Death of Kings_ A Novel - Bernard Cornwell [118]
We watered the horses in the two streams that ran through the town and I sent Osferth and Finan to buy food while Æthelflaed and I took thirty men to the town’s second largest hall, a magnificent and new building that stood at Liccelfeld’s northern edge. The widow who lived there had not fled from our arrival. Instead she waited in her hall, accompanied by a dozen servants.
Her name was Edith. She was young, she was pretty and she was hard, though she looked soft. Her face was round, her curly red hair was springy and her figure plump. She wore a gown of linen dyed gold and around her neck was a looped golden chain. ‘You’re Offa’s widow,’ I said, and she nodded without speaking. ‘Where are his dogs?’
‘I drowned them,’ she said.
‘How much did Jarl Sigurd pay your husband to lie to us?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she said.
I turned to Sihtric. ‘Search the place,’ I told him, ‘take all the food you need.’
‘You can’t…’ Edith began.
‘I can do what I want!’ I snarled at her. ‘Your husband sold Wessex and Mercia to the Danes.’
She was stubborn, admitting nothing, yet there was too much evident wealth in the newly built hall. She screamed at us, clawed at me when I took the gold from around her neck, and spat curses when we left. I did not leave the town straightaway, instead I went to the graveyard by the cathedral where my men dug Offa’s body from its grave. He had paid silver to the priests so that he could be buried close to the relics of Saint Chad, believing that proximity would hasten his ascent into heaven on the day of Christ’s return to earth, but I did my best to consign his filthy soul to the Christian hell. We carried his rotting body, still in its discoloured winding sheet, to the edge of town and there threw it into a stream.
Then we rode on eastwards to discover whether his treachery had doomed Wessex.
PART FOUR
Death in Winter
Eleven
The village was no more. The houses were smouldering piles of charred timbers and ash, the corpses of four hacked dogs lay in the muddy street, and the stink of roasted flesh was mingling with the sullen smoke. A woman’s body, naked and swollen, floated in a pond. Ravens were perched on her shoulders, tearing at the bloated flesh. Blood had dried black in the grooves of the flat washing-stone beside the water. A great elm tree towered above the village, but its southern side had been set alight by flames from the church roof and had burned so that the tree appeared lightning-blasted, one half in full green leaf, the other half black, shrivelled and brittle. The ruins of the church still burned and there was not one person alive to tell us the name of the place, though a dozen smears of smoke told us that this was not the only village to be reduced to charred ruin.
We had ridden eastwards, again following the tracks of Haesten’s band, then those hoof-prints had turned south to join a larger burned and beaten path. That path had been made by hundreds of horses, probably thousands, and the smoke trails in the sky suggested that the Danes were journeying south towards the valley of the Temes and the rich pickings of Wessex beyond.
‘There are corpses in the church,’ Osferth told me. His voice was calm, yet I could tell he was angry. ‘Many corpses,’ he said. ‘They must have locked them inside and burned the church around them.’
‘Like a hall-burning,’ I said, remembering Ragnar the Elder’s hall blazing in the night and the screams of the people trapped inside.
‘There are children there,’ Osferth said, sounding angrier. ‘Their bodies shrivelled to the size of babies!’
‘Their souls are with God,’ Æthelflaed tried to comfort him.
‘There’s no pity any more,’ Osferth said, looking at the sky, which