Death of Kings_ A Novel - Bernard Cornwell [92]
The small eyes stared at me. One of the wolfhounds snarled and was quietened. ‘The burner of boats,’ Eohric said, clearly amused.
‘He burns towns too,’ Finan could not resist saying, reminding Eohric that I had burned his fine port at Dumnoc.
Eohric’s mouth tightened, but he did not rise to the bait. Instead he glanced south at the city. ‘A fine place, Lord Uhtred.’
‘May I ask what brings you here, lord King?’ I asked respectfully.
‘I am a Christian,’ Eohric said. His voice was a rumble, impressive and deep, ‘and the Holy Father in Rome tells me that Plegmund is my spiritual father. The archbishop invited me, I came.’
‘We’re honoured,’ I said, because what else do you say to a king?
‘Weohstan tells me you captured the city,’ Eohric said. He sounded bored, like a man who knows he must make conversation, but is not interested in what is being said.
‘I did, lord.’
‘At the gate over there?’ he gestured west towards Ludd’s Gate.
‘Yes, lord King.’
‘You must tell me the tale,’ he said, though he was only being polite. We were both being polite. This was a man who had tried to kill me and neither of us acknowledged that, but instead made stilted conversation. I knew what he was thinking. He was thinking that the wall beside the Bishop’s Gate was the most vulnerable place in the whole three miles of Roman ramparts. It offered the easiest approach, though the rubbish-stinking ditch was a formidable obstacle, but east of the gate the wall’s ragstone had crumbled in places and been replaced with a palisade of oak trunks. A whole stretch of wall between the Bishop’s Gate and the Old Gate was derelict. When I had commanded the garrison I had made the palisade, but it needed repair and if Lundene could be captured then this was the easiest place to attack, and Eohric was thinking the same thing. He gestured to a man beside him. ‘This is the Jarl Oscytel,’ he said.
Oscytel was the commander of Eohric’s household troops. He was what I expected, big and brutal, and I nodded to him and he nodded back. ‘You’ve come to pray too?’ I asked him.
‘I come because my king ordered me to come,’ Oscytel said.
And why, I thought angrily, had Edward allowed this nonsense? Eohric and Oscytel could well become Wessex’s enemies, yet here they were being welcomed to Lundene and treated as honoured guests. There was a great feast that night and one of Edward’s harpists chanted a great poem in praise of Eohric, celebrating his heroism, though in truth Eohric had never made any great reputation in battle. He was a sly, clever man, who ruled by force, who avoided battle, who survived because his kingdom lay at the edge of Britain and so no armies needed to cross his land to reach their enemies.
Yet Eohric was not negligible. He could lead at least two thousand well-equipped warriors to war and if the Danes were ever to make a wholehearted assault on Wessex then Eohric’s men would be a valuable addition. Equally, if the Christians were ever to make an assault on the northern pagans they would welcome those two thousand troops. Both sides tried to seduce Eohric and Eohric received the gifts, made promises and did nothing.
Eohric did nothing, but he was the key to Plegmund’s grand idea to unite all Britain. The archbishop claimed it had come to him in a dream after Alfred’s funeral, and he had persuaded Edward that the dream was from God. Britain would be united by Christ, not by the sword, and there was something propitious in the year, 900. Plegmund believed, and convinced Edward, that Christ would return in the year 1000, and that it was the divine will that the last hundred years of the Christian millennium should be spent converting the Danes in readiness for the second coming. ‘War has failed,’ Plegmund thundered from his pulpit, ‘so we must put our faith in peace!’ He believed the time had come to convert the pagans and he wanted Eohric’s Christian Danes to be his missionaries to Sigurd and Cnut.
‘He wants what?’ I