THE WARRIOR CHRONICLES

Books 1-6

BERNARD CORNWELL

Table Of Contents

Title Page

THE LAST KINGDOM

THE PALE HORSEMAN

THE LORDS OF THE NORTH

SWORD SONG

THE BURNING LAND

DEATH OF KINGS

About the Author

Also by Bernard Cornwell

The Sharpe Series

Copyright

About the Publisher

THE LAST KINGDOM

THE LAST KINGDOM

BERNARD CORNWELL

THE LAST KINGDOM

is for Judy, with love

Wyrd bið ful ãræd

CONTENTS

Title Page

Dedication

Map

Place-names

Prologue: NORTHUMBRIA, 866–867 AD

Part One: A PAGAN CHILDHOOD

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Part Two: THE LAST KINGDOM

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Part Three: THE SHIELD WALL

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Historical Note

Copyright

PLACE-NAMES

The spelling of place-names in Anglo-Saxon England was an uncertain business, with no consistency and no agreement even about the name itself. Thus London was variously rendered as Lundonia, Lundenberg, Lundenne, Lundene, Lundenwic, Lundenceaster and Lundres. Doubtless some readers will prefer other versions of the names listed below, but I have usually employed whatever spelling is cited in the Oxford Dictionary of English Place-Names for the years nearest or contained within Alfred’s reign, 871–899 AD, but even that solution is not foolproof. Hayling Island, in 956, was written as both Heilincigae and Hæglingaiggæ. Nor have I been consistent myself; I have preferred the modern England to Englaland and, instead of Norðhymbralond, have used Northumbria to avoid the suggestion that the boundaries of the ancient kingdom coincide with those of the modern county. So this list, like the spellings themselves, is capricious:

Æbbanduna

Abingdon, Berkshire

Æsc’s Hill

Ashdown, Berkshire

Baðum (pronounced Bathum)

Bath, Avon

Basengas

Basing, Hampshire

Beamfleot

Benfleet, Essex

Beardastopol

Barnstable, Devon

Bebbanburg

Bamburgh Castle, Northumberland

Berewic

Berwick-upon-Tweed, Northumberland

Berrocscire

Berkshire

Blaland

North Africa

Cantucton

Cannington, Somerset

Cetreht

Catterick, Yorkshire

Cippanhamm

Chippenham, Wiltshire

Cirrenceastre

Cirencester, Gloucestershire

Contwaraburg

Canterbury, Kent

Cornwalum

Cornwall

Cridianton

Crediton, Devon

Cynuit

Cynuit Hillfort, nr. Cannington, Somerset

Dalriada

Western Scotland

Defnascir

Devonshire

Deoraby

Derby, Derbyshire

Dic

Diss, Norfolk

Dunholm

Durham, County Durham

Eoferwic

York (also the Danish Jorvic, pronounced Yorvik)

Exanceaster

Exeter, Devon

Fromtun

Frampton on Severn, Gloucestershire

Gegnesburh

Gainsborough, Lincolnshire

the Gewæsc

The Wash

Gleawecestre

Gloucester, Gloucestershire

Grantaceaster

Cambridge, Cambridgeshire

Gyruum

Jarrow, County Durham

Haithabu

Hedeby, trading town in Southern Denmark

Hamanfunta

Havant, Hampshire

Hamptonscir

Hampshire

Hamtun

Southampton, Hampshire

Heilincigae

Hayling Island, Hampshire

Hreapandune

Repton, Derbyshire

Kenet

River Kennet

Ledecestre

Leicester, Leicestershire

Lindisfarena

Lindisfarne (Holy Island), Northumberland

Lundene

London

Mereton

Marten, Wiltshire

Meslach

Matlock, Derbyshire

Pedredan

River Parrett

Pictland

Eastern Scotland

the Poole

Poole Harbour, Dorset

Readingum

Reading, Berkshire

Sæfern

River Severn

Scireburnan

Sherborne, Dorset

Snotengaham

Nottingham, Nottinghamshire

Solente

Solent

Streonshall

Strensall, Yorkshire

Sumorsæte

Somerset

Suth Seaxa

Sussex (South Saxons)

Synningthwait

Swinithwaite, Yorkshire

Temes

River Thames

Thornsæta

Dorset

Tine

River Tyne

Trente

River Trent

Tuede

River Tweed

Twyfyrde

Tiverton, Devon

Uisc

River Exe

Werham

Wareham, Dorset

Wiht

Isle of Wight

Wiire

River Wear

Wiltun

Wilton, Wiltshire

Wiltunscir

Wiltshire

Winburnan

Wimborne Minster, Dorset

Wintanceaster

Winchester, Hampshire

PROLOGUE

Northumbria, 866–867 AD

My name is Uhtred. I am the son of Uhtred, who was the son of Uhtred and his father was also called Uhtred. My father’s clerk, a priest called Beocca, spelt it Utred. I do not know if that was how my father would have written it, for he could neither read nor write, but I can do both and sometimes I take the old parchments from their wooden chest and I see the name spelled Uhtred or Utred or Ughtred or Ootred. I look at those parchments which are deeds saying that Uhtred, son of Uhtred is the lawful and sole owner of the lands that are carefully marked by stones and by dykes, by oaks and by ash, by marsh and by sea, and I dream of those lands, wave-beaten and wild beneath the wind-driven sky. I dream, and know that one day I will take back the land from those who stole it from me.

I am an Ealdorman, though I call myself Earl Uhtred, which is the same thing, and the fading parchments are proof of what I own. The law says I own that land, and the law, we are told, is what makes us men under God instead of beasts in the ditch. But the law does not help me take back my land. The law wants compromise. The law thinks money will compensate for loss. The law, above all, fears the bloodfeud. But I am Uhtred, son of Uhtred, and this is the tale of a bloodfeud. It is a tale of how I will take from my enemy what the law says is mine. And it is the tale of a woman and of her father, a king.

He was my king and all that I have I owe to him. The food that I eat, the hall where I live and the swords of my men, all came from Alfred, my king, who hated me.

This story begins long before I met Alfred. It begins when I was nine years old and first saw the Danes. It was the year 866 and I was not called Uhtred then, but Osbert, for I was my father’s second son and it was the eldest who took the name Uhtred. My brother was seventeen then, tall and well-built, with our family’s fair hair and my father’s morose face.

The day I first saw the Danes we were riding along the sea shore with hawks on our wrists. There was my father, my father’s brother, my brother, myself and a dozen retainers. It was autumn. The sea-cliffs were thick with the last growth of summer, there were seals on the rocks, and a host of seabirds wheeling and shrieking, too many to let the hawks off their leashes. We rode till we came to the criss-crossing shallows that rippled between our land and Lindisfarena, the Holy Island, and I remember staring across the water at the broken walls of the abbey. The Danes had plundered it, but that had been many years before I was born, and though the monks were living there again the monastery had never regained its former glory.

I also remember that day as beautiful and perhaps it was. Perhaps it rained, but I do not think so. The sun shone, the seas were low, the breakers gentle and the world happy. The hawk’s claws gripped my wrist through the leather sleeve, her hooded head twitching because she could hear the cries of the white birds. We had left the fortress in the forenoon, riding north, and though we carried hawks we did not ride to hunt, but rather so my father could make up his mind.

We ruled this land. My father, Ealdorman Uhtred, was lord of everything south of the Tuede and north of the Tine, but we did have a king in Northumbria and his name, like mine, was Osbert. He lived to the south of us, rarely came north, and did not bother us, but now a man called Ælla wanted the throne and Ælla, who was an Ealdorman from the hills west of Eoferwic, had raised an army to challenge Osbert and had sent gifts to my father to encourage his support. My father, I realise now, held the fate of the rebellion in his grip. I wanted him to support Osbert, for no other reason than the rightful king shared my name and foolishly, at nine years old, I believed any man called Osbert must be noble, good and brave. In truth Osbert was a dribbling fool, but he was the king, and my father was reluctant to abandon him. But Osbert had sent no gifts and had shown no respect, while Ælla had, and so my father worried. At a moment’s notice we could lead a hundred and fifty men to war, all well armed, and given a month we could swell that force to over four hundred foemen, so whichever man we supported would be the king and grateful to us.

Or so we thought.

And then I saw them.

Three ships.

In my memory they slid from a bank of sea mist, and perhaps they did, but memory is a faulty thing and my other images of that day are of a clear, cloudless sky, so perhaps there was no mist, but it seems to me that one moment the sea was empty and the next there were three ships coming from the south.

Beautiful things. They appeared to rest weightless on the ocean, and when their oars dug into the waves they skimmed the water. Their prows and sterns curled high and were tipped with gilded beasts, serpents and dragons, and it seemed to me that on that far off summer’s day the three boats danced on the water, propelled by the rise and fall of the silver wings of their oar banks. The sun flashed off the wet blades, splinters of light, then the oars dipped, were tugged and the beast-headed boats surged and I stared entranced.

‘The devil’s turds,’ my father growled. He was not a very good Christian, but he was frightened enough at that moment to make the sign of the cross.

‘And may the devil swallow them,’ my uncle said. His name was Ælfric and he was a slender man; sly, dark and secretive.

The three boats had been rowing northwards, their square sails furled on their long yards, but when we turned back south to canter homewards on the sand so that our horses’ manes tossed like wind-blown spray and the hooded hawks mewed in alarm, the ships turned with us. Where the cliff had collapsed to leave a ramp of broken turf we rode inland, the horses heaving up the slope, and from there we galloped along the coastal path to our fortress.

To Bebbanburg. Bebba had been a queen in our land many years before, and she had given her name to my home, which is the dearest place in all the world. The fort stands on a high rock that curls out to sea. The waves beat on its eastern shore and break white on the rock’s northern point, and a shallow sea-lake ripples along the western side between the fortress and the land. To reach Bebbanburg you must take the causeway to the south, a low strip of rock and sand that is guarded by a great wooden tower, the Low Gate, that is built on top of an earthen wall, and we thundered through the tower’s arch, our horses white with sweat, and rode past the granaries, the smithy, the mews and the stables, all wooden buildings well thatched with rye straw, and so up the inner path to the High Gate which protected the peak of the rock that was surrounded by a wooden rampart encircling my father’s hall. There we dismounted, letting slaves take our horses and hawks, and ran to the eastern rampart from where we gazed out to sea.

The three ships were now close to the islands where the puffins live and the seal-folk dance in winter. We watched them, and my stepmother, alarmed by the sound of hooves, came from the hall to join us on the rampart. ‘The devil has opened his bowels,’ my father greeted her.

‘God and his saints preserve us,’ Gytha said, crossing herself. I had never known my real mother who had been my father’s second wife and, like his first, had died in childbirth, so both my brother and I, who were really half-brothers, had no mother, but I thought of Gytha as my mother and, on the whole, she was kind to me, kinder indeed than my father, who did not much like children. Gytha wanted me to be a priest, saying that my elder brother would inherit the land and become a warrior to protect it so I must find another life path. She had given my father two sons and a daughter, but none had lived beyond a year.

The three ships were coming closer now. It seemed they had come to inspect Bebbanburg, which did not worry us for the fortress was reckoned impregnable, and so the Danes could stare all they wanted. The nearest ship had twin banks of twelve oars each and, as the ship coasted a hundred paces offshore, a man leaped from the ship’s side and ran down the nearer bank of oars, stepping from one shaft to the next like a dancer, and he did it wearing a mail shirt and holding a sword. We all prayed he would fall, but of course he did not. He had long fair hair, very long, and when he had pranced the full length of the oar bank he turned and ran the shafts again.

‘She was trading at the mouth of the Tine a week ago,’ Ælfric, my father’s brother, said.

‘You know that?’

‘I saw her,’ Ælfric said, ‘I recognise that prow. See how there’s a light-coloured strake on the bend?’ He spat. ‘She didn’t have a dragon’s head then.’

‘They take the beast-heads off when they trade,’ my father said. ‘What were they buying?’

‘Exchanging pelts for salt and dried fish. Said they were merchants from Haithabu.’

‘They’re merchants looking for a fight now,’ my father said, and the Danes on the three ships were indeed challenging us by clashing their spears and swords against their painted shields, but there was little they could do against Bebbanburg and nothing we could do to hurt them, though my father ordered his wolf banner raised. The flag showed a snarling wolf’s head and it was his standard in battle, but there was no wind and so the banner hung limp and its defiance was lost on the pagans who, after a while, became bored with taunting us, settled to their thwarts and rowed off to the south.

‘We must pray,’ my stepmother said. Gytha was much younger than my father. She was a small, plump woman with a mass of fair hair and a great reverence for Saint Cuthbert whom she worshipped because he had worked miracles. In the church beside the hall she kept an ivory comb that was said to have been Cuthbert’s beard-comb, and perhaps it was.

‘We must act,’ my father snarled. He turned away from the battlements. ‘You,’ he spoke to my elder brother, Uhtred. ‘Take a dozen men, ride south. Watch the pagans, but nothing more, you understand? If they land their ships on my ground I want to know where.’

‘Yes, father.’

‘But don’t fight them,’ my father ordered. ‘Just watch the bastards and be back here by nightfall.’

Six other men were sent to rouse the country. Every free man owed military duty and so my father was assembling his army, and by the morrow’s dusk he expected to have close to two hundred men, some armed with axes, spears or reaping hooks, while his retainers, those men who lived with us in Bebbanburg, would be equipped with well-made swords and hefty shields. ‘If the Danes are outnumbered,’ my father told me that night, ‘they won’t fight. They’re like dogs, the Danes. Cowards at heart, but they’re given courage by being in a pack.’ It was dark and my brother had not returned, but no one was unduly anxious about that. Uhtred was capable, if sometimes reckless, and doubtless he would arrive in the small hours and so my father had ordered a beacon lit in the iron becket on top of the High Gate to guide him home.

We reckoned we were safe in Bebbanburg for it had never fallen to an enemy’s assault, yet my father and uncle were still worried that the Danes had returned to Northumbria. ‘They’re looking for food,’ my father said. ‘The hungry bastards want to land, steal some cattle, then sail away.’

I remembered my uncle’s words, how the ships had been at the mouth of the Tine trading furs for dried fish, so how could they be hungry? But I said nothing. I was nine years old and what did I know of Danes?

I did know that they were savages, pagans and terrible. I knew that for two generations before I was born their ships had raided our coasts. I knew that Father Beocca, my father’s clerk and our mass priest, prayed every Sunday to spare us from the fury of the Northmen, but that fury had passed me by. No Danes had come to our land since I had been born, but my father had fought them often enough and that night, as we waited for my brother to return, he spoke of his old enemy. They came, he said, from northern lands where ice and mist prevailed, they worshipped the old gods, the same ones we had worshipped before the light of Christ came to bless us, and when they had first come to Northumbria, he told me, fiery dragons had whipped across the northern sky, great bolts of lightning had scarred the hills and the sea had been churned by whirlwinds.

‘They are sent by God,’ Gytha said timidly, ‘to punish us.’

‘Punish us for what?’ my father demanded savagely.

‘For our sins,’ Gytha said, making the sign of the cross.

‘Our sins be damned,’ my father snarled. ‘They come here because they’re hungry.’ He was irritated by my stepmother’s piety, and he refused to give up his wolf’s head banner that proclaimed our family’s descent from Woden, the ancient Saxon god of battles. The wolf, Ealdwulf the smith had told me, was one of Woden’s three favoured beasts, the others being the eagle and the raven. My mother wanted our banner to show the cross, but my father was proud of his ancestors, though he rarely talked about Woden. Even at nine years old I understood that a good Christian should not boast of being spawned by a pagan god, but I also liked the idea of being a god’s descendant and Ealdwulf often told me tales of Woden, how he had rewarded our people by giving us the land we called England, and how he had once thrown a war spear clear around the moon, and how his shield could darken the midsummer sky and how he could reap all the corn in the world with one stroke of his great sword. I liked those tales. They were better than my stepmother’s stories of Cuthbert’s miracles. Christians, it seemed to me, were forever weeping and I did not think Woden’s worshippers cried much.

We waited in the hall. It was, indeed it still is, a great wooden hall, strongly thatched and stout beamed, with a harp on a dais and a stone hearth in the centre of the floor. It took a dozen slaves a day to keep that great fire going, dragging the wood along the causeway and up through the gates, and at summer’s end we would make a log pile bigger than the church just as a winter store. At the edges of the hall were timber platforms, filled with rammed earth and layered with woollen rugs, and it was on those platforms that we lived, up above the draughts. The hounds stayed on the bracken-strewn floor below, where lesser men could eat at the year’s four great feasts.

There was no feast that night, just bread and cheese and ale, and my father waited for my brother and wondered aloud if the Danes were restless again. ‘They usually come for food and plunder,’ he told me, ‘but in some places they’ve stayed and taken land.’

‘You think they want our land?’ I asked.

‘They’ll take any land,’ he said irritably. He was always irritated by my questions, but that night he was worried and so he talked on. ‘Their own land is stone and ice, and they have giants threatening them.’

I wanted him to tell me more about the giants, but he brooded instead. ‘Our ancestors,’ he went on after a while, ‘took this land. They took it and made it and held it. We do not give up what our ancestors gave us. They came across the sea and they fought here, and they built here and they’re buried here. This is our land, mixed with our blood, strengthened with our bone. Ours.’ He was angry, but he was often angry. He glowered at me, as if wondering whether I was strong enough to hold this land of Northumbria that our ancestors had won with sword and spear and blood and slaughter.

We slept after a while, or at least I slept. I think my father paced the ramparts, but by dawn he was back in the hall and it was then I was woken by the horn at the High Gate and I stumbled off the platform and out into the morning’s first light. There was dew on the grass, a sea eagle circling overhead, and my father’s hounds streaming from the hall door in answer to the horn’s call. I saw my father running down to the Low Gate and I followed him until I could wriggle my way through the men who were crowding onto the earthen rampart to stare along the causeway.

Horsemen were coming from the south. There were a dozen of them, their horses’ hooves sparkling with the dew. My brother’s horse was in the lead. It was a brindled stallion, wild-eyed and with a curious gait. It threw its forelegs out as it cantered and no one could mistake that horse, but it was not Uhtred who rode it. The man bestride the saddle had long, long hair the colour of pale gold, hair that tossed like the horses’ tails as he rode. He wore mail, had a flapping scabbard at his side and an axe slung across one shoulder and I was certain he was the same man who had danced the oar shafts the previous day. His companions were in leather or wool and as they neared the fortress the long-haired man signalled that they should curb their horses as he rode ahead alone. He came within bowshot, though none of us on the rampart put an arrow on the string, then he pulled the horse to a stop and looked up at the gate. He stared all along the line of men, a mocking expression on his face, then he bowed, threw something on the path and wheeled the horse away. He kicked his heels and the horse sped back and his ragged men joined him to gallop south.

What he had thrown onto the path was my brother’s severed head. It was brought to my father who stared at it a long time, but betrayed no feelings. He did not cry, he did not grimace, he did not scowl, he just looked at his eldest son’s head and then he looked at me. ‘From this day on,’ he said, ‘your name is Uhtred.’

Which is how I was named.

Father Beocca insisted that I should be baptised again, or else heaven would not know who I was when I arrived with the name Uhtred. I protested, but Gytha wanted it and my father cared more for her contentment than for mine, and so a barrel was carried into the church and half filled with sea water and Father Beocca stood me in the barrel and ladled water over my hair. ‘Receive your servant Uhtred,’ he intoned, ‘into the holy company of the saints and into the ranks of the most bright angels.’ I hope the saints and angels are warmer than I was that day, and after the baptism was done Gytha wept for me, though why I did not know. She might have done better to weep for my brother.

We found out what had happened to him. The three Danish ships had put into the mouth of the River Aln where there was a small settlement of fishermen and their families. Those folk had prudently fled inland, though a handful stayed and watched the river mouth from woods on higher ground and they said my brother had come at nightfall and seen the Vikings torching the houses. They were called Vikings when they were raiders, but Danes or pagans when they were traders, and these men had been burning and plundering so were reckoned to be Vikings. There had seemed very few of them in the settlement, most were on their ships, and my brother decided to ride down to the cottages and kill those few, but of course it was a trap. The Danes had seen his horsemen coming and had hidden a ship’s crew north of the village, and those forty men closed behind my brother’s party and killed them all. My father claimed his eldest son’s death must have been quick, which was a consolation to him, but of course it was not a quick death for he lived long enough for the Danes to discover who he was, or else why would they have brought his head back to Bebbanburg? The fishermen said they tried to warn my brother, but I doubt they did. Men say such things so that they are not blamed for disaster, but whether my brother was warned or not, he still died and the Danes took thirteen fine swords, thirteen good horses, a coat of mail, a helmet and my old name.

But that was not the end of it. A fleeting visit by three ships was no great event, but a week after my brother’s death we heard that a great Danish fleet had rowed up the rivers to capture Eoferwic. They had won that victory on All Saints’ Day, which made Gytha weep for it suggested God had abandoned us, but there was also good news for it seemed that my old namesake, King Osbert, had made an alliance with his rival, the would-be King Ælla, and they had agreed to put aside their rivalry, join forces and take Eoferwic back. That sounds simple, but of course it took time. Messengers rode, advisers confused, priests prayed, and it was not till Christmas that Osbert and Ælla sealed their peace with oaths, and then they summoned my father’s men, but of course we could not march in winter. The Danes were in Eoferwic and we left them there until the early spring when news came that the Northumbrian army would gather outside the city and, to my joy, my father decreed that I would ride south with him.

‘He’s too young,’ Gytha protested.

‘He is almost ten,’ my father said, ‘and he must learn to fight.’

‘He would be better served by continuing his lessons,’ she said.

‘A dead reader is no use to Bebbanburg,’ my father said, ‘and Uhtred is now the heir so he must learn to fight.’

That night he made Beocca show me the parchments kept in the church, the parchments that said we owned the land. Beocca had been teaching me to read for two years, but I was a bad pupil and, to Beocca’s despair, I could make neither head nor tail of the writings. Beocca sighed, then told me what was in them. ‘They describe the land,’ he said, ‘the land your father owns, and they say the land is his by God’s law and by our own law.’ And one day, it seemed, the lands would be mine for that night my father dictated a new will in which he said that if he died then Bebbanburg would belong to his son Uhtred, and I would be Ealdorman, and all the folk between the Tuede and the Tine would swear allegiance to me.

‘We were kings here once,’ he told me, ‘and our land was called Bernicia.’ He pressed his seal into the red wax, leaving the impression of a wolf’s head.

‘We should be kings again,’ Ælfric, my uncle said.

‘It doesn’t matter what they call us,’ my father said curtly, ‘so long as they obey us,’ and then he made Ælfric swear on the comb of Saint Cuthbert that he would respect the new will and acknowledge me as Uhtred of Bebbanburg. Ælfric did so swear. ‘But it won’t happen,’ my father said. ‘We shall slaughter these Danes like sheep in a fold, and we shall ride back here with plunder and honour.’

‘Pray God,’ Ælfric said.

Ælfric and thirty men would stay at Bebbanburg to guard the fortress and protect the women. He gave me gifts that night; a leather coat that would protect against a sword cut and, best of all, a helmet around which Ealdwulf the smith had fashioned a band of gilt bronze. ‘So they will know you are a prince,’ Ælfric said.

‘He’s not a prince,’ my father said, ‘but an Ealdorman’s heir.’ Yet he was pleased with his brother’s gifts to me and added two of his own, a short sword and a horse. The sword was an old blade, cut down, with a leather scabbard lined with fleece. It had a chunky hilt, was clumsy, yet that night I slept with the blade under my blanket.

The next morning, as my stepmother wept on the ramparts of the High Gate, and under a blue, clean sky, we rode to war. Two hundred and fifty men went south, following our banner of the wolf’s head.

That was in the year 867, and it was the first time I ever went to war.

And I have never ceased.

‘You will not fight in the shield wall,’ my father said.

‘No, father.’

‘Only men can stand in the shield wall,’ he said, ‘but you will watch, you will learn, and you will discover that the most dangerous stroke is not the sword or axe that you can see, but the one you cannot see, the blade that comes beneath the shields to bite your ankles.’

He grudgingly gave me much other advice as we followed the long road south. Of the two hundred and fifty men who went to Eoferwic from Bebbanburg, one hundred and twenty were on horseback. Those were my father’s household men or else the wealthier farmers, the ones who could afford some kind of armour and had shields and swords. Most of the men were not wealthy, but they were sworn to my father’s cause, and they marched with sickles, spears, reaping hooks, fish gaffs and axes. Some carried hunting bows, and all had been ordered to bring a week’s food which was mostly hard bread, harder cheese and smoked fish. Many were accompanied by women. My father had ordered that no women were to march south, but he did not send them back, reckoning that the women would follow anyway, and that men fought better when their wives or lovers were watching, and he was confident that those women would see the levy of Northumbria give the Danes a terrible slaughter. He claimed we were the hardest men of England, much harder than the soft Mercians. ‘Your mother was a Mercian,’ he added, but said nothing more. He never talked of her. I knew they had been married less than a year, that she had died giving birth to me, and that she was an Ealdorman’s daughter, but as far as my father was concerned she might never have existed. He claimed to despise the Mercians, but not as much as he scorned the coddled West Saxons. ‘They don’t know hardship in Wessex,’ he maintained, but he reserved his severest judgment for the East Anglians. ‘They live in marshes,’ he once told me, ‘and live like frogs.’ We Northumbrians had always hated the East Anglians for long ago they had defeated us in battle, killing Æthelfrith, our king and husband to the Bebba after whom our fortress was named. I was to discover later that the East Anglians had given horses and winter shelter to the Danes who had captured Eoferwic, so my father was right to despise them. They were treacherous frogs.

Father Beocca rode south with us. My father did not much like the priest, but did not want to go to war without a man of God to say prayers. Beocca, in turn, was devoted to my father who had freed him from slavery and provided him with his education. My father could have worshipped the devil and Beocca, I think, would have turned a blind eye. He was young, clean-shaven and extraordinarily ugly, with a fearful squint, a flattened nose, unruly red hair and a palsied left hand. He was also very clever, though I did not appreciate it then, resenting that he gave me lessons. The poor man had tried so hard to teach me letters, but I mocked his efforts, preferring to get a beating from my father to concentrating on the alphabet.

We followed the Roman road, crossing their great wall at the Tine, and still going south. The Romans, my father said, had been giants who built wondrous things, but they had gone back to Rome and the giants had died and now the only Romans left were priests, but the giants’ roads were still there and, as we went south, more men joined us until a horde marched on the moors either side of the stony road’s broken surface. The men slept in the open, though my father and his chief retainers would bed for the night in abbeys or barns.

We also straggled. Even at nine years old I noticed how we straggled. Men had brought liquor with them, or else they stole mead or ale from the villages we passed, and they frequently got drunk and simply collapsed at the roadside and no one seemed to care. ‘They’ll catch up,’ my father said carelessly.

‘It’s not good,’ Father Beocca told me.

‘What’s not good?’

‘There should be more discipline. I have read the Roman wars and know there must be discipline.’

‘They’ll catch up,’ I said, echoing my father.

That night we were joined by men from the place called Cetreht where, long ago, we had defeated the Welsh in a great battle. The newcomers sang of the battle, chanting how we had fed the ravens with the foreigners’ blood, and the words cheered my father who told me we were near Eoferwic and that next day we might expect to join Osbert and Ælla, and how the day after that we would feed the ravens again. We were sitting by a fire, one of hundreds of fires that stretched across the fields. South of us, far off across a flat land, I could see the sky glowing from the light of still more fires and knew they showed where the rest of Northumbria’s army gathered.

‘The raven is Woden’s creature, isn’t it?’ I asked nervously.

My father looked at me sourly. ‘Who told you that?’

I shrugged, said nothing.

‘Ealdwulf?’ He guessed, knowing that Bebbanburg’s blacksmith, who had stayed at the fortress with Ælfric, was a secret pagan.

‘I just heard it,’ I said, hoping I would get away with the evasion without being hit, ‘and I know we are descended from Woden.’

‘We are,’ my father acknowledged, ‘but we have a new God now.’ He stared balefully across the encampment where men were drinking. ‘Do you know who wins battles, boy?’

‘We do, father.’

‘The side that is least drunk,’ he said and then, after a pause, ‘but it helps to be drunk.’

‘Why?’

‘Because a shield wall is an awful place.’ He gazed into the fire. ‘I have been in six shield walls,’ he went on, ‘and prayed every time it would be the last. Your brother, now, he was a man who might have loved the shield wall. He had courage.’ He fell silent, thinking, then scowled. ‘The man who brought his head. I want his head. I want to spit into his dead eyes then put his skull on a pole above the Low Gate.’

‘You will have it,’ I said.

He sneered at that. ‘What do you know?’ he asked. ‘I brought you, boy, because you must see battle. Because our men must see that you are here. But you will not fight. You’re like a young dog who watches the old dogs kill the boar, but doesn’t bite. Watch and learn, watch and learn and maybe one day you’ll be useful. But for now you’re nothing but a pup.’ He dismissed me with a wave.

Next day the Roman road ran across a flat land, crossing dykes and ditches, until at last we came to where the combined armies of Osbert and Ælla had made their shelters. Beyond them, and just visible through the scattered trees, was Eoferwic, and that was where the Danes were.

Eoferwic was, and still is, the chief city of northern England. It possesses a great abbey, an archbishop, a fortress, high walls, and a vast market. It stands beside the River Ouse, and boasts a bridge, but ships can reach Eoferwic from the distant sea, and that was how the Danes had come. They must have known that Northumbria was weakened by civil war, that Osbert, the rightful king, had marched westwards to meet the forces of the pretender Ælla, and in the absence of the king they had taken the city. It would not have been difficult for them to have discovered Osbert’s absence. The trouble between Osbert and Ælla had been brewing for weeks, and Eoferwic was filled with traders, many from across the sea, who would have known of the two men’s bitter rivalry. One thing I learned about the Danes was that they knew how to spy. The monks who write the chronicles tell us that they came from nowhere, their dragon-prowed ships suddenly appearing from a blue vacancy, but it was rarely like that. The Viking crews might attack unexpectedly, but the big fleets, the war fleets, went where they knew there was already trouble. They found an existing wound and filled it like maggots.

My father took me close to the city, he and a score of his men, all of us mounted and all wearing mail or leather. We could see the enemy on the wall. Some of the wall was built of stone, that was the Roman work, but much of the city was protected by an earth wall, topped by a high wooden palisade, and to the east of the city part of that palisade was missing. It seemed to have been burned for we could see charred wood on top of the earthen wall where fresh stakes had been driven to hold the new palisade that would replace the burned fence.

Beyond the new stakes was a jumble of thatched roofs, the wooden bell towers of three churches and, on the river, the masts of the Danish fleet. Our scouts claimed there were thirty-four ships, which was said to mean the Danes had an army of around a thousand men. Our own army was larger, nearer to fifteen hundred, though it was difficult to count. No one seemed to be in charge. The two leaders, Osbert and Ælla, camped apart and, though they had officially made peace, they refused to speak to each other, communicating instead through messengers. My father, the third most important man in the army, could talk to both, but he was not able to persuade Osbert and Ælla to meet, let alone agree on a plan of campaign. Osbert wished to besiege the city and starve the Danes out, while Ælla urged an immediate attack. The rampart was broken, he said, and an assault would drive deep into the tangle of streets where the Danes could be hunted down and killed. I do not know which course my father preferred, for he never said, but in the end the decision was taken away from us.

Our army could not wait. We had brought some food, but that was soon exhausted, and men were going ever farther afield to find more, and some of those men did not return. They just slipped home. Other men grumbled that their farms needed work and if they did not return home they would face a hungry year. A meeting was called of every important man and they spent all day arguing. Osbert attended the meeting, which meant Ælla did not, though one of his chief supporters was there and hinted that Osbert’s reluctance to assault the city was caused by cowardice. Perhaps it was, for Osbert did not respond to the jibe, proposing instead that we dug our own forts outside the city. Three or four such forts, he said, would trap the Danes. Our best fighters could man the forts, and our other men could go home to look after their fields. Another man proposed building a new bridge across the river, a bridge that would trap the Danish fleet, and he argued the point tediously, though I think everyone knew that we did not have the time to make a bridge across such a wide river. ‘Besides,’ King Osbert said, ‘we want the Danes to take their ships away. Let them go back to the sea. Let them go and trouble someone else.’ A bishop pleaded for more time, saying that Ealdorman Egbert, who held land south of Eoferwic, had yet to arrive with his men.

‘Nor is Ricsig here,’ a priest said, speaking of another great lord.

‘He’s sick,’ Osbert said.

‘Sickness of courage,’ Ælla’s spokesman sneered.

‘Give them time,’ the bishop suggested. ‘With Egbert’s and Ricsig’s men we shall have enough troops to frighten the Danes with sheer numbers.’

My father said nothing at the meeting, though it was plain many men wanted him to speak, and I was perplexed that he stayed silent, but that night Beocca explained why. ‘If he said we should attack,’ the priest said, ‘then men would assume he had sided with Ælla, while if he encouraged a siege, he would be seen to be on Osbert’s side.’

‘Does it matter?’

Beocca looked at me across the campfire, or one of his eyes looked at me while the other wandered somewhere in the night. ‘When the Danes are beaten,’ he said, ‘then Osbert and Ælla’s feud will start again. Your father wants none of it.’

‘But whichever side he supports,’ I said, ‘will win.’

‘But suppose they kill each other?’ Beocca asked, ‘who will be king then?’

I looked at him, understood, said nothing.

‘And who will be king thereafter?’ Beocca asked, and he pointed at me. ‘You. And a king should be able to read and write.’

‘A king,’ I answered scornfully, ‘can always hire men who can read and write.’

Then, next morning, the decision to attack or besiege was made for us, because news came that more Danish ships had appeared at the mouth of the River Humber, and that could only mean the enemy would be reinforced within a few days, and so my father, who had stayed silent for so long, finally spoke. ‘We must attack,’ he told both Osbert and Ælla, ‘before the new boats come.’

Ælla, of course, agreed enthusiastically, and even Osbert understood that the new ships meant that everything was changed. Besides, the Danes inside the city had been having problems with their new wall. We woke one morning to see a whole new stretch of palisade, the wood raw and bright, but a great wind blew that day and the new work collapsed, and that caused much merriment in our encampments. The Danes, men said, could not even build a wall. ‘But they can build ships,’ Father Beocca told me.

‘So?’

‘A man who can build a ship,’ the young priest said, ‘can usually build a wall. It is not so hard as shipbuilding.’

‘It fell down!’

‘Perhaps it was meant to fall down,’ Beocca said, and, when I just stared at him, he explained. ‘Perhaps they want us to attack there?’

I do not know if he told my father of his suspicions, but if he did then I have no doubt my father dismissed them. He did not trust Beocca’s opinions on war. The priest’s usefulness was in encouraging God to smite the Danes and that was all and, to be fair, Beocca did pray mightily and long that God would give us the victory.

And the day after the wall collapsed we gave God his chance to fulfil Beocca’s prayers.

We attacked.

I do not know if every man who assaulted Eoferwic was drunk, but they would have been had there been enough mead, ale and birch wine to go round. The drinking had gone on much of the night and I woke to find men vomiting in the dawn. Those few who, like my father, possessed mail shirts pulled them on. Most were armoured in leather, while some men had no protection other than their coats. Weapons were sharpened on whetstones. The priests walked round the camp scattering blessings, while men swore oaths of brotherhood and loyalty. Some banded together and promised to share their plunder equally, a few looked pale and more than a handful sneaked away through the dykes that crossed the flat, damp landscape.

A score of men were ordered to stay at the camp and guard the women and horses, though Father Beocca and I were both ordered to mount. ‘You’ll stay on horseback,’ my father told me, ‘and you’ll stay with him,’ he added to the priest.

‘Of course, my lord,’ Beocca said.

‘If anything happens,’ my father was deliberately vague, ‘then ride to Bebbanburg, shut the gate and wait there.’

‘God is on our side,’ Beocca said.

My father looked a great warrior, which indeed he was, though he claimed to be getting too old for fighting. His greying beard jutted over his mail coat, above which he had hung a crucifix carved from ox bone that had been a gift from Gytha. His sword belt was leather studded with silver, while his great sword, Bone-Breaker, was sheathed in leather banded with gilt-bronze strappings. His boots had iron plates on either side of the ankles, reminding me of his advice about the shield wall, while his helmet was polished so that it shone, and its face-piece, with its eyeholes and snarling mouth, was inlaid with silver. His round shield was made of limewood, had a heavy iron boss, was covered in leather and painted with the wolf’s head. Ealdorman Uhtred was going to war.

The horns summoned the army. There was little order in the array. There had been arguments about who should be on the right or left, but Beocca told me the argument had been settled when the bishop cast dice, and King Osbert was now on the right, Ælla on the left and my father in the centre, and those three chieftains’ banners were advanced as the horns called. The men assembled under the banners. My father’s household troops, his best warriors, were at the front, and behind them were the bands of the thegns. Thegns were important men, holders of great lands, some of them with their own fortresses, and they were the men who shared my father’s platform in the feasting hall, and men who had to be watched in case their ambitions made them try to take his place, but now they loyally gathered behind him, and the ceorls, free men of the lowest rank, assembled with them. Men fought in family groups, or with friends. There were plenty of boys with the army, though I was the only one on horseback and the only one with a sword and helmet.

I could see a scatter of Danes behind the unbroken palisades on either side of the gap where their wall had fallen down, but most of their army filled that gap, making a shield barrier on top of the earthen wall, and it was a high earthen wall, at least ten or twelve feet high, and steep, so it would be a hard climb into the face of the waiting killers, but I was confident we would win. I was nine years old, almost ten.

The Danes were shouting at us, but we were too far away to hear their insults. Their shields, round like ours, were painted yellow, black, brown and blue. Our men began beating weapons on their shields and that was a fearsome sound, the first time I ever heard an army making that war music; the clashing of ash spear shafts and iron sword blades on shield-wood.

‘It is a terrible thing,’ Beocca said to me. ‘War, it is an awful thing.’

I said nothing. I thought it was glorious and wonderful.

‘The shield wall is where men die,’ Beocca said, and he kissed the wooden cross that hung about his neck. ‘The gates of heaven and hell will be jostling with souls before this day is done,’ he went on gloomily.

‘Aren’t the dead carried to a feasting hall?’ I asked.

He looked at me very strangely, then appeared shocked. ‘Where did you hear that?’

‘At Bebbanburg,’ I said, sensible enough not to admit that it was Ealdwulf the smith who told me those tales as I watched him beating rods of iron into sword blades.

‘That is what heathens believe,’ Beocca said sternly. ‘They believe dead warriors are carried to Woden’s corpse-hall to feast until the world’s ending, but it is a grievously wrong belief. It is an error! But the Danes are always in error. They bow down to idols, they deny the true God, they are wrong.’

‘But a man must die with a sword in his hand?’ I insisted.

‘I can see we must teach you a proper catechism when this is done,’ the priest said sternly.

I said nothing more. I was watching, trying to fix every detail of that day in my memory. The sky was summer blue, with just a few clouds off in the west, and the sunlight reflected from our army’s spear points like glints of light flickering on the summer sea. Cowslips dotted the meadow where the army assembled, and a cuckoo called from the woods behind us where a crowd of our women were watching the army. There were swans on the river that was placid for there was little wind. The smoke from the cooking fires inside Eoferwic rose almost straight into the air, and that sight reminded me that there would be a feast in the city that night, a feast of roasted pork or whatever else we found in the enemy’s stores. Some of our men, those in the foremost ranks, were darting forward to shout at the enemy, or else dare him to come and do private battle between the lines, one man on one man, but none of the Danes broke rank. They just stared, waited, their spears a hedge, their shields a wall, and then our horns blew again and the shouting and the shield-banging faded as our army lurched forward.

It went raggedly. Later, much later, I was to understand the reluctance of men to launch themselves against a shield wall, let alone a shield wall held at the top of a steep earthen bank, but on that day I was just impatient for our army to hurry forward and break the impudent Danes, and Beocca had to restrain me, catching hold of my bridle to stop me riding into the rearmost ranks. ‘We shall wait until they break through,’ he said.

‘I want to kill a Dane,’ I protested.

‘Don’t be stupid, Uhtred,’ Beocca said angrily. ‘You try and kill a Dane,’ he went on, ‘and your father will have no sons. You are his only child now, and it is your duty to live.’

So I did my duty and I hung back, and I watched as, so slowly, our army found its courage and advanced towards the city. The river was on our left, the empty encampment behind our right, and the inviting gap in the city wall was to our front and there the Danes were waiting silently, their shields overlapping.

‘The bravest will go first,’ Beocca said to me, ‘and your father will be one of them. They will make a wedge, what the Latin authors call a porcinum caput. You know what that means?’

‘No.’ Nor did I care.

‘A swine’s head. Like the tusk of a boar. The bravest will go first and, if they break through, the others will follow.’

Beocca was right. Three wedges formed in front of our lines, one each from the household troops of Osbert, Ælla and my father. The men stood close together, their shields overlapping like the Danish shields, while the rearward ranks of each wedge held their shields high like a roof, and then, when they were ready, the men in the three wedges gave a great cheer and started forward. They did not run. I had expected them to run, but men cannot keep the wedge tight if they run. The wedge is war in slow time, slow enough for the men inside the wedge to wonder how strong the enemy is and to fear that the rest of the army will not follow, but they did. The three wedges had not gone more than twenty paces before the remaining mass of men moved forward.

‘I want to be closer,’ I said.

‘You will wait,’ Beocca said.

I could hear the shouts now, shouts of defiance and shouts to give a man courage, and then the archers on the city walls loosed their bows and I saw the glitter of the feathers as the arrows slashed down towards the wedges, and a moment later the throwing spears came, arching over the Danish line to fall on the upheld shields. Amazingly, at least to me, it seemed that none of our men was struck, though I could see their shields were stuck with arrows and spears like hedgehog spines, and still the three wedges advanced, and now our own bowmen were shooting at the Danes, and a handful of our men broke from the ranks behind the wedges to hurl their own spears at the enemy shield wall.

‘Not long now,’ Beocca said nervously. He made the sign of the cross. He was praying silently and his crippled left hand was twitching.

I was watching my father’s wedge, the central wedge, the one just in front of the wolf’s head banner, and I saw the closely touching shields vanish into the ditch that lay in front of the earthen wall and I knew my father was perilously close to death and I urged him to win, to kill, to give the name Uhtred of Bebbanburg even more renown, and then I saw the shield wedge emerge from the ditch and, like a monstrous beast, crawl up the face of the wall.

‘The advantage they have,’ Beocca said in the patient voice he used for teaching, ‘is that the enemy’s feet are easy targets when you come from below.’ I think he was trying to reassure himself, but I believed him anyway, and it must have been true for my father’s formation, first up the wall, did not seem to be checked when they met the enemy’s shield wall. I could see nothing now except the flash of blades rising and falling, and I could hear that sound, the real music of battle, the chop of iron on wood, iron on iron, yet the wedge was still moving. Like a boar’s razor-sharp tusk it had pierced the Danish shield wall and was moving forward, and though the Danes wrapped around the wedge, it seemed our men were winning for they pressed forward across the earthen bank, and the soldiers behind must have sensed that Ealdorman Uhtred had brought them victory for they suddenly cheered and surged to help the beleaguered wedge.

‘God be praised,’ Beocca said, for the Danes were fleeing. One moment they had formed a thick shield wall, bristling with weapons, and now they were vanishing into the city and our army, with the relief of men whose lives have been spared, charged after them.

‘Slowly, now,’ Beocca said, walking his horse forward and leading mine by the bridle.

The Danes had gone. Instead the earthen wall was black with our men who were scrambling through the gap in the city’s ramparts, then down the bank’s farther side into the streets and alleyways beyond. The three flags, my father’s wolf head, Ælla’s war axe and Osbert’s cross, were inside Eoferwic. I could hear men cheering and I kicked my horse, forcing her out of Beocca’s grasp. ‘Come back!’ he shouted, but though he followed me he did not try to drag me away. We had won, God had given us victory and I wanted to be close enough to smell the slaughter.

Neither of us could get into the city because the gap in the palisade was choked with our men, but I kicked the horse again and she forced her way into the press. Some men protested at what I was doing, then they saw the gilt-bronze circle on my helmet and knew I was nobly born and so they tried to help me through, while Beocca, stranded at the back of the crowd, shouted that I should not get too far ahead of him. ‘Catch up!’ I called back to him.

Then he shouted again, but this time his voice was frantic, terrified, and I turned to see Danes streaming across the field where our army had advanced. It was a horde of Danes who must have sallied from the city’s northern gate to cut off our retreat, and they must have known we would retreat, because it seemed they could build walls after all, and had built them across the streets inside the city, then feigned flight from the ramparts to draw us into their killing ground and now they sprang the trap. Some of the Danes who came from the city were mounted, most were on foot, and Beocca panicked. I do not blame him. The Danes like killing Christian priests and Beocca must have seen death, did not desire martyrdom, and so he turned his horse and kicked it hard and it galloped away beside the river and the Danes, not caring about the fate of one man where so many were trapped, let him go.

It is a truth that in most armies the timid men and those with the feeblest weapons are at the back. The brave go to the front, the weak seek the rear, so if you can get to the back of an enemy army you will have a massacre.

I am an old man now and it has been my fate to see panic flicker through many armies. That panic is worse than the terror of sheep penned in a cleft and being assaulted by wolves, more frantic than the writhing of salmon caught in a net and dragged to the air. The sound of it must tear the heavens apart, but to the Danes, that day, it was the sweet sound of victory and to us it was death.

I tried to escape. God knows I panicked too. I had seen Beocca racing away beside the riverside willows and I managed to turn the mare, but then one of our own men snatched at me, presumably wanting my horse, and I had the wit to draw my short sword and hack blindly at him as I kicked back my heels, but all I achieved was to ride out of the panicked mass into the path of the Danes, and all around me men were screaming and the Danish axes and swords were chopping and swinging. The grim work, the blood feast, the song of the blade, they call it, and perhaps I was saved for a moment because I was the only one in our army who was on horseback and a score of the Danes were also mounted and perhaps they mistook me for one of their own, but then one of those Danes called to me in a language I did not speak and I looked at him and saw his long hair, unhelmeted, his long fair hair and his silver-coloured mail and the wide grin on his wild face and I recognised him as the man who had killed my brother and, like the fool I was, I screamed at him. A standard-bearer was just behind the long-haired Dane, flaunting an eagle’s wing on a long pole. Tears were blurring my sight, and perhaps the battle madness came onto me because, despite my panic, I rode at the long-haired Dane and struck at him with my small sword, and his sword parried mine, and my feeble blade bent like a herring’s spine. It just bent and he drew back his own sword for the killing stroke, saw my pathetic bent blade and began to laugh. I was pissing myself, he was laughing, and I beat at him again with the useless sword and still he laughed, and then he leaned over, plucked the weapon from my hand and threw it away. He picked me up then. I was screaming and hitting at him, but he thought it all so very funny, and he draped me belly down on the saddle in front of him and then he spurred into the chaos to continue the killing.

And that was how I met Ragnar, Ragnar the Fearless, my brother’s killer and the man whose head was supposed to grace a pole on Bebbanburg’s ramparts, Earl Ragnar.

PART ONE

A Pagan Childhood

One

The Danes were clever that day. They had made new walls inside the city, invited our men into the streets, trapped them between the new walls, surrounded them and killed them. They did not kill all the Northumbrian army, for even the fiercest warriors tire of slaughter and, besides, the Danes made much money from slavery. Most of the slaves taken in England were sold to farmers in the wild northern isles, or to Ireland, or sent back across the sea to the Danish lands, but some, I learned, were taken to the big slave markets in Frankia and a few were shipped south to a place where there was no winter and where men with faces the colour of scorched wood would pay good money for men and even better money for young women.

But they killed enough of us. They killed Ælla and they killed Osbert and they killed my father. Ælla and my father were fortunate, for they died in battle, swords in their hands, but Osbert was captured and he was tortured that night as the Danes feasted in a city stinking of blood. Some of the victors guarded the walls, others celebrated in the captured houses, but most gathered in the hall of Northumbria’s defeated king where Ragnar took me. I did not know why he took me there, I half expected to be killed or, at best, sold into slavery, but Ragnar made me sit with his men and put a roasted goose leg, half a loaf of bread and a pot of ale in front of me, then cuffed me cheerfully round the head.

The other Danes ignored me at first. They were too busy getting drunk and cheering the fights which broke out once they were drunk, but the loudest cheers came when the captured Osbert was forced to fight against a young warrior who had extraordinary skill with a sword. He danced round the king, then chopped off his left hand before slitting his belly with a sweeping cut and, because Osbert was a heavy man, his guts spilled out like eels slithering from a ruptured sack. Some of the Danes were weak with laughter after that. The king took a long time to die, and while he cried for relief, the Danes crucified a captured priest who had fought against them in the battle. They were intrigued and repelled by our religion, and they were angry when the priest’s hands pulled free of the nails and some claimed it was impossible to kill a man that way, and they argued that point drunkenly, then tried to nail the priest to the hall’s timber walls a second time until, bored with it, one of their warriors slammed a spear into the priest’s chest, crushing his ribs and mangling his heart.

A handful of them turned on me once the priest was dead and, because I had worn a helmet with a gilt-bronze circlet, they thought I must be a king’s son and they put me in a robe and a man climbed onto the table to piss on me, and just then a huge voice bellowed at them to stop and Ragnar bullied his way through the crowd. He snatched the robe from me and harangued the men, telling them I knew not what, but whatever he said made them stop and Ragnar then put an arm round my shoulders and took me to a dais at the side of the hall and gestured I should climb up to it. An old man was eating alone there. He was blind, both eyes milky white and had a deep-lined face framed by grey hair as long as Ragnar’s. He heard me clamber up and asked a question, and Ragnar answered and then walked away.

‘You must be hungry, boy,’ the old man said in English.

I did not answer. I was terrified of his blind eyes.

‘Have you vanished?’ he asked, ‘did the dwarves pluck you down to the under-earth?’

‘I’m hungry,’ I admitted.

‘So you are there after all,’ he said, ‘and there’s pork here, and bread, and cheese, and ale. Tell me your name.’

I almost said Osbert, then remembered I was Uhtred. ‘Uhtred,’ I said.

