Elfwin

by S. Fowler Wright

First published 1930
by George G. Harrap

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CHAPTER I

        ETHELFLEDA of Mercia sat the black Welsh pony which she had taken twelve months earlier from the King of Gwent, and looked across the frozen meadows at the stockaded gate of Derby, from which her army had been driven four times since morning.

        She had come there in the early dawn of the winter day, from the mass at which the abbot Theobald had blessed her troops, to observe, and by her presence to inspire, the expected victory. For beyond that it had seemed that her part was done. Hers had been the audacious plan, the unexcusing levy, the concentration at Tamworth where the great roads met, the rapid march urged relentlessly through the mire of the winter ways. The strategy had been always hers, even when Ethelred lived. But the actual fighting was for her thanes to order. Was - or had been. For now the sun was setting behind her, and the four battle-thanes of Mercia lay dead in the Derby streets.

        There she had sat since morning, silent and motionless, with eyes that never wavered from the city gate. It was as though she saw a vision of victory, or looked for a success which would be lost if once her eyes should fall, or her faith should falter.

        Thus she had sat, and seen the first rush of Ethred and his chosen followers surmount the gate, and storm their way into the stronghold of the Danes. Thus she had watched as the noise of battle clamoured within the city. Thus she had seen the out-flung remnant of her troops straggle backward from their repulse. But Ethred had not returned.

        Then she had looked at Ethelgarth, and spoken nothing, but, with that slight imperious motion of her hand which all men knew, she had pointed to the city gate, and he had marshalled her broken troops as best he might, and led them on, and they too had stormed the gate, and they too had straggled back at the last, a broken remnant of what they had been. But Ethelgarth had not returned.

        And after that, twice more. Offa and Ethelheld, they had gone the same road, they had led good men to the same measure of success, and, in the end, to the same deaths; and they had not returned.

        The four battle-thanes of Mercia, the four captains she trusted, and on whom she leaned, they were all dead today. So many of her best were dead today! And it had all been for nothing. It was a failure, and there was no one round her but knew it. The Danes knew it also. It had been a hard fight, but they had been ready for her this time. They were busy now killing the badly wounded, as was best and most merciful, throwing out the dead bodies, and repairing the breaches in the stockade. The sound of their axes echoed across the meadow in the clear winter air, above the grass on which the frost was whitening. They lost no time for a needed work, though their arms might be weary. They were professional soldiers, not amateurs like hers.

        Her own men, knowing failure, looked to the night, and the morning. They thought of the retreat, and wondered if the Danes would allow them to retire unfollowed. But Ethelfleda looked further. She thought of what the news would mean to her other enemies of the League of the Five Towns. What it would mean to her brother Edward at Winchester, to the twice-treasoned Gaidhils of the Dee valley, what it would mean in Anglesey, and at Brecknock, to the Britons of Strathclyde - above all, what it would mean at York.

        With that capacity for cold, clear thinking which had made her name, as it had made that of her brother, the Wessex king, for twenty years the terror of their all-circling foes, she saw that it was the end.

        Widow of a man she had never loved, mother of a child to whom the purpose of her life was nothing, with whom she was at bitter difference, she had given everything to Mercia, as she had promised her father, Alfred, whom later ages would call the Great, everything for her mother's land. Everything she had given, even her body, even her soul - everything but her faith. And here was the end, across this frozen field, and at the gate she had failed to storm.

        Her name had not been linked with failure - not in all these years. Feint or fight, she had met or outmanoeuvred the stronger foes by which her land was surrounded on every side but where her brother held the Wessex wolds. She had stormed Brecknock. She had rebuilt Chester. She had combined with Edward in the strategy which had broken the Danish army at Wodensfield. And this winter, in defiance of the elements and all the laws of war, she had thought to have taken one of the Five Towns . . . and it had led to this.

        She had called out every man from the lands she ruled, every man of the valleys of Severn, and Trent, and Dee: every man of the Chiltern and Cotswold hills: every man of the Midland weald: every man with feet to move and hands to strike - and she had led them to this.

        Because they trusted her they had come, when they might have stayed in the comfort of their winter homes, and in the season when they were secure from every likely foe . . .

        Cynfrid came to her pony's shoulder. Someone must speak, for no one knew what to do, if she were silent. There was none other to give orders which all would heed. There were so many of those who had been the leaders of yesterday who were only fit to nurse their wounds. There were so many dead.

        He spoke with a timid urgency.

        "Lady, they are fearful of a night raid. They will not camp so near as last night. There are so few that are fit, and the sun is low. Unless we make order now they will scatter before the dawn. Hermild of Chester has loaded his baggage-carts . . ."

        He stopped at the abrupt short motion of her bridle-hand, and she looked down, but it was not as though she saw him. He did not know whether she had heard what he said. Then her eyes changed, and she looked at him as though there were only they two in the world.

        That was Ethelfleda's way. She moved as one who saw nothing of the life around her: as one who dreamed or prayed; and then, when she spoke to any, it was with a sudden intimacy of recognition, as though everything outside themselves were made distant and small.

        She said: "You will stay here and watch. You will let the King know."

        She slid down from the pony's back, and gave him the rein to hold. He did not think to question her order, though he did not clearly understand it. He knew that she meant the King her brother, Edward of Wessex. But what was he to watch?

        She looked round at the group of weary and disheartened men who waited on her for the guidance which it seemed that she would not give.

        She said: "Where is the flag?"

        There was not much left of the flag of Mercia. It had been seized by Danish hands in that last struggle in the narrow Derby streets. The man who bore it went down beneath a Danish axe. Edgurth of Crida had snatched at the trailing cloth, and when the Dane who held it dragged upon the staff, it had torn across. And so he had brought half of it away, and now came forward, holding a dirty tattered cloth, fouled green and tarnished gold. It seemed to Ethelfleda, as she took it to her own hands, that it was a symbol of the trampled land that she had failed to save.

        Her head bent to kiss it, amid the waiting silence of the group, thane and franklin, freeman and serf, who had crowded round her for guidance. Her lips moved, as though she prayed. "Mary pity . . ." they could hear no more. Men respond quickly to emotion when hearts and bodies are wearied. Thorgild, a blood-grimed freedman of Edgurth's, Worcester-born, but sometimes doubted for a Danish mother and a Danish name, sobbed aloud in the silence.

        Ethelfleda lifted her hand, and pointed to the gate, round which so many of her best had died. But no one moved. It was too plainly foolish. Four times that day she had pointed the path of death, and they had taken it - and the most of them had not returned. If from the first time, not from the second; if from the second, not from the third - the fourth. And these were the men who had not crowded forward to the shambles of the stockade, and the Danish axes. They were the men who had lagged: the inevitable rear. And they were worn out. They had tried a foolish, hopeless thing, because she had bidden them do it, and they had failed - utterly. Everyone knew it, Dane and Saxon alike. Many had known that it must be so when the morning broke. And now the fight was done.

        Ethelfleda looked at them and understood. Had she not been able to understand she could not have ruled so long and led so well. She knew that she had no words that could move them.

        She turned and went forward over the frozen field.

        They watched her for a time in a bewildered silence. She was halfway to the gate before any man moved, and then their thought was to protect and to persuade return rather than to follow her to a fresh assault - that is, if there were any clear thought at all in the little crowd that quickened pace to a run as it became aware of the length by which she led them.

        The Danes did not regard her either as she advanced alone; it was only when they saw the running crowd behind that they stopped their work to stare, and then stretched hands for their weapons.

        Their cries went backward into the town, to rouse an army that had scattered for food and rest, and part of which had already been withdrawn to its barrack-huts on the further side of the river; for they were no more than the repairing-gang, and a double gate-guard, who first saw the advance across the darkening meadow. But whistles shrilled from point to point, and the Danish forces, better trained, as they were better weaponed than their Saxon foes, mustered rapidly, and hurried to their stations at the stockade.

        For now the whole of the Saxon army - or almost all - was in motion against them. A word had gone backward through the camp that the Queen herself was leading a new assault, and this had changed in the mouths of men, so that the cry sounded, "the Queen has taken the gate;" and what man would be last when the fight is done, and a rich town cowers to the spoiler?

        The half-light helped what was already a half-truth as the Saxon army gathered, and poured forward with an impetus that quickened at every pace; for Ethelfleda and her immediate followers were over the gate indeed, changing fierce blows with those who were already there to oppose them.

        Cynfrid, holding the pony's rein, and watching as he had been ordered, saw that the gate had been burst, or opened by those who were already within it. The Saxon army poured through.

        He waited for half-an-hour, or it might be somewhat longer than that, listening to the noise of battle that roared in the city streets. He was half-minded to go forward, but he saw that the banner of the Five Towns still hung from the square stone keep of the castle within the town, unless the failing light had deceived him. And then he saw that it was descending from the tower of St. Olave's church. The church was much nearer than the castle, and he could see it more clearly. Now a torn rag fluttered in its place. He knew what that must be, though it was too dark for the reading either of sign or colour.

        "Mother of God!" he said, in a voice that trembled, as in a frightened awe, in its reversal of the disaster to which he had believed them fallen, "she has taken the town."

CHAPTER II

        GUTHRUM ERICSSON, King of East Anglia, sat at meat that afternoon in a small room in the castle of Derby, a stone-built stronghold on the west bank of the Derwent, and at the north end of the town.

        He had three companions, as tired and hungry as himself, to share the meal - Jarl Biorn, governor of town and castle; Sithric, King of Northumbria; and Sithric's friend, the viking, Bear Thorkeld.

        Guthrum was a burly, slow-speaking man with small shrewd eyes, good-humoured enough unless cruelty could produce a jest, and the best man at a bargain of any Dane in the Danelaw.

        He was stirred with a natural anger, for the fighting which had been forced upon them was an outrage upon the experiences of a lifetime, and a transgression of all the laws of war. It was no satisfaction that the audacity had met with its natural disaster; it ought not to have occurred. He felt much as a trade-unionist of a thousand years later might feel had he been forced to work overtime without extra payment, or, at least - well, that remained to be talked over.

        He looked speculatively at Jarl Biorn. Had the Saxons come three days later, when he would have been on the march to Peterborough, he had a shrewd opinion that the Jarl would have lost the town. If that were admitted, the price of the assistance he had given could be placed at half the spoils it held. He had been too shrewd to move till he was asked. But he knew that the Jarl would not admit anything of the kind. There was substance here for an argument that might last half the night. Well, there was no hurry. He would get the best price he could and without quarrelling. He looked at Biorn's scowling face and he knew that it would be easy to quarrel.

        But he was not a fool. He took the chance of the sword when occasion called, as a merchant takes the chance of an ocean freight, but he did not seek it. He would not have been King of East Anglia had he not been a good man of his hands; he would not have been alive at forty-nine had he not economised in conflict.

        Jarl Biorn had good cause to be sulky. He was normally of a morose temperament, one who expected the buffets of fortune before he felt them, but this was ill-luck beyond reason. He had summoned the King's help when the second assault had fought its way to the marketplace, and he knew well enough that the tide would have risen to the castle-gate - even had he stopped it there! - had not King Guthrum, who had been camping on the other side of the river, his huts erected on the site of the ruins of the Old Roman town, come at good speed to his rescue. He knew that nine hundred men are not thrown into any fight without a bill to be paid when the time comes for the reckoning - do not wade armpit-deep in ice-cold Derwent water to save the half-hour which it would have taken to go round by the narrow bridge, and forget to ask for something more substantial than gratitude.

        Besides, the losses had been heavy, and there is a price on the lives of men. It would be much less than nine hundred that Guthrum would lead out tomorrow on the Icenian Way.

