The Pale Horseman

'I'm sorry,' Harald said. 'It was not my place to tell you, but you needed to know before you saw Mildrith again.'

'She hates me,' I said bleakly.

'Yes,' he said, 'she does.' He paused. 'I thought she would go mad with grief, but God has preserved her. She would like ...'

'Like what?'

'To join the sisters at Cridianton. When the Danes leave. They have a nunnery there, a small house.'

I did not care what Mildrith did. 'And my son is buried here?'

'Under the yew tree,' he turned and pointed, 'beside the church.'

So let him stay there, I thought. Let him rest in his short grave to wait the chaos of the world's ending.

'Tomorrow,' I said, 'we raise the fyrd.'

Because there was a kingdom to save.

Priests were summoned to Harald's hall and the priests wrote the summons for the fyrd. Most thegns could not read, and many of their priests would probably struggle to decipher the few words, but the messengers would tell them what the parchments said. They were to arm their men and bring them to Ocmundtun, and the wax seal on the summons was the authority for those orders. The seal showed Odda the Elder's badge of a stag.

‘It will take a week,' Harald warned me, 'for most of the fyrd to reach here, and the Ealdorman will try to stop it happening at all.'

'What will he do?'

'Tell the thegns to ignore it, I suppose.'

'And Svein? What will he do?'

'Try to kill us?'

'And he has eight hundred men who can be here tomorrow.' I said.

‘And I have thirty men,' Harald said bleakly.

'But we do have a fortress,' I said, pointing to the limestone ridge with its palisade.

I did not doubt that the Danes would come. By summoning the fyrd we threatened their safety, and Svein was not a man who would take a threat lightly, and so, while the messages were carried north and south, the townsfolk were told to take their valuables up to the fort beside the river. Some men were set to strengthening the palisade, others took livestock up onto the moor so the beasts could not be taken by the Danes, and Steapa went to every nearby settlement and demanded that men of fighting age go to Ocmundtun with any weapon they possessed, so that by that afternoon the fort was manned by over eighty men. Few were warriors, most had no weapons other than an axe, but from the foot of the hill they looked formidable enough. Women carried food and water to the fort, and most of the town reckoned to sleep up there, despite the rain, for fear that the Danes would come in the night.

Odda the Elder refused to go to the fort. He was too sick, he said, and too feeble, and if he was supposed to die then he would die in Harald's hall. Harald and I tried to persuade him, but he would not listen. 'Mildrith can go,' he said.

'No,' she said. She sat by Odda's bed, her hands clutched tight under the sleeves of her grey robe.

She stared at me, challenge in her eyes, daring me to give her an order to abandon Odda and go to the fortress.

'I am sorry,' I said to her.

'Sorry?'

'About our son.'

'You were not a father to him,' she accused me. Her eyes glistened. 'You wanted him to be a Dane!

You wanted him to be a pagan! You didn't even care for his soul!'

'I cared for him,' I said, but she ignored that. I had not sounded convincing, even to myself.

'His soul is safe,' Harald said gently. 'He is in the Lord Jesus' arms. He is happy.'

Mildrith looked at him and I saw how Harald's words had comforted her, though she still began crying. She caressed her wooden cross, then Odda the Elder reached out and patted her arm.

'If the Danes come, lord,' I said to him, 'I shall send men for you.'

I turned then and went from the sickroom. I could not cope with Mildrith crying or with the thought of a dead son. Such things are difficult, much more difficult than making war, and so I buckled on my swords, picked up my shield and put on my splendid wolf-crested helmet so that, when Harald came from Odda's chamber, he checked to see me standing like a warlord by his hearth.

'If we make a big fire at the eastern end of town,' I said, 'we'll see the Danes come. It will give us time to carry Lord Odda to the fort.'

'Yes.' He looked up at the great rafters of his hall, and perhaps he was thinking that he would never see it thus again, for the Danes would come and the hall would burn. He made the sign of the cross.

'Fate is inexorable,' I told him. What else was there to say? The Danes might come, the hall might burn, but they were small things in the balance of a kingdom, and so I went to order the fire that would illuminate the eastern road, but the Danes did not come that night. It rained softly all through the darkness, so that in the morning the folk in the fort were wet, cold and unhappy.

Then, in the dawn, the first men of the fyrd arrived. It might take days for the farther parts of the shire to receive their summons and to arm men and despatch them to Ocmundtun, but the nearer places sent men straight away so that by late morning there were close to three hundred beneath the fort. No more than seventy of those could be called warriors, men who had proper weapons, shields and at least a leather coat. The rest were farm labourers with hoes or sickles or axes.

Harald sent foraging parties to find grain. It was one thing to gather a force, quite another to feed it, and none of us knew how long we would have to keep the men assembled. If the Danes did not come to us, then we would have to go to them and force them from Cridianton, and for that we would need the whole fyrd of Defnascir. Odda the Younger, I thought, would never allow that to happen.

Nor did he. For, as the rain ended and the noontime prayers were said, Odda himself came to Ocmundtun and he did not come alone, but rode with sixty of his warriors in chain mail and as many Danes in their war glory. The sun came out as they appeared from the eastern trees and it shone on mail and on spear points, on bridle chains and stirrup irons, on polished helmets and bright shield bosses. They spread into the pastures on either side of the road and advanced on Ocmundtun in a wide line, and at its centre were two standards. One, the black stag, was the banner of Defnascir, while the other was a Danish triangle and displayed the white horse.

'There'll be no fight,' I told Harald.

'There won't?'

'Not enough of them. Svein can't afford to lose men, so he's come to talk.'

'I don't want to meet them here,' he gestured at the fort. 'We should be in the hall.'

He ordered that the best armed men should go down to the town, and there we filled the muddy street outside the hall as Odda and the Danes came from the cast. The horsemen had to break their line to enter the town, making a column instead, and the column was led by three men. Odda was in the centre and he was flanked by two Danes, one of them Svein of the White Horse.

Svein looked magnificent, a silver-white warrior. He rode a white horse, wore a white woollen cloak, and his mail and boar-snouted helmet had been scrubbed with sand until they glowed silver in the watery sunlight. His shield bore a silvered boss around which a white horse had been painted. The leather of his bridle, saddle and scabbard had been bleached pale. He saw me, but showed no recognition, just looked along the line of men barring the street and seemed to dismiss them as useless. His banner of the white horse was carried by the second horseman who had the same darkened face as his master, a face hammered by sun and snow, ice and wind.