Cynewulf saw Alfred only once more. The King summoned him to Lunden, won back from the Danes.

It was nine years after Ethandune.

‘And it will be,’ Cynewulf remarked, as his patient horse bore him along the broken Roman road towards Lunden, ‘a meeting I would never have imagined could take place, in the darkest hours at Aethelingaig.‘

‘What’s that, Father?’ asked Saberht, who rode at his side.

‘Oh, nothing, boy, nothing,’ Cynewulf said. ‘Just talking to myself.’

The novice scratched his tonsure, raggedly cut in a head of thick black hair. Of course, his manner implied, this mumbling dotage was to be expected of a man of Cynewulf’s advanced years - nearly forty, by God.

Cynewulf wiped the sweat of an unseasonably warm April day from his brow, and tried to master his irritation. After all, it wasn’t the boy’s fault he was growing old. The novice, not yet twenty, was as lithe as a stoat, and as randy, as his lurid confessions proved. But he was a good boy who did his best to take care of Cynewulf, even if he did treat the priest as if he were Methuselah’s twin.

Of course forty years was well short of the three-score-years-and-ten promised in the Bible. But life was hard in these fallen times, and bodies wore out, even those of priests. In particular Cynewulf’s knees ached constantly, no doubt a relic of the long hours he spent on them each day. He embraced such suffering and dedicated it to God.

But in a sense he had been spared. Most of Cynewulf’s boyhood friends were dead and gone, and he knew very few people older than himself. Suddenly he found himself lost in a world full of youthful innocents, like Saberht, who knew nothing of the remote past of thirty years ago, or twenty or even ten, the days of Aethelingaig and Ethandune, knew nothing and cared less.

Why, Saberht didn’t even fear the Dane. To him the Dane was a spent force who had been defeated by Alfred and now, in the King’s latter years, was being beaten steadily back. Oh, the Dane clung on in the north-east, but what was there to fear? So quickly the generations turned, Cynewulf thought, so quickly the past was forgotten.

But Cynewulf had not forgotten, and nor had Alfred.

So Saberht was unafraid of the Dane - but, oddly, he was wary of Lunden.

On this last day of travelling, coming down towards Lunden from the north - through lands taken under Alfred’s sway from the Danes just a year ago - they crossed over a ridge of high ground, and Lunden and its river opened up before them. Cynewulf pulled up his horse, breathing hard, and Saberht slowed beside him.