        The Jarl had another reason for sulkiness. The left hand of his serf, Axe-flinger, had been cut off at the wrist, and he could never bet again on the skill which had often won him more than he had got as his spoil-share of a Mercian raid. Much may be gained by a boastful-seeming wager, when the night is late, and the horns are empty. . . .

        With the free manners of a man who is in his own castle, he reached down for a handful of the loose clean straw that rose halfway up the legs of his stool, to wipe a hairy mouth, from which the mead had dribbled. He muttered something about the she-devil frying in her Christian hell.

        Bear Thorkeld took up the word. He had no personal interest in the financial questions which were in the minds of king and jarl. He was here with Sithric by a wandering chance, with their servants only, and any help he had given could be paid by a gift of cloak or chain - or left unpaid as the jarl would. Danes of good birth did not send in bills under such circumstances. Besides, he had his assertion of timidity to maintain. He would be little likely to claim that he had rendered help in the fighting.

        He said: "Why don't you end it, once for all? Gwent would help, after what she gave them last winter. How long will the Gaidhil keep her peace, when they hear what's happened today? Sithric here would bring Northumbria in. He wants the girl. We could get up a few coast-raids that would keep Edward too busy to help her. You've got your chance after today. You might win all Mercia to the Thames valley, and the Malvern hills, and let Hereford go to Gwent."

        Guthrum nodded speculatively. They were his own thoughts, but more clearly detailed than he had yet formed them. And Thorkeld's judgement was good.

        Biorn heard the idea without enthusiasm. It was a matter that had often been discussed among the jarls of the Five Towns, when opportunities of realising it had not seemed so near. But they had seen disadvantages.

        "Garth and wild," he growled, as though in sufficient comment.

        Guthrum was more explicit. "You can't raid in the Danelaw. Mercia breeds, and we salt. Mercia sows, and we reap. It works well enough for us, as it is . . or it would, but for Ethelwulf's spawn."

        That was the trouble. Ethelwulf had been King of Wessex, and his sons after him, one after another, to Alfred, the youngest, and now Alfred's son, Edward, and they had all been alive in their determination to render Wessex unhealthy for the plundering Dane.

        But Mercia had been an easy raiding-ground, weak and near and fertile, its king, Burhred, chased overseas, his place taken by their puppet Kelwulf, till Alfred had married his eldest daughter, Ethelfleda, to Ethelred, the Mercian earl, and she had introduced the family habits to her husband's rule. And since Ethelred's death they had learnt that widow may be worse than wife.

        . . . That was till today's disaster, which should be the end of that irritation.

        Guthrum commented judiciously. He agreed that Mercia could be conquered when the next fighting season should arrive. He thought the necessary alliances could be made. In his heart, he was willing enough. He saw himself as the king of the wider lands. Mercia down, Wessex might follow. That meant fighting. Hard fighting. He did not welcome that. And he saw the advantages of "garth and wild" as well as Biorn - the Danelaw for the peaceful garth, and Mercia for the wild where they could hunt at their leisure. But the hunting had not been very satisfactory during recent years. No one minded a salt of danger in any sport, or business. But no man would care to hunt under such conditions that he would be likely to be carried home on a shutter about

twice a week, and a raiding-ground that meant a pitched battle twice a year was about equally objectionable. The Danes had no wish to get killed themselves, nor any great wish to kill Saxons, who might be occupied so much better in growing corn, some at least of which they would be able to keep for their own feeding. That was not only better for them. It was better for both.

        But "Ethelwulf's spawn" had never looked at the question in that reasonable spirit.

        Here was an instance today. Everyone knew that you couldn't campaign in the winter months. It wasn't done.

        When December opened you sat at home, and changed tales, and thanked the gods for a land in which logs were plentiful.

        Well, she had got her wages this time, and honest Danes might live more peacefully in the time to come.

        Bear Thorkeld began to count on the force that might be called in for the coast-raiding. Besides his own three ships in the Tyne, he knew where several of the more influential vikings had laid up for the winter. And they had four months - or more - to make plans, and to gather crews.

        He was one who could never resist planning a fight, though he claimed that he always kept out of it if he could; and there had been one or two events in his life which might seem to support this view, though there were few who believed it.

        Guthrum looked at him speculatively. What had he to gain? He had said that Sithric wanted "the girl." That was Elfwin, of course. Common talk, that. Just the sort of thing to bring a young fool like Sithric into the plan. (Yet was he a fool? Elfwin was heiress to Mercia. There was danger there, unless the bargain were clear. He must give more thought to that.) But Bear Thorkeld had no sure lure, and had always avoided Wessex. He would raid in Spain, and on the southern Mediterranean seaboard, and even down the west coast of Africa, facing the unknown seas.

        But he had a high repute, and few quarrels. That was important, for the feuds among the vikings were a perpetual obstacle to united action. If he could get together a really formidable fleet. . . The plan was gaining shape in Guthrum's mind. He looked at Thorkeld, and his small eyes twinkled humorously.

        We all know what Sithric wants; but Bear Thorkeld isn't seeking a Saxon wife. He's got too many in Norway now. . . Besides, they say the Saxon women have different eyes from ours, and -" He left the sentence unfinished, and Thorkeld, who understood it quite well, received its various implications without resentment. He turned his scarred face, with its one good eye, upon the smiling king, but he did not offer the explanation for which he sought.

        You'd find it a good plan," he said carelessly. "But you know your business best."

        Bear Thorkeld was the son of Hubba, the viking whose piracies had been the dread of the coasts of south-western Europe half-a-century earlier, and who had died with some hundreds of his companions when the starving garrison of Kynwith castle, on the Taw, which they were besieging, sallied out with the desperation of cornered men, and inflicted upon their tormentors a defeat from which there were few who escaped alive to the long-ships at Appledore.

        Thorkeld was the son of Swertha, of Stromness, a sister of Jarl Anwind, a landowner in her own right, and a woman of some importance in Orkney. He was five years old when his father sailed on his last piracy. All his youth he lived at Stromness, where a hundred long-ships, coming in from all the world, would lie up for the winter, and a hundred others, sailing south from Norway when the spring came, would call for change of news, or rendezvous, or recruiting, or for stores or water, before they sailed to take toll of the richer lands to southward. There he watched and listened and dreamed, and when he was twelve years old his half-brother, Halca, took him on a cruise that ended in the night-assault and plunder of a castle thirty miles up the Seine and ten miles inland. After that, he went on many such expeditions, plundering the rich Christian lands, as it was natural that the Northmen should, and on his nineteenth birthday his mother gave him a long-ship for his own command, complete with crew and stores for a six months' voyage.

        It was a good ship, though not new, being the best she could afford to buy, for she was not rich, and the crew had not been over-easy to get together, and included too large a proportion of slaves and of untrained men, for it was a year when there was a great call for volunteers for a fleet which was to raid the Mediterranean coasts, and most men chose to sail under leaders of established fame, and where hopes of spoil were the highest.

        Thorkeld was young, and had the reputation of a dreamer only. "Wave-watcher" men called him then. The name was just enough. He had a dream which he had told to none, and he would say nothing as to where he meant to sail, until his ship was clear of the narrow strait, with Hoy Head and a south-east wind behind, and then he had put the helm round and sailed due north with the wind on his starboard quarter. For it was his thought to seek a land which he had dreamed to find beyond the ice-fields, where the summer sun would shine and never set.

        He had trouble from the first day. Trouble with a wind that shifted to north-north-east, so that he could make little , progress, or none, as though the skies themselves would warn him of the folly of the course he chose, while all his kinsmen were sailing southward to take tribute from their natural enemies: trouble with the crew, whose sullen mutterings were to break out a week later into open mutiny.

        He met the hostility of the wind with a stubborn seamanship, tacking and wearing if any progress could be made-against it, and ordering out the oars when he found that he was being carried south by a force against which his single sail could make no headway.

        He met the crew with the same obstinacy, arguing, threatening, promising; finally, killing the spokesman of the mutineers in a duel fought with axes within a roped space on the quarter-deck, the ship lying-to while it was fought, and it being agreed that the result should determine whether the course should be north or south when it should resume its progress.

        Afterwards, it was a triumph of personality by which he had gained the support of a sufficient majority of the crew to his own belief and to somewhat of his own enthusiasm - and something they had found of what they sought. A wide and nightless plain of sun and flowers on which the snow was forgotten. But it had taken long to seek, and when they reached it they were aware, from the low large circle of the sun, of the near coming of the arctic night.

        They gathered what food the land could offer for their empty hold and turned their prow toward a distant home.

        Then light head-winds had hindered, and there had been hard labour at the oars in icy seas, while behind them followed the pursuing shadow of the frozen dark - followed and gained. The ice-pack closed around them and the darkness fell.

        It was three months later that Thorkeld the Wave-watcher had crawled out from an opened scuttle of a ship that was now no more than a snow-hump on a twilight plain of ice-hummocks to give battle to a bear that smelt and growled above the frozen hatches, and win food, if he might, for himself and the dying remnant of his crew.

        The fight had ended with Thorkeld underneath and the bear above, but the knife in his left hand had pierced its throat, even while its teeth were in his right shoulder, and he guarded his face as best he might with a damaged arm. There were eleven beside Thorkeld left alive when the ship came in sight of the green Iceland hills and cast anchor in Isa Fiord, and when Thorkeld went ashore men saw that his right arm was shrunken, and his right eye missing. The right side of his face was deeply scarred and discoloured and it moved curiously when he spoke or ate, and from that day he was called Bear Thorkeld, and the old name forgotten. . .

        But that was long ago; and he had sailed on many seas and seen many a strange chance since then. It was not every man who would take his service, for he was not one who would push first when the spoils were divided, or choose the richest lands for his raiding. But he gathered those round him of his own kind, and had made a name of which men talked for a thousand miles in the northland, when the doors were barred and tales were told in the winter.

        He was keener now on the taking of spoil than he had been in younger days, for, though he had never married, it was something more than jest when Guthrum said that he had many wives in Norway.

        Marriage customs in the Scandinavian lands were different from those which prevailed within the pale of Christianity. There were many differences, not all to the advantage or the honour of either. There was one ancient custom of the north by which a woman, even of noble birth, and a landholder in her own right, might have children of different fathers without loss of reputation, or rather with added honour, according to the quality of those who acknowledged the fatherhood.

        There were such women, of good repute, in Scandinavia, in Iceland, in Orkney, and in the wild north lands of Scotland, who had been glad that a viking of so great a name should have their friendship and the hospitality of their halls when he had laid his long-ships up for the winter, so that they might have the hope of a son to boast of so renowned a father, and who might prove worthy of the name he bore. . . Thorkeld had no private object in the plan which he had suggested as it rose in his own mind, and he could not therefore have stated it even had he been one who would give an easy confidence to such men as Guthrum. He had, in fact, a plan of a different kind of audacity which he expected to occupy him for the next two or three years, and from which it was likely enough that he would not return.

        But he could not hold his mind back from the chessboard aspects of the life around him. He lived neither for wealth nor power, but for the event, the experience. He was still the Wave-watcher, though another name, born of another element of his nature, had overlaid it. War, which was a business to the men with whom he talked, was an art to him whether on land or sea - so that this last exploit of Ethelfleda, which to them had been a maddening irritation, a breach of the accepted rules by which they counted to enjoy their summer plunderings in the security of a winter peace, was to him an experiment fascinating in its audacity, and one which (he saw) had not failed through the unorthodoxy of its conception, but from causes which would have operated equally or more adversely to herself had she made her attack during the accepted season.

        He turned to his companion, the young King of Northumbria, who had listened in silence to the wisdom of the older men. Sithric was of a muscular slimness, light of hair and skin, handsome in the northern style, pleasant and courteous of speech and manner, who had done his share during the day, as a guest should, in a fight which was not his, and showed less sign of his exertions, in the arrogant ease of youth, than did his older companions.