‘An ugly name,’ the old man said, ‘but my son said I was to look after you, so I will, but you must look after me too. Could you cut me some pork?’

‘Your son?’ I asked.

‘Earl Ragnar,’ he said, ‘sometimes called Ragnar the Fearless. Who were they killing in here?’

‘The king,’ I said, ‘and a priest.’

‘Which king?’

‘Osbert.’

‘Did he die well?’

‘No.’

‘Then he shouldn’t have been king.’

‘Are you a king?’ I asked.

He laughed. ‘I am Ravn,’ he said, ‘and once I was an earl and a warrior, but now I am blind so I am no use to anyone. They should beat me over the head with a cudgel and send me on my way to the netherworld.’ I said nothing to that because I did not know what to say. ‘But I try to be useful,’ Ravn went on, his hands groping for bread. ‘I speak your language and the language of the Britons and the tongue of the Wends and the speech of the Frisians and that of the Franks. Language is now my trade, boy, because I have become a skald.’

‘A skald?’

‘A scop, you would call me. A poet, a weaver of dreams, a man who makes glory from nothing and dazzles you with its making. And my job now is to tell this day’s tale in such a way that men will never forget our great deeds.’

‘But if you cannot see,’ I asked, ‘how can you tell what happened?’

Ravn laughed at that. ‘Have you heard of Odin? Then you should know that Odin sacrificed one of his own eyes so that he could obtain the gift of poetry. So perhaps I am twice as good a skald as Odin, eh?’

‘I am descended from Woden,’ I said.

‘Are you?’ He seemed impressed, or perhaps he just wanted to be kind. ‘So who are you, Uhtred, descendant of the great Odin?’

‘I am the Ealdorman of Bebbanburg,’ I said, and that reminded me I was fatherless and my defiance crumpled and, to my shame, I began to cry. Ravn ignored me as he listened to the drunken shouts and the songs and the shrieks of the girls who had been captured in our camp and who now provided the warriors with the reward for their victory, and watching their antics took my mind off my sorrow because, in truth, I had never seen such things before though, God be thanked, I took plenty of such rewards myself in times to come.

‘Bebbanburg?’ Ravn said. ‘I was there before you were born. It was twenty years ago.’

‘At Bebbanburg?’

‘Not in the fortress,’ he admitted, ‘it was far too strong. But I was to the north of it, on the island where the monks pray. I killed six men there. Not monks, men. Warriors.’ He smiled to himself, remembering. ‘Now tell me, Ealdorman Uhtred of Bebbanburg,’ he went on, ‘what is happening.’

So I became his eyes and I told him of the men dancing, and the men stripping the women of their clothes, and what they then did to the women, but Ravn had no interest in that. ‘What,’ he wanted to know, ‘are Ivar and Ubba doing?’

‘Ivar and Ubba?’

‘They will be on the high platform. Ubba is the shorter and looks like a barrel with a beard, and Ivar is so skinny that he is called Ivar the Boneless. He is so thin that you could press his feet together and shoot him from a bowstring.’

I learned later that Ivar and Ubba were the two oldest of three brothers and the joint leaders of this Danish army. Ubba was asleep, his black-haired head cushioned by his arms that, in turn, were resting on the remnants of his meal, but Ivar the Boneless was awake. He had sunken eyes, a face like a skull, yellow hair drawn back to the nape of his neck, and an expression of sullen malevolence. His arms were thick with the golden rings Danes like to wear to prove their prowess in battle, while a gold chain was coiled around his neck. Two men were talking to him. One, standing just behind Ivar, seemed to whisper into his ear, while the other, a worried-looking man, sat between the two brothers. I described all this to Ravn, who wanted to know what the worried man sitting between Ivar and Ubba looked like.

‘No arm rings,’ I said, ‘a gold circlet around his neck. Brown hair, long beard, quite old.’

‘Everyone looks old to the young,’ Ravn said. ‘That must be King Egbert.’

‘King Egbert?’ I had never heard of such a person.

‘He was Ealdorman Egbert,’ Ravn explained, ‘but he made his peace with us in the winter and we have rewarded him by making him king here in Northumbria. He is king, but we are the lords of the land.’ He chuckled, and young as I was I understood the treachery involved. Ealdorman Egbert held estates to the south of our kingdom and was what my father had been in the north, a great power, and the Danes had suborned him, kept him from the fight, and now he would be called king, yet it was plain that he would be a king on a short leash. ‘If you are to live,’ Ravn said to me, ‘then it would be wise to pay your respects to Egbert.’

‘Live?’ I blurted out the word. I had somehow thought that having survived the battle then of course I would live. I was a child, someone else’s responsibility, but Ravn’s words hammered home my reality. I should never have confessed my rank, I thought. Better to be a living slave than a dead Ealdorman.

‘I think you’ll live,’ Ravn said. ‘Ragnar likes you and Ragnar gets what he wants. He says you attacked him?’

‘I did, yes.’

‘He would have enjoyed that. A boy who attacks Earl Ragnar? That must be some boy, eh? Too good a boy to waste on death he says, but then my son always had a regrettably sentimental side. I would have chopped your head off, but here you are, alive, and I think it would be wise if you were to bow to Egbert.’

Now, I think, looking back so far into my past, I have probably changed that night’s events. There was a feast, Ivar and Ubba were there, Egbert was trying to look like a king, Ravn was kind to me, but I am sure I was more confused and far more frightened than I have made it sound. Yet in other ways my memories of the feast are very precise. Watch and learn, my father had told me, and Ravn made me watch, and I did learn. I learned about treachery, especially when Ragnar, summoned by Ravn, took me by the collar and led me to the high dais where, after a surly gesture of permission from Ivar, I was allowed to approach the table. ‘Lord King,’ I squeaked, then knelt so that a surprised Egbert had to lean forward to see me. ‘I am Uhtred of Bebbanburg,’ I had been coached by Ravn in what I should say, ‘and I seek your lordly protection.’

That produced silence, except for the mutter of the interpreter talking to Ivar. Then Ubba awoke, looked startled for a few heartbeats as if he were not sure where he was, then he stared at me and I felt my flesh shrivel for I had never seen a face so malevolent. He had dark eyes and they were full of hate and I wanted the earth to swallow me. He said nothing, just gazed at me and touched a hammer-shaped amulet hanging at his neck. Ubba had his brother’s thin face, but instead of fair hair drawn back against the skull, he had bushy black hair and a thick beard that was dotted with scraps of food. Then he yawned and it was like staring into a beast’s maw. The interpreter spoke to Ivar who said something and the interpreter, in turn, talked to Egbert who tried to look stern. ‘Your father,’ he said, ‘chose to fight us.’

‘And is dead,’ I answered, tears in my eyes, and I wanted to say something more, but nothing would come, and instead I just snivelled like an infant and I could feel Ubba’s scorn like the heat of a fire. I cuffed angrily at my nose.

‘We shall decide your fate,’ Egbert said loftily, and I was dismissed.

I went back to Ravn who insisted I tell him what had happened, and he smiled when I described Ubba’s malevolent silence. ‘He’s a frightening man,’ Ravn agreed, ‘to my certain knowledge he’s killed sixteen men in single combat, and dozens more in battle, but only when the auguries are good, otherwise he won’t fight.’

‘The auguries?’

‘Ubba is a very superstitious young man,’ Ravn said, ‘but also a dangerous one. If I give you one piece of advice, young Uhtred, it is never, never, to fight Ubba. Even Ragnar would fear to do that and my son fears little.’

‘And Ivar?’ I asked, ‘would your son fight Ivar?’

‘The boneless one?’ Ravn considered the question. ‘He too is frightening, for he has no pity, but he does possess sense. Besides, Ragnar serves Ivar if he serves anyone, and they’re friends, so they would not fight. But Ubba? Only the gods tell him what to do, and you should beware of men who take their orders from the gods. Cut me some of the crackling, boy. I particularly like pork crackling.’

I cannot remember now how long I was in Eoferwic. I was put to work, that I do remember. My fine clothes were stripped from me and given to some Danish boy, and in their place I was given a flea-ridden shift of tattered wool that I belted with a piece of rope. I cooked Ravn’s meals for a few days, then the other Danish ships arrived and proved to hold mostly women and children, the families of the victorious army, and it was then I understood that these Danes had come to stay in Northumbria. Ravn’s wife arrived, a big woman called Gudrun with a laugh that could have felled an ox, and she chivvied me away from the cooking fire that she now tended with Ragnar’s wife, who was called Sigrid and whose hair reached to her waist and was the colour of sunlight reflecting off gold. She and Ragnar had two sons and a daughter. Sigrid had given birth to eight children, but only those three had lived. Rorik, his second son, was a year younger than me and on the very first day I met him he picked a fight, coming at me in a whirl of fists and feet, but I put him on his back and was throttling the breath out of him when Ragnar picked us both up, crashed our heads together and told us to be friends. Ragnar’s eldest son, also called Ragnar, was eighteen, already a man, and I did not meet him then for he was in Ireland where he was learning to fight and to kill so he could become an Earl like his father. In time I did meet Ragnar the Younger who was very similar to his father; always cheerful, boisterously happy, enthusiastic about whatever needed to be done, and friendly to anyone who paid him respect.

Like all the other children I had work to keep me busy. There was always firewood and water to be fetched, and I spent two days helping to burn the green muck from the hull of a beached ship, and I enjoyed that even though I got into a dozen fights with Danish boys, all of them bigger than me, and I lived with black eyes, bruised knuckles, sprained wrists, and loosened teeth. My worst enemy was a boy called Sven who was two years older than me and very big for his age with a round, vacant face, a slack jaw, and a vicious temper. He was the son of one of Ragnar’s shipmasters, a man called Kjartan. Ragnar owned three ships, he commanded one, Kjartan the second and a tall, weather-hardened man named Egil steered the third. Kjartan and Egil were also warriors, of course, and as shipmasters they led their crews into battle and so were reckoned important men, their arms heavy with rings, and Kjartan’s son Sven took an instant dislike to me. He called me English scum, a goat-turd and dog-breath, and because he was older and bigger he could beat me fairly easily, but I was also making friends and, luckily for me, Sven disliked Rorik almost as much as he hated me, and the two of us could just thrash him together and after a while Sven avoided me unless he was sure I was alone. So apart from Sven it was a good summer. I never had quite enough to eat, I was never clean, Ragnar made us laugh and I was rarely unhappy.

Ragnar was often absent, for much of the Danish army spent that summer riding the length and breadth of Northumbria to quell the last shreds of resistance, but I heard little news, and no news of Bebbanburg. It seemed the Danes were winning, for every few days another English thegn would come to Eoferwic and kneel to Egbert, who now lived in the palace of Northumbria’s king, though it was a palace that had been stripped of anything useful by the victors. The gap in the city wall had been repaired in a day, the same day that a score of us dug a great hole in the field where our army had fled in panic. We filled the hole with the rotting corpses of the Northumbrian dead. I knew some of them. I suppose my father was among them, but I did not see him. Nor, looking back, did I miss him. He had always been a morose man, expecting the worst, and not fond of children.

The worst job I was given was painting shields. We first had to boil down some cattle hides to make size, a thick glue, that we stirred into a powder we had made from crushing copper ore with big stone pestles, and the result was a viscous blue paste that had to be smeared on the newly-made shields. For days afterwards I had blue hands and arms, but our shields were hung on a ship and looked splendid. Every Danish ship had a strake running down each side from which the shields could hang, overlapping as though they were being held in the shield wall, and these shields were for Ubba’s craft, the same ship I had burned and scraped clean. Ubba, it seemed, planned to leave, and wanted his ship to be beautiful. She had a beast on her prow, a prow that curved like a swan’s breast from the waterline, then jutted forward. The beast, half dragon and half worm, was the topmost part, and the whole beast-head could be lifted off its stem and stowed in the bilge. ‘We lift the beast-heads off,’ Ragnar explained to me, ‘so they don’t frighten the spirits.’ I had learned some of the Danish language by then.

‘The spirits?’

Ragnar sighed at my ignorance. ‘Every land has its spirits,’ he said, ‘its own little gods, and when we approach our own lands we take off the beast-heads so that the spirits aren’t scared away. How many fights have you had today?’

‘None.’

‘They’re getting frightened of you. What’s that thing around your neck?’

I showed him. It was a crude iron hammer, a miniature hammer the size of a man’s thumb, and the sight of it made him laugh and cuff me around the head. ‘We’ll make a Dane of you yet,’ he said, plainly pleased. The hammer was the sign of Thor, who was a Danish god almost as important as Odin, as they called Woden, and sometimes I wondered if Thor was the more important god, but no one seemed to know or even care very much. There were no priests among the Danes, which I liked, because priests were forever telling us not to do things or trying to teach us to read or demanding that we pray, and life without them was much more pleasant. The Danes, indeed, seemed very casual about their gods, yet almost every one wore Thor’s hammer. I had torn mine from the neck of a boy who had fought me, and I have it to this day.

The stern of Ubba’s ship, which curved and reared as high as the prow, was decorated with a carved eagle’s head, while at her masthead was a wind-vane in the shape of a dragon. The shields were hung on her flanks, though I later learned they were only displayed there for decoration and that once the ship was under way the shields were stored inboard. Just underneath the shields were the oar-holes, each rimmed with leather, fifteen holes on each side. The holes could be stopped with wooden plugs when the ship was under sail so that the craft could lean with the wind and not be swamped. I helped scrub the whole boat clean, but before we scrubbed her she was sunk in the river, just to drown the rats and discourage the fleas, and then we boys scraped every inch of wood and hammered wax-soaked wool into every seam, and at last the ship was ready and that was the day my uncle Ælfric arrived in Eoferwic.

The first I knew of Ælfric’s coming was when Ragnar brought me my own helmet, the one with the gilt-bronze circlet, and a tunic edged with red embroidery, and a pair of shoes. It felt strange to walk in shoes again. ‘Tidy your hair, boy,’ he said, then remembered he had the helmet that he pushed onto my tousled head. ‘Don’t tidy your hair,’ he said, grinning.

‘Where are we going?’ I asked him.

‘To hear a lot of words, boy. To waste our time. You look like a Frankish whore in that robe.’

‘That bad?’

‘That’s good, lad! They have great whores in Frankia; plump, pretty and cheap. Come on.’ He led me from the river. The city was busy, the shops full, the streets crowded with packmules. A herd of small, dark-fleeced sheep was being driven to slaughter, and they were the only obstruction that did not part to make way for Ragnar whose reputation ensured respect, but that reputation was not grim for I saw how the Danes grinned when he greeted them. He might be called Jarl Ragnar, Earl Ragnar, but he was hugely popular, a jester and fighter who blew through fear as though it were a cobweb. He took me to the palace, which was only a large house, part-built by the Romans in stone and part-made more recently in wood and thatch. It was in the Roman part, in a vast room with stone pillars and limewashed walls, that my uncle waited and with him was Father Beocca and a dozen warriors, all of whom I knew, and all of whom had stayed to defend Bebbanburg while my father rode to war.

Beocca’s crossed eyes widened when he saw me. I must have looked very different for I was long-haired, sun-darkened, skinny, taller and wilder. Then there was the hammer amulet about my neck, which he saw for he pointed to his own crucifix, then at my hammer and looked very disapproving. Ælfric and his men scowled at me as though I had let them down, but no one spoke, partly because Ivar’s own guards, all of them tall men, and all of them in mail and helmets and armed with long-shafted war axes, stood across the head of the room where a simple chair, which now counted as Northumbria’s throne, stood on a wooden platform.

King Egbert arrived, and with him was Ivar the Boneless and a dozen men, including Ravn who, I had learned, was a counsellor to Ivar and his brother. With Ravn was a tall man, white-haired and with a long white beard. He was wearing long robes embroidered with crosses and winged angels and I later discovered this was Wulfhere, the Archbishop of Eoferwic who, like Egbert, had given his allegiance to the Danes. The king sat, looking uncomfortable, and then the discussion began.

They were not there just to discuss me. They talked about which Northumbrian lords were to be trusted, which were to be attacked, what lands were to be granted to Ivar and Ubba, what tribute the Northumbrians must pay, how many horses were to be brought to Eoferwic, how much food was to be given to the army, which ealdormen were to yield hostages, and I sat, bored, until my name was mentioned. I perked up then and heard my uncle propose that I should be ransomed. That was the gist of it, but nothing is ever simple when a score of men decide to argue. For a long time they wrangled over my price, the Danes demanding an impossible payment of three hundred pieces of silver, and Ælfric not wanting to budge from a grudging offer of fifty. I said nothing, but just sat on the broken Roman tiles at the edge of the hall and listened. Three hundred became two seventy-five, fifty became sixty, and so it went on, the numbers edging closer, but still wide apart, and then Ravn, who had been silent, spoke for the first time. ‘The Earl Uhtred,’ he said in Danish, and that was the first time I heard myself described as an Earl, which was a Danish rank, ‘has given his allegiance to King Egbert. In that he has an advantage over you, Ælfric.’

The words were translated and I saw Ælfric’s anger when he was given no title. But nor did he have a title, except the one he had granted to himself, and I learned about that when he spoke softly to Beocca who then spoke up for him. ‘The Ealdorman Ælfric,’ the young priest said, ‘does not believe that a child’s oath is of any significance.’

Had I made an oath? I could not remember doing so, though I had asked for Egbert’s protection, and I was young enough to confuse the two things. Still, it did not much matter, what mattered was that my uncle had usurped Bebbanburg. He was calling himself Ealdorman. I stared at him, shocked, and he looked back at me with pure loathing in his face.

‘It is our belief,’ Ravn said, his blind eyes looking at the roof of the hall that was missing some tiles so that a light rain was spitting through the rafters, ‘that we would be better served by having our own sworn Earl in Bebbanburg, loyal to us, than endure a man whose loyalty we do not know.’

Ælfric could feel the wind changing and he did the obvious thing. He walked to the dais, knelt to Egbert and kissed the king’s outstretched hand and, as a reward, received a blessing from the Archbishop. ‘I will offer a hundred pieces of silver,’ Ælfric said, his allegiance given.

‘Two hundred,’ Ravn said, ‘and a force of thirty Danes to garrison Bebbanburg.’

‘With my allegiance given,’ Ælfric said angrily, ‘you will have no need of Danes in Bebbanburg.’

So Bebbanburg had not fallen and I doubted it could fall. There was no stronger fortress in all Northumbria, and perhaps in all England.

Egbert had not spoken at all, nor did he, but nor had Ivar and it was plain that the tall, thin, ghost-faced Dane was bored with the whole proceedings for he jerked his head at Ragnar who left my side and went to talk privately with his lord. The rest of us waited awkwardly. Ivar and Ragnar were friends, an unlikely friendship for they were very different men, Ivar all savage silence and grim threat, and Ragnar open and loud, yet Ragnar’s eldest son served Ivar and was even now, at eighteen years old, entrusted with the leadership of some of the Danes left in Ireland who were holding onto Ivar’s lands in that island. It was not unusual for eldest sons to serve another lord, Ragnar had two Earls’ sons in his ships’ crews and both might one day expect to inherit wealth and position if they learned how to fight. So Ragnar and Ivar now talked and Ælfric shuffled his feet and kept looking at me, Beocca prayed and King Egbert, having nothing else to do, just tried to look regal.

Ivar finally spoke. ‘The boy is not for sale,’ he announced.

‘Ransom,’ Ravn corrected him gently.

Ælfric looked furious. ‘I came here …’ he began, but Ivar interrupted him.

‘The boy is not for ransom,’ he snarled, then turned and walked from the big chamber. Egbert looked awkward, half rose from his throne, sat again, and Ragnar came and stood beside me.

‘You’re mine,’ he said softly, ‘I just bought you.’

‘Bought me?’

‘My sword’s weight in silver,’ he said.

‘Why?’

‘Perhaps I want to sacrifice you to Odin?’ he suggested, then tousled my hair. ‘We like you, boy,’ he said, ‘we like you enough to keep you. And besides, your uncle didn’t offer enough silver. For five hundred pieces? I’d have sold you for that.’ He laughed.

Beocca hurried across the room. ‘Are you well?’ he asked me.

‘I’m well,’ I said.

‘That thing you’re wearing,’ he said, meaning Thor’s hammer, and he reached as though to pull it from its thong.

‘Touch the boy, priest,’ Ragnar said harshly, ‘and I’ll straighten your crooked eyes before opening you from your gutless belly to your skinny throat.’

Beocca, of course, could not understand what the Dane had said, but he could not mistake the tone and his hand stopped an inch from the hammer. He looked nervous. He lowered his voice so only I could hear him. ‘Your uncle will kill you,’ he whispered.

‘Kill me?’

‘He wants to be Ealdorman. That’s why he wished to ransom you. So he could kill you.’

‘But,’ I began to protest.

‘Shh,’ Beocca said. He was curious about my blue hands, but did not ask what had caused them. ‘I know you are the Ealdorman,’ he said instead, ‘and we will meet again.’ He smiled at me, glanced warily at Ragnar, and backed away.

Ælfric left. I learned later that he had been given safe passage to and from Eoferwic, which promise had been kept, but after that meeting he retreated to Bebbanburg and stayed there. Ostensibly he was loyal to Egbert, which meant he accepted the overlordship of the Danes, but they had not yet learned to trust him. That, Ragnar explained to me, was why he had kept me alive. ‘I like Bebbanburg,’ he told me, ‘I want it.’

‘It’s mine,’ I said stubbornly.

‘And you’re mine,’ he said, ‘which means Bebbanburg is mine. You’re mine, Uhtred, because I just bought you, so I can do whatever I like with you. I can cook you, if I want, except there’s not enough meat on you to feed a weasel. Now, take off that whore’s tunic, give me the shoes and helmet, and go back to work.’

So I was a slave again, and happy. Sometimes, when I tell folk my story, they ask why I did not run away from the pagans, why I did not escape southwards into the lands where the Danes did not yet rule, but it never occurred to me to try. I was happy, I was alive, I was with Ragnar and it was enough.

More Danes arrived before winter. Thirty-six ships came, each with its contingent of warriors, and the ships were pulled onto the riverbank for the winter while the crews, laden with shields and weapons, marched to wherever they would spend the next few months. The Danes were casting a net over eastern Northumbria, a light one, but still a net of scattered garrisons. Yet they could not have stayed if we had not let them, but those Ealdormen and thegns who had not died at Eoferwic had bent the knee and so we were a Danish kingdom now, despite the leashed Egbert on his pathetic throne. It was only in the west, in the wilder parts of Northumbria, that no Danes ruled, but nor were there any strong forces in those wild parts to challenge them.

Ragnar took land west of Eoferwic, up in the hills. His wife and family joined him there, and Ravn and Gudrun came, plus all Ragnar’s ships’ crews who took over homesteads in the nearby valleys. Our first job was to make Ragnar’s house larger. It had belonged to an English thegn who had died at Eoferwic, but it was no grand hall, merely a low wooden building thatched with rye straw and bracken on which grass grew so thickly that, from a distance, the house looked like a long hummock. We built a new part, not for us, but for the few cattle, sheep and goats who would survive the winter and give birth in the new year. The rest were slaughtered. Ragnar and the men did most of the killing, but as the last few beasts came to the pen, he handed an axe to Rorik, his younger son. ‘One clean, quick stroke,’ he ordered, and Rorik tried, but he was not strong enough and his aim was not true and the animal bellowed and bled and it took six men to restrain it while Ragnar did the job properly. The skinners moved onto the carcass and Ragnar held the axe to me. ‘See if you can do better.’

A cow was pushed towards me, a man lifted her tail, she obediently lowered her head and I swung the axe, remembering exactly where Ragnar had hit each time, and the heavy blade swung true, straight into the spine just behind the skull and she went down with a crash. ‘We’ll make a Danish warrior of you yet,’ Ragnar said, pleased.

The work lessened after the cattle slaughter. The English who still lived in the valley brought Ragnar their tribute of carcasses and grain, just as they would have delivered the supplies to their English lord. It was impossible to read from their faces what they thought of Ragnar and his Danes, but they gave no trouble, and Ragnar took care not to disturb their lives. The local priest was allowed to live and give services in his church that was a wooden shed decorated with a cross, and Ragnar sat in judgment on disputes, but always made certain he was advised by an Englishman who was knowledgeable in the local customs. ‘You can’t live somewhere,’ he told me, ‘if the people don’t want you to be there. They can kill our cattle or poison our streams, and we would never know who did it. You either slaughter them all or learn to live with them.’

The sky grew paler and the wind colder. Dead leaves blew in drifts. Our main work now was to feed the surviving cattle and to keep the log pile high. A dozen of us would go up into the woods and I became proficient with an axe, learning how to bring a tree down with an economy of strokes. We would harness an ox to the bigger trunks to drag them down to the shieling, and the best trees were put aside for building, while the others were split and chopped for burning. There was also time for play and so we children made our own hall high up in the woods, a hall of unsplit logs with a thatch of bracken and a badger’s skull nailed to the gable in imitation of the boar’s skull that crowned Ragnar’s home, and in our pretend hall Rorik and I fought over who would be king, though Thyra, his sister, who was eight years old, was always the lady of the house. She would spin wool there, because if she did not spin enough thread by winter’s end she would be punished, and she would watch while we boys fought our mock battles with toy wooden swords. Most of the boys were servants’ sons, or slave children, and they always insisted I was the English chief while Rorik was the Danish leader, and my war-band only received the smallest, weakest boys and so we nearly always lost, and Thyra, who had her mother’s pale gold hair, would watch and spin, ever spinning, the distaff in her left hand while her right teased the thread out of the sheared fleece.

Every woman had to spin and weave. Ragnar reckoned it took five women or a dozen girls a whole winter to spin enough thread to make a new sail for a boat, and boats were always needing new sails, and so the women worked every hour the gods sent. They also cooked, boiled walnut shells to dye the new thread, picked mushrooms, tanned the skins of the slaughtered cattle, collected the moss we used for wiping our arses, rolled beeswax into candles, malted the barley and placated the gods. There were so many gods and goddesses, and some were peculiar to our own house and those the women celebrated in their own rites, while others, like Odin and Thor were mighty and ubiquitous, but they were rarely treated in the same way that the Christians worshipped their God. A man would appeal to Thor, or to Loki, or to Odin, or to Vikr, or to any of the other great beings who lived in Asgard, which seemed to be the heaven of the gods, but the Danes did not gather in a church as we had gathered every Sunday and every saint’s day in Bebbanburg, and just as there were no priests among the Danes, nor were there any relics or sacred books. I missed none of it.

I wish I had missed Sven, but his father, Kjartan, had a home in the next valley and it did not take long for Sven to discover our hall in the woods and, as the first winter frosts crisped the dead leaves and the berries shone on hawthorn and holly, we found our games turning savage. We no longer split into two sides, because we now had to fight off Sven’s boys who would come stalking us, but for a time no great damage was done. It was a game, after all, just a game, but one Sven won repeatedly. He stole the badger’s skull from our gable, which we replaced with a fox’s head and Thyra shouted at Sven’s boys, skulking in the woods, that she had smeared the fox skull with poison, and we thought that very clever of her, but next morning we found our pretend hall burned to the ground.

‘A hall-burning,’ Rorik said bitterly.

‘Hall-burning?’

‘It happens at home,’ Rorik explained. ‘You go to an enemy’s hall and burn it to the ground. But there’s one thing about a hall-burning. You have to make sure everyone dies. If there are any survivors then they’ll take revenge, so you attack at night, surround the hall, and kill everyone who tries to escape the flames.’

But Sven had no hall. There was his father’s house, of course, and for a day we plotted revenge on that, discussing how we would burn it down and spear the family as they ran out, but it was only boastful boy talk and of course nothing came of it. Instead we built ourselves a new hall, higher in the woods. It was not as fanciful as the old, not nearly so weathertight, really nothing more than a crude shelter of branches and bracken, but we nailed a stoat’s skull to its makeshift gable and assured ourselves that we still had our kingdom in the hills.

But nothing short of total victory would satisfy Sven and, a few days later, when our chores were done, just Rorik, Thyra and I went up to our new hall. Thyra span while Rorik and I argued over where the best swords were made, he saying it was Denmark and I claiming the prize for England, neither of us old enough or sensible enough to know that the best blades come from Frankia, and after a while we got tired of arguing and picked up our sharpened ash poles that served as play spears and decided to look for the wild boar that sometimes trampled through the wood at nightfall. We would not have dared try to kill a boar, they were much too big, but we pretended we were great hunters, and just as we two great hunters were readying to go into the woods, Sven attacked. Just him and two of his followers, but Sven, instead of carrying a wooden sword, swung a real blade, long as a man’s arm, the steel glittering in the winter light, and he ran at us, bellowing like a madman. Rorik and I, seeing the fury in his eyes, ran away. He followed us, crashing through the wood like the wild boar we had wanted to stalk, and it was only because we were much faster that we got away from that wicked blade, and then a moment later we heard Thyra scream.

We crept back, cautious of the sword that Sven must have taken from his father’s house and, when we reached our pathetic hut, found that Thyra was gone. Her distaff was on the floor and her wool was all speckled with dead leaves and pieces of twig.

Sven had always been clumsy in his strength and he had left a trail through the woods that was easy enough to follow and after a while we heard voices. We kept following, crossing the ridge-top where beeches grew, then down into our enemy’s valley, and Sven did not have the sense to post a rearguard who would have seen us. Instead, revelling in his victory, he had gone to the clearing that must have been his refuge in the wood because there was a stone hearth in the centre and I remember wondering why we had never built a similar hearth for ourselves. He had tied Thyra to a tree and stripped the tunic from her upper body. There was nothing to see there, she was just a small girl, only eight years old and thus four or five years from being marriageable, but she was pretty and that was why Sven had half stripped her. I could see that Sven’s two companions were unhappy. Thyra, after all, was Earl Ragnar’s daughter and what had started as a game was now dangerous, but Sven had to show off. He had to prove he had no fear. He had no idea Rorik and I were crouched in the undergrowth, and I do not suppose he would have cared if he had known.

He had dropped the sword by the hearth and now he planted himself in front of Thyra and took down his breeches. ‘Touch it,’ he ordered her.

One of his companions said something I could not hear.

‘She won’t tell anyone,’ Sven said confidently, ‘and we won’t hurt her.’ He looked back to Thyra. ‘I won’t hurt you if you touch it!’

It was then I broke cover. I was not being brave. Sven’s companions had lost their appetite for the game, Sven himself had his breeches around his ankles, and his sword was lying loose in the clearing’s centre and I snatched it up and ran at him. He somehow kept his feet as he turned. ‘I’ll touch it,’ I shouted, and I swung the long blade at his prick, but the sword was heavy, I had not used a man’s blade before, and instead of hitting where I had aimed I sliced it down his bare thigh, opening the skin, and I swung it back, using all my strength, and the blade chopped into his waist where his clothes took most of the force. He fell over, shouting, and his two friends dragged me away as Rorik went to untie his sister.

That was all that happened. Sven was bleeding, but he managed to pull up his breeches and his friends helped him away and Rorik and I took Thyra back to the homestead where Ravn heard Thyra’s sobs and our excited voices and demanded silence. ‘Uhtred,’ the old man said sternly, ‘you will wait by the pigsties. Rorik, you will tell me what happened.’

I waited outside as Rorik told what had happened, then Rorik was sent out and I was summoned indoors to recount the afternoon’s escapade. Thyra was now in her mother’s arms, and her mother and grandmother were furious. ‘You tell the same tale as Rorik,’ Ravn said when I had finished.

‘Because it’s the truth,’ I said.

‘So it would seem.’

‘He raped her!’ Sigrid insisted.

‘No,’ Ravn said firmly, ‘thanks to Uhtred, he did not.’

That was the story Ragnar heard when he returned from hunting, and as it made me a hero I did not argue against its essential untruth which was that Sven would not have raped Thyra for he would not have dared. His foolishness knew few limits, but limits there were, and committing rape on the daughter of Earl Ragnar, his father’s warlord, was beyond even Sven’s stupidity. Yet he had made an enemy and, next day, Ragnar led six men to Kjartan’s house in the neighbouring valley. Rorik and I were given horses and told to accompany the men, and I confess I was frightened. I felt I was responsible. I had, after all, started the games in the high woods, but Ragnar did not see it that way. ‘You haven’t offended me. Sven has.’ He spoke darkly, his usual cheerfulness gone. ‘You did well, Uhtred. You behaved like a Dane.’ There was no higher praise he could have given me, and I sensed he was disappointed that I had charged Sven instead of Rorik, but I was older and much stronger than Ragnar’s younger son so it should have been me who fought.

We rode through the cold woods and I was curious because two of Ragnar’s men carried long branches of hazel that were too spindly to use as weapons, but what they were for I did not like to ask because I was nervous.

Kjartan’s homestead was in a fold of the hills beside a stream that ran through pastures where he kept sheep, goats and cattle, though most had been killed now, and the few remaining animals were cropping the last of the year’s grass. It was a sunny day, though cold. Dogs barked as we approached, but Kjartan and his men snarled at them and beat them back to the yard beside the house where he had planted an ash tree that did not look as though it would survive the coming winter, and then, accompanied by four men, none of them armed, he walked towards the approaching horsemen. Ragnar and his six men were armed to the hilt with shields, swords and war axes, and their broad chests were clad in mail, while Ragnar was wearing my father’s helmet that he had purchased after the fighting at Eoferwic. It was a splendid helmet, its crown and face-piece decorated with silver, and I thought it looked better on Ragnar than it had on my father.

Kjartan the shipmaster was a big man, taller than Ragnar, with a flat, wide face like his son’s and small, suspicious eyes and a huge beard. He glanced at the hazel branches and must have recognised their meaning for he instinctively touched the hammer-charm hanging on a silver chain about his neck. Ragnar curbed his horse and, in a gesture that showed his utter contempt, he tossed down the sword that I had carried back from the clearing where Sven had tied Thyra. By rights the sword belonged to Ragnar now, and it was a valuable weapon with silver wire wrapped around its hilt, but he tossed the blade at Kjartan’s feet as though it were nothing more than a hay-knife. ‘Your son left that on my land,’ he said, ‘and I would have words with him.’

‘My son is a good boy,’ Kjartan said stoutly, ‘and in time he will serve at your oars and fight in your shield wall.’

‘He has offended me.’

‘He meant no harm, lord.’

‘He has offended me,’ Ragnar repeated harshly. ‘He looked on my daughter’s nakedness and showed her his own.’

‘And he was punished for it,’ Kjartan said, giving me a malevolent glance. ‘Blood was shed.’

Ragnar made an abrupt gesture and the hazel branches were dropped to the ground. That was evidently Ragnar’s answer, which made no sense to me, but Kjartan understood, as did Rorik who leaned over and whispered to me. ‘That means he must fight for Sven now.’

‘Fight for him?’

‘They mark a square on the ground with the branches and they fight inside the square.’

Yet no one moved to arrange the hazel branches into a square. Instead Kjartan walked back to his house and summoned Sven who came limping from under the low lintel, his right leg bandaged. He looked sullen and terrified, and no wonder, for Ragnar and his horsemen were in their war glory, shining warriors, sword-Danes.

‘Say what you have to say,’ Kjartan said to his son.

Sven looked up at Ragnar. ‘I am sorry,’ he mumbled.

‘I can’t hear you,’ Ragnar snarled.

‘I am sorry, lord,’ Sven said, shaking with fear.

‘Sorry for what?’ Ragnar demanded.

‘For what I did.’

‘And what did you do?’

Sven found no answer, or none that he cared to make, and instead he shuffled his feet and looked down at the ground. Cloud shadows raced across the far moor, and two ravens beat up to the head of the valley.

‘You laid hands on my daughter,’ Ragnar said, ‘and you tied her to a tree, and you stripped her naked.’

‘Half naked,’ Sven muttered, and for his pains took a thump on the head from his father.

‘A game,’ Kjartan appealed to Ragnar, ‘just a game, lord.’

‘No boy plays such games with my daughter,’ Ragnar said. I had rarely seen him angry, but he was angry now, grim and hard, no trace of the big-hearted man who could make a hall echo with laughter. He dismounted and drew his sword, his battle-blade called Heart-Breaker, and he held the tip towards Kjartan. ‘Well?’ he asked, ‘do you dispute my right?’

‘No, lord,’ Kjartan said, ‘but he is a good boy, strong and a hard worker, and he will serve you well.’

‘And he has seen things he should not see,’ Ragnar said, and he tossed Heart-Breaker into the air so that her long blade turned in the sun and he caught her by the hilt as she dropped, but now he was holding her backwards, as if she were a dagger rather than a sword. ‘Uhtred!’ Ragnar called, making me jump. ‘He says she was only half naked. Is that true?’

‘Yes, lord.’

‘Then only half a punishment,’ Ragnar said, and he drove the sword forward, hilt first, straight into Sven’s face. The hilts of our swords are heavy, sometimes decorated with precious things, but however pretty they appear, the hilts are still brutal lumps of metal, and Heart-Breaker’s hilt, banded with silver, crushed Sven’s right eye. Crushed it to jelly, blinding it instantly, and Ragnar spat at him then slid his blade back into its fleece-lined scabbard.

Sven was crouching, whimpering, his hands clasped over his ruined eye.

‘It is over,’ Ragnar said to Kjartan.

Kjartan hesitated. He was angry, shamed and unhappy, but he could not win a trial of strength with Earl Ragnar and so, at last, he nodded. ‘It is over,’ he agreed.

‘And you no longer serve me,’ Ragnar said coldly.

We rode home.

The hard winter came, the brooks froze, snow drifted to fill the streambeds, and the world was cold, silent and white. Wolves came to the edge of the woods and the midday sun was pale, as though its strength had been leeched away by the north wind.

Ragnar rewarded me with a silver arm ring, the first I ever received, while Kjartan was sent away with his family. He would no longer command one of Ragnar’s ships and he would no longer receive a share of Ragnar’s generosity, for now he was a man without a lord and he went to Eoferwic where he joined the garrison holding the town. It was not a prestigious job, any Dane with ambition would rather serve a lord like Ragnar who could make him rich, while the men guarding Eoferwic were denied any chance of plunder. Their task was to watch across the flat fields outside the city and to make certain that King Egbert fomented no trouble, but I was relieved that Sven was gone, and absurdly pleased with my arm ring. The Danes loved arm rings. The more a man possessed, the more he was regarded, for the rings came from success. Ragnar had rings of silver and rings of gold, rings carved as dragons and rings inlaid with glittering stones. When he moved you could hear the rings clinking. The rings could be used as money if there were no coins. I remember watching a Dane take off an arm ring and hack it to shreds with an axe, then offer a merchant scraps of the ring until the scales showed he had paid sufficient silver. That was down in the bigger valley, in a large village where most of Ragnar’s younger men had settled and where traders brought goods from Eoferwic. The incoming Danes had found a small English settlement in the valley, but they needed more space for new houses and to make it they had burned down a grove of hazels, and that was what Ragnar called the place, Synningthwait, which meant the place cleared by fire. Doubtless the village had an English name, but it was already being forgotten.

‘We’re in England to stay now,’ Ragnar told me as we went home one day after buying supplies in Synningthwait. The road was a track pounded in the snow and our horses picked a careful path between the drifts through which the black twigs of the hedge-tops just showed. I was leading the two packhorses laden with their precious bags of salt and asking Ragnar my usual questions; where swallows went in winter, why elves gave us hiccups, and why Ivar was called the Boneless. ‘Because he’s so thin, of course,’ Ragnar said, ‘so that he looks as if you could roll him up like a cloak.’

‘Why doesn’t Ubba have a nickname?’

‘He does. He’s called Ubba the Horrible.’ He laughed, because he had made the nickname up, and I laughed because I was happy. Ragnar liked my company and, with my long fair hair, men mistook me for his son and I liked that. Rorik should have been with us, but he was sick that day, and the women were plucking herbs and chanting spells. ‘He’s often sick,’ Ragnar said, ‘not like Ragnar,’ he meant his eldest son who helped hold onto Ivar’s lands in Ireland, ‘Ragnar’s built like an ox,’ he went on, ‘never gets sick! He’s like you, Uhtred.’ He smiled, thinking of his eldest son, who he missed. ‘He’ll take land and thrive. But Rorik? Perhaps I shall have to give him this land. He can’t go back to Denmark.’

‘Why not?’

‘Denmark is bad land,’ Ragnar explained. ‘It’s either flat and sandy and you can’t grow a fart on that sort of field, or across the water it’s great steep hills with little patches of meadow where you work like a dog and starve.’

‘Across the water?’ I asked, and he explained that the Danes came from a country that was divided into two parts, and the two parts were surrounded by countless islands, and that the nearer part, from where he came, was very flat and very sandy, and that the other part, which lay to the east across a great sound of water, was where the mountains were. ‘And there are Svear there too,’ he went on.

‘Svear?’

‘A tribe. Like us. They worship Thor and Odin, but they speak differently.’ He shrugged. ‘We get along with the Svear, and with the Norse.’ The Svear, the Norse and the Danes were the Northmen, the men who went on Viking expeditions, but it was the Danes who had come to take my land, though I did not say that to Ragnar. I had learned to hide my soul, or perhaps I was confused. Northumbrian or Dane? Which was I? What did I want to be?

‘Suppose,’ I asked, ‘that the rest of the English do not want us to stay here.’ I used the word ‘us’ deliberately.

He laughed at that. ‘The English can want what they like! But you saw what happened at Yorvik.’ That was how the Danes pronounced Eoferwic. For some reason they found that name difficult, so they said Yorvik instead. ‘Who was the bravest English fighter at Yorvik?’ Ragnar asked. ‘You! A child! You charged me with that little sax! It was a gutting knife, not a sword, and you tried to kill me! I almost died laughing.’ He leaned over and cuffed me affectionately. ‘Of course the English don’t want us here,’ he went on, ‘but what can they do? Next year we’ll take Mercia, then East Anglia and finally Wessex.’

‘My father always said Wessex was the strongest kingdom,’ I said. My father had said nothing of the sort, indeed he despised the men of Wessex because he thought them effete and over-pious, but I was trying to provoke Ragnar.

I failed. ‘It’s the richest kingdom,’ he said, ‘but that doesn’t make it strong. Men make a kingdom strong, not gold.’ He grinned at me. ‘We’re the Danes. We don’t lose, we win, and Wessex will fall.’

‘It will?’

‘It has a new weak king,’ he said dismissively, ‘and if he dies then his son is a mere child, so perhaps they’d put the new king’s brother on the throne instead. We’d like that.’

‘Why?’

‘Because the brother is another weakling. He’s called Alfred.’

Alfred. That was the first time I ever heard of Alfred of Wessex. I thought nothing of it at the time. Why should I have done?

‘Alfred,’ Ragnar continued scathingly. ‘All he cares about is rutting girls, which is good! Don’t tell Sigrid I said that, but there’s nothing wrong with unsheathing the sword when you can, but Alfred spends half his time rutting and the other half praying to his god to forgive him for rutting. How can a god disapprove of a good hump?’

‘How do you know about Alfred?’ I asked.

‘Spies, Uhtred, spies. Traders, mostly. They talk to folk in Wessex, so we know all about King Æthelred and his brother Alfred. And Alfred’s sick as a stoat half the time.’ He paused, perhaps thinking of his younger son who was ill. ‘It’s a weak house,’ he went on, ‘and the West Saxons should get rid of them and put a real man on the throne, except they won’t, and when Wessex falls there will be no more England.’

‘Perhaps they’ll find their strong king,’ I said.

‘No,’ Ragnar said firmly. ‘In Denmark,’ he went on, ‘our kings are the hard men, and if their sons are soft, then a man from another family becomes king, but in England they believe the throne passes through a woman’s legs. So a feeble creature like Alfred could become king just because his father was a king.’

‘You have a king in Denmark?’

‘A dozen. I could call myself king if I fancied, except Ivar and Ubba might not like it, and no man offends them lightly.’

I rode in silence, listening to the horses’ hooves crunching and squeaking in the snow. I was thinking of Ragnar’s dream, the dream of no more England, of her land given to the Danes. ‘What happens to me?’ I finally blurted out.

‘You?’ He sounded surprised that I had asked. ‘What happens to you, Uhtred, is what you make happen. You will grow, you will learn the sword, you will learn the way of the shield wall, you will learn the oar, you will learn to give honour to the gods, and then you will use what you have learned to make your life good or bad.’

‘I want Bebbanburg,’ I said.

‘Then you must take it. Perhaps I will help you, but not yet. Before that we go south, and before we go south we must persuade Odin to look on us with favour.’

I still did not understand the Danish way of religion. They took it much less seriously than we English, but the women prayed often enough and once in a while a man would kill a good beast, dedicate it to the gods, and mount its bloody head above his door to show that there would be a feast in Thor or Odin’s honour in his house, but the feast, though it was an act of worship, was always the same as any other drunken feast.

I remember the Yule feast best because that was the week Weland came. He arrived on the coldest day of the winter when the snow was heaped in drifts, and he came on foot with a sword by his side, a bow on his shoulder and rags on his back and he knelt respectfully outside Ragnar’s house. Sigrid made him come inside and she fed him and gave him ale, but when he had eaten he insisted on going back into the snow and waiting for Ragnar who was up in the hills, hunting.

Weland was a snake-like man, that was my very first thought on seeing him. He reminded me of my uncle Ælfric, slender, sly and secretive, and I disliked him on sight and I felt a flicker of fear as I watched him prostrate himself in the snow when Ragnar returned.

‘My name is Weland,’ he said, ‘and I am in need of a lord.’

‘You are not a youth,’ Ragnar said, ‘so why do you not have a lord?’

‘He died, lord, when his ship sank.’

‘Who was he?’

‘Snorri, lord.’

‘Which Snorri?’

‘Son of Eric, son of Grimm, from Birka.’

‘And you did not drown?’ Ragnar asked as he dismounted and gave me the reins of his horse.

‘I was ashore, lord, I was sick.’

‘Your family? Your home?’

‘I am son of Godfred, lord, from Haithabu.’

‘Haithabu!’ Ragnar said sourly. ‘A trader?’

‘I am a warrior, lord.’

‘So why come to me?’

Weland shrugged. ‘Men say you are a good lord, a ring-giver, but if you turn me down, lord, I shall try other men.’

‘And you can use that sword, Weland Godfredson?’

‘As a woman can use her tongue, lord.’

‘You’re that good, eh?’ Ragnar asked, as ever unable to resist a jest. He gave Weland permission to stay, sending him to Synningthwait to find shelter, and afterwards, when I said I did not like Weland, Ragnar just shrugged and said the stranger needed kindness. We were sitting in the house, half choking from the smoke that writhed about the rafters. ‘There is nothing worse, Uhtred,’ Ragnar said, ‘than for a man to have no lord. No ring-giver,’ he added, touching his own arm rings.

‘I don’t trust him,’ Sigrid put in from the fire where she was making bannocks on a stone. Rorik, recovering from his sickness, was helping her, while Thyra, as ever, was spinning. ‘I think he’s an outlaw,’ Sigrid said.

‘He probably is,’ Ragnar allowed, ‘but my ship doesn’t care if its oars are pulled by outlaws.’ He reached for a bannock and had his hand slapped away by Sigrid who said the cakes were for Yule.

The Yule feast was the biggest celebration of the year, a whole week of food and ale and mead and fights and laughter and drunken men vomiting in the snow. Ragnar’s men gathered at Synningthwait and there were horse races, wrestling matches, competitions in throwing spears, axes and rocks, and, my favourite, the tug of war where two teams of men or boys tried to pull the other into a cold stream. I saw Weland watching me as I wrestled with a boy a year older than me. Weland already looked more prosperous. His rags were gone and he wore a cloak of fox fur. I got drunk that Yule for the first time, helplessly drunk so that my legs would not work and I lay moaning with a throbbing head and Ragnar roared with laughter and made me drink more mead until I threw up. Ragnar, of course, won the drinking competition, and Ravn recited a long poem about some ancient hero who killed a monster and then the monster’s mother who was even more fearsome than her son, but I was too drunk to remember much of it.

And after the Yule feast I discovered something new about the Danes and their gods, for Ragnar had ordered a great pit dug in the woods above his house, and Rorik and I helped make the pit in a clearing. We axed through tree roots, shovelled out earth, and still Ragnar wanted it deeper, and he was only satisfied when he could stand in the base of the pit and not see across its lip. A ramp led down into the hole, beside which was a great heap of excavated soil.

The next night all Ragnar’s men, but no women, walked to the pit in the darkness. We boys carried pitch-soaked torches that flamed under the trees, casting flickering shadows that melted into the surrounding darkness. The men were all dressed and armed as though they were going to war.

Blind Ravn waited at the pit, standing at the far side from the ramp, and he chanted a great epic in praise of Odin. On and on it went, the words as hard and rhythmic as a drum beat, describing how the great god had made the world from the corpse of the giant Ymir, and how he had hurled the sun and moon into the sky, and how his spear, Gungnir, was the mightiest weapon in creation, forged by dwarves in the world’s deeps, and on the poem went and the men gathered around the pit seemed to sway to the poem’s pulse, sometimes repeating a phrase, and I confess I was almost as bored as when Beocca used to drone on in his stammering Latin, and I stared out into the woods, watching the shadows, wondering what things moved in the dark and thinking of the sceadugengan.

I often thought of the sceadugengan, the Shadow-Walkers. Ealdwulf, Bebbanburg’s blacksmith, had first told me of them. He had warned me not to tell Beocca of the stories, and I never did, and Ealdwulf told me how, before Christ came to England, back when we English had worshipped Woden and the other gods, it had been well known that there were Shadow-Walkers who moved silent and half-seen across the land, mysterious creatures who could change their shapes. One moment they were wolves, then they were men, or perhaps eagles, and they were neither alive nor dead, but things from the shadow world, night-beasts, and I stared into the dark trees and I wanted there to be sceadugengan out there in the dark, something that would be my secret, something that would frighten the Danes, something to give Bebbanburg back to me, something as powerful as the magic which brought the Danes victory.

It was a child’s dream, of course. When you are young and powerless you dream of possessing mystical strength, and once you are grown and strong you condemn lesser folk to that same dream, but as a child I wanted the power of the sceadugengan. I remember my excitement that night at the notion of harnessing the power of the Shadow-Walkers before a whinny brought my attention back to the pit and I saw that the men at the ramp had divided, and that a strange procession was coming from the dark. There was a stallion, a ram, a dog, a goose, a bull and a boar, each animal led by one of Ragnar’s warriors, and at the back was an English prisoner, a man condemned for moving a field marker, and he, like the beasts, had a rope about his neck.

