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so that Alfred, who was waiting amidships, staggered. There were kings who might have disemboweled a steersman for that loss of dignity, but Alfred seemed not to notice. He was talking earnestly with a thin-faced, scrape-chinned, pale-cheeked monk. It was Asser of Wales. I had heard that Brother Asser was the king’s new pet, and I knew he hated me, which was only right because I hated him. I still smiled at him and he twitched away as if I had just vomited down his robe, bending his head closer to Alfred who could have been his twin, for Alfred of Wessex looked much more like a priest than a king. He wore a long black cloak and a growing baldness gave him the tonsured look of a monk. His hands, like a clerk’s, were always ink stained, while his bony face was lean and serious and earnest and pale. His beard was thin. He often went clean-shaven, but now had a beard streaked thick with white hairs.
    Crewmen secured the Haligast , then Alfred took Asser’s elbow and stepped ashore with him. The Welshman wore an oversized cross on his chest and Alfred touched it briefly before turning to me. “My lord Uhtred,” he said enthusiastically. He was being unusually pleasant, not because he was glad to see me, but because he thought I was plotting treason. There was little other reason for me to sup with his nephew Æthelwold.
    “My lord King,” I said, and bowed to him. I ignored Brother Asser. The Welshman had once accused me of piracy, murder, and a dozen other things, and most of his accusations had been accurate, but I was still alive. He shot me a dismissive glance, then scuttled off through the mud, evidently going to make certain that the nuns in Coccham’s convent were not pregnant, drunk, or happy.
    Alfred, followed by Egwine, who now commanded the household troops, and by six of those troops, walked along my new battlements. He glanced at Ulf’s ship, but said nothing. I knew I had to tell him of the capture of Lundene, but I decided to let that news wait until hehad asked his questions of me. For now he was content to inspect the work we had been doing and he found nothing to criticize, nor did he expect to. Coccham’s burh was far more advanced than any of the others. The next fort west on the Temes, at Welengaford, had scarcely broken ground, let alone built a palisade, while the walls at Oxnaforda had slumped into their ditch after a week of violent rain just before Yule. Coccham’s burh, though, was almost finished. “I am told,” Alfred said, “that the fyrd is reluctant to work. You have not found that true?”
    The fyrd was the army, raised from the shire, and the fyrd not only built the burhs, but formed their garrisons. “The fyrd are very reluctant to work, lord,” I said.
    “Yet you have almost finished?”
    I smiled. “I hanged ten men,” I said, “and it encouraged the rest to enthusiasm.”
    He stopped at a place where he could stare downriver. Swans made the view lovely. I watched him. The lines on his face were deeper and his skin paler. He looked ill, but then Alfred of Wessex was always a sick man. His stomach hurt and his bowels hurt, and I saw a grimace as a stab of pain lanced through him. “I heard,” he spoke coldly, “that you hanged them without benefit of trial?”
    “I did, lord, yes.”
    “There are laws in Wessex,” he said sternly.
    “And if the burh isn’t built,” I said, “then there will be no Wessex.”
    “You like to defy me,” he said mildly.
    “No, lord, I swore an oath to you. I do your work.”
    “Then hang no more men without a fair trial,” he said sharply, then turned and stared across the river to the Mercian bank. “A king must bring justice, Lord Uhtred. That is a king’s job. And if a land has no king, how can there be law?” He still spoke mildly, but he was testing me, and for a moment I felt alarm. I had assumed he had come to discover what Æthelwold had said to me, but his mention of Mercia, and of its lack of a king, suggested he