I.
Deep in the night, he groans.
Pain twists and winds
across his stomach, a knife
serrated, wicked.
Sweat beads on his brow;
he shuts his eyes tight
until it passes.
Weak, a fire gutters in
the corner, feeble,
wood gone to ashes —
so unlike the war flames
blazing beyond the door.
Those fires are unquenchable.
They strangle the heavens.
He closes his eyes again,
and he prays to the one God.
The king of kings.
Pagans are slaughtering
his people. On winter hills,
barren fields, in the ruins,
haunted, of Rome’s old cities.
Burned hills, now.
Burned fields.
Burned cities.
Burned bread lingers still
in his nostrils, his
fevered dreams.
His is an empire of ashes.
Smoke drifts above
and here below,
all is ash.
Bog, also, at the very edges.
Marsh and salted brine,
where warfires don’t reach.
II.
In Athelney, the Danes’ vaunted lightning
bearer doesn’t have enough kindling.
The wood, sticks, twigs: They’re all soaked through.
Soggy, sodden, crumbling.
Soaked, more sweat, and Alfred cries out
as if at the last hour, heaving, gasping,
life on the brink, death in the shadows.
He is King of the Bog.
Sick, broken, lord of mud, the rushes.
Commander of worms. Might feed them soon.
Ruler of fish, too,
schools of them.
An irony to that, bitter,
and a hope barely cogent flickers:
that his overturned throne, charred,
is being baptized in the muck,
made new in this frigid, swirling bracken.
But cinders cool where flames
that hardly warmed before
are snuffed out, thin embers dying.
Midnight’s darkness triumphs
in Skaði’s foul
howling wind.
Ice in the air,
a blade in his belly,
and darkness.
Hope is a foolish thing.
A splash outside, not far from the hut,
and he brings ink-stained hands up,
reaches for his sword, shaking,
so frail, daring to pretend
this is enough, that he can stand
if the sons of Ragnar have found him.
Or ealdormen. Wolvish Wulfhere, vipers, witan.
He shivers, waiting, thinking
of Twelfth Night, burned bread,
burned kingdoms. An old man at thirty.
III.
Wiglaf pushes past the curtain,
bright recognition though unseen.
Such sure certainty.
Hope is not foolish for Wiglaf.
He has stayed when all else betrayed,
has defied those who sold the lion of
Wessex for false peace, empty security.
He strikes flint on stone, sending sparks
into the deadened fireplace — Rest, lord —
and he helps Alfred back into bed.
The king sees a path that night in snatches of sleep,
and at morn he joins Wiglaf by the fire to etch a plan,
hand trembling, murmuring, a stick on the loamy floor.
For he knows down deep that God may,
when He will, replace bad with good,
grief with happiness. And did not the Lord himself
spend forty days in the wilderness?
Selwood. In May, at that old gathering place
where his grandfather stood tall.
Ecgberht’s Stone. The mottled forest’s hall.
A call for the fyrd, the shepherds, the men
of the land who want to live as men in the land:
Meet at Ecgberht’s Stone.
And the Bog King stirs on the margins,
a whisper, a rumor creeping from village
to village, on farms and now-planted
fields, during Eostre’s fervid celebrations,
in the white bleached bones of Rome.
A ghost on the smoldering fringes,
yet flesh.
The true king lives.
He will be at Ecgberht’s Stone in May.
Alone, those gray eyes, God-possessed
— or, perhaps, with an army.
IV.
Dizzying, on the eve of that assembly
to behold sharp stars no longer choked
by Guthrum’s putrid smoke.
Those pinprick lights set into the firmament
are cold, remote. Alfred’s stomach tightens
gazing at them, yet as Íringe’s Wec wheels closer
to first light he senses benevolence — a blessing.
He is one of Abraham’s numberless children
grasping at peace, security enough
for his people to be grafted into the olive tree.
Preserving the way, knowledge of faith,
on this small island battered by foamy sea.
When the stars dissipate and day breaks,
the deposed king will know if he can stand,
if his vision of Anglaland will advance.
A country of schools, books, burhs to thwart
the vikings’ bloody plans.
A weighty burden to carry, that dream, in this time.
Kings who don’t feel the weight of the task assigned,
who don’t answer the dark with defiance, should not be kings at all.
Alfred, burdened, does not sleep.
Rosy red dawn greets him all too soon, and
his loyal company — then illumines the arriving
steadfast four thousand who have journeyed
across hills, fields, to be with him in the trees.
No fear of heathen would hold them back.
Nothing at all could harry that unlikely
undaunted gathering at Ecgberht’s Stone.
They march to Iley Oak, then Ethandun,
where, outnumbered, they cut down the Danes
who had made great slaughter in Anglaland,
who had thought to reverse the world’s turn to Christ
and point the people to worship of stone and iron.
Thor’s hammer is not all-powerful; Woden’s one eye
cannot see all things.
Wise, patient, Alfred offers a choice to the remnant:
Repent, bow to the one who does see all things,
who does hold all power in His hand.
To some, this looks like folly. It is far too trusting.
But the spear-Danes accept Alfred’s mercy, and Guthrum
upholds his word, promised at the treaty table in May, after Ethandun.
They sit by the warming fire together, then, a feast,
and a new pattern is writ in the hearth’s dancing flames.
Peace in the land, for now, and a king who will forge
peace all the more,
immense weight laden on his shoulders,
ever with fear and trembling before
the throne of the King over all kings.