I knew the stallion. It was Ragnar’s finest, a great black horse called Flame-Stepper, a horse Ragnar loved. Yet Flame-Stepper, like all the other beasts, was to be given to Odin that night. Ragnar did it. Stripped to his waist, his scarred chest broad in the flamelight, he used a war axe to kill the beasts one by one, and Flame-Stepper was the last animal to die and the great horse’s eyes were white as it was forced down the ramp. It struggled, terrified by the stench of blood that had splashed the sides of the pit, and Ragnar went to the horse and there were tears on his face as he kissed Flame-Stepper’s muzzle, and then he killed him, one blow between the eyes, straight and true, so that the stallion fell, hooves thrashing, but dead within a heartbeat. The man died last, and that was not so distressing as the horse’s death, and then Ragnar stood in the mess of blood-matted fur and raised his gore-smothered axe to the sky. ‘Odin!’ he shouted.

‘Odin!’ Every man echoed the shout, and they held their swords or spears or axes towards the steaming pit. ‘Odin!’ they shouted again, and I saw Weland the snake staring at me across the firelit slaughter hole.

All the corpses were taken from the pit and hung from tree branches. Their blood had been given to the creatures beneath the earth and now their flesh was given to the gods above, and then we filled in the pit, we danced on it to stamp down the earth, and the jars of ale and skins of mead were handed around and we drank beneath the hanging corpses. Odin, the terrible god, had been summoned because Ragnar and his people were going to war.

I thought of the blades held over the pit of blood, I thought of the god stirring in his corpse-hall to send a blessing on these men, and I knew that all England would fall unless it found a magic as strong as the sorcery of these strong men. I was only ten years old, but on that night I knew what I would become.

I would join the sceadugengan, I would be a Shadow-Walker.

Two

Springtime, the year 868, I was eleven years old and the Wind-Viper was afloat.

She was afloat, but not at sea. The Wind-Viper was Ragnar’s ship, a lovely thing with a hull of oak, a carved serpent’s head at the prow, an eagle’s head at the stern and a triangular wind-vane made of bronze on which a raven was painted black. The wind-vane was mounted at her masthead, though the mast was now lowered and being supported by two timber crutches so that it ran like a rafter down the centre of the long ship. Ragnar’s men were rowing and their painted shields lined the ship’s sides. They chanted as they rowed, pounding out the tale of how mighty Thor had fished for the dread Midgard Serpent that lies coiled about the roots of the world, and how the serpent had taken the hook baited with an ox’s head, and how the giant Hymir, terrified of the vast snake, had cut the line. It is a good tale and its rhythms took us up the River Trente, which is a tributary of the Humber and flows from deep inside Mercia. We were going south, against the current, but the journey was easy, the ride placid, the sun warm and the river’s margins thick with flowers. Some men rode horses, keeping pace with us on the eastern bank, while behind us was a fleet of beast-prowed ships. This was the army of Ivar the Boneless and Ubba the Horrible, a host of Northmen, sword-Danes, going to war.

All eastern Northumbria belonged to them, western Northumbria offered grudging allegiance, and now they planned to take Mercia which was the kingdom at England’s heartland. The Mercian territory stretched south to the River Temes where the lands of Wessex began, west to the mountainous country where the Welsh tribes lived, and east to the farms and marshes of East Anglia. Mercia, though not as wealthy as Wessex, was much richer than Northumbria and the River Trente ran into the kingdom’s heart and the Wind-Viper was the tip of a Danish spear aimed at that heart.

The river was not deep, but Ragnar boasted that the Wind-Viper could float on a puddle, and that was almost true. From a distance she looked long, lean and knife-like, but when you were aboard you could see how the midships flared outwards so that she sat on the water like a shallow bowl rather than cut through it like a blade, and even with her belly laden with forty or fifty men, their weapons, shields, food and ale, she needed very little depth. Once in a while her long keel would scrape on gravel, but by keeping to the outside of the river’s sweeping bends we were able to stay in sufficient water. That was why the mast had been lowered, so that, on the outside of the river’s curves, we could slide under the overhanging trees without becoming entangled.

Rorik and I sat in the prow with his grandfather, Ravn, and our job was to tell the old man everything we could see, which was very little other than flowers, trees, reeds, waterfowl and the signs of trout rising to mayfly. Swallows had come from their winter sleep and swooped across the river while martins pecked at the banks to collect mud for their nests. Warblers were loud, pigeons clattered through new leaves and the hawks slid still and menacing across the scattered clouds. Swans watched us pass and once in a while we would see otter cubs playing beneath the pale-leaved willows and there would be a flurry of water as they fled from our coming. Sometimes we passed a riverside settlement of thatch and timber, but the folks and their livestock had already run away.

‘Mercia is frightened of us,’ Ravn said. He lifted his white, blind eyes to the oncoming air, ‘and they are right to be frightened. We are warriors.’

‘They have warriors too,’ I said.

Ravn laughed. ‘I think only one man in three is a warrior, and sometimes not even that many, but in our army, Uhtred, every man is a fighter. If you do not want to be a warrior you stay home in Denmark. You till the soil, herd sheep, fish the sea, but you do not take to the ships and become a fighter. But here in England? Every man is forced to the fight, yet only one in three or maybe only one in four has the belly for it. The rest are farmers who just want to run. We are wolves fighting sheep.’

Watch and learn, my father had said, and I was learning. What else can a boy with an unbroken voice do? One in three men are warriors, remember the Shadow-Walkers, beware the cut beneath the shield, a river can be an army’s road to a kingdom’s heart, watch and learn.

‘And they have a weak king,’ Ravn went on. ‘Burghred, he’s called, and he has no guts for a fight. He will fight, of course, because we shall force him, and he will call on his friends in Wessex to help him, but in his weak heart he knows he cannot win.’

‘How do you know?’ Rorik asked.

Ravn smiled. ‘All winter, boy, our traders have been in Mercia. Selling pelts, selling amber, buying iron ore, buying malt, and they talk and they listen and they come back and they tell us what they heard.’

Kill the traders, I thought.

Why did I think that way? I liked Ragnar. I liked him much more than I had liked my father. I should, by rights, be dead, yet Ragnar had saved me and Ragnar spoilt me and he treated me like a son, and he called me a Dane, and I liked the Danes, yet even at that time I knew I was not a Dane. I was Uhtred of Bebbanburg and I clung to the memory of the fortress by the sea, of the birds crying over the breakers, of the puffins whirring across the whitecaps, of the seals on the rocks, of the white water shattering on the cliffs. I remembered the folk of that land, the men who had called my father ‘lord’, but talked to him of cousins they held in common. It was the gossip of neighbours, the comfort of knowing every family within a half-day’s ride, and that was, and is, Bebbanburg to me; home. Ragnar would have given me the fortress if it could be taken, but then it would belong to the Danes and I would be nothing more than their hired man, Ealdorman at their pleasure, no better than King Egbert who was no king but a pampered dog on a short rope, and what the Dane gives, the Dane can take away, and I would hold Bebbanburg by my own effort.

Did I know all that at eleven? Some, I think. It lay in my heart, unformed, unspoken, but hard as a stone. It would be covered over in time, half forgotten and often contradicted, but it was always there. Destiny is all, Ravn liked to tell me, destiny is everything. He would even say it in English, ‘wyrd bið ful ãræd.’

‘What are you thinking?’ Rorik asked me.

‘That it would be nice to swim,’ I said.

The oars dipped and the Wind-Viper glided on into Mercia.

Next day a small force waited in our path. The Mercians had blocked the river with felled trees which did not quite bar the way, but would certainly make it hard for our oarsmen to make progress through the small gap between the tangling branches. There were about a hundred Mercians and they had a score of bowmen and spear-throwers waiting by the blockage, ready to pick off our rowers, while the rest of their men were formed into a shield wall on the eastern bank. Ragnar laughed when he saw them. That was something else I learned, the joy with which the Danes faced battle. Ragnar was whooping with joy as he leaned on the steering oar and ran the ship into the bank, and the ships behind were also grounding themselves while the horsemen who had been keeping pace with us dismounted for battle.

I watched from the Wind-Viper’s prow as the ships’ crews hurried ashore and pulled on leather or mail. What did those Mercians see? They saw young men with wild hair, wild beards and hungry faces. Men who embraced battle like a lover. If the Danes could not fight an enemy, they fought amongst themselves. Most had nothing but monstrous pride, battle-scars and well-sharpened weapons, and with those things they would take whatever they wanted, and that Mercian shield wall did not even stay to contest the fight, but once they saw they would be outnumbered they ran away to the mocking howls of Ragnar’s men who then stripped off their mail and leather and used their axes and the Wind-Viper’s hide-twisted ropes to clear away the fallen trees. It took a few hours to unblock the river, but then we were moving again. That night the ships clustered together on the riverbank, fires were lit ashore, men were posted as sentries and every sleeping warrior kept his weapons beside him, but no one troubled us and at dawn we moved on, soon coming to a town with thick earthen walls and a high palisade. This, Ragnar assumed, was the place the Mercians had failed to defend, but there seemed to be no sign of any soldiers on the wall so he ran the boat ashore again and led his crew towards the town.

The earth walls and timber palisade were both in good condition, and Ragnar marvelled that the town’s garrison had chosen to march downriver to fight us, rather than stay behind their well-tended defences. The Mercian soldiers were plainly gone now, probably fled south, for the gates were open and a dozen townsfolk were kneeling outside the wooden arch and holding out supplicant hands for mercy. Three of the terrified people were monks, their tonsured heads bowed. ‘I hate monks,’ Ragnar said cheerfully. His sword, Heart-Breaker, was in his hand and he swept her naked blade in a hissing arc.

‘Why?’ I asked.

‘Monks are like ants,’ he said, ‘wriggling about in black, being useless. I hate them. You’ll speak for me, Uhtred. Ask them what place this is?’

I asked and learned that the town was called Gegnesburh.

‘Tell them,’ Ragnar instructed me, ‘that my name is Earl Ragnar, I am called the Fearless and that I eat children when I’m not given food and silver.’

I duly told them. The kneeling men looked up at Ragnar who had unbound his hair which, had they known, was always a sign that he was in a mood for killing. His grinning men made a line behind him, a line heavy with axes, swords, spears, shields and war hammers.

‘What food there is,’ I translated a grey-bearded man’s answer, ‘is yours. But he says there is not much food.’

Ragnar smiled at that, stepped forward and, still smiling, swung Heart-Breaker so that her blade half severed the man’s head. I jumped back, not in alarm, but because I did not want my tunic spattered with his blood. ‘One less mouth to feed,’ Ragnar said cheerfully. ‘Now ask the others how much food there is.’

The grey-bearded man was now red-bearded and he was choking and twitching as he died. His struggles slowly ended and then he just lay, dying, his eyes gazing reprovingly into mine. None of his companions tried to help him, they were too frightened. ‘How much food do you have?’ I demanded.

‘There is food, lord,’ one of the monks said.

‘How much?’ I demanded again.

‘Enough.’

‘He says there’s enough,’ I told Ragnar.

‘A sword,’ Ragnar said, ‘is a great tool for discovering the truth. What about the monk’s church? How much silver does it have?’

The monk gabbled that we could look for ourselves, that we could take whatever we found, that it was all ours, anything we found was ours, all was ours. I translated these panicked statements and Ragnar again smiled. ‘He’s not telling the truth, is he?’

‘Isn’t he?’ I asked.

‘He wants me to look because he knows I won’t find, and that means they’ve hidden their treasure or had it taken away. Ask him if they’ve hidden their silver.’

I did and the monk reddened. ‘We are a poor church,’ he said, ‘with little treasure,’ and he stared wide-eyed as I translated his answer, then he tried to get up and run as Ragnar stepped forward, but he tripped over his robe and Heart-Breaker pierced his spine so that he jerked like a landed fish as he died.

There was silver, of course, and it was buried. Another of the monks told us so, and Ragnar sighed as he cleaned his sword on the dead monk’s robe. ‘They’re such fools,’ he said plaintively. ‘They’d live if they answered truthfully the first time.’

‘But suppose there wasn’t any treasure?’ I asked him.

‘Then they’d tell the truth and die,’ Ragnar said, and found that funny. ‘But what’s the point of a monk except to hoard treasure for us Danes? They’re ants who hoard silver. Find the ants’ nest, dig, and a man’s rich.’ He stepped over his victims. At first I was shocked by the ease with which he would kill a defenceless man, but Ragnar had no respect for folk who cringed and lied. He appreciated an enemy who fought, who showed spirit, but men who were weakly sly like the ones he killed at Gegnesburh’s gate were beneath his contempt, no better than animals.

We emptied Gegnesburh of food, then made the monks dig up their treasure. It was not much; two silver mass cups, three silver plates, a bronze crucifix with a silver Christ, a bone carving of angels climbing a ladder and a bag of silver pennies. Ragnar distributed the coins among his men, then hacked the silver plates and cups to pieces with an axe and shared out the scraps. He had no use for the bone carving so shattered it with his sword. ‘A weird religion,’ he said, ‘they worship just one god?’

‘One god,’ I said, ‘but he’s divided into three.’

He liked that. ‘A clever trick,’ he said, ‘but not useful. This triple god has a mother, doesn’t he?’

‘Mary,’ I said, following him as he explored the monastery in search of more plunder.

‘I wonder if her baby came out in three bits,’ he said. ‘So what’s this god’s name?’

‘Don’t know.’ I knew he had a name because Beocca had told me, but I could not remember it. ‘The three together are the trinity,’ I went on, ‘but that’s not God’s name. Usually they just call him God.’

‘Like giving a dog the name dog,’ Ragnar declared, then laughed. ‘So who’s Jesus?’

‘One of the three.’

‘The one who died, yes? And he came back to life?’

‘Yes,’ I said, suddenly fearful that the Christian god was watching me, readying a dreadful punishment for my sins.

‘Gods can do that,’ Ragnar said airily. ‘They die, come back to life. They’re gods.’ He looked at me, sensing my fear, and ruffled my hair. ‘Don’t you worry, Uhtred, the Christian god doesn’t have power here.’

‘He doesn’t?’

‘Of course not!’ He was searching a shed at the back of the monastery and found a decent sickle that he tucked into his belt. ‘Gods fight each other! Everyone knows that. Look at our gods! The Aesir and Vanir fought like cats before they made friends.’ The Aesir and the Vanir were the two families of Danish gods who now shared Asgard, though at one time they had been the bitterest of enemies. ‘Gods fight,’ Ragnar went on earnestly, ‘and some win, some lose. The Christian god is losing, otherwise why would we be here? Why would we be winning? The gods reward us if we give them respect, but the Christian god doesn’t help his people, does he? They weep rivers of tears for him, they pray to him, they give him their silver, and we come along and slaughter them! Their god is pathetic. If he had any real power then we wouldn’t be here, would we?’

It seemed an unassailable logic to me. What was the point of worshipping a god if he did not help you? And it was incontrovertible that the worshippers of Odin and Thor were winning, and I surreptitiously touched the hammer of Thor hanging from my neck as we returned to the Wind-Viper. We left Gegnesburh ravaged, its folk weeping and its store-houses emptied, and we rowed on down the wide river, the belly of our boat piled with grain, bread, salted meat and smoked fish. Later, much later, I learned that Ælswith, King Alfred’s wife, had come from Gegnesburh. Her father, the man who had failed to fight us, was Ealdorman there and she had grown up in the town and always lamented that, after she had left, the Danes had sacked the place. God, she always declared, would have his revenge on the pagans who had ravaged her home town, and it seemed wise not to tell her that I had been one of the ravagers.

We ended the voyage at a town called Snotengaham, which means the home of Snot’s people, and it was a much greater place than Gegnesburh, but its garrison had fled and those people who remained welcomed the Danes with piles of food and heaps of silver. There would have been time for a horseman to reach Snotengaham with news of Gegnesburh’s dead, and the Danes were always happy for such messengers to spread fear of their coming, and so the larger town, with its walls, fell without a fight.

Some ships’ crews were ordered to man the walls, while others raided the countryside. The first thing they sought was more horses, and when the war-bands were mounted they ranged farther afield, stealing, burning, and harrowing the land. ‘We shall stay here,’ Ragnar told me.

‘All summer?’

‘Till the world ends, Uhtred. This is Danish land now.’

At winter’s end Ivar and Ubba had sent three ships back to the Danish homeland to encourage more settlers, and those new ships began arriving in ones and twos, bringing men, women and children. The newcomers were allowed to take whatever houses they wished, except for those few that belonged to the Mercian leaders who had bent the knee to Ivar and Ubba. One of those was the bishop, a young man called Æthelbrid, who preached to his congregations that God had sent the Danes. He never said why God had done this, and perhaps he did not know, but the sermons meant that his wife and children lived and his house was safe and his church was allowed to retain one silver mass cup, though Ivar insisted that the bishop’s twin sons be held as hostages in case the Christian god changed his mind about the Danes.

Ragnar, like the other Danish leaders, constantly rode out into the country to bring back food and he liked me to go with him, for I could translate for him, and as the days passed we heard more and more stories of a great Mercian army gathering to the south, at Ledecestre, which Ragnar said was the greatest fortress in Mercia. It had been made by the Romans, who built better than any man could build now, and Burghred, Mercia’s king, was assembling his forces there, and that was why Ragnar was so intent on gathering food. ‘They’ll besiege us,’ he said, ‘but we’ll win and then Ledecestre will be ours and so will Mercia.’ He spoke very calmly, as though there could be no possibility of defeat.

Rorik stayed in the town while I rode with his father. That was because Rorik was sick again, struck by cramping pains in his belly so severe that he was sometimes reduced to helpless tears. He vomited in the night, was pale, and the only relief came from a brew of herbs made for him by an old woman who was a servant of the bishop. Ragnar worried about Rorik, yet he was pleased that his son and I were such good friends. Rorik did not question his father’s fondness for me, nor was he jealous. In time, he knew, Ragnar planned to take me back to Bebbanburg and I would be given my patrimony and he assumed I would stay his friend and so Bebbanburg would become a Danish stronghold. I would be Earl Uhtred and Rorik and his older brother would hold other strongholds, and Ragnar would be a great lord, supported by his sons and by Bebbanburg, and we would all be Danes, and Odin would smile on us, and so the world would go on until the final conflagration when the great gods fought the monsters and the army of the dead would march from Valhalla and the underworld give up its beasts and fire would consume the great tree of life, Yggdrasil. In other words everything would stay the same until it was all no more. That was what Rorik thought, and doubtless Ragnar thought so too. Destiny, Ravn said, is everything.

News came in the high summer that the Mercian army was marching at last, and that King Æthelred of Wessex was bringing his army to support Burghred, and so we were to be faced by two of the three remaining English kingdoms. We stopped our raids into the countryside and readied Snotengaham for the inevitable siege. The palisade on the earth wall was strengthened and the ditch outside the wall was deepened. The ships were drawn up on the town’s riverbank far from the walls so they could not be reduced to ash by fire-arrows shot from outside the defences, and the thatch of the buildings closest to the wall was pulled off the houses so that they could not be set ablaze.

Ivar and Ubba had decided to endure a siege because they reckoned we were strong enough to hold what we had taken, but that if we took more territory then the Danish forces would be stretched thin and could be defeated piece by piece. It was better, they reckoned, to let the enemy come and break himself on Snotengaham’s defences.

That enemy came as the poppies bloomed. The Mercian scouts arrived first, small groups of horsemen who circled the town warily, and at midday Burghred’s foot soldiers appeared, band after band of men with spears, axes, swords, sickles and hay-knives. They camped well away from the walls, using branches and turf to make a township of crude shelters that sprang up across the low hills and meadows. Snotengaham lay on the north bank of the Trente, which meant the river was between the town and the rest of Mercia, but the enemy army came from the west, having crossed the Trente somewhere to the south of the town. A few of their men stayed on the southern bank to make sure our ships did not cross the river to land men for foraging expeditions, and the presence of those men meant that the enemy surrounded us, but they made no attempt to attack us. The Mercians were waiting for the West Saxons to come and in that first week the only excitement occurred when a handful of Burghred’s archers crept towards the town and loosed a few arrows at us and the missiles whacked into the palisade and stuck there, perches for birds, and that was the extent of their belligerence. After that they fortified their camp, surrounding it with a barricade of felled trees and thorn bushes. ‘They’re frightened that we’ll make a sally and kill them all,’ Ragnar said, ‘so they’re going to sit there and try to starve us out.’

‘Will they?’ I asked.

‘They couldn’t starve a mouse in a pot,’ Ragnar said cheerfully. He had hung his shield on the outer side of the palisade, one of over twelve hundred bright-painted shields which were displayed there. We did not have twelve hundred men, but nearly all the Danes possessed more than one shield and they hung them all on the wall to make the enemy think our garrison equalled the number of shields. The great lords among the Danes hung their banners on the wall; Ubba’s raven flag and Ragnar’s eagle wing among them. The raven banner was a triangle of white cloth, fringed with white tassels, showing a black raven with spread wings, while Ragnar’s standard was a real eagle’s wing, nailed to a pole, and it was becoming so tattered that Ragnar had offered a golden arm ring to any man who could replace it. ‘If they want us out of here,’ he went on, ‘then they’d best make an assault, and they’d best do it in the next three weeks before their men go home and cut their harvest.’

But the Mercians, instead of attacking, tried to pray us out of Snotengaham. A dozen priests, all robed and carrying cross-tipped poles, and followed by a score of monks carrying sacred banners on cross-staffs, came out from behind their barricades and paraded just beyond bowshot. The flags showed saints. One of the priests scattered holy water, and the whole group stopped every few yards to pronounce curses on us. That was the day the West Saxon forces arrived to support Burghred, whose wife was sister to Alfred and to King Æthelred of Wessex, and that was the first day I ever saw the dragon standard of Wessex. It was a huge banner of heavy green cloth on which a white dragon breathed fire, and the standard-bearer galloped to catch up with the priests and the dragon streamed behind him. ‘Your turn will come,’ Ragnar said quietly, talking to the rippling dragon.

‘When?’

‘The gods only know,’ Ragnar said, still watching the standard. ‘This year we should finish off Mercia, then we’ll go to East Anglia, and after that, Wessex. To take all the land and treasure in England, Uhtred? Three years? Four? We need more ships though.’ He meant we needed more ships’ crews, more shield-Danes, more swords.

‘Why not go north?’ I asked him.

‘To Dalriada and Pictland?’ he laughed. ‘There’s nothing up there, Uhtred, except bare rocks, bare fields and bare arses. The land there is no better than at home.’ He nodded out towards the enemy encampment. ‘But this is good land. Rich and deep. You can raise children here. You can grow strong here.’ He fell silent as a group of horsemen appeared from the enemy camp and followed the rider who carried the dragon standard. Even from a long way off it was possible to see that these were great men for they rode splendid horses and had mail coats glinting beneath their dark red cloaks. ‘The King of Wessex?’ Ragnar guessed.

‘Æthelred?’

‘It’s probably him. We shall find out now.’

‘Find out what?’

‘What these West Saxons are made of. The Mercians won’t attack us, so let’s see if Æthelred’s men are any better. Dawn, Uhtred, that’s when they should come. Straight at us, ladders against the wall, lose some men, but let the rest slaughter us.’ He laughed. ‘That’s what I’d do, but that lot?’ He spat in derision.

Ivar and Ubba must have thought the same thing, for they sent two men to spy on the Mercian and West Saxon forces to see if there was any sign that ladders were being made. The two men went out at night and were supposed to skirt the besiegers’ encampment and find a place to watch the enemy from outside their fortifications, but somehow they were both seen and caught. The two men were brought to the fields in front of the wall and made to kneel there with their hands tied behind their backs. A tall Englishman stood behind them with a drawn sword and I watched as he poked one of the Danes in the back, as the Dane lifted his head and then as the sword swung. The second Dane died in the same way, and the two bodies were left for the ravens to eat. ‘Bastards,’ Ragnar said.

Ivar and Ubba had also watched the executions. I rarely saw the brothers. Ubba stayed in his house much of the time while Ivar, so thin and wraithlike, was more evident, pacing the walls every dawn and dusk, scowling at the enemy and saying little, though now he spoke urgently to Ragnar, gesturing south to the green fields beyond the river. He never seemed to speak without a snarl, but Ragnar was not offended. ‘He’s angry,’ he told me afterwards, ‘because he needs to know if they plan to assault us. Now he wants some of my men to spy on their camp, but after that?’ He nodded at the two headless bodies in the field. ‘Maybe I’d better go myself.’

‘They’ll be watching for more spies,’ I said, not wanting Ragnar to end up headless before the walls.

‘A leader leads,’ Ragnar said, ‘and you can’t ask men to risk death if you’re not willing to risk it yourself.’

‘Let me go,’ I said.

He laughed at that. ‘What kind of leader sends a boy to do a man’s job, eh?’

‘I’m English,’ I said, ‘and they won’t suspect an English boy.’

Ragnar smiled at me. ‘If you’re English,’ he said, ‘then how could we trust you to tell us the truth of what you see?’

I clutched Thor’s hammer. ‘I will tell the truth,’ I said, ‘I swear it. And I’m a Dane now! You’ve told me that! You say I’m a Dane!’

Ragnar began to take me seriously. He knelt to look into my face. ‘Are you really a Dane?’ he asked.

‘I’m a Dane,’ I said and, at that moment I meant it. At other times I was sure I was a Northumbrian, a secret sceadugengan hidden among the Danes, and in truth I was confused. I loved Ragnar as a father, was fond of Ravn, wrestled and raced and played with Rorik when he was well enough, and all of them treated me as one of them. I was just from another tribe. There were three main tribes among the Northmen; the Danes, the Norse and the Svear, but Ragnar said there were others, like the Getes, and he was not sure where the Northmen ended and the others began, but suddenly he was worried about me. ‘I’m a Dane,’ I repeated forcibly, ‘and who better than me to spy on them? I speak their language!’

‘You’re a boy,’ Ragnar said, and I thought he was refusing to let me go, but instead he was getting used to the idea. ‘No one will suspect a boy,’ he went on. He still stared at me, then stood and glanced again at the two bodies where ravens were pecking at the severed heads. ‘Are you sure, Uhtred?’

‘I’m sure.’

‘I’ll ask the brothers,’ he said, and he did, and Ivar and Ubba must have agreed for they let me go. It was after dark when the gate was opened and I slipped out. Now, I thought, I am a Shadow-Walker at last, though in truth the journey needed no supernatural skills for there was a slew of campfires in the Mercian and West Saxon lines to light the way. Ragnar had advised me to skirt the big encampment and see if there was an easy way in at the back, but instead I walked straight towards the nearest fires that lay behind the felled trees that served as the English protective wall, and beyond that black tangle I could see the dark shapes of sentries outlined by the campfires. I was nervous. For months I had been treasuring the idea of the sceadugengan, and here I was, out in the dark, and not far away there were headless bodies and my imagination invented a similar fate for myself. Why? One small part of me knew I could walk into the camp and say who I was, then demand to be taken to Burghred or to Æthelred, yet I had spoken the truth to Ragnar. I would go back, and I would tell the truth. I had promised that, and to a boy promises are solemn things, buttressed by the dread of divine revenge. I would choose my own tribe in time, but that time had not yet come, and so I crept across the field feeling very small and vulnerable, my heart thumping against my ribs, and my soul consumed by the importance of what I did.

And halfway to the Mercian camp I felt the hairs on the back of my neck prickle. I had the sensation I was being followed and I twisted, listened and stared, and saw nothing but the black shapes that shudder in the night, but like a hare I sprinted to one side, dropped suddenly and listened again, and this time I was sure I heard a footfall in the grass. I waited, watched, saw nothing and crept on until I reached the Mercian barricade and I waited again there, but heard nothing more behind me and decided I had been imagining things. I had also been worrying that I would not be able to pass the Mercian obstacles, but in the end it was simple enough because a big felled tree left plenty of space for a boy to wriggle through its branches, and I did it slowly, making no noise, then ran on into the camp and was almost immediately challenged by a sentry. ‘Who are you?’ the man snarled and I could see the firelight reflecting from a glittering spear head that was being run towards me.

‘Osbert,’ I said, using my old name.

‘A boy?’ The man checked, surprised.

‘Needed a piss.’

‘Hell, boy, what’s wrong with pissing outside your shelter?’

‘My master doesn’t like it.’

‘Who’s your master?’ The spear had been lifted and the man was peering at me in the small light from the fires.

‘Beocca,’ I said. It was the first name that came to my head.

‘The priest?’

That surprised me, and I hesitated, but then nodded and that satisfied the man. ‘Best get back to him then,’ he said.

‘I’m lost.’

‘Shouldn’t come all this way to piss on my sentry post then, should you?’ he said, then pointed. ‘It’s that way, boy.’

So I walked openly through the camp, past the fires and past the small shelters where men snored. A couple of dogs barked at me. Horses whinnied. Somewhere a flute sounded and a woman sang softly. Sparks flew up from the dying fires.

The sentry had pointed me towards the West Saxon lines. I knew that because the dragon banner was hung outside a great tent that was lit by a larger fire, and I moved towards that tent for lack of anywhere else to go. I was looking for ladders, but saw none. A child cried in a shelter, a woman moaned, and some men sang near a fire. One of the singers saw me, shouted a challenge and then realised I was just a boy and waved me away. I was close to the big fire now, the one that lit the front of the bannered tent, and I skirted it, going towards the darkness behind the tent that was lit from within by candles or lanterns. Two men stood guard at the tent’s front and voices murmured from inside, but no one noticed me as I slipped through the shadows, still looking for ladders. Ragnar had said the ladders would be stored together, either at the heart of the camp or close to its edge, but I saw none. Instead I heard sobbing.

I had reached the back of the big tent and was hiding beside a great stack of firewood and, judging by the stink, was close to a latrine. I crouched and saw a man kneeling in the open space between the woodpile and the big tent and it was that man who was sobbing. He was also praying and sometimes beating his chest with his fists. I was astonished, even alarmed by what he did, but I lay on my belly like a snake and wriggled in the shadows to get closer to see what else he might do.

He groaned as if in pain, raised his hands to the sky, then bent forward as if worshipping the earth. ‘Spare me, God,’ I heard him say, ‘spare me. I am a sinner.’ He vomited then, though he did not sound drunk, and after he had spewed up he moaned. I sensed he was a young man, then a flap of the tent lifted and a wash of candlelight spilled across the grass. I froze, still as a log, and saw that it was indeed a young man who was so miserable, and then also saw, to my astonishment, that the person who had lifted the tent flap was Father Beocca. I had thought it a coincidence that there should be two priests with that name, but it was no coincidence at all. It was indeed red-haired, cross-eyed Beocca and he was here, in Mercia.

‘My lord,’ Beocca said, dropping the flap and casting darkness over the young man.

‘I am a sinner, father,’ the man said. He had stopped sobbing, perhaps because he did not want Beocca to see such evidence of weakness, but his voice was full of sadness. ‘I am a grievous sinner.’

‘We are all sinners, my lord.’

‘A grievous sinner,’ the young man repeated, ignoring Beocca’s solace. ‘And I am married!’

‘Salvation lies in remorse, my lord.’

‘Then, God knows, I should be redeemed, for my remorse would fill the sky.’ He lifted his head to stare at the stars. ‘The flesh, father,’ he groaned, ‘the flesh.’

Beocca walked towards me, stopped and turned. He was almost close enough for me to touch, but he had no idea I was there. ‘God sends temptation to test us, my lord,’ he said quietly.

‘He sends women to test us,’ the young man said harshly, ‘and we fail, and then he sends the Danes to punish us for our failure.’

‘His way is hard,’ Beocca said, ‘and no one has ever doubted it.’

The young man, still kneeling, bowed his head. ‘I should never have married, father. I should have joined the church. Gone to a monastery.’

‘And God would have found a great servant in you, my lord, but he had other plans for you. If your brother dies …’

‘Pray God he does not! What sort of king would I be?’

‘God’s king, my lord.’

So that, I thought, was Alfred. That was the very first time I ever saw him or heard his voice and he never knew. I lay in the grass, listening, as Beocca consoled the prince for yielding to temptation. It seemed Alfred had humped a servant girl and, immediately afterwards, had been overcome by physical pain and what he called spiritual torment.

‘What you must do, my lord,’ Beocca said, ‘is bring the girl into your service.’

‘No!’ Alfred protested.

A harp began to play in the tent and both men checked to listen, then Beocca crouched by the unhappy prince and put a hand on his shoulder. ‘Bring the girl into your service,’ Beocca repeated, ‘and resist her. Lay that tribute before God, let him see your strength, and he will reward you. Thank God for tempting you, lord, and praise him when you resist the temptation.’

‘God will kill me,’ Alfred said bitterly. ‘I swore I wouldn’t do it again. Not after Osferth.’ Osferth? The name meant nothing to me. Later, much later, I discovered Osferth was Alfred’s bastard son, whelped on another servant girl. ‘I prayed to be spared the temptation,’ Alfred went on, ‘and to be afflicted with pain as a reminder, and as a distraction, and God in his mercy made me sick, but still I yielded. I am the most miserable of sinners.’

‘We are all sinners,’ Beocca said, his good hand still on Alfred’s shoulder, ‘and we are all fallen short of the glory of God.’

‘None has fallen as far as me,’ Alfred moaned.

‘God sees your remorse,’ Beocca said, ‘and he will lift you up. Welcome the temptation, lord,’ he went on urgently, ‘welcome it, resist it, and give thanks to God when you succeed. And God will reward you, lord, he will reward you.’

‘By removing the Danes?’ Alfred asked bitterly.

‘He will, my lord, he will.’

‘But not by waiting,’ Alfred said, and now there was a sudden hardness in his voice that made Beocca draw away from him. Alfred stood, towering over the priest. ‘We should attack them!’

‘Burghred knows his business,’ Beocca said soothingly, ‘and so does your brother. The pagans will starve, my lord, if that is God’s will.’

So I had my answer, and it was that the English were not planning an assault, but rather hoped to starve Snotengaham into surrender. I dared not carry that answer straight back to the town, not while Beocca and Alfred were so close to me, and so I stayed and listened as Beocca prayed with the prince and then, when Alfred was calm, the two moved back to the tent and went inside.

And I went back. It took a long time, but no one saw me. I was a true sceadugengan that night, moving among the shadows like a spectre, climbing the hill to the town until I could run the last hundred paces and I called Ragnar’s name and the gate creaked open and I was back in Snotengaham.

Ragnar took me to see Ubba when the sun rose and, to my surprise, Weland was there, Weland the snake, and he gave me a sour look, though not so sour as the scowl on Ubba’s dark face. ‘So what did you do?’ he growled.

‘I saw no ladders …’ I began.

‘What did you do?’ Ubba snarled, and so I told my tale from the beginning, how I had crossed the fields and had thought I was being followed, and had dodged like a hare, then gone through the barricade and spoken to the sentry. Ubba stopped me there and looked at Weland. ‘Well?’

Weland nodded. ‘I saw him through the barricade, lord, heard him speak to a man.’

So Weland had followed me? I looked at Ragnar who shrugged. ‘My lord Ubba wanted a second man to go,’ he explained, ‘and Weland offered.’

Weland gave me a smile, the kind of smile the devil might give a bishop entering hell. ‘I could not get through the barrier, lord,’ he told Ubba.

‘But you saw the boy go through?’

‘And heard him speak to the sentry, lord, though what he said I could not tell.’

‘Did you see ladders?’ Ubba asked Weland.

‘No, lord, but I only skirted the fence.’

Ubba stared at Weland, making him uncomfortable, then transferred his dark eyes to me and made me uncomfortable. ‘So you got through the barrier,’ he said, ‘so what did you see?’ I told him how I had found the large tent, and of the conversation I had overheard, how Alfred had wept because he had sinned, and how he had wanted to attack the town and how the priest had said that God would starve the Danes if that was his will, and Ubba believed me because he reckoned a boy could not make up the story of the servant girl and the prince.

Besides, I was amused, and it showed. Alfred, I thought, was a pious weakling, a weeping penitent, a pathetic nothing, and even Ubba smiled as I described the sobbing prince and the earnest priest. ‘So,’ Ubba asked me, ‘no ladders?’

‘I saw none, lord.’

He stared at me with that fearsomely bearded face and then, to my astonishment, he took off one of his arm rings and tossed it to me. ‘You’re right,’ he told Ragnar, ‘he is a Dane.’

‘He’s a good boy,’ Ragnar said.

‘Sometimes the mongrel you find in the field turns out to be useful,’ Ubba said, then beckoned to an old man who had been sitting on a stool in the room’s corner.

The old man was called Storri and, like Ravn, he was a skald, but also a sorcerer and Ubba would do nothing without his advice, and now, without saying a word, Storri took a sheaf of thin white sticks, each the length of a man’s hand, and he held them just above the floor, muttered a prayer to Odin, then let them go. They made a small clattering noise as they fell, and then Storri leaned forward to look at the pattern they made.

They were runesticks. Many Danes consulted the runesticks, but Storri’s skill at reading the signs was famous, and Ubba was a man so riddled with superstition that he would do nothing unless he believed the gods were on his side. ‘Well?’ he asked impatiently.

Storri ignored Ubba, instead he stared at the score of sticks, seeing if he could detect a rune letter or a significant pattern in their random scatter. He moved around the small pile, still peering, then nodded slowly. ‘It could not be better,’ he said.

‘The boy told the truth?’

‘The boy told the truth,’ Storri said, ‘but the sticks talk of today, not of last night, and they tell me all is well.’

‘Good.’ Ubba stood and took his sword from a peg on the wall. ‘No ladders,’ he said to Ragnar, ‘so no assault. We shall go.’

They had been worried that the Mercians and West Saxons would launch an attack on the walls while they made a raid across the river. The southern bank was lightly garrisoned by the besiegers, holding little more than a cordon of men to deter forage parties crossing the Trente, but that afternoon Ubba led six ships across the river and attacked those Mercians, and the runesticks had not lied, for no Danes died and they brought back horses, weapons, armour and prisoners.

Twenty prisoners.

The Mercians had beheaded two of our men, so now Ubba killed twenty of theirs, and did it in their sight so they could see his revenge. The headless bodies were thrown into the ditch in front of the wall and the twenty heads were stuck on spears and mounted above the northern gate.

‘In war,’ Ragnar told me, ‘be ruthless.’

‘Why did you send Weland to follow me?’ I asked him, hurt.

‘Because Ubba insisted on it,’ he said.

‘Because you didn’t trust me?’

‘Because Ubba trusts no one except Storri,’ he said. ‘And I trust you, Uhtred.’

The heads above Snotengaham’s gate were pecked by birds till they were nothing but skulls with hanks of hair that stirred in the summer wind. The Mercians and the West Saxons still did not attack. The sun shone. The river rippled prettily past the town where the ships were drawn up on the bank.

Ravn, though he was blind, liked to come to the ramparts where he would demand that I describe all I could see. Nothing changes, I would say, the enemy are still behind their hedge of felled trees, there are clouds above the distant hills, a hawk hunts, the wind ripples the grass, the swifts are gathering in groups, nothing changes, and tell me about the runesticks, I begged him.

‘The sticks!’ he laughed.

‘Do they work?’

He thought about it. ‘If you can read them, yes. I was good at reading the runes before I lost my eyes.’

‘So they do work,’ I said eagerly.

Ravn gestured towards the landscape he could not see. ‘Out there, Uhtred,’ he said, ‘there are a dozen signs from the gods, and if you know the signs then you know what the gods want. The runesticks give the same message, but I have noticed one thing.’ He paused and I had to prompt him, and he sighed as though he knew he should not say more. But he did. ‘The signs are best read by a clever man,’ he went on, ‘and Storri is clever. I dare say I am no fool.’

I did not really understand what he was saying. ‘But Storri is always right?’

‘Storri is cautious. He won’t take risks, and Ubba, though he doesn’t know it, likes that.’

‘But the sticks are messages from the gods?’

‘The wind is a message from the gods,’ Ravn said, ‘as is the flight of a bird, the fall of a feather, the rise of a fish, the shape of a cloud, the cry of a vixen, all are messages, but in the end, Uhtred, the gods speak in only one place.’ He tapped my head. ‘There.’

I still did not understand and was obscurely disappointed. ‘Could I read the sticks?’

‘Of course,’ he said, ‘but it would be sensible to wait till you’re older. What are you now?’

‘Eleven,’ I said, tempted to say twelve.

‘Maybe you’d best wait a year or two before reading the sticks. Wait till you’re old enough to marry, four or five years from now?’

That seemed an unlikely proposition for I had no interest in marriage back then. I was not even interested in girls, though that would change soon enough.

‘Thyra, perhaps?’ Ravn suggested.

‘Thyra!’ I thought of Ragnar’s daughter as a playmate, not as a wife. Indeed, the very idea of it made me laugh.

Ravn smiled at my amusement. ‘Tell me, Uhtred, why we let you live.’

‘I don’t know.’

‘When Ragnar captured you,’ he said, ‘he thought you could be ransomed, but he decided to keep you. I thought he was a fool, but he was right.’

‘I’m glad,’ I said, meaning it.

‘Because we need the English,’ Ravn went on. ‘We are few, the English are many, despite which we shall take their land, but we can only hold it with the help of Englishmen. A man cannot live in a home that is forever besieged. He needs peace to grow crops and raise cattle, and we need you. When men see that Earl Uhtred is on our side then they won’t fight us. And you must marry a Danish girl so that when your children grow they will be both Dane and English and see no difference.’ He paused, contemplating that distant future, then chuckled. ‘Just make sure they’re not Christians, Uhtred.’

‘They will worship Odin,’ I said, again meaning it.

‘Christianity is a soft religion,’ Ravn said savagely, ‘a woman’s creed. It doesn’t ennoble men, it makes them into worms. I hear birds.’

‘Two ravens,’ I said, ‘flying north.’

‘A real message!’ he said delightedly, ‘Huginn and Muminn are going to Odin.’

Huginn and Muminn were the twin ravens that perched on the god’s shoulders where they whispered into his ear. They did for Odin what I did for Ravn, they watched and told him what they saw. He sent them to fly all over the world and to bring back news, and the news they carried back that day was that the smoke from the Mercian encampment was less thick. Fewer fires were lit at night. Men were leaving that army.

‘Harvest time,’ Ravn said in disgust.

‘Does that matter?’

‘They call their army the fyrd,’ he explained, forgetting for a moment that I was English, ‘and every able man is supposed to serve in the fyrd, but when the harvest ripens they fear hunger in the winter so they go home to cut their rye and barley.’

‘Which we then take?’

He laughed. ‘You’re learning, Uhtred.’

Yet the Mercians and West Saxons still hoped they could starve us and, though they were losing men every day, they did not give up until Ivar loaded a cart with food. He piled cheeses, smoked fish, newly baked bread, salted pork and a vat of ale onto the cart and, at dawn, a dozen men dragged it towards the English camp. They stopped just out of bowshot and shouted to the enemy sentries that the food was a gift from Ivar the Boneless to King Burghred.

Next day a Mercian horseman rode towards the town carrying a leafy branch as a sign of truce. The English wanted to talk. ‘Which means,’ Ravn told me, ‘that we have won.’

‘It does?’

‘When an enemy wants to talk,’ he said, ‘it means he does not want to fight. So we have won.’

And he was right.

Three

Next day we made a pavilion in the valley between the town and the English encampment, stretching two ships’ sails between timber poles, the whole thing supported by seal-hide ropes lashed to pegs, and there the English placed three high-backed chairs for King Burghred, King Æthelred and for Prince Alfred, and draped the chairs with rich red cloths. Ivar and Ubba sat on milking stools.

Both sides brought thirty or forty men to witness the discussions, which began with an agreement that all weapons were to be piled twenty paces behind the two delegations. I helped carry swords, axes, shields and spears, then went back to listen.

Beocca was there and he spotted me. He smiled. I smiled back. He was standing just behind the young man I took to be Alfred, for though I had heard him in the night I had not seen him clearly. He alone among the three English leaders was not crowned with a circlet of gold, though he did have a large, jewelled cloak brooch which Ivar eyed rapaciously. I saw, as Alfred took his seat, that the prince was thin, long-legged, restless, pale and tall. His face was long, his nose long, his beard short, his cheeks hollow and his mouth pursed. His hair was a nondescript brown, his eyes worried, his brow creased, his hands fidgety and his face frowning. He was only nineteen, I later learned, but he looked ten years older. His brother, King Æthelred, was much older, over thirty, and he was also long-faced, but burlier and even more anxious-looking, while Burghred, King of Mercia, was a stubby man, heavy-bearded, with a bulging belly and a balding pate.

Alfred said something to Beocca who produced a sheet of parchment and a quill which he gave to the prince. Beocca then held a small vial of ink so that Alfred could dip the quill and write.

‘What is he doing?’ Ivar asked.

‘He is making notes of our talks,’ the English interpreter answered.

‘Notes?’

‘So there is a record, of course.’

‘He has lost his memory?’ Ivar asked, while Ubba produced a very small knife and began to clean his fingernails. Ragnar pretended to write on his hand, which amused the Danes.

‘You are Ivar and Ubba?’ Alfred asked through his interpreter.

‘They are,’ our translator answered. Alfred’s pen scratched, while his brother and brother-in-law, both kings, seemed content to allow the young prince to question the Danes.

‘You are sons of Lothbrok?’ Alfred continued.

‘Indeed,’ the interpreter answered.

‘And you have a brother? Halfdan?’

‘Tell the bastard to shove his writing up his arse,’ Ivar snarled, ‘and to shove the quill up after it, and then the ink until he shits black feathers.’

‘My lord says we are not here to discuss family,’ the interpreter said suavely, ‘but to decide your fate.’

‘And to decide yours,’ Burghred spoke for the first time.

‘Our fate?’ Ivar retorted, making the Mercian king quail from the force of his skull-gaze, ‘our fate is to water the fields of Mercia with your blood, dung the soil with your flesh, pave it with your bones, and rid it of your filthy stink.’

The discussion carried on like that for a long time, both sides threatening, neither yielding, but it had been the English who called for the meeting and the English who wanted to make peace and so the terms were slowly hammered out. It took two days, and most of us who were listening became bored and lay on the grass in the sunlight. Both sides ate in the field, and it was during one such meal that Beocca cautiously came across to the Danish side and greeted me warily. ‘You’re getting tall, Uhtred,’ he said.

‘It is good to see you, father,’ I answered dutifully. Ragnar was watching, but without any sign of worry on his face.

‘You’re still a prisoner, then?’ Beocca asked.

‘I am,’ I lied.

He looked at my two silver arm rings which, being too big for me, rattled at my wrist. ‘A privileged prisoner,’ he said wryly.

‘They know I am an Ealdorman,’ I said.

‘Which you are, God knows, though your uncle denies it.’

‘I have heard nothing of him,’ I said truthfully.

Beocca shrugged. ‘He holds Bebbanburg. He married your father’s wife and now she is pregnant.’

‘Gytha!’ I was surprised. ‘Pregnant?’

‘They want a son,’ Beocca said, ‘and if they have one …’ he did not finish the thought, but nor did he need to. I was the Ealdorman, and Ælfric had usurped my place, yet I was still his heir and would be until he had a son. ‘The child must be born any day now,’ Beocca said, ‘but you need not worry.’ He smiled and leaned towards me so he could speak in a conspiratorial whisper. ‘I brought the parchments.’

I looked at him with utter incomprehension. ‘You brought the parchments?’

‘Your father’s will! The land-charters!’ He was shocked that I did not immediately understand what he had done. ‘I have the proof that you are the Ealdorman!’

‘I am the Ealdorman,’ I said, as if proof did not matter. ‘And always will be.’

‘Not if Ælfric has his way,’ Beocca said, ‘and if he has a son then he will want the boy to inherit.’

‘Gytha’s children always die,’ I said.

‘You must pray that every child lives,’ Beocca said crossly, ‘but you are still the Ealdorman. I owe that to your father, God rest his soul.’

‘So you abandoned my uncle?’ I asked.

‘Yes, I did!’ he said eagerly, plainly proud that he had fled Bebbanburg. ‘I am English,’ he went on, his crossed eyes blinking in the sun, ‘so I came south, Uhtred, to find Englishmen willing to fight the pagans, Englishmen able to do God’s will and I found them in Wessex. They are good men, godly men, stalwart men!’

‘Ælfric doesn’t fight the Danes?’ I asked. I knew he did not, but I wanted to hear it confirmed.

‘Your uncle wants no trouble,’ Beocca said, ‘and so the pagans thrive in Northumbria and the light of our Lord Jesus Christ grows dimmer every day.’ He put his hands together as if in prayer, his palsied left hand quivering against his ink-stained right. ‘And it is not just Ælfric who succumbs. Ricsig of Dunholm gives them feasts, Egbert sits on their throne, and for that betrayal there must be weeping in heaven. It must be stopped, Uhtred, and I went to Wessex because the king is a godly man and knows it is only with God’s help that we can defeat the pagans. I shall see if Wessex is willing to ransom you.’ That last sentence took me by surprise so that instead of looking pleased I looked puzzled, and Beocca frowned. ‘You didn’t hear me?’ he asked.

‘You want to ransom me?’

‘Of course! You are noble, Uhtred, and you must be rescued! Alfred can be generous about such things.’

‘I would like that,’ I said, knowing it was what I was supposed to say.

‘You should meet Alfred,’ he said enthusiastically. ‘You’ll enjoy that!’

I had no wish to meet Alfred, certainly not after listening to him whimper about a servant girl he had humped, but Beocca was insistent and so I went to Ragnar and asked his permission. Ragnar was amused. ‘Why does the squinty bastard want you to meet Alfred?’ he asked, looking at Beocca.

‘He wants me to be ransomed. He thinks Alfred might pay.’

‘Pay good money for you!’ Ragnar laughed. ‘Go on,’ he said carelessly, ‘it never hurts to see the enemy close up.’

Alfred was with his brother, some distance away, and Beocca talked to me as he led me towards the royal group. ‘Alfred is his brother’s chief helper,’ he explained. ‘King Æthelred is a good man, but nervous. He has sons, of course, but both are very young …’ his voice tailed away.

