brine pits that soured the land around the River Wevere. Great fires burned where men boiled the brine in iron vats and where salt made heaps like snowdrifts. The Romans, of course, had made the saltworks, or at least had expanded them so they could supply all Britain with salt, and to make that easy they had embanked a road across the water meadows, raising it on a great causeway of gravel.
I had scouts ranging ahead, though there was small need of them on the wide flat plain across which the road ran like a spear. I expected no trouble, though only a fool travelled Britain’s roads without taking precautions. In places we passed through thick woodland and it was possible that stragglers from Cynlæf’s forces might be looking for unarmed travellers, but no hungry or desperate men would dare attack my men, who wore mail and helmets and were armed with swords.
But hungry, desperate men might have attacked our companions, who were eighteen women on their way to establish the convent that Æthelstan wanted in Mameceaster and a dozen merchants who had been stranded in Ceaster by the siege. The merchants, in turn, had servants who led packhorses laden with valuable goods; tanned hides, silverware from Gleawecestre and fine spearheads forged in Lundene. One packhorse carried the corpse of a man who had followed Cynlæf. The head was separately wrapped in canvas, and both head and body would be nailed to Mameceaster’s main gate as a warning to others tempted to rebel against King Edward’s rule. Æthelstan, his manner cold and distant after I had refused to give him my oath, had asked me to protect the merchants, packhorses, nuns, and corpse all the way to Mameceaster. ‘I’m not going that far,’ I told him.
‘You’re going to the Ribbel,’ he had pointed out, ‘going by Mameceaster is your easiest route.’
‘I don’t want the settlers on the Ribbel to know I’m coming,’ I said, ‘which means I can’t use the roads.’ Roman roads would lead us to Mameceaster and another road left that fortress and went north to Ribelcastre, a Roman fort on the Ribbel. Following such roads made travel easy; there was little chance of getting lost in endless tracts of wooded hills, and, at least in the larger settlements, there were barns to sleep in, smithies to shoe horses, and taverns accustomed to feeding travellers. But Arnborg, who I suspected might have occupied the old Roman fort at Ribelcastre, would have men watching the road. So I planned to approach him from the west, through land settled by Norsemen.
‘The nuns need protection,’ Æthelstan had protested.
‘So protect them,’ I had said, and so twenty-two of Æthelstan’s spearmen rode to guard the travellers on the last part of their journey.
Sunngifu was one of the women. ‘What I don’t understand,’ I said to her, ‘is why you need a convent in Mameceaster.’
‘Nuns are needed everywhere, Lord Uhtred,’ she said.
‘Mameceaster,’ I said, ‘is a frontier burh. All the land around it is pagan, nasty and dangerous.’
‘Like you?’
I looked down at her. I had offered her one of my spare horses, but she had refused, claiming that Jesus’s disciples had walked everywhere, so she and the sisters should do the same. ‘I’m nasty?’ I asked. She just smiled. She was so breathtakingly beautiful even in a dark grey habit with a cowl covering her startling fair hair. ‘You’d better hope I am nasty,’ I told her, ‘because that will keep you safe.’
‘Jesus keeps me safe, lord.’
‘Jesus will be no damned use to you if a Danish war-band comes out of that wood,’ I nodded towards a stretch of leafless trees to the east, and thought of Abbess Hild, my friend now in far off Wintanceaster, who had been raped repeatedly by Guthrum’s Danes. ‘It’s a cruel world, Mus,’ I said, using her old nickname, ‘and you have to hope the warriors defending you are just as cruel as your enemies.’
‘Are you cruel, lord?’
‘I’m good at war,’ I told her, ‘and war is cruel.’
She looked ahead to where Æthelstan’s horsemen rode. ‘Will they be enough to protect us?’
‘How many other travellers have you seen on this road?’ I asked. We were going north, entering low hills and leaving the wide flat plain with its lazy rivers behind us.
‘Not many,’ she said.
‘Just three today,’ I said, ‘and why? Because this is dangerous country. It’s mostly Danish with just a few Saxons. Until Edward made his burh at Mameceaster it was ruled by a Dane, and that was only two years ago. Now that country is being settled by Norsemen. I think it’s madness sending you to Mameceaster.’
‘Then why won’t you protect us all the way?’
‘Because twenty-two warriors are enough to keep you safe,’ I said confidently, ‘and because I have urgent business somewhere else and it will be quicker for me to cut across country.’ I was tempted to escort the nuns all the way to Mameceaster, but the temptation was solely because of Mus. I wondered about her. When she had been married to Bishop Leofstan she had whored enthusiastically, but Æthelstan had been certain she was a reformed sinner. Maybe she was, but I did not like to ask her. ‘What will you do in Mameceaster?’ I asked instead.
‘Maybe I’ll take my vows.’
‘Why haven’t you taken them yet?’
‘I don’t feel worthy, lord.’
I gave her a sceptical look. ‘Prince Æthelstan believes you’re the holiest woman he knows.’
‘And the prince is a good man, lord, a very good man,’ she said, smiling, ‘but he doesn’t know women very well.’
Something in her tone made me look at her again, but her face was all innocence, so I ignored her remark. ‘So what will you do in Mameceaster?’ I asked instead.
‘Pray,’ she said, and I made a scornful sound. ‘And heal the sick, lord.’ She gave me her dazzling smile. ‘And what’s your business, lord, that makes you abandon me?’
‘I have to kill a monk,’ I told her, and, to my surprise, she laughed.
We left them next morning, striking west into wooded hills. I had not been truthful with Mus, our quickest route was to follow the convenient Roman roads, but I needed to approach Arnborg’s settlement without being discovered, and that meant cutting across the country, finding our way by instinct and by the sun. I doubled my scouts. We were entering land where the Danish had been reinforced by Norse settlers, where few Saxons survived, land that had been claimed by Mercia, but never occupied by Mercian troops. Mameceaster, the nearest burh, had been made deep in this land, a defiant gesture by Edward that claimed that he was king of all the country south of the burh, but many of the people here had not even heard of Edward.
The land was rich, but sparsely settled. There were no villages. In southern Mercia and in Wessex, which was now supposedly all one kingdom, there were settlements of cottages, usually built around a church and with no defensive palisade, but here what dwellings existed were almost all behind strong timber walls. We avoided them. We ate hard cheese, stale bread, and smoked herrings that Æthelstan’s steward had given us from his storehouses. We carried forage bags for the horses because the spring grass was still weeks away. We slept in the woods, warmed by fires. Folk would see those fires and wonder who had set them, but we were still far south of the Ribbel, and I doubted that Arnborg would hear of us. Men must have seen us, even if we did not see them, but all they saw were some ninety armed riders with their servants and spare horses. We flew no banner, and the wolf heads on our shields were faded. If any folk did see us they would avoid us because in a dangerous land we were the danger.
Next day, late in a cold afternoon, we saw the Ribbel. It was a sullen day with a grey sky and a grey sea, and ahead of us stretched the wide estuary where grey mudbanks were edged with endless marshes. Smoke rose into the windless air from a dozen settlements on the estuary’s shores. No ships disturbed the river’s channels that threaded the mud, though I could see a score of fishing boats hauled above the high-tide mark. It was close to low tide now and some of the withies marking