[What Might Have Been 02] Alternate Heroes Read online

  This night-time raid was a pale shadow of past encounters. Nine times now Alfred had led whole armies, real armies, thousands of men, against the drawn-up line of the enemy. With the war horns bellowing, the men drumming their spears against the hollow shields, the champions in the front rank throwing up their gold-hilted swords and catching them as they called on their ancestors to witness their deeds. And always, always the Viking line had stood watching, unafraid. The horses’ heads on poles grinning over their array, the terrible Raven banner of the sons of Ragnar spreading its wings in triumph.

  How bold the attack; how bad the defeat. Only once, at Ashdown, had Alfred made the enemy fall back.

  So there would be no triumph in this night encounter, no glory. But when this band of plunderers vanished, the rest of the invaders would know there was one Saxon king still left in England.

  As they pushed through the gap in the thorn hedge and strode into the miserable cluster of wattle-and-daub huts, Alfred jerked his shield down so he could seize the handgrip, and cleared the sax knife in its sheath. In pitched battle he carried long sword and iron-mounted spear, but for these scrimmages among the houses the men of Wessex had gone back to the weapons of their ancestors, the Saxons. The men of the sax: short, pointed, single-edged cleavers. He strode quickly so that the hurrying companions could not squeeze past him. Where was the Viking sentry? When they had reached the last patch of shadow before the churchyard the men stopped at his signal and pushed forward the peasant guide. Alfred looked at him once, and nodded.

  “Call now to your woman.”

  The peasant drew in his breath, shivering with fear, then ran forward five paces into the little open square before the church. He halted and at the top of his voice uttered the long, wailing ululation of the wolf, the wild wolf of the English forests.

  Instantly a harsh voice roared out from the church’s tiny belfry, little more than a platform above the roof. A javelin streaked down at the howling man, but he had already leapt aside. There was a scrape of metal as the Saxons drew their weapons. The door swung suddenly outwards; Alfred held his shield in front of him and charged for the center of the door.

  Figures pushed furiously in front of him, Tobba on the left, Wighard, captain of the king’s guard, on the right. As he burst into the room men were already down, bare-skinned bearded figures rolling in blood. A naked, screeching woman ran across his path, and behind her he saw a Viking jumping for the ax that leaned against the wall. Alfred hurled himself forward and as the Viking turned back he drove the sax in under his chin. When he spun round, shield raised in automatic defence, he realized the skirmish was already over. The English had fanned out in one furious sweep and driven from wall to wall, cutting every Viking down, stabbing savagely at the fallen; no veteran of the Athelney winter thought for an instant of honor, or display. A Viking with his back turned was all they wanted to see.

  Even as relief flooded into him Alfred remembered that there was one task left undone. Where was that Viking sentry? He had been on the belfry, awake and armed. He had had no time to come down and fall in the slaughter. Behind the altar there was a staircase leading up, little more than a ladder. Alfred called out in warning to the milling Englishmen and sprang towards it with his shield high. He was too late. Elfstan, his old companion, stared at his king without comprehension, threw up his arms, and fell forward. The javelin was bedded deep in his spine.

  Slowly, deliberately, an armed Viking stepped down the ladder. He was the biggest man Alfred had ever seen, taller even than himself. His biceps swelled above gleaming bracelets, the rivets of his mail shirt straining to contain the bulk inside. Round his neck and waist shone the loot of a plundered continent. Without haste the Viking threw aside his shield and tossed a great poleax from one hand to the other.

  His eyes met the king’s. He nodded, and pointed the spiked head of the ax at the planked floor.

  “Kom. Thou. Konungrinn. De king.”

  The fight’s already won, thought Alfred. Lose my life now? Insane. But can I turn aside from a challenge? I should have the churls with their bows to shoot him down. That is all that any pirate deserves from England.

  The Viking was already halfway down the stair, moving as fast as a cat, not stopping to whirl up the ax but stabbing straight forward with the point. Reflex hurled Alfred’s shield up to push the blow aside. But behind it came two hundred and eighty pounds of driving weight. The attacker fought for a neck-break hold, snatching at the sax in Alfred’s hand. For a moment all the king could do was struggle to get free. Then he was hurled aside. As he hit the wall there was a clang of metal, a moan. He saw Wighard falling back, his useless right arm trying to cover the rent in his armor.