‘So if he dies,’ I said, ‘the eldest son becomes king?’

‘No, no!’ Beocca sounded shocked, ‘Æthelwold’s much too young. He’s no older than you!’

‘But he’s the king’s son,’ I insisted.

‘When Alfred was a small boy,’ Beocca leaned down and lowered his voice, though not its intensity, ‘his father took him to Rome. To see the Pope! And the Pope, Uhtred, invested him as the future king!’ He stared at me as if he had proved his point.

‘But he’s not the heir,’ I said, puzzled.

‘The Pope made him heir!’ Beocca hissed at me. Later, much later, I met a priest who had been in the old king’s entourage and he said Alfred had never been invested as the future king, but instead had been given some meaningless Roman honour, but Alfred, to his dying day, insisted the Pope had conferred the succession on him, and so justified his usurpation of the throne that by rights should have gone to Æthelred’s eldest son.

‘But if Æthelwold grows up,’ I began.

‘Then of course he might become king,’ Beocca interrupted me impatiently, ‘but if his father dies before Æthelwold grows up then Alfred will be king.’

‘Then Alfred will have to kill him,’ I said, ‘him and his brother.’

Beocca gazed at me in shocked amazement. ‘Why do you say that?’ he asked.

‘He has to kill them,’ I said, ‘just like my uncle wanted to kill me.’

‘He did want to kill you. He probably still does!’ Beocca made the sign of the cross, ‘but Alfred is not Ælfric! No, no. Alfred will treat his nephews with Christian mercy, of course he will, which is another reason he should become king. He is a good Christian, Uhtred, as I pray you are, and it is God’s will that Alfred should become king. The Pope proved that! And we have to obey God’s will. It is only by obedience to God that we can hope to defeat the Danes.’

‘Only by obedience?’ I asked. I thought swords might help.

‘Only by obedience,’ Beocca said firmly, ‘and by faith. God will give us victory if we worship him with all our hearts, and if we mend our ways and give him the glory. And Alfred will do that! With him at our head the very hosts of heaven will come to our aid. Æthelwold can’t do that. He’s a lazy, arrogant, tiresome child.’ Beocca seized my hand and pulled me through the entourage of West Saxon and Mercian lords. ‘Now remember to kneel to him, boy, he is a prince.’ He led me to where Alfred was sitting and I duly knelt as Beocca introduced me. ‘This is the boy I spoke of, lord,’ he said, ‘he is the Ealdorman Uhtred of Northumbria, a prisoner of the Danes since Eoferwic fell, but a good boy.’

Alfred gave me an intense look which, to be honest, made me uncomfortable. I was to discover in time that he was a clever man, very clever, and thought twice as fast as most others, and he was also a serious man, so serious that he understood everything except jokes. Alfred took everything heavily, even a small boy, and his inspection of me was long and searching as if he tried to plumb the depths of my unfledged soul. ‘Are you a good boy?’ he finally asked me.

‘I try to be, lord,’ I said.

‘Look at me,’ he ordered, for I had lowered my eyes. He smiled when I met his gaze. There was no sign of the sickness he had complained of when I eavesdropped on him and I wondered if, after all, he had been drunk that night. It would have explained his pathetic words, but now he was all earnestness. ‘How do you try to be good?’ he asked.

‘I try to resist temptation, lord,’ I said, remembering Beocca’s words to him behind the tent.

‘That’s good,’ he said, ‘very good, and do you resist it?’

‘Not always,’ I said, then hesitated, tempted to mischief, and then, as ever, yielded to temptation. ‘But I try, lord,’ I said earnestly, ‘and I tell myself I should thank God for tempting me and I praise him when he gives me the strength to resist the temptation.’

Both Beocca and Alfred stared at me as if I had sprouted angel’s wings. I was only repeating the nonsense I had heard Beocca advise Alfred in the dark, but they thought it revealed my great holiness, and I encouraged them by trying to look meek, innocent and pious. ‘You are a sign from God, Uhtred,’ Alfred said fervently. ‘Do you say your prayers?’

‘Every day, lord,’ I said, and did not add that those prayers were addressed to Odin.

‘And what is that about your neck? A crucifix?’ He had seen the leather thong and, when I did not answer, he leaned forward and plucked out Thor’s hammer that had been hidden behind my shirt. ‘Dear God,’ he said, and made the sign of the cross. ‘And you wear those too,’ he added, grimacing at my two arm rings which were cut with Danish rune-letters. I must have looked a proper little heathen.

‘They make me wear them, lord,’ I said, and felt his impulse to tear the pagan symbol off the thong, ‘and beat me if I don’t,’ I added hastily.

‘Do they beat you often?’ he asked.

‘All the time, lord,’ I lied.

He shook his head sadly, then let the hammer fall. ‘A graven image,’ he said, ‘must be a heavy burden for a small boy.’

‘I was hoping, lord,’ Beocca intervened, ‘that we could ransom him.’

‘Us?’ Alfred asked, ‘ransom him?’

‘He is the true Ealdorman of Bebbanburg,’ Beocca explained, ‘though his uncle has taken the title, but the uncle will not fight the Danes.’

Alfred gazed at me, thinking, then frowned. ‘Can you read, Uhtred?’ he asked.

‘He has begun his lessons,’ Beocca answered for me. ‘I taught him, lord, though in all honesty he was ever a reluctant pupil. Not good with his letters, I fear. His thorns were prickly and his ashes spindly.’

I said that Alfred did not understand jokes, but he loved that one, even though it was feeble as watered milk and stale as old cheese. But it was beloved of all who taught reading, and both Beocca and Alfred laughed as though the jest were fresh as dew at sunrise. The thorn, ð and the ash, æ were two letters of our alphabet. ‘His thorns are prickly,’ Alfred echoed, almost incoherent with laughter, ‘and his ashes spindly. His b’s don’t buzz and his i’s,’ he stopped, suddenly embarrassed. He had been about to say my i’s were crossed, then he remembered Beocca and he looked contrite. ‘My dear Beocca.’

‘No offence, my lord, no offence.’ Beocca was still happy, as happy as when he was immersed in some tedious text about how Saint Cuthbert baptised puffins or preached the gospel to the seals. He had tried to make me read that stuff, but I had never got beyond the shortest words.

‘You are fortunate to have started your studies early,’ Alfred said to me, recovering his seriousness. ‘I was not given a chance to read until I was twelve years old!’ His tone suggested I should be shocked and surprised by this news so I dutifully looked appalled. ‘That was grievously wrong of my father and stepmother,’ Alfred went on sternly, ‘they should have started me much earlier.’

‘Yet now you read as well as any scholar, my lord,’ Beocca said.

‘I do try,’ Alfred said modestly, but he was plainly delighted with the compliment.

‘And in Latin too!’ Beocca said, ‘and his Latin is much better than mine!’

‘I think that’s true,’ Alfred said, giving the priest a smile.

‘And he writes a clear hand,’ Beocca told me, ‘such a clear, fine hand!’

‘As must you,’ Alfred told me firmly, ‘to which end, young Uhtred, we shall indeed offer to ransom you, and if God helps us in that endeavour then you shall serve in my household and the first thing you will do is become a master of reading and writing. You’ll like that!’

‘I will, lord,’ I said, meaning it to sound as a question, though it came out as dull agreement.

‘You will learn to read well,’ Alfred promised me, ‘and learn to pray well, and learn to be a good honest Christian, and when you are of age you can decide what to be!’

‘I will want to serve you, lord,’ I lied, thinking that he was a pale, boring, priest-ridden weakling.

‘That is commendable,’ he said, ‘and how will you serve me, do you think?’

‘As a soldier, lord, to fight the Danes.’

‘If God wishes it,’ he said, evidently disappointed in my answer, ‘and God knows we shall need soldiers, though I pray daily that the Danes will come to a knowledge of Christ and so discover their sins and be led to end their wicked ways. Prayer is the answer,’ he said vehemently, ‘prayer and fasting and obedience, and if God answers our prayers, Uhtred, then we shall need no soldiers, but a kingdom always has need of good priests. I wanted that office for myself, but God disposed otherwise. There is no higher calling than the priestly service. I might be a prince, but in God’s eyes I am a worm while Beocca is a jewel beyond price!’

‘Yes, lord,’ I said, for want of anything else to say. Beocca tried to look modest.

Alfred leaned forward, hid Thor’s hammer behind my shirt, then laid a hand on my head. ‘God’s blessing on you, child,’ he said, ‘and may his face shine upon you and release you from your thraldom and bring you into the blessed light of freedom.’

‘Amen,’ I said.

They let me go then and I went back to Ragnar. ‘Hit me,’ I said.

‘What?’

‘Thump me around the head.’

He glanced up and saw that Alfred was still watching me, so he cuffed me harder than I expected. I fell down, grinning. ‘So why did I just do that?’ Ragnar asked.

‘Because I said you were cruel to me,’ I said, ‘and beat me constantly.’ I knew that would amuse Ragnar and it did. He hit me again, just for luck. ‘So what did the bastards want?’ he asked.

‘They want to ransom me,’ I said, ‘so they can teach me to read and write, and then make me into a priest.’

‘A priest? Like the squinty little bastard with the red hair?’

‘Just like him.’

Ragnar laughed. ‘Maybe I should ransom you. It would be a punishment for telling lies about me.’

‘Please don’t,’ I said fervently, and at that moment I wondered why I had ever wanted to go back to the English side. To exchange Ragnar’s freedom for Alfred’s earnest piety seemed a miserable fate to me. Besides, I was learning to despise the English. They would not fight, they prayed instead of sharpening their swords, and it was no wonder the Danes were taking their land.

Alfred did offer to ransom me, but balked at Ragnar’s price that was ludicrously high, though not nearly so steep as the price Ivar and Ubba extracted from Burghred.

Mercia was to be swallowed. Burghred had no fire in his big belly, no desire to go on fighting the Danes who got stronger as he grew weaker. Perhaps he was fooled by all those shields on Snotengaham’s walls, but he must have decided he could not beat the Danes and instead he surrendered. It was not just our forces in Snotengaham that persuaded him to do this. Other Danes were raiding across the Northumbrian border, ravaging Mercian lands, burning churches, slaughtering monks and nuns, and those horsemen were now close to Burghred’s army and were forever harassing his forage parties, and so Burghred, weary of unending defeat, weakly agreed to every outrageous demand, and in return he was allowed to stay as King of Mercia, but that was all. The Danes were to take his fortresses and garrison them, and they were free to take Mercian estates as they wished, and Burghred’s fyrd was to fight for the Danes if they demanded it, and Burghred, moreover, was to pay a vast price in silver for this privilege of losing his kingdom while keeping his throne. Æthelred and Alfred, having no part to play in the discussions, and seeing that their ally had collapsed like a pricked bladder, left on the second day, riding south with what remained of their army, and thus Mercia fell.

First Northumbria, then Mercia. In just two years half of England was gone and the Danes were only just beginning.

We ravaged the land again. Bands of Danes rode into every part of Mercia and slaughtered whoever resisted, took whatever they wished, then garrisoned the principal fortresses before sending messages to Denmark for more ships to come. More ships, more men, more families and more Danes to fill the great land that had fallen into their laps.

I had begun to think I would never fight for England because by the time I was old enough to fight there would be no England. So I decided I would be a Dane. Of course I was confused, but I did not spend much time worrying about my confusion. Instead, as I approached twelve years old, I began my proper education. I was made to stand for hours holding a sword and shield stretched out in front of me until my arms ached, I was taught the strokes of the blade, made to practise with throwing spears, and given a pig to slaughter with a war spear. I learned to fend with a shield, how to drop it to stop the lunge beneath the rim, and how to shove the heavy shield boss into an enemy’s face to smash his nose and blind him with tears. I learned to pull an oar. I grew, put on muscle, began to speak in a man’s voice and was slapped by my first girl. I looked like a Dane. Strangers still mistook me for Ragnar’s son for I had the same fair hair that I wore long and tied with a strip of leather at the nape of my neck, and Ragnar was pleased when that happened though he made it plain that I would not replace Ragnar the Younger or Rorik. ‘If Rorik lives,’ he said sadly, for Rorik was still sickly. ‘You will have to fight for your inheritance,’ Ragnar told me, and so I learned to fight and, that winter, to kill.

We returned to Northumbria. Ragnar liked it there and, though he could have taken better land in Mercia, he liked the northern hills and the deep vales and the dark hanging woods where, as the first frosts crisped the morning, he took me hunting. A score of men and twice as many dogs beat through the woods, trying to trap boar. I stayed with Ragnar, both of us armed with heavy boar spears. ‘A boar can kill you, Uhtred,’ he warned me, ‘he can rip you from the crotch to the neck unless you place the spear just right.’

The spear, I knew, must be placed in the beast’s chest or, if you were lucky, down its throat. I knew I could not kill a boar, but if one came, I would have to try. A full-grown boar can be twice the weight of a man and I did not have the strength to drive one back, but Ragnar was determined to give me first strike and he would be close behind to help. And so it happened. I have killed hundreds of boar since, but I will always remember that first beast; the small eyes, the sheer anger, the determination, the stench, the bristling hairs flecked with mud, and the sweet thud of the spear going deep into the chest, and I was hurled back as if I had been kicked by Odin’s eight-legged horse, and Ragnar drove his own spear through the thick hide and the beast squealed and roared, legs scrabbling, and the pursuing dogs howled, and I found my feet, gritted my teeth, and put my weight on the spear and felt the boar’s life pulsing up the ash shaft. Ragnar gave me a tusk from that carcass and I hung it next to Thor’s hammer and in the days that followed I wanted to do nothing except hunt, though I was not allowed to pursue boar unless Ragnar was with me, but when Rorik was well enough he and I would take our bows into the woods to look for deer.

It was on one of those expeditions, high up at the edge of the woods, just beneath the moors that were dappled by melting snow, that the arrow almost took my life. Rorik and I were creeping through undergrowth and the arrow missed me by inches, sizzling past my head to thump into an ash tree. I turned, putting an arrow on my own string, but saw no one, then we heard feet racing away downhill through the trees and we followed, but whoever had shot the arrow ran too fast for us.

‘An accident,’ Ragnar said. ‘He saw movement, thought you were a deer, and loosed. It happens.’ He looked at the arrow which we had retrieved, but it had no marks of ownership. It was just a goose-fledged shaft of hornbeam tipped with an iron head. ‘An accident,’ he decreed.

Later that winter we moved back to Eoferwic and spent days repairing the boats. I learned to split oak trunks with wedge and mallet, cleaving out the long pale planks that patched the rotted hulls. Spring brought more ships, more men, and with them was Halfdan, youngest brother of Ivar and Ubba. He came ashore roaring with energy, a tall man with a big beard and scowling eyes. He embraced Ragnar, thumped me on the shoulder, punched Rorik in the head, swore he would kill every Christian in England, then went to see his brothers. The three of them planned the new war which, they promised, would strip East Anglia of its treasures and, as the days warmed, we readied for it.

Half the army would march by land, while the other half, which included Ragnar’s men, would go by sea and so I anticipated my first proper voyage, but before we left Kjartan came to see Ragnar, and trailing him was his son Sven, his missing eye a red hole in his angry face. Kjartan knelt to Ragnar and bowed his head. ‘I would come with you, lord,’ he said.

Kjartan had made a mistake by letting Sven follow him, for Ragnar, usually so generous, gave the boy a sour look. I call him a boy, but in truth Sven was almost a man now and promised to be a big one, broad in the chest, tall and strong. ‘You would come with me,’ Ragnar echoed flatly.

‘I beg you, lord,’ Kjartan said, and it must have taken a great effort to say those words, for Kjartan was a proud man, but in Eoferwic he had found no plunder, earned no arm rings, and made no reputation for himself.

‘My ships are full,’ Ragnar said coldly, and turned away. I saw the look of hatred on Kjartan’s face.

‘Why doesn’t he sail with someone else?’ I asked Ravn.

‘Because everyone knows he offended Ragnar, so to give him a place at the oars is to risk my son’s dislike.’ Ravn shrugged. ‘Kjartan should go back to Denmark. If a man loses his lord’s trust then he has lost everything.’

But Kjartan and his one-eyed son stayed in Eoferwic instead of going back to Denmark, and we sailed, first flowing with the current back down the Ouse and so into the Humber where we spent the night. Next morning we took the shields off the ships’ sides, then waited till the tide lifted their hulls and we could row eastwards into the first great seas.

I had been offshore at Bebbanburg, going with fishermen to cast nets about the Farne Islands, but this was a different sensation. The Wind-Viper rode those waves like a bird instead of thrashing through like a swimmer. We rowed out of the river, then took advantage of a north-west wind to hoist the great sail and the oars were fiddled out of their holes, the holes were covered with wooden plugs and the great sweeps stored inboard as the sail cracked, bellied, trapped the wind and drove us southwards. There were eighty-nine ships altogether, a fleet of dragon-headed killers, and they raced each other, calling insults whenever they travelled faster than some other boat. Ragnar leaned on the steering oar, his hair flying in the wind and a smile as broad as the ocean on his face. Seal-hide ropes creaked, the boat seemed to leap up the seas, seethe through their tops and slide in flying spray down their faces. I was frightened at first, for the Wind-Viper bent to that wind, almost dropping her leeward side beneath the great green sea, but then I saw no fear on the other men’s faces and I learned to enjoy the wild ride, whooping with delight when the bow smashed into a heavy sea and the green water flew like an arrow shower down the deck.

‘I love this!’ Ragnar called to me. ‘In Valhalla I hope to find a ship, a sea and a wind!’

The shore was ever in sight, a low green line to our right, sometimes broken by dunes, but never by trees or hills, and as the sun sank we turned towards that land and Ragnar ordered the sail furled and the oars out.

We rowed into a water land, a place of marsh and reed, of bird cries and long-legged herons, of eel traps and ditches, of shallow channels and long meres, and I remembered my father saying the East Anglians were frogs. We were on the edge of their country now, at the place where Mercia ended and East Anglia began in a tangle of water, mud and salt flats. ‘They call it the Gewæsc,’ Ragnar said.

‘You’ve been here?’

‘Two years ago,’ he said. ‘Good country to raid, Uhtred, but treacherous water. Too shallow.’

The Gewæsc was very shallow and Weland was in the Wind-Viper’s bow, weighing the depth with a lump of iron tied to a rope. The oars only dipped if Weland said there was sufficient water and so we crept westwards into the dying light followed by the rest of the fleet. The shadows were long now, the red sun slicing into the open jaws of the dragon, serpent and eagle heads on the ships’ prows. The oars worked slowly, their blades dripping water as they swept forward for the next stroke, and our wake spread in long slow ripples touched red by dying sun-fire.

We anchored that night and slept aboard the ships and in the dawn Ragnar made Rorik and me climb his mast. Ubba’s ship was nearby and he too had men clambering up towards the painted wind-vane at the masthead.

‘What can you see?’ Ragnar called up to us.

‘Three men on horseback,’ Rorik answered, pointing south, ‘watching us.’

‘And a village,’ I added, also pointing south.

To the men on shore we were something from their darkest fears. All they could see was a thicket of masts and the savage carved beasts at the high prows and sterns of our ships. We were an army, brought here by our dragon boats, and they knew what would follow and, as I watched, the three horsemen turned and galloped south.

We went on. Ubba’s ship led the way now, following a twisting shallow channel and I could see Ubba’s sorcerer, Storri, standing in the bows and I guessed he had cast the runes and predicted success. ‘Today,’ Ragnar told me wolfishly, ‘you will learn the Viking way.’

To be a Viking was to be a raider, and Ragnar had not conducted a shipborne raid in many years. He had become an invader instead, a settler, but Ubba’s fleet had come to ravage the coastline and draw the East Anglian army towards the sea while his brother, Ivar, led the land army south from Mercia, and so that early summer I learned the Viking ways. We took the ships to the mainland where Ubba found a stretch of land with a thin neck that could easily be defended and, once our ships were safely drawn onto the beach, we dug an earthwork across the neck as a rampart. Then large parties of men disappeared into the countryside, returning next morning with captured horses and the horses were used to mount another war-band that rode inland as Ragnar led his men on foot along the tangled shoreline.

We came to a village, I never did learn its name, and we burned it to the ground. There was no one there. We burned farmsteads, a church, and marched on, following a road that angled away from the shore, and at dusk we saw a larger village and we hid in a wood, lit no fires, and attacked at dawn.

We came shrieking from the half-light. We were a nightmare in the dawn; men in leather with iron helmets, men with round painted shields, men with axes, swords and spears. The folk in that place had no weapons and no armour, and perhaps they had not even known there were Danes in their countryside for they were not ready for us. They died. A few brave men tried to make a stand by their church, but Ragnar led a charge against them and they were slaughtered where they stood, and Ragnar pushed open the church door to find the small building filled with women and children. The priest was in front of the altar and he cursed Ragnar in Latin as the Dane stalked up the small nave, and the priest was still cursing when Ragnar disembowelled him.

We took a bronze crucifix, a dented silver plate and some coins from the church. We found a dozen good cooking pots in the houses and some shears, sickles and iron spits. We captured cattle, goats, sheep, oxen, eight horses, and sixteen young women. One woman screamed that she could not leave her child and I watched Weland spit the small boy on a spear, then thrust the bloodied corpse into the woman’s arms. Ragnar sent her away, not because he pitied her, but because one person was always spared to carry news of the horror to other places. Folk must fear the Danes, Ragnar said, and then they would be ready to surrender. He gave me a piece of burning wood he had taken from a fire. ‘Burn the thatch, Uhtred,’ he ordered, so I went from house to house, putting fire to the reed thatch. I burned the church and then, just as I approached the last house, a man burst from the door with a three-pronged eel spear that he lunged at me. I twisted aside, avoiding his thrust by luck rather than judgement, and I hurled the burning wood at the man’s face and the flames made him duck as I backed away, and Ragnar threw me a spear, a heavy war spear made for thrusting rather than throwing, and it skidded in the dust in front of me and I understood he was letting me fight as I plucked it up. He would not have let me die, for he had two of his bowmen standing ready with arrows on their strings, but he did not interfere as the man ran at me and lunged again.

I parried, knocking the rusted eel spear aside and stepping back again to give myself room. The man was twice my size and more than twice my weight. He was cursing me, calling me a devil’s bastard, a worm of hell, and he rushed me again and I did what I had learned hunting the boar. I stepped to my left, waited till he levelled the spear, stepped back to the right and thrust.

It was not a clean thrust, nor did I have the weight to hurl him back, but the spear point punctured his belly and then his weight pushed me back as he half snarled and half gasped, and I fell, and he fell on top of me, forced sideways because the spear was in his guts, and he tried to take a grip of my throat, but I wriggled out from beneath him, picked up his own eel spear and rammed it at his throat. There were rivulets of blood on the earth, droplets spraying in the air, and he was jerking and choking, blood bubbling at his ripped throat, and I tried to pull the eel spear back, but the barbs on the points were caught in his gullet, so I ripped the war spear from his belly and tried to stop him jerking by thrusting it down hard into his chest, but it only glanced off his ribs. He was making a terrible noise, and I suppose I was in a panic, and I was unaware that Ragnar and his men were almost helpless with laughter as they watched me try to kill the East Anglian. I did, in the end, or else he just bled to death, but by then I had poked and stabbed and torn him until he looked as though a pack of wolves had set on him.

But I got a third arm ring, and there were grown warriors in Ragnar’s band who only wore three. Rorik was jealous, but he was younger and his father consoled him that his time would come. ‘How does it feel?’ Ragnar asked me.

‘Good,’ I said, and God help me, it did.

It was then that I first saw Brida. She was my age, black-haired, thin as a twig, with big dark eyes and a spirit as wild as a hawk in spring, and she was among the captured women and, as the Danes began dividing those captives amongst themselves, an older woman pushed the child forward as if giving her to the Vikings. Brida snatched up a piece of wood and turned on the woman and beat at her, driving her back, screaming that she was a sour-faced bitch, a dried-up hank of gristle, and the older woman tripped and fell into a patch of nettles where Brida went on thrashing her. Ragnar was laughing, but eventually pulled the child away and, because he loved anyone with spirit, gave her to me. ‘Keep her safe,’ he said, ‘and burn that last house.’

So I did.

And I learned another thing.

Start your killers young, before their consciences are grown. Start them young and they will be lethal.

We took our plunder back to the ships and that night, as I drank my ale, I thought of myself as a Dane. Not English, not any more. I was a Dane and I had been given a perfect childhood, perfect, at least, to the ideas of a boy. I was raised among men, I was free, I ran wild, I was encumbered by no laws, was troubled by no priests, was encouraged to violence, and I was rarely alone.

And it was that, that I was rarely alone, which kept me alive.

Every raid brought more horses, and more horses meant more men could go farther afield and waste more places, steal more silver and take more captives. We had scouts out now, watching for the approach of King Edmund’s army. Edmund ruled East Anglia and, unless he wished to collapse as feebly as Burghred of Mercia, he had to send men against us to preserve his kingdom, and so we watched the roads and waited.

Brida stayed close to me. Ragnar had taken a strong liking to her, probably because she treated him defiantly and because she alone did not weep when she was captured. She was an orphan and had been living in the house of her aunt, the woman whom she had beaten and whom she hated, and within days Brida was happier among the Danes than she had ever been among her own people. She was a slave now, a slave who was supposed to stay in the camp and cook, but one dawn as we went raiding she ran after us and hauled herself up behind my saddle and Ragnar was amused by that and let her come along.

We went far south that day, out of the flat lands where the marshes stretched, and into low wooded hills amongst which were fat farms and a fatter monastery. Brida laughed when Ragnar killed the abbot, and afterwards, as the Danes collected their plunder, she took my hand and led me over a low rise to a farm which had already been plundered by Ragnar’s men. The farm belonged to the monastery and Brida knew the place because her aunt had frequently gone to the monastery to pray. ‘She wanted children,’ Brida said, ‘and only had me.’ Then she pointed at the farm and watched for my reaction.

It was a Roman farm, she told me, though like me she had little idea who the Romans really were, only that they had once lived in England and then had gone. I had seen plenty of their buildings before, there were some in Eoferwic, but those other buildings had crumbled, then been patched with mud and reroofed with thatch, while this farm looked as though the Romans had only just left.

It was astonishing. The walls were of stone, perfectly cut, square and close-mortared, and the roof was of tile, patterned and tight-fitting, and inside the gate was a courtyard surrounded with a pillared walkway and in the largest room was an amazing picture on the floor, made up of thousands of small coloured stones, and I gaped at the leaping fish that were pulling a chariot in which a bearded man stood holding an eel spear like the one I had faced in Brida’s village. Hares surrounded the picture, chasing each other through looping strands of leaves. There had been other pictures painted on the walls, but they had faded or else been discoloured by water that had leaked through the old roof. ‘It was the abbot’s house,’ Brida told me, and she took me into a small room where there was a cot beside which one of the abbot’s servants lay dead in his own blood. ‘He brought me in here,’ she said.

‘The abbot did?’

‘And told me to take my clothes off.’

‘The abbot did?’ I asked again.

‘I ran away,’ she said in a very matter-of-fact tone, ‘and my aunt beat me. She said I should have pleased him and he’d have rewarded us.’

We wandered through the house and I felt a wonder that we could no longer build like this. We knew how to sink posts in the ground and make beams and rafters and roof them with thatch from rye or reed, but the posts rotted, the thatch mouldered, and the houses sagged. In summer our houses were winter dark, and all year they were choked with smoke, and in winter they stank of cattle, yet this house was light and clean and I doubted any cow had ever dunged on the man in his fish-drawn chariot. It was an unsettling thought, that somehow we were sliding back into the smoky dark and that never again would man make something so perfect as this small building. ‘Were the Romans Christians?’ I asked Brida.

‘Don’t know,’ she said. ‘Why?’

‘Nothing,’ I said, but I had been thinking that the gods reward those they love and it would have been nice to know which gods had looked after the Romans. I hoped they had worshipped Odin, though these days, I knew, they were Christians because the Pope lived in Rome and Beocca had taught me that the Pope was the chief of all the Christians, and was a very holy man. His name, I remembered, was Nicholas. Brida could not have cared less about the gods of the Romans, instead she knelt to explore a hole in the floor that seemed to lead only to a cellar so shallow that no person could ever get inside. ‘Maybe elves lived there?’ I suggested.

‘Elves live in the woods,’ she insisted. She decided the abbot might have hidden treasures in the space and borrowed my sword so she could widen the hole. It was not a real sword, merely a sax, a very long knife, but Ragnar had given it to me and I wore it proudly.

‘Don’t break the blade,’ I told her, and she stuck her tongue out at me, then began prising the mortar at the hole’s edge while I went back to the courtyard to look at the raised pond that was green and scummy now, but somehow I knew it had once been filled with clear water. A frog crawled onto the small stone island in the centre and I again remembered my father’s verdict on the East Anglians; mere frogs.

Weland came through the gate. He stopped just inside and licked his lips, tongue flickering, then half smiled. ‘Lost your sax, Uhtred?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘Ragnar sent me,’ he said, ‘we’re leaving.’

I nodded, said nothing, but knew that Ragnar would have sounded a horn if we were truly ready to leave.

‘So come on, boy,’ he said.

I nodded again, still said nothing.

His dark eyes glanced at the building’s empty windows, then at the pool. ‘Is that a frog,’ he asked, ‘or a toad?’

‘A frog.’

‘In Frankia,’ he said, ‘men say you can eat frogs.’ He walked towards the pool and I moved to stay on the far side from him, keeping the raised stone structure between us. ‘Have you eaten a frog, Uhtred?’

‘No.’

‘Would you like to?’

‘No.’

He put a hand into a leather bag which hung from his sword belt that was strapped over a torn mail coat. He had money now, two arm rings, proper boots, an iron helmet, a long sword and the mail coat which needed mending, but was far better protection than the rags he had worn when he first came to Ragnar’s house. ‘This coin if you catch a frog,’ he said, spinning a silver penny in the air.

‘I don’t want to catch a frog,’ I said sullenly.

‘I do,’ he said, grinning, and he drew the sword, its blade hissing on the scabbard’s wooden throat, and he stepped into the pool, the water not reaching the tops of his boots, and the frog leaped away, plopping into the green scum, and Weland was not looking at the frog, but at me, and I knew he was going to kill me, but for some reason I could not move. I was astonished, and yet I was not astonished. I had never liked him, never trusted him, and I understood that he had been sent to kill me and had only failed because I had always been in company until this moment when I had let Brida lead me away from Ragnar’s band. So Weland had his chance now. He smiled at me, reached the centre of the pool, came closer, raised the sword and I found my feet at last and raced back into the pillared walkway. I did not want to go into the house, for Brida was there, and I knew he would kill her if he found her. He jumped out of the pond and chased me, and I raced down the walkway, around the corner, and he cut me off, and I dodged back, wanting to reach the gateway, but he knew that was what I wanted and he took care to keep between me and my escape. His boots left wet footprints on the Roman flagstones.

‘What’s the matter, Uhtred?’ he asked, ‘frightened of frogs?’

‘What do you want?’ I asked.

‘Not so cocky now, eh? Ealdorman?’ He stalked towards me, sword flashing from side to side. ‘Your uncle sends his regards and trusts you will burn in hell while he lives in Bebbanburg.’

‘You come from …’ I began, but it was obvious Weland was serving Ælfric so I did not bother to finish the question, but instead edged backwards.

‘The reward for your death will be the weight of his newborn child in silver,’ Weland said, ‘and the child should be born by now. And he’s impatient for your death, your uncle is. I almost managed to track you down that night outside Snotengaham, and almost hit you with an arrow last winter, but you ducked. Not this time, but it will be quick, boy. Your uncle said to make it quick, so kneel down, boy, just kneel.’ He swept the blade left and right, his wrist whippy so the sword hissed. ‘I haven’t given her a name yet,’ he said. ‘Perhaps after this she’ll be known as Orphan-Killer.’

I feinted right, went left, but he was quick as a stoat and he blocked me, and I knew I was cornered, and he knew it too and smiled. ‘I’ll make it quick,’ he said, ‘I promise.’

Then the first roof tile hit his helmet. It could not have hurt much, but the unexpected blow jarred him backwards and confused him, and the second tile hit his waist and the third smacked him on the shoulder, and Brida shouted from the roof. ‘Back through the house!’ I ran, the lunging sword missing me by inches, and I twisted through the door, ran over the fish-drawn chariot, through a second door, another door, saw an open window and dove through, and Brida jumped down from the roof and together we ran for the nearby woods.

Weland followed me, but he abandoned the pursuit when we vanished in the trees. Instead he went south, on his own, fleeing what he knew Ragnar would do to him, and for some reason I was in tears by the time I found Ragnar again. Why did I cry? I do not know, unless it was the confirmation that Bebbanburg was gone, that my beloved refuge was occupied by an enemy, and an enemy who, by now, might have a son.

Brida received an arm ring, and Ragnar let it be known that if any man touched her he, Ragnar, would personally geld that man with a mallet and a plank-splitter. She rode home on Weland’s horse.

And next day the enemy came.

Ravn had sailed with us, blind though he was, and I was required to be his eyes so I described how the East Anglian army was forming on a low ridge of dry land to the south of our camp. ‘How many banners?’ he asked me.

‘Twenty-three,’ I said, after a pause to count them.

‘Showing?’

‘Mostly crosses,’ I said, ‘and some saints.’

‘He’s a very pious man, King Edmund,’ Ravn said, ‘he even tried to persuade me to become a Christian.’ He chuckled at the memory. We were sitting on the prow of one of the beached ships, Ravn in a chair, Brida and I at his feet, and the Mercian twins, Ceolnoth and Ceolberht on his far side. They were the sons of Bishop Æthelbrid of Snotengaham and they were hostages even though their father had welcomed the Danish army, but, as Ravn said, taking the bishop’s sons hostage would keep the man honest. There were dozens of other such hostages from Mercia and Northumbria, all sons of prominent men, and all under sentence of death if their fathers caused trouble. There were other Englishmen in the army, serving as soldiers and, if it were not for the language they spoke, they would have been indistinguishable from the Danes. Most of them were either outlaws or masterless men, but all were savage fighters, exactly the kind of men the English needed to face their enemy, but now those men were fighting for the Danes against King Edmund. ‘And he’s a fool,’ Ravn said scornfully.

‘A fool?’ I asked.

‘He gave us shelter during the winter before we attacked Eoferwic,’ Ravn explained, ‘and we had to promise not to kill any of his churchmen.’ He laughed softly. ‘What a very silly condition. If their god was any use then we couldn’t have killed them anyway.’

‘Why did he give you shelter?’

‘Because it was easier than fighting us,’ Ravn said. He was using English because the other three children did not understand Danish, though Brida was learning quickly. She had a mind like a fox, quick and sly. Ravn smiled. ‘The silly King Edmund believed we would go away in the springtime and not come back, yet here we are.’

‘He shouldn’t have done it,’ one of the twins put in. I could not tell them apart, but was annoyed by them for they were fierce Mercian patriots, despite their father’s change of allegiance. They were ten years old and forever upbraiding me for loving the Danes.

‘Of course he shouldn’t have done it,’ Ravn agreed mildly.

‘He should have attacked you!’ Ceolnoth or Ceolberht said.

‘He would have lost if he had,’ Ravn said, ‘we made a camp, protected it with walls, and stayed there. And he paid us money to make no trouble.’

‘I saw King Edmund once,’ Brida put in.

‘Where was that, child?’ Ravn asked.

‘He came to the monastery to pray,’ she said, ‘and he farted when he knelt down.’

‘No doubt their god appreciated the tribute,’ Ravn said loftily, frowning because the twins were now making farting noises.

‘Were the Romans Christians?’ I asked him, remembering my curiosity at the Roman farm.

‘Not always,’ Ravn said. ‘They had their own gods once, but they gave them up to become Christians and after that they knew nothing but defeat. Where are our men?’

‘Still in the marsh,’ I said.

Ubba had hoped to stay in the camp and so force Edmund’s army to attack along the narrow neck of land and die on our short earthen wall, but instead the English had remained south of the treacherous lowland and were inviting us to attack them. Ubba was tempted. He had made Storri cast the runesticks and rumour said that the result was uncertain, and that fed Ubba’s caution. He was a fearsome fighter, but always wary when it came to picking a fight, but the runesticks had not predicted disaster and so he had taken the army out into the marsh where it now stood on whatever patches of drier land it could find, and from where two tracks led up to the low ridge. Ubba’s banner, the famous raven on its three-sided cloth, was midway between the two paths, both of which were strongly guarded by East Anglian shield walls, and any attack up either path would mean that a few of our men would have to attack a lot of theirs, and Ubba must have been having second thoughts for he was hesitating. I described all that to Ravn.

‘It doesn’t do,’ he told me, ‘to lose men, even if we win.’

‘But if we kill lots of theirs?’ I asked.

‘They have more men, we have few. If we kill a thousand of theirs then they will have another thousand tomorrow, but if we lose a hundred men then we must wait for more ships to replace them.’

‘More ships are coming,’ Brida said.

‘I doubt there will be any more this year,’ Ravn said.

‘No,’ she insisted, ‘now,’ and she pointed and I saw four ships nosing their way through the tangle of low islands and shallow creeks.

‘Tell me,’ Ravn said urgently.

‘Four ships,’ I said, ‘coming from the west.’

‘From the west? Not the east?’

‘From the west,’ I insisted, which meant they were not coming from the sea, but from one of the four rivers which flowed into the Gewæsc.

‘Prows?’ Ravn demanded.

‘No beasts on the prows,’ I said, ‘just plain wooden posts.’

‘Oars?’

‘Ten a side, I think, maybe eleven. But there are far more men than rowers.’

‘English ships!’ Ravn sounded amazed, for other than small fishing craft and some tubby cargo vessels the English had few ships, yet these four were warships, built long and sleek like the Danish ships, and they were creeping through the mazy waterways to attack Ubba’s beached fleet. I could see smoke trickling from the foremost ship and knew they must have a brazier on board and so were planning to burn the Danish boats and thus trap Ubba.

But Ubba had also seen them, and already the Danish army was streaming back towards the camp. The leading English ship began to shoot fire-arrows at the closest Danish boat and, though there was a guard on the boats, that guard was composed of the sick and the lame, and they were not strong enough to defend the ships against a seaborne attack. ‘Boys!’ one of the guards bellowed.

‘Go,’ Ravn told us, ‘go,’ and Brida, who considered herself as good as any boy, came with the twins and me. We jumped down to the beach and ran along the water’s edge to where smoke was thickening above the beached Danish boat. Two English ships were shooting fire-arrows now, while the last two attackers were trying to edge past their companions to reach more of our craft.

Our job was to extinguish the fire while the guards hurled spears at the English crews. I used a shield to scoop up sand that I dumped onto the fire. The English ships were close and I could see they were made of new raw wood. A spear thumped close to me and I picked it up and threw it back, though feebly because it clattered against an oar and fell into the sea. The twins were not trying to put out the fire and I hit one of them and threatened to hit him harder if they did not make an effort, but we were too late to save the first Danish ship which was well ablaze, so we abandoned it and tried to rescue the next one, but a score of fire-arrows slammed into the rowers’ benches, another landed on the furled sail, and two of the boys were dead at the water’s edge. The leading English ship turned to the beach then, its prow thick with men bristling with spears, axes and swords. ‘Edmund!’ they shouted, ‘Edmund!’ The bow grated on the beach and the warriors jumped off to begin slaughtering the Danish ships’ guard. The big axes slammed down and blood spattered up the beach or was sluiced away by the tiny waves which washed the sand. I grabbed Brida’s hand and pulled her away, splashing through a shallow creek where tiny silver fish scattered in alarm. ‘We have to save Ravn!’ I told her.

She was laughing. Brida always enjoyed chaos.

Three of the English ships had beached themselves and their crews were ashore, finishing off the Danish guards. The last ship glided on the falling tide, shooting fire-arrows, but then Ubba’s men were back in the camp and they advanced on the English with a roar. Some men had stayed with the raven banner at the earthen wall to make sure King Edmund’s forces could not swarm over the neck of land to take the camp, but the rest came screaming and vengeful. The Danes love their ships. A ship, they say, is like a woman or a sword, sharp and beautiful, worth dying for, and certainly worth fighting for, and the East Anglians, who had done so well, had now made a mistake for the tide was ebbing and they could not shove their boats off into the small waves. Some of the Danes protected their own unharmed boats by raining throwing axes, spears and arrows at the crew of the single enemy boat afloat, while the rest attacked the Englishmen ashore.

That was a slaughter. That was Danish work. That was a fit fight for the skalds to celebrate. Blood was thick on the tideline, blood slurping with the rise and fall of the small waves, men screaming and falling, and all about them the smoke of the burning boats was whirling so that the hazed sun was red above a sand turned red, and in that smoke the rage of the Danes was terrible. It was then I first saw Ubba fight and marvelled at him, for he was a bringer of death, a grim warrior, a sword-lover. He did not fight in a shield wall, but ran into his enemies, shield slamming one way as his war axe gave death in the other, and it seemed he was indestructible for, at one moment, he was surrounded by East Anglian fighters, but there was a scream of hate, a clash of blade on blade, and Ubba came out of the tangle of men, his blade red, blood in his beard, trampling his enemies into the blood-rich tide, and looking for more men to kill. Ragnar joined him, and Ragnar’s men followed, harvesting an enemy beside the sea, screaming hate at men who had burned their ships, and when the screaming and killing were done we counted sixty-eight English bodies, and some we could not count for they had run into the sea and drowned there, dragged down by the weight of weapons and armour. The sole East Anglian ship to escape was a ship of the dying, its new wooden flanks running with blood. The victorious Danes danced over the corpses they had made, then made a heap of captured weapons. There were thirty Danish dead, and those men were burned on a half-burned ship, another six Danish craft had been destroyed, but Ubba captured the three beached English boats which Ragnar declared to be pieces of shit. ‘It’s astonishing they even floated,’ he said, kicking at a badly caulked strake.

Yet the East Anglians had done well, I thought. They had made mistakes, but they had hurt Danish pride by burning dragon ships, and if King Edmund had attacked the wall protecting the camp he might have turned the slaughter into a massacre of Danes, but King Edmund had not attacked. Instead, as his shipmen died beneath the smoke, he had marched away.

He thought he was facing the Danish army by the sea, only to find that the real attack had come by land. He had just learned that Ivar the Boneless was invading his land.

And Ubba was enraged. The few English prisoners were sacrificed to Odin, their screams a call to the god that we needed his help. And next morning, leaving the burned boats like smoking black skeletons on the beach, we rowed the dragon fleet west.

Four

King Edmund of East Anglia is now remembered as a saint, as one of those blessed souls who live for ever in the shadow of God. Or so the priests tell me. In heaven, they say, the saints occupy a privileged place, living on the high platform of God’s great hall where they spend their time singing God’s praises. For ever. Just singing. Beocca always told me that it would be an ecstatic existence, but to me it seems very dull. The Danes reckon their dead warriors are carried to Valhalla, the corpse-hall of Odin, where they spend their days fighting and their nights feasting and swiving, and I dare not tell the priests that this seems a far better way to endure the afterlife than singing to the sound of golden harps. I once asked a bishop whether there were any women in heaven. ‘Of course there are, my lord,’ he answered, happy that I was taking an interest in doctrine, ‘many of the most blessed saints are women.’

‘I mean women we can hump, bishop.’

He said he would pray for me. Perhaps he did.

I do not know if King Edmund was a saint. He was a fool, that was for sure. He had given the Danes refuge before they attacked Eoferwic, and given them more than refuge. He had paid them coin, provided them with food and supplied their army with horses, all on the two promises that they would leave East Anglia in the spring and that they would not harm a single churchman. They kept their promises, but now, two years later and much stronger, the Danes were back, and King Edmund had decided to fight them. He had seen what had happened to Mercia and Northumbria, and must have known his own kingdom would suffer the same fate, and so he gathered his fyrd and prayed to his god and marched to do battle. First he faced us by the sea, then, hearing that Ivar was marching around the edge of the great watery wastes west of the Gewæsc, he turned about to confront him. Ubba then led our fleet up the Gewæsc and we nosed into one of the rivers until the channel was so narrow our oars could not be used, and then men towed the boats, wading through waist-deep water until we could go no farther and there we left the ships under guard while the rest of us followed soggy paths through endless marshland until, at long last, we came to higher ground. No one knew where we were, only that if we went south we had to reach the road along which Edmund had marched to confront Ivar. Cut that road and we would trap him between our forces and Ivar’s army.

Which is precisely what happened. Ivar fought him, shield wall against shield wall, and we knew none of it until the first East Anglian fugitives came streaming eastwards to find another shield wall waiting for them. They scattered rather than fight us, we advanced, and from the few prisoners we took we discovered that Ivar had beaten them easily. That was confirmed next day when the first horsemen from Ivar’s forces reached us.

King Edmund fled southwards. East Anglia was a big country, he could easily have found refuge in a fortress, or else he could have gone to Wessex, but instead he put his faith in God and took shelter in a small monastery at Dic. The monastery was lost in the wetlands and perhaps he believed he would never be found there, or else, as I heard, one of the monks promised him that God would shroud the monastery in a perpetual fog in which the pagans would get lost, but the fog never came and the Danes arrived instead.

Ivar, Ubba and their brother Halfdan rode to Dic, taking half their army while the other half set about pacifying East Anglia, which meant raping, burning and killing until the people submitted, which most did swiftly enough. East Anglia, in short, fell as easily as Mercia, and the only bad news for the Danes was that there had been unrest in Northumbria. Rumours spoke of some kind of revolt, Danes had been killed, and Ivar wanted that rising quenched, but he dared not leave East Anglia so soon after capturing it, so at Dic he made a proposal to King Edmund that would leave Edmund as king just as Burghred still ruled over Mercia.

The meeting was held in the monastery’s church that was a surprisingly large hall made of timber and thatch, but with great leather panels hanging on the walls. The panels were painted with gaudy scenes. One of the pictures showed naked folk tumbling down to hell where a massive serpent with a fanged mouth swallowed them up. ‘Corpse-Ripper,’ Ragnar said with a shudder.

‘Corpse-Ripper?’

‘A serpent that waits in Niflheim,’ he explained, touching his hammer amulet. Niflheim, I knew, was a kind of Norse hell, but unlike the Christian hell, Niflheim was icy cold. ‘Corpse-Ripper feeds on the dead,’ Ragnar went on, ‘but he also gnaws at the tree of life. He wants to kill the whole world and bring time to an end.’ He touched his hammer again.

Another panel, behind the altar, showed Christ on the cross, and next to it was a third painted leather panel that fascinated Ivar. A man, naked but for a loincloth, had been tied to a stake and was being used as a target by archers. At least a score of arrows had punctured his white flesh, but he still had a saintly expression and a secret smile as though, despite his troubles, he was quite enjoying himself. ‘Who is that?’ Ivar wanted to know.

‘The blessed Saint Sebastian,’ King Edmund was seated in front of the altar, and his interpreter provided the answer. Ivar, skull eyes staring at the painting, wanted to know the whole story, and Edmund recounted how the blessed Saint Sebastian, a Roman soldier, had refused to renounce his faith and so the emperor had ordered him shot to death with arrows. ‘Yet he lived!’ Edmund said eagerly, ‘he lived because God protected him and God be praised for that mercy.’

‘He lived?’ Ivar asked suspiciously.

‘So the emperor had him clubbed to death instead,’ the interpreter finished the tale.

‘So he didn’t live?’

‘He went to heaven,’ King Edmund said, ‘so he lived.’

Ubba intervened, wanting to have the concept of heaven explained to him, and Edmund eagerly sketched its delights, but Ubba spat in derision when he realised that the Christian heaven was Valhalla without any of the amusements. ‘And Christians want to go to heaven?’ he asked in disbelief.

‘Of course,’ the interpreter said.

Ubba sneered. He and his two brothers were attended by as many Danish warriors as could cram themselves into the church, while King Edmund had an entourage of two priests and six monks who all listened as Ivar proposed his settlement. King Edmund could live, he could rule in East Anglia, but the chief fortresses were to be garrisoned by Danes, and Danes were to be granted whatever land they required, except for royal land. Edmund would be expected to provide horses for the Danish army, coin and food for the Danish warriors, and his fyrd, what was left of it, would march under Danish orders. Edmund had no sons, but his chief men, those who lived, had sons who would become hostages to ensure that the East Anglians kept the terms Ivar proposed.

‘And if I say no?’ Edmund asked.

Ivar was amused by that. ‘We take the land anyway.’

The king consulted his priests and monks. Edmund was a tall, spare man, bald as an egg though he was only about thirty years old. He had protruding eyes, a pursed mouth and a perpetual frown. He was wearing a white tunic which made him look like a priest himself. ‘What of God’s church?’ he finally asked Ivar.

‘What of it?’

‘Your men have desecrated God’s altars, slaughtered his servants, defiled his image and stolen his tribute!’ The king was angry now. One of his hands was clenched on the arm of his chair that was set in front of the altar, while the other hand was a fist which beat time with his accusations.

‘Your god cannot look after himself?’ Ubba enquired.

‘Our God is a mighty God,’ Edmund declared, ‘the creator of the world, yet he also allows evil to exist to test us.’

‘Amen,’ one of the priests murmured as Ivar’s interpreter translated the words.

‘He brought you!’ the king spat, ‘pagans from the north! Jeremiah foretold this!’

‘Jeremiah?’ Ivar asked, quite lost now.

One of the monks had a book, the first I had seen in many years, and he unwrapped its leather cover, paged through the stiff leaves and gave it to the king who reached into a pocket and took out a small ivory pointer that he used to indicate the words he wanted. ‘Quia malum ego,’ he thundered, the pale pointer moving along the lines, ‘adduco ab aquilone et contritionem magnam!’

He stopped there, glaring at Ivar, and some of the Danes, impressed by the forcefulness of the king’s words, even though none of them understood a single one of them, touched their hammer charms. The priests around Edmund looked reproachfully at us. A sparrow flew in through a high window and perched for a moment on an arm of the high wooden cross that stood on the altar.

Ivar’s dread face showed no reaction to Jeremiah’s words and it finally dawned on the East Anglian interpreter, who was one of the priests, that the king’s impassioned reading had meant nothing to any of us. ‘For I will bring evil from the north,’ he translated, ‘and great destruction.’