        Thorkeld said: "Here were strife to your choice? If the Picts were quiet, you could bring six thousand men in the spring, or perhaps more. You'd need a truce with Strathclyde. They might join, for the Reged plain."

        Guthrum's small eyes were watchful for the young king's answer.

        "It sounds not ill," he said when he saw that they were all waiting for him to speak. Thorkeld guessed that he would have preferred to remain in silence, and wished his question had been left unasked. But Sithric spoke now with an easy fankness:

        "It would depend on the Picts keeping quiet. We're not like you" - he addressed himself more personally to Guthrum as he continued - "we've got Picts on the north, and Strathclyde on the west, and Mercia down here, and you've got no one you need think of except these Saxons that you raid all summer. . . It may be we could do it after today, if we should all join, but it isn't easy to weigh. Edward wouldn't let Mercia go down without aid, and you know what Wessex is. If you'd spent two years in Gloucester, as I did . . ." He left the sentence unfinished and added: "I should want Elfwin - and Mercia. That leaves enough; there's all Wessex - and Kent."

        Guthrum nodded slowly. "Yes," he said. "If we won it all. . ." He fell silent. Here was a young man who knew his own mind, and could state it clearly. He judged that he was of a straight-dealing kind, but one who would be tenacious for the right he claimed. This was well to be known, for Sithric was the one factor that he had to learn. No one knew him as yet. Up to six months before, he had been held in idleness, a Northumbrian hostage at Ethelfleda's court in Gloucester. When the last king of Northumbria had died, he had been nominated king in his absence by those who did not expect that he could gain his freedom, they being led by his kinsman Hathgar, who had meant to rule in his name. And when he escaped - it was said with the aid of Elfwin, Ethelfleda's daughter, the heiress of Mercia - he had entered York by one of those strange coincidences of life which are so bafflingly frequent, on the day on which Hathgar had died in a private brawl, so that there had been none to meet him with treachery or a false and jealous friendship, and he had picked up the reins for which no other was reaching as they fell from a dead hand.

        But, beyond that, he was a young man, handsome, cheerful, and courteous, but of untested quality. He was like a sword well-polished in the armourer's booth, good to look at and to admire, but one for which a man would not lightly change a weapon, however dulled and chipped, which had stood the test of the battle.

        Guthrum, thinking shrewdly, judged him to be of good temper, but not over-pliant: hard to bend, and quick to spring back as the pressure slackened. Brittle? It remained to prove. . . He could count something on his youth. He supposed that war, which was a business to himself or Biorn - serious and dangerous business to be undertaken only after cautious reckoning for a sufficient end - and which was an art to Thorkeld to be admired and studied, an end in itself - was a sport to Sithric - a sport which he would not lightly miss. . . But what was he doing here in the winter, wandering with Thorkeld among the Five Towns? Thorkeld went where he would. He was out-of-work in the winter. But Sithric's place was in York.

        Well, it was a thing that only Sithric or Thorkeld could tell him, and neither of them (he judged) would be likely to do so unless he had a sufficient object. It might be best not to ask. Much may be learnt by those who watch and keep silent, and no one knows that they learn it.

        So they thought and talked while the short day shadowed without, so that torches must be lit in the narrow-windowed chamber; and Guthrum, leaning back at ease from his stool against the wall behind him, must loosen his belt as he called for his drinking-horn to be filled again - and then all these far-thinking plans, and cunning doubtful thoughts were gone the way of their own foolishness - were gone forever as a cry of Haro! Haro! rose in the street below, and a thrall burst into the little chamber, deference lost in fear, to blurt out that the Saxons had come again - that they were swarming into the town.

        Cursing, half incredulous, and half in fury, Biorn leapt to his feet with a lightness that defied tired muscles and a heavy meal. He ran out and down the stair not stopping to arm, except that he had caught up his sheathed sword and was pulling it out as he ran.

        Guthrum rose almost as lightly. He stood for a dozen seconds, his face blank of expression, his ears alert for the sounds without. Then he ran out also, taking no weapons at all, linking his belt as he did so.

        Bear Thorkeld's face twitched into an attempted laugh as he watched him. "He's off," he said, and then, as Sithric looked his incredulity: "He sent his men back over the river an hour ago. You'll find he'll join them there, and lead them back here if he sees that Biorn's winning, and, if he thinks he isn't, he'll clear out while he can. He won't risk East Anglia to save Biorn - or the Five Towns."

        "Is he thus?" Sithric answered. "Then is it learnt in good time. He makes no traffic with me."

        Thorkeld's face twitched again as he said: "We may leave thought of that now. Don't you see? They sat winning the next game while they were losing this. We won that we shall never play."

        Sithric paused in doubt. "Yet must we now do that we can." He had armed himself as they talked, without haste or delay. He looked older, less slimly built in his padded hauberk, coated with little overlapping plates of shining steel. He picked up his sword-belt, saying again: "We must do that we can; but I would I had a few hundred of my own axe-men here - your ships' pikes would be useful too."

        Thorkeld answered bluntly: "I wouldn't lose one in this brawl, for the spoil of the Five Towns. . . As to help, it's a choice to take. . . It may be too late to get clear."

        The viking led the way with no more words to a higher floor of the castle, from which a narrow window gave them some view of the darkening street, for the castle of that time was built on a space within the town from which the houses had been cleared, but so that the narrow crooked streets crowded against its walls and made it less strong for defence than had they been demolished more ruthlessly.

        At their first downward glance, it might have seemed that the issue was already decided, for there came a scatter of Danish soldiers running, dodging, and slipping into the cover of the narrow alleys, with a rush of Mercians behind them, battle-drunk and exultant, but the next minute, down from the higher street of which their window gave no view, Biorn himself came into sight, running at the head of his guard, his sword out, his great voice bellowing above the hundred noises of the fight, and the two forces met in a combat in which they swayed and struggled, too closely crowded for the free use of axe or sword, so that the cooler among them let the heavier weapons fall, and found their daggers were more effectual to gain the breathing-space that they needed.

        Thorkeld turned away after a moment's glance.

        "We should see if the gate be closed," he said, and they went down together.

        They came on the steward, a maimed man, limping slowly from some mischance of hunt or battle, and very glad to see them.

        He said that he had not thought that there was an armed man left in the castle, besides the wardroom guard.

        Yes, he had seen that the gates were closed, and that men stood ready to open promptly to a friendly call.

        He seemed intelligent, though pessimistic. Thorkeld asked him: "Could the castle stand, if the town fell?"

        He looked doubtful. Perhaps, for a few days. But for the moment there was no garrison; and, if there were a garrison, there was no food. That would be the real trouble. There was food enough in the town, and over the river. But it had not been brought into the castle. There had been no thought of such an attack, and town and castle had been regarded as one for such purposes. Now there was not even a floating ox in the brine-tank.

        There seemed nothing to be done but to keep the gates open to friend, and closed to foe, and to wait the event.

        The two men walked back to the room from which they came, and the viking put the case, as he saw it, to his companion.

        "We can go out if we like, and try to get clear of the town before we see how the dice fall. If the Saxons catch us at that, it looks worse than if we stay here; and while we're trying it we're about equally likely to get knocked on the head by either side.

        "If we stay here, and Biorn drives the Saxons out, we stand sure. If he get the worse, he should fall back here, and hold out if he may till he get help.

        "If the castle fall, there'll be an end till the spring, but if it stand there'll be succour tried either from Leicester or Nottingham. Probably Guthrum'd join them for that, and we might be free in a week.

        "For my part, I should stay, having feud with none, and Ethelfleda is one that I would to meet. If she thought she'd hang me for a heathen Dane (which I am not - but the difference might not seem important to her), I might tell her that which would change her mind.

        "But you stand not as I. You may get that which you came to seek. But it may be by a dangered way, and, if you would to come clear, it is chance to be quickly tried.

        "You must think how you stand as a hostage fled. She might hang you for that, and there is none that would call her wrong."

        "I shan't move if you are minded to stay," the young Dane answered. "I may get that for which I came, and by a short road. . . No, she would never that."

        He spoke confidently of one from whom he had had much kindness, and whose daughter he had learned to love - but he wished that he were quite sure.

        That was ever the dole with those who had dealings with the house of Ethelwulf. They had their long prayers in their cold-stoned churches, and then - you could never be quite sure.

CHAPTER III

        FOUR hours later, Sithric and Thorkeld sat again in the little room to share another meal with others than those who had eaten with them in the afternoon, but whether as prisoners, or hosts, or guests, it was not easy to tell.

        Biorn was there also, but he lay now against the wall, his heavy difficult breathing loud in the silence of the room showing that he was not dead, and a hole in the side of his head into which one might have put a baby's fist showing that it could not be long before he would be so.

        The Danes, knowing little of surgery but much of wounds, would have cut his throat at once, but that was not the Christian way, and now there was a Mercian guard at the gate (for when it was known that Biorn was down the castle had surrendered with little ceremony), and there was no one with both the will and authority to give that merciful order.

        So the Jarl of Derby, breathing loudly, lay on his back in the bloody straw.

        Anselm of Worcester, Ethelfleda's chaplain, lifting a thin white, blue-veined hand, signed courteously to those who had risen as he entered to resume their seats, and took his own beside Egbert, an Etheling of Wroxeter who had been there already.

        Anselm was very old. He had been a militant priest of the Church in younger days: had fought under King Burhred, before that monarch fled to Rome, wearied of a life of war, to make his peace with Heaven before he died. Anselm had two sons in Ethelfleda's army, for he was of the tradition of the Bernician priesthood, which did not forbid marriage, but excommunicated any priest who should divorce his wife. Now he was very frail and feeble, with a staff to support his steps, but his sunken eyes had lost nothing of the steel-blue keenness which had never quailed either for prince or prelate. They were eyes that could be cold and very merciless, eyes that had looked on many sad and some dreadful things, but which showed nothing of his thoughts as he gave one penetrating glance at the viking's distorted features and one of recognition to Sithric whom he already knew.

        "Sirs," he said, "if you will swear a binding oath that they shall not be used in any hostile way, it is the will of the Lady of Mercia that you keep your swords."

        "It is like herself," Thorkeld answered. "May we hope to meet her tonight?"

        "She comes later," Anselm answered. "Now she gives thanks to God in St. Olave's church. I would have been there also, but the scourge of years is upon me. She may be long, and it is her will that we shall eat without waiting."

        That was Ethelfleda's way, as it had been the way of all the house of Egbert and Ethelwulf for a hundred years. She was weary from a long and anxious day, to which her strength was no longer equal; she had been many hours without food; she had given such hurried orders as were

most urgent, leaving a score of dispositions for the settling of a later hour; and she knelt alone to pray in St. Olave's church.

        It is told of her father Alfred, when he was young in war and his brother Ethelred was king, that they had gathered the men of Wessex for a great battle against the Danes, and that it had been agreed between them that Alfred should attack on one side and Ethelred on the other, and Alfred had led his men forward at the appointed time, and his brother had not moved, so that the whole force of the Danes had charged down upon his slender lines, and he had faced them as best he might while there had come no movement from his brother's camp, for the priest had been slow, and Ethelred would allow no curtailment of the mass which he had ordered to be celebrated in his tent before the battle.

        After that, he had moved in no hesitant manner, and in the end they had scattered the Danish army, with the loss of most of their leaders.

        Asser tells this tale - Asser who was Alfred's friend, and who must have heard it from him, and from others who were there, and who had seen men die to hold the line which Ethelred had delayed to support; but he does not say that Alfred had resented his brother's failure.

        "The things of God cannot be put aside for the things of men," Ethelred had told him, and there was no answer to make.

