Knight Rodrigo had been living a boring life in Chester's camp these days, staring at the purple light peeking through the cracks in the sky, but the hoarse voice of the Derbyshire Clergy kept coming to his ears.

This was the eighth time that St. Alkmund had been mentioned, and the knight thought to himself that the old fellow could repeat something countless times, and each time he would be as excited as he had been when he first mentioned it. The only new face in the camp these days is a Count of Mercia's Guard, a rather memorable face, except that its owner has a very common Anglo name: Guthraki. The Mercian with nostrils as big as the mouth of a chimney did not look good at anyone as soon as he entered the barracks, and it was only after he took the initiative to challenge and was defeated by Rodrigo for the fifth time that he changed his expression to a less ugly expression. So, the morning before yesterday, a squire in red armor had come and invited the Spaniards to meet Count Mercia in the castle.

"My guard said you weren't an ordinary mercenary, Spaniard?" Count Mercia was reading a letter, and asked casually without showing much interest in Rodrigo in front of him.

"I'm a knight, my lord."

Count Mercia raised his head: "A Spanish knight, this is rare in the north, what kind of fate drove you to come here from that land full of sunshine?" ”

"A murder of a blood relative." Rodrigo replied briefly.

The Count is not too strange, blood vendettas are still rare in this day and age? He just nodded: "Guthrak told me, you are proficient in the use of swords and spears, and you are also good at training?" ”

Rodrigo was a little surprised, he had never mentioned training to the Anglo guard, but he nodded and admitted.

"Okay." Count Moka didn't continue to ask, didn't even let him prove anything, "Spaniard, since you are willing to fight with us, you are our friend, and the addition of friends always makes the shield wall stronger. ”

Rodrigo then learns that he has become the commander of all the Derbyshire militias, and that the priest who hired him has become his subordinate.

So the monk, who had ignored the Spaniards, began to babble on and on about anything he thought was valuable, including the number of cattle in the abbey and the glorious history of the Derbyshire militia, but knew nothing about the number of horses in the camp at the moment, or the attendance of the soldiers, and only pronounced the names of the saints and Mrs. Ethelfred more affectionately than at home. This made Rodrigo can't help but feel that it is better to be this guy's superior than his subordinate.

At this moment, a cavalryman galloped from the direction of the distant oak watchtower, a typical Danish knight of Northumbria, dressed in an indigo robe, covered with a sturdy iron armor with strong locks, and in addition to a sword fastened to his belt with a leather buckle, a strangely shaped saber hung from the light saddle, which Rodrigo had only seen at the Moorish merchants of Zaragoza, and it was a weapon of the Seljuks of the East.

"Your Majesty has already conquered?" At Chester Castle, the Earl of Mercia confirmed the news to the messenger again.

"Yes, my lord, at the moment the Dafelds and the Irish are besieged near Emrin."

"Does Your Majesty have any explanation?" The Count finally breathed a sigh of relief.

"Our army needs more craftsmen, and at the moment Lord William Mallett is building a castle in the north, and His Majesty's main force also needs to build more fortresses to surround the enemy." The messenger immediately replied.

The war in Wales seemed to end much sooner than expected, and the Earl of Moka, though he had no doubt about the king's defeat of the enemy, did not expect it to go so smoothly, and according to the Northumbrian knights, the king attacked on the night of the arrival of the king and the prince of Grufiz, and the enemy's camp was completely occupied before dawn the next day, and King Dafeld and Prince Grufiz abandoned all their baggage equipment and fled westward, only to be intercepted by the armies of Boas and Gwynes, The army of lords of the valley ceased to exist after this battle. At the current pace, perhaps before All Saints' Day, the English will be able to return to their divisions.

Suddenly, the Count remembered something, and asked, "You say that Lord William Mallett is building the castle?" ”

"Yes, my lord, His Majesty ordered him to build a new stone fortress on the Roman fortress of Kergistanin in Gwynes."

The Earl of Mercia finally made a stir, did the king want to maintain a garrison in Wales, or even establish a royal rule? He couldn't help but think of Edgar's insistence on gathering the main infantry forces such as Northumbria and Wessex before sending troops. It seems that the king did not intend to go into battle only as reinforcements from the Welsh, but wanted to exert direct military influence on Wales. The castle built by his uncle Mallett at the choke point on the northern coast seems to have been intended to monitor any threat of invasion on the Irish Sea, suggesting that the king did not trust the Gwynnesians and was prepared to take the defense of these areas into his own hands.

This is not a trivial matter, although the English have long maintained an advantage over the Welsh, even when the other side is united, the English can not fall behind, but the ancient Anglo-Saxon kings at most only made these small British monarchs submit, that is, the Earl of Glamorgan, who previously expressed his allegiance to the king, Caradog, in fact, among the Britons, he still called himself the king, and the obligation to the English was only a meager tribute of forty pounds a year. If King Edgar had not understood Boas and Gwynes's previous submissions in this way, and had wanted to ask for more, the war would probably not have ended there. The Earl did not know how much strength it required to conquer Wales, nor did he know that in the original history, Edward I of the Plantagenet Dynasty had invested more than 98,000 pounds in two years for the war in Wales, and he only knew that it was impossible to conquer this unruly nation with three or four thousand horsemen. And what about the Danes? Was the king not at all worried about the viking rage, or did he really believe that the diplomatic genius of the Bishop of Canterbury would be enough to quell the wolves lurking beneath the glacier?

The Earl of Moka then began to consider sending reinforcements, but he could not abandon his duty to defend Chester and rush to the Welsh front without the king's orders. Looking at the letter handed to him by the messenger, Moka's mind seemed to be caught in a labyrinth, and he could not get out of this disturbing myth until he knew the king's intentions.

Soon, the news of the victory at the front spread throughout Chester, and the English began to cheer and celebrate, only the Spaniards were slightly disappointed, took a sip of light beer, and secretly thought to themselves, it seems that this war will not have its own meritorious service.