‘It is in the book!’ Edmund said fiercely, giving the volume back to the monk.

‘You can keep your church,’ Ivar said carelessly.

‘It is not enough,’ Edmund said. He stood up to give his next words more force. ‘I will rule here,’ he went on, ‘and I will suffer your presence if I must, and I will provide you with horses, food, coin and hostages, but only if you, and all of your men, submit to God. You must be baptised!’

That word was lost on the Danish interpreter, and on the king’s, and finally Ubba looked to me for help. ‘You have to stand in a barrel of water,’ I said, remembering how Beocca had baptised me after my brother’s death, ‘and they pour more water over you.’

‘They want to wash me?’ Ubba asked, astonished.

I shrugged. ‘That’s what they do, lord.’

‘You will become Christians!’ Edmund said, then shot me an irritated look. ‘We can baptise in the river, boy. Barrels are not necessary.’

‘They want to wash you in the river,’ I explained to Ivar and Ubba, and the Danes laughed.

Ivar thought about it. Standing in a river for a few minutes was not such a bad thing, especially if it meant he could hurry back to quell whatever trouble afflicted Northumbria. ‘I can go on worshipping Odin once I’m washed?’ he asked.

‘Of course not!’ Edmund said angrily. ‘There is only one God!’

‘There are many gods,’ Ivar snapped back, ‘many! Everyone knows that.’

‘There is only one God, and you must serve him.’

‘But we’re winning,’ Ivar explained patiently, almost as if he talked to a child, ‘which means our gods are beating your one god.’

The king shuddered at this awful heresy. ‘Your gods are false gods,’ he said, ‘they are turds of the devil, they are evil things who will bring darkness to the world, while our God is great, he is all powerful, he is magnificent.’

‘Show me,’ Ivar said.

Those two words brought silence. The king, his priests and monks all stared at Ivar in evident puzzlement.

‘Prove it,’ Ivar said, and his Danes murmured their support of the idea.

King Edmund blinked, evidently lost for inspiration, then had a sudden idea and pointed at the leather panel on which was painted Saint Sebastian’s experience of being an archers’ target. ‘Our God spared the blessed Saint Sebastian from death by arrows!’ Edmund said, ‘which is proof enough, is it not?’

‘But the man still died,’ Ivar pointed out.

‘Only because that was God’s will.’

Ivar thought about that. ‘So would your god protect you from my arrows?’ he asked.

‘If it is his will, yes.’

‘So let’s try,’ Ivar proposed. ‘We shall shoot arrows at you, and if you survive then we’ll all be washed.’

Edmund stared at the Dane, wondering if he was serious, then looked nervous when he saw that Ivar was not joking. The king opened his mouth, found he had nothing to say and closed it again, then one of his tonsured monks murmured to him and he must have been trying to persuade the king that God was suggesting this ordeal in order to extend his church, and that a miracle would result, and the Danes would become Christians and we would all be friends and end up singing together on the high platform in heaven. The king did not look entirely convinced by this argument, if that was indeed what the monk was proposing, but the Danes wanted to attempt the miracle now and it was no longer up to Edmund to accept or refuse the trial.

A dozen men shoved the monks and priests aside while more went outside to find bows and arrows. The king, trapped in his defence of God, was kneeling at the altar, praying as hard as any man has ever prayed. The Danes were grinning. I was enjoying it. I think I rather hoped to see a miracle, not because I was a Christian, but because I just wanted to see a miracle. Beocca had often told me about miracles, stressing that they were the real proof of Christianity’s truths, but I had never seen one. No one had ever walked on the water at Bebbanburg and no lepers were healed there and no angels had filled our night skies with blazing glory, but now, perhaps, I would see the power of God that Beocca had forever preached to me. Brida just wanted to see Edmund dead.

‘Are you ready?’ Ivar demanded of the king.

Edmund looked at his priests and monks and I wondered if he was about to suggest that one of them should replace him in this test of God’s power. Then he frowned and looked back to Ivar. ‘I will accept your proposal,’ he said.

‘That we shoot arrows at you?’

‘That I remain king here.’

‘But you want to wash me first.’

‘We can dispense with that,’ Edmund said.

‘No,’ Ivar said. ‘You have claimed your god is all powerful, that he is the only god, so I want it proved. If you are right then all of us will be washed. Are we agreed?’ This question was asked of the Danes who roared their approval.

‘Not me,’ Ravn said, ‘I won’t be washed.’

‘We will all be washed!’ Ivar snarled, and I realised he truly was interested in the outcome of the test, more interested, indeed, than he was in making a quick and convenient peace with Edmund. All men need the support of their god and Ivar was trying to discover whether he had, all these years, been worshipping at the wrong shrine. ‘Are you wearing armour?’ he asked Edmund.

‘No.’

‘Best to be sure,’ Ubba intervened and glanced at the fatal painting. ‘Strip him,’ he ordered.

The king and the churchmen protested, but the Danes would not be denied and King Edmund was stripped stark naked. Brida enjoyed that. ‘He’s puny,’ she said. Edmund, the butt of laughter now, did his best to look dignified. The priests and monks were on their knees, praying, while six archers took their stance a dozen paces from Edmund.

‘We are going to find out,’ Ivar told us, stilling the laughter, ‘whether the English god is as powerful as our Danish gods. If he is, and if the king lives, then we shall become Christians, all of us!’

‘Not me,’ Ravn said again, but quietly so that Ivar could not hear. ‘Tell me what happens, Uhtred.’

It was soon told. Six arrows hit, the king screamed, blood spattered the altar, he fell down, he twitched like a gaffed salmon, and six more arrows thumped home. Edmund twitched some more, and the archers kept on shooting, though their aim was bad because they were half helpless with laughter, and they went on shooting until the king was as full of feathered shafts as a hedgehog has spikes. And he was quite dead by then. He was bloodied, his white skin red-laced, open-mouthed and dead. His god had failed him miserably. Nowadays, of course, that story is never told, instead children learn how brave Saint Edmund stood up to the Danes, demanded their conversion and was murdered. So now he is a martyr and saint, warbling happily in heaven, but the truth is that he was a fool and talked himself into martyrdom.

The priests and monks wailed, so Ivar ordered them killed as well, then he decreed that Earl Godrim, one of his chiefs, would rule in East Anglia and that Halfdan would savage the country to quench the last sparks of resistance. Godrim and Halfdan would be given a third of the army to keep East Anglia quiet, while the rest of us would return to subdue the unrest in Northumbria.

So now East Anglia was gone.

And Wessex was the last kingdom of England.

We returned to Northumbria, half rowing and half sailing the Wind-Viper up the gentle coast, then rowing against the rivers’ currents as we travelled up the Humber, then the Ouse until Eoferwic’s walls came in sight, and there we hauled the ship onto dry land so she would not rot through the winter. Ivar and Ubba returned with us, so that a whole fleet skimmed the river, oars dripping, beastless prows bearing branches of green oak to show we came home victorious. We brought home much treasure. The Danes set much store by treasure. Their men follow their leaders because they know they will be rewarded with silver, and in the taking of three of England’s four kingdoms the Danes had amassed a fortune which was shared among the men and some, a few, decided to take their money back home to Denmark. Most stayed, for the richest kingdom remained undefeated and men reckoned they would all become as wealthy as gods once Wessex fell.

Ivar and Ubba had come to Eoferwic expecting trouble. They had their shields displayed on the flanks of their ships, but whatever unrest had disturbed Northumbria had not affected the city and King Egbert, who ruled at the pleasure of the Danes, sulkily denied there had been any rising at all. Archbishop Wulfhere said the same. ‘There is always banditry,’ he declared loftily, ‘and perhaps you heard rumours of it?’

‘Or perhaps you are deaf,’ Ivar snarled, and Ivar was right to be suspicious for, once it was known that the army had returned, messengers came from Ealdorman Ricsig of Dunholm. Dunholm was a great fortress on a high crag that was almost surrounded by the River Wiire, and the crag and the river made Dunholm almost as strong as Bebbanburg. It was ruled by Ricsig who had never drawn his sword against the Danes. When we attacked Eoferwic and my father was killed, Ricsig had claimed to be sick and his men had stayed home, but now he sent servants to tell Ivar that a band of Danes had been slaughtered at Gyruum. That was the site of a famous monastery where a man called Bede wrote a history of the English church which Beocca had always praised to me, saying that when I learned to read properly I could give myself the treat of reading it. I have yet to do so, but I have been to Gyruum and seen where the book was written for Ragnar was asked to take his men there and discover what had happened.

It seemed six Danes, all of them masterless men, had gone to Gyruum and demanded to see the monastery’s treasury and, when the monks claimed to be penniless, the six had started killing, but the monks had fought back and, as there were over a score of monks, and as they were helped by some men from the town, they succeeded in killing the six Danes who had then been spitted on posts and left to rot on the foreshore. Thus far, as Ragnar admitted, the fault lay with the Danes, but the monks, encouraged by this slaughter, had marched west up the River Tine, and attacked a Danish settlement where there were only a few men, those too old or too sick to travel south with the army, and there they had raped and killed at least a score of women and children, proclaiming that this was now a holy war. More men had joined the makeshift army, but Ealdorman Ricsig, fearing the revenge of the Danes, had sent his own troops to disperse them. He had captured a good number of the rebels, including a dozen monks, who were now held at his fortress above the river at Dunholm.

All this we heard from Ricsig’s messengers, then from folk who had survived the massacre, and one of those was a girl the same age as Ragnar’s daughter, and she said the monks had raped her one at a time, and afterwards they had forcibly baptised her. She said there had been nuns present as well, women who had urged the men on and had taken part in the slaughter afterwards. ‘Nests of vipers,’ Ragnar said. I had never seen him so angry, not even when Sven had exposed himself to Thyra. We dug up some of the Danish dead and all were naked and all were blood-spattered. They had all been tortured.

A priest was found and made to tell us the names of the chief monasteries and nunneries in Northumbria. Gyruum was one, of course, and just across the river was a large nunnery, while to the south, where the Wiire met the sea, was a second monastery. The house at Streonshall was close to Eoferwic, and that held many nuns, while close to Bebbanburg, on the island that Beocca had always told me was sacred, was the monastery of Lindisfarena. There were many others, but Ragnar was content with the chief places, and he sent men to Ivar and Ubba suggesting that the nuns of Streonshall should be dispersed, and any found to have joined the revolt should be killed, then he set about Gyruum. Every monk was killed, the buildings that were not made of stone were burned, the treasures, for they did indeed have silver and gold hidden beneath their church, were taken. I remember we discovered a great pile of writings, sheet upon sheet of parchments, all smothered in tight black writing, and I have no idea what the writings were, and now I never will, for they were all burned, and once Gyruum was no more we went south to the monastery at the mouth of the Wiire and we did the same there, and afterwards crossed the Tine and obliterated the nunnery on the northern bank. The nuns there, led by their abbess, deliberately scarred their own faces. They knew we were coming and so, to deter rape, cut their cheeks and foreheads and so met us all bloody, screaming and ugly. Why they did not run away I do not know, but instead they waited for us, cursed us, prayed for heaven’s revenge on us, and died.

I never told Alfred that I took part in that famous harrowing of the northern houses. The tale is still told as evidence of Danish ferocity and untrustworthiness, indeed every English child is told the story of the nuns who cut their faces to the bone so that they would be too ugly to rape, though that did not work any more than King Edmund’s prayers had saved him from arrows. I remember one Easter listening to a sermon about the nuns, and it was all I could do not to interrupt and say that it had not happened as the priest described. The priest claimed that the Danes had promised that no monk or nun would ever be hurt in Northumbria, and that was not true, and he claimed that there was no cause for the massacres, which was equally false, and then he told a marvellous tale of how the nuns had prayed and God had placed an invisible curtain at the nunnery gate, and the Danes had pushed against the curtain and could not pierce it, and I was wondering why, if the nuns had this invisible shield, they had bothered to scar themselves, but they must have known how the story would end, because the Danes were supposed to have fetched a score of small children from the nearby village and threatened to cut their throats unless the curtain was lifted, which it was.

None of that happened. We arrived, they screamed, the young ones were raped and then they died. But not all of them, despite the famous tales. At least two were pretty and not at all scarred, and both of them stayed with Ragnar’s men and one of them gave birth to a child who grew up to become a famous Danish warrior. Still, priests have never been great men for the truth and I kept quiet which was just as well. In truth we never killed everybody because Ravn drove it home to me that you always left one person alive to tell the tale so that news of the horror would spread.

Once the nunnery was burned we went to Dunholm where Ragnar thanked the Ealdorman Ricsig, though Ricsig was plainly shocked by the revenge the Danes had taken. ‘Not every monk and nun took part in the slaughter,’ he pointed out reprovingly.

‘They are all evil,’ Ragnar insisted.

‘Their houses,’ Ricsig said, ‘are places of prayer and of contemplation, places of learning.’

‘Tell me,’ Ragnar demanded, ‘what use is prayer, contemplation or learning? Does prayer grow rye? Does contemplation fill a fishing net? Does learning build a house or plough a field?’

Ricsig had no answer to those questions, nor indeed did the Bishop of Dunholm, a timid man who made no protest at the slaughter, not even when Ricsig meekly handed over his prisoners who were put to death in various imaginative ways. Ragnar had become convinced that the Christian monasteries and nunneries were sources of evil, places where sinister rites were performed to encourage folk to attack the Danes and he saw no point in letting such places exist. The most famous monastery of all, though, was that at Lindisfarena, the house where Saint Cuthbert had lived, and the house that had first been sacked by the Danes two generations before. It had been that attack which had been portended by dragons in the sky and whirlwinds churning the sea and lightning storms savaging the hills, but I saw no such strange wonders as we marched north.

I was excited. We were going close to Bebbanburg and I wondered whether my uncle, the false Ealdorman Ælfric, would dare come out of his fortress to protect the monks of Lindisfarena who had always looked to our family for their safety. We all rode horses, three ships’ crews, over a hundred men, for it was late in the year and the Danes did not like taking their ships into hard weather. We skirted Bebbanburg, riding in the hills, catching occasional glimpses of the fortress’s wooden walls between the trees. I stared at it, seeing the fretting sea beyond, dreaming.

We crossed the flat coastal fields and came to the sandy beach where a track led to Lindisfarena, but at high tide the track was flooded and we were forced to wait. We could see the monks watching us on the farther shore. ‘The rest of the bastards will be burying their treasures,’ Ragnar said.

‘If they have any left,’ I said.

‘They always have some left,’ Ragnar said grimly.

‘When I was last here,’ Ravn put in, ‘we took a chest of gold! Pure gold!’

‘A big chest?’ Brida asked. She was mounted behind Ravn, serving as his eyes this day. She came everywhere with us, spoke good Danish by now and was regarded as bringing luck by the men, who adored her.

‘As big as your chest,’ Ravn said.

‘Not much gold then,’ Brida said, disappointed.

‘Gold and silver,’ Ravn reminisced, ‘and some walrus tusks. Where did they get those?’

The sea relented, the bickering waves slunk back down the long sands and we rode through the shallows, past the withies that marked the track, and the monks ran off. Small flickers of smoke marked where farmsteads dotted the island and I had no doubt those folk were burying what few possessions they owned.

‘Will any of these monks know you?’ Ragnar asked me.

‘Probably.’

‘Does that worry you?’

It did, but I said it did not, and I touched Thor’s hammer and somewhere in my thoughts there was a tendril of worry that God, the Christian god, was watching me. Beocca always said that everything we did was watched and recorded, and I had to remind myself that the Christian god was failing and that Odin, Thor and the Danish gods were winning the war in heaven. Edmund’s death had proved that and so I consoled myself that I was safe.

The monastery lay on the south of the island from where I could see Bebbanburg on its crag of rock. The monks lived in a scatter of small timber buildings, thatched with rye and moss, and built about a small stone church. The abbot, a man called Egfrith, came to meet us carrying a wooden cross. He spoke Danish, which was unusual, and he showed no fear. ‘You are most welcome to our small island,’ he greeted us enthusiastically, ‘and you should know that I have one of your countrymen in our sick chamber.’

Ragnar rested his hands on the fleece-covered pommel of his saddle. ‘What is that to me?’ he asked.

‘It is an earnest of our peaceful intentions, lord,’ Egfrith said. He was elderly, grey-haired, thin and missing most of his teeth so that his words came out sibilant and distorted. ‘We are a humble house,’ he went on, ‘we tend the sick, we help the poor and we serve God.’ He looked along the line of Danes, grim helmeted men with their shields hanging by their left knees, swords and axes and spears bristling. The sky was low that day, heavy and sullen, and a small rain was darkening the grass. Two monks came from the church carrying a wooden box that they placed behind Egfrith, then backed away. ‘That is all the treasure we have,’ Egfrith said, ‘and you are welcome to it.’

Ragnar jerked his head at me and I dismounted, walked past the abbot and opened the box to find it was half full of silver pennies, most of them clipped, and all of them dull because they were of bad quality. I shrugged at Ragnar as if to suggest they were poor reward.

‘You are Uhtred!’ Egfrith said. He had been staring at me.

‘So?’ I answered belligerently.

‘I heard you were dead, lord,’ he said, ‘and I praise God you are not.’

‘You heard I was dead?’

‘That a Dane killed you.’

We had been talking in English and Ragnar wanted to know what had been said, so I translated. ‘Was the Dane called Weland?’ Ragnar asked Egfrith.

‘He is called that,’ Egfrith said.

‘Is?’

‘Weland is the man lying here recovering from his wounds, lord,’ Egfrith looked at me again as though he could not believe I was alive.

‘His wounds?’ Ragnar wanted to know.

‘He was attacked, lord, by a man from the fortress. From Bebbanburg.’

Ragnar, of course, wanted to hear the whole tale. It seemed Weland had made his way back to Bebbanburg where he claimed to have killed me, and so received his reward in silver coins, and he was escorted from the fortress by a half dozen men who included Ealdwulf, the blacksmith who had told me stories in his forge, and Ealdwulf had attacked Weland, hacking an axe down into his shoulder before the other men dragged him off. Weland had been brought here, while Ealdwulf, if he still lived, was back in Bebbanburg.

If Abbot Egfrith thought Weland was his safeguard, he had miscalculated. Ragnar scowled at him. ‘You gave Weland shelter even though you thought he had killed Uhtred?’ he demanded.

‘This is a house of God,’ Egfrith said, ‘so we give every man shelter.’

‘Including murderers?’ Ragnar asked, and he reached behind his head and untied the leather lace which bound his hair. ‘So tell me, monk, how many of your men went south to help their comrades murder Danes?’

Egfrith hesitated, which was answer enough, and then Ragnar drew his sword and the abbot found his voice. ‘Some did, lord,’ he admitted, ‘I could not stop them.’

‘You could not stop them?’ Ragnar asked, shaking his head so that his wet unbound hair fell around his face. ‘Yet you rule here?’

‘I am the abbot, yes.’

‘Then you could stop them.’ Ragnar was looking angry now and I suspected he was remembering the bodies we had disinterred near Gyruum, the little Danish girls with blood still on their thighs. ‘Kill them,’ he told his men.

I took no part in that killing. I stood by the shore and listened to the birds cry and I watched Bebbanburg and heard the blades doing their work, and Brida came to stand beside me and she took my hand and stared south across the white-flecked grey to the great fortress on its crag. ‘Is that your house?’ she asked.

‘That is my house.’

‘He called you lord.’

‘I am a lord.’

She leaned against me. ‘You think the Christian god is watching us.’

‘No,’ I said, wondering how she knew that I had been thinking about that very question.

‘He was never our god,’ she said fiercely. ‘We worshipped Woden and Thor and Eostre and all the other gods and goddesses, and then the Christians came and we forgot our gods, and now the Danes have come to lead us back to them.’ She stopped abruptly.

‘Did Ravn tell you that?’

‘He told me some,’ she said, ‘but the rest I worked out. There’s war between the gods, Uhtred, war between the Christian god and our gods, and when there is war in Asgard the gods make us fight for them on earth.’

‘And we’re winning?’ I asked.

Her answer was to point to the dead monks, scattered on the wet grass, their robes bloodied, and now that their killing was done Ragnar dragged Weland out of his sickbed. The man was plainly dying, for he was shivering and his wound stank, but he was conscious of what was happening to him. His reward for killing me had been a heavy bag of good silver coins that weighed as much as a new-born babe, and that we found beneath his bed and we added it to the monastery’s small hoard to be divided among our men.

Weland himself lay on the bloodied grass, looking from me to Ragnar. ‘You want to kill him?’ Ragnar asked me.

‘Yes,’ I said, for no other response was expected. Then I remembered the beginning of my tale, the day when I had seen Ragnar oar-dancing just off this coast and how, next morning, he had brought my brother’s head to Bebbanburg. ‘I want to cut off his head,’ I said.

Weland tried to speak, but could only manage a guttural groan. His eyes were on Ragnar’s sword.

Ragnar offered the blade to me. ‘It’s sharp enough,’ he said, ‘but you’ll be surprised by how much force is needed. An axe would be better.’

Weland looked at me now. His teeth chattered and he twitched. I hated him. I had disliked him from the first, but now I hated him, yet I was still oddly nervous of killing him even though he was already half dead. I have learned that it is one thing to kill in battle, to send a brave man’s soul to the corpse-hall of the gods, but quite another to take a helpless man’s life, and he must have sensed my hesitation for he managed a pitiful plea for his life. ‘I will serve you,’ he said.

‘Make the bastard suffer,’ Ragnar answered for me, ‘send him to the corpse-goddess, but let her know he’s coming by making him suffer.’

I do not think he suffered much. He was already so feeble that even my puny blows drove him to swift unconsciousness, but even so it took a long time to kill him. I hacked away. I have always been surprised by how much effort is needed to kill a man. The skalds make it sound easy, but it rarely is. We are stubborn creatures, we cling to life and are very hard to kill, but Weland’s soul finally went to its fate as I chopped and sawed and stabbed and at last succeeded in severing his bloody head. His mouth was twisted into a rictus of agony, and that was some consolation.

Now I asked more favours of Ragnar, knowing he would give them to me. I took some of the poorer coins from the hoard, then went to one of the larger monastery buildings and found the writing place where the monks copied books. They used to paint beautiful letters on the books and, before my life was changed at Eoferwic, I used to go there with Beocca and sometimes the monks would let me daub scraps of parchment with their wonderful colours.

I wanted the colours now. They were in bowls, mostly as powder, a few mixed with gum, and I needed a piece of cloth which I found in the church; a square of white linen that had been used to cover the sacraments. Back in the writing place I drew a wolf’s head in charcoal on the white cloth and then I found some ink and began to fill in the outline. Brida helped me and she proved to be much better at making pictures than I was, and she gave the wolf a red eye and a red tongue, and flecked the black ink with white and blue that somehow suggested fur, and once the banner was made we tied it to the staff of the dead abbot’s cross. Ragnar was rummaging through the monastery’s small collection of sacred books, tearing off the jewel-studded metal plates that decorated their front covers, and once he had all the plates, and once my banner was made, we burned all the timber buildings.

The rain stopped as we left. We trotted across the causeway, turned south, and Ragnar, at my request, went down the coastal track until we reached the place where the road crossed the sands to Bebbanburg.

We stopped there and I untied my hair so that it hung loose. I gave the banner to Brida who would ride Ravn’s horse while the old man waited with his son. And then, a borrowed sword at my side, I rode home.

Brida came with me as standard-bearer and the two of us cantered along the track. The sea broke white to my right and slithered across the sands to my left. I could see men on the walls and up on the Low Gate, watching, and I kicked the horse, making it gallop, and Brida kept pace, her banner flying above, and I curbed the horse where the track turned north to the gate and now I could see my uncle. He was there, Ælfric the Treacherous, thin-faced, dark-haired, gazing at me from the Low Gate and I stared up at him so he would know who I was, and then I threw Weland’s severed head onto the ground where my brother’s head had once been thrown. I followed it with the silver coins.

I threw thirty coins. The Judas price. I remembered that church tale. It was one of the few that I had liked.

There were archers on the wall, but none drew. They just watched. I gave my uncle the evil sign, the devil’s horns made with the two outer fingers, and then I spat at him, turned and trotted away. He knew I was alive now, knew I was his enemy, and knew I would kill him like a dog if ever I had the chance.

‘Uhtred!’ Brida called. She had been looking behind and I twisted in the saddle to see that one warrior had jumped over the wall, had fallen heavily, but was now running towards us. He was a big man, heavily bearded, and I thought I could never fight such a man, and then I saw the archers loose their arrows and they flecked the ground about the man who I now saw was Ealdwulf, the smith.

‘Lord Uhtred!’ Ealdwulf called, ‘Lord Uhtred!’ I turned the horse and went to him, shielding him from the arrows with my horse’s bulk, but none of the arrows came close and I suspect, looking back on that distant day, that the bowmen were deliberately missing. ‘You live, lord!’ Ealdwulf beamed up at me.

‘I live.’

‘Then I come with you,’ he said firmly.

‘But your wife, your son?’ I asked.

‘My wife died, lord, last year, and my son was drowned while fishing.’

‘I am sorry,’ I said. An arrow skidded through the dune grass, but it was yards away.

‘Woden gives, and Woden takes away,’ Ealdwulf said, ‘and he has given me back my lord.’ He saw Thor’s hammer about my neck and, because he was a pagan, he smiled.

And I had my first follower. Ealdwulf the smith.

‘He’s a gloomy man, your uncle,’ Ealdwulf told me as we journeyed south, ‘miserable as shit, he is. Even his new son don’t cheer him up.’

‘He has a son?’

‘Ælfric the Younger, he’s called, and he’s a bonny wee thing. Healthy as you like. Gytha’s sick though. She won’t last long. And you, lord? You look well.’

‘I am well.’

‘You’d be twelve now?’

‘Thirteen.’

‘A man, then. Is that your woman?’ He nodded at Brida.

‘My friend.’

‘No meat on her,’ Ealdwulf said, ‘so better as a friend.’ The smith was a big man, almost forty years old, with hands, forearms and face black-scarred from countless small burns from his forge. He walked beside my horse, his pace apparently effortless despite his advanced years. ‘So tell me about these Danes,’ he said, casting a dubious look at Ragnar’s warriors.

‘They’re led by Earl Ragnar,’ I said, ‘who is the man who killed my brother. He’s a good man.’

‘He’s the one who killed your brother?’ Ealdwulf seemed shocked.

‘Destiny is everything,’ I said, which might have been true but also avoided having to make a longer answer.

‘You like him?’

‘He’s like a father to me. You’ll like him.’

‘He’s still a Dane, though, isn’t he, lord? They might worship the right gods,’ Ealdwulf said grudgingly, ‘but I’d still like to see them gone.’

‘Why?’

‘Why?’ Ealdwulf seemed shocked that I had asked. ‘Because this isn’t their land, lord, that’s why. I want to walk without being afraid. I don’t want to touch my forelock to a man just because he has a sword. There’s one law for them and another for us.’

‘There’s no law for them,’ I said.

‘If a Dane kills a Northumbrian,’ Ealdwulf said indignantly, ‘what can a man do? There’s no wergild, no reeve to see, no lord to seek justice.’

That was true. Wergild was the blood price of a man’s life, and every person had a wergild. A man’s was more than a woman’s, unless she was a great woman, and a warrior’s was greater than a farmer’s, but the price was always there, and a murderer could escape being put to death if the family of the murdered man would accept the wergild. The reeve was the man who enforced the law, reporting to his Ealdorman, but that whole careful system of justice had vanished since the Danes had come. There was no law now except what the Danes said it was, and that was what they wanted it to be, and I knew that I revelled in that chaos, but then I was privileged. I was Ragnar’s man, and Ragnar protected me, but without Ragnar I would be no better than an outlaw or a slave.

‘Your uncle doesn’t protest,’ Ealdwulf went on, ‘but Beocca did. You remember him? Red-haired priest with a shrivelled hand and crossed eyes?’

‘I met him last year,’ I said.

‘You did? Where?’

‘He was with Alfred of Wessex.’

‘Wessex!’ Ealdwulf said, surprised. ‘Long way to go. But he was a good man, Beocca, despite being a priest. He ran off because he couldn’t stand the Danes. Your uncle was furious. Said Beocca deserved to be killed.’

Doubtless, I thought, because Beocca had taken the parchments that proved me to be the rightful Ealdorman. ‘My uncle wanted me killed too,’ I said, ‘and I never thanked you for attacking Weland.’

‘Your uncle was going to give me to the Danes for that,’ he said, ‘only no Dane complained, so he did nothing.’

‘You’re with the Danes now,’ I said, ‘and you’d better get used to it.’

Ealdwulf thought about that for a moment. ‘Why not go to Wessex?’ he asked.

‘Because the West Saxons want to turn me into a priest,’ I said, ‘and I want to be a warrior.’

‘Go to Mercia then,’ Ealdwulf suggested.

‘That’s ruled by the Danes.’

‘But your uncle lives there.’

‘My uncle?’

‘Your mother’s brother!’ He was astonished that I did not know my own family. ‘He’s Ealdorman Æthelwulf, if he still lives.’

‘My father never talked about my mother,’ I said.

‘Because he loved her. She was a beauty, your mother, a piece of gold, and she died giving birth to you.’

‘Æthelwulf,’ I said.

‘If he lives.’

But why go to Æthelwulf when I had Ragnar? Æthelwulf was family, of course, but I had never met him and I doubted he even remembered my existence, and I had no desire to find him, and even less desire to learn my letters in Wessex, so I would stay with Ragnar. I said as much to Ealdwulf. ‘He’s teaching me to fight,’ I said.

‘Learn from the best, eh?’ Ealdwulf said grudgingly. ‘That’s how you become a good smith. Learn from the best.’

Ealdwulf was a good smith and, despite himself, he came to like Ragnar for Ragnar was generous and he appreciated good workmanship. A smithy was added onto our home near Synningthwait and Ragnar paid good silver for a forge, an anvil, and for the great hammers, tongs and files that Ealdwulf needed. It was late winter before all was ready, and then ore was purchased from Eoferwic and our valley echoed to the clang of iron on iron, and even on the coldest days the smithy was warm and men gathered there to exchange stories or to tell riddles. Ealdwulf was a great man for riddles and I would translate for him as he baffled Ragnar’s Danes. Most of his riddles were about men and women and what they did together and those were easy enough to guess, but I liked the complicated ones. My father and mother gave me up for dead, one riddle began, then a loyal kinswoman wrapped and protected me, and I killed all her children, but she still loved me and fed me until I rose above the dwelling houses of men and so left her. I could not guess that one, nor could any of the Danes, and Ealdwulf refused to give me the answer even when I begged him and it was only when I told the riddle to Brida that I learned the solution. ‘A cuckoo, of course,’ she said instantly. She was right, of course.

By spring the forge needed to be larger, and all that summer Ealdwulf made metal for swords, spears, axes and spades. I asked him once if he minded working for the Danes and he just shrugged. ‘I worked for them in Bebbanburg,’ he said, ‘because your uncle does their bidding.’

‘But there are no Danes in Bebbanburg?’

‘None,’ he admitted, ‘but they visit and are made welcome. Your uncle pays them tribute.’ He stopped suddenly, interrupted by a shout of what I thought was pure rage.

I ran out of the smithy to see Ragnar standing in front of the house while, approaching up the track, was a crowd of men led by a mounted warrior. And such a warrior. He had a mail coat, a fine helmet hanging from the saddle, a bright-painted shield, a long sword and arms thick with rings. He was a young man with long fair hair and a thick gold beard, and he roared back at Ragnar like a rutting stag, then Ragnar ran towards him and I half thought the young man would draw the sword and kick at his horse, but instead he dismounted and ran uphill and, when the two met, they embraced and thumped each other’s backs and Ragnar, when he turned towards us, had a smile that would have lit the darkest crypt of hell. ‘My son!’ he shouted up at me, ‘my son!’

It was Ragnar the Younger, come from Ireland with a ship’s crew and, though he did not know me, he embraced me, lifting me off the ground, whirled his sister around, thumped Rorik, kissed his mother, shouted at the servants, scattered gifts of silver chain links, and petted the hounds. A feast was ordered, and that night he gave us his news, saying he now commanded his own ship, that he had come for a few months only and that Ivar wanted him back in Ireland by the spring. He was so like his father, and I liked him immediately, and the house was always happy when Ragnar the Younger was there. Some of his men lodged with us, and that autumn they cut trees and added a proper hall to the house, a hall fit for an earl with big beams and a high gable on which a boar’s skull was nailed.

‘You were lucky,’ he told me one day. We were thatching the new roof, laying down the thick rye straw and combing it flat.

‘Lucky?’

‘That my father didn’t kill you at Eoferwic.’

‘I was lucky,’ I agreed.

‘But he was always a good judge of men,’ he said, passing me a pot of ale. He perched on the roof ridge and gazed across the valley. ‘He likes it here.’

‘It’s a good place. What about Ireland?’

He grinned. ‘Bog and rock, Uhtred, and the skraelings are vicious.’ The skraelings were the natives. ‘But they fight well! And there’s silver there, and the more they fight the more silver we get. Are you going to drink all that ale, or do I get some?’

I handed him back the pot and watched as the ale ran down his beard as he drained it. ‘I like Ireland well enough,’ he said when he had finished, ‘but I won’t stay there. I’ll come back here. Find land in Wessex. Raise a family. Get fat.’

‘Why don’t you come back now?’

‘Because Ivar wants me there, and Ivar’s a good lord.’

‘He frightens me.’

‘A good lord should be frightening.’

‘Your father isn’t.’

‘Not to you, but what about the men he kills? Would you want to face Earl Ragnar the Fearless in a shield wall?’

‘No.’

‘So he is frightening,’ he said, grinning. ‘Go and take Wessex,’ he said, ‘and find the land that will make me fat.’

We finished the thatch, and then I had to go up into the woods because Ealdwulf had an insatiable appetite for charcoal which is the only substance that burns hot enough to melt iron. He had shown a dozen of Ragnar’s men how to produce it, but Brida and I were his best workers and we spent much time among the trees. The charcoal heaps needed constant attention and, as each would burn for at least three days, Brida and I would often spend all night beside such a pile, watching for a tell-tale wisp of smoke coming from the bracken and turf covering the burn. Such smoke betrayed that the fire inside was too hot and we would have to scramble over the warm heap to stuff the crack with earth and so cool the fire deep inside the pile.

We burned alder when we could get it, for that was the wood Ealdwulf preferred, and the art of it was to char the alder logs, but not let them burst into flame. For every four logs we put into a pile we would get one back, while the rest vanished to leave the lightweight, deep black, dirty charcoal. It could take a week to make the pile. The alder was carefully stacked in a shallow pit, and a hole was left in the stack’s centre which we filled with charcoal from the previous burn. Then we would put a layer of bracken over the whole thing, cover that with thick turves and, when all was done, put fire down the central hole and, when we were sure the charcoal was alight, stuff the hole tight. Now the silent, dark fire had to be controlled. We would open gaps at the base of the pit to let a little air in, but if the wind changed then the air holes had to be stuffed and others made. It was tedious work, and Ealdwulf’s appetite for charcoal seemed unlimited, but I enjoyed it. To be all night in the dark, beside the warm burn, was to be a sceadugengan, and besides, I was with Brida and we had become more than friends.

She lost her first baby up beside the charcoal burn. She had not even known she was pregnant, but one night she was assailed with cramps and spear-like pains, and I wanted to go and fetch Sigrid, but Brida would not let me. She told me she knew what was happening, but I was scared helpless by her agony and I shuddered in fear throughout the dark until, just before dawn, she gave birth to a tiny dead baby boy. We buried it with its afterbirth, and Brida stumbled back to the homestead where Sigrid was alarmed by her appearance and gave her a broth of leeks and sheep brains and made her stay at home. Sigrid must have suspected what had happened for she was sharp with me for a few days and she told Ragnar it was time Brida was married. Brida was certainly of age, being thirteen, and there were a dozen young Danish warriors in Synningthwait who were in need of wives, but Ragnar declared that Brida brought his men luck and he wanted her to ride with us when we attacked Wessex.

‘And when will that be?’ Sigrid asked.

‘Next year,’ Ragnar suggested, ‘or the year after. No longer.’

‘And then?’

‘Then England is no more,’ Ragnar said. ‘It will all be ours.’ The last of the four kingdoms would have fallen and England would be Daneland and we would all be Danes or slaves or dead.

We celebrated the Yule feast and Ragnar the Younger won every competition in Synningthwait, he hurled rocks farther than anyone, wrestled men to the ground and even drank his father into insensibility. Then followed the dark months, the long winter, and in spring, when the gales had subsided, Ragnar the Younger had to leave and we had a melancholy feast on the eve of his going, and next morning he led his men away from the hall, going down the track in a grey drizzle. Ragnar watched his son all the way down into the valley and when he turned back to his newly-built hall he had tears in his eyes. ‘He’s a good man,’ he told me.

‘I liked him,’ I said truthfully, and I did, and many years later, when I met him again, I still liked him.

There was an empty feeling after Ragnar the Younger had left, but I remember that spring and summer fondly for it was in those long days that Ealdwulf made me a sword. ‘I hope it’s better than my last one,’ I said ungraciously.

‘Your last one?’

‘The one I carried when we attacked Eoferwic,’ I said.

‘That thing! That wasn’t mine. Your father bought it in Berewic, and I told him it was crap, but it was only a short sword. Good for killing ducks, maybe, but not for fighting. What happened to it?’

‘It bent,’ I said, remembering Ragnar laughing at the feeble weapon.

‘Soft iron, boy, soft iron.’

There were two sorts of iron, he told me, the soft and the hard. The hard made the best cutting edge, but it was brittle and a sword made of such iron would snap at the first brutal stroke, while a sword made of the softer metal would bend as my short sword had done. ‘So what we do is use both,’ he told me, and I watched as he made seven iron rods. Three were of the hard iron, and he was not really sure how he made the iron hard, only that the glowing metal had to be laid in the burning charcoal, and if he got it just right then the cooled metal would be hard and unbending. The other four rods were longer, much longer, and they were not exposed to the charcoal for the same length of time, and those four he twisted until each had been turned into a spiral. They were still straight rods, but tightly twisted until they were the same length as the hard iron rods. ‘Why do you do that?’ I asked.

‘You’ll see,’ he said mysteriously, ‘you’ll see.’

He finished with seven rods, each as thick as my thumb. Three were of the hard metal, which Ragnar called steel, while the four softer rods were prettily twisted into their tight spirals. One of the hard rods was longer and slightly thicker than the others, and that one was the sword’s spine and the extra length was the tang onto which the hilt would eventually be riveted. Ealdwulf began by hammering that rod flat so that it looked like a very thin and feeble sword, then he placed the four twisted rods either side of it, two to each side so that they sheathed it, and he welded the last two steel rods on the outside to become the sword’s edges, and it looked grotesque then, a bundle of mismatched rods, but this was when the real work began, the work of heating and hammering, metal glowing red, the black dross twisting as it burned away from the iron, the hammer swinging, sparks flying in the dark forge, the hiss of burning metal plunged into water, the patience as the emerging blade was cooled in a trough of ash shavings. It took days, yet as the hammering and cooling and heating went on I saw how the four twisted rods of soft iron, which were now all melded into the harder steel, had been smoothed into wondrous patterns, repetitive curling patterns that made flat, smoky wisps in the blade. In some lights you could not see the patterns, but in the dusk, or when, in winter, you breathed on the blade, they showed. Serpent breath, Brida called the patterns, and I decided to give the sword that name; Serpent-Breath. Ealdwulf finished the blade by hammering grooves which ran down the centre of each side. He said they helped stop the sword being trapped in an enemy’s flesh. ‘Blood channels,’ he grunted.

The boss of the hilt was of iron, as was the heavy crosspiece, and both were simple, undecorated and big, and when all was done, I shaped two pieces of ash to make the handle. I wanted the sword decorated with silver or gilt bronze, but Ealdwulf refused. ‘It’s a tool, lord,’ he said, ‘just a tool. Something to make your work easier, and no better than my hammer.’ He held the blade up so that it caught the sunlight. ‘And one day,’ he went on, leaning towards me, ‘you will kill Danes with her.’

She was heavy, Serpent-Breath, too heavy for a fourteen-year-old, but I would grow into her. Her point tapered more than Ragnar liked, but that made her well-balanced for it meant there was not much weight at the blade’s outer end. Ragnar liked weight there, for it helped break down enemy shields, but I preferred Serpent-Breath’s agility, given her by Ealdwulf’s skill, and that skill meant she never bent nor cracked, not ever, for I still have her. The ash handles have been replaced, the edges have been nicked by enemy blades, and she is slimmer now because she has been sharpened so often, but she is still beautiful, and sometimes I breathe on her flanks and see the patterns emerge in the blade, the curls and wisps, the blue and silver appearing in the metal like magic, and I remember that spring and summer in the woods of Northumbria and I think of Brida staring at her reflection in the newly-made blade.

And there is magic in Serpent-Breath. Ealdwulf had his own spells that he would not tell me, the spells of the smith, and Brida took the blade into the woods for a whole night and never told me what she did with it, and those were the spells of a woman, and when we made the sacrifice of the pit slaughter, and killed a man, a horse, a ram, a bull and a drake, I asked Ragnar to use Serpent-Breath on the doomed man so that Odin would know she existed and would look well on her. Those are the spells of a pagan and a warrior.

And I think Odin did see her, for she has killed more men than I can ever remember.

It was late summer before Serpent-Breath was finished and then, before autumn brought its sea-churning storms, we went south. It was time to obliterate England, so we sailed towards Wessex.

Five

We gathered at Eoferwic where the pathetic King Egbert was forced to inspect the Danes and wish them well. He rode down the riverbank where the boats waited and where the ragged crews lined on the shore and gazed at him scornfully, knowing he was not a real king, and behind him rode Kjartan and Sven, now part of his Danish bodyguard, though I assumed their job was as much to keep Egbert a prisoner as to keep him alive. Sven, a man now, wore a scarf over his missing eye, and he and his father looked far more prosperous. Kjartan wore mail and had a huge war axe slung on his shoulder, while Sven had a long sword, a coat of fox pelts, and two arm rings. ‘They took part in the massacre at Streonshall,’ Ragnar told me. That was the large nunnery near Eoferwic, and it was evident that the men who had taken their revenge on the nuns had made good plunder.

Kjartan, a dozen rings on his arms, looked Ragnar in the eye. ‘I would still serve you,’ he said, though without the humility of the last time he had asked.

‘I have a new shipmaster,’ Ragnar said, and said no more, and Kjartan and Sven rode on, though Sven gave me the evil sign with his left hand.

The new shipmaster was called Toki, a nickname for Thorbjorn, and he was a splendid sailor and a better warrior who told tales of rowing with the Svear into strange lands where no trees grew except birch and where winter covered the land for months. He claimed the folk there ate their own young, worshipped giants and had a third eye at the back of their heads, and some of us believed his tales.

We rowed south on the last of the summer tides, hugging the coast as we always did and spending the nights ashore on East Anglia’s barren coast. We were going towards the River Temes which Ragnar said would take us deep inland to the northern boundary of Wessex.

Ragnar now commanded the fleet. Ivar the Boneless had returned to the lands he had conquered in Ireland, taking a gift of gold from Ragnar to his eldest son, while Ubba was ravaging Dalriada, the land north of Northumbria. ‘Small pickings up there,’ Ragnar said scornfully, but Ubba, like Ivar, had amassed so much treasure in his invasions of Northumbria, Mercia and East Anglia that he was not minded to gather more from Wessex, though, as I shall tell you in its proper place, Ubba was to change his mind later and come south.

But for the moment Ivar and Ubba were absent and so the main assault on Wessex would be led by Halfdan, the third brother, who was marching his land army out of East Anglia and would meet us somewhere on the Temes. Ragnar was not happy about the change of command, Halfdan, he muttered, was an impetuous fool, too hotheaded, but he cheered up when he remembered my tales of Alfred which confirmed that Wessex was led by men who put their hopes in the Christian god who had been shown to possess no power at all. We had Odin, we had Thor, we had our ships, we were warriors.

After four days we came to the Temes and rowed against its great current as the river slowly narrowed on us. On the first morning that we came to the river only the northern shore, which was East Anglian territory, was visible, but by midday the southern bank, that used to be the Kingdom of Kent and was now a part of Wessex, was a dim line on the horizon. By evening the banks were a half-mile apart, but there was little to see for the river flowed through flat, dull marshland. We used the tide when we could, blistered our hands on the oars when we could not, and so pulled upstream until, for the very first time, I came to Lundene.

I thought Eoferwic was a city, but Eoferwic was a village compared to Lundene. It was a vast place, thick with smoke from cooking fires, and built where Mercia, East Anglia and Wessex met. Burghred of Mercia was Lundene’s lord, so it was Danish land now, and no one opposed us as we came to the astonishing bridge which stretched so far across the wide Temes.

Lundene. I came to love that place. Not as I love Bebbanburg, but there was a life to Lundene that I found nowhere else, because the city was like nowhere else. Alfred once told me that every wickedness under the sun was practised there, and I am glad to say he was right. He prayed for the place, I revelled in it, and I can still remember gawking at the city’s two hills as Ragnar’s ship ghosted against the current to come close to the bridge. It was a grey day and a spiteful rain was pitting the river, yet to me the city seemed to glow with sorcerous light.

It was really two cities built on two hills. The first, to the east, was the old city that the Romans had made, and it was there that the bridge began its span across the wide river and over the marshes on the southern bank. That first city was a place of stone buildings and had a stone wall, a real wall, not earth and wood, but masonry, high and wide, skirted by a ditch. The ditch had filled with rubbish and the wall was broken in places where it had been patched with timber, but so had the city itself where huge Roman buildings were buttressed by thatched wooden shacks where a few Mercians lived, though most were reluctant to make their homes in the old city. One of their kings had built himself a palace within the stone wall, and a great church, its lower half of masonry and upper parts of wood, had been made atop the hill, but most of the folk, as if fearing the Roman ghosts, lived outside the walls, in a new city of wood and thatch that stretched out to the west.

The old city once had wharves and quays, but they had long rotted so that the waterfront east of the bridge was a treacherous place of rotted pilings and broken piers that stabbed the river like shattered teeth. The new city, like the old, was on the river’s northern bank, but was built on a low hill to the west, a half-mile upstream from the old, and had a shingle beach sloping up to the houses that ran along the riverside road. I have never seen a beach so foul, so stinking of carcasses and shit, so covered in rubbish, so stark with the slimy ribs of abandoned ships and loud with squalling gulls, but that was where our boats had to go and that meant we first had to negotiate the bridge.

The gods alone know how the Romans had built such a thing. A man could walk from one side of Eoferwic to the other and he would still not have walked the length of Lundene’s bridge, though in that year of 871 the bridge was broken and it was no longer possible to walk its full length. Two arches in the centre had long fallen in, though the old Roman piers that had supported the missing roadway were still there and the river foamed treacherously as its water seethed past the broken piers. To make the bridge the Romans had sunk pilings into the Temes’s bed, then into the tangle of foetid marshes on the southern bank, and the pilings were so close together that the water heaped up on their farther side, then fell through the gaps in a glistening rush. To reach the dirty beach by the new city we would have to shoot one of the two gaps, but neither was wide enough to let a ship through with its oars extended. ‘It will be interesting,’ Ragnar said drily.

‘Can we do it?’ I asked.

‘They did it,’ he said, pointing at ships beached upstream of the bridge, ‘so we can.’ We had anchored, waiting for the rest of the fleet to catch up. ‘The Franks,’ Ragnar went on, ‘have been making bridges like this on all their rivers. You know why they do it?’

‘To get across?’ I guessed. It seemed an obvious answer.

‘To stop us getting upriver,’ Ragnar said. ‘If I ruled Lundene I’d repair that bridge, so let’s be grateful the English couldn’t be bothered.’

We shot the gap in the bridge by waiting for the heart of the rising tide. The tide flows strongest halfway between its ebb and the flood, and that brought a surge of water that diminished the flow of the current cascading between the piers. In that short time we might get seven or eight ships through the gap and it was done by rowing at full speed towards the gap and, at the very last minute, raising the oar blades so they would clear the rotted piers, and the momentum of the ship should then carry her through. Not every ship made it on the first try. I watched two slew back, thump against a pier with the crash of breaking blades, then drift back downstream with crews of cursing men, but the Wind-Viper made it, almost coming to a stop just beyond the bridge, but we managed to get the frontmost oars in the water, hauled, and inch by inch we crept away from the sucking gap, then men from two ships anchored upstream managed to cast us lines and they hauled us away from the bridge until suddenly we were in slack water and could row her to the beach.

On the southern bank, beyond the dark marshes, where trees grew on low hills, horsemen watched us. They were West Saxons, and they would be counting ships to estimate the size of the Great Army. That was what Halfdan called it, the Great Army of the Danes come to take all of England, but so far we were anything but great. We would wait in Lundene to let more ships come and for more men to march down the long Roman roads from the north. Wessex could wait awhile as the Danes assembled.

And, as we waited, Brida, Rorik and I explored Lundene. Rorik had been sick again, and Sigrid had been reluctant to let him travel with his father, but Rorik pleaded with his mother to let him go, Ragnar assured her that the sea voyage would mend all the boy’s ills, and so he was here. He was pale, but not sickly, and he was as excited as I was to see the city. Ragnar made me leave my arm rings and Serpent-Breath behind for, he said, the city was full of thieves. We wandered the newer part first, going through malodorous alleys where the houses were full of men working leather, beating at bronze or forging iron. Women sat at looms, a flock of sheep was being slaughtered in a yard, and there were shops selling pottery, salt, live eels, bread, cloth, weapons, any imaginable thing. Church bells set up a hideous clamour at every prayer time or whenever a corpse was carried for burial in the city’s graveyards. Packs of dogs roamed the streets, red kites roosted everywhere, and smoke lay like a fog over the thatch that had all turned a dull black. I saw a wagon so loaded with thatching reed that the wagon itself was hidden by its heap of sagging reeds that scraped on the road and ripped and tore against the buildings on either side of the street as two slaves goaded and whipped the bleeding oxen. Men shouted at the slaves that the load was too big, but they went on whipping, and then a fight broke out when the wagon tore down a great piece of rotted roof. There were beggars everywhere; blind children, women without legs, a man with a weeping ulcer on his cheek. There were folk speaking languages I had never heard, folk in strange costumes who had come across the sea, and in the old city, which we explored the next day, I saw two men with skin the colour of chestnuts and Ravn told me later they came from Blaland, though he was not certain where that was. They wore thick robes, had curved swords, and were talking to a slave dealer whose premises were full of captured English folk who would be shipped to the mysterious Blaland. The dealer called to us. ‘You three belong to anyone?’ He was only half joking.

