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to waste his time on childhood.
    Cynewise returned to the stockade and the royal house. Penda was busy and would not return until late in the night. He would be drunk and full of fierce lusts as always before he started on one of his raids. She would need strength. She made sure no one would disturb her and told her women that she was going to sleep. Then she drew the heavy cloth over the windows of her chamber and lit a tiny iron lamp. She listened for a moment to make sure that there was no one moving in the other chamber and then pulled out from under the wooden bed that she and Penda shared, a small plain box. With trembling hands she fumbled to open it, knowing that if Penda caught her now she would be dead, though she bore him a hundred sons. The lid came away at last and inside, wrapped in silk, was a tiny golden crucifix set with pearls given to her by her father Cynegils on her last visit home to Wessex.
    They had talked long into the night about his conversion to Christianity and, although she had refused baptism for fear of her husband, she had taken the cross, well hidden in her robes, to be kept secret in this box ever since. From time to time she came to it and pondered over the strange religion that it symbolised. That a god could be invisible and only show himself when he chose was not strange to her, but that he commanded that they did not slay their enemies (the Northumbrians, the East Anglians, the Celts) but only the desires in their own hearts, the secret roots of hatred deep in their own minds, was new to her. ‘Fight only against yourself,’ he said, ‘prepare
yourself
as a temple for your god instead of building one of stone and wood. Have no blood feuds… pay no wergild… forgive all men for what they do…’ She shivered. There was so much she did not understand.
    Again she listened and when she heard no sound she knelt before the little cross now propped up on her clothes-chest.
    ‘God of my father Cynegils,’ she whispered, her heart pounding nervously, ‘protect my sister Cyneberga and her husband King Oswald of Bernicia. Soften my lord’s heart and let him be content with his own country, with his own people.’ She stopped, opening her eyes a crack to see if there was anyone or anything changed in the room, but nothing had that she could see.
    She rose from her knees, wrapped the cross in the silk, and returned it to its box and thence to its hiding place. She then bowed low before the small wooden statue of Thunor that stood in an alcove.
    She took off her ring and laid it at his feet.
    ‘Lord of Storm, wild warrior and defender of the gods,’ she said softly, ‘watch over my lord and bring him safely home.’

    King Anna and his family only heard of Oswald’s defeat and death at the battle of Maserfield more than a week after it had occurred.
    News of Penda’s army on the move had reached them earlier, and Anna had breathed a sigh of relief that it was northward bound this time and not towards his own country. His spies in Northumbria were many, but the savagery of the fighting that followed Penda’s invasion was such that none could leave until, defeated, many of the Bernicians and Deirans fled, and refugees came straggling south.
    The queen and Etheldreda were so moved by the stories of the suffering of the refugees that they insisted on travelling north to see what they could do to help.
    Tondbert, prince of the marshlands, gave them a lodge on the island of Ely in which to rest and ordered his men to help the women in any way they required. He himself took Etheldreda in his light reed boat ahead of the main party, impressing her with his skill at manoeuvring the craft through the reeds, finding the waterways, and avoiding the mud-banks, the water snakes and the fen demons. He was a grizzled old man in his fifties, tough and brown-skinned from continual exposure to the weather, rough in manner, having learned no courtly graces in ruling such a wild and independent bunch of