        Now Ethelfleda, Alfred's daughter, knelt with hands and head on the low rail of the altar, glad of the support it gave, for she was physically ill with some internal evil before which her doctors were helpless - "a messenger from Satan to buffet her," so Anselm had called it - (had not her father suffered for nearly thirty years in the same way?) - and gave thanks for the victory.

        "Not unto me the glory, O Lord," she prayed, for she knew that heart and faith had faltered more than once as the day waned, "not unto me the glory. . ." She prayed long and passionately for the souls of the four thanes whom she had sent to their deaths - for the souls of all the men who had gone to death at her bidding. "Bring them into Thy peace, O Lord." She even prayed that the guilt might be upon herself if they had died in sin, for she saw that but for her they would have been alive by their own hearths tonight. But it was worth it! - would have been worth it, had it cost another thousand lives. Her mind turned aside from prayers to a new planning. She would attempt nothing more in the winter, but she would not wait again for the Danes to move when the frost ended - she would have Leicester in the spring!

        . . . Her mind wandered back to the audacity of a year ago, from which had come the thought which had ended here tonight. It was that summer that the King of Gwent had come down from his home in the Black Mountains, and raided the Avon valley while her own hands had been more than full with the Danes who were in northern Mercia with a force which she could only harass, for it was too great for her to meet it in a pitched battle with the men that were with her then.

        The King of Gwent had made alliance with the Danes, so that they might both find Mercia the easier prey; and he had turned homeward, heavy with spoil, to find that she had mustered every man she could call out, and was holding the Severn fords, by which way he must go homeward, if at all.

        He had cursed her when he saw it - cursed, and then laughed and turned back. He would winter with his friends in the Danelaw, and go home in the spring, when they could aid him to force a passage, if she were still there to dispute it.

        And in the spring he had come again, and found the fords unguarded, and marched home in triumph, still loaded with much of last year's booty. But when he came to Brecknock, at the far end of his mountain roads, he had found his castle burnt and his queen gone. For Ethelfleda had led a force of chosen men through torrent and snow drift in the winter hills, and had stormed a castle most of the garrison of which was with its king in the Danelaw. It cost him a heavy price to win back his wife and the other hostages she had taken - he would think twice before he came again to the Avon valley. There had been little fighting then, for the manhood of Gwent were away, but it had taught her how the hardship of winter campaigning may be endured and lightened, and it was from that experience that the thought had come that she would try it against one of the Five Towns - a shorter and an easier road, though with a harder fight at the finish.

        . . . And then there was that afternoon, three months before, when she had sat on that same black pony that she had ridden today, and looked down from the heather and bilberry covered ridge of the Lickey Hills upon the retiring army of the Danes, marching, close-ordered, home along the Roman Salt-way, with the plunder of half a county which they had swept up, even to the very walls of Worcester. . . With the resinous scent of pines from the hillside woods, the wind had brought the sound of the creaking of the loaded corn-wains, the lowing of cattle, the bleating of hurried sheep, the grunt and scuffle of the carted swine.

        Elgurth had been beside her then, urging, pleading for leave to attack with the six hundred men that lay hidden in the Red Ditch and among the wooded swamps below Alvechurch. But she would not have it. She would not let herself be moved, even by the sight of the wrist-bound Saxon women, seized at the caprice of the Danes, and destined for the bearing of heathen babes who might perish unchristened.

        She would not waste a Mercian life for an attack which was so likely to end in failure - and she had had the secret purpose even then, which she had not told even to Edward, whom she had met at Reading during the summer, and to whom she had given up the earldom that Ethelred had held, with Oxford, London, and the Berkshire wold, that he might be unhindered in his own campaign which had since developed in the Ouse valley so that he had recovered Bedford almost without a blow.

        What would he think, when he heard that she had taken Derby and all it held? It would mean much to him also. She knew Edward's mind, almost as her own. He would strike harder than ever now. It might even mean that he would strike for Northampton itself. . .

        Were they destined - he and she - to drive the heathen plunderers finally from the English land? Even to dream it was a joy almost intolerable. And then - if they could bring unity to the divided Saxon kingdoms and earldoms whose quarrels had first made it possible for the raiding Northmen to win a footing on the Anglian coast? Athelstan and Elfwin - Edward's son and her daughter - if they were wed, as they must be, Wessex and Mercia would be one, and the old feuds be forgotten. . . And the thought of Elfwin brought the memory of her wild fancy for the Danish prince - a heathen with whom no Christian would wed; an untaught barbarian who could not read a line in a Latin book; an enemy of all her race.

Mercia, in the hands of a Northumbrian Dane - Wessex itself might fall, and the age-long battle for Christianity and civilisation would be lost at last - and lost for a girl's whim. It was a thought beyond tolerance.

        . . . And she had heard an hour before that Sithric was in her hands - in the captured castle. And he was a hostage whose life had been forfeit to her by the laws of war.

        . . . She had once said to Edward that she could never condemn a hostage to death under any circumstance. It was a thing which could not be made right by any arguing.

        As an abstract question there could be only one answer, but as a practical issue it was insoluble, like the question of slavery. It was cruel and wrong that Christian men and women should be sold on Bristol quay or in the market at Worcester (it might be right enough for heathens, Pict or Dane, or other aliens) - but what else was possible to be done with an outlawed man? You couldn't force people to take him back to their folk bond; and so, if he were not a slave, any man might kill him that would, and there would be no fine to pay: he had no protection at all.

        . . . She had said that she would put no hostage to the sword, and Edward had answered: "Well, who does? - but you'd better not say that you never will, or you'll find you'll have to, to save your friends." And, being wise, she had considered this, and seen its truth, and kept her mouth closed on that subject in future.

        For the custom was, when any treaty was made, or a bargain between nation or tribe, that they would give hostages to each other as pledges of good faith and fulfilment, and these hostages would be of the tribe's best, or the king's nearest - son, it might be, or sister - and their lives were forfeit by traditional law should there be breach of peace or bargain while the treaty held. It might be thought that there would be reluctance to be made a living stake in this way, and especially so as it was a rare treaty indeed which was not ignored or broken within three months of its signature. But, in fact, there were many more volunteers than were required for this purpose, for it was a way by which strange lands could be visited without expense, and with the assurance of good entertainment at the courts of their enemies. It was true that, when the terms of the treaties were broken, the hostages became liable to unpleasant consequences, but, in fact, the worst that was likely to happen was some severity of detention, for there were almost always hostages on the other side whose fate must be thought of. And besides, if things go badly, a live hostage - and particularly one whose life is forfeit by the rules of war - is a pawn to play, while a dead one is of no use at all, and an awkward memory should the time come, as it may, when you will be asking for peace or mercy.

        Of course there were exceptions. There have been accidents of travel at all times, which do not prevent men from wandering.

        Even a thousand years earlier, in the time of Caesar, it may be read that he could have hostages very easily for the asking, and a chief who had handed over his children as the stake of faith would attack his camp in a fortnight as though the incident were forgotten.

        But if it should be known that Ethelfleda had a conscientious objection to taking the life of a hostage on the trivial ground of his being the most obviously innocent of her enemies, she saw that it would not conduce to the safety of those that she might give to others, and there were Mercian hostages even overseas in Armorica and in Ireland.

        . . . Yet it remained a fact that the life of Sithric was doubly forfeit. Forfeit by Bernicia's breach of faith and by his own flight - the escape which Elfwin had aided, if she had not prompted. Should she put him to death there would be none to condemn her - and it might be a duty to her God and to the land she loved. Her thoughts came backward to prayer. Nonne qui oderunt, te, Domine, oderam. . . She must see these men and learn what had brought them here. Physical fatigue was forgotten in the many things of the mind as she joined her waiting guard at the church porch and made her way to the castle.

CHAPTER IV

        IT was said of the Lady of Mercia that she kept more state at Tamworth or Gloucester and more distance from those she governed than had been the Saxon custom either of king or earlderman, but Ethelfleda in the camp was a woman of a different temper.

        She sat with little ceremony to the meal which her attendants had prepared in the little room we have seen - the great banquet-hall would have been bare and cold, for the fire had fallen, the thrall who should have tended it lying colder still in the mid-gutter of a Derby lane.

        She greeted Sithric with a distant formality, from which he had little cause for satisfaction, and Bear Thorkeld with warmer courtesy, looking at him with the interest which we feel towards those of whom we have heard much talk before but she did not forget that he was an alien, if not an active foe, and that she had found him in the hold of her enemies.

        She turned aside Anselm's anxiety as to her health an rest with a quick impatience. "I cannot rest as yet. There still much to be ordered."

        Seating herself, she looked at Sithric, still standing in deference, with a straight glance which was yet as that of stranger. "You need not stay now. I suppose you know your chamber, as you know what you do here. There is an order that you do not pass the gate. We will talk in the morning."

        She looked at Biorn, and there was less regard (if it might be) than she would have paid to a dying hog.

        "Let him be," she said. "They can have him, if they a tomorrow, to burn in their own way."

        She turned to Thorkeld. She thought him uglier than report had told.

        "I would know," she said, "if you drew sword against today."

        "In the earlier day," he said, "I gave aid as a guest should."

        "And why not later?"

        "There was disorder and I was not asked - and I saw what the end must be - and it was a quarrel which was not mine."

        "Yet you are of those who have made hell in England for a hundred years. You are a viking known. Is there reason why I should not hang you, as my right is?"

        "I could show you reason," said Thorkeld. "But the hour is late."

        "Could you show reason as good as mine? The reason of a single raid from coast or river - rape and slaughter, plunder and fire?" she answered, and her voice had the cold fierceness that such thoughts must bring.

        "When?" said Thorkeld.

        As to that she was not sure. She was suddenly aware of a great weariness.

        She said, "You are all one. But we will talk in the morning."

CHAPTER V.

        "HAD I failed last night," Ethelfleda told him, as one who states a clear fact dispassionately, "you would have been of those who would have joined in next year's spoiling."

        "It is like enough," said the viking. It may be a word too much to say that he would not have lied had his life been staked on his denial, but he thought himself in little peril, and it is a fact that he had lived for fifty years more or less - he took little care in the counting - and he had not found a need so great that a lie must meet it.

        They stood alone on the castle wall, for he had said that he had that which he would show to her only, and Ethelfleda, who feared no man, had led the way to this high solitude.

        "It is like enough," he said, recalling the plan which he had proposed last evening, and which seemed so foolish today, "but I have no such purpose now, if I ever thought it. I have different plans, which should bring peace rather than warfare."

        "Peace!" she said bitterly. "What peace has been in a hundred years since Northmen landed at Weymouth? Our cattle taken, our churches burnt, our women raped, our children tossed on your pikes! Do you wonder if our hearts are empty of mercy?"

        Thorkeld answered coolly: "It is the world's way with the weak, and it is for those who made it to answer. But it is foolish to burn good wood, be it roof or keel. As for the women, they should be content for the stronger to take them. . . It is not every Northman who will toss a babe on the sword-point. There are those of us who count it an evil deed, and you know the name that they call us. But it is a thing that will chance at times when men are drunk with plunder and song, and with wine and the swordplay. . . You have a rich land, and you have more food than you have mouths to eat it. Our fields are small, and our crops are scanty. Our women bear strong sons, and they will take their need. I think that you are faced by a tide that you will no turn. . . There is another thing that may break you. Since Harfager ruled it, Norway is all one land; and Gorm is making Denmark alike; but you are at open feud, Saxon ant Briton, earldom and earldom, shire and shire, which scarcely stills when we raid you. Should we leave you quiet, would there be peace in England for half a year? There would be only peace in the Danelaw. . . What we need is an empty land which I once thought to find in the Arctic seas, but the winter is a night too long, and its cold too dreadful. Yet we may seek further, to better end, and it is that which is in my mind to try."

