Death of Kings_ A Novel - Bernard Cornwell [101]
We rowed up the curving River Medwæg to the burh at Hrofeceastre where I saw that the timber palisade atop the mighty earth bank was rotting like the one in Lundene, but a great heap of newly felled oak trunks suggested that someone here was ready to repair the defences. Finan and I went ashore at the wharf by the Roman bridge and walked to the bishop’s house beside the great church. The steward bowed to us and, when he heard my name, did not dare ask for my sword. Instead he took us to a comfortable room and had servants bring us ale and food.
Bishop Swithwulf and his wife arrived an hour later. The bishop was a worried-looking man, grey-haired, with a long face and twitching hands, while his wife was small and nervous. She must have bowed to me ten times before sitting. ‘What brings you here, lord?’ Swithwulf asked.
‘Curiosity,’ I said.
‘Curiosity?’
‘I’m wondering why the Danes are so quiet,’ I said.
‘God’s will,’ the bishop’s wife said timidly.
‘Because they’re planning something,’ Swithwulf said. ‘Never trust a Dane when he’s silent.’ He looked at his wife. ‘Don’t the cooks need your advice?’
‘The cooks? Oh!’ She stood, fluttered for a moment, then fled.
‘Why are the Danes quiet?’ Swithwulf asked me.
‘Sigurd’s ill,’ I suggested, ‘Cnut’s busy on his northern border.’
‘And Æthelwold?’
‘Getting drunk in Eoferwic,’ I said.
‘Alfred should have strangled him,’ Swithwulf growled.
I was warming to the bishop. ‘You’re not preaching peace like the rest?’ I asked.
‘Oh, I preach what I’m told to preach,’ he said, ‘but I’m also deepening the ditch and rebuilding the wall.’
‘And Ealdorman Sigelf?’ I asked. Sigelf was the ealdorman of Cent, the county’s military leader and its most prominent noble.
The bishop looked at me suspiciously. ‘What of him?’
‘He wants to be King of Cent, I hear.’
Swithwulf was taken aback by that statement. He frowned. ‘His son had that idea,’ he said cautiously, ‘I’m not sure if Sigelf thinks the same way.’
‘And Sigebriht was talking to the Danes,’ I said. Sigebriht, who had surrendered to me outside Sceaftesburi, was Sigelf’s son.
‘You know that?’
‘I know that,’ I said. The bishop sat silent. ‘What’s going on in Cent?’ I asked, and still he was silent. ‘You’re the bishop,’ I said, ‘you hear things from your priests. So tell me.’
He still hesitated, but then, like a millpond’s dam bursting, he told me of the unhappiness in Cent. ‘We were our own kingdom once,’ he said. ‘Now Wessex treats us as runts of the litter. Look what happened when Haesten and Harald landed! Were we protected? No!’
Haesten had landed on Cent’s northern coast while Jarl Harald Bloodhair had brought more than two hundred ships to the southern shore where he had stormed a half-built burh and slaughtered the men inside, then spread across the county in an orgy of burning, killing, enslaving and robbing. Wessex had sent an army led by Æthelred and Edward to oppose the invaders, but the army had done nothing. Æthelred and Edward had placed their men on the great wooded ridge at the centre of Cent and then argued whether to strike north towards Haesten or south towards Harald, and all the while Harald had burned and killed.
‘I killed Harald,’ I said.
‘You did,’ the bishop allowed, ‘but not till after he’d ravaged the county!’
‘So men want Cent to be its own kingdom again?’ I asked.
He hesitated a long time before answering, and even then he was evasive. ‘No one wanted that while Alfred lived,’ he said, ‘but now?’
I stood and walked to a window from