‘To Earl Ragnar,’ Brida said, ‘who would love to pay you a visit.’

‘Give his lordship my respects,’ the dealer said, then spat, and eyed us as we walked away.

The buildings of the old city were extraordinary. They were Roman work, high and stout, and even though their walls were broken and their roofs had fallen in they still astonished. Some were three or even four floors high and we chased each other up and down their abandoned stairways. Few English folk lived here, though many Danes were now occupying the houses as the army assembled. Brida said that sensible people would not live in a Roman town because of the ghosts that haunted the old buildings, and maybe she was right though I had seen no ghosts in Eoferwic, but her mention of spectres made us all nervous as we peered down a flight of steps into a dark, pillared cellar.

We stayed in Lundene for weeks and even when Halfdan’s army reached us we did not move west. Mounted bands did ride out to forage, but the Great Army still gathered and some men grumbled we were waiting too long, that the West Saxons were being given precious time to ready themselves, but Halfdan insisted on lingering. The West Saxons sometimes rode close to the city, and twice there were fights between our horsemen and their horsemen, but after a while, as Yule approached, the West Saxons must have decided we would do nothing till winter’s end and their patrols stopped coming close to the city.

‘We’re not waiting for spring,’ Ragnar told me, ‘but for deep winter.’

‘Why?’

‘Because no army marches in winter,’ he said wolfishly, ‘so the West Saxons will all be at home, sitting around their fires and praying to their feeble god. By spring, Uhtred, all England will be ours.’

We all worked that early winter. I hauled firewood, and when I was not hauling logs from the wooded hills north of the city, I was learning the skills of the sword. Ragnar had asked Toki, his new shipmaster, to be my teacher and he was a good one. He watched me rehearse the basic cuts, then told me to forget them. ‘In a shield wall,’ he said, ‘it’s savagery that wins. Skill helps, and cunning is good, but savagery wins. Get one of these,’ he held out a sax with a thick blade, much thicker than my old sax. I despised the sax for it was much shorter than Serpent-Breath and far less beautiful, but Toki wore one beside his proper sword, and he persuaded me that in the shield wall the short, stout blade was better. ‘You’ve no room to swing or hack in a shield wall,’ he said, ‘but you can thrust, and a short blade uses less room in a crowded fight. Crouch and stab, bring it up into their groins.’ He made Brida hold a shield and pretend to be the enemy, and then, with me on his left, he cut at her from above and she instinctively raised the shield. ‘Stop!’ he said, and she froze into stillness. ‘See?’ he told me, pointing at the raised shield, ‘your partner makes the enemy raise their shield, then you can slice into their groin.’ He taught me a dozen other moves, and I practised because I liked it and the more I practised the more muscle I grew and the more skilful I became.

We usually practised in the Roman arena. That is what Toki called it, the arena, though what the word meant neither he nor I had any idea, but it was, in a place of extraordinary things, astonishing. Imagine an open space as large as a field surrounded by a great circle of tiered stone where weeds now grew from the crumbling mortar. The Mercians, I later learned, had held their folkmoots here, but Toki said the Romans had used it for displays of fighting in which men died. Maybe that was another of his fantastic stories, but the arena was huge, unimaginably huge, a thing of mystery, the work of giants, dwarfing us, so big that all the Great Army could have collected inside and there would still have been room for two more armies just as big on the tiered seats.

Yule came, and the winter feast was held and the army vomited in the streets and still we did not march, but shortly afterwards the leaders of the Great Army met in the palace next to the arena. Brida and I, as usual, were required to be Ravn’s eyes and he, as usual, told us what we were seeing.

The meeting was held in the church of the palace, a Roman building with a roof shaped like a half-barrel on which the moon and stars were painted, though the blue and golden paint was peeling and discoloured now. A great fire had been lit in the centre of the church and it was filling the high roof with swirling smoke. Halfdan presided from the altar, and around him were the chief Earls. One was an ugly man with a blunt face, a big brown beard and a finger missing from his left hand. ‘That is Bagseg,’ Ravn told us, ‘and he calls himself a king, though he’s no better than anyone else.’ Bagseg, it seemed, had come from Denmark in the summer, bringing eighteen ships and nearly six hundred men. Next to him was a tall, gloomy man with white hair and a twitching face. ‘Earl Sidroc,’ Ravn told us, ‘and his son must be with him?’

‘Thin man,’ Brida said, ‘with a dripping nose.’

‘Earl Sidroc the Younger. He’s always sniffing. My son is there?’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘next to a very fat man who keeps whispering to him and grinning.’

‘Harald!’ Ravn said. ‘I wondered if he would turn up. He’s another king.’

‘Really?’ Brida asked.

‘Well, he calls himself king, and he certainly rules over a few muddy fields and a herd of smelly pigs.’

All those men had come from Denmark, and there were others besides. Earl Fraena had brought men from Ireland, and Earl Osbern who had provided the garrison for Lundene while the army gathered, and together these kings and Earls had assembled well over two thousand men.

Osbern and Sidroc proposed crossing the river and striking directly south. This, they argued, would cut Wessex in two and the eastern part, which used to be the Kingdom of Kent, could then be taken quickly. ‘There has to be much treasure in Contwaraburg,’ Sidroc insisted, ‘it’s the central shrine of their religion.’

‘And while we march on their shrine,’ Ragnar said, ‘they will come up behind us. Their power is not in the east, but in the west. Defeat the west and all Wessex falls. We can take Contwaraburg once we’ve beaten the west.’

This was the argument. Either take the easy part of Wessex or else attack their major strongholds that lay to the west, and two merchants were asked to speak. Both men were Danes who had been trading in Readingum only two weeks before. Readingum lay a few miles upriver and was on the edge of Wessex, and they claimed to have heard that King Æthelred and his brother, Alfred, were gathering the shire forces from the west and the two merchants reckoned the enemy army would number at least three thousand.

‘Of whom only three hundred will be proper fighting men,’ Halfdan interjected sarcastically, and was rewarded by the sound of men banging swords or spears against their shields. It was while this noise echoed under the church’s barrel roof that a new group of warriors entered, led by a very tall and very burly man in a black tunic. He looked formidable, clean-shaven, angry and very rich for his black cloak had an enormous brooch of amber mounted in gold, his arms were heavy with golden rings and he wore a golden hammer on a thick golden chain about his neck. The warriors made way for him, his arrival causing silence among the crowd nearest to him, and the silence spread as he walked up the church until the mood, that had been of celebration, suddenly seemed wary.

‘Who is it?’ Ravn whispered to me.

‘Very tall,’ I said, ‘many arm rings.’

‘Gloomy,’ Brida put in, ‘dressed in black.’

‘Ah! The Earl Guthrum,’ Ravn said

‘Guthrum?’

‘Guthrum the Unlucky,’ Ravn said.

‘With all those arm rings?’

‘You could give Guthrum the world,’ Ravn said, ‘and he would still believe you had cheated him.’

‘He has a bone hanging in his hair,’ Brida said.

‘You must ask him about that,’ Ravn said, evidently amused, but he would say no more about the bone, which was evidently a rib and was tipped with gold.

I learned Guthrum the Unlucky was an Earl from Denmark who had been wintering at Beamfleot, a place that lay a good distance east of Lundene on the northern side of the Temes estuary, and once he had greeted the men bunched about the altar he announced that he had brought fourteen ships upriver. No one applauded. Guthrum, who had the saddest, sourest face I had ever seen, stared at the assembly like a man standing trial and expecting a dire verdict. ‘We had decided,’ Ragnar broke the uncomfortable silence, ‘to go west.’ No such decision had been made, but nor did anyone contradict Ragnar. ‘Those ships that are already through the bridge,’ Ragnar went on, ‘will take their crews upstream and the rest of the army will march on foot or horseback.’

‘My ships must go upstream,’ Guthrum said.

‘They are through the bridge?’

‘They will still go upstream,’ Guthrum insisted, thus letting us know that his fleet was below the bridge.

‘It would be better,’ Ragnar said, ‘if we went tomorrow.’ In the last few days the whole of the Great Army had assembled in Lundene, marching in from the settlements east and north where some had been quartered, and the longer we waited, the more of the precious food supply would be consumed.

‘My ships go upstream,’ Guthrum said flatly.

‘He’s worried,’ Ravn whispered to me, ‘that he can’t carry away the plunder on horseback. He wants his ships so he can fill them with treasure.’

‘Why let him come?’ I asked. It was plain no one liked Earl Guthrum, and his arrival seemed as unwelcome as it was inconvenient, but Ravn just shrugged the question off. Guthrum, it seemed, was here, and if he was here he must take part. That still seems incomprehensible to me, just as I still did not understand why Ivar and Ubba were not joining the attack on Wessex. It was true that both men were rich and scarcely needed more riches, but for years they had talked of conquering the West Saxons and now both had simply turned away. Guthrum did not need land or wealth either, but he thought he did, so he came. That was the Danish way. Men served in a campaign if they wished, or else they stayed at home, and there was no single authority among the Danes. Halfdan was the Great Army’s ostensible leader, but he did not frighten men as his two older brothers did and so he could do nothing without the agreement of the other chieftains. An army, I learned in time, needs a head. It needs one man to lead it, but give an army two leaders and you halve its strength.

It took two days to get Guthrum’s ships past the bridge. They were beautiful things, those ships, larger than most Danish boats, and each decorated at prow and stern with black painted serpent heads. His men, and there were many of them, all wore black. Even their shields were painted black, and while I thought Guthrum to be one of the most miserable men I had ever seen, I had to confess his troops were impressive. We might have lost two days, but we had gained the black warriors.

And what was there to fear? The Great Army had gathered, it was midwinter when no one fought so the enemy should not be expecting us, and that enemy was led by a king and a prince more interested in prayer than in fighting. All Wessex lay before us and common report said that Wessex was as rich a country as any in all the world, rivalling Frankia for its treasures, and inhabited by monks and nuns whose houses were stuffed with gold, spilling over with silver and ripe for slaughter. We would all be rich.

So we went to war.

Ships on the winter Temes. Ships sliding past brittle reeds and leafless willows and bare alders. Wet oar blades shining in the pale sunlight. The prows of our ships bore their beasts to quell the spirits of the land we invaded, and it was good land with rich fields, though all were deserted. There was almost a celebratory air to that brief voyage, a celebration unspoiled by the presence of Guthrum’s dark ships. Men oar-walked, the same feat I had watched Ragnar perform on that far off day when his three ships had appeared off Bebbanburg. I tried it myself and raised a huge cheer when I fell in. It looked easy to run along the oar bank, leaping from shaft to shaft, but a rower only had to twitch an oar to cause a man to slip and the river water was bitterly cold so that Ragnar made me strip off my wet clothes and wear his bearskin cloak until I was warm. Men sang, the ships forged against the current, the far hills to north and south slowly closed on the river’s banks and, as evening came, we saw the first horsemen on the southern skyline. Watching us.

We reached Readingum at dusk. Each of Ragnar’s three ships was loaded with spades, many of them forged by Ealdwulf, and our first task was to start making a wall. As more ships came, more men helped, and by nightfall our camp was protected by a long, straggling earth wall which would have been hardly any obstacle to an attacking force for it was merely a low mound that was easy to cross, but no one did come and assault us, and no Wessex army appeared next morning and so we were free to make the wall higher and more formidable.

Readingum was built where the River Kenet flows into the Temes, and so our wall was built between the two rivers. It enclosed the small town which had been abandoned by its inhabitants and provided shelter for most of the ships’ crews. The land army was still out of sight for they had marched along the north bank of the Temes, in Mercian territory, and were seeking a ford which they found further upstream so that our wall was virtually finished by the time they marched in. At first we thought it was the West Saxon army coming, but it was Halfdan’s men, marching out of enemy territory which they had found deserted.

The wall was high now, and because there were deep woods to the south, we had cut trees to make a palisade along its whole length that was about eight hundred paces. In front of the wall we dug a ditch that flooded when we broke through the two rivers’ banks, and across the ditch we were making four bridges guarded by wooden forts. This was our base. From here we could march deep into Wessex, and we needed to, for, with so many men and now horses inside the wall, there was a risk of hunger unless we found supplies of grain, hay and cattle. We had brought barrels of ale and a large amount of flour, salt meat and dried fish in the ships, but it was astonishing how fast those great heaps diminished.

The poets, when they speak of war, talk of the shield wall, they talk of the spears and arrows flying, of the blade beating on the shield, of the heroes who fall and the spoils of the victors, but I was to discover that war was really about food. About feeding men and horses. About finding food. The army that eats wins. And, if you keep horses in a fortress, it is about shovelling dung. Just two days after the land army came to Readingum, we were short of food and the two Sidrocs, father and son, led a large force west into enemy territory to find stores of food for men and horses, and instead they found the fyrd of Berrocscire.

We learned later that the whole idea of attacking in winter was no surprise to the West Saxons after all. The Danes were good at spying, their merchants exploring the places the warriors would go, but the West Saxons had their own men in Lundene and they knew how many men we were, and when we would march, and they had assembled an army to meet us. They had also sought help from the men of southern Mercia, where Danish rule was lightest, and Berrocscire lay immediately north of the West Saxon border and the men of Berrocscire had crossed the river to help their neighbours and their fyrd was led by an Ealdorman called Æthelwulf.

Was it my uncle? There were many men called Æthelwulf, but how many were Ealdormen in Mercia? I admit I felt strange when I heard the name, and I thought of the mother I had never met. In my mind she was the woman who was ever kind, ever gentle, ever loving and I thought she must be watching me from somewhere, heaven or Asgard or wherever our souls go in the long darkness, and I knew she would hate that I was with the army that marched against her brother, and so that night I was in a black mood.

But so was the Great Army for my uncle, if Æthelwulf was indeed my uncle, had trounced the two Earls. Their foraging party had walked into an ambush and the men of Berrocscire had killed twenty-one Danes and taken another eight prisoner. The Englishmen had lost a few men themselves, and yielded one prisoner, but they had gained the victory, and it made no difference that the Danes had been outnumbered. The Danes expected to win, and instead they had been chased home without the food we needed. They felt shamed and a shudder went through the army because they did not think mere Englishmen could beat them.

We were not starving yet, but the horses were desperately short of hay which, anyway, was not the best food for them, but we had no oats and so forage parties simply cut whatever winter grass we could find beyond our growing wall and the day after Æthelwulf’s victory Rorik, Brida and I were in one of those groups, slashing at grass with long knives and stuffing sacks with the poor feed, when the army of Wessex came.

They must have been encouraged by Æthelwulf’s victory, for now the whole enemy army attacked Readingum. The first I knew of it was the sound of screaming from farther west, then I saw horsemen galloping among our forage parties, hacking down with swords or skewering men with spears, and the three of us just ran, and I heard the hooves behind and snatched a look and saw a man riding at us with a spear and knew one of us must die and I took Brida’s hand to drag her out of his path and just then an arrow shot from Readingum’s wall slapped into the horseman’s face and he twisted away, blood pouring from his cheek, and meanwhile panicking men were piling around the two central bridges and the West Saxon horsemen, seeing it, galloped towards them. The three of us half waded and half swam the ditch, and two men hauled us, wet, muddy and shivering, up across the wall.

It was chaos outside now. The foragers crowding at the ditch’s far side were being hacked down, and then the Wessex infantry appeared, band after band of them emerging from the far woods to fill the fields. I ran back to the house where Ragnar was lodging and found Serpent-Breath beneath the cloaks where I hid her, and I strapped her on and ran out to find Ragnar. He had gone north, to the bridge close beside the Temes, and Brida and I caught up with his men there. ‘You shouldn’t come,’ I told Brida. ‘Stay with Rorik.’ Rorik was younger than us and, after getting soaked in the ditch he had started shivering and feeling sick and I had made him stay behind.

Brida ignored me. She had equipped herself with a spear and looked excited, though nothing was happening yet. Ragnar was staring over the wall, and more men were assembling at the gate, but Ragnar did not open it to cross the bridge. He did glance back to see how many men he had. ‘Shields!’ he shouted, for, in their haste, some men had come with nothing but swords or axes, and those men now ran to fetch their shields. I had no shield, but nor was I supposed to be there and Ragnar did not see me.

What he saw was the end of a slaughter as the West Saxon horsemen chopped into the last of the foragers. A few of the enemy were put down by our arrows, but neither the Danes nor the English had many bowmen. I like bowmen. They can kill at a great distance and, even if their arrows do not kill, they make an enemy nervous. Advancing into arrows is a blind business, for you must keep your head beneath the rim of the shield, but shooting a bow is a great skill. It looks easy, and every child has a bow and some arrows, but a man’s bow, a bow capable of killing a stag at a hundred paces, is a huge thing, carved from yew, and needing immense strength to haul, and the arrows fly wild unless a man has practised constantly, and so we never had more than a handful of archers. I never mastered the bow. With a spear, an axe or a sword I was lethal, but with a bow I was like most men, useless.

I sometimes wonder why we did not stay behind our wall. It was virtually finished, and to reach it the enemy must cross the ditch or file over the four bridges, and they would have been forced to do that under a hail of arrows, spears and throwing axes. They would surely have failed, but then they might have besieged us behind that wall and so Ragnar decided to attack them. Not just Ragnar. While Ragnar was gathering men at the northern gate, Halfdan had been doing the same at the southern end, and when both believed they had enough men, and while the enemy infantry was still some two hundred paces away, Ragnar ordered the gate opened and led his men through.

The West Saxon army, under its great dragon banner, was advancing towards the central bridges, evidently thinking that the slaughter there was a foretaste of more slaughter to come. They had no ladders, so how they thought they would cross the newly-made wall I do not know, but sometimes in battle a kind of madness descends and men do things without reason. The men of Wessex had no reason to concentrate on the centre of our wall, especially as they could not hope to cross it, but they did, and now our men swarmed from the two flanking gates to attack them from north and south.

‘Shield wall!’ Ragnar roared, ‘shield wall!’

You can hear a shield wall being made. The best shields are made of lime, or else of willow, and the wood knocks together as men overlap the shields. Left side of the shield in front of your neighbour’s right side, that way the enemy, most of whom are right-handed, must try to thrust through two layers of wood.

‘Make it tight!’ Ragnar called. He was in the centre of the shield wall, in front of his ragged eagle wing standard, and he was one of the few men with an expensive helmet which would mark him to the enemy as a chieftain, a man to be killed. Ragnar still used my father’s helmet, the beautiful one made by Ealdwulf with the face-piece and the inlay of silver. He also wore a mail shirt, again one of the few men to possess such a treasure. Most men were armoured in leather.

The enemy was turning outwards to meet us, making their own shield wall, and I saw a group of horsemen galloping up their centre behind the dragon banner. I thought I saw Beocca’s red hair among them and that made me certain Alfred was there, probably among a gaggle of black-robed priests who were doubtless praying for our deaths.

The West Saxon shield wall was longer than ours. It was not only longer, but thicker, because while our wall was backed by three ranks of men, theirs had five or six. Good sense would have dictated that we either stayed where we were and let them attack us, or that we should have retreated back across the bridge and ditch, but more Danes were coming to thicken Ragnar’s ranks and Ragnar himself was in no mood to be sensible. ‘Just kill them!’ he screamed, ‘just kill them! Kill them!’ And he led the line forward and, without any pause, the Danes gave a great war shout and surged with him. Usually the shield walls spend hours staring at each other, calling out insults, threatening, and working up the courage to that most awful of moments when wood meets wood and blade meets blade, but Ragnar’s blood was fired and he did not care. He just charged.

That attack made no sense, but Ragnar was furious. He had been offended by Æthelwulf’s victory, and insulted by the way their horsemen had cut down our foragers, and all he wanted to do was hack into the Wessex ranks, and somehow his passion spread through his men so that they howled as they ran forward. There is something terrible about men eager for battle.

A heartbeat before the shields clashed, our rearmost men threw their spears. Some had three or four spears that they hurled one after the other, launching them over the heads of our front ranks. There were spears coming back, and I plucked one from the turf and hurled it back as hard as I could.

I was in the rearmost rank, pushed back there by men who told me to get out of their way, but I advanced with them and Brida, grinning with mischief, came with me. I told her to go back to the town, but she just stuck her tongue out at me and then I heard the hammering crash, the wooden thunder, of shields meeting shields. That was followed by the sound of spears striking limewood, the ringing of blade on blade, but I saw nothing of it because I was not then tall enough, but the shock of the shield walls made the men in front of me reel back, then they were pushing forward again, trying to force their own front rank through the West Saxon shields. The right-hand side of our wall was bending back where the enemy outflanked us, but our reinforcements were hurrying to that place, and the West Saxons lacked the courage to charge home. Those West Saxons had been at the rear of their advancing army, and the rear is always where the timid men congregate. The real fight was to my front and the noise there was of blows, iron shield boss on shield-wood, blades on shields, men’s feet shuffling, the clangour of weapons, and few voices except those wailing in pain or in a sudden scream. Brida dropped onto all fours and wriggled between the legs of the men in front of her, and I saw she was lancing her spear forward to give the blow that comes beneath the shield’s rim. She lunged into a man’s ankle, he stumbled, an axe fell and there was a gap in the enemy line and our line bulged forward, and I followed, using Serpent-Breath as a spear, jabbing at men’s boots, then Ragnar gave a mighty roar, a shout to stir the gods in the great sky halls of Asgard, and the shout asked for one more great effort. Swords chopped, axes swung, and I could sense the enemy retreating from the fury of the Northmen.

Good Lord deliver us.

Blood on the grass now, so much blood that the ground was slick, and there were bodies that had to be stepped over as our shield wall thrust forward, leaving Brida and me behind, and I saw her hands were red because blood had seeped down the long ash shaft of her spear. She licked the blood and gave me a sly smile. Halfdan’s men were fighting on the enemy’s farther side now, their battle noise suddenly louder than ours because the West Saxons were retreating from Ragnar’s attack, but one man, tall and well-built, resisted us. He had a mail coat belted with a red leather sword belt and a helmet even more glorious than Ragnar’s, for the Englishman’s helmet had a silver boar modelled on its crown, and I thought for a moment it could be King Æthelred himself, but this man was too tall, and Ragnar shouted at his men to stand aside and he swung his sword at the boar-helmeted enemy who parried with his shield, lunged with his sword, and Ragnar took the blow on his own shield and rammed it forward to crash against the man who stepped back, tripped on a corpse and Ragnar swung his sword overhand, as if he were killing an ox, and the blade chopped down onto the mail coat as a rush of enemy came to save their lord.

A charge of Danes met them, shield on shield, and Ragnar was roaring his victory and stabbing down into the fallen man, and suddenly there were no more Wessex men resisting us, unless they were dead or wounded, and their army was running, their king and their prince both spurring away on horseback surrounded by priests, and we jeered and cursed them, told them they were women, that they fought like girls, that they were cowards.

And then we rested, catching breath on a field of blood, our own corpses among the enemy dead, and Ragnar saw me then, and saw Brida, and laughed. ‘What are you two doing here?’

For answer Brida held up her bloodied spear and Ragnar glanced at Serpent-Breath and saw her reddened tip. ‘Fools,’ he said, but fondly, and then one of our men brought a West Saxon prisoner and made him inspect the lord whom Ragnar had killed. ‘Who is he?’ Ragnar demanded.

I translated for him.

The man made the sign of the cross. ‘It is the Lord Æthelwulf,’ he said.

And I said nothing.

‘What did he say?’ Ragnar asked.

‘It is my uncle,’ I said.

‘Ælfric?’ Ragnar was astonished. ‘Ælfric from Northumbria?’

I shook my head. ‘He is my mother’s brother,’ I explained, ‘Æthelwulf of Mercia.’ I did not know that he was my mother’s brother, perhaps there was another Æthelwulf in Mercia, but I felt certain all the same that this was Æthelwulf, my kin, and the man who had won the victory over the Earls Sidroc. Ragnar, the previous day’s defeat revenged, whooped for joy while I stared into the dead man’s face. I had never known him, so why was I sad? He had a long face with a fair beard and a trimmed moustache. A good-looking man, I thought, and he was family, and that seemed strange for I knew no family except Ragnar, Ravn, Rorik and Brida.

Ragnar had his men strip Æthelwulf of his armour and take his precious helmet, and then, because the Ealdorman had fought so bravely, Ragnar left the corpse its other clothes and put a sword into its hand so that the gods could take the Mercian’s soul to the great hall where brave warriors feast with Odin.

And perhaps the Valkyries did take his soul, because next morning, when we went out to bury the dead, Ealdorman Æthelwulf’s body was gone.

I heard later, much later, that he was indeed my uncle. I also heard that some of his own men had crept back to the field that night and somehow found their lord’s body and taken it to his own country for a Christian burial.

And perhaps that is true too. Or perhaps Æthelwulf is in Odin’s corpse-hall.

But we had seen the West Saxons off. And we were still hungry. So it was time to fetch the enemy’s food.

Why did I fight for the Danes? All lives have questions, and that one still haunts me, though in truth there was no mystery. To my young mind the alternative was to be sitting in some monastery learning to read, and give a boy a choice like that and he would fight for the devil rather than scratch on a tile or make marks on a clay tablet. And there was Ragnar, whom I loved, and who sent his three ships across the Temes to find hay and oats stored in Mercian villages and he found just enough so that by the time the army marched westwards our horses were in reasonable condition.

We were marching on Æbbanduna, another frontier town on the Temes between Wessex and Mercia, and, according to our prisoner, a place where the West Saxons had amassed their supplies. Take Æbbanduna and Æthelred’s army would be short of food, Wessex would fall, England would vanish and Odin would triumph.

There was the small matter of defeating the West Saxon army first, but we marched just four days after routing them in front of the walls of Readingum, so we were blissfully confident that they were doomed. Rorik stayed behind, for he was sick again, and the many hostages, like the Mercian twins Ceolberht and Ceolnoth, also stayed in Readingum, guarded there by the small garrison we left to watch over the precious ships.

The rest of us marched or rode. I was among the older of the boys who accompanied the army, our job in battle was to carry the spare shields that could be pushed forward through the ranks in battle. Shields got chopped to pieces in fighting. I have often seen warriors fighting with a sword or axe in one hand, and nothing but the iron shield boss hung with scraps of wood in the other. Brida also came with us, mounted behind Ravn on his horse, and for a time I walked with them, listening as Ravn rehearsed the opening lines of a poem called the Fall of the West Saxons. He had got as far as listing our heroes, and describing how they readied themselves for battle, when one of those heroes, the gloomy Earl Guthrum, rode alongside us. ‘You look well,’ he greeted Ravn in a tone which suggested that was a condition unlikely to last.

‘I cannot look at all,’ Ravn said. He liked puns.

Guthrum, swathed in a black cloak, looked down at the river. We were advancing along a low range of hills and, even in the winter sunlight, the river valley looked lush. ‘Who will be King of Wessex?’ he asked.

‘Halfdan?’ Ravn suggested mischievously.

‘Big kingdom,’ Guthrum said gloomily. ‘Could do with an older man.’ He looked at me sourly. ‘Who’s that?’

‘You forget I am blind,’ Ravn said, ‘so who is who? Or are you asking me which older man you think should be made king? Me, perhaps?’

‘No, no! The boy leading your horse. Who is he?’

‘That is the Earl Uhtred,’ Ravn said grandly, ‘who understands that poets are of such importance that their horses must be led by mere Earls.’

‘Uhtred? A Saxon?’

‘Are you a Saxon, Uhtred?’

‘I’m a Dane,’ I said.

‘And a Dane,’ Ravn went on, ‘who wet his sword at Readingum. Wet it, Guthrum, with Saxon blood.’ That was a barbed comment, for Guthrum’s black-clothed men had not fought outside the walls.

‘And who’s the girl behind you?’

‘Brida,’ Ravn said, ‘who will one day be a skald and a sorceress.’

Guthrum did not know what to say to that. He glowered at his horse’s mane for a few strides, then returned to his original subject. ‘Does Ragnar want to be king?’

‘Ragnar wants to kill people,’ Ravn said. ‘My son’s ambitions are very few; merely to hear jokes, solve riddles, get drunk, give rings, lie belly to belly with women, eat well and go to Odin.’

‘Wessex needs a strong man,’ Guthrum said obscurely. ‘A man who understands how to govern.’

‘Sounds like a husband,’ Ravn said.

‘We take their strongholds,’ Guthrum said, ‘but we leave half their land untouched! Even Northumbria is only half garrisoned. Mercia has sent men to Wessex, and they’re supposed to be on our side. We win, Ravn, but we don’t finish the job.’

‘And how do we do that?’ Ravn asked.

‘More men, more ships, more deaths.’

‘Deaths?’

‘Kill them all!’ Guthrum said with a sudden vehemence, ‘every last one! Not a Saxon alive.’

‘Even the women?’ Ravn asked.

‘We could leave some young ones,’ Guthrum said grudgingly, then scowled at me. ‘What are you looking at, boy?’

‘Your bone, lord,’ I said, nodding at the gold-tipped bone hanging in his hair.

He touched the bone. ‘It’s one of my mother’s ribs,’ he said. ‘She was a good woman, a wonderful woman, and she goes with me wherever I go. You could do worse, Ravn, than make a song for my mother. You knew her, didn’t you?’

‘I did indeed,’ Ravn said blandly. ‘I knew her well enough, Guthrum, to worry that I lack the poetic skills to make a song worthy of such an illustrious woman.’

The mockery flew straight past Guthrum the Unlucky. ‘You could try,’ he said. ‘You could try, and I would pay much gold for a good song about her.’

He was mad, I thought, mad as an owl at midday, and then I forgot him because the army of Wessex was ahead, barring our road and offering battle.

The dragon banner of Wessex was flying on the summit of a long low hill that lay athwart our road. To reach Æbbanduna, which evidently lay a short way beyond the hill and was hidden by it, we would need to attack up the slope and across that ridge of open grassland, but to the north, where the hills fell away to the River Temes, there was a track along the river which suggested we might skirt the enemy position. To stop us he would need to come down the hill and give battle on level ground.

Halfdan called the Danish leaders together and they talked for a long time, evidently disagreeing about what should be done. Some men wanted to attack uphill and scatter the enemy where they were, but others advised fighting the West Saxons in the flat river meadows, and in the end Earl Guthrum the Unlucky persuaded them to do both. That, of course, meant splitting our army into two, but even so I thought it was a clever idea. Ragnar, Guthrum and the two Earls Sidroc would go down to the lower ground, thus threatening to pass by the enemy-held hill, while Halfdan, with Harald and Bagseg, would stay on the high ground and advance towards the dragon banner on the ridge. That way the enemy might hesitate to attack Ragnar for fear that Halfdan’s troops would fall on their rear. Most likely, Ragnar said, the enemy would decide not to fight at all, but instead retreat to Æbbanduna where we could besiege them. ‘Better to have them penned in a fortress than roaming around,’ he said cheerfully.

‘Better still,’ Ravn commented drily, ‘not to divide the army.’

‘They’re only West Saxons,’ Ragnar said dismissively.

It was already afternoon and, because it was winter, the day was short so there was not much time, though Ragnar thought there was more than enough daylight remaining to finish off Æthelred’s troops. Men touched their charms, kissed sword hilts, hefted shields, then we were marching down the hill, going off the chalk grasslands into the river valley. Once there, we were half hidden by the leafless trees, but now and again I could glimpse Halfdan’s men advancing along the hill crests and I could see there were West Saxon troops waiting for them, which suggested that Guthrum’s plan was working and that we could march clear around the enemy’s northern flank. ‘What we do then,’ Ragnar said, ‘is climb up behind them, and the bastards will be trapped. We’ll kill them all!’

‘One of them has to stay alive,’ Ravn said.

‘One? Why?’

‘To tell the tale, of course. Look for their poet. He’ll be handsome. Find him and let him live.’

Ragnar laughed. There were, I suppose, about eight hundred of us, slightly fewer than the contingent that had stayed with Halfdan, and the enemy army was probably slightly larger than our two forces combined, but we were all warriors and many of the West Saxon fyrd were farmers forced to war and so we saw nothing but victory.

Then, as our leading troops marched out of an oakwood, we saw the enemy had followed our example and divided their own army into two. One half was waiting on the hill for Halfdan while the other half had come to meet us.

Alfred led our opponents. I knew that because I could see Beocca’s red hair and, later on, I glimpsed Alfred’s long anxious face in the fighting. His brother, King Æthelred, had stayed on the heights where, instead of waiting for Halfdan to assault him, he was advancing to make his own attack. The Saxons, it seemed, were avid for battle.

So we gave it to them.

Our forces made shield wedges to attack their shield wall. We called on Odin, we howled our war cries, we charged, and the West Saxon line did not break, it did not buckle, but instead held fast and so the slaughter-work began.

Ravn told me time and again that destiny was everything. Fate rules. The three spinners sit at the foot of the tree of life and they make our lives and we are their playthings, and though we think we make our own choices, all our fates are in the spinners’ threads. Destiny is everything, and that day, though I did not know it, my destiny was spun. Wyrd bið ful ãræd, fate is unstoppable.

What is there to say of the battle that the West Saxons said happened at a place they called Æsc’s Hill? I assume Æsc was the thegn who had once owned the land, and his fields received a rich tilth of blood and bone that day. The poets could fill a thousand lines telling what happened, but battle is battle. Men die. In the shield wall it is sweat, terror, cramp, half blows, full blows, screaming and cruel death.

There were really two battles at Æsc’s Hill, the one above and the other below, and the deaths came swiftly. Harald and Bagseg died, Sidroc the Older watched his son die and then was cut down himself, and with him died Earl Osbern and Earl Fraena, and so many other good warriors, and the Christian priests were calling on their god to give the West Saxon swords strength, and that day Odin was sleeping and the Christian god was awake.

We were driven back. On top of the hill and in the valley we were driven back, and it was only the weariness of the enemy that stopped a full slaughter and let our survivors retreat from the fight, leaving their companions behind in their death blood. Toki was one of them. The shipmaster, so full of sword skill, died in the ditch behind which Alfred’s shield wall had waited for us. Ragnar, blood all over his face and with enemy’s blood matted in his unbound hair, could not believe it. The West Saxons were jeering.

The West Saxons had fought like fiends, like men inspired, like men who know their whole future rested on a winter afternoon’s work, and they had beaten us.

Destiny is all. We were defeated and went back to Readingum.

Six

These days, whenever Englishmen talk of the battle of Æsc’s Hill, they speak of God giving the West Saxons the victory because King Æthelred and his brother Alfred were praying when the Danes appeared.

Maybe they are right. I can well believe that Alfred was praying, but it helped that he chose his position well. His shield wall was just beyond a deep, winter-flooded ditch and the Danes had to fight their way up from that mud-bottomed trough and they died as they came, and men who would rather have been farmers than warriors beat off an assault of sword-Danes, and Alfred led the farmers, encouraged them, told them they could win, and put his faith in God. I think the ditch was the reason that he won, but he would doubtless have said that God dug the ditch.

Halfdan lost as well. He was attacking uphill, climbing a smooth gentle slope, but it was late in the day and the sun was in his men’s eyes, or so they said afterwards, and King Æthelred, like Alfred, encouraged his men so well that they launched a howling downhill attack that bit deep into Halfdan’s ranks, who became discouraged when they saw the lower army retreating from Alfred’s stubborn defence. There were no angels with fiery swords present, despite what the priests now say. At least I saw none. There was a waterlogged ditch, there was a battle, the Danes lost and destiny changed.

I did not know the Danes could lose, but at fourteen years old I learned that lesson and, for the first time I heard Saxon cheers and jeers, and something hidden in my soul stirred.

And we went back to Readingum.

There was plenty more fighting as winter turned to spring and spring to summer. New Danes came with the new year, and our ranks were thus restored, and we won all our subsequent encounters with the West Saxons, twice fighting them at Basengas in Hamptonscir, then at Mereton, which was in Wiltunscir and thus deep inside their territory, and again in Wiltunscir at Wiltun, and each time we won, which meant we held the battlefield at day’s end, but at none of those clashes did we destroy the enemy. Instead we wore each other out, fought each other to a bloody standstill, and as summer caressed the land we were no nearer conquering Wessex than we had been at Yule.

But we did manage to kill King Æthelred. That happened at Wiltun where the king received a deep axe wound to his left shoulder and, though he was hurried from the field, and though priests and monks prayed over his sickbed, and though cunning men treated him with herbs and leeches, he died after a few days.

And he left an heir, an ætheling, Æthelwold. He was Prince Æthelwold, eldest son of Æthelred, but he was not old enough to be his own master for, like me, he was only fifteen, yet even so some men proclaimed his right to be named the King of Wessex, but Alfred had far more powerful friends and he deployed the legend of the Pope having invested him as the future king. The legend must have worked its magic for, sure enough, at the meeting of the Wessex witan, which was the assembly of nobles, bishops and powerful men, Alfred was acclaimed as the new king. Perhaps the witan had no choice. Wessex, after all, was desperately fighting off Halfdan’s forces and it would have been a bad time to make a boy into a king. Wessex needed a leader and so the witan chose Alfred, and Æthelwold and his younger brother were whisked off to an abbey where they were told to get on with their lessons. ‘Alfred should have murdered the little bastards,’ Ragnar told me cheerfully, and he was probably right.

So Alfred, the youngest of six brothers, was now the King of Wessex. The year was 871. I did not know it then, but Alfred’s wife had just given birth to a daughter he named Æthelflaed. Æthelflaed was fifteen years younger than me and even if I had known of her birth I would have dismissed it as unimportant. But destiny is all. The spinners work and we do their will whether we will or not.

Alfred’s first act as king, other than to bury his brother and put his nephews away in a monastery and have himself crowned and go to church a hundred times and weary God’s ears with unceasing prayers, was to send messengers to Halfdan proposing a conference. He wanted peace, it seemed, and as it was midsummer and we were no nearer to victory than we had been at midwinter, Halfdan agreed to the meeting, and so, with his army’s leaders and a bodyguard of picked men, he went to Baðum.

I went too, with Ragnar, Ravn and Brida. Rorik, still sick, stayed in Readingum and I was sorry he did not see Baðum for, though it was only a small town, it was almost as marvellous as Lundene. There was a bath in the town’s centre, not a small tub, but an enormous building with pillars and a crumbling roof above a great stone hollow that was filled with hot water. The water came from the underworld and Ragnar was certain that it was heated by the forges of the dwarves. The bath, of course, had been built by the Romans, as had all the other extraordinary buildings in Baðum’s valley. Not many men wanted to get into the bath because they feared water even though they loved their ships, but Brida and I went in and I discovered she could swim like a fish. I clung to the edge and marvelled at the strange experience of having hot water all over my naked skin.

Beocca found us there. The centre of Baðum was covered by a truce which meant no man could carry weapons there, and West Saxons and Danes mixed amicably enough in the streets so there was nothing to stop Beocca searching for me. He came to the bath with two other priests, both gloomy-looking men with running noses, and they watched as Beocca leaned down to me. ‘I saw you come in here,’ he said, then he noticed Brida who was swimming underwater, her long black hair streaming, then she reared up and he could not miss her small breasts and he recoiled as though she were the devil’s handmaid. ‘She’s a girl, Uhtred!’

‘I know,’ I said.

‘Naked!’

‘God is good,’ I said.

He stepped forward to slap me, but I pushed myself away from the edge of the bath and he nearly fell in. The other two priests were staring at Brida. God knows why. They probably had wives, but priests, I have found, get very excited about women. So do warriors, but we do not shake like aspens just because a girl shows us her tits. Beocca tried to ignore her, though that was difficult because Brida swam up behind me and put her arms around my waist. ‘You must slip away,’ Beocca whispered to me.

‘Slip away?’

‘From the pagans! Come to our quarters, we’ll hide you.’

‘Who is he?’ Brida asked me. She spoke in Danish.

‘He was a priest I knew at home,’ I said.

‘Ugly, isn’t he?’ she said.

‘You have to come,’ Beocca hissed at me. ‘We need you!’

‘You need me?’

He leaned even closer. ‘There’s unrest in Northumbria, Uhtred. You must have heard what happened.’ He paused to make the sign of the cross. ‘All those monks and nuns slaughtered! They were murdered! A terrible thing, Uhtred, but God will not be mocked. There is to be a rising in Northumbria and Alfred will encourage it. If we can say that Uhtred of Bebbanburg is on our side it will help!’

I doubted it would help at all. I was fifteen and hardly old enough to inspire men into making suicidal attacks on Danish strongholds. ‘She’s not a Dane,’ I told Beocca, who I did not think would have said these things if he believed Brida could understand them, ‘she’s from East Anglia.’

He stared at her. ‘East Anglia?’

I nodded, then let mischief have its way. ‘She’s the niece of King Edmund,’ I lied, and Brida giggled and ran a hand down my body to try to make me laugh.

Beocca made the sign of the cross again. ‘Poor man! A martyr! Poor girl.’ Then he frowned. ‘But …’ he began, then stopped, quite incapable of understanding why the dreaded Danes allowed two of their prisoners to frolic naked in a bath of hot water, then he closed his squinty eyes because he saw where Brida’s hand had come to rest. ‘We must get you both out of here,’ he said urgently, ‘to a place where you can learn God’s ways.’

‘I should like that,’ I said and Brida squeezed so hard that I almost cried out in pain.

‘Our quarters are to the south of here,’ Beocca said, ‘across the river and on top of the hill. Go there, Uhtred, and we shall take you away. Both of you.’

Of course I did no such thing. I told Ragnar, who laughed at my invention that Brida was King Edmund’s niece and shrugged at the news that there would be an uprising in Northumbria. ‘There are always rumours of revolts,’ he said, ‘and they all end the same way.’

‘He was very certain,’ I said.

‘All it means is that they’ve sent monks to stir up trouble. I doubt it will amount to much. Anyway, once we’ve settled with Alfred we can go back. Go home, eh?’

But settling with Alfred was not as easy as Halfdan or Ragnar had supposed. It was true that Alfred was the supplicant and that he wanted peace because the Danish forces had been raiding deep into Wessex, but he was not ready to collapse as Burghred had yielded in Mercia. When Halfdan proposed that Alfred stay king, but that the Danes occupy the chief West Saxon forts, Alfred threatened to walk out and continue the war. ‘You insult me,’ he said calmly. ‘If you wish to take the fortresses, then come and take them.’

‘We will,’ Halfdan threatened and Alfred merely shrugged as if to say the Danes were welcome to try, but Halfdan knew, as all the Danes knew, that their campaign had failed. It was true that we had scoured large swathes of Wessex, we had taken much treasure, slaughtered or captured livestock, burned mills and homes and churches, but the price had been high. Many of our best men were dead or else so badly wounded that they would be forced to live off their lords’ charity for the rest of their days. We had also failed to take a single West Saxon fortress, which meant that when winter came we would be forced to withdraw to the safety of Lundene or Mercia.

Yet if the Danes were exhausted by the campaign, so were the West Saxons. They had also lost many of their best men, they had lost treasure and Alfred was worried that the Britons, the ancient enemy who had been defeated by his ancestors, might flood out of their fastnesses in Wales and Cornwalum. Yet Alfred would not succumb to his fears, he would not meekly give in to Halfdan’s demands, though he knew he must meet some of them, and so the bargaining went on for a week and I was surprised by Alfred’s stubbornness.

He was not an impressive man to look at. There was something spindly about him, and his long face had a weak cast, but that was a deception. He never smiled as he faced Halfdan, he rarely took those clever brown eyes off his enemy’s face, he pressed his point tediously and he was always calm, never raising his voice even when the Danes were screaming at him. ‘What we want,’ he explained again and again, ‘is peace. You need it, and it is my duty to give it to my country. So you will leave my country.’ His priests, Beocca among them, wrote down every word, filling precious sheets of parchment with endless lines of script. They must have used every drop of ink in Wessex to record that meeting and I doubt anyone ever read the whole account.

Not that the meetings went on all day. Alfred insisted they could not start until he had attended church, and he broke at midday for more prayer, and he finished before sundown so that he could return to the church. How that man prayed! But his patient bargaining was just as remorseless, and in the end Halfdan agreed to evacuate Wessex, but only on payment of six thousand pieces of silver and, to make sure it was paid, he insisted that his forces must remain in Readingum where Alfred was required to deliver three wagons of fodder daily and five wagons of rye grain. When the silver was paid, Halfdan promised, the ships would slide back down the Temes and Wessex would be free of pagans. Alfred argued against allowing the Danes to stay in Readingum, insisting that they withdraw east of Lundene, but in the end, desperate for peace, he accepted that they could remain in the town and so, with solemn oaths on both sides, the peace was made.

I was not there when the conference ended, nor was Brida. We had been there most days, serving as Ravn’s eyes in the big Roman hall where the talking went on, but when we got bored, or rather when Ravn was tired of our boredom, we would go to the bath and swim. I loved that water.

We were swimming on the day before the talking finished. There were just the two of us in the great echoing chamber. I liked to stand where the water gushed in from a hole in a stone, letting it cascade over my long hair, and I was standing there, eyes closed, when I heard Brida squeal. I opened my eyes and just then a pair of strong hands gripped my shoulders. My skin was slippery and I twisted away, but a man in a leather coat jumped into the bath, told me to be quiet, and seized me again. Two other men were wading across the pool, using long staves to shepherd Brida to the water’s edge. ‘What are you …’ I began to ask, using Danish.

‘Quiet, boy,’ one of the men answered. He was a West Saxon and there were a dozen of them, and when they had pulled our wet naked bodies out of the water they wrapped us in big, stinking cloaks, scooped up our clothes and hurried us away. I shouted for help and was rewarded by a thump on my head that might have stunned an ox.

We were pushed over the saddles of two horses and then we travelled for some time with men mounted behind us, and the cloaks were only taken off at the top of the big hill that overlooks Baðum from the south. And there, beaming at us, was Beocca. ‘You are rescued, lord,’ he said to me, ‘praise Almighty God, you are rescued! As are you, my lady,’ he added to Brida.

I could only stare at him. Rescued? Kidnapped, more like. Brida looked at me, and I at her, and she gave the smallest shake of her head as if to suggest we should keep silent, at least I took it to mean that, and did so, then Beocca told us to get dressed.

I had slipped my hammer amulet and my arm rings into my belt pouch when I undressed and I left them there as Beocca hurried us into a nearby church, little more than a wood and straw shack that was no bigger than a peasant’s pigsty, and there he gave thanks to God for our deliverance. Afterwards he took us to a nearby hall where we were introduced to Ælswith, Alfred’s wife, who was attended by a dozen women, three of them nuns, and guarded by a score of heavily armed men.

Ælswith was a small woman with mouse-brown hair, small eyes, a small mouth and a very determined chin. She was wearing a blue dress which had angels embroidered in silver thread about its skirt and about the hem of its wide sleeves, and she wore a heavy crucifix of gold. A baby was in a wooden cradle beside her and later, much later, I realised that the baby must have been Æthelflaed, so that was the very first time I ever saw her, though I thought nothing of it at the time. Ælswith welcomed me, speaking in the distinctive tones of a Mercian, and after she had enquired about my parentage, she told me we had to be related because her father was Æthelred who had been an Ealdorman in Mercia, and he was first cousin to the late lamented Æthelwulf whose body I had seen outside Readingum. ‘And now you,’ she turned to Brida, ‘Father Beocca tells me you are niece to the holy King Edmund?’

Brida just nodded.

‘But who are your parents?’ Ælswith demanded, frowning. ‘Edmund had no brothers, and his two sisters are nuns.’

‘Hild,’ Brida said. I knew that had been the name of her aunt, whom Brida had hated.

‘Hild?’ Ælswith was puzzled, more than puzzled, suspicious. ‘Neither of good King Edmund’s sisters are called Hild.’

‘I’m not his niece,’ Brida confessed in a small voice.

‘Ah.’ Ælswith leaned back in her chair, her sharp face showing the look of satisfaction some people assume when they have caught a liar telling an untruth.

‘But I was taught to call him uncle,’ Brida went on, surprising me, for I thought she had found herself in an impossible quandary and was confessing the lie, but instead, I realised, she was embroidering it. ‘My mother was called Hild and she had no husband but she insisted I call King Edmund uncle,’ she spoke in a small, frightened voice, ‘and he liked that.’

‘He liked it?’ Ælswith snapped. ‘Why?’

‘Because,’ Brida said, and then blushed, and how she made herself blush I do not know, but she lowered her eyes, reddened and looked as if she were about to burst into tears.

‘Ah,’ Ælswith said again, catching on to the girl’s meaning and blushing herself. ‘So he was your …’ she did not finish, not wanting to accuse the dead and holy King Edmund of having fathered a bastard on some woman called Hild.

‘Yes,’ Brida said, and actually started crying. I stared up at the hall’s smoke-blackened rafters and tried not to laugh. ‘He was ever so kind to me,’ Brida sobbed, ‘and the nasty Danes killed him!’

Ælswith plainly believed Brida. Folk usually do believe the worst in other folk, and the saintly King Edmund was now revealed as a secret womaniser, though that did not stop him eventually becoming a saint, but it did condemn Brida because Ælswith now proposed that she be sent to some nunnery in southern Wessex. Brida might have royal blood, but it was plainly tainted by sin, so Ælswith wanted her locked away for life. ‘Yes,’ Brida agreed meekly, and I had to pretend I was choking in the smoke. Then Ælswith presented us both with crucifixes. She had two ready, both of silver, but she whispered to one of the nuns and a small wooden one was substituted for one of the silver crucifixes and that one was presented to Brida while I received a silver one, which I obediently hung about my neck. I kissed mine, which impressed Ælswith, and Brida hurriedly imitated me, but nothing she could do now would impress Alfred’s wife. Brida was a self-condemned bastard.

