‘He sends women to test us,’ the young man said harshly, ‘and we fail, and then he sends the Danes to punish us for our failure.’
‘His way is hard,’ Beocca said, ‘and no one has ever doubted it.’
The young man, still kneeling, bowed his head. ‘I should never have married, father. I should have joined the church. Gone to a monastery.’
‘And God would have found a great servant in you, my lord, but he had other plans for you. If your brother dies …’
‘Pray God he does not! What sort of king would I be?’
‘God’s king, my lord.’
So that, I thought, was Alfred. That was the very first time I ever saw him or heard his voice and he never knew. I lay in the grass, listening, as Beocca consoled the prince for yielding to temptation. It seemed Alfred had humped a servant girl and, immediately afterwards, had been overcome by physical pain and what he called spiritual torment.
‘What you must do, my lord,’ Beocca said, ‘is bring the girl into your service.’
‘No!’ Alfred protested.
A harp began to play in the tent and both men checked to listen, then Beocca crouched by the unhappy prince and put a hand on his shoulder. ‘Bring the girl into your service,’ Beocca repeated, ‘and resist her. Lay that tribute before God, let him see your strength, and he will reward you. Thank God for tempting you, lord, and praise him when you resist the temptation.’
‘God will kill me,’ Alfred said bitterly. ‘I swore I wouldn’t do it again. Not after Osferth.’ Osferth? The name meant nothing to me. Later, much later, I discovered Osferth was Alfred’s bastard son, whelped on another servant girl. ‘I prayed to be spared the temptation,’ Alfred went on, ‘and to be afflicted with pain as a reminder, and as a distraction, and God in his mercy made me sick, but still I yielded. I am the most miserable of sinners.’
‘We are all sinners,’ Beocca said, his good hand still on Alfred’s shoulder, ‘and we are all fallen short of the glory of God.’
‘None has fallen as far as me,’ Alfred moaned.
‘God sees your remorse,’ Beocca said, ‘and he will lift you up. Welcome the temptation, lord,’ he went on urgently, ‘welcome it, resist it, and give thanks to God when you succeed. And God will reward you, lord, he will reward you.’
‘By removing the Danes?’ Alfred asked bitterly.
‘He will, my lord, he will.’
‘But not by waiting,’ Alfred said, and now there was a sudden hardness in his voice that made Beocca draw away from him. Alfred stood, towering over the priest. ‘We should attack them!’
‘Burghred knows his business,’ Beocca said soothingly, ‘and so does your brother. The pagans will starve, my lord, if that is God’s will.’
So I had my answer, and it was that the English were not planning an assault, but rather hoped to starve Snotengaham into surrender. I dared not carry that answer straight back to the town, not while Beocca and Alfred were so close to me, and so I stayed and listened as Beocca prayed with the prince and then, when Alfred was calm, the two moved back to the tent and went inside.
And I went back. It took a long time, but no one saw me. I was a true sceadugengan that night, moving among the shadows like a spectre, climbing the hill to the town until I could run the last hundred paces and I called Ragnar’s name and the gate creaked open and I was back in Snotengaham.
Ragnar took me to see Ubba when the sun rose and, to my surprise, Weland was there, Weland the snake, and he gave me a sour look, though not so sour as the scowl on Ubba’s dark face. ‘So what did you do?’ he growled.
‘I saw no ladders …’ I began.
‘What did you do?’ Ubba snarled, and so I told my tale from the beginning, how I had crossed the fields and had thought I was being followed, and had dodged like a hare, then gone through the barricade and spoken to the sentry. Ubba stopped me there and looked at Weland. ‘Well?’
Weland nodded. ‘I saw him through the barricade, lord, heard him speak to a man.’
So Weland had followed me? I looked at Ragnar who shrugged. ‘My lord Ubba wanted a second man to go,’ he explained, ‘and Weland offered.’
Weland gave me a smile, the kind of smile the devil might give a bishop entering hell. ‘I could not get through the barrier, lord,’ he told Ubba.
‘But you saw the boy go through?’
‘And heard him speak to the sentry, lord, though what he said I could not tell.’
‘Did you see ladders?’ Ubba asked Weland.
‘No, lord, but I only skirted the fence.’
Ubba stared at Weland, making him uncomfortable, then transferred his dark eyes to me and made me uncomfortable. ‘So you got through the barrier,’ he said, ‘so what did you see?’ I told him how I had found the large tent, and of the conversation I had overheard, how Alfred had wept because he had sinned, and how he had wanted to attack the town and how the priest had said that God would starve the Danes if that was his will, and Ubba believed me because he reckoned a boy could not make up the story of the servant girl and the prince.
Besides, I was amused, and it showed. Alfred, I thought, was a pious weakling, a weeping penitent, a pathetic nothing, and even Ubba smiled as I described the sobbing prince and the earnest priest. ‘So,’ Ubba asked me, ‘no ladders?’
‘I saw none, lord.’
He stared at me with that fearsomely bearded face and then, to my astonishment, he took off one of his arm rings and tossed it to me. ‘You’re right,’ he told Ragnar, ‘he is a Dane.’
‘He’s a good boy,’ Ragnar said.
‘Sometimes the mongrel you find in the field turns out to be useful,’ Ubba said, then beckoned to an old man who had been sitting on a stool in the room’s corner.
The old man was called Storri and, like Ravn, he was a skald, but also a sorcerer and Ubba would do nothing without his advice, and now, without saying a word, Storri took a sheaf of thin white sticks, each the length of a man’s hand, and he held them just above the floor, muttered a prayer to Odin, then let them go. They made a small clattering noise as they fell, and then Storri leaned forward to look at the pattern they made.
They were runesticks. Many Danes consulted the runesticks, but Storri’s skill at reading the signs was famous, and Ubba was a man so riddled with superstition that he would do nothing unless he believed the gods were on his side. ‘Well?’ he asked impatiently.
Storri ignored Ubba, instead he stared at the score of sticks, seeing if he could detect a rune letter or a significant pattern in their random scatter. He moved around the small pile, still peering, then nodded slowly. ‘It could not be better,’ he said.
‘The boy told the truth?’
‘The boy told the truth,’ Storri said, ‘but the sticks talk of today, not of last night, and they tell me all is well.’
‘Good.’ Ubba stood and took his sword from a peg on the wall. ‘No ladders,’ he said to Ragnar, ‘so no assault. We shall go.’
They had been worried that the Mercians and West Saxons would launch an attack on the walls while they made a raid across the river. The southern bank was lightly garrisoned by the besiegers, holding little more than a cordon of men to deter forage parties crossing the Trente, but that afternoon Ubba led six ships across the river and attacked those Mercians, and the runesticks had not lied, for no Danes died and they brought back horses, weapons, armour and prisoners.
Twenty