‘Why don’t we just ride to Mercia?’ I suggested to Leofric. The king had lent us horses and I did not mind stealing them.
‘What do we do there?’
‘Find men?’ I suggested. ‘Fight?’
‘Don’t be daft, Earsling,’ Leofric said. ‘We want the fleet. And if you don’t marry the ugly sow, I don’t get to command it.’
‘I command it,’ I said.
‘But only if you marry,’ Leofric said, ‘and then you’ll command the fleet and I’ll command you.’
Father Willibald arrived then. He had slept in the monastery next door to the tavern and had come to make sure I was ready, and looked alarmed at my ragged condition. ‘What’s that mark on your face?’ he asked.
‘Bastard hit me last night,’ I said, ‘I was drunk. So was he, but I was more drunk. Take my advice, father, never get into a fight when you’re badly drunk.’
I drank more ale for breakfast. Willibald insisted I wear my best tunic, which was not saying much for it was stained, crumpled and torn. I would have preferred to wear my coat of mail, but Willibald said that was inappropriate for a church, and I suppose he was right, and I let him brush me down and try to dab the worst stains out of the wool. I tied my hair with a leather lace, strapped on Serpent-Breath and Wasp-Sting, which again Willibald said I should not wear in a holy place, but I insisted on keeping the weapons, and then, a doomed man, I went to the cathedral with Willibald and Leofric.
It was raining as if the heavens were being drained of all their water. Rain bounced in the streets, flowed in streams down the gutters and leaked through the cathedral’s thatch. A brisk cold wind was coming from the east and it found every crack in the cathedral’s wooden walls so that the candles on the altars flickered and some blew out. It was a small church, not much bigger than Ragnar’s burned hall, and it must have been built on a Roman foundation for the floor was made of flagstones that were now being puddled by rainwater. The bishop was already there, two other priests fussed with the guttering candles on the high altar, and then Ealdorman Odda arrived with my bride.
Who took one look at me and burst into tears.
What was I expecting? A woman who looked like a sow, I suppose, a woman with a pox-scarred face and a sour expression and haunches like an ox. No one expects to love a wife, not if they marry for land or position, and I was marrying for land and she was marrying because she had no choice, and there really is no point in making too much of a fuss about it, because that is the way the world works. My job was to take her land, work it, make money, and Mildrith’s duty was to give me sons and make sure there was food and ale on my table. Such is the holy sacrament of marriage.
I did not want to marry her. By rights, as an Ealdorman of Northumbria, I could expect to marry a daughter of the nobility, a daughter who would bring much more land than twelve hilly hides in Defnascir. I might have expected to marry a daughter who could increase Bebbanburg’s holdings and power, but that was plainly not going to happen, so I was marrying a girl of ignoble birth who would now be known as the Lady Mildrith and she might have shown some gratitude for that, but instead she cried and even tried to pull away from Ealdorman Odda.
He probably sympathised with her, but the bride price had been paid, and so she was brought to the altar and the bishop, who had come back from Cippanhamm with a streaming cold, duly made us man and wife. ‘And may the blessing of God the Father,’ he said, ‘God the Son and God the Holy Ghost be on your union.’ He was about to say amen, but instead sneezed mightily.
‘Amen,’ Willibald said. No one else spoke.
So Mildrith was mine.
Odda the Younger watched as we left the church and he probably thought I did not see him, but I did, and I marked him down. I knew why he was watching.
For the truth of it, which surprised me, was that Mildrith was desirable. That word does not do her justice, but it is so very hard to remember a face from long ago. Sometimes, in a dream, I see her, and she is real then, but when I am awake and try to summon her face I cannot do it. I remember she had clear, pale skin, that her lower lip jutted out too much, that her eyes were very blue and her hair the same gold as mine. She was tall, which she disliked, thinking it made her unwomanly, and had a nervous expression, as though she constantly feared disaster, and that can be very attractive in a woman and I confess I found her attractive. That did surprise me, indeed it astonished me, for such a woman should have long been married. She was almost seventeen years old, and by that age most women have already given birth to three or four children or else been killed in the attempt, but as we rode to her holdings that lay to the west of the River Uisc’s mouth I heard some of her tale. She was being drawn in a cart by two oxen that Willibald had insisted garlanding with flowers. Leofric, Willibald and I rode alongside the cart, and Willibald asked her questions and she answered him readily enough for he was a priest and a kind man.
Her father, she said, had left her land and debts, and the debts were greater than the value of the land. Leofric sniggered when he heard the word debts. I said nothing, but just stared doggedly ahead.
The trouble, Mildrith said, had begun when her father had granted a tenth of his holdings as ælmesæcer, which is land devoted to the church. The church does not own it, but has the right to all that the land yields, whether in crops or cattle, and her father had made the grant, Mildrith explained, because all his children except her had died and he wanted to find favour with God. I suspected he had wanted to find favour with Alfred, for in Wessex an ambitious man was well advised to look after the church if he wanted the king to look after him.
But then the Danes had raided, cattle had been slaughtered, a harvest failed, and the church took her father to law for failing to provide the land’s promised yield. Wessex, I discovered, was very devoted to the law, and all the men of law are priests, every last one of them, which means that the law is the church, and when Mildrith’s father died the law had decreed that he owed the church a huge sum, quite beyond his ability to pay, and Alfred, who had the power to lift the debt, refused to do so. What this meant was that any man who married Mildrith married the debt, and no man had been willing to take that burden until a Northumbrian fool wandered into the trap like a drunk staggering downhill.
Leofric was laughing. Willibald looked worried.
‘So what is the debt?’ I asked.
‘Two thousand shillings, lord,’ Mildrith said in a very small voice.
Leofric almost choked laughing and I could have cheerfully killed him on the spot.
‘And it increases yearly?’ Willibald asked shrewdly.
‘Yes,’ Mildrith said, refusing to meet my eyes. A more sensible man would have explored Mildrith’s circumstances before the marriage contract was made, but I had just seen marriage as a route to the fleet. So now I had the fleet, I had the debt and I had the girl, and I also had a new enemy, Odda the Younger, who had plainly wanted Mildrith for himself, though his father, wisely, had refused to saddle his family with the crippling debt, nor, I suspected, did he want his son to marry beneath him.
There is a hierarchy among men. Beocca liked to tell me it reflected the hierarchy of heaven, and perhaps it does, but I know nothing of that, but I do know how men are ranked. At the top is the king, and beneath him are his sons, and then come the Ealdormen who are the chief nobles of the land and without land a man cannot be noble, though I was, because I have never abandoned my claim to Bebbanburg. The king and his Ealdormen are the power of a kingdom, the men who hold great lands and raise the armies, and beneath them are the lesser nobles, usually called reeves, and they are responsible for law in a lord’s land, though a man can cease to be a reeve if he displeases his lord. The reeves are drawn from the ranks of thegns, who are wealthy men who can lead followers to war, but who lack the wide holdings of noblemen like Odda or my father.