        He went on to tell of settlements on the Greenland coast of vague tales of a further land, of the crews he had gatherer of a courage like his own, of ships he had bought or built which he thought fit for the perils of distant seas.

        They stood fur-cloaked on the battlements, for the day was cold though windless, and he drew parchment charts from an oilskin case that he had brought and spread them on the stone parapet against which they leaned. They were rough charts, scrawled and erased and queried, and they ended blankly before the Atlantic wastes that no man had yet ventured to sail - or, if so, he had not returned, and there was none to tell it. Listening, she forgot that it was a barbarian with whom she spoke, one of her hated and heathen foes, while she weighed the venture with that combination of imaginative genius and cool judgement that belonged to the family from which she came.

        "Have you ships that would live?" she asked doubtfully.

        The long-ship of that time, in which the viking sailed from his native fiords for the raiding of Europe, was not built for a long voyage, nor for rough weather, nor yet for warfare.

        It was built narrow, for speed; and shallow and flat-bottomed for the ascent of rivers. It liked to follow the coast, and to lie up if the wind were threatening. When the spring came, and the sea was quiet and the wind favourable, it would venture the crossing of the northern sea, depending on its oars for a quick voyage should the wind cease or veer. Mostly they were boats of sixteen oars a side, of a length of eighty feet or a hundred, a breadth of fifteen or twenty, and a depth of about six. They had little space for cargo, and the crews would not endure the discomfort of sleeping in them if they could land on the beach and spread a sail for their shelter.

        Thorkeld had built three ship's of a greater depth and of two feet extra width and thought them fit for any storm which would be likely on a summer sea, and with these he was of a mind to explore beyond the Greenland coast, if there were any land to the westward.

        "Queen, if you should hold me here," he remarked reasonably - he did not suggest any more acute unpleasantness - "my men will be enlisted by others, and they may be used against you, which it is not my purpose to do."

        "I have heard," she answered, "and Anselm has recalled it to me this morning, that you have not been of our frequent foes. It is said that you withdrew from the great Thames fleet of ten years back - that which was trapped at last in the Lea."

        "I would not join it, being afraid," Thorkeld answered simply. "I liked not its leaders, nor the plans they made. Nor are our long-ships equal to the fighting ships of your father's building."

        She changed the subject sharply. "What doth Sithric here ?"

        "He is my friend," Thorkeld answered, and said no more. She might take it as explaining Sithric's coming or his own silence, as she would.

        "He is no friend to me or to mine," she said, and turned her eyes on to the viking with that rare intimacy of approach which could bring all men, or almost all, to her bidding.

        "You call him friend. You see far. You look around and ahead. If he leave York, where there are ever those who will plot, and come hereward when Yule is near, I know well why - as you know it. You will be his friend if you show him that what he seeks is vain.

        "I will speak plainly, for it is a time when such words are best. You have said that we Saxons strive among ourselves and that it is through that that you slay us. Do you think us so blind - we who have the burden of rule - that we do no see it?. . . You call me queen, but you know well that I am not. I am the Lady of Mercia. Edward is my overlord. That may be little to Edward, and it is nothing to me. We have been as one from our births. I am Wessex-born and the child of a Wessex king, but Mercia is my mother's land. I say it is nothing to me. But there was a time when Mercia ruled from sea to sea; and the Mercians do not forget."

        She paused for a moment, her mind overloaded with contending memories, and the viking answered.

        "What are words? It is your deeds that are known to the world's ends. You are the freedom of Mercia."

        "I am not for Mercia," she answered, "nor is Edward for Wessex. We are for England always. Mercia is a thin wedge of freedom driven northward amidst our foes. It is the edge of the Wessex axe. When Ethelred died, I had not a friend on all my borders except Wessex in the south. There were Danes in East Anglia; Danes in the Five Towns; Danes in Northumbria; Picts and Britons in Strathclyde; Irish Danes at the Dee-mouth; Britons in North Wales, and in Gwent

        . . . Edward said, 'Give me back the dukedom which our father gave at your marriage. Give me Oxford and London. Give me the right to move with freedom on the Berkshire downs, and to make what order I will, and I will so harry East Anglia that they will have little leisure to vex you.' That I gave, and what he said he did. Was it not well for all? Bedford is his, and I am in Derby today. Yet my own murmured against me. Not only the Ethelings - the old nobles - but my own thanes muttered and scowled. There was talk of calling a folk-moot. A folk-moot when I needed every man to hold the line of the Watling Street that could be spared from the harvest! A folk-moot when there were Danes on the Bridgnorth hill! And it might have been, had I not sworn aloud at Tamworth in the hall of my judgement, yes, by the Death of God, that I would hang the next man that spake, though he were the best I had."

        She paused again, but he did not think that she had finished, or that she expected an answer. The point was yet to come.

        For a moment the pain and weakness of the evil which was destroying her body overcame her mind.

        She said, "I would sit," and they moved to a wooden bench under the battlements.

        Then she spoke again in a quieter voice. "It was when my father came back from his last war that I learnt what my life must be. He had taken London. He had driven the Danes back into the Danelaw, and even there they were to yield to his bidding. He said: 'I have a hard thing to say, and we must talk alone,' and he took me into his own room, where he would let no man enter.... We had had a happy childhood at Winchester. There was always war in the distance, but it did not reach us; and we had many books which my father sought ever to save and gather. All those years I had not seen a man killed! . . . It was not till Edward was fifteen that my father let him go out with the armies that he might be skilled in the ways of war....

        "All those years Mercia had been in slavery to the Danes, since King Burhred fled to Rome. Now they had withdrawn as the price of peace in the south, and the King, my father, was overlord once again.

        "He said to me: 'There is one, Ethelred, of the royal Mercian house, your mother's cousin and yours, to whom I have given the earldom of Mercia. It is my will that you wed this man so that the old feud may be ended. I am near to death,' (he looked well as he said it, and the words had little meaning: I understand now), 'and Edward will be king here, and I will make it that you are equal to Ethelred in your own right, and you and Edward will be as one when you face our foes; and I think, at the last, you will free the land.'

        "I said: 'I cannot wed a man that I have not seen. I am happy here. How could I help Edwald? I am a girl, young and foolish, knowing nothing of state-craft or of war. Is it not enough that I order your household since my mother died? If you do not want me here I will go to my aunt at Shaftesbury, and Ethelgiva can take my place.'

        "My father thought long, and he said: 'You shall go to your aunt, if you will, even though you should take the veil. I would not hold you from God. Yet I think that this is God's will, and, in the end, you will do it.'

        "So I went to Ethelwerna, who was the abbess of Shaftesbury, and I stayed there for a time; and we talked long, and in the end I went back, for she had shown me that it was the right way.

        "I was wedded to Ethelred, of whom I have no evil to say, and my daughter Elfwin was born. My father died and Edward was king in Wessex. Then I said to him: 'Send me Athelstan, your eldest, and he shall grow with Elfwin, and in due time they will wed and the two lands will be one and the old feud forgotten.'

        "Edward said: 'That cannot be, for you will have sons, and they will claim the earldom, as is right.' But I said: 'I will have no sons. I will have no more children at all; for that is the way of peace.' And Edward said: 'Then it is good,' and he sent the boy, for his new queen was glad that the child should not be in her sight, and they grew together."

        Thorkeld said bluntly: "You must have thought you were God."

        "God?" she said wonderingly. For the word sounded strangely from viking lips.

        "I mean neither Odin nor Christ," he answered. "You must have thought that you could change the purpose of the Fates from which all things are."

        "There is none higher than God," she said. "You speak the folly of dreams. I think that I did right, for I took ever the harder way. And I sent letters by one who travelled to the Saxon School, and he brought back dispensation, even from the Bishop at Rome."

        And she fell silent again, having many memories of the old days, and some doubt as to how much more could be wisely said as she approached the point to which all this had been leading, so that it was Thorkeld who brought it to speech, saying:

        "And now it goeth not well? There is another who will not wed as she is ordered to do, and there is no aunt to guide her?"

        "It went well," she said. "It went well till this Sithric came." She remembered things which she would not speak, which it was not for such as Thorkeld to know, and she altered her word, having no will to lie. "It went not ill till he came."

        "Queen," he said, "what is all this to me?"

        "You call him friend. You are older than he, and you see more. I show the rock on which he will surely die, if there be no pilot's hand on the helm."

        "I see no cause of death," Thorkeld said, "though much folly.... I will be no pilot of unsounded seas. You must give me chartage. Is thy daughter as one of the line of Ethelwulf? . . . I mean no evil . . . But there is always talk."

        "There is one thing that no talk will change. She is the heiress of Mercia. She is of the royal house and she is last and only. She cannot wed with a Dane."

        Thorkeld saw that there were things that Ethelfleda would not discuss, though she would not deny them.

        There were strange things said of the heiress of Mercia; and, though Sithric might talk in a different way, his words often confirmed them.

        It was said that she showed no likeness to the line of Ethelwulf nor to her father, the Mercian earl - that she was not Saxon, nor even British, but was as black and small as Pict. It was said that when she was two years old, a woman had been ducked three times because she had said that she was a changeling child. It being December, the water had been cold, and the woman died. People observing her end whispered the more, but there was no open speech....

        For three generations the house of Ethelwulf had been the sole rock which had withstood the Danish conquest of England. The tide had beaten upon it on every side: a times it had overwhelmed it so that it had seemed to be lost in the storm: but it was a rock that it could not drown Its sons had been of one mould, and its daughters also. Wise in counsel, skilful and stubborn in war, faithful to their God and church, lovers of freedom and order, each waging

lifelong fight for Christianity and civilisation in their corner of England, against a barbarism which had been advancing for two hundred years like a shadow of night across the face of Europe, they had made Wessex the one rock on which the edge of the Danish axes broke.

        Once, in the days of Alfred, when Dane and Northman had combined with all their strength to destroy this stubborn core of the England which they had almost won, it had seemed that the last night had fallen. For three winter months Alfred had lain in his last retreat amid the swamps of Athelney. But with the spring there had been a steady gathering of Wessex men behind the screen of the Selwood thickets, a swift and secret march, a day-long fight among the woods of Etheldune, a following of the routed Danes, a close siege of their camp, and their surrender to famine. But that was forty years ago, and it was only last night, though she could not know it, that the high tide had turned as Ethelfleda led the way across the frozen meadows.... There were hard battles yet to fight, long years of strife to be endured beyond Edward's life or hers, but, if Wessex and Mercia could be one, if the dream and purpose of her life could prevail, the end was sure. And of the young Athelstan there was no doubt. He showed already all the qualities for which his fathers had been honoured and loved and feared. And for the plan which would have wedded him to Elfwin next Easter, it had gone - till Sithric came - not ill.

        The two children had been brought up together, so far as Elfwin could be brought up with any, and though they quarrelled and differed, they had known their intended fates without any evident protest.

        In those days the bond between mother and child had been very close - even closer, it might seem, because they were so far apart in all else that they loved or valued.

        For Elfwin had been a strange child from her birth. A lover of deep woods and of waters which men fought and feared, rather than of the warm hearth and the coultered fields. A silent child, content with the solitude of her own dreams, but one who said things, when she talked, at which men wondered. She would look at life with her own eyes, and not with those of parent or priest as a child should. She would not learn even to read, pleading aching of head or eyes, and escaping at the first chance to the solitudes of the woods she loved. And in that she had her father's support, for he had little learning himself, though he could sign his name and could read some words in his own tongue, and in those days she was small and thin and very pale, though of a restless activity. He said: "You will be little pleasured when the child is dead, though she may have learnt to read in three tongues," and the word gained her some freedom, for her mother had been afraid.

