going to be king in Mercia?”
“The Fates say so,” I said, not looking at him. Finan and I had been slaves together on a trader’s ship. We had suffered, frozen, endured and learned to love each other like brothers, and I cared about his opinion.
“The Fates,” Finan said, “are tricksters.”
“Is that a Christian view?” I asked.
He smiled. He wore his cloak’s hood over his helmet, so I could see little of his thin, feral face, but I saw the flash of teeth when he smiled. “I was a great man in Ireland,” he said, “I had horses to outrun the wind, women to dim the sun, and weapons that could outfight the world, yet the Fates doomed me.”
“You live,” I said, “and you’re a free man.”
“I’m your oath-man,” he said, “and I gave you my oath freely. And you, lord, are Alfred’s oath-man.”
“Yes,” I said.
“Were you forced to make your oath to Alfred?” Finan asked.
“No,” I confessed.
The rain was stinging in my face. The sky was low, the land dark. “If fate is unavoidable,” Finan asked, “why do we make oaths?”
I ignored the question. “If I break my oath to Alfred,” I said instead, “will you break yours to me?”
“No, lord,” he said, smiling again. “I would miss your company,” he went on, “but you would not miss Alfred’s.”
“No,” I admitted, and we let the conversation drift away with the wind-blown rain, though Finan’s words lingered in my mind and they troubled me.
We spent that night close to the great shrine of Saint Alban. The Romans had made a town there, though that town had now decayed, and so we stayed at a Danish hall just to the east. Our host was welcoming enough, but he was cautious in conversation. He did admit to hearing that Sigefrid had moved men into Lundene’s old town, but he neither condemned nor praised the act. He wore the hammer amulet, as did I, but he also kept a Saxon priest who prayed over the meal of bread, bacon, and beans. The priest was a reminder that this hall was in East Anglia, and that East Anglia was officially Christian and at peace with its Christian neighbors, but our host made certain that his palisade gate was barred and that he had armed men keeping watch through the damp night. There was a shiftless air to this land, a feeling that a storm might break at any time.
The rainstorm ended in the darkness. We left at dawn, riding into a world of frost and stillness, though Wæclingastræt became busier as we encountered men driving cattle to Lundene. The beasts were scrawny, but they had been spared the autumn slaughter so they could feed the city through its winter. We rode past them and the herdsmen dropped to their knees as so many armed men clattered by. The clouds cleared to the east so that, when we came to Lundene in the middle of the day, the sun was bright behind the thick pall of dark smoke that always hangs above the city.
I have always liked Lundene. It is a place of ruins, trade, and wickedness that sprawls along the northern bank of the Temes. The ruinswere the buildings the Romans left when they abandoned Britain, and their old city crowned the hills at the city’s eastern end and were surrounded by a wall made of brick and stone. The Saxons had never liked the Roman buildings, fearing their ghosts, and so had made their own town to the west, a place of thatch and wood and wattle and narrow alleys and stinking ditches that were supposed to carry sewage to the river, but usually lay glistening and filthy until a downpour of rain flooded them. That new Saxon town was a busy place, stinking with the smoke from smithy fires and raucous with the shouts of tradesmen, too busy, indeed, to bother making a defensive wall. Why did they need a wall, the Saxons argued, for the Danes were content to live in the old city and had showed no desire to slaughter the inhabitants of the new. There were palisades in a few places, evidence that some men had tried to protect the rapidly growing new town,
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