Death of Kings_ A Novel - Bernard Cornwell [149]
‘Help me!’ His horse was in the grasp of one of my men, and now he tried to stand, but I kicked him down. ‘Help me, Uhtred,’ he said.
‘I have helped you all your life,’ I said, ‘all your miserable life, and now Edward is king.’
‘No,’ he said, ‘no!’
He was not denying his cousin’s kingship, but the threat of my sword. I shuddered with anger as I drove Serpent-Breath down. I drove it at his breast and that great blade tore through his mail, forcing the shattered links down through his breastbone and ribs and right into his rotten heart that exploded under the steel’s thrust. He screamed still, and still I plunged that blade down, and the scream dribbled away to a gasp and I held Serpent-Breath there, watching his life leak away into the East Anglian soil.
So Æthelwold was dead, and Finan, who had rescued Wasp-Sting, plucked my arm. ‘Come, lord, come!’ he said. The Danes were shouting again, and we ran, protected by the horsemen, and soon there were more horsemen in the mist and I knew Edward’s army had come, but neither he nor the leaderless Danes wanted a fight. The Danes had the protection of the ditch now, they were in their shield wall, but they were not marching on Lundene.
So we marched there instead.
Edward wore his father’s crown at the Christmas feast. The emeralds glinted in the firelight of the great Roman hall at the top of Lundene’s hill. Lundene was safe.
A sword or axe had cut into my hip, though I had not realised it at the time. My mail coat was being mended by a smith, and the wound itself was healing. I remembered the fear, the blood, the screams.
‘I was wrong,’ Edward told me.
‘True, lord King,’ I said.
‘We should have attacked them at Cracgelad,’ he said, then stared down the hall where his lords and thegns were dining. He looked like his father at that moment, though his face was stronger. ‘The priests said you couldn’t be trusted.’
‘Maybe I can’t,’ I said.
He smiled at that. ‘But the priests say that God’s providence dictated the war. By waiting, they say, we killed all our enemies.’
‘Almost all our enemies,’ I corrected him, ‘and a king cannot wait on God’s providence. A king must make decisions.’
He took the reproof well. ‘Mea culpa,’ he said quietly, then, ‘yet God was on our side.’
‘The ditch was on our side,’ I said, ‘and your sister won that war.’
It had been Æthelflaed who delayed the Danes. If they had crossed the river during the night they would have been ready to attack earlier and they would surely have overwhelmed us long before Steapa’s horsemen came to the rescue. Yet most of the Danes had stayed in Huntandon, held there by the threat to their rear. That threat had been the burning halls. Æthelflaed, ordered by her brother to ride to safety, had instead taken her Mercian troops north and set the fires that had frightened the Danes into thinking another army was behind them.
‘I burned two halls,’ she said, ‘and one church.’
She sat on my left, Edward on my right, while Father Coenwulf and the bishops had been pushed to the ends of the high table. ‘You burned a church?’ Edward asked, shocked.
‘It was an ugly church,’ she said, ‘but big, and it burned bright.’
Burned bright. I touched her hand, which rested on the table. Almost all our enemies were dead, only Haesten, Cnut and Sigurd remained alive, yet to kill one Dane is to resurrect a dozen. Their ships would keep coming across the sea, because the Danes would never rest until the emerald crown was theirs, or until we had crushed them utterly.
Yet for the moment