It was fish stew. It was always fish stew.
And next day we went to find the enemy.
There were six of us. The man who poled the punt, Iseult and 1, two of the newly-arrived household troops and Alfred. I tried once again to make him stay behind, but he insisted.
'If anyone should stay,' he said, 'it is Iseult.'
‘She comes,' I said.
'Evidently.' He did not argue, and we all climbed into a large punt and went westwards, and Alfred stared at the birds, thousands of birds. There were coot, moorhen, dabchicks, ducks, grebes and herons, while off to the west, white against the sullen sky, was a cloud of gulls.
The marsh man slid us silent and fast through secret channels. There were times when he seemed to be taking us directly into a bank of reeds or grass, yet the shallow craft would slide through into another stretch of open water. The incoming tide rippled through the gaps, bringing fish to the hidden nets and basket traps. Beneath the gulls, far off to the west, I could see the masts of Svein's fleet, which had been dragged ashore on the coast.
Alfred saw them too. 'Why don't they join Guthrum?'
'Because Svein doesn't want to take Guthrum's orders,' I said.
'You know that?'
'He told me so.'
Alfred paused, perhaps thinking of my trial in front of the Witan. He gave me a rueful look. 'What sort of man is he?'
'Formidable.'
'So why hasn't he attacked us here?'
I had been wondering the same thing. Svein had missed a golden chance to invade the swamp and hunt Alfred down. So why had he not even tried? 'Because there's easier plunder elsewhere,' I suggested, 'and because he won't do Guthrum's bidding. They're rivals. If Svein takes Guthrum's orders then he acknowledges Guthrum as his king.'
Alfred stared at the distant masts which showed as small scratches against the sky, then I mutely pointed towards a hill that reared steeply from the western water flats and the marsh man obediently went that way, and when the punt grounded we clambered through thick alders and past some sunken hovels where sullen folk in dirty otter fur watched us pass. The marsh man knew no name for the place, except to call it Brant, which meant steep, and it was steep. Steep and high, offering a view southwards to where the Pedredan coiled like a great snake through the swamp's heart. And at the river's mouth, where sand and mud stretched into the Saefern Sea, I could see the Danish ships.
They were grounded on the far bank of the Pedredan in the same place that Ubba had grounded his ships before meeting his death in battle. From there Svein could easily row to Æthelingaeg, for the river was wide and deep, and he would meet no challenge until he reached the river barrier beside the fort where Leofric waited. I wanted Leofric and his garrison to have some warning if the Danes attacked, and this high hill offered a view of Svein's camp, but was far enough away so that it would not invite an attack from the enemy.
'We should make a beacon here,' I said to Alfred. A fire lit here would give Æthelingaeg two or three hours' warning of a Danish attack.
He nodded, but said nothing. He stared at the distant ships, but they were too far off to count. He looked pale, and I knew he had found the climb to the summit painful, so now I urged him downhill to where the hovels leaked smoke.
'You should rest here, lord,' I told him. 'I'm going to count ships. But you should rest.'
He did not argue and I suspected his stomach pains were troubling him again. I found a hovel that was occupied by a widow and her four children, and I gave her a silver coin and said her king needed warmth and shelter for the day, and I do not think she understood who he was, but she knew the value of a shilling and so Alfred went into her house and sat by the fire.
'Give him broth,' I told the widow, whose name was Elwide, 'and let him sleep.'
She scorned that. 'Folk can't sleep while there's work!' she said. 'There are eels to skin, fish to smoke, nets to mend, traps to weave.'
'They can work,' I said, pointing to the two household troops, and I left them all to Elwide's tender mercies while Iseult and I took the punt southwards and, because the Pedredan's mouth was only three or four miles away, and because Brant was such a clear landmark, I left the marshman to help skin and smoke eels.
We crossed a smaller river and then poled through a long mere broken by marsh grass and by now I could see the hill on the Pedredan's far bank where we had been trapped by Ubba, and I told Iseult the story of the fight as I poled the punt across the shallows. The hull grounded twice and I had to push it into deeper water until I realised the tide was falling fast and so I tied the boat to a rotting stake, then we walked across a drying waste of mud and sea lavender towards the Pedredan. I had grounded farther from the river than I had wanted, and it was a long walk into a cold wind, but we could see all we needed once we reached the steep bank at the river's edge. The Danes could also see us. I was not in mail, but I did have my swords, and the sight of me brought men to the further shore where they hurled insults across the swirling water. I ignored them. I was counting ships and saw twenty-four beast-headed boats hauled up on the strip of ground where we had defeated Ubba the year before. Ubba's burned ships were also there, their black ribs half buried in the sand where the men capered and shouted their insults.
'How many men can you see?' I asked Iseult.
There were a few Danes in the half wrecked remnants of the monastery where Svein had killed the monks, but most were by the boats. 'Just men?' she asked.
'Forget the women and children,' I said. There were scores of women, mostly in the small village that was a little way upstream.
She did not know the English words for the bigger numbers, so she gave me her estimate by opening and closing her fingers six times.
'Sixty?' I said, and nodded. 'At most seventy. And there are twenty-four ships.' She frowned, not understanding the point I made. 'Twenty-four ships,' I said, 'means an army of what? Eight hundred?
Nine hundred men? So those sixty or seventy men are the ship-guards. And the others? Where are the others?' I asked the question of myself, watching as five of the Danes dragged a small boat to the river's edge. They planned to row across and capture us, but I did not intend to stay that long. The others,' I answered my own question, have gone south. They've left their women behind and gone raiding.
They're burning, killing, getting rich. They're raping Defnascir.'
'They're coming,' Iseult said, watching the five men clamber into the small boat.
'You want me to kill them?’
'You can?' She looked hopeful.
'No,' I said, 'so let's go.'
We started back across the long expanse of mud and sand. It looked smooth, but there were runnels cutting through and the tide had turned and the sea was sliding back into the land with surprising speed. The sun was sinking, tangling with black clouds and the wind pushed the flood up the Saefern and the water gurgled and shivered as it filled the small creeks. I turned to see that the five Danes had abandoned their chase and gone back to the western bank where their fires looked delicate against the evening's fading light. 'I can't see the boat,' Iseult said.