Alfred returned from Baðum after nightfall and I had to accompany him to church where the prayers and praises went on forever. Four monks chanted, their droning voices half sending me to sleep, and afterwards, for it did eventually end, I was invited to join Alfred for a meal. Beocca impressed on me that this was an honour, that not many folk were asked to eat with the king, but I had eaten with Danish chieftains who never seemed to mind who shared their table so long as they did not spit in the gruel, so I was not flattered. I was hungry, though. I could have eaten a whole roasted ox and I was impatient as we ceremonially washed our hands in basins of water held by the servants and then as we stood by our stools and chairs as Alfred and Ælswith were conducted to the table. A bishop allowed the food to cool as he said an interminable prayer asking God to bless what we were about to eat, and then at last we sat, but what a disappointment that supper was! No pork, no beef, no mutton, not a thing a man might want to eat, but only curds, leeks, soft eggs, bread, diluted ale and barley boiled into a gelid broth as palatable as frogspawn. Alfred kept saying how good it was, but in the end he did confess that he was afflicted with terrible pains in his belly and that this pap-like diet kept the agony at bay.

‘The king is a martyr to meat,’ Beocca explained to me. He was one of the three priests at the high table, another of whom was a bishop who had no teeth and mashed his bread into the broth with a candle stick, and there were also two Ealdormen and, of course, Ælswith who did much of the talking. She was opposing the notion of allowing the Danes to stay in Readingum, but in the end Alfred said he had no choice and that it was a small concession to make for peace, and that ended the discussion. Ælswith did rejoice that her husband had negotiated the release of all the young hostages held by Halfdan’s army, which Alfred had insisted on for he feared those young ones would be led away from the true church. He looked at me as he spoke about that, but I took little notice, being far more interested in one of the servants who was a young girl, perhaps four or five years older than me, who was startlingly pretty with a mass of black-ringleted hair and I wondered if she was the girl who Alfred kept close so he could thank God for giving him the strength to resist temptation. Later, much later, I discovered she was the same girl. Her name was Merewenna and I thanked God, in time, for not resisting temptation with her, but that lies far ahead in my tale, and for now I was at Alfred’s disposal or, rather, at Ælswith’s.

‘Uhtred must learn to read,’ she said. What business it was of hers I did not know, but no one disputed her statement.

‘Amen,’ Beocca said.

‘The monks at Winburnan can teach him,’ she suggested.

‘A very good idea, my lady,’ Beocca said, and the toothless bishop nodded and dribbled his approval.

‘Abbot Hewald is a very diligent teacher,’ Ælswith said. In truth Abbot Hewald was one of those bastards who would rather whip the young than teach them, but doubtless that was what Ælswith meant.

‘I rather think,’ Alfred put in, ‘that young Uhtred’s ambition is to be a warrior.’

‘In time, if God wills it, he will be,’ Ælswith said, ‘but what use is a soldier who cannot read God’s word?’

‘Amen,’ Beocca said.

‘No use at all,’ Alfred agreed. I thought teaching a soldier to read was about as much use as teaching a dog to dance, but said nothing, though Alfred sensed my scepticism. ‘Why is it good for a soldier to read, Uhtred?’ he demanded of me.

‘It is good for everyone to read,’ I said dutifully, earning a smile from Beocca.

‘A soldier who reads,’ Alfred said patiently, ‘is a soldier who can read orders, a soldier who will know what his king wants. Suppose you are in Northumbria, Uhtred, and I am in Wessex, how else will you know my will?’

That was breathtaking, though I was too young to realise it at the time. If I was in Northumbria and he was in Wessex then I was none of his damned business, but of course Alfred was already thinking ahead, far ahead, to a time when there would be one English kingdom and one English king. I just gaped at him and he smiled at me. ‘So Winburnan it is, young man,’ he said, ‘and the sooner you are there, the better.’

‘The sooner?’ Ælswith knew nothing of this suggested haste and was sharply suspicious.

‘The Danes, my dear,’ Alfred explained, ‘will look for both children. If they discover they are here they may well demand their return.’

‘But all hostages are to be freed,’ Ælswith objected, ‘you said so yourself.’

‘Was Uhtred a hostage?’ Alfred asked softly, staring at me. ‘Or was he in danger of becoming a Dane?’ He left the questions hanging, and I did not try to answer them. ‘We must make you into a true Englishman,’ Alfred said, ‘so you must go south in the morning. You and the girl.’

‘The girl doesn’t matter,’ Ælswith said dismissively. Brida had been sent to eat with the kitchen slaves.

‘If the Danes discover she’s Edmund’s bastard,’ one of the Ealdormen observed, ‘they’ll use her to destroy his reputation.’

‘She never told them that,’ I piped up, ‘because she thought they might mock him.’

‘There’s some good in her then,’ Ælswith said grudgingly. She helped herself to one of the soft-boiled eggs. ‘But what will you do,’ she demanded of her husband, ‘if the Danes accuse you of rescuing the children?’

‘I shall lie, of course,’ Alfred said. Ælswith blinked at him, but the bishop mumbled that the lie would be for God and so forgivable.

I had no intention of going to Winburnan. That was not because I was suddenly avid to be a Dane, but it had everything to do with Serpent-Breath. I loved that sword, and I had left it with Ragnar’s servants, and I wanted her back before my life took whatever path the spinners required of me and, to be sure, I had no wish to give up life with Ragnar for the scant joys of a monastery and a teacher. Brida, I knew, wished to go back to the Danes, and it was Alfred’s sensible insistence that we be removed from Baðum as soon as possible that gave us our opportunity.

We were sent away next morning, before dawn, going south into a hilly country and escorted by a dozen warriors who resented the job of taking two children deep into the heartland of Wessex. I was given a horse, Brida was provided with a mule, and a young priest called Willibald was officially put in charge of delivering Brida to a nunnery and me to Abbot Hewald. Father Willibald was a nice man with an easy smile and a kind manner. He could imitate bird calls and made us laugh by inventing a conversation between a quarrelsome fieldfare with its chack-chack call and a soaring skylark, then he made us guess what birds he was imitating, and that entertainment, mixed in with some harmless riddles, took us to a settlement high above a soft-flowing river in the heavily wooded countryside. The soldiers insisted on stopping there because they said the horses needed a rest. ‘They really need ale,’ Willibald told us, and shrugged as if it was understandable.

It was a warm day. The horses were hobbled outside the hall, the soldiers got their ale, bread and cheese, then sat in a circle and threw dice and grumbled, leaving us to Willibald’s supervision, but the young priest stretched out on a half-collapsed haystack and fell asleep in the sunlight. I looked at Brida, she looked at me, and it was as simple as that. We crept along the side of the hall, circled an enormous dungheap, dodged through some pigs that rooted in a field, wriggled through a hedge and then we were in woodland where we both started to laugh. ‘My mother insisted I call him uncle,’ Brida said in her small voice, ‘and the nasty Danes killed him,’ and we both thought that was the funniest thing we had ever heard, and then we came to our senses and hurried northwards.

It was a long time before the soldiers searched for us, and later they brought hunting dogs from the hall where they had purchased ale, but by then we had waded up a stream, changed direction again, found higher ground, and hidden ourselves. They did not find us, though all afternoon we could hear the hounds baying in the valley. They must have been searching the riverbank, thinking we had gone there, but we were safe and alone and high.

They searched for two days, never coming close, and on the third day we saw Alfred’s royal cavalcade riding south on the road under the hill. The meeting at Baðum was over, and that meant the Danes were retreating to Readingum and neither of us had any idea how to reach Readingum, but we knew we had travelled west to reach Baðum, so that was a start, and we knew we had to find the River Temes, and our only two problems were food and the need to avoid being caught.

That was a good time. We stole milk from the udders of cows and goats. We had no weapons, but we fashioned cudgels from fallen branches and used them to threaten some poor old man who was patiently digging a ditch and had a small sack with bread and pease pudding for his meal, and we stole that, and we caught fish with our hands, a trick that Brida taught me, and we lived in the woods. I wore my hammer amulet again. Brida had thrown away her wooden crucifix, but I kept the silver one for it was valuable.

After a few days we began travelling by night. We were both frightened at first, for the night is when the sceadugengan stir from their hiding places, but we became good at traversing the darkness. We skirted farms, following the stars, and we learned how to move without noise, how to be shadows. One night something large and growling came close and we heard it shifting, pawing the ground, and we both beat at the leaf mould with our cudgels and yelped and the thing went away. A boar? Perhaps. Or perhaps one of the shapeless, nameless sceadugengan that curdle dreams.

We had to cross a range of high, bare hills where we managed to steal a lamb before the shepherd’s dogs even knew we were there. We lit a fire in the woods north of the hills and cooked the meat, and next night we found the river. We did not know what river, but it was wide, it flowed beneath deep trees, and nearby was a settlement where we saw a small round boat made of bent willow sticks covered with goatskin, and that night we stole the boat and let it carry us downstream, past settlements, under bridges, ever going east.

We did not know it, but the river was the Temes, and so we came safe to Readingum.

Rorik had died. He had been sick for so long, but there were times when he had seemed to recover, but whatever illness carried him away had done so swiftly and Brida and I reached Readingum on the day that his body was burned. Ragnar, in tears, stood by the pyre and watched as the flames consumed his son. A sword, a bridle, a hammer amulet and a model ship had been placed on the fire, and after it was done the melted metal was placed with the ashes in a great pot that Ragnar buried close to the Temes. ‘You are my second son now,’ he told me that night, and then remembered Brida, ‘and you are my daughter.’ He embraced us both, then got drunk. Next morning he wanted to ride out and kill West Saxons, but Ravn and Halfdan restrained him.

The truce was holding. Brida and I had only been gone a little over three weeks and already the first silver was coming to Readingum, along with fodder and food. Alfred, it seemed, was a man of his word and Ragnar was a man of grief. ‘How will I tell Sigrid?’ he wanted to know.

‘It is bad for a man to have only one son,’ Ravn told me, ‘almost as bad as having none. I had three, but only Ragnar lives. Now only his eldest lives.’ Ragnar the Younger was still in Ireland.

‘He can have another son,’ Brida said.

‘Not from Sigrid,’ Ravn said, ‘but he could take a second wife, I suppose. It is sometimes done.’

Ragnar had given me back Serpent-Breath, and another arm ring. He gave a ring to Brida too, and he took some consolation from the story of our escape. We had to tell it to Halfdan and to Guthrum the Unlucky, who stared at us dark-eyed as we described the meal with Alfred, and Alfred’s plans to educate me, and even grief-stricken Ragnar laughed when Brida retold the story of how she had claimed to be King Edmund’s bastard.

‘This Queen Ælswith,’ Halfdan wanted to know, ‘what is she like?’

‘No queen,’ I said, ‘the West Saxons won’t have queens.’ Beocca had told me that. ‘She is merely the king’s wife.’

‘She is a weasel pretending to be a thrush,’ Brida said.

‘Is she pretty?’ Guthrum asked.

‘A pinched face,’ Brida said, ‘and piggy eyes and a pursed mouth.’

‘He’ll get no joy there then,’ Halfdan said, ‘why did he marry her?’

‘Because she’s from Mercia,’ Ravn said, ‘and Alfred would have Mercia on his side.’

‘Mercia belongs to us,’ Halfdan growled.

‘But Alfred would take it back,’ Ravn said, ‘and what we should do is send ships with rich gifts for the Britons. If they attack from Wales and Cornwalum then he must divide his army.’

That was an unfortunate thing to say, for Halfdan still smarted from the memory of dividing his own army at Æsc’s Hill, and he just scowled into his ale. So far as I know he never did send gifts to the Britons, and it would have been a good idea if he had, but he was distracted by his failure to take Wessex, and there were rumours of unrest in both Northumbria and Mercia. The Danes had captured so much of England so quickly that they had never really subdued their conquest, nor did they hold all the fortresses in the conquered land and so revolts flared like heathland fires. They were easily put down, but untended they would spread and become dangerous. It was time, Halfdan said, to stamp on the fires and to cow the conquered English into terrified submission. Once that was done, once Northumbria, Mercia and East Anglia were quiet, the attack on Wessex could be resumed.

The last of Alfred’s silver came and the Danish army released the young hostages, including the Mercian twins, and the rest of us went back to Lundene. Ragnar dug up the pot with his younger son’s ashes and carried it downstream on Wind-Viper. ‘I shall take it home,’ he told me, ‘and bury him with his own people.’

We could not travel north that year. It was autumn when we reached Lundene and so we had to wait through the winter, and it was not till spring that Ragnar’s three ships left the Temes and sailed north. I was almost sixteen then, and growing fast so that I was suddenly a head taller than most men, and Ragnar made me take the steering oar. He taught me to guide a ship, how to anticipate the buffet of wind or wave and how to heave on the steering oar before the ship veered. I learned the subtle touch, though at first the ship swayed drunkenly as I put too much pressure on the oar, but in time I came to feel the ship’s will in the long oar’s shaft and learned to love the quiver in the ash as the sleek hull gained her full speed.

‘I shall make you my second son,’ Ragnar told me on that voyage.

I did not know what to say.

‘I shall always favour my eldest,’ he went on, meaning Ragnar the Younger, ‘but you shall still be as a son to me.’

‘I would like that,’ I said awkwardly. I gazed at the distant shore that was flecked by the little dun sails of the fishing boats that were fleeing from our ships. ‘I am honoured,’ I said.

‘Uhtred Ragnarson,’ he said, trying it out, and he must have liked the sound of it for he smiled, but then he thought of Rorik again and the tears came to his eyes and he just stared eastwards into the empty sea.

That night we slept in the mouth of the Humber.

And two days later came back to Eoferwic.

The king’s palace had been repaired. It had new shutters on its high windows and the roof was freshly thatched with golden rye straw. The palace’s old Roman walls had been scrubbed so that the lichen was gone from the joints between the stones. Guards stood at the outer gate and, when Ragnar demanded entry, they curtly told him to wait and I thought he would draw his sword, but before his anger could erupt Kjartan appeared. ‘My lord Ragnar,’ he said sourly.

‘Since when does a Dane wait at this gate?’ Ragnar demanded.

‘Since I ordered it,’ Kjartan retorted, and there was insolence in his voice. He, like the palace, looked prosperous. He wore a cloak of black bear fur, had tall boots, a chain-mail tunic, a red leather sword belt and almost as many arm rings as Ragnar. ‘No one enters here without my permission,’ Kjartan went on, ‘but of course you are welcome, Earl Ragnar.’ He stepped aside to let Ragnar, myself and three of Ragnar’s men into the big hall where, five years before, my uncle had tried to buy me from Ivar. ‘I see you still have your English pet,’ Kjartan said, looking at me.

‘Go on seeing while you have eyes,’ Ragnar said carelessly. ‘Is the king here?’

‘He only grants audience to those people who arrange to see him,’ Kjartan said.

Ragnar sighed and turned on his erstwhile shipmaster. ‘You itch me like a louse,’ he said, ‘and if it pleases you, Kjartan, we shall lay the hazel rods and meet man to man. And if that does not please you, then fetch the king because I would speak with him.’

Kjartan bridled, but decided he did not want to face Ragnar’s sword in a fighting space marked by hazel branches and so, with an ill grace, he went into the palace’s back rooms. He made us wait long enough, but eventually King Egbert appeared, and with him were six guards who included one-eyed Sven who now looked as wealthy as his father. Big too, almost as tall as I was, with a broad chest and hugely muscled arms.

Egbert looked nervous but did his best to appear regal. Ragnar bowed to him, then said there were tales of unrest in Northumbria and that Halfdan had sent him north to quell any such disturbances. ‘There is no unrest,’ Egbert said, but in such a frightened voice that I thought he would piss his breeches.

‘There were disturbances in the inland hills,’ Kjartan said dismissively, ‘but they ended.’ He patted his sword to show what had ended them.

Ragnar persevered, but learned nothing more. A few men had evidently risen against the Danes, there had been ambushes on the road leading to the west coast, the perpetrators had been hunted down and killed, and that was all Kjartan would say. ‘Northumbria is safe,’ he finished, ‘so you can return to Halfdan, my lord, and keep on trying to defeat Wessex.’

Ragnar ignored that last barb. ‘I shall go to my home,’ he said, ‘bury my son and live in peace.’

Sven was fingering his sword hilt and looking at me sourly with his one eye, but while the enmity between us, and between Ragnar and Kjartan, was obvious, no one made trouble and we left. The ships were hauled onto shore, the silver fetched from Readingum was shared out among the crews, and we went home carrying Rorik’s ashes.

Sigrid wailed at the news. She tore her dress and tangled her hair and screamed, and the other women joined her, and a procession carried Rorik’s ashes to the top of the nearest hill where the pot was buried, and afterwards Ragnar stayed there, looking across the hills and watching the white clouds sail across the western sky.

We stayed home all the rest of that year. There were crops to grow, hay to cut, a harvest to reap and to grind. We made cheese and butter. Merchants and travellers brought news, but none from Wessex where, it seemed, Alfred still ruled and had his peace, and so that kingdom remained, the last one of England. Ragnar sometimes spoke of returning there, carrying his sword to gain more riches, but the fight seemed to have gone from him that summer. He sent a message to Ireland, asking that his eldest son come home, but such messages were not reliable and Ragnar the Younger did not come that year. Ragnar also thought of Thyra, his daughter. ‘He says it’s time I married,’ she said to me one day as we churned butter.

‘You?’ I laughed.

‘I’m nearly fourteen!’ she said defiantly.

‘So you are. Who’ll marry you?’

She shrugged. ‘Mother likes Anwend.’ Anwend was one of Ragnar’s warriors, a young man not much older than me, strong and cheerful, but Ragnar had an idea she should marry one of Ubba’s sons, but that would mean she would go away and Sigrid hated that thought and Ragnar slowly came around to Sigrid’s way of thinking. I liked Anwend and thought he would make a good husband for Thyra who was growing ever more beautiful. She had long golden hair, wide-set eyes, a straight nose, unscarred skin, and a laugh that was like a ripple of sunshine. ‘Mother says I must have many sons,’ she said.

‘I hope you do.’

‘I’d like a daughter too,’ she said, straining with the churn because the butter was solidifying and the work getting harder. ‘Mother says Brida should marry as well.’

‘Brida might have different ideas,’ I said.

‘She wants to marry you,’ Thyra said.

I laughed at that. I thought of Brida as a friend, my closest friend, and just because we slept with each other, or we did when Sigrid was not watching, did not make me want to marry her. I did not want to marry at all, I thought only of swords and shields and battles, and Brida thought of herbs.

She was like a cat. She came and went secretly, and she learned all that Sigrid could teach her about herbs and their uses. Bindweed as a purgative, toadflax for ulcers, marsh marigold to keep elves away from the milk pails, chickweed for coughs, cornflower for fevers, and she learned other spells she would not tell me, women’s spells, and said that if you stayed silent in the night, unmoving, scarce breathing, the spirits would come, and Ravn taught her how to dream with the gods, which meant drinking ale in which pounded redcap mushrooms had been steeped, and she was often ill for she drank it too strong, but she would not stop, and she made her first songs then, songs about birds and about beasts, and Ravn said she was a true skald. Some nights, when we watched the charcoal burn, she would recite to me, her voice soft and rhythmic. She had a dog now that followed her everywhere. She had found him in Lundene on our homeward journey and he was black and white, as clever as Brida herself, and she called him Nihtgenga, which means night-walker, or goblin. He would sit with us by the charcoal pyre and I swear he listened to her songs. Brida made pipes from straw and played melancholy tunes and Nihtgenga would watch her with big sad eyes until the music overcame him and then he would raise his muzzle and howl, and we would both laugh and Nihtgenga would be offended and Brida would have to pet him back to happiness.

We forgot the war until, when the summer was at its height and a pall of heat lay over the hills, we had an unexpected visitor. Earl Guthrum the Unlucky came to our remote valley. He came with twenty horsemen, all dressed in black, and he bowed respectfully to Sigrid who chided him for not sending warning. ‘I would have made a feast,’ she said.

‘I brought food,’ Guthrum said, pointing to some packhorses, ‘I did not want to empty your stores.’

He had come from distant Lundene, wanting to talk with Ragnar and Ravn, and Ragnar invited me to sit with them because, he said, I knew more than most men about Wessex, and Wessex was what Guthrum wished to talk about, though my contribution was small. I described Alfred, described his piety, and warned Guthrum that though the West Saxon king was not an impressive man to look at, he was undeniably clever. Guthrum shrugged at that. ‘Cleverness is overrated,’ he said gloomily. ‘Clever doesn’t win battles.’

‘Stupidity loses them,’ Ravn put in, ‘like dividing the army when we fought outside Æbbanduna?’

Guthrum scowled, but decided not to pick a fight with Ravn, and instead asked Ragnar’s advice on how to defeat the West Saxons, and demanded Ragnar’s assurance that, come the new year, Ragnar would bring his men to Lundene and join the next assault. ‘If it is next year,’ Guthrum said gloomily. He scratched at the back of his neck, jiggling his mother’s gold-tipped bone that still hung from his hair. ‘We may not have sufficient men.’

‘Then we will attack the year after,’ Ragnar said.

‘Or the one after that,’ Guthrum said, then frowned. ‘But how do we finish the pious bastard?’

‘Split his forces,’ Ragnar said, ‘because otherwise we’ll always be outnumbered.’

‘Always? Outnumbered?’ Guthrum looked dubious at that assertion.

‘When we fought here,’ Ragnar said, ‘some Northumbrians decided not to fight us and they took refuge in Mercia. When we fought in Mercia and East Anglia the same thing happened, and men fled from us to find sanctuary in Wessex. But when we fight in Wessex they have nowhere to go. No place is safe for them. So they must fight, all of them. Fight in Wessex and the enemy is cornered.’

‘And a cornered enemy,’ Ravn put in, ‘is dangerous.’

‘Split them,’ Guthrum said pensively, ignoring Ravn again.

‘Ships on the south coast,’ Ragnar suggested, ‘an army on the Temes, and British warriors coming from Brycheinog, Glywysing and Gwent.’ Those were the southern Welsh kingdoms where the Britons lurked beyond Mercia’s western border. ‘Three attacks,’ Ragnar went on, ‘and Alfred will have to deal with them all and he won’t be able to do it.’

‘And you will be there?’ Guthrum asked.

‘You have my word,’ Ragnar said, and then the conversation turned to what Guthrum had seen on his journey, and admittedly he was a pessimistic man and prone to see the worst in everything, but he despaired of England. There was trouble in Mercia, he said, and the East Anglians were restless, and now there was talk that King Egbert in Eoferwic was encouraging revolt.

‘Egbert!’ Ragnar was surprised at the news, ‘he couldn’t encourage a piss out of a drunk man!’

‘It’s what I’m told,’ Guthrum said, ‘may not be true. Fellow called Kjartan told me.’

‘Then it’s almost certainly not true.’

‘Not true at all,’ Ravn agreed.

‘He seemed a good man to me,’ Guthrum said, obviously unaware of Ragnar’s history with Kjartan, and Ragnar did not enlighten him, and probably forgot the conversation once Guthrum had travelled on.

Yet Guthrum had been right. Plotting was going on in Eoferwic, though I doubt it was Egbert who did it. Kjartan did it, and he started by spreading rumours that King Egbert was secretly organising a rebellion, and the rumours became so loud and the king’s reputation so poisoned that one night Egbert, fearing for his life, managed to evade his Danish guards and flee south with a dozen companions. He took shelter with King Burghred of Mercia who, though his country was occupied by Danes, had been allowed to keep his own household guard that was sufficient to protect his new guest. Ricsig of Dunholm, the man who had handed the captured monks to Ragnar, was declared the new king of Northumbria, and he rewarded Kjartan by allowing him to ravage any place that might have harboured rebels in league with Egbert. There had been no rebellion, of course, but Kjartan had invented one, and he savaged the few remaining monasteries and nunneries in Northumbria, thus becoming even wealthier, and he stayed as Ricsig’s chief warrior and tax collector.

All this passed us by. We brought in the harvest, feasted, and it was announced that at Yule there would be a wedding between Thyra and Anwend. Ragnar asked Ealdwulf the smith to make Anwend a sword as fine as Serpent-Breath, and Ealdwulf said he would and, at the same time, make me a short sword of the kind Toki had recommended for fighting in the shield wall, and he made me help him beat out the twisted rods. All that autumn we worked until Ealdwulf had made Anwend’s sword and I had helped make my own sax. I called her Wasp-Sting because she was short and I could not wait to try her out on an enemy, which Ealdwulf said was foolishness. ‘Enemies come soon enough in a man’s life,’ he told me, ‘you don’t need to seek them out.’

I made my first shield in the early winter, cutting the limewood, forging the great boss with its handle that was held through a hole in the wood, painting it black and rimming it with an iron strip. It was much too heavy, that shield, and later I learned how to make them lighter, but as the autumn came I carried shield, sword and sax everywhere, accustoming myself to their weight, practising the strokes and parries, dreaming. I half feared and half longed for my first shield wall, for no man was a warrior until he had fought in the shield wall, and no man was a real warrior until he had fought in the front rank of the shield wall, and that was death’s kingdom, the place of horror, but like a fool I aspired to it.

And we readied ourselves for war. Ragnar had promised his support to Guthrum and so Brida and I made more charcoal and Ealdwulf hammered out spear points and axe heads and spades, while Sigrid found joy in the preparations for Thyra’s wedding. There was a betrothal ceremony at the beginning of winter when Anwend, dressed in his best clothes that were neatly darned, came to our hall with six of his friends and he shyly proposed himself to Ragnar as Thyra’s husband. Everyone knew he was going to be her husband, but the formalities were important, and Thyra sat between her mother and father as Anwend promised Ragnar that he would love, cherish and protect Thyra, and then proposed a bride price of twenty pieces of silver which was much too high, but which, I suppose, meant he really loved Thyra.

‘Make it ten, Anwend,’ Ragnar said, generous as ever, ‘and spend the rest on a new coat.’

‘Twenty is good,’ Sigrid said firmly, for the bride price, though given to Ragnar, would become Thyra’s property once she was married.

‘Then have Thyra give you a new coat,’ Ragnar said, taking the money, and then he embraced Anwend and there was a feast and Ragnar was happier that night than he had been since Rorik’s death. Thyra watched the dancing, sometimes blushing as she met Anwend’s eyes. Anwend’s six friends, all warriors of Ragnar, would come back with him for the wedding and they would be the men who would watch Anwend take Thyra to his bed and only when they reported that she was a proper woman would the marriage be deemed to have taken place.

But those ceremonies would have to wait until Yule. Thyra would be wedded then, we would have our feast, the winter would be endured, we would go to war. In other words we thought the world would go on as it ever did.

And at the foot of Yggdrasil, the tree of life, the three spinners mocked us.

I have spent many Christmases at the West Saxon court. Christmas is Yule with religion, and the West Saxons managed to spoil the midwinter feast with chanting monks, droning priests and savagely long sermons. Yule is supposed to be a celebration and a consolation, a moment of warm brightness in the heart of winter, a time to eat because you know that the lean times are coming when food will be scarce and ice locks the land, and a time to be happy and get drunk and behave irresponsibly and wake up next morning wondering if you will ever feel well again, but the West Saxons handed the feast to the priests who made it as joyous as a funeral. I have never really understood why people think religion has a place in the midwinter feast, though of course the Danes remembered their gods at that time, and sacrificed to them, but they also believed Odin, Thor and the other gods were all feasting in Asgard and had no wish to spoil the feasts in Midgard, our world. That seems sensible, but I have learned that most Christians are fearfully suspicious of enjoyment and Yule offered far too much of that for their taste. Some folk in Wessex knew how to celebrate it, and I always did my best, but if Alfred was anywhere close then you could be sure that we were required to fast, pray and repent through the whole twelve days of Christmas.

Which is all by way of saying that the Yule feast where Thyra would be married was to be the greatest in Danish memory. We worked hard as it approached. We kept more animals alive than usual, and slaughtered them just before the feast so that their meat would not need to be salted, and we dug great pits where the pigs and cows would be cooked on huge gridirons that Ealdwulf made. He grumbled about it, saying that forging cooking implements took him away from his real work, but he secretly enjoyed it because he loved his food. As well as pork and beef we planned to have herring, salmon, mutton, pike, freshly baked bread, cheese, ale, mead, and, best of all, the puddings that were made by stuffing sheep intestines with blood, offal, oats, horseradish, wild garlic and juniper berries. I loved those puddings, and still do, all crisp on the outside, but bursting with warm blood when you bite into them. I remember Alfred grimacing with distaste as I ate one and as the bloody juices ran into my beard, but then he was sucking on a boiled leek at the time.

We planned sports and games. The lake in the heart of the valley had frozen and I was fascinated by the way the Danes strapped bones to their feet and glided on the ice, a pastime that lasted until the ice broke and a young man drowned, but Ragnar reckoned the lake would be hard frozen again after Yule and I was determined to learn the skill of ice-gliding. For the moment, though, Brida and I were still making charcoal for Ealdwulf who had decided to make Ragnar a sword, the finest he had ever made, and we were charged with turning two wagonloads of alderwood into the best possible fuel.

We planned to break the pile the day before the feast, but it was bigger than any we had made before and it was still not cool enough, and if you break a pile before it is ready then the fire will flare up with terrible force and burn all the half-made charcoal into ash, and so we made certain every vent was properly sealed and reckoned we would have time to break it on Yule morning before the celebrations began. Most of Ragnar’s men and their families were already at the hall, sleeping wherever they could find shelter and ready for the first meal of the day and for the games that would take place in the meadow before the marriage ceremony, but Brida and I spent that last night up at the pile for fear that some animal would scratch through the turf and so start a draught that would revive the burn. I had Serpent-Breath and Wasp-Sting, for I would go nowhere without them, and Brida had Nihtgenga, for she would go nowhere without him, and we were both swathed in furs because the night was cold. When a pile was burning you could rest on the turf and feel the heat, but not that night because the fire was almost gone.

‘If you go very still,’ Brida said after dark, ‘you can feel the spirits.’

I think I fell asleep instead, but sometime towards dawn I woke and found Brida was also asleep. I sat up carefully, so as not to wake her, and I stared into the dark and I went very still and listened for the sceadugengan. Goblins and elves and sprites and spectres and dwarves, all those things come to Midgard at night and prowl among the trees, and when we guarded the charcoal piles both Brida and I put out food for them so they would leave us in peace. So I woke, I listened, and I heard the small sounds of a wood at night, the things moving, the claws in the dead leaves, the wind’s soft sighs.

And then I heard the voices.

I woke Brida and we were both still. Nihtgenga growled softly until Brida whispered that he should be quiet.

Men were moving in the dark, and some were coming to the charcoal pile and we slipped away into the blackness under the trees. We could both move like shadows and Nihtgenga would make no sound without Brida’s permission. We had gone uphill because the voices were downhill, and we crouched in utter darkness and heard men moving around the charcoal pile, and then there was the crack of flint and iron and a small flame sprung up. Whoever it was searched for the folk they reckoned would be watching the charcoal, but they did not find us, and after a while they moved downhill and we followed.

Dawn was just leeching the eastern sky with a wolf-grey edge. There was frost on the leaves and a small wind. ‘We should get to Ragnar,’ I whispered.

‘We can’t,’ Brida said, and she was right, for there were scores of men in the trees and they were between us and the hall, and we were much too far away to shout a warning to Ragnar, and so we tried to go around the strangers, hurrying along the hill’s ridge so we could drop down to the forge where Ealdwulf slept, but before we had gone halfway the fires burst into life.

That dawn is seared on my memory, burned there by the flames of a hall-burning. There was nothing we could do except watch. Kjartan and Sven had come to our valley with over a hundred men and now they attacked Ragnar by setting fire to the thatch of his hall. I could see Kjartan and his son, standing amidst the flaming torches that lit the space in front of the door, and as folk came from the hall they were struck by spears or arrows so that a pile of bodies grew in the firelight which became ever brighter as the thatch flared and finally burst into a tumultuous blaze that outshone the light of the grey dawn. We could hear people and animals screaming inside. Some men burst from the hall with weapons in hand, but they were cut down by the soldiers who surrounded the hall, men at every door or window, men who killed the fugitives, though not all of them. The younger women were pushed aside under guard, and Thyra was given to Sven who struck her hard on the head and left her huddled at his feet as he helped kill her family.

I did not see Ravn, Ragnar or Sigrid die, though die they did, and I suspect they were burned in the hall when the roof collapsed in a roaring gout of flame, smoke and wild sparks. Ealdwulf also died and I was in tears. I wanted to draw Serpent-Breath and rush into those men around the flames, but Brida held me down, and then she whispered to me that Kjartan and Sven would surely search the nearby woods for any survivors, and she persuaded me to pull back into the lightening trees. Dawn was a sullen iron band across the sky and the sun cloud-hidden in shame as we stumbled uphill to find shelter among some fallen rocks deep in the high wood.

All that day the smoke rose from Ragnar’s hall, and next night there was a glow above the tangled black branches of the trees, and next morning there were still wisps of smoke coming from the valley where we had been happy. We crept closer, both of us hungry, to see Kjartan and his men raking through the embers.

They pulled out lumps and twists of melted iron, a mail coat fused into a crumpled horror, silver welded into chunks, and they took whatever they found that could be sold or used again. At times they appeared frustrated, as if they had not found enough treasure, though they took enough. A wagon carried Ealdwulf’s tools and anvil down the valley. Thyra had a rope put around her neck, was placed on a horse and led away by one-eyed Sven. Kjartan pissed on a heap of glowing cinders, then laughed as one of his men said something. By afternoon they were gone.

I was sixteen and no longer a child.

And Ragnar, my lord, who had made me his son, was dead.

The bodies were still in the ashes, though it was impossible to tell who was who, or even to tell men from women for the heat had shrunk the dead so they all looked like children and the children like babies. Those who had died outside the hall were recognisable and I found Ealdwulf there, and Anwend, both stripped naked. I looked for Ragnar, but could not identify him. I wondered why he had not burst from the hall, sword in hand, and decided he knew he was going to die and did not want to give his enemy the satisfaction of seeing it.

We found food in one of the storage pits that Kjartan’s men had missed as they searched the hall. We had to shift hot charred pieces of timber to uncover the pit, and the bread, cheese and meat had all been soured by smoke and ash, but we ate. Neither of us spoke. At dusk some English folk came cautiously to the hall and stared at the destruction. They were wary of me, thinking of me as a Dane, and they dropped to their knees as I approached. They were the lucky ones, for Kjartan had slaughtered every Northumbrian in Synningthwait, down to the last baby, and had loudly blamed them for the hall-burning. Men must have known it was his doing, but his savagery at Synningthwait confused things and, in time, many folk came to believe that the English had attacked Ragnar, and Kjartan had taken revenge for their attack. But these English had escaped his swords. ‘You will come back in the morning,’ I told them, ‘and bury the dead.’

‘Yes, lord.’

‘You will be rewarded,’ I promised them, thinking I would have to surrender one of my precious arm rings.

‘Yes, lord,’ one of them repeated, and then I asked them if they knew why this had happened and they looked nervous, but finally one said he had been told that Earl Ragnar was planning a revolt against Ricsig. One of the Englishmen who served Kjartan had told him that when he went down to their hovels to find ale. He had also told them to hide themselves before Kjartan slaughtered the valley’s inhabitants.

‘You know who I am?’ I asked the man.

‘The Lord Uhtred, lord.’

‘Tell no man I’m alive,’ I said and he just stared at me. Kjartan, I decided, must think that I was dead, that I was one of the shrunken charred bodies in the hall, and while Kjartan did not care about me, Sven did, and I did not want him hunting me. ‘And return in the morning,’ I went on, ‘and you will have silver.’

There is a thing called the bloodfeud. All societies have them, even the West Saxons have them, despite their vaunted piety. Kill a member of my family and I shall kill one of yours, and so it goes on, generation after generation or until one family is all dead, and Kjartan had just wished a bloodfeud on himself. I did not know how, I did not know where, I could not know when, but I would revenge Ragnar. I swore it that night.

And I became rich that night. Brida waited until the English folk were gone and then she led me to the burned remnants of Ealdwulf’s forge and she showed me the vast piece of scorched elm, a section of a tree’s trunk, that had held Ealdwulf’s anvil. ‘We must move that,’ she said.

It took both of us to tip over that monstrous piece of elm, and beneath it was nothing but earth, but Brida told me to dig there and, for want of other tools, I used Wasp-Sting and had only gone down a hand’s breadth when I struck metal. Gold. Real gold. Coins and small lumps. The coins were strange, incised with a writing I had never seen before, neither Danish runes nor English letters, but something weird which I later learned came from the people far away who live in the desert and worship a god called Allah who I think must be a god of fire because al, in our English tongue, means burning. There are so many gods, but those folk who worshipped Allah made good coin and that night we unearthed forty-eight of them, and as much again in loose gold, and Brida told me she had watched Ragnar and Ealdwulf bury the hoard one night. There was gold, silver pennies, and four pieces of jet, and doubtless this was the treasure Kjartan had expected to find, for he knew Ragnar was wealthy, but Ragnar had hidden it well. All men hide a reserve of wealth for the day when disaster comes. I have buried hoards in my time, and even forgotten where one was and perhaps, years from now, some lucky man will find it. That hoard, Ragnar’s hoard, belonged to his eldest son, but Ragnar, it was strange to think he was just Ragnar now, no longer Ragnar the Younger, was far away in Ireland and I doubted he was even alive, for Kjartan would surely have sent men to kill him. But alive or dead he was not here and so we took the hoard.

‘What do we do?’ Brida asked that night. We were back in the woods.

I already knew what we would do, perhaps I had always known. I am an Englishman of England, but I had been a Dane while Ragnar was alive for Ragnar loved me and cared for me and called me his son, but Ragnar was dead and I had no other friends among the Danes. I had no friends among the English, for that matter, except for Brida of course, and unless I counted Beocca who was certainly fond of me in a complicated way, but the English were my folk and I think I had known that ever since the moment at Æsc’s Hill where for the first time I saw Englishmen beat Danes. I had felt pride then. Destiny is all, and the spinners touched me at Æsc’s Hill and now, at last, I would respond to their touch.

‘We go south,’ I said.

‘To a nunnery?’ Brida asked, thinking of Ælswith and her bitter ambitions.

‘No.’ I had no wish to join Alfred and learn to read and bruise my knees with praying. ‘I have relatives in Mercia,’ I said. I had never met them, knew nothing of them, but they were family and family has its obligations, and the Danish hold on Mercia was looser than elsewhere and perhaps I could find a home and I would not be a burden because I carried gold.

I had said I knew what I would do, but that is not wholly true. The truth is that I was in a well of misery, tempted to despair and with tears ever close to my eyes. I wanted life to go on as before, to have Ragnar as my father, to feast and to laugh. But destiny grips us and, next morning, in a soft winter rain, we buried the dead, paid silver coins, and then walked southwards. We were a boy on the edge of being a grown man, a girl and a dog, and we were going to nowhere.

PART TWO

The Last Kingdom

Seven

I settled in southern Mercia. I found another uncle, this one called Ealdorman Æthelred, son of Æthelred, brother of Æthelwulf, father of Æthelred, and brother to another Æthelred who had been the father of Ælswith who was married to Alfred, and Ealdorman Æthelred, with his confusing family, grudgingly acknowledged me as a nephew, though the welcome became slightly warmer when I presented him with two gold coins and swore on a crucifix that it was all the money I possessed. He assumed Brida was my lover, in which he was right, and thereafter he ignored her.

The journey south was wearisome, as all winter journeys are. For a time we sheltered at an upland homestead near Meslach and the folk there took us for outlaws. We arrived at their hovel in an evening of sleet and wind, both of us half frozen, and we paid for food and shelter with a few links from the chain of the silver crucifix Ælswith had given me, and in the night the two eldest sons came to collect the rest of our silver, but Brida and I were awake, half expecting such an attempt, and I had Serpent-Breath and Brida had Wasp-Sting and we threatened to geld both boys. The family was friendly after that, or at least scared into docility, believing me when I told them that Brida was a sorceress. They were pagans, some of the many English heretics left in the high hills, and they had no idea that the Danes were swarming over England. They lived far from any village, grunted prayers to Thor and Odin, and sheltered us for six weeks and we worked for our keep by chopping wood, helping their ewes give birth and then standing guard over the sheep pens to keep the wolves at bay.

In early spring we moved on. We avoided Hreapandune, for that was where Burghred kept his court, the same court to which the hapless Egbert of Northumbria had fled, and there were many Danes settled around the town. I did not fear Danes, I could talk to them in their own tongue, knew their jests and even liked them, but if word got back to Eoferwic that Uhtred of Bebbanburg still lived then I feared Kjartan would put a reward on my head. So I asked at every settlement about Ealdorman Æthelwulf who had died fighting the Danes at Readingum, and I learned he had lived at a place called Deoraby, but that the Danes had taken his lands, and his younger brother had gone to Cirrenceastre that lay in the far southern parts of Mercia, very close to the West Saxon border, and that was good because the Danes were thickest in Mercia’s north, and so we went to Cirrenceastre and found it was another Roman town, well walled with stone and timber, and that Æthelwulf’s brother, Æthelred, was now Ealdorman and lord of the place.

We arrived when he sat in court and we waited in his hall among the petitioners and oath-takers. We watched as two men were flogged and a third branded on the face and sent into outlawry for cattle-thieving, and then a steward brought us forward, thinking we had come to seek redress for a grievance, and the steward told us to bow, and I refused and the man tried to make me bend at the waist and I struck him in the face, and that got Æthelred’s attention. He was a tall man, well over forty years old, almost hairless except for a huge beard, and as gloomy as Guthrum. When I struck the steward he beckoned to his guards who were lolling at the hall’s edges. ‘Who are you?’ he growled at me.

‘I am the Ealdorman Uhtred,’ I said, and the title stilled the guards and made the steward back nervously away. ‘I am the son of Uhtred of Bebbanburg,’ I went on, ‘and of Æthelgifu, his wife. I am your nephew.’

He stared at me. I must have looked a wreck for I was travel-stained and long-haired and ragged, but I had two swords and monstrous pride. ‘You are Æthelgifu’s boy?’ he asked.

‘Your sister’s son,’ I said, and even then I was not certain this was the right family, but it was, and Ealdorman Æthelred made the sign of the cross in memory of his younger sister, whom he hardly remembered, and waved the guards back to the hall’s sides and asked me what I wanted.

‘Shelter,’ I said, and he nodded grudgingly. I told him I had been a prisoner of the Danes ever since my father’s death, and he accepted that willingly enough, but in truth he was not very interested in me, indeed my arrival was a nuisance for we were two more mouths to feed, but family imposes obligation, and Ealdorman Æthelred met his. He also tried to have me killed.

His lands, which stretched to the River Sæfern in the west, were being raided by Britons from Wales. The Welsh were old enemies, the ones who had tried to stop our ancestors from taking England, indeed their name for England is Lloegyr, which means the Lost Lands, and they were forever raiding or thinking of raiding or singing songs about raiding, and they had a great hero called Arthur who was supposed to be sleeping in his grave and one day he was going to rise up and lead the Welsh to a great victory over the English and so take back the Lost Lands, though so far that has not happened.

About a month after I arrived Æthelred heard that a Welsh war-band had crossed the Sæfern and were taking cattle from his lands near Fromtun and he rode to clear them out. He went westwards with fifty men, but ordered the chief of his household troops, a warrior called Tatwine, to block their retreat near the ancient Roman town of Gleawecestre. He gave Tatwine a force of twenty men that included me. ‘You’re a big lad,’ Æthelred said to me before he left, ‘have you ever fought in a shield wall?’

I hesitated, wanting to lie, but decided that poking a sword between men’s legs at Readingum was not the same thing. ‘No, lord,’ I said.

‘Time you learned. That sword must be good for something, where did you get it?’

‘It was my father’s, lord,’ I lied, for I did not want to explain that I had not been a prisoner of the Danes, nor that the sword had been a gift, for Æthelred would have expected me to give it to him. ‘It is the only thing of my father’s I have,’ I added pathetically, and he grunted, waved me away, and told Tatwine to put me in the shield wall if it came to a fight.

I know that because Tatwine told me so when everything was over. Tatwine was a huge man, as tall as me, with a chest like a blacksmith and thick arms on which he made marks with ink and a needle. The marks were just blotches, but he boasted that each one was a man he had killed in battle, and I once tried to count them, but gave up at thirty-eight. His sleeves hid the rest. He was not happy to have me in his band of warriors, and even less happy when Brida insisted on accompanying me, but I told him she had sworn an oath to my father never to leave my side and that she was a cunning woman who knew spells that would confuse the enemy, and he believed both lies and probably thought that once I was dead his men could have their joy of Brida while he took Serpent-Breath back to Æthelred.

The Welsh had crossed the Sæfern high up, then turned south into the lush water meadows where cattle grew fat. They liked to come in fast and go out fast, before the Mercians could gather forces, but Æthelred had heard of their coming in good time and, as he rode west, Tatwine led us north to the bridge across the Sæfern that was the quickest route home to Wales.

The raiders came straight into that trap. We arrived at the bridge at dusk, slept in a field, were awake before dawn and, just as the sun rose, saw the Welshmen and their stolen cattle coming towards us. They made an effort to ride further north, but their horses were tired, ours were fresh, and they realised there was no escape and so they returned to the bridge. We did the same and, dismounted, formed the shield wall. The Welsh made their wall. There were twenty-eight of them, all savage-looking men with shaggy hair and long beards and tattered coats, but their weapons looked well cared for and their shields were stout.

Tatwine spoke some of their language and he told them that if they surrendered now they would be treated mercifully by his lord. Their only response was to howl at us, and one of them turned around, lowered his breeches, and showed us his dirty backside, which passed as a Welsh insult.

Nothing happened then. They were in their shield wall on the road, and our shield wall blocked the bridge, and they shouted insults and Tatwine forbade our men to shout back, and once or twice it seemed as if the Welsh were going to run to their horses and try to escape by galloping northwards, but every time they hinted at such a move, Tatwine ordered the servants to bring up our horses, and the Welsh understood that we would pursue and overtake them and so they went back to the shield wall and jeered at us for not assaulting them. Tatwine was not such a fool. The Welshmen outnumbered us which meant that they could overlap us, but by staying on the bridge our flanks were protected by its Roman parapets and he wanted them to come at us there. He placed me in the centre of the line, and then stood behind me. I understood later that he was ready to step into my place when I fell. I had an old shield with a loose handle loaned to me by my uncle.

Tatwine again tried to persuade them to surrender, promising that only half of them would be put to death, but as the other half would all lose a hand and an eye, it was not a tempting offer. Still they waited, and might have waited until nightfall had not some local people come along and one of them had a bow and some arrows, and he began shooting at the Welsh who, by now, had been drinking steadily through the morning. Tatwine had given us all some ale, but not much.

I was nervous. More than nervous, I was terrified. I had no armour, while the rest of Tatwine’s men were in mail or good leather. Tatwine had a helmet, I had hair. I expected to die, but I remembered my lessons and slung Serpent-Breath on my back, strapping her sword belt around my throat. A sword is much quicker to draw over the shoulder, and I expected to begin the fight with Wasp-Sting. My throat was dry, a muscle in my right leg quivered, my belly felt sour, but entwined with that fear was excitement. This was what life had led to, a shield wall, and if I survived this then I would be a warrior.

The arrows flew one after the other, mostly thumping into shields, but one lucky shaft slid past a shield and sank into a man’s chest and he fell back, and suddenly the Welsh leader lost patience and gave a great scream. And they charged.

It was a small shield wall, not a great battle. A cattle skirmish, not a clash of armies, but it was my first shield wall, and I instinctively rattled my shield against my neighbours’ shields, to make sure they touched, and I lowered Wasp-Sting, meaning to bring her up under the rim, and I crouched slightly to receive the charge, and the Welsh were howling like madmen, a noise meant to scare us, but I was too intent on doing what I had been taught to be distracted by the howls.

‘Now!’ Tatwine shouted and we all lunged our shields forward and there was a blow on mine like Ealdwulf’s hammer thumping the anvil, and I was aware of an axe swinging overhead to split my skull and I ducked, raising the shield, and stabbed Wasp-Sting up into the man’s groin. She went smooth and true, just as Toki had taught me, and that groin-stroke is a wicked blow, one of the killer strikes, and the man screamed a terrible scream, just like a woman in childbirth, and the short sword was stuck in his body, blood pouring down her hilt and the axe tumbled down my back as I straightened. I drew Serpent-Breath across my left shoulder and swung at the man attacking my right-hand neighbour. It was a good stroke, straight into the skull, and I ripped her back, letting Ealdwulf’s edge do its work, and the man with Wasp-Sting in his crotch was under my feet so I stamped on his face. I was shouting now, shouting in Danish, shouting their deaths, and it was all suddenly easy, and I stepped over my first victim to finish off the second, and that meant I had broken our shield wall, which did not matter because Tatwine was there to guard the space. I was in the Welsh space now, but with two dead men beside me, and a third man turned on me, sword coming in a great scything stroke that I met with the shield boss and, as he tried to cover his body with his own shield, I lunged Serpent-Breath into his throat, ripped her out, swung her all the way around and she clanged against a shield behind me, and I turned, all savagery and anger now, and I charged a fourth man, throwing him down with my weight, and he began to shout for mercy and received none.

The joy of it. The sword joy. I was dancing with joy, joy seething in me, the battle joy that Ragnar had so often spoken of, the warrior joy. If a man has not known it, then he is no man. It was no battle, that, no proper slaughter, just a thief-killing, but it was my first fight and the gods had moved in me, had given my arm speed and my shield strength, and when it was done, and when I danced in the blood of the dead, I knew I was good. Knew I was more than good. I could have conquered the world at that moment and my only regret was that Ragnar had not seen me, but then I thought he might be watching from Valhalla and I raised Serpent-Breath to the clouds and shouted his name. I have seen other young men come from their first fights with that same joy, and I have buried them after their next battle. The young are fools and I was young. But I was good.

The cattle thieves were finished. Twelve were dead or so badly wounded as to be near death and the others had fled. We caught them easily enough and, one by one, we killed them, and afterwards I went back to the man whose shield had kissed mine when the walls clashed and I had to put my right foot into his bloody crotch to drag Wasp-Sting free of his clinging flesh, and at that moment all I wanted was more enemies to kill.

‘Where did you learn to fight, boy?’ Tatwine asked me.

