The Price of Blood (49 page)

“I’ll sail to Rochester soon enough,” he said, “to see which way the wind is blowing. But these men”—he gestured in the direction of his companions—“will stay here. You and your child—Cnut’s child, if you like—will have need of more men. For your protection.”

He looked at her with cold, glittering eyes, and the threat in them was plain enough. He would leave behind more Danish thugs to guard her, and their first concern would not be her protection.

“As I said,” he went on with an evil smile, “there is a storm brewing. I think we would not want to have you swept away.”

September 1011

Rochester, Kent

It was hot. Athelstan ran a finger around the damp, clinging neckline of his linen smoc and muttered a silent curse at the fate that had brought him to this wretched place. He glanced for what he guessed must be the thousandth time toward the Medway. A group of Danish shipmen were out there in the searing afternoon sun, muscling bulky sacks of silver into a large pan for weighing, then muscling them out again.

They were nearly finished now, thank God. Twelve thousand pounds of coin and hack silver hauled out of the holds of English vessels, inspected by a gang of Danes, weighed, and stacked inside a storehouse set well above the tide line. It had taken three days.

He had watched it all, one of a handful of English nobles—and of what passed for nobles among the Danes—charged to be official observers. Today they had broken bread together to mark the completion of this second payment of the gafol, their tables sheltered from the harsh sunlight by a broad canopy.

Still, it was hot. And his anger at being forced to dally here beneath Rochester’s walls to bear witness to this spectacle made him hotter still.

“Have the bastards humiliated us enough, do you suppose?” he snarled.

Beside him his brother Edrid grunted a wordless reply. Archbishop Ælfheah, who was seated next to that ox, Hemming, at the top of the table, didn’t hear the question, but from the grim set of his face Athelstan guessed that the archbishop, too, had stomached about as much of this as he could take.

The Danes had demanded that the dozen English nobles and prelates who had delivered the silver should wait here, forced to watch while the shipmen inspected and weighed every pound of the English gafol. He didn’t know what he hated more: their glee as they pawed through the enormous treasure, or their obvious satisfaction at doing it before the eyes of the Canterbury archbishop and two of Æthelred’s sons.

“
By Christ
, I want to leave this place,” he muttered. “That’s the last of the silver weighed. The tide is ebbing, and I see no reason to prolong this any further, especially as our host looks as though he’s beyond caring whether we are here or not.”

The potent beor had been flowing freely today, and Hemming had clearly downed far too many cups of it. His huge body slumped against one side of his chair, and his small eyes, framed by thick brows and an unkempt beard, had fluttered closed some time ago. A string of drool seeped from the corner of his gaping mouth.

And this man was to be their ally! What a colossal mistake! Ælfheah had been adamant that of the three Viking warlords, this one was the least governable, the one most likely to turn against them if given even the slightest provocation.

Yet the king had insisted on going ahead with this mad scheme.

Of course Hemming can’t be trusted
, he had argued.
He’s abandoning his Danish allies, isn’t he? He’s already an oath breaker, and so what? We merely have to keep him happy and give him no reason to abandon us in turn.

So the delivery date for this second gafol payment had been moved forward to take advantage of the absence of Cnut and Thorkell. God alone knew where they had gone. Hemming, though, claimed that when they returned, they would find that the Danish ships they’d left behind would be ranged against them from the Thames mouth all the way to the Isle of Thanet.

“Do you think we can trust him?” Edrid asked.

“No!” Athelstan growled. “I cannot see what’s to prevent him from taking the silver, hauling up anchor tomorrow, and sailing as far from England as a steady wind will take him.”

“But there’s to be an even larger payment in the spring if he keeps his word to us,” Edrid protested. “He’ll want that silver as well, won’t he?”

“A bird in the hand, Edrid,” he replied. “Why not take the silver now and be done with it? What does he have to lose? He can turn his back on England, let his brother and Cnut split the gafol we’ve promised to deliver next spring, and have a good laugh at us for believing that he would defend us against his own kind.”

He cursed again, wishing he knew if that was indeed what Hemming was thinking.

He eyed the man who stood behind Hemming’s chair—no Dane, but a Mercian who knew the Danish tongue and was acting as translator between Ælfheah and the warlord. Who was he, and who did he answer to?

He would relish holding a knife to that fellow’s throat and putting a few searing questions to him. He must know a great deal about these Danes. Surely he had some inkling of what was going on in Hemming’s pisspot of a brain. He might even be persuaded to reveal the names of others who, through bribery or threat, had tied themselves in some way to the Northmen. There had to be more of them.
Christ
.
How many more? How many Englishmen had lost faith in their king after two years of slaughter and destruction?

He saw that Ælfheah, who seemed to have determined at last that it was pointless to remain here any longer, was getting to his feet. Every Englishman under the canopy, as well as the few Danes who could still stand, rose with him. To Athelstan’s relief no one bothered to take their leave of the besotted Hemming.

At the wharf, he and Edrid bid the archbishop farewell. Ælfheah would sail south to Canterbury while they made for the Thames and London. Their leave-taking was brief, for they were all of them eager to be on their separate ways.

While the oarsmen maneuvered their ship into the river, Athelstan looked back toward the shore. A lone rider emerged from the shadow of the city wall and set out toward the bridge that crossed the Medway and led north to London.

“Is that the Mercian?” he asked Edrid.

His brother looked to where he pointed just as the horseman halted to say something to the guard at the bridge.

“It is, yes,” Edrid agreed. They watched as he kicked his horse into a gallop and crossed the span. “I wonder where he’s going in such a hurry.”

