"I have just been told, gently enough, that I make a deficient servant, Osbert. Did you know that?"
The woman wails in denial, covers her crimson face with both hands. Her husband is looking back and forth, his face a blank, uncertain what to think.
"It is the only reason we let you claim rank," Osbert murmurs, closing the door. "The fact that you can't even clean boots properly."
Aeldred laughs, then sobers, looking up at his friend. "You saved my life," he says, "and then these people saved ours." Osbert hesitates. "You remember anything of the night?" The king shakes his head.
"Just as well," his friend says, eventually.
"We should pray," Aeldred says. They do, giving thanks on their knees, facing east to the sun, for all known blessings.
They wait until sunset and then they leave, to hide among the marshes, besieged in their own land.
Beortferth is a low-lying, wet islet, lost amid dank, spreading salt fens. Only the smaller rodents live there, and marsh birds, water snakes, biting insects in summer. It was the bird-catchers who first found the place, long ago, making their precarious way through the fens, on foot, or poling flat-bottomed skiffs.
It is almost always foggy here, tendrils of mist, the god's sun a distant, wan thing, even on the clear days. You can see strange visions here, get hopelessly lost. Horses and men have been sucked down in the stagnant bogs, which are deep in places. Some say there are nameless creatures down there, alive since the days of darkness. The safe paths are narrow, not remotely predictable, you must know them exactly, ride or walk in single file, easy to ambush. Groves of gnarled trees rise up in places, startling and strange in the greyness, roots in water, leading the wanderer to stray and fall.
In winter it is always damp, unhealthy, there is desperately little in the way of food, and that winter—when the Erlings won the Battle of Camburn Field—was a cruelly harsh one.
Endless freezing rain and snow, thin, grey-yellow ice forming in the marsh, the wet wind slashing. Almost every one of them has a cough, rheumy eyes, loose bowels. All of them are hungry, and cold.
It is Aeldred's finest hour. It is this winter that will create and define him as what he will become, and some will claim to have sensed this as it was happening.
Osbert is not one of them, nor Burgred. Concealing their own coughs and fluxes as best they can, flatly denying exhaustion, refusing to acknowledge hunger, Aeldred's two commanders (as young as he was, that winter) will each say, long afterwards, that they survived by not thinking ahead, addressing only the demands of each day, each hour. Eyes lowered like a man pushing a plough through a punishing, stony field.
In the first month they arrange and supervise the building of a primitive fort on the isle, more a windbreak with a roof than anything else. When it is complete, before he ever steps inside, Aeldred stands in a slanting rain before the forty-seven men who are with him by then (a number never forgotten, all of them named in the Chronicle) and formally declares the isle to be the seat of his realm, heart of the Anglcyn in their land, in the name of Jad.
His realm. Forty-seven men. Ingemar Svidrirson and his Erlings are inside Raedhill's walls, foraging unopposed through a beaten countryside. Not a swift sea raid for slaves and glory and gold. Here to settle, and rule.
Osbert looks across sparse, patchy grass in rain towards Burgred of Denferth, and then back at the man who leads them in this hunted, misty refuge, with salt in the biting air, and for the first time since Camburn Field he allows himself the idea of hope. Looking up from the plough. Aeldred kneels in prayer; they all do.
That same afternoon, having given thanks, in piety, their first raiding party rides out from the swamps.
Fifteen of them, Burgred leading. They are gone two days, to make a wide loop away from here. They surprise and kill eight Erlings foraging for winter provisions in a depleted countryside, and bring their weapons and horses (and the provisions) back. A triumph, a victory. While they are out, four men have come wandering in through the fens, to join the king.
Hope, a licence to dream. The beginnings of these things. Men gather close around a night fire in Beortferth Hall, walls and a roof between them and the rain at last. There is one bard among them, his instrument damply out of tune. It doesn't matter. He sings the old songs, and Aeldred joins in the singing, and then all of them do. They take turns on watch outside, on the higher ground, and farther out, at the entrances to the marshes, east and north. Sound carries here; those on watch can hear the singing sometimes. It is a warming for them, amazingly so.
That same night, Aeldred's fever comes again.
They have their one singer, and a single aged cleric with bad knees, some artisans, masons, bird-catchers, fletchers, farmers, fighting men from the fyrd, with and without weapons. No leech. No one with knives and cups to bleed him, or any sure knowledge of herbs. The cleric prays, kneeling painfully, sun disk in his hands, where the king lies by the fire and Osbert—for it is seen as his task—tries, in anguish, to decide whether Aeldred, thrashing and crying out, oblivious, lost to them and to Jad's created world, needs to be warmed or cooled at any given moment, and his heart breaks again and again all the long night.
By springtime there are almost two hundred of them on the isle. The season has brought other life: herons, otters, the loud croaking of frogs in the marsh. There are more wooden structures now, even a small chapel, and they have organized, of necessity, a network of food suppliers, hunting parties. The hunters become more than that, if Erlings are seen.
The northmen have had a difficult winter of their own, it appears. Short of food, not enough of them to safely extend their reach beyond the fastness of Raedhill until others come—if they come—when the weather turns. And their own foraging parties have been encountering, with disturbing frequency, horsed Anglcyn fighters with murderous vengeance in their eyes and hands, emerging from some base the Erlings cannot find in this too-wide, forested, hostile countryside. It is one thing to beat a royal army in a field, another to hold what you claim.
The mood on the isle is changing. Spring can do that, quickening season. They have a routine now, shelter, birdsong, greater numbers each day.
Amid all this, those of the Beortferth leaders not taking parties out from the fens are… learning how to read.
It is a direct order of the king's, an obsession. An idea he has about the kingdom he would make. Aeldred himself, stealing time, labours at a rough-hewn wooden table at a translation into Anglcyn of the single, charred Rhodian text someone found amid the ruins of a chapel west and south of them. Burgred has not been shy about teasing the king about this task. It is entirely uncertain, he maintains, what ultimate good it will be to have a copy in their own tongue of a classical text on the treatment of cataracts.
The consolations of learning, the king replies, airily enough, are profound, in and of themselves. He swears a good deal, however, as he works, not seeming especially consoled. It is a source of amusement to many of them, though not necessarily to those engaged, at a given moment, in sounding out their letters like children under the cleric's irritable instruction.
Among the new recruits making their way late in winter, through the fens to Beortferth was a lean grey man claiming training in leechcraft. He has bled the king by cup and blade, achieving little, if anything. There is also a woman with them now, old, stooped like a hoop—and so safe among so many restless men.