the blind bastard out of bed and bring them both to Cirrenceastre.’
‘Them? Out of bed?’ Osferth could be slow to understand sometimes.
‘Where else will they be?’ I asked, and Finan laughed.
Father Cuthbert was my priest. I did not want a priest, but he had been sent to me by King Edward and I liked Cuthbert. He had been blinded by Cnut. He was, I was constantly assured, a good priest, meaning he did his work well enough. ‘What work?’ I had asked Osferth once and had been assured that Cuthbert visited the sick and said his prayers and preached his sermons, but every time I visited his small house beside Fagranforda’s church I had to wait while he dressed. He would then appear smiling, dishevelled and flustered, followed a moment later by Mehrasa, the dark-skinned slave girl he had married. She was a beauty.
And Cuthbert was in danger. I was not certain that Æthelhelm knew that it had been Father Cuthbert who had married Edward to his Centish love. If he did know, then Cuthbert would have to be silenced, though it was possible Edward had never revealed the priest’s identity. Edward was fond of his son, and he was fond of Cuthbert too, but how far did that affection reach? Edward was not a weak king, but he was a lazy one, happy to leave most of the kingdom’s affairs to Æthelhelm and to a pack of diligent priests who, in truth, ruled Wessex fairly and firmly. That left Edward free to hunt and to whore.
And while the king hunted deer, boars, and women, Æthelhelm gathered power. He used it well enough. There was justice in Wessex, and the burhs were kept in repair, and the fyrd practised with weapons, and the Danes had finally learned that invading Wessex led only to defeat, and Æthelhelm himself was a decent enough man except that he saw a chance to be the grandfather of a king, and a great king at that. He would guide his grandson as he guided Edward, and I did not doubt that Æthelhelm’s ambition was the same dream that had haunted Alfred. That dream was to unite the Saxons, to take the four kingdoms and make them one. And that was a good dream, but Æthelhelm wanted to be sure it was his family that made the dream come true.
And I would stop him.
If I could.
I would stop him because I knew Æthelstan was legitimate. He was the ætheling, the king’s eldest son and, besides, I loved that boy. Æthelhelm would stop at nothing to destroy him and I would do anything to protect him.
We did not have far to go. Once on the hilltops we could see the smear of smoke that marked Cirrenceastre’s hearth fires. We were hurrying and my ribs hurt. The land either side of the Roman road belonged to Æthelflaed, and it was good land. The first lambs were in the fields, guarded by men and dogs. The wealth of the land had been granted to Æthelflaed by her father, but her brother could take it away, and Æthelhelm’s unexpected presence in Gleawecestre suggested that Edward was siding with Æthelred, or rather that Æthelhelm was making the decisions that would dictate Mercia’s fate.
‘What will he do to the boy?’ Finan asked, evidently thinking much the same thoughts as those in my head. ‘Cut his throat?’
‘No. He knows Edward likes the twins.’ Æthelstan had a twin sister, Eadgyth.
‘He’ll put Æthelstan into a monastery,’ my son suggested, ‘and little Eadgyth into a convent.’
‘Like enough.’
‘Somewhere far away,’ my son went on, ‘with some bastard abbot who beats the shit out of you every two days.’
‘They’ll try to make him into a priest,’ Finan said.
‘Or hope he falls ill and dies,’ I said, then winced as my horse came down heavily on a rough patch of stone. The roads decayed. Everything decayed.
‘You shouldn’t be riding, father,’ my son said reprovingly.
‘I’m in pain all the time,’ I said, ‘and if I gave into it then I’d do nothing.’
But that journey was painful and by the time I came to Cirrenceastre’s western gate I was almost weeping with agony. I tried to hide the pain. I sometimes wonder whether the dead can see the living? Do they sit in Valhalla’s great feast-hall and watch those they left behind? I could imagine Cnut sitting there and thinking that I must join him soon, and we would raise a horn of ale together. There is no pain in Valhalla, no sadness, no tears, no broken oaths. I could see Cnut grinning at me, not with any pleasure at my pain, but rather because we had liked each other in life. ‘Come to me,’ he was saying, ‘come to me and live!’ It was tempting.
‘Father?’ My son sounded worried.
I blinked and the shadows that had clouded my eyes drained away and I saw we had reached the gate and one of the town guards was frowning up at me. ‘Lord?’ the man said.
‘Did you speak?’
‘The king’s men are in my lady’s house,’ he said.
‘The king’s men!’ I exclaimed, and the man just stared at me. I turned to Osferth. ‘Keep going! Find Cuthbert!’ His route to Fagranforda lay through the town. ‘The king’s men?’ I asked the guard again.
‘King Edward’s men, lord.’
‘And they’re still there?’
‘So far as I know, lord.’
I spurred on. Æthelflaed’s house had once belonged to the Roman commander, or I assumed it had been the commander’s house because it was a lavish building that lay in a corner of the old Roman fort. The fort’s walls had been pulled down, except for the northern side, which was part of the town’s ramparts, but the house was easily defended. It was built about a large courtyard, and the outer walls were of honey-coloured stone and had no windows. There was a pillared entrance facing south, and Æthelflaed had made a new gateway from her stable yard through the town’s northern wall. I sent Sihtric with six companions to guard that northern entrance while I rode with thirty men to the small square that faced the southern door. There was a crowd of curious folk in the square, all wondering why King Edward of Wessex had sent armed men to Cirrenceastre. The crowd parted as our horses’ hooves sounded loud in the street behind them, then we were in the open space and I saw two spearmen beside Æthelflaed’s door. One was sitting on a stone urn that held a small pear tree. He stood and snatched up his shield as we arrived, while the other rapped on the closed door with the butt of his spear. Both men were in mail, they wore helmets, and their round shields were freshly painted with the dragon of Wessex. There was a small hatch in the door and I saw it slide to one side and someone peered out at us. Two boys were guarding horses on the eastern side of the square beside Æthelflaed’s tall wooden church. ‘Count the horses,’ I told my son.
‘Twenty-three,’ he answered almost at once.
So we outnumbered them.