Conqueror

XIX

Cynewulf saw Alfred only once more. The King summoned him to Lunden, won back from the Danes.

It was nine years after Ethandune.

'And it will be,' Cynewulf remarked, as his patient horse bore him along the broken Roman road towards Lunden, 'a meeting I would never have imagined could take place, in the darkest hours at Aethelingaig.'

'What's that, Father?' asked Saberht, who rode at his side.

'Oh, nothing, boy, nothing,' Cynewulf said. 'Just talking to myself.'

The novice scratched his tonsure, raggedly cut in a head of thick black hair. Of course, his manner implied, this mumbling dotage was to be expected of a man of Cynewulf's advanced years – nearly forty, by God.

Cynewulf wiped the sweat of an unseasonably warm April day from his brow, and tried to master his irritation. After all, it wasn't the boy's fault he was growing old. The novice, not yet twenty, was as lithe as a stoat, and as randy, as his lurid confessions proved. But he was a good boy who did his best to take care of Cynewulf, even if he did treat the priest as if he were Methuselah's twin.

Of course forty years was well short of the three-score-years-and-ten promised in the Bible. But life was hard in these fallen times, and bodies wore out, even those of priests. In particular Cynewulf's knees ached constantly, no doubt a relic of the long hours he spent on them each day. He embraced such suffering and dedicated it to God.

But in a sense he had been spared. Most of Cynewulf's boyhood friends were dead and gone, and he knew very few people older than himself. Suddenly he found himself lost in a world full of youthful innocents, like Saberht, who knew nothing of the remote past of thirty years ago, or twenty or even ten, the days of Aethelingaig and Ethandune, knew nothing and cared less.

Why, Saberht didn't even fear the Dane. To him the Dane was a spent force who had been defeated by Alfred and now, in the King's latter years, was being beaten steadily back. Oh, the Dane clung on in the north-east, but what was there to fear? So quickly the generations turned, Cynewulf thought, so quickly the past was forgotten.

But Cynewulf had not forgotten, and nor had Alfred.

So Saberht was unafraid of the Dane – but, oddly, he was wary of Lunden.

On this last day of travelling, coming down towards Lunden from the north-through lands taken under Alfred's sway from the Danes just a year ago – they crossed over a ridge of high ground, and Lunden and its river opened up before them. Cynewulf pulled up his horse, breathing hard, and Saberht slowed beside him.

The river snaked lazily across a broad valley, its waters shining like beaten iron. The Roman wall was a great ellipse that hugged the north bank. The city had been abandoned so long ago that mature oak trees sprouted from the foundations of ruined office buildings. But today, smoke rose up from a hundred fires burning within the walls and gathered in a pall. For centuries the English had shunned Lunden's antique walls, but today the old city was no longer empty.

'Now look,' Cynewulf instructed Saberht. 'What a magnificent sight. And there are layers of histories, visible to us even from here.'

'Yes, Father,' Saberht mumbled passively.

'Once the Romans called this place Londinium, and it was the capital of their province, one of the greatest cities of the western empire. Now it is ours, and we call it Lundenburh.' Fortified Lunden.

Alfred had planted his burhs, his new towns, across his half of an England partitioned between Wessex and the Danes. The burhs had been based on the remains of Roman cities, or older hill-forts, or where necessary had been built from scratch, like Wealingaford. The streets were planned, the towns walled by stone or turf, and every one of them had a mint and a market. It was a whole country laid out to a grand design. Ultimately no point in England would be more than twenty Roman miles from a burh – and when the Northmen came again, they would find a country of towns rolled up like hedgehogs.

Cynewulf closed his eyes and smiled. 'The value of history – the value of reading, novice. Once the Emperor Constantine, faced by barbarian threats, developed a similar sort of deep defence. And now we do it again.'

'Yes, Father.'

And of all the burhs, none was greater than Lunden.

Cynewulf clapped Saberht on the shoulder. 'Somewhere in there, right now, the King is holding court. And that is where we're going.'

'We're going in there? Inside the walls?' Saberht touched his throat and muttered.

Cynewulf took the young man's wrist and pulled it smartly back. Around his neck Saberht wore a small crucifix, carved of wood. Cynewulf knew immediately that it wasn't the Christian cross that comforted Saberht but the wood itself.

'Oh, Saberht,' Cynewulf said. 'A wooden charm to protect you from cities of stone?'

'Yes, Father. I mean-'

'Never mind. We'll discuss this during your confession. For now we will complete our journey, and I want no more superstitious twitching from you.'

'No, Father.'

Side by side priest and novice rode down from the higher ground, towards the gates of Lunden.