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Back Conqueror Save as PDF
Chapters (88)
  1. Title Page
  2. Copyright Page
  3. I
  4. I
  5. II
  6. III
  7. IV
  8. V
  9. VI
  10. VII
  11. VIII
  12. IX
  13. X
  14. XI
  15. II
  16. I
  17. II
  18. III
  19. IV
  20. V
  21. VI
  22. VII
  23. VIII
  24. IX
  25. X
  26. XI
  27. XII
  28. XIII
  29. XIV
  30. XV
  31. XVI
  32. XVII
  33. XVIII
  34. XIX
  35. XX
  36. XXI
  37. III
  38. I
  39. II
  40. III
  41. IV
  42. V
  43. VI
  44. VII
  45. VIII
  46. IX
  47. X
  48. XI
  49. XII
  50. XIII
  51. XIV
  52. XV
  53. XVI
  54. XVII
  55. XVIII
  56. XIX
  57. XX
  58. XXI
  59. IV
  60. I
  61. II
  62. III
  63. IV
  64. V
  65. VI
  66. VII
  67. VIII
  68. IX
  69. X
  70. XI
  71. XII
  72. XIII
  73. XIV
  74. XV
  75. XVI
  76. XVII
  77. XVIII
  78. XIX
  79. XX
  80. XXI
  81. XXII
  82. XXIII
  83. XXIV
  84. XXV
  85. XXVI
  86. XXVII
  87. EPILOGUE
  88. Afterword

Ibn Zuhr said, ‘Every breath we take here we risk discovery, and an unpleasant fate. We must return to the King’s camp with this intelligence.’

‘But Aebbe—’

Arngrim grabbed the priest’s arm. ‘Perhaps we will be able to save her. But not today, cousin. The Danes are too strong.’

Ibn Zuhr nodded. ‘We will go back the way we came. Follow me.’ Moving silent as a cat, he crept through the forest, following a trail visible only to his own dark-adapted eyes, away from the Danish camp.

VI

VI

To the west of Cippanhamm there was a bank of forest, through which the King and his chastened party had retreated that dark night after the Twelve Days assault. Beyond this the ground rose to become boggy moorland where only a few stunted sheep browsed around heather-thatched hovels. During the retreat some of the thegns had begun to complain as the chill ice-crusted mud of the moorland weighed down their steps. But Amgrim and others, leading the grim flight, had known that the King would be as safe in this wilderness as anywhere else, for the Danes would be reluctant to move away from open water. Even the walled towns weren’t safe; Escanceaster, for example, had been taken by the Danes the previous year.

As for the King himself, he seemed shocked to his core by the midwinter truce-breaking treachery of the Danes. With his priests and clerks fluttering around in their spoiled robes, Alfred had walked steadily into the dismal wilderness, looking neither left nor right, giving no orders, allowing himself to be led as passively as a child.

They had come at last to a place where the marshland was tidal, flooded daily by the Sabrina river, and in the sunlight open water shone everywhere, flat and calm and gummy with life.

‘I know this place,’ Arngrim had said. ‘When I was a boy, we hunted here - my cousins and the athelings, Alfred and his older brothers. We called it the Isle of the Princes.’ Aethelingaig. ‘Alfred will remember it.’

‘You have chosen well,’ Cynewulf said.

Aethelingaig was inhabited: indeed people had lived here for a long time. You found your way from island to island along paths, causeways of logs pressed into the mud, ancient and endlessly renewed. The people lived in hovels on stilts, feeding off coots, moorhens, ducks, grebes, and gulls, and in the streams were weirs of brushwood, funnels in which eels and lampreys could be caught. Cynewulf had been told it was possible that these people might be British, clinging to land owned by deep chains of forefathers, land too worthless to have been taken from them by the new English dynasties.

And the people of the marshes were only dimly aware of what was going on outside their watery realm. As the King’s procession passed, one grubby old chap had called, ‘What’s up, are the Romans back?’