  Tobba stepped forward, his fist a short flashing arc which ended at the Viking’s temple. As the giant staggered back towards him Alfred stepped forward and drove his sax with all his strength deep into the enemy’s back, twisted furiously, withdrew as the man fell.

  Tobba grinned at him and displayed his right fist. Five metal rings encircled the thumb and fingers.

  “I ’ad the metalsmith mek it for me,” he said.

  Alfred stared round the room, trying to take stock. Already the place was crowded, the men of the village pushing in, calling to each other—and to their women, now struggling into their clothes. They gaped down at the gashed and bloody corpses while a furtive figure was already rummaging beneath discarded armor for the loot all plunderers carried with them. Wulfhun saw this and knocked man aside. Wighard was down, obviously on the point of death. The Viking’s ax had almost severed his arm and driven far too deep between neck and shoulder. Edbert, again priest not warrior, was bent over him, fussing with a phial, frowning at the mortally wounded man’s words. As Alfred watched, the dying man fixed his eyes on his king, spoke haltingly to the chaplain, and then fell back, choking.

  The pirate at his feet was moving too, saying something. Alfred’s lifted hand stayed the eager peasant who rushed forward with his knife raised.

  “What?” he said.

  The pirate spoke again, in the kind of pidgin used by the invaders’ captive women and slaves.

  “Good stroke were that. I fought in front for fifteen years. Never saw stroke like him.”

  He fumbled for something round his neck, a charm pendant beneath the massive golden neck ring, concern coming into his eyes till his hand closed over it. He sighed, raised himself.

  “But now I go!” he called. “I go. To Thruthvangar!”

  Alfred nodded, and the peasant sprang forward.

  Three days later the king sat on the camp stool which was all that Athelney could offer for a throne, waiting for the councillors to come to the meeting he had called, still tossing the Viking’s mysterious pendant meditatively from hand to hand.

  There was no doubt what it was. When he had first pulled it out and shown it to the others, Edbert had said straight away, with a look of horror: “It is the pudendum hominis! It is a sign of the beastly lusts of the devil’s children, abandoned to original sin! It is the pillar which the heathen worship, so boldly destroyed by our countryman the worthy Boniface in Detmar! It is—”

  “It’s a prick,” said Tobba, putting the matter more simply.

  It was a token, the king thought now, closing his fist angrily on it. A token for all the difficulties he continued to face.

  He had had two dozen companions when they all set out from Athelney. But as they made their long, circuitous ride across Somerset, first one man had dropped out with horse trouble and then another. In darkness they simply faded away into the dusk; they had had their fill of the endless, losing battles. Noblemen, king’s companions, men whose fathers and grandfathers had fought for Christ and Wessex. They would go home quietly to their estates, sit and watch, perhaps send discreet emissaries to the Viking king at Chippenham. Sooner or later one of them would betray the secret of the camp at Athelney, and then Alfred too would wake one night, as he had woken so many Viking stragglers, with shrieks around hi
m and a knife already in his throat.

  It would be sooner if they heard he had begun to refuse battle with the heathen. Small as the action had been, that night raid had been important. Eighteen men could still make a difference. But why had those eighteen stayed with him? The companions, no doubt, because they still felt it their duty. The churls, maybe, because they thought the heathens had come to take their land. But how long would either motivation last against continuous defeat and fear of death? Deep in his bones Alfred knew that there was only one man in his army, only one man in Athelney, who genuinely and without pretence had no fear of any Viking who ever breathed, and that was the grim and silent churl Tobba. No one knew where he came from. He had simply appeared in the camp one dawn, with a Viking ax in his hand and two mail shirts over his gigantic shoulder, saying nothing about where he had got them, or how he had slipped through the sentries round the marsh. He was just there. To kill the invaders. If only the king could find a thousand subjects like him.