        She wondered vainly how she had borne such a child though she fancied that it was partly explained by the hard ships of that year, when food had been very scarce, for the harvest had failed, and it was after the summer when the Danes had crossed Mercia with all their host, to winter a last within the deserted walls of Chester, and they had taken much cattle. She had not been one to eat while others lacked And when the spring came and the birth of her child was near, Ethelred had taken her to a safe place deep in the hear of the Arden woods, for there was no town, nor any village that summer, where a woman could be in peace, without fear that she would be called to a sudden flight when she might be the least able to face it. Indeed, in those days, there were few Mercian women so bold or careless that they would bear child beneath the roof of its father, unless within the protection of the stockaded mounds of the greater towns. Every village and settlement had its secret corral, in swamp forest, to which children and cattle could be hurried if alarm were given, and to these places would the women go when the time of childbirth neared. That is, for such as gave birth in the summer days; but, for the most part, they would plan these things for the winter, when roads were mired and fords were flooded, and there was peace in the land....

        It was when Elfwin was ten years old that there had been the question of the Maisemore wood.

        Now all men know that there is a natural enmity and a constant warfare between themselves and the forest.

        It is true that there are pannage woods of beech and oak which are for the feeding of swine, but, apart from that, a tree is of no use to any till it be felled, nor can you grow corn even then on the cleared land till you have grubbed up the roots with much labour of men, and straining of the pulling ox-teams.

        Acre by acre, as the children grow and there are more hands for the axe-hafts, men win their way along the river valleys, and widen their settlements, right and left, till there are broad fertile farms from which the forest has been driven back; but the fight is hard, and the forest watches ever, like a beast crouching to spring, and, if there be too much war, or a pestilence shall prevail, it will win back that which it lost, and men of a later time will stumble over fallen walls that t docks and nettles have hidden.

        So when men are not fighting among themselves, they take axe to the trees that the spade may follow. It is the warfare that has never ceased since the first men were: which may not cease till the earth's purpose is ended.

        Maisemore wood was on the narrow land between the west bank of the Severn and the Leadon river which flows into it under the walls of Gloucester.

        It was a very old wood of the ancient English trees, oak and yew and holly, thorn and ash; and in places there were elms and some birches. But it held none of the newer trees; beech and lime and plane moving up from the south had not forced footing in that close growth, nor had there been invasion of the northern pines, by which men knew that it was a very ancient wood. Older than the coming of men to the land. It had fox-gloved hollows and was floored with hyacinths, and there were thickets of briar-rose, and of woodbine among the haws.

        That year there was a pause of peace after the harvest, and Ethelred gathered men for the felling of the wood which was but five miles from Gloucester town but on the further side of the Severn, where men were loth to dwell, being in more jeopardy both from Dane and Briton. His wood-ward marked the trees by number in the order of felling, so that they should fall clear, one after one, but when the axe-men came to the first they could not strike for there was a child that cried, with thin white arms round the tree, that it should not be hurt. They feared to use violence, for she was the Earl's daughter: they offered gifts, but she would not take them.

        At the last they went and told the Earl, and he laughed and said: "If the child want the wood, let it stand." But Ethelfleda had been at hand, and she had said: "You are foolish ever. Let me deal in this."

        And the Earl answered: "You may deal if you will. But the wood stands."

        She said: "So it shall end if you will. But let me deal."

        And she sent for Elfwin, who came gladly enough, for at that time they loved well.

        She said: "Here I am, mother. Here is your Little Sin." (For so she called herself, which is another tale which we need not tell.)

        And Ethelfleda said: "What is this I hear of the wood?" And, being patient, she told the child of her folly, and showed that men are more than trees, and that such things must be.

        But the child said: "I think it would be a fairer world if there were more trees and fewer men. They do not move to do evil. They need neither spade nor prayer."

        And Ethelfleda said: "You can save the wood if you will, and it shall be yours of your father's gift. What will you barter for that?"

        And Elfwin said: "I will give much. I will learn Latin words, and I will be in my own bed at night, even in the summer nights when the woods are best; and my tongue shall stay in its place." (For when Athelstan, being a wiser child, would tell her follies, she would put out her tongue at him behind his back, a pink flicker, thin and quick like a snake's, which her mother blamed.)

        So this treaty was made, and if its terms were not kept, the gift was to be taken back, and the wood felled.

        By this, Ethelfleda gained much, where Ethelred would have given without terms, for Ethelfleda was one who ever strove for her own will; yet she saw not then that Elfwin had her will also, though she thought it later.

        But the years passed, and that she always slept in her bed when her mother was away in her many wars, or her buildings of burgh and wall, is a thing which is hard to say, for when, but a year ago, Ethelfleda had been planning for the taking of the castle of the King of Gwent, she had said: "I would that I had a sure guide of Saxon birth, for if we hire them of the hills they may betray us for the bond of blood, and the chapmen know not the way overland, for they go up from the coast."

        And Elfwin had looked as one who would speak, and paused, for her mother and she had not spoken to one another for many weeks, and at last she said: "It is not hard to find. I can show the way if you will."

        And Ethelfleda answered: "How can you know more than others?"

        Elfwin laughed, and said: "I go far in dreams."

        Her mother answered: "Can you never speak true words? For this is a great thing."

        Elfwin said: "Dream or truth, how should I know now? There have been summers since. But I can guide you through Gwent if you will. It is a country of hills and of quick streams, and the trees are many, but the men are evil and few."

        Ethelfleda said: "If you would leave your dreams, and tell me how you know this! - if you know it indeed, for it is a great matter."

        Elfwin sat at the board as they spoke, picking the bone of a rabbit's leg with teeth which were small but very sharp, and a dog stood on either side of her stool, watching that he might catch the bone with a swift snap, should she cast it on his side, before it fell in the litter.

        Elfwin was nineteen then, a woman no longer awkward or pale or thin, but with a slim body that was soft and firm and tireless. She wore a tunic of apple-green, with a waist-belt embroidered in silver thread, and between her breasts, which were round and firm, but too small for those of a Saxon woman, there hung an enamelled cross, with a holy relic blessed by St. Cuthbert himself, which her mother gave her at her confirmation three years before, but, above that, her tunic was closed at the throat with a silver brooch of an outlandish pattern, scrolled with some heathen rune, which Sithric had given, and concerning which she and her mother had quarrelled some months before.

        Elfwin answered nothing till she had finished the bone, and had cast it to the jaws of the dog on her left hand, whose turn it was; then she wiped the dagger, sharp and small, which could be used either as a weapon or at the meal, and put it back in the sheath at her belt as she said:

        "We both dream, mother, you and I; and they are dreams that we cannot leave. Only, the dreams in your mind become deeds. You dream today that you have fired the castle at Brecon, and tomorrow you will be there and the smoke will rise to the winter sky. Today's dream and tomorrow's deed, they are one to you; but with me it is the deed of yesterday that is the dream today. That is why I do naught of the things I dream - " And at that her voice had sunk and her eyes had changed as a man sees death, for the thought came that it was of Sithric that she dreamed, that she would have him in spite of all, and her words were her own doom. Yet that was but a moment, and she went on in another tone, pausing between her words to lick a soiled finger delicately with that small pink tongue which she had used in childhood to a worse end.

        "Yet, be it from deed or dream, I can show you the way you need, which is not from here" (they were in Gloucester at this time), "for there is dense forest, hard to pass, where there are men that dig sea-coal from beneath the trees, and there are valleys of Wye and Usk which are ill to traverse in winter, and could be held by few; but from Hereford is a better way.... I will guide there, and Offa, who is thy best at such warfare, can capture the castle; but I would mother, that you should not go, for these are days when you tire and it will be a hard way in the frozen hills."

        Ethelfleda knew then that she spoke truth, and said: "You shall be our guide, and we will go by Hereford, of which I had thought already; but I must go myself, for which I have strength enough." For she feared lest her men might return, saying that the way was flooded, or that there were drifts of snow, or that they had been lost in the hills, or that the castle was too strongly held, or that their food had failed, if she were not there to see that it came to a good end; and she would also to forbid evil when the castle was stormed.

        So Elfwin had ridden with her and had guided them as though she were in her own land, but how she came to know so much she would never say.

        . . . All this was in Ethelfleda's thought, and much more that there is no space to write, and of which she had no will to talk.

        And Thorkeld answered: "Had you failed last night, it might have been no ill thing that your daughter should be loved of a Danish king."

        But she spoke again at that, with the passion which had died from her later words.

        "It had been no ill thing? It had been worse than now. For now it is but a vain dream which my hands will break; but then had it been an overreaching fear. Can oil and water blend? Can - " She checked herself, as though feeling that to such a hearer there could be no use in such words. She ended: "I will see Sithric, and he shall swear by every oath he owns that he will seek her no more, or I will hang him as my right is. You are his friend if you tell him that what I say I shall very surely do."

        "As to that," Thorkeld answered, "he should know you better than I. But I will tell him that there is no woman for whom a man may pay with his life but he has priced her too dear. It is a thing that you and I know well, being old, but it is hard for the young to learn."

        Then he went, with no further words, for he judged that what he thought would be vain to say.

CHAPTER VI

        ETHELFLEDA said: "I will take it of you though it be but a Danish oath, for I think that if you swear it you will not lie."

        "Lady," Sithric answered, "it is for that reason it will not be sworn, for it is an oath that I could not keep."

        "Is life naught? I have no will for your death, yet your life is forfeit to me; and by your own folly and by the mercy of God you are in my hands, and I will not spare you unless you swear, for it is a thing that I dare not do."

        "Lady," Sithric answered again, and she was aware of thought of anger that he should so address her, which had not been his use - he who was himself a king, a Danish king of a conquered part of her own land - but it was her true title, and she would not let a thought of pride deflect he mind.

        "Lady," he said, "she is of your own blood, though in some ways she may be unlike her race, but she is alike in this, that the thing that she mislikes she will not do. She and I would wed, but it should be for peace not evil. I want not Mercia, having my own land to rule. Let Athelstan have it. But him she would not have had, had we not met."

        "You are self-deceived," she answered. "Him she would have had; and him she will have still. You know not those of whom you speak. That which we mislike we most often do . . . But you know well that you cannot wed. You are not of her faith nor of her kind. What life were hers in the land where your kinsmen have befouled and slaughtered? It was known through the whole world, a land of learning and peace. Is there a book left unburned? A monk's house unfallen? A church in all the land that yet stands?"

        "There is the great church at York."

        "Truly," she said with an added bitterness in her tone, "there is the great church at York. And why is that? Is it not that it could not be fired lest the whole town burn?"

        "Yet it stands," he answered. "Be that as it may." He kept steadily to his point with a strength of will and a self-control that she could almost fear. "I will offer this. I will wed her in your church at York, by the rites of your own church, and her faith will be free in the land."

        "It is vain to talk," Ethelfleda answered, with the gesture of her hand with which she was wont to end that which she would no longer hear. "You are not of her faith, and there is no priest that would wed you. It is against the order of God."

        "That is naught," said the Dane. "For on the day that I take her I will take her faith also if that must be. It is a faith that is well enough, and it is a smaller thing, for there be many gods, but of Elfwin there is but one."

        "You blaspheme," she answered, "not knowing the faith. There is no God but one, and without true faith it is a church which you may not join."

        "If I bring Northumbria to your faith, is it a small thing?" he persisted. "Is there a priest in your church that will not welcome me gladly, being that which I am?"

        She did not answer that, for she knew that there had been such admissions to the church, and she had heard them defended.

        She said: "We waste words over that which shall never be. If you would live, you shall swear. You shall give me answer tomorrow, for I go back to Tamworth, and I will end this thing before I go. I have talked too long."

