“The thanes of Wessex will only follow a man of Wessex.”
“Even if they are told different? If the order comes—from Rome?”
The name hung in the air. Alfred paused, contemptuous reply checked on his lips. Once before in his lifetime Wessex had challenged Rome: when his brother Ethelbald had married his father’s widow against all the rules of the Church. The word had come, the threats had been made. Ethelbald had died soon after—no one knew what of—the bride had been returned to her father, king of the Franks. They had not let Ethelbald’s body lie in Winchester.
The bishop smiled, knowing his words struck home. “You see, lord king, you have no choice. And what you do does not matter in any case. It is only a test of your loyalty. The man you supported—Sheaf the son of the heathen jarl, the Englishman who was brought up as a Christian and then turned his back on it, the apostate, worse than any pagan, worse than the Boneless One himself—he has no more than weeks to live. His enemies ring him round. Believe me! I hear news that you do not.
“Sever your bond with him at once. Show your obedience to the Church your Mother.”
The bishop leaned back in his new-carved chair, sure of his power, anxious to mark an ascendancy which would last as long as the young man in front of him might live.
“King though you may yet be,” he said, “you are in our minster now. You have our leave to go. Go. And issue the orders I demand.”
The poem he had learned for his mother years ago came back suddenly to the young atheling’s mind. It had been a poem of wise advice for warriors, a poem from before Christian times.
“Answer lie with lie,” it had said, “and let your enemy, the man who mocks you, miss your thought. He will be unaware, when your wrath shall fall.” Good advice, thought Alfred. Maybe my mother sent it.
“I will obey your words,” he said, rising humbly. “And I must beg you to forgive the errors of my youth, while I thank you for your prudent direction.”
Weakling! thought the bishop.
He hears news that I do not? wondered the king.
To anyone who knew him—and to the many who did not—the marks of defeat and shame and ignominious flight in the depths of winter, all were visible on Ivar Ragnarsson’s face.
The terrible eyes were still there, the eyes under frozen lashes that never blinked. But there was something in them that had not been there before: an absence, a withdrawal. Ivar walked like a man with something forever on his mind, slowly, absently, almost painfully, shorn of the lithe grace that had once marked him out.
It was still there when needed. The long flight from the fields of Norfolk across England to his brothers’ base at York had not been an easy one. Men who had slipped out of sight when the Great Army passed that way before now emerged from every lane and byroad as a mere pair of exhausted men cantered back. Ivar and the faithful horse-swain Hamal, who had ridden to save him from the Way. At least six times the pair had been ambushed by angry peasants, local thanes, and the border-guards of king Burgred.
Ivar had dealt contemptuously with them all. Before the pair were out of Norfolk he had slashed the heads from two churls driving a farm-cart, taken their leather jackets and blanket coats, handed them to Hamal without a word. By the time they reached York his kills had been beyond count.
Three trained warriors at once could not stand against him, reported Hamal to a curious, fascinated audience. He means to prove he is still the Champion of the North.
Takes a lot of proving now, his audience muttered, the carls of the Army talking freely as was their right. Go with twenty long hundreds, come back with one man. He can be beaten.
That was what Ivar could not forget. His brothers, plying him with hot mead in front of the fire in their quarters by the minster, they had seen it. Seen too that their brother, never safe, now could not be trusted at all in any matter that required calculation. It had not broken their famous unity—nothing ever would—but now, whenever they talked among themselves, there were three and one, where once there had been four.