“Yes,” Athelstan said. “So do I.”

Athelstan had cause to remember that moment two days later when a flurry of rumors reached London that Hemming was dead. An English noble, it was said, had slipped into Rochester and gutted him in the night. Another tale blamed the death on a Rochester whore who had smothered Hemming while she was in his bed; another that the Canterbury archbishop had cast a curse on the Dane that had made him sicken, his bowels turned to water. However Hemming had died, it was always the English who had killed him.

“If Hemming is dead,” Athelstan told Edmund, “it was none of our doing. The most likely explanation I can think of is that he drank himself to death.”

Yet the image of a rider hastening across Rochester’s bridge kept returning to him. Could the Mercian, Alric, have somehow been responsible for the warlord’s death? And if he was, had he done them a favor or had he brought more trouble down upon their heads?

Ten days later, he had the answer. Canterbury lay in ruins, and Archbishop Ælfheah was a prisoner of the Danes.

Chapter Thirty-Two

September 1011

London

“W
hat are you going to do?” Emma raised the question the moment that Æthelred stepped into the bedchamber.

For hours she had been waiting for him, nervous and agitated because she knew what detained him. A single hostage, an abbot, had been released from Canterbury and had arrived at the palace just after dark, accompanied by three Danish warriors. The king had been closeted with his advisers and with the Canterbury priest ever since.

Now it was late, well into the night’s second watch, and instead of answering her, Æthelred ordered the body servant who entered the room a step behind him to bring more candles.

“And put more charcoal on the brazier, then leave us.” To Emma he said only, “Wine.”

She went to a table where a flagon and cups stood ready, poured the wine, and brought it to him. He took a long swallow but still did not reply to her query. The servant did the king’s bidding while Æthelred paced the chamber in moody silence. She watched him, waiting for him to speak and hounded by apprehension.

For two days the grim outlines of the attack upon Canterbury had swirled through London’s streets. The cathedral and its precincts had been burnt and the city pillaged. The king’s hall and the archbishop’s palace had been destroyed and Canterbury, as she had known it when she first came to England, was gone. What she did not yet know was how many lives had been lost.

What she could not guess was what the king proposed to do about it.

A direct assault seemed unlikely. The Danes had taken Canterbury by stealth, arriving on the Feast of Roodmas when the cathedral had been jammed with worshipers venerating the relic of the Holy Cross. Few men had been left to watch the city gates, and the enemy had wagered that they could enter almost unopposed. They had won their wager. Now, though, Canterbury’s stout walls would be well defended by Vikings, and the watchers would be vigilant. Any attempt to retake the city by force would cost many lives and would probably be futile.

She could imagine no other recourse except to offer more tribute. But the king was already pledged to deliver another twenty-four thousand pounds of silver in the spring—the last of the forty-eight thousand that had been promised them.

What if treasure, though, was not the prize that the Danes were after?

The warning that her mother had sent at Easter, hinting of some calamity about to strike England, had been racing through her mind since she’d first heard of the attack. Was the assault on Canterbury only the beginning of some greater wave of destruction?

She continued to watch as her husband paced, the silence broken only by the hushed movements of the servant. When he slipped out of the chamber, she repeated her question: “What will you do?”

Still he did not answer her, but only strode to the table where the flagon stood and poured himself more wine.

Perhaps he had no answers to give.

“I should never have sent Ælfheah to negotiate with the Danish warlords,” he said. “I’ll send no more churchmen to parley with my enemies. They are worse than useless.”

“You sent Ælfheah because you deemed him trustworthy,” she reminded him.

“And look where it has led! Despite his efforts the Danes ravaged Kent and Sussex in March, and now they’ve taken Canterbury. The devil hound them to hell.”

She was standing beside the brazier, watching him, and she could not find it in her heart to do anything but sympathize with his frustration and outrage. The Danes had bested him on the battlefield and at the bargaining table. Now they had broken faith with him by pillaging Canterbury. It was a monstrous crime, and London was rife with rumors of what horrors they might commit next.

“Have they given any justification for breaking the truce?” she asked.

“They say it has naught to do with the truce. They claim that Ælfheah murdered Hemming, and this attack is their revenge.” His pacing had taken him to the window, and he drew the leather curtain aside and stared into the darkness. “They’ve taken more than two hundred hostages,” he said. “Ælfheah and the bishop of Rochester are the most prominent, but Canterbury was filled with nobles and high-ranking clergy when it fell. Abbots, priests, monks—
Christ
. They’ve even imprisoned the nuns.”

With the drawing of the curtain the night air invaded the room and Emma felt a sudden chill. But it was his words, not the breeze, that made her shiver. What would happen to the women while they were in Danish hands?
Sweet Virgin
, it might already be too late. She went to where he stood near the window embrasure.

“The women must be freed,” she urged, “before—”

“The Danes will not let them go without some recompense,” he said savagely. “Surely you know that.”

Yes, she knew it only too well. The taking of hostages was a favorite tactic of the Danes. Books, relics, innocent victims—anything and anyone could be captured and held for ransom. Seven years ago the price on her own head would have been half of England had Swein Forkbeard managed to get her to his ship as he had intended.

“How much do they want?”

“We do not yet know,” he said, turning from the window, “but the ransom of an archbishop and a bishop will be costly. They have bid us send three envoys unarmed into Canterbury to meet with their leaders and learn their demands. Three Danes will remain here as pledges that our men will not be harmed.”

So it was treasure that they wanted, after all. “Who will you send?” If it were up to her, she would send Athelstan, but the king would never agree to that. He had no confidence in his sons.