The Burning Land by Bernard Cornwell Read Free Book Online Page B

make defense easy?” I asked the abbot.
    “You could hold it forever, given enough men,” Oslac said confidently. I gazed at him, noting the scar across the bridge of his nose. Abbot Oslac, I decided, had been a warrior before he became a monk.
    “But why invite Harald to besiege us there?” Alfred asked, “when we have Æscengum and its walls and its storehouses?”
    “And how long will those storehouses last, lord?” I asked him. “We have enough men inside these walls to hold the enemy till Judgment Day, but not enough food to reach Christmas.” The burhs were not provisioned for a large army. The intent of the walled towns was to hold the enemy in check and allow the army of household warriors, the trained men, to attack the besiegers in the open country outside.
    “But Fearnhamme?” Alfred asked.
    “Is where we shall destroy Harald,” I said unhelpfully. I looked at Æthelred. “Order your men to Fearnhamme, cousin, and we’ll trap Harald there.”
    There was a time when Alfred would have questioned and tested my ideas, but that day he looked too tired and too sick to argue, and he plainly did not have the patience to listen to other men challenging my plans. Besides, he had learned to trust me when it came towarfare, and I expected his assent to my vague proposal, but then he surprised me. He turned to the churchmen and gestured that one of them should join him, and Bishop Asser took the elbow of a young, stocky monk and guided him to the king’s chair. The monk had a hard, bony face and black tonsured hair as bristly and stiff as a badger’s pelt. He might have been handsome except his eyes were milky, and I guessed he had been blind from birth. He groped for the king’s chair, found it and knelt beside Alfred, who laid a fatherly hand on the monk’s bowed head. “So, Brother Godwin?” he asked gently.
    “I am here, lord, I am here,” Godwin said in a voice scarce above a hoarse whisper.
    “And you heard the Lord Uhtred?”
    “I heard, lord, I heard.” Brother Godwin raised his blind eyes to the king. He said nothing for a while, but his face was twisting all that time, twisting and grimacing like a man possessed by an evil spirit. He started to utter a choking noise, and what astonished me was that none of this alarmed Alfred, who waited patiently until, at last, the young monk regained a normal expression. “It will be well, lord King,” Godwin said, “it will be well.”
    Alfred patted Brother Godwin’s head again and smiled at me. “We shall do as you suggest, Lord Uhtred,” he said decisively. “You will direct your men to Fearnhamme,” he spoke to Æthelred, then looked back to me, “and my son,” he went on, “will command the West Saxon forces.”
    “Yes, lord,” I said dutifully. Edward, the youngest man in the church, looked embarrassed, and his eyes flicked nervously from me to his father.
    “And you,” Alfred turned to look at his son, “will obey the Lord Uhtred.”
    Æthelred could contain himself no longer. “What guarantees do we have,” he asked petulantly, “that the heathens will go to Fearnhamme?”
    “Mine,” I said harshly.
    “But you cannot be certain!” Æthelred protested.
    “He will go to Fearnhamme,” I said, “and he will die there.”
    I was wrong about that.
    Messengers rode to Æthelred’s men at Silcestre, ordering them to march on Fearnhamme at first light next morning. Once there they were to occupy the hill that stands just north of the river. Those five hundred men were the anvil, while the men at Æscengum were my hammer, but to lure Harald onto the anvil would mean dividing our forces, and it is a rule of war not to do that. We had, at my best estimate, about five hundred men fewer than the Danes, and by keeping our army in two parts I was inviting Harald to destroy them separately. “But I’m relying on Harald being an impulsive fool, lord,” I told Alfred that night.
    The king had joined me on Æscengum’s eastern rampart.