        She went with no further words.

CHAPTER VII

        THERE came one who rode a mud-splashed horse through the rain along the valley road.

        She rode as one who sits at ease, but by her horse's signs she had ridden both fast and far.

        The gate-guard had orders to be more heedful of those who entered the town than of those who rode forth, for reasons easy to see, but they did not stay her, though they looked in wonder.

        Their pikes went to the salute. They stared after her up the narrow street.

        She rode on through the town, asking way of none, for she saw where the castle rose, and she was one who would ever find her own path.

        As she rode through the market-square she saw Cynfrid, chattering at a booth. She drew rein, and called him to her.

        "Cynfrid," she said, "do I come in time? Is all well?"

        He knew her meaning well enough, but he was less sure how to frame his reply.

        He was loyal to her and to her mother, with a dog's loyalty and a dog's wisdom, and there were things which he would not see.

        "Lady," he said, "there is nothing which has gone ill."

        "So I thought it would be . . . Where is the Queen now?"

        She would always call her mother queen, because it fretted Athelstan, and he could not openly resent it without rudeness, being still in his aunt's charge. She would tease him also, calling him "overlord," which she was resolved that he should never be. To Mercia, perhaps, but not to her. So she told him; threatening, in another mood, that she would lead Mercia to the walls of Winchester when the time of her rule came. She had no will to do it, but she liked well to vex him, and to hear him talk of duty to faith and land, and . . . How she hated Wessex and him!

        Cynfrid answered: "The Queen rode forth on the western road three hours ago. She rides after Hermild, who left the camp, thinking all was lost, before we had taken the town."

        "Does she ride with force?"

        "She made up six troops, picking the best from all." He added: "Hermild hath not forty, and they are footmen and ill armed."

        Elfwin nodded. It was like her mother to leave nothing to chance. To go herself, and to take such a force as would make resistance vain. Six troops was nearly two hundred men.

        But she had her own matters in mind. She asked: "What start had he?"

        He had had a clear day, even without counting his evening march. It would be tonight, at the best, before Ethelfleda would reach him. She must return at an easier pace. There were two clear days and perhaps three.

        She said: "It is very well." She blessed Hermild of Chester in her heart, though he deserved to hang, as he would.

        She sang somewhat as she rode on, now with a thought for her horse, letting him walk if he would, and looking round at the strange streets with lively eyes, and shaking the rain from her cloak, for the skies were clearing.

        Half-an-hour later she sat at a needed meal with Anselm, who rose late, and with Thorkeld, to whom all times were alike.

        They were in the little room of which we know, and she sat at the head of the board, as her right was. The bishop sat on her right and the viking on the other hand. There was none other there but those who served.

        She greeted Anselm, whom she knew (and could have feared, but that it was not easy for her to have fear of men), but her eyes were for Thorkeld, of whom she had heard tales that will ever grow in the telling. She did not mind his twisted face, nor his one eye. She was of those who see souls.

        She asked: "You have wandered far?"

        He said: "Lady, I have gone where I would. Now there is neither near nor far. It is all home to me. Yet I would go farther before I die."

        "You have found life," she answered, but he knew that she had another thing in her mind, and it was to that she would come.

        He looked at her critically. She was finely formed, but too slight for his own liking. Yet she might breed good babes. She had ridden far, and she showed no weariness. That was well. She came of a great house - at least on her mother's side. He thought less of Ethelred. An easy man, so it was told, whom his wife ruled . . . But she was unlike to either. Yet it was foolish to call her Pict. She was black enough, but she had nothing of their ill-shaped leanness, their queer ears, or their furtive ways. To think of a Pict was to think of something that twisted under your horse's feet or your own, or of a knife up-thrust in the belly. She was not Pict nor British.

        Yet he thought Sithric a fool. He could admire the small dark head with its glossy half-curling hair, but her eyes were hard to read, and a woman should be easy to read and to handle. He judged her neither. Had he come on her on Bristol slave-quay, he would have thought her worth a good price, even to that of an old boat. But not more. And it might not have been easy to sell her in a good market . . .

        She turned to Anselm as the one to whom such a question could be most fitly asked.

        "I heard tale that Sithric is here?"

        "It is true," said the bishop, "but it should be nothing to you."

        "It is much to me," she answered, "as I think you know." (Had she not confessed to him last Easter? Did he think her one that would change?) "He must be safely from here before my mother returns."

        "That cannot be," said the bishop. "Your mother hath made other disposal."

        "My father," - and Thorkeld thought that he heard the hardness which was sometimes in her mother's voice when it spoke of her country's wrongs - "there are few things that cannot be."

        "Yet this is one," the bishop answered, unmoved. "For he is guarded by those who would not heed you, having received orders too strict to break. You will do no good if you meddle. It will only be to your shame, and you have shame enough."

        Elfwin opened wide eyes at that, as at an unlooked-for folly.

        "Father, you speak an ill word. I have no shame at all."

        "Verily, I think you have none," said Anselm.

        "Then there is one thing on which we do not differ." She turned to Thorkeld. She knew that she could always silence Anselm with flippant words, which it was beneath his dignity to counter in their own coin, even had he a wit that could have held its own at such fencing. She asked: "Will you tell me what hath been?"

        But Anselm spoke again. He had thought of another aspect of the matter on which defence would be difficult.

        "Rode you here alone?"

It was rarely that Elfwin laughed, though she would smile often to herself as one pleased with her dreams. But her eyes were alight with merriment as she answered.

        "I could say no and yes to that and they were both true. I said to Athelstan: 'I ride to Derby in haste: give me a guard.' He said: 'You cannot do that: your mother would be wroth.' I said: 'That is nothing to you. That is between her and me only.' He said: 'She has made me governor here. I cannot let you go.' - For my mother had made him governor both of the castle and of the town during her absence here. She hath ever some pretext to keep him safe from the fighting. - I said: 'I am not Tamworth. You are not governor of me. I cannot stay to talk, being in haste. Give me a guard.' He said: 'That I will not do.' I said: 'Shall I ride guard-less in a land which no Saxon might enter but two days since? What will you tell my mother, if I be lost?' "

        "He was wild at that, for he knew not what to say or to do. He said at last: 'If I give you a guard it is to partner folly, for without a guard you cannot go.' I said: 'I will go guard-less. Have you known me to lie?' He said: 'You shall not go. I will give orders against it.' I said: 'Will you that? And is there one here that will heed them? You may be prince in Wessex, but I am heiress of Mercia.' He was wild in wrath, but he would not try that fall, being in doubt. He said again: 'You know that you cannot ride to Derby alone, and you shall have no guard from me, so you cannot go.'

        "When I was gone, he was afraid and he sent a guard of ten men, who came up with me five miles beyond the town or it may be six, with their horses blown, for I had ridden fast and they were heavy men. There was a time when I said: 'I ride as hard as I may on a winter road. Go back now, lest your horses die.' So they went, unwillingly; and I rode here, being hindered of none."

        Her lips still smiled as she added as to herself: "He well knew why I came."

        Thorkeld spoke at last. He answered shortly, giving the point at once as his way was.

        "Sithric is here under guard. The Queen has said that his life is forfeit in law, but he may go free if he will swear that he will come south no more. Otherwise he was to hang today."

        "He hath not sworn that?" Her voice was confident as though she would assert rather than ask, but it had a tone of anxiety as of one who would have assurance given.

        "He saith that he will not swear," Thorkeld answered.

        "So I knew. But if the Queen be absent, how gave she him till today to make answer?"

Anselm interposed. "Your mother knew not that she would go till it was late yesterday. Sithric's matter waits her return."

        That was how it had been. She had not heard of Hermild's absence till late that night, and she had given orders at once that six troops should be ready to pursue him with the first light of the winter dawn.

        It may seem strange both that she should not have learnt it till then, and that she should think that such pursuit were needed, but the explanations are simple.

        Chester stood by itself. The Dee valley is wide and flat. The grass is good for the fattening of cattle. There is a high rock six miles from the river-mouth, and on this Chester had been built. It had stood, it might be, for a millennium. It guarded all the plain, both from the Welsh hills, and the sea. But there came a time when it was sacked and spoiled, and after that it stood empty for nearly three hundred years. And for all that time there were few or none that lived in the valley, for it is useless to fatten cattle we cannot keep. Men who travelled by the Roman road that ran from North Wales to the Danelaw might look up at its deserted walls and talk of the great days when there had been cities everywhere, and England had been a secure and ordered land. But the Dee valley was an empty waste when Ethelfleda had come down it ten years before, resolved to reclaim it to her own rule.

        There was the rock, and the protection of the marsh and the river curve, and there was still the circling mound, and the wide moat, and the ruins of the city wall, but inside there was nothing but the fallen houses and the weed-grown streets.

        Ethelfleda rebuilt the walls. She built a new fort at the bridgehead. She put in a Mercian garrison, and the town began to rise again. She resettled the valley. She found that it had become a place of casual resort of the Gaidhil - the Irish Danes, who came for the fishing, or as a point from which they could cross England by the shortest way to reach their friends in the Danelaw. She made peace with these Danes, of whom some had accepted the Christian faith, and in a later year she admitted as colonists some Norwegians who had invaded Wales, and, being defeated there, had fled into the Mercian land. With these mixed elements she re-peopled the empty land, but there had been fighting among them and rebellion already, which had not been easy to quell. She had levied men from every shire she ruled for the winter raid on the Danelaw, but those that had come under Hermild from the Dee valley had been late and few and ill equipped and of an obvious reluctance. Before he had judged that her cause was lost and had reloaded his baggage-carts, he had done little to aid the fight, and he had been well content to believe it. If he should carry such a tale to Chester and it should spread thence to North Wales and to Ireland, there might be raised a fire, before the truth should be known, which it would cost much to stamp out.

        Yet no man had told her that he had gone till the evening of the next day, for there had been much to order. There was great spoil to divide, and many claims to consider: there had been garrison to provide for the captured town in a half-hostile land, from an army that was impatient of every hour that held it together. For that was always the trouble with the Saxon armies. When the fight was over, every man wanted to take his share of the spoil and go. Besides, they could not stay long in the winter fields: they must be billeted in the town, and in the Danish camp over the river. Prisoners were few in these wars. It was flight or slaughter for most; but there were eight hundred unwounded men on this occasion surrendered during the fight, or brought out from the houses in which they hid, who would make good slaves either to sell to the merchants for the sea-trade, or to till the Mercian fields.

        There was prompt inquisition also to be made among the inhabitants of a town that had been in Danish hands for so many years. Some to be restored to property or offices they had lost, some to have provisional leave to remain, some to be expelled, some to be sent to the slave-gang. And the four thanes who were the professional leaders of this civilian levy had all been killed, and many of the best of their helpers. Was it strange that a day had passed before Hermild's flight was reported to Ethelfleda, when each who might have spoken would conclude (if he thought at all) that she knew it? . .

        Elfwin, having learnt what she would, talked of Sithric no more. She judged Thorkeld his friend, which Anselm was surely not. She would talk with Thorkeld alone.

        She asked only who was in charge in the Queen's absence, where so many were dead. Anselm told her that Egbert, the Etheling of Wroxeter, was in charge of the castle, and Hunno of the town.

        Dull men both, Elfwin thought them. Her mother must have been short of choice indeed when she gave command to such as they. Yet they were not men that she could hope to wheedle, though she might outwit them.

        Anselm did not say that his natural authority and that of his office led him to consider himself the actual representative of the absent Queen, and that he had already given such orders, on that assumption, as he thought well, and had found none to dispute them.

CHAPTER VIII

        ELFWIN went out when the meal was over to see what accommodation the castle gave for her own apartment and to observe what she could. It had little comfort for women, and she said that, for that night at least, she would sleep in the Queen's room, and there must be better order tomorrow.

