Death of Kings_ A Novel - Bernard Cornwell [91]
‘Their deaths would solve many problems,’ Offa said.
So I had done Edward one small service by spreading a rumour that would please Æthelhelm, his father-in-law. In truth the twins were healthy, squalling babies, and problems in the making, but problems that could wait, just as Cnut had decided that his invasion of southern Mercia and Wessex must wait.
There are seasons of our lives when nothing seems to be happening, when no smoke betrays a burned town or homestead and few tears are shed for the newly dead. I have learned not to trust those times, because if the world is at peace then it means someone is planning war.
Spring came and with it Edward’s coronation at Cyninges Tun, the King’s town, which lay just west of Lundene. I thought it a strange choice. Wintanceaster was the main town of Wessex where Alfred had built his great new church and where the largest royal palace stood, but Edward had chosen Cyninges Tun. It was true that it was a great royal estate, but of late it had been ignored because it was too close to Lundene and, before I captured that city from the Danes, Cyninges Tun had been plundered again and again. ‘The archbishop says it’s where some of the old monarchs were crowned,’ Edward explained to me, ‘and there’s a stone here.’
‘A stone, lord?’
He nodded. ‘It’s a royal stone. The old kings either stood on it or sat on it, I’m not sure which.’ He shrugged, evidently confused by the stone’s purpose. ‘Plegmund thinks it’s important.’
I had been summoned to the royal estate a week before the ceremonies and ordered to bring as many household warriors as I could muster. I had seventy-four men, all mounted, all well-equipped, and Edward added a hundred of his own men and asked that we protect Cyninges Tun during his crowning. He feared that the Danes would attack and I gladly agreed to keep guard. I would much rather have been on horseback under the open skies than sitting and standing through hours of Christian ceremony, and so I rode the empty countryside while Edward sat or stood on the royal stone and had his head anointed with holy oil and then crowned with his father’s emerald-studded crown.
No Danes attacked. I had been so sure that Alfred’s death would mean war, but it brought one of those strange periods during which swords rested in their scabbards, and Edward was crowned in peace and afterwards he went to Lundene and summoned me there to a great council. The streets of the old Roman city were hung with banners, all in celebration of Edward’s coronation, while the formidable ramparts were thick with troops. None of that was surprising, but what was astonishing was to find Eohric there.
King Eohric of East Anglia, who had conspired to kill me, was in Lundene by invitation of Archbishop Plegmund who had sent two of his own nephews as hostages to guarantee the king’s safety. Eohric and his followers had come up the Temes in three lion-prowed boats and were now quartered in the great Mercian palace that crowned the hill at the centre of the old Roman city. Eohric was a big man, bellied like a pregnant sow, strong as a bullock, with a suspicious, small-eyed face. I first saw him on the ramparts where he was walking with a group of his men along the old Roman defences. He had three wolfhounds on leashes and their presence on the ramparts was provoking the dogs in the city beneath to howl. Weohstan, the commander of the garrison, was Eohric’s guide, presumably because Edward had ordered him to show the East Anglian king whatever he wanted to see.
I was with Finan. We climbed to the ramparts up a Roman stair built into one tower of the gate that men called the Bishop’s Gate. It was morning, and the sun was warming the old stone. It stank because the ditch outside the wall was filling with refuse and offal. Children were scavenging there.
A dozen West Saxon soldiers were clearing the way for Eohric’s men, but they let me alone and Finan and I just waited as the East Anglians approached us. Weohstan looked alarmed, perhaps because Finan and I were both wearing swords,