Sword Song by Bernard Cornwell Page A

you are a warrior, and he needs warriors.” He paused to pull out the wooden cross that hung about his neck. “Swear on it,” he said.
    “Swear what?”
    “That you will keep your oath to him! Do that and I will keep silent. Do that and I will deny what happened. Do that and I will protect you.”
    I hesitated.
    “If you break your oath to Alfred,” Pyrlig said, “then you are my enemy and I’ll be forced to kill you.”
    “You think you could?” I asked.
    He grinned his mischievous grin. “Ah, you like me, lord, even though I am a Welshman and a priest, and you’d be reluctant to kill me, and I’d have three strokes before you woke up to your danger, so yes, lord, I would kill you.”
    I put my right hand on the cross. “I swear it,” I said.
    And I was still Alfred’s man.

THREE
    W e reached Coccham that evening and I watched Gisela, who had as little love for Christianity as I did, warm to Father Pyrlig. He flirted with her outrageously, complimented her extravagantly, and played with our children. We had two then, and we had been lucky, for both babies had lived, as had their mother. Uhtred was the oldest. My son. He was four years old with hair as golden-colored as mine and a strong little face with a pug nose, blue eyes, and a stubborn chin. I loved him then. My daughter Stiorra was two years old. She had a strange name and at first I had not liked it, but Gisela had pleaded with me and I could refuse her almost nothing, and certainly not the naming of a daughter. Stiorra simply meant “star,” and Gisela swore that she and I had met under a lucky star and that our daughter had been born under the same star. I had got used to the name by now and loved it as I loved the child, who had her mother’s dark hair and long face and sudden mischievous smile. “Stiorra, Stiorra!” I would say as I tickled her, or let her play with my arm rings. Stiorra, so beautiful.
    I played with her on the night before Gisela and I left for Wintanceaster. It was spring and the Temes had subsided so that the river meadows showed again and the world was hazed with green as the leaves budded. The first lambs wobbled in fields bright with cowslips, and the blackbirds filled the sky with rippling song. Salmon had returned to the river and our woven willow traps provided good eating. The pear trees in Coccham were thick with buds, and just as thick with bullfinches, which had to be scared away by small boys so that we would have fruit in the summertime. It was a good time of year, a time when the world stirred, and a time when we had been summoned to Alfred’s capital for the wedding of his daughter, Æthelflaed, to my cousin, Æthelred. And that night, as I pretended my knee was a horse and that Stiorra was the horse’s rider, I thought about my promise to provide Æthelred with his wedding gift. The gift of a city. Lundene.
    Gisela was spinning wool. She had shrugged when I had told her she was not to be Queen of Mercia, and she had nodded gravely when I said I would keep my oath with Alfred. She accepted fate more readily than I did. Fate and that fortunate star, she said, had brought us together despite all that the world had done to keep us apart. “If you keep your oath to Alfred,” she said suddenly, interrupting my play with Stiorra, “then you must capture Lundene from Sigefrid?”
    “Yes,” I said, marveling as I often did that her thoughts and mine were so often the same.
    “Can you?” she asked.
    “Yes,” I said. Sigefrid and Erik were still in the old city, their men guarding the Roman walls that they had repaired with timber. No ship could now come up the Temes without paying the brothers their toll, and that toll was huge, so that the river traffic had stopped, as merchants sought other ways to bring goods to Wessex. King Guthrum of East Anglia had threatened Sigefrid and Erik with war, but his threat had proved empty. Guthrum did not want war, he just wanted to persuade Alfred that he was doing his