“Silver,” he mused. “If the black monks had known that, they would have whipped their slaves till they died in search of it. So the slaves did not tell them. They tell me because they know I will give them a share. And with new silver—it is not long ago that every time we minted the money was worse, and soon Canterbury money would have been as bad as York. Now, with the silver I put back from the Church hoards, a Wessex penny is as good as any in Frankland or the German lands beyond. And the traders come in from everywhere, from Dorestad and Compostella, and the Franklands too if they can evade their own king’s ban. They all pay harbor-dues, and I use it to pay my miners. The traders are happy, and the miners are happy, and I am happy too.
“So, Godive, you see that things are not as bad as they were, even for the churls. It may not seem much, but a horse to ride and a full belly even in Lent is happiness to many.”
A bell began to chime from the Old Minster in the town below, its strokes ringing out over the steep valley. Ringing for a bridal, probably: the priests who remained in Wessex had found that if they were to keep any worshipers for the White Christ they had to use their assets of music and ritual, more impressive still than the strange tales of the Way-missionaries from the North.
“It still rests on war, though,” she replied.
Alfred nodded. “It always did. I saw this valley a desolation of burnt fields when I was a boy. The Vikings took the town and burnt every house in it except the stone Minster. They would have pulled that down if they had had time. We fought them then and we fight them still. The difference is that now we fight them at sea, so the land is spared. And the more it is spared the stronger we are, and the weaker they grow.”
He hesitated again. “Are you missing your—your brother? I know well that all this goes back to him. If it had not been for him I would have been dead, or a penniless exile, or at best a puppet-king with Bishop Daniel holding my strings. Or some Viking jarl, maybe. I owe him everything.” He patted her hand. “Even you.”
Godive dropped her eyes. Her husband always referred to Shef, now, as her brother, though she knew that he knew that there was no blood relationship between them, that they were stepbrother and stepsister only. Sometimes she thought that Alfred had realized the truth of their relationship, maybe the truth too that her first husband had really been her half-brother. But if he suspected, he was careful to ask no further. He did not know that she had miscarried twice, deliberately, while she had been first married, taking the dangerous birth-wort. If she had believed in any god, the Christian one or the strange pantheon of the Way, she would have prayed to him or them for a safe delivery for what might now be in her womb.
“I hope he is alive.”
“At least no-one has seen him dead. All our traders know there is a reward for any news, and a greater one for the man who brings him back.”
“Not many kings would pay to have a rival return,” said Godive.
“He is no rival to me. My rivals are across the Channel there, or up in the North working mischief. It looks safe as we sit on this hill and look over the fields. I tell you, I would feel twenty times safer if Shef were back in England. He is our best hope. The churls call him sigesaelig, you know, the Victorious.”
Godive squeezed her husband’s arm. “They call you Alfred esteadig. The Gracious. That is a better name.”
In the great tent of striped canvas many days’ march and sail to the north, the conference was less happy. The tent had been pitched with its rear into the wind, and the front wall brailed up so the men inside it could also look out. They looked out over a drear landscape of moor and heather, marked here and there by columns of smoke rising, the marks of the harrying parties coming down on one clump of wretched bothies or another. The three Ragnarssons left alive sat on their camp stools, ale-horns in hand. Each had a weapon stuck into the ground beside him, spear or spiked axe, as well as their swords belted on. Twice already that spring, since the battle off the Elbe, one jarl or another had tried to challenge their authority. Sensitive as cats to the constant ebb and flow of reputation on which power rested, all three knew they had to offer their followers a scheme. A bribe. A proposition. Or there would be tents struck in the night, ships missing at the next rendezvous, men gone to try their fortune in the service of some sea-king better favored by luck.