  Alfred opened his fist and the golden token swung before his eyes, a shining symbol of all that troubled him. First and foremost, he simply could not beat the Vikings in the open field. During the battle-winter eight years before, he and his brother King Ethelred had led the men of Wessex to fight the Vikings’ Great Army nine times. Eight times they had been beaten.

  The ninth time was at Ashdown … Well, he had gained great credit there, and still had some of it left. While his brother had dallied at the pre-battle mass, Alfred had seen that the Vikings were beginning to move down the hill. When Ethelred refused to curtail the mass and leave early, Alfred had stridden forward on his own, and had led the men of Wessex up the hill himself, charging in the front like a wild boar, or so the poets said. Just that one time his fury and frustration had inspired the men so that in the end the Vikings had yielded, retreated to leave a field full of dead, two heathen kings and five jarls among them. They had been back again two weeks later, as ready to fight as ever.

  In some ways that day’s battle had resembled the little skirmish so recently fought. Total surprise, with the fight as good as won even as it began. But though the skirmish had been won, there had still been one Viking left, ready to fight on. He had cost Alfred two good men and had come within a hair of ending the campaign forever by killing the last of all the English kings still prepared to resist.

  He had died well too. Better than his victim Wighard, Alfred was forced to admit. Very, very reluctantly Edbert had been compelled to reveal what the last words of the king’s captain were. He had died saying: “God should have spared me this.” How many years in purgatory that would cost him, Edbert had lamented, how little the faith of these degenerate times … Well, the dying Viking had had faith. Faith in something. Maybe that was what made them fight so with such resolution.

  It was the English who were not fighting well. That was Alfred’s second problem, and he knew exactly what caused it. They expected to lose. Soon after every battle began the first of the wounded would be begging their friends not to leave them on the field to be dispatched when the English withdrew—as everyone knew they would. And their friends were only too ready to help them back to their ponies. Sometimes those who assisted returned to the front, sometimes they didn’t. It was surprising in a way that so many men were still prepared to obey their king’s call, to turn out and fight for their lands and their right not to obey foreigners.

  But the thanes were beginning to hope that when the end finally came they could make a deal with the invaders, keep their lands, maybe pay higher taxes, bow to foreign kings. They could do what the men of the north, and of the Mark, had done. Five years before Burgred, king of the Mark, had given up, collected his treasury and the crown jewels, and slipped away to Rome. The pony-loads of gold and silver he had taken with him would buy him a handsome estate in the sun for the rest of his life. Alfred knew that some of his followers were already wondering whether it would not be a good plan to depose their king, the last stubborn atheling of the house of Cerdic, and replace him with someone more biddable. There was little chance for him to forget Burgred’s treachery. Far too often Alfred’s wife Ealhswith reminded him of her kinsman, the former king of the Mark.

  She had a son and daughter to think of. But he had a kingdom—reason enough for him to battle on. As for the rest of the English, if they fought badly it was not due to any lack of skill or want of age. It was because they had plenty to lose and almost nothing to gain. Nor had he anything to offer the loyal. No land. It had been twenty years since his pious father had given a whole tenth of all his land in all the kingdom to the Church. Land that ordinarily would have gone to supporting warriors, pensioning off the injured, making the old companions ready and eager to breed sons and send them into service in their turn. Alfred had none now to give.

  He hadn’t been able to beat the Vikings when he had an army—and now it was impossible to raise one. The Vikings had all but caught him in bed three months before, when every Christian in Wessex was sleeping off the Christmas festivities. He had barely escaped them, fleeing like a thief into the night. Now the Viking king sat in Chippenham and sent his messengers along the high roads. The true king must skulk in the marsh and hope that in the end news of his continued resistance would somehow seep out.

  And that took him to the third of his problems. He couldn’t beat the Vikings because his men would not support him. He couldn’t get his men to support him because their rewards had gone to the Church. And the Church…

  The sound of challenges from outside told him that his councillors had arrived and were about to be shown in. Swiftly Alfred gave the pendant—prick, pudendum or holy sign, whatever it was—one last look and then stuffed it into his belt-bag and forgot about it. He touched the cross that hung from a silver chain about his neck. The cross of the true Christ. Might His power still be with him. The canvas screen of his shelter was pulled aside.

