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he had called, still tossing the Viking s mysterious pendant meditatively from
hand to hand.
There was no doubt what it was. When he had first pulled it out and shown it
to the others, Edbert had said straight away, with a gasp of horror:  It is
the pudendum hominis! It is a sign of the beastly lusts of the devil s
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children, abandoned to original sin! It is the pillar which the heathen
worship, so boldly destroyed by our countryman the worthy Boniface in Detmar!
It is
 It s a prick, said Tobba, putting the matter more simply.
It was a token, the king thought now, closing his fist angrily on it. A token
for all the difficulties he continued to face.
He had had two dozen companions when they all set out from Athelney. But as
they made their long, circuitous ride across Somerset, first one man had
dropped out with horse trouble and then another. In darkness they simply faded
away into the dusk; they had had their fill of the endless, losing battles.
Noblemen, king s companions, men whose fathers and grandfathers had fought for
Christ and Wessex. They would go home quietly to their estates, sit and watch,
perhaps send discreet emissaries to the Viking king at Chippenham. Sooner or
later one of them would betray the secret of the camp at Athelney, and then
Alfred too would wake one night, as he had woken so many Viking stragglers,
with shrieks around him and a knife already in his throat.
It would be sooner if they heard he had begun to refuse battle with the
heathen. Small as the action had been, that night raid had been important.
Eighteen men could still make a difference.
But why had those eighteen stayed with him? The companions, no doubt, because
they still felt it their duty. The churls, maybe, because they thought the
heathens had come to take their land. But how long would either motivation
last against continuous defeat and fear of death? Deep in his bones Alfred
knew that there was only one man in his army, only one man in Athelney, who
genuinely and without pretence had no fear of any Viking who ever breathed,
and that was the grim and silent churl Tobba. No one knew where he came from.
He had simply appeared in the camp one dawn, with a Viking ax in his hand and
two mail shirts over his gigantic shoulder, saying nothing about where he had
gotten them, or how he had slipped through the sentries round the marsh. He
was just there. To kill the invaders. If only the king could find a thousand
subjects like him.
Alfred opened his fist and the golden token swung before his eyes, a shining
symbol of all that troubled him. First and foremost, he simply could not beat
the Vikings in the open field.
During the battle-winter eight years before, he and his brother King Ethelred
had led the men of
Wessex to fight the Vikings Great Army nine times. Eight times they had been
beaten.
The ninth time was at Ashdown. . . . Well, he had gained great credit there,
and still had some of it left. While his brother had dallied at the prebattle
mass, Alfred had seen that the Vikings were beginning to move down the hill.
When Ethelred refused to curtail the mass and leave early, Alfred had stridden
forward on his own, and had led the men of Wessex up the hill himself,
charging in the front like a wild boar, or so the poets said. Just that one
time his fury and frustration had inspired the men so that in the end the
Vikings had yielded, retreated to leave a
field full of dead, two heathen kings and five jarls among them. They had been
back again two weeks later, as ready to fight as ever.
In some ways that day s battle had resembled the little skirmish so recently
fought. Total surprise, with the fight as good as won even as it began. But
though the skirmish had been won, there had still been one Viking left, ready
to fight on. He had cost Alfred two good men, and had come within a hair of
ending the campaign forever by killing the last of all the English kings still
prepared to resist.
He had died well too. Better than his victim Wighard, Alfred was forced to
admit. Very, very reluctantly Edbert had been compelled to reveal what the
last words of the king s captain were.
He had died saying:  God should have spared me this. How many years in
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purgatory that would cost him, Edbert had lamented, how little the faith of
these degenerate times. . . . Well, the dying
Viking had had faith. Faith in something. Maybe that was what made them fight
so with such resolution.
It was the English who were not fighting well. That was Alfred s second
problem, and he knew exactly what caused it. They expected to lose. Soon after
every battle began the first of the wounded would be begging their friends not
to leave them on the field to be dispatched when the
English withdrew as everyone knew they would. And their friends were only too
ready to help them back to their ponies. Sometimes those who assisted returned
to the front, sometimes they didn t. It was surprising in a way that so many
men were still prepared to obey their king s call, to turn out and fight for
their lands and their right not to obey foreigners.
But the thanes were beginning to hope that when the end finally came they
could make a deal with the invaders, keep their lands, maybe pay higher taxes,
bow to foreign kings. They could do what the men of the north, and of the
Mark, had done. Five years before Burgred, king of the
Mark, had given up, collected his treasury and the crown jewels, and slipped
away to Rome. The pony-loads of gold and silver he had taken with him would
buy him a handsome estate in the sun for the rest of his life. Alfred knew
that some of his followers were already wondering whether it would not be a
good plan to depose their king, the last stubborn atheling of the house of
Cerdic, and replace him with someone more biddable. There was little chance
for him to forget
Burgred s treachery. Far too often Alfred s wife Ealhswith reminded him of her
kinsman, the former king of the Mark.
She had a son and daughter to think of. But he had a kingdom reason enough for
him to battle on. As for the rest of the English, if they fought badly it was
not due to any lack of skill or want of courage. It was because they had
plenty to lose and almost nothing to gain. Nor had he anything to offer the
loyal. No land. It had been twenty years since his pious father had given a
whole tenth of all his land in all the kingdom to the Church. Land that
ordinarily would have gone to supporting warriors, pensioning off the injured,
making the old companions ready and eager to breed sons and send them into
service in their turn. Alfred had none now to give.
He hadn t been able to beat the Vikings when he had an army and now it was
impossible to raise one. The Vikings had all but caught him in bed three
months before, when every Christian in Wessex was sleeping off the Christmas
festivities. He had barely escaped them, fleeing like a thief into the night.
Now the Viking king sat in Chippenham and sent his messengers along the high
roads. The true king must skulk in the marsh and hope that in the end news of
his continued resistance would somehow seep out.
And that took him to the third of his problems. He couldn t beat the Vikings
because his men would not support him. He couldn t get his men to support him
because their rewards had gone to the Church. And the Church . . . [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]