She came back to find Thorkeld alone, and resolved to learn how far he would be likely to aid her.

        "How move you here, are you free?" she asked.

        And Thorkeld answered: "I am free to go if I will. The Queen is kind. But I stay at her wish; for she thinks that: may persuade Sithric to such course as will save his life which she is loth to take."

        "Think you to do it?"

        "I know not. Life is dear to all. To lose it for a woman i a plain folly, for it is to lose her with the rest, and if you are a king you lose much."

        "There is no life will be lost. Can you see Sithric? Can I?"

        "There was an order that I could see him, which I did. I know not if it still hold. Nor how it would be with you."

        "Is he below?"

        "No. He is in a chamber on this floor to the east."

        "Will you try if he can be seen, and tell him that I am here ?"

        Thorkeld agreed to this. He went out and returned at once.

        "The two guards have the keys, and their orders are to admit none till the Queen returns."

        "As to that, we will see," said Elfwin. "Will you show the way?"

        They went together.

        He did not lead to the chamber in which Sithric was held, but to the end of the corridor which led both to that room and to the one from which they came, for it was here that there was a guardroom and a heavy door. For this part of the castle was not for the confinement of prisoners, but for the use of the castle's lords and their guests, and the locked and guarded door was so placed that it gave protection to those who dwelt there against internal treachery or secret entrance to the castle, which were risks which a noble of that time must always take into reckoning.

        Here were two of Ethelfleda's most trusted men, relieved by others every eight hours, who held the great door and the keys of Sithric's chamber. There was therefore no one actually on guard at the room itself, but what difference was there in that? He was stoutly locked in, and should he escape from the room itself, his gain was small, for there was no way out except by the guarded way, and even if that were passed, he would still be in the castle.

        The two men sat on a bench at the side of the open door which would be locked and barred in the night-time, so that this wing of the castle could not be entered by any, till they had parleyed with the guards through a grated hole in the panel.

        The men rose as Elfwin approached. They were well armed with pike and sword and dagger.

        They saluted, as they had done when she passed through before, when she had given them no thought at all.

        Now she stopped and said: "I would speak with King Sithric. Have you the keys here?"

One of the men answered. He was short and somewhat stout. He looked worried and breathed heavily between his words.

        "Lady - it is the Queen's charge - that none shall enter."

        The other man was silent. He had an obstinate, rather sullen face. He would not lift his eyes from the ground.

        Elfwin did not argue. She said, "That is well," as though she were content, and returned. Thorkeld was puzzled. He had not thought her to be a woman of action from the tales that were in the mouths of men. From what he had seen in the last hours he was inclined to a different judgement, but he saw her now give way very quickly, and the first thought returned.

        When they were back in the room she said: "It were vain to have said more. They had talked of it between themselves since you had questioned them. We must look higher than they."

        In the next hour she saw Egbert, with whom she might have prevailed had not Anselm been first to warn him. She saw Anselm also, but gained nothing beyond the satisfaction of feeling that she had vexed the intellectual arrogance of the old priest with words that he could not seize.

        She met Thorkeld from these rebuffs, showing an undisturbed serenity at which the viking was more puzzled than before. He thought now that Sithric's danger was much greater from Elfwin's coming, for he thought her powerless to help, while it might well be that her presence (should it come to Sithric's knowledge) would stiffen his resistance to the taking of the oath which the Queen required, and might make her more resolute to enforce her will.

        He had thought before that Sithric was at a pass where he had no choice but to yield, and that he would surely do so rather than lose his life for so vain an obstinacy, but he turned now to the contrivance of some escape before the Queen should return.

        As to that, he was not hopeless, though he could see but one way. The guards must be slain and the keys seized. He was vexed by a point of honour as to how far he could go in such direction, having kept his sword on the condition that it should not be used in any active enmity. Was this a literal pledge, or did it bind him against hostile violence of any kind? With his friend's life in the balance, he could only answer it in one way, but he was not sure that Ethelfleda would accept that interpretation, and he saw that, should he give active aid, his own life might tremble in the same scale.

        That thought made him cautious. For he had no mind to end his days in this by-chance peril.

        He pondered whether to take Elfwin into his confidence or to keep his plans to himself. He disliked to be allied with women when steel was bare, or in any swift or subtle or secret thing. He did not feel assured that she was one whose wit was of a fighting kind. She seemed to take repulse as an expected thing.

        On the other hand, there were ways in which she might help, both in the castle and afterwards should they win free. Also, he was Sithric's friend, and the Dane might not thank him if she were left behind. He might even refuse to move without her, should he learn that she was in the castle. Lovers are often fools. At the least, he felt sure that she would not betray them. On the balance, she must be told.

        "I am minded," he said, "to get him forth tonight, even though we break in the door."

        "It would not be a quiet way," she answered. " Can we think of no better?"

        "I meant it not, unless better plans should fail. Yet even if we get clear of the castle gates there is more to do. Are there any here you could trust? Could you procure that there shall be three horses outside the walls?"

        "Three?" she said. "You have a servant here?"

        "I have more than one, as hath Sithric, but we know not where they have been lodged. That is for thought, also. But I meant not them. It is for Sithric and you and me."

        "Me?" she said, opening large eyes as she had done to Anselm when he spoke of shame. "I go not to York. We are not wed."

        Thorkeld looked at her in a new wonder and some contempt. Here was the lover who had come for her at his life's risk, and she thought less of him than of a priest's prayer.

        Yet a woman's no may change, and he had his friend's battle to fight.

        He said: " There is nothing in that to hinder. You can be wedded in York."

        "That is wrong," she answered. "He is not of my faith."

        He turned this aside almost in the words that Sithric had used on the day before.

        "That is little. There are so many gods. If he worship you (as he does), he will worship your gods also. He will marry you where you will."

        "Yet I come not to York," she answered. "I know not enough of your Danish ways - and I know too much. There may be many gods, but they have given me but one womb, which I guard well. There are things which I will not do."

        She spoke without heat, not as one who argues or who resents, but as one who explains only. Thorkeld might think her fool if he would, or he might pity Sithric who risked so much for so poor a gain, but he Judged it useless to urge. Yet he added: " If you stay here, having aided us to go, you must face the Queen's wrath."

        "That," she said, "is the more cause to stay."

        "Shall I tell Sithric this," he asked in a final effort, "if he win free? That we have met, and that she for whom he came and hath risked all will not go with him when the chance is hers?"

        "You may waste words as you will," she answered, "for he would know it untold. Yet I will tell it myself when we shall meet, for which the time should be near."

        There was surprise in Thorkeld's one eye as he replied: "How should you see him soon? Did you not say that there is none that will grant leave?"

        "Said I so? . . . Yet I learnt when the guards change and his meal is served."

        "Doth that help? Will you not ask in vain of the new guard?"

        "But I think not to ask. I go in."

CHAPTER IX

        BISHOP ANSELM went to the Etheling again after his encounter with Elfwin. Unlike Thorkeld, having ' known her longer, he did not underrate either her capacity or pertinacity in the pursuit of that which she might desire. In all this he knew that she was of her mother's race. Her difference was that her desires were not controlled by the values of those about her, whose guidance she should have sought, and the code of conduct which she observed was of an equal freedom, as is common with those who care little to read or to listen to those who teach, but rather to walk apart, and to eat and sleep when they will.

        He remembered that Sithric had escaped once before, when at Gloucester, and that none had known how he did it, though it was supposed that it was at Elfwin's contriving; and the cryptic answer she had given when he had asked her directly what had been.

        "Father, few are held, but it be of their own will. There is ever a new way."

        Was she planning a new way now? Then it was his part to ensure that it should fail. He gave up the rest which his age required to warn Egbert again, and when he learnt that she had questioned as to the times at which the guards were changed and the hours at which food was carried to Sithric's room, he went himself to give such orders as must (he thought) prevent this knowledge being of avail for any purpose which he could think her to have.

        The guards were changed at the sixth hour, and those who came on duty brought the evening meal from the buttery as they came up. The others went off when they appeared, after transferring their keys, and one of the new men would then go on with tray and platters to Sithric's room, while the other held guard at the door.

        That seemed well enough to deal with one who was pledged not to use his sword, and was not expected to make any wild attempt at flight, such as would bring him under the observation of a score of the garrison before he could hope even to come to the outer gate, which would be barred and guarded.

        It seemed well enough; but Anselm ordered that the two new men should take in the meal together, and that the two whom they were to relieve should not go off duty till they had returned and reported that the prisoner had been secured for the night.

        It followed that Elfwin, seated at ease, still talking to Thorkeld, but of his own life, which she was keen to know heard the feet not of one but of two as they passed the door with the meal which they carried along the passage.

        If she were puzzled by this it did not seem a sufficient reason to change the purpose which she had formed.

        She rose without haste and went out into the passage. She was not seen of those guards to whom she had spoken before, who were at the door at the passage-end, for the passage turned, rectangular with the castle wall, and she saw those whom she would follow entering Sithric's room. They did not see her, but, had they done so, what of it? She might walk where she would.

        Sithric, sitting in evil mood, not having been told that Ethelfleda had ridden forth, and having waited all day for a moment which did not come, looked up as the men entered. He had heard the steps of two where he had expected one. Did it mean evil? Had she decided to have his life without further parley, and so make her end sure? He felt a cold doubt, and yet the relief which comes when the time of waiting ends and the battle joins.

        He saw the two guards, of whom he knew one by sight, and with whom he had had some speech already. That one had unlocked the door and came in holding the keys. The one who was strange bore the tray.

        Sithric felt the reaction of anticlimax.

        He said: "I have no will to eat. Bring you no word?"

        The man who held the keys answered, taking the question to himself, because Sithric's eyes were on him, and because they had spoken before.

        "Lord," he said, "the Queen hath ridden forth. All things wait her return."

        After the moment's pause of these words, he turned, as it seemed, to close the door. For he had in mind the caution that Anselm had given that they should guard Sithric well, that he should not leave, nor that any should enter to him.

        But Elfwin came in as he turned.

        He knew her well, being a Gloucester man, of her mother's household there, and the thought to oppose her with any force did not come to his mind.

        Yet he said: "Lady, we have orders that none should enter here."

        She answered: "But such orders are not for me. I go where I will. From whom came they? Not from the Queen?"

        No, the man admitted. They were from the Etheling; and Bishop Anselm.

        "I thought that," she answered. "Should they question aught, you will say that the Lady Elfwin does not answer to them. She walks where she will."

        The man looked irresolute and unhappy. He knew that when there are differences among those above, those fare best who walk wide. His companion, having laid out the dishes, stood as one unconcerned, being well content to leave him to take the brunt of the trouble.

        "Lady," he said, "you will hold us clear?"

        "Clear?" she said. "Nay, faith, I promise naught. Of this I do hold no speech with any. You will say what you will."

        "Lady," he said, "we would go. We cannot leave you here."

        "You will wait," she answered, "outside. The dishes must be borne back when they are cleared. I must have speech with the King."

        The two men looked at each other, but neither was of a courage to contest the issue. They went out, drawing the door close.

CHAPTER X

        THE room into which Elfwin came was a fair guest-chamber into which a king and queen might have been shown without shame, having a bed of good size, stool and table and lamp, and a stout chest for storage of clothes. It had also a hanging of tapestry on its longer wall, of a great age, and of a value which only the chapmen knew. It showed a woman bare under a great swan which held her with beak and feet and with the beating of great wings. Meaning it must have had when it was wrought, but it was a dead tale. For though the Latin tongue still lived, so that kings could speak to one another from land to land in the Christian pale, yet such books as were left in England at that day were English records and missals and the lives of s