The Burning Land by Bernard Cornwell

He had arrived with his usual entourage of priests, but had waved them away so he could talk with me privately. He stood for a moment just staring at the distant dull glow of fires where Harald’s men had sacked villages and I knew he was lamenting all the burned churches. “Is he an impulsive fool?” he inquired mildly.
    “You tell me, lord,” I said.
    “He’s savage, unpredictable, and given to sudden rages,” the king said. Alfred paid well for information about the northmen and kept meticulous notes on every leader. Harald had been pillaging in Frankia before its people bribed him to leave, and I did not doubt that Alfred’s spies had told him everything they could discover about Harald Bloodhair. “You know why he’s called Bloodhair?” Alfred asked.
    “Because before every battle, lord, he sacrifices a horse to Thor and soaks his hair in the animal’s blood.”
    “Yes,” Alfred said. He leaned on the palisade. “How can you be sure he’ll go to Fearnhamme?” he asked.
    “Because I’ll draw him there, lord. I’ll make a snare and pull him onto our spears.”
    “The woman?” Alfred asked with a slight shudder.
    “She is said to be special to him, lord.”
    “So I hear,” he said. “But he will have other whores.”
    “She’s not the only reason he’ll go to Fearnhamme, lord,” I said, “but she’s reason enough.”
    “Women brought sin into this world,” he said so quietly I almost did not hear him. He rested against the oak trunks of the parapet and gazed toward the small town of Godelmingum that lay just a few miles eastward. The people who lived there had been ordered to flee, and now the only inhabitants were fifty of my men who stood sentinel to warn us of the Danish approach. “I had hoped the Danes had ceased wanting this kingdom,” he broke the silence plaintively.
    “They’ll always want Wessex,” I said.
    “All I ask of God,” he went on, ignoring my truism, “is that Wessex should be safe and ruled by my son.” I answered nothing to that. There was no law that decreed a son should succeed his father as king, and if there had been then Alfred would not be Wessex’s ruler. He had succeeded his brother, and that brother had a son, Æthelwold, who wanted desperately to be king in Wessex. Æthelwold had been too young to assume the throne when his father died, but he was in his thirties now, a man in his ale-sozzled prime. Alfred sighed, then straightened. “Edward will need you as an adviser,” he said.
    “I should be honored, lord,” I said.
    Alfred heard the dutiful tone in my voice and did not like it. He stiffened, and I expected one of his customary reproofs, but instead he looked pained. “God has blessed me,” he said quietly. “When I came to the throne, Lord Uhtred, it seemed impossible that we should resist the Danes. Yet by God’s grace Wessex lives. We have churches, monasteries, schools, laws. We have made a country where God dwells, and I cannot believe it is God’s will that it should vanish when I am called to judgment.”
    “May that be many years yet, lord,” I said as dutifully as I had spoken before.
    “Oh, don’t be a fool,” he snarled with sudden anger. He shuddered, closed his eyes momentarily, and when he spoke again his voice was low and wan. “I can feel death coming, Lord Uhtred. It’slike an ambush. I know it’s there and I can do nothing to avoid it. It will take me and it will destroy me, but I do not want it to destroy Wessex with me.”
    “If it’s your God’s will,” I said harshly, “then nothing I can do nor anything Edward can do will stop it.”
    “We’re not puppets in God’s hands,” he said testily. “We are his instruments. We earn our fate.” He looked at me with some bitterness for he had never forgiven me for abandoning Christianity in favor of the older religion. “Don’t your gods reward you for good behavior?”
    “My gods are capricious, lord.” I had learned that word from Bishop Erkenwald