  He looked glumly at the seven men who came in, as they slowly and with inappropriate courtesy found places among the motley assortment of seats he could provide. Only one councillor had an unquestioned right to be there. At least two of the others he could much better have spared. But they were all he had to work with.

  “I will say who is present, for those who have not met before,” he began. “First, all should know Alderman Ethelnoth.” The rest nodded politely to the red-faced heavy man who sat nearest to the king: the only shire-leader still to be in the field, still fighting from a bivouac like Alfred’s own.

  “Next, we have a spokesman from Alderman Odda.” Odda was the shire-leader of Devon. “Wihtbord, what know you of the enemy?”

  The young, scarred man spoke briefly and without shyness. “I have heard that Ubbi is in Bristol fitting out a fleet. He has the Raven banner with him. My master, Odda, has called out the shire levy, a thousand men at a time. He is watching the coast.”

  This was news—and bad news. Ubbi was one of the dreaded sons of Ragnar. Two of the others were gone. Halfdan had retired to the north, Sigurd Snake-eye was thought to be ravaging in Ireland. And—thank God—no one had heard of Ivar the Boneless for some time. Bad news. Alfred had hoped that he would only have to deal with the relatively weaker King Guthrum. But with Ubbi outfitting a fleet, the Ragnarssons still presented a great danger.

  “Representing both Dorset and Hampshire we have Osbert.”

  Glum silence greeted this remark. The presence of Osbert reminded them that the true aldermen of these two shires could not or would not come. Everyone knew that the alderman of Hampshire had fled overseas, while the alderman of Dorset had cravenly submitted to the Viking Guthrum, so could not be trusted with knowledge of his king’s whereabouts.

  Almost with relief Alfred turned to the three churchmen present.

  “Bishop Daniel is here in his own right, to speak for the Church—”

  “And also for my lord the archbishop of Canterbury.”

  “—and I have further invited Bishop Ceolred to join us, for wisdom and his experi
ence.”

  Eyes turned curiously to the old man, evidently in very poor health, who sat nearest the door. He was in fact the bishop of Leicester, far beyond the borders of Wessex. But Leicester was now a Viking town, and the bishop had fled to what he thought was safety with the king of Wessex. Perhaps he regretted it now. Still, Alfred thought, he might at least get some sense through to this overbearing idiot Daniel and his lord of Canterbury.

  “Finally Edbert my chaplain is here to make note of all decisions reached. And Wulfsige is present as captain of my guard.”

  Alfred looked around at his handful of followers and kept a stern face so his black depression would not show. “Nobles, I have to tell you this. There will be a battle. I am calling the muster of Wessex for Ascension Day. It will be at Edgebright’s Stone, east of Selwood. Every man of Wessex must be there or forfeit all land-right and kin-right forever.”

  There were slow nods. Every Christian knew when Easter was, if he knew nothing else. It had been ten days ago. In thirty more days would be Ascension. Everyone knew Edgebright’s Stone. And it was far enough away from the Viking center at Chippenham to make a muster possible.

  “Bishop Daniel, I rely on you to pass this message to every priest in your diocese and in the archdiocese of your lord, so that they can tell every Christian in every parish.”

  “How am I to do that, my lord? I have no hundreds of horsemen.”

  “Write, then. Make a hundred writs. Send riders on circuits.”

  Edbert coughed apologetically. “Lord king, not all priests may be able to read. True they are pious men, worthy men, but—”

  “They read and write quick enough when it comes to snatching land by charter!” Wulfsige’s snarl was echoed by all the laymen.

  Alfred silenced them with a sharp motion. ‘Send the messages, Bishop Daniel. Another day we will take up the question of whether priests who cannot read should be priests or not. The day of the muster is fixed, and I will be there, even if none of the rest of Wessex follows me. But I trust my subjects’ loyalty. We will have an army to fight the heathens. What I need to know is, how can I be sure of victory—this time?”