I turned on him as though he were an enemy, pride flaring in my face and Wasp-Sting twitching as if she were hungry for blood. ‘I am an Ealdorman of Northumbria,’ I told him.

He paused, wary of me, then nodded. ‘Yes, lord,’ he said, then reached forward and felt the muscles of my right arm. ‘Where did you learn to fight?’ he asked, leaving off the insulting ‘boy’.

‘I watched the Danes.’

‘Watched,’ he said tonelessly. He looked into my eyes, then grinned and embraced me. ‘God love me,’ he said, ‘but you’re a savage one. Your first shield wall?’

‘My first,’ I admitted.

‘But not your last, I dare say, not your last.’

He was right about that.

I have sounded immodest, but I have told the truth. These days I employ poets to sing my praises, but only because that is what a lord is supposed to do, though I often wonder why a man should get paid for mere words. These word-stringers make nothing, grow nothing, kill no enemies, catch no fish and raise no cattle. They just take silver in exchange for words, which are free anyway. It is a clever trick, but in truth they are about as much use as priests.

I did fight well, that is no lie, but I had spent my growing years dreaming of little else, and I was young, and the young are reckless in battle, and I was strong and quick, and the enemy were tired. We left their severed heads on the bridge parapets as a greeting for other Britons coming to visit their Lost Lands, then we rode south to meet Æthelred who was doubtless disappointed to find me alive and still hungry, but he accepted Tatwine’s verdict that I could be useful as a fighter.

Not that there would be much battle, except against outlaws and cattle thieves. Æthelred would have liked to fight the Danes because he fretted under their rule, but he feared their revenge and so took care not to offend them. That was easy enough, for Danish rule was light in our part of Mercia, but every few weeks some Danes would come to Cirrenceastre and demand cattle or food or silver and he had little choice but to pay. In truth he did not look north to the impotent King Burghred as his lord, but south to Wessex, and had I possessed any intelligence in those days I would have understood that Alfred was extending his influence over those southern parts of Mercia. The influence was not obvious, no West Saxon soldiers patrolled the country, but Alfred’s messengers were forever riding and talking to the chief men, persuading them to bring their warriors south if the Danes attacked Wessex again.

I should have been wary of those West Saxon envoys, but I was too caught up in the intrigues of Æthelred’s household to pay them any notice. The Ealdorman did not like me much, but his eldest son, also called Æthelred, detested me. He was a year younger than I, but very conscious of his dignity and a great hater of the Danes. He was also a great hater of Brida, mainly because he tried to hump her and got a knee in the groin for his trouble, and after that she was put to work in Ealdorman Æthelred’s kitchens and she warned me, the very first day, not to touch the gruel. I did not, but the rest of the table all suffered from liquid bowels for the next two days thanks to the elderberries and iris root she had added to the pot. The younger Æthelred and I were forever quarrelling, though he was more careful after I beat him with my fists the day I found him whipping Brida’s dog.

I was a nuisance to my uncle. I was too young, too big, too loud, too proud, too undisciplined, but I was also a family member and a lord, and so Ealdorman Æthelred endured me and was happy to let me chase Welsh raiders with Tatwine. We almost always failed to catch them.

I came back from one such pursuit late at night and let a servant rub down the horse while I went to find food and instead, of all people, discovered Father Willibald in the hall where he was sitting close to the embers of the fire. I did not recognise him at first, nor did he know me when I walked in all sweaty with a leather coat, long boots, a shield and two swords. I just saw a figure by the fire. ‘Anything to eat there?’ I asked, hoping I would not have to light a tallow candle and grope through the servants sleeping in the kitchen.

‘Uhtred,’ he said, and I turned and peered through the gloom. Then he whistled like a blackbird and I recognised him. ‘Is that Brida with you?’ the young priest asked.

She was also in leather, with a Welsh sword strapped to her waist. Nihtgenga ran to Willibald, whom he had never met, and allowed himself to be stroked. Tatwine and the other warriors all tramped in, but Willibald ignored them. ‘I hope you’re well, Uhtred?’

‘I’m well, father,’ I said, ‘and you?’

‘I’m very well,’ he said.

He smiled, obviously wanting me to ask why he had come to Æthelred’s hall, but I pretended to be uninterested. ‘You didn’t get into trouble for losing us?’ I asked him instead.

‘The Lady Ælswith was very angry,’ he admitted, ‘but Alfred seemed not to mind. He did chide Father Beocca though.’

‘Beocca? Why?’

‘Because Beocca had persuaded him you wanted to escape the Danes, and Beocca was wrong. Still, no harm done.’ He smiled. ‘And now Alfred has sent me to find you.’

I squatted close to him. It was late summer, but the night was surprisingly chill so I threw another log onto the fire so that sparks flew up and a puff of smoke drifted into the high beams. ‘Alfred sent you,’ I said flatly. ‘He still wants to teach me to read?’

‘He wants to see you, lord.’

I looked at him suspiciously. I called myself a lord, and so I was by birthright, but I was well imbued with the Danish idea that lordship was earned, not given, and I had not earned it yet. Still, Willibald was showing respect. ‘Why does he want to see me?’ I asked.

‘He would talk with you,’ Willibald said, ‘and when the talk is done you are free to come back here or, indeed, go anywhere else you wish.’

Brida brought me some hard bread and cheese. I ate, thinking. ‘What does he want to talk to me about?’ I asked Willibald, ‘God?’

The priest sighed. ‘Alfred has been king for two years, Uhtred, and in those years he has had only two things on his mind. God and the Danes, but I think he knows you cannot help him with the first.’ I smiled. Æthelred’s hounds had woken as Tatwine and his men settled on the high platforms where they would sleep. One of the hounds came to me, hoping for food and I stroked his rough fur and I thought how Ragnar had loved his hounds. Ragnar was in Valhalla now, feasting and roaring and fighting and whoring and drinking, and I hoped there were hounds in the Northmen’s heaven, and boars the size of oxen, and spears sharp as razors. ‘There is only one condition attached to your journey,’ Willibald went on, ‘and that is that Brida is not to come.’

‘Brida’s not to come, eh?’ I repeated.

‘The Lady Ælswith insists on it,’ Willibald said.

‘Insists?’

‘She has a son now,’ Willibald said, ‘God be praised, a fine boy called Edward.’

‘If I were Alfred,’ I said, ‘I’d keep her busy too.’

Willibald smiled. ‘So will you come?’

I touched Brida, who had settled beside me. ‘We’ll come,’ I promised him, and Willibald shook his head at my obstinacy, but did not try to persuade me to leave Brida behind.

Why did I go? Because I was bored. Because my cousin Æthelred disliked me. Because Willibald’s words had suggested that Alfred did not want me to become a scholar, but a warrior. I went because fate determines our lives.

We left in the morning. It was a late summer’s day, a soft rain falling on trees heavy with leaf. At first we rode through Æthelred’s fields, thick with rye and barley and loud with the rattling noise of corncrakes, but after a few miles we were in the wasteland that was the frontier region between Wessex and Mercia. There had been a time when these fields were fertile, when the villages were full and sheep roamed the higher hills, but the Danes had ravaged the area in the summer after their defeat at Æsc’s Hill, and few men had come back to settle the land. Alfred, I knew, wanted folk to come here to plant crops and rear cattle, but the Danes had threatened to kill any man who used the land for they knew as well as Alfred that such men would look to Wessex for protection, that they would become West Saxons and increase the strength of Wessex, and Wessex, as far as the Danes were concerned, existed only because they had yet to take it.

Yet that land was not entirely deserted. A few folk still lived in the villages, and the woods were full of outlaws. We saw none, and that was good for we still had a fair amount of Ragnar’s hoard that Brida carried. Each coin was now wrapped in a scrap of rag so that the frayed leather bag did not clink as she moved.

By day’s end we were well south of that region and into Wessex and the fields were lush again and the villages full. No wonder the Danes yearned for this land.

Alfred was at Wintanceaster, which was the West Saxon capital and a fine town in a rich countryside. The Romans had made Wintanceaster, of course, and Alfred’s palace was mostly Roman, though his father had added a great hall with beautifully carved beams, and Alfred was building a church that was even bigger than the hall, making its walls from stone that were covered with a spider’s web of timber scaffolding when I arrived. There was a market beside the new building and I remember thinking how odd it was to see so many folk without a single Dane among them. The Danes looked like us, but when Danes walked through a market in northern England the crowds parted, men bowed, and there was a hint of fear. None here. Women haggled over apples and bread and cheese and fish, and the only language I heard was the raw accents of Wessex.

Brida and I were given quarters in the Roman part of the palace. No one tried to part us this time. We had a small room, limewashed, with a straw mattress, and Willibald said we should wait there, and we did until we got bored with waiting, after which we explored the palace, finding it full of priests and monks. They looked at us strangely, for both of us wore arm rings cut with Danish runes. I was a fool in those days, a clumsy fool, and did not have the courtesy to take the arm rings off. True, some English wore them, especially the warriors, but not in Alfred’s palace. There were plenty of warriors in his household, many of them the great Ealdormen who were Alfred’s courtiers, led his retainers and were rewarded by land, but such men were far outnumbered by priests, and only a handful of men, the trusted bodyguard of the king’s household, were permitted to carry weapons in the palace. In truth it was more like a monastery than a king’s court. In one room there were a dozen monks copying books, their pens scratching busily, and there were three chapels, one of them beside a courtyard that was full of flowers. It was beautiful, that courtyard, buzzing with bees and thick with fragrance. Nihtgenga was just pissing on one of the flowering bushes when a voice spoke behind us. ‘The Romans made the courtyard.’

I turned and saw Alfred. I went on one knee, as a man should when he sees a king, and he waved me up. He was wearing woollen breeches, long boots and a simple linen shirt, and he had no escort, neither guard nor priest. His right sleeve was ink-stained. ‘You are welcome, Uhtred,’ he said.

‘Thank you, lord,’ I said, wondering where his entourage was. I had never seen him without a slew of priests within fawning distance, but he was quite alone that day.

‘And Brida,’ he said, ‘is that your dog?’

‘He is,’ she said defiantly.

‘He looks a fine beast. Come,’ he ushered us through a door into what was evidently his own private chamber. It had a tall desk at which he could stand and write. The desk had four candleholders, though as it was daylight the candles were not lit. A small table held a bowl of water so he could wash the ink off his hands. There was a low bed covered in sheepskins, a stool on which were piled six books and a sheaf of parchments, and a low altar on which was an ivory crucifix and two jewelled reliquaries. The remains of a meal were on the window ledge. He moved the plates, bent to kiss the altar, then sat on the ledge and began sharpening some quills for writing. ‘It is kind of you to come,’ he said mildly. ‘I was going to talk with you after supper tonight, but I saw you in the garden, so thought we could talk now.’ He smiled and I, lout that I was, scowled. Brida squatted by the door with Nihtgenga close to her.

‘Ealdorman Æthelred tells me you are a considerable warrior, Uhtred,’ Alfred said.

‘I’ve been lucky, lord.’

‘Luck is good, or so my own warriors tell me. I have not yet worked out a theology of luck, and perhaps I never will. Can there be luck if God disposes?’ He frowned at me for a few heartbeats, evidently thinking about the apparent contradiction, but then dismissed the problem as an amusement for another day. ‘So I suppose I was wrong to try and encourage you to the priesthood?’

‘There’s nothing wrong with encouragement, lord,’ I said, ‘but I had no wish to be a priest.’

‘So you ran away from me. Why?’

I think he expected me to be embarrassed and to evade his question, but I told him the truth. ‘I went back to fetch my sword,’ I told him. I wished I had Serpent-Breath at that moment, because I hated being without her, but the palace doorkeeper had insisted I give up all my weapons, even the small knife I used for eating.

He nodded seriously, as if that were a good reason. ‘It’s a special sword?’

‘The best in the world, lord.’

He smiled at that, recognising a boy’s misplaced enthusiasm. ‘So you went back to Earl Ragnar?’

I nodded this time, but said nothing.

‘Who did not hold you prisoner, Uhtred,’ he said sternly, ‘indeed he never did, did he? He treated you like a son.’

‘I loved him,’ I blurted out.

He stared at me and I became uncomfortable under his gaze. He had very light eyes that gave you the sense of being judged. ‘Yet in Eoferwic,’ Alfred went on mildly, ‘they are saying you killed him.’

Now it was my time to stare at him. I was angry, confused, astonished and surprised, so confused that I did not know what to say. But why was I so surprised? What else would Kjartan claim? Except, I thought, Kjartan must have thought me dead, or I hoped he thought me dead.

‘They lie,’ Brida said flatly.

‘Do they?’ Alfred asked me, still in a mild voice.

‘They lie,’ I said angrily.

‘I never doubted it,’ he said. He put down his quills and knife and leaned over to the heap of stiff parchments that rested on his pile of books and sifted through them until he found the one he was looking for. He read for a few moments. ‘Kjartan? Is that how it is pronounced?’

‘Kjartan,’ I corrected him, making the ‘j’ sound like a ‘y’.

‘Earl Kjartan now,’ Alfred said, ‘and reckoned to be a great lord. Owner of four ships.’

‘That’s all written down?’ I asked.

‘Whatever I discover of my enemies is written down,’ Alfred said, ‘which is why you are here. To tell me more. Did you know Ivar the Boneless is dead?’

My hand instinctively went to Thor’s hammer, which I wore under my jerkin. ‘No. Dead?’ It astonished me. Such was my awe of Ivar that I suppose I had thought he would live for ever, but Alfred spoke the truth. Ivar the Boneless was dead.

‘He was killed fighting against the Irish,’ Alfred said, ‘and Ragnar’s son has returned to Northumbria with his men. Will he fight Kjartan?’

‘If he knows Kjartan killed his father,’ I said, ‘he’ll disembowel him.’

‘Earl Kjartan has sworn an oath of innocence in the matter,’ Alfred said.

‘Then he lies.’

‘He’s a Dane,’ Alfred said, ‘and the truth is not in them.’ He gave me a sharp look, doubtless for the many lies I had fed him over the years. He stood then and paced the small room. He had said that I was there to tell him about the Danes, but in the next few moments he was the one who did the telling. King Burghred of Mercia, he said, was tired of his Danish overlords and had decided to flee to Rome.

‘Rome?’

‘I was taken there twice as a child,’ he said, ‘and I remember the city as a very untidy place,’ that was said very sternly, ‘but a man feels close to God there, so it is a good place to pray. Burghred is a weak man, but he did his small best to alleviate Danish rule, and once he is gone then we can expect the Danes to fill his land. They will be on our frontier. They will be in Cirrenceastre.’ He looked at me. ‘Kjartan knows you’re alive.’

‘He does?’

‘Of course he does. The Danes have spies, just as we do.’ And Alfred’s spies, I realised, had to be efficient for he knew so much. ‘Does Kjartan care about your life?’ he went on. ‘If you tell the truth about Ragnar’s death, Uhtred, then he does care because you can contradict his lies and if Ragnar learns that truth from you then Kjartan will certainly fear for his life. It is in Kjartan’s interest, therefore, to kill you. I tell you this only so that you may consider whether you wish to return to Cirrenceastre where the Danes have,’ he paused, ‘influence. You will be safer in Wessex, but how long will Wessex last?’ He evidently did not expect an answer, but kept pacing. ‘Ubba has sent men to Mercia, which suggests he will follow. Have you met Ubba?’

‘Many times.’

‘Tell me of him.’

I told him what I knew, told him that Ubba was a great warrior, though very superstitious and that intrigued Alfred who wanted to know all about Storri the sorcerer and about the runesticks, and I told him how Ubba never picked battles for the joy of fighting, but only when the runes said he could win, but that once he fought he did so with a terrible savagery. Alfred wrote it all down, then asked if I had met Halfdan, the youngest brother, and I said I had, but very briefly.

‘Halfdan speaks of avenging Ivar,’ Alfred said, ‘so it’s possible he will not come back to Wessex. Not soon, anyway. But even with Halfdan in Ireland there will be plenty of pagans left to attack us.’ He explained how he had anticipated an attack this year, but the Danes had been disorganised and he did not expect that to last. ‘They will come next year,’ he said, ‘and we think Ubba will lead them.’

‘Or Guthrum,’ I said.

‘I had not forgotten him. He is in East Anglia now.’ He glanced reproachfully at Brida, remembering her tales of Edmund. Brida, quite unworried, just watched him with half-closed eyes. He looked back to me. ‘What do you know of Guthrum?’

Again I talked and again he wrote. He was intrigued about the bone in Guthrum’s hair, and shuddered when I repeated Guthrum’s insistence that every Englishman be killed. ‘A harder job than he thinks,’ Alfred said drily. He laid the pen down and began pacing again. ‘There are different kinds of men,’ he said, ‘and some are to be more feared than others. I feared Ivar the Boneless, for he was cold and thought carefully. Ubba? I don’t know, but I suspect he is dangerous. Halfdan? A brave fool, but with no thoughts in his head. Guthrum? He is the least to be feared.’

‘The least?’ I sounded dubious. Guthrum might be called the Unlucky, but he was a considerable chieftain and led a large force of warriors.

‘He thinks with his heart, Uhtred,’ Alfred said, ‘not his head. You can change a man’s heart, but not his head.’ I remember staring at Alfred then, thinking that he spouted foolishness like a horse pissing, but he was right. Or almost right because he tried to change me, but never succeeded.

A bee drifted through the door, Nihtgenga snapped impotently at it and the bee droned out again. ‘But Guthrum will attack us?’ Alfred asked.

‘He wants to split you,’ I said. ‘One army by land, another by sea, and the Britons from Wales.’

Alfred looked at me gravely. ‘How do you know that?’

So I told him about Guthrum’s visit to Ragnar and the long conversation which I had witnessed, and Alfred’s pen scratched, little flecks of ink spattering from the quill at rough spots on the parchment. ‘What this suggests,’ he spoke as he wrote, ‘is that Ubba will come from Mercia by land and Guthrum by sea from East Anglia.’ He was wrong about that, but it seemed likely at the time. ‘How many ships can Guthrum bring?’

I had no idea. ‘Seventy?’ I suggested, ‘a hundred?’

‘Far more than that,’ Alfred said severely, ‘and I cannot build even twenty ships to oppose them. Have you sailed, Uhtred?’

‘Many times.’

‘With the Danes?’ he asked pedantically.

‘With the Danes,’ I confirmed.

‘What I would like you to do,’ he said, but at that moment a bell tolled somewhere in the palace and he immediately broke off from what he was saying. ‘Prayers,’ he said, putting down his quill, ‘you will come.’ It was not a question, but a command.

‘I have things to do,’ I said, waited a heartbeat, ‘lord.’

He blinked at me in surprise for he was not used to men opposing his wishes, especially when it came to saying prayers, but I kept a stubborn face and he did not force the issue. There was the slap of sandalled feet on the paved path outside his chamber and he dismissed us as he hurried to join the monks going to their service. A moment later the drone of a chant began, and Brida and I abandoned the palace, going into the town where we discovered a tavern that sold decent ale. I had been offered none by Alfred. The folk there were suspicious of us, partly because of the arm rings with their Danish runes, and partly because of our strange accents, mine from the north and Brida’s from the east, but a sliver of our silver was weighed and trusted, and the wary atmosphere subsided when Father Beocca came in, saw us, and raised his inky hands in welcome. ‘I have been searching high and low for you,’ he said, ‘Alfred wanted you.’

‘He wanted to pray,’ I said.

‘He would have you eat with him.’

I drank some ale. ‘If I live to be a hundred, father,’ I began.

‘I pray you live longer than that,’ Beocca said, ‘I pray you live as long as Methuselah.’

I wondered who that was. ‘If I live to be a hundred,’ I said again, ‘I hope never to eat with Alfred again.’

He shook his head sadly, but agreed to sit with us and take a pot of ale. He reached over and pulled at the leather thong half hidden by my jerkin and so revealed the hammer. He tutted. ‘You lied to me, Uhtred,’ he said sadly. ‘When you ran away from Father Willibald we made enquiries. You were never a prisoner! You were treated as a son!’

‘I was,’ I agreed.

‘But why did you not come to us then? Why did you stay with the Danes?’

I smiled. ‘What would I have learned here?’ I asked. He began to answer, but I stilled him. ‘You would have made me a scholar, father,’ I said, ‘and the Danes made me a warrior. And you will need warriors when they come back.’

Beocca understood that, but he was still sad. He looked at Brida. ‘And you, young lady, I hope you did not lie?’

‘I always tell the truth, father,’ she said in a small voice, ‘always.’

‘That is good,’ he said, then reached over again to hide my amulet. ‘Are you a Christian, Uhtred?’ he asked.

‘You baptised me yourself, father,’ I said evasively.

‘We will not defeat the Danes unless we hold the faith,’ he said earnestly, then smiled, ‘but will you do what Alfred wants?’

‘I don’t know what he wants. He ran off to wear out his knees before he could tell me.’

‘He wants you to serve on one of the ships he’s building,’ he said. I just gaped at him. ‘We’re building ships, Uhtred,’ Beocca went on enthusiastically, ‘ships to fight the Danes, but our sailors are not fighters. They’re, well, sailors! And they’re fishermen, of course, and traders, but we need men who can teach them what the Danes do. Their ships raid our shores incessantly. Two ships come? Three ships? Sometimes more. They land, burn, kill, take slaves and vanish. But with ships we can fight them.’ He punched his withered left hand with his right and winced with the pain. ‘That’s what Alfred wants.’

I glanced at Brida who gave a small shrug as if to say that she thought Beocca was telling the truth.

I thought of the two Æthelreds, younger and older, and their dislike of me. I remembered the joy of a ship on the seas, of the wind tearing at the rigging, of the oars bending and flashing back the sun, of the songs of the rowers, of the heartbeat of the steering-oar, of the seethe of the long green water against the hull. ‘Of course I’ll do it,’ I said.

‘Praise God,’ Beocca said. And why not?

I met Æthelflaed before I left Wintanceaster. She was three or four years old, I suppose, and full of words. She had bright gold hair. She was playing in the garden outside Alfred’s study and I remember she had a rag doll and Alfred played with her and Ælswith worried he was making her too excited. I remember her laugh. She never lost that laugh. Alfred was good with her for he loved his children. Most of the time he was solemn, pious and very self-disciplined, but with small children he became playful and I almost liked him as he teased Æthelflaed by hiding her rag doll behind his back. I also remember how Æthelflaed ran over to Nihtgenga and fondled him and Ælswith called her back. ‘Dirty dog,’ she told her daughter, ‘you’ll get fleas or worse. Come here!’ She gave Brida a very sour look and muttered, ‘Scrætte!’ That means prostitute and Brida pretended not to have heard, as did Alfred. Ælswith ignored me, but I did not mind because Alfred had summoned a palace slave who laid a helmet and a mail coat on the grass. ‘For you, Uhtred,’ Alfred said.

The helmet was bright iron, dented on the crown by the blow of a weapon, polished with sand and vinegar, and with a face-piece in which two eyeholes stared like the pits of a skull. The mail was good, though it had been pierced by a spear or sword where the owner’s heart had been, but it had been expertly repaired by a good smith and it was worth many pieces of silver. ‘They were both taken from a Dane at Æsc’s Hill,’ Alfred told me. Ælswith watched disapprovingly.

‘Lord,’ I said, and went on one knee and kissed his hand.

‘A year’s service,’ he said, ‘is all I ask of you.’

‘You have it, lord,’ I said, and sealed that promise with another kiss on his ink-stained knuckles.

I was dazzled. The two pieces of armour were rare and valuable, and I had done nothing to deserve such generosity, unless to behave boorishly is to deserve favours. And Alfred had been generous, though a lord should be generous. That is what a lord is, a giver of rings, and a lord who does not distribute wealth is a lord who will lose the allegiance of his men, yet even so I had not earned the gifts, though I was grateful for them. I was dazzled by them and, for a moment, I thought Alfred a great and good and admirable man.

I should have thought a moment longer. He was generous, of course, but Alfred, unlike his wife, was never grudging with gifts, but why give such valuable armour to a half-fledged youth? Because I was useful to him. Not very useful, but still of use. Alfred sometimes played chess, a game for which I have small patience, but in chess there are pieces of great value and pieces of little worth, and I was one of those. The pieces of great value were the lords of Mercia who, if he could bind them to him, would help Wessex fight the Danes, but he was already looking beyond Mercia into East Anglia and Northumbria and he had no Northumbrian lords in exile except me, and he foresaw a time when he would need a Northumbrian to persuade the northern folk to accept a southern king. If I had been really valuable, if I could have brought him the allegiance of folk nearer his frontier, then he would have given me a noble West Saxon wife, for a woman of high birth is the greatest gift a lord can bestow, but a helmet and a coat of mail were sufficient for the distant idea of Northumbria. I doubt he thought I could deliver that country to him, but he did see that one day I might be useful in its delivery and so he bound me to him with gifts and made the bonds acceptable with flattery. ‘None of my men has fought on shipboard,’ he told me, ‘so they must learn. You might be young, Uhtred, but you have experience which means you know more than they do. So go and teach them.’

Me? Know more than his men? I had sailed in Wind-Viper, that was all, but I had never fought from a ship, though I was not going to tell Alfred that. Instead I accepted his gifts and went south to the coast, and thus he had tucked away a pawn that might one day be useful. To Alfred, of course, the most valuable pieces on the board were his bishops who were supposed to pray the Danes out of England, and no bishop ever went unfed in Wessex, but I could not complain for I had a coat of mail, a helmet of iron, and looked like a warrior. Alfred loaned us horses for our journey and he sent Father Willibald with us, not as a guardian this time, but because he insisted that his new ships’ crews must have a priest to look after their spiritual needs. Poor Willibald. He used to get sick as a dog every time a ripple touched a ship, but he never abandoned his responsibilities, especially towards me. If prayers could make a man into a Christian then I would be a saint ten times over by now.

Destiny is all. And now, looking back, I see the pattern of my life’s journey. It began in Bebbanburg and took me south, ever southwards, until I reached the farthest coast of England and could go no further and still hear my own language. That was my childhood’s journey. As a man I have gone the other way, ever northwards, carrying sword and spear and axe to clear the path back to where I began. Destiny. The spinners favour me, or at least they have spared me, and for a time they made me a sailor.

I took my mail coat and helmet in the year 874, the same year that King Burghred fled to Rome, and Alfred expected Guthrum to come in the following spring, but he did not, nor in the summer, and so Wessex was spared an invasion in 875. Guthrum should have come, but he was a cautious man, ever expecting the worst, and he spent a full eighteen months raising the greatest army of Danes that had ever been seen in England. It dwarfed the Great Army that had marched to Readingum, and it was an army that should have finished Wessex and granted Guthrum’s dream of slaughtering the last Englishman in England. Guthrum’s host did come in time and when that time came the three spinners cut England’s threads one by one until she dangled by a wisp, but that story must wait and I mention it now only to explain why we were given time to prepare ourselves.

And I was given to Heahengel. So help me, that was the ship’s name. It means Archangel. She was not mine, of course, she had a shipmaster called Werferth who had commanded a tubby boat that had traded across the sea before he was persuaded to steer Heahengel, and her warriors were led by a grim old beast called Leofric. And me? I was the turd in the butter-churn.

I was not needed. All Alfred’s flattering words about me teaching his sailors how to fight were just that, mere words. But he had persuaded me to join his fleet, and I had promised him a year, and here I was in Hamtun which was a fine port at the head of a long arm of the sea. Alfred had ordered twelve ships made, and their maker was a shipwright who had been an oarsman on a Danish boat before escaping in Frankia and making his way back to England. There was not much about ship fighting that he did not know, and nothing I could teach anyone, but ship fighting is a very simple affair. A ship is a scrap of land afloat. So a ship fight is a land fight at sea. Bang your boat alongside the enemy, make a shield wall, and kill the other crew. But our shipwright, who was a cunning man, had worked out that a larger ship gave its crew an advantage because it could hold more men and its sides, being higher, would serve as a wall, and so he had built twelve big ships which at first looked odd to me for they had no beast-heads at their prows or sterns, though they did all have crucifixes nailed to their masts. The whole fleet was commanded by Ealdorman Hacca, who was brother to the Ealdorman of Hamptonscir, and the only thing he said when I arrived was to advise me to wrap my mail coat in an oiled sack so it would not rust. After that he gave me to Leofric.

‘Show me your hands,’ Leofric ordered. I did and he sneered. ‘You’ll have blisters soon, Earsling.’

That was his favourite word, earsling. It means arseling. That was me, though sometimes he called me Endwerc, which means a pain in the arse, and he made me an oarsman, one of the sixteen on the bæcbord, which is the left-hand side of the ship as you look forward. The other side is the steorbord, for it is on that side that the steering oar is rigged. We had sixty warriors aboard, thirty-two rowed at a time unless the sail could be hoisted, and we had Werferth at the steering oar and Leofric snarling up and down telling us to pull harder.

All autumn and winter we rowed up and down Hamtun’s wide channel and beyond in the Solente, which is the sea south of the island called Wiht, and we fought the tide and wind, hammering Heahengel through short, cold waves until we had become a crew and could make her leap across the sea and, to my surprise, I found that Heahengel was a fast ship. I had thought that, being so much bigger, she would be slower than the Danish ships, but she was fast, very fast, and Leofric was turning her into a lethal weapon.

He did not like me and though he called me Earsling and Endwerc I did not face him down because I would have died. He was a short, wide man, muscled like an ox, with a scarred face, a quick temper and a sword so battered that its blade was slim as a knife. Not that he cared, for his preferred weapon was the axe. He knew I was an Ealdorman, but did not care, nor did he care that I had once served on a Danish boat. ‘The only thing the Danes can teach us, Earsling,’ he told me, ‘is how to die.’

He did not like me, but I liked him. At night, when we filled one of Hamtun’s taverns, I would sit near him to listen to his few words which were usually scornful, even about our own ships. ‘Twelve,’ he snarled, ‘and how many can the Danes bring?’

No one answered.

‘Two hundred?’ he suggested. ‘And we have twelve?’

Brida beguiled him one night into talking about his fights, all of them ashore, and he talked of Æsc’s Hill, how the Danish shield wall had been broken by a man with an axe, and it was obviously Leofric himself who had done that, and he told how the man had held the axe halfway up its shaft because that made it quicker to recover from the blow, though it diminished the force of the weapon, and how the man had used his shield to hold off the enemy on his left, killed the one in front then the one to the right, and then had slipped his hand down the axe handle to start swinging it in terrible, flashing strokes that carved through the Danish lines. He saw me listening and gave me his usual sneer. ‘Been in a shield wall, Earsling?’

I held up one finger.

‘He broke the enemy shield wall,’ Brida said. She and I lived in the tavern stables and Leofric liked Brida though he refused to allow her on board Heahengel because he reckoned a woman brought ill-luck to a ship. ‘He broke the wall,’ Brida said, ‘I saw it.’

He gazed at me, not sure whether to believe her. I said nothing. ‘Who were you fighting,’ he asked after a pause, ‘nuns?’

‘Welshmen,’ Brida said.

‘Oh, Welshmen! Hell, they die easy,’ he said, which was not true, but it let him keep his scorn of me, and next day, when we had a practice fight with wooden staves instead of real weapons, he made sure he opposed me and he beat me to the ground as if I were a yapping dog, opening a cut on my skull and leaving me dazed. ‘I’m not a Welshman, Earsling,’ he said. I liked Leofric a lot.

The year turned. I became eighteen years old. The great Danish army did not come, but their ships did. The Danes were being Vikings again, and their dragon ships came in ones and twos to harry the West Saxon coast, to raid and to rape and to burn and to kill, but this year Alfred had his own ships ready.

So we went to sea.

Eight

We spent the spring, summer and autumn of the year 875 rowing up and down Wessex’s south coast. We were divided into four flotillas, and Leofric commanded Heahengel, Ceruphin and Cristenlic which meant Archangel, Cherubim and Christian. Alfred had chosen the names. Hacca, who led the whole fleet, sailed in the Evangelista which soon acquired the reputation of being an unlucky ship, though her real ill fortune was to have Hacca on board. He was a nice enough man, generous with his silver, but he hated ships, hated the sea, and wanted nothing more than to be a warrior on dry land, which meant that Evangelista was always on Hamtun’s hard undergoing repairs.

But not the Heahengel. I tugged that oar till my body ached and my hands were hard as oak, but the rowing put muscle on me, so much muscle. I was big now, big, tall and strong, and cocky and belligerent as well. I wanted nothing more than to try Heahengel against some Danish ship, yet our first encounter was a disaster. We were off the coast of Suth Seaxa, a marvellous coast of rearing white cliffs, and Ceruphin and Cristenlic had gone far out to sea while we slid inshore hoping to attract a Viking ship that would pursue us into an ambush sprung by the other two craft. The trap worked, only the Viking was better than us. He was smaller, much smaller, and we pursued him against the falling tide, gaining on him with every dip of our oars, but then he saw Ceruphin and Cristenlic slamming in from the south, their oar blades flashing back the sunlight and their bow waves seething white, and the Danish shipmaster turned his craft as if she had been mounted on a spindle and, with the strong tide now helping him, dashed back at us.

‘Turn into him!’ Leofric roared at Werferth who was at the steering oar, but instead Werferth turned away, not wanting to bring on a collision, and I saw the oars of the Danish ship slide into their holes as she neared us and then she ran down our steorbord flank, snapping our oars one by one, the impact throwing the oar shafts back into our rowers with enough force to break some men’s ribs, and then the Danish archers, they had four or five aboard, began loosing their arrows. One went into Werferth’s neck and there was blood pouring down the steering deck and Leofric was bellowing in impotent rage as the Danes, oars slid out again, sped safely away down the fast ebbing tide. They jeered as we wallowed in the waves.

‘Have you steered a boat, Earsling?’ Leofric asked me, pulling the dying Werferth aside.

‘Yes.’

‘Then steer this one.’ We limped home with only half our proper oars, and we learned two lessons. One was to carry spare oars and the second was to carry archers, except that Ealdorman Freola, who commanded the fyrd of Hamptonscir, said he could spare no bowmen, that he had too few as it was, and that the ships had already consumed too many of his other warriors, and besides, he said, we should not need archers. Hacca, his brother, told us not to make a fuss. ‘Just throw spears,’ he advised Leofric.

‘I want archers,’ Leofric insisted.

‘There are none!’ Hacca said, spreading his hands.

Father Willibald wanted to write a letter to Alfred. ‘He will listen to me,’ he said.

‘So you write to him,’ Leofric said sourly, ‘and what happens then?’

‘He will send archers, of course!’ Father Willibald said brightly.

‘The letter,’ Leofric said, ‘goes to his damn clerks, who are all priests, and they put it in a pile, and the pile gets read slowly, and when Alfred finally sees it he asks for advice, and two damned bishops have their say, and Alfred writes back wanting to know more, and by then it’s Candlemas and we’re all dead with Danish arrows in our backs.’ He glared at Willibald and I began to like Leofric even more. He saw me grinning. ‘What’s so funny, Endwerc?’ he demanded.

‘I can get you archers,’ I said.

‘How?’

With one piece of Ragnar’s gold, which we displayed in Hamtun’s marketplace and said that the gold coin, with its weird writing, would go to the best archer to win a competition that would be held one week hence. That coin was worth more than most men could earn in a year and Leofric was curious how I had come by it, but I refused to tell him. Instead I set up targets and word spread through the countryside that rich gold was to be had with cheap arrows, and over forty men arrived to test their skill and we simply marched the best twelve on board Heahengel and another ten each to Ceruphin and Cristenlic, then took them to sea. Our twelve protested, of course, but Leofric snarled at them and they all suddenly decided they wanted nothing better than to sail the Wessex coast with him. ‘For something that dribbled out of a goat’s backside,’ Leofric told me, ‘you’re not completely useless.’

‘There’ll be trouble when we get back,’ I warned him.

‘Of course there’ll be trouble,’ he agreed, ‘trouble from the shire reeve, from the Ealdorman, from the bishop and from the whole damned lot of them.’ He laughed suddenly, a very rare occurrence. ‘So let’s kill some Danes first.’

We did. And by chance it was the same ship that had shamed us, and she tried the same trick again, but this time I turned Heahengel into her and our bows smashed into her quarter and our twelve archers were loosing shafts into her crew. Heahengel had ridden up over the other ship, half sinking her and pinning her down, and Leofric led a charge over the prow, and there was blood thickening the water in the Viking bilge. Two of our men managed to tie the ships together which meant I could leave the steering oar and, without bothering to put on either helmet or mail coat, I jumped aboard with Serpent-Breath and joined the fight. There were shields clashing in the wide midships, spears jabbing, swords and axes swinging, arrows flighting overhead, men screaming, men dying, the rage of battle, the joy of blade song and it was all over before Ceruphin or Cristenlic could join us.

How I did love it. To be young, to be strong, to have a good sword and to survive. The Danish crew had been forty-six strong and all but one died, and he only lived because Leofric bellowed that we must take a prisoner. Three of our men died, and six were foully wounded and they probably all died once we got them ashore, but we bailed out the Viking ship and went back to Hamtun with her in tow, and in her blood-drenched belly we found a chest of silver that she had stolen from a monastery on Wiht. Leofric presented a generous amount to the bowmen, so that when we went ashore and were confronted by the reeve, who demanded that we give up the archers, only two of them wanted to go. The rest could see their way to becoming wealthy, and so they stayed.

The prisoner was called Hroi. His lord, whom we had killed in the battle, had been called Thurkil and he served Guthrum, who was in East Anglia where he now called himself king of that country. ‘Does he still wear the bone in his hair?’ I asked.

‘Yes, lord,’ Hroi said. He did not call me lord because I was an Ealdorman, for he did not know that. He called me lord because he did not want me to kill him when the questioning was done.

Hroi did not think Guthrum would attack this year. ‘He waits for Halfdan,’ he told me.

‘And Halfdan’s where?’

‘In Ireland, lord.’

‘Avenging Ivar?’

‘Yes, lord.’

‘You know Kjartan?’

‘I know three men so called, lord.’

‘Kjartan of Northumbria,’ I said, ‘father of Sven.’

‘Earl Kjartan, you mean?’

‘He calls himself Earl now?’ I asked.

‘Yes, lord, and he is still in Northumbria.’

‘And Ragnar? Son of Ragnar the Fearless?’

‘Earl Ragnar is with Guthrum, lord, in East Anglia. He has four boats.’

We chained Hroi and sent him under guard to Wintanceaster for Alfred liked to talk with Danish prisoners. I do not know what happened to him. He was probably hanged or beheaded, for Alfred did not extend Christian mercy to pagan pirates.

And I thought of Ragnar the Younger, Earl Ragnar now, and wondered if I would meet his boats on the Wessex coast, and wondered too whether Hroi had lied and that Guthrum would invade that summer. I thought he would, for there was much fighting across the island of Britain. The Danes of Mercia had attacked the Britons in north Wales, I never did discover why, and other Danish bands raided across the West Saxon frontier, and I suspected those raids were meant to discover West Saxon weaknesses before Guthrum launched his Great Army, but no army came and, as the summer reached its height, Alfred felt safe enough to leave his forces in North Wessex to visit the fleet.

His arrival coincided with news that seven Danish ships had been seen off Heilincigae, an island which lay in shallow waters not far to Hamtun’s east, and the news was confirmed when we saw smoke rising from a pillaged settlement. Only half our ships were in Hamtun, the others were at sea, and one of the six in port, the Evangelista, was on the hard having her bottom scraped. Hacca was nowhere near Hamtun, gone to his brother’s house probably, and he would doubtless be annoyed that he had missed the king’s visit, but Alfred had given us no warning of his arrival, probably because he wanted to see us as we really were, rather than as we would have been had we known he was coming. As soon as he heard about the Danes off Heilincigae he ordered us all to sea and boarded Heahengel along with two of his guards and three priests, one of whom was Beocca who came to stand beside the steering oar.

‘You’ve got bigger, Uhtred,’ he said to me, almost reproachfully. I was a good head taller than him now, and much broader in the chest.

‘If you rowed, father,’ I said, ‘you’d get bigger.’

He giggled. ‘I can’t imagine myself rowing,’ he said, then pointed at my steering oar. ‘Is that difficult to manage?’ he asked.

I let him take it and suggested he turned the boat slightly to the steorbord and his crossed eyes widened in astonishment as he tried to push the oar and the water fought against him. ‘It needs strength,’ I said, taking the oar back.

‘You’re happy, aren’t you?’ He made it sound like an accusation.

‘I am, yes.’

‘You weren’t meant to be,’ he said.

‘No?’

‘Alfred thought this experience would humble you.’

I stared at the king who was up in the bows with Leofric, and I remembered the king’s honeyed words about me having something to teach these crews, and I realised he had known I had nothing to contribute, yet he had still given me the helmet and armour. That, I assumed, was so I would give him a year of my life in which he hoped Leofric would knock the arrogance out of my bumptious youthfulness. ‘Didn’t work, did it?’ I said, grinning.

‘He said you must be broken like a horse.’

‘But I’m not a horse, father, I’m a lord of Northumbria. What did he think? That after a year I’d be a meek Christian ready to do his bidding?’

‘Is that such a bad thing?’

‘It’s a bad thing,’ I said. ‘He needs proper men to fight the Danes, not praying lickspittles.’

Beocca sighed, then made the sign of the cross because poor Father Willibald was feeding the gulls with his vomit. ‘It’s time you were married, Uhtred,’ Beocca said sternly.

I looked at him in astonishment. ‘Married! Why do you say that?’

‘You’re old enough,’ Beocca said.

‘So are you,’ I retorted, ‘and you’re not married, so why should I be?’

‘I live in hope,’ Beocca said. Poor man, he had a squint, a palsied hand and a face like a sick weasel, which really did not make him a great favourite with women. ‘But there is a young woman in Defnascir you should look at,’ he told me enthusiastically, ‘a very well born young lady! A charming creature, and,’ he paused, evidently having run out of the girl’s qualities, or else because he could not invent any new ones, ‘her father was the shire reeve, rest his soul. A lovely girl. Mildrith, she’s called.’ He smiled at me expectantly.

‘A reeve’s daughter,’ I said flatly. ‘The king’s reeve? The shire reeve?’

‘Her father was reeve of southern Defnascir,’ Beocca said, sliding the man down the social ladder, ‘but he left Mildrith property. A fair piece of land near Exanceaster.’

‘A reeve’s daughter,’ I repeated, ‘not an Ealdorman’s daughter?’

‘She’s sixteen, I believe,’ Beocca said, gazing at the shingled beach sliding away to our east.

‘Sixteen,’ I said scathingly, ‘and unmarried, which suggests she has a face like a bag of maggots.’

‘That is hardly relevant,’ he said crossly.

‘You don’t have to sleep with her,’ I said, ‘and no doubt she’s pious?’

‘She is a devoted Christian, I’m happy to say.’

‘You’ve seen her?’ I asked.

‘No,’ he admitted, ‘but Alfred has talked of her.’

‘This is Alfred’s idea?’

‘He likes to see his men settled, to have their roots in the land.’

‘I’m not his man, father. I’m Uhtred of Bebbanburg, and the lords of Bebbanburg don’t marry pious maggot-faced bitches of low birth.’

‘You should meet her,’ he persisted, frowning at me. ‘Marriage is a wonderful thing, Uhtred, ordained by God for our happiness.’

‘How would you know?’

‘It is,’ he insisted weakly.

‘I’m already happy,’ I said. ‘I hump Brida and I kill Danes. Find another man for Mildrith. Why don’t you marry her? Good God, father, you must be near thirty! If you don’t marry soon you’ll go to your grave a virgin. Are you a virgin?’

He blushed, but did not answer because Leofric came back to the steering deck with a black scowl. He never looked happy, but he appeared grimmer than ever at that moment and I had an idea that he had been arguing with Alfred, an argument he had plainly lost. Alfred himself followed, a serene look of indifference on his long face. Two of his priests trailed him, carrying parchment, ink and quills and I realised notes were being taken. ‘What would you say, Uhtred, was the most crucial equipment for a ship?’ Alfred asked me. One of the priests dipped his quill in the ink in readiness for my answer, then staggered as the ship hit a wave. God knows what his writing looked like that day. ‘The sail?’ Alfred prompted me. ‘Spears? Archers? Shields? Oars?’

‘Buckets,’ I said.

‘Buckets?’ He looked at me with disapproval, suspecting I was mocking him.

‘Buckets to bail the ship, lord,’ I said, nodding down into Heahengel’s belly where four men scooped out sea water and chucked it over the side, though a good deal landed on the rowers. ‘What we need, lord, is a better way of caulking ships.’

‘Write that down,’ Alfred instructed the priests, then stood on tiptoe to look across the intervening low land into the sea-lake where the enemy ships had been sighted.

‘They’ll be long gone,’ Leofric growled.

‘I pray not,’ Alfred said.

‘The Danes don’t wait for us,’ Leofric said. He was in a terrible mood, so terrible that he was willing to snarl at his king. ‘They aren’t fools,’ he went on, ‘they land, they raid and they go. They’ll have sailed on the ebb.’ The tide had just turned and was flooding against us now, though I never did quite understand the tides in the long waters from the sea to Hamtun for there were twice as many high tides there as anywhere else. Hamtun’s tides had a mind of their own, or else were confused by the channels.

‘The pagans were there at dawn,’ Alfred said.

‘And they’ll be miles away by now,’ Leofric said. He spoke to Alfred as if he were another crewman, using no respect, but Alfred was always patient with such insolence. He knew Leofric’s worth.

But Leofric was wrong that day about the enemy. The Viking ships were not gone, but still off Heilincigae, all seven of them, having been trapped there by the falling tide. They were waiting for the rising water to float them free, but we arrived first, coming into the sea-lake through the narrow entrance which leads from the northern bank of the Solente. Once through the entrance a ship is in a world of marshes, sandbanks, islands and fish traps, not unlike the waters of the Gewæsc. We had a man aboard who had grown up on those waters, and he guided us, but the Danes had lacked any such expertise and they had been misled by a line of withies, stuck into the sand at low tide to mark a channel, which had been deliberately moved to entice them onto a mudbank on which they were now firmly stuck.

Which was splendid. We had them trapped like foxes in a one-hole earth and all we had to do was anchor in the sea-lake entrance, hope our anchors held against the strong currents, wait for them to float off and then slaughter them, but Alfred was in a hurry. He wanted to get back to his land forces and insisted we return him to Hamtun before nightfall, and so, against Leofric’s advice, we were ordered to an immediate attack.

That too was splendid, except that we could not approach the mudbank directly for the channel was narrow and it would mean going in single file and the lead ship would face seven Danish ships on its own, and so we had to row a long way to approach them from the south, which meant that they could escape to the sea-lake’s entrance if the tide floated them off, which it might very well do, and Leofric muttered into his beard that we were going about the battle all wrong. He was furious with Alfred.

Alfred, meanwhile, was fascinated by the enemy ships, which he had never seen so clearly before. ‘Are the beasts representations of their gods?’ he asked me, referring to the finely carved prows and sterns that flaunted their monsters, dragons and serpents.

‘No, lord, just beasts,’ I said. I was beside him, having relinquished the steering oar to the man who knew these waters, and I told the king how the carved heads could be lifted off their posts so that they did not terrify the spirits of the land.

‘Write that down,’ he ordered a priest. ‘And the wind-vanes at the mastheads?’ he asked me, looking at the nearer one which was painted with an eagle, ‘are they designed to frighten the spirits?’

I did not answer. Instead I was staring at the seven ships across the slick hump of the mudbank and I recognised one. Wind-Viper. The light-coloured strake in the bow was clear enough, but even so I would have recognised her. Wind-Viper, lovely Wind-Viper, ship of dreams, here at Heilincigae.

‘Uhtred?’ Alfred prompted me.

‘They’re just wind-vanes, lord,’ I said. And if Wind-Viper was here, was Ragnar here too? Or had Kjartan taken the ship and leased it to a shipmaster?

‘It seems a deal of trouble,’ Alfred said pettishly, ‘to decorate a ship.’

‘Men love their ships,’ I said, ‘and fight for them. You honour what you fight for, lord. We should decorate our ships.’ I spoke harshly, thinking we would love our ships more if they had beasts on their prows, and had proper names like Blood-Spiller, Sea-Wolf or Widow-Maker. Instead the Heahengel led the Ceruphin and Cristenlic through the tangled waters, and behind us were the Apostol and the Eftwyrd, which meant Judgment Day and was probably the best named of our fleet because she sent more than one Dane to the sea’s embrace.

The Danes were digging, trying to deepen the treacherous channel and so float their ships, but as we came nearer they realised they would never complete such a huge task and went back to their stranded boats to fetch armour, helmets, shields and weapons. I pulled on my coat of mail, its leather lining stinking of old sweat, and I pulled on the helmet, then strapped Serpent-Breath on my back and Wasp-Sting to my waist. This was not going to be a sea-fight, but a land battle, shield wall against shield wall, a maul in the mud, and the Danes had the advantage because they could mass where we must land and they could meet us as we came off the ships, and I did not like it. I could see Leofric hated it, but Alfred was calm enough as he pulled on his helmet. ‘God is with us,’ he said.

‘He needs to be,’ Leofric muttered, then raised his voice to shout at the steersman. ‘Hold her there!’ It was tricky to keep Heahengel still in the swirling current, but we backed oars and she slewed around as Leofric peered at the shore. I assumed he was waiting for the other ships to catch up so that we could all land together, but he had seen a spit of muddy sand projecting from the shore and had worked out that if we beached Heahengel there then our first men off the prow would not have to face a shield wall composed of seven Viking crews. The spit was narrow, only wide enough for three or four men to stand abreast and a fight there would be between equal numbers. ‘It’s a good enough place to die, Earsling,’ he told me, and led me forward. Alfred hurried behind us. ‘Wait,’ Leofric snapped at the king so savagely that Alfred actually obeyed. ‘Put her on the spit!’ Leofric yelled back to the steersman, ‘now!’

Ragnar was there. I could see the eagle wing on its pole, and then I saw him, looking so like his father that for a moment I thought I was a boy again.

‘Ready, Earsling?’ Leofric said. He had assembled his half-dozen best warriors, all of us in the prow, while behind us the bowmen readied to launch their arrows at the Danes who were hurrying towards the narrow stretch of muddy sand. Then we lurched forward as Heahengel’s bow scraped aground. ‘Now!’ Leofric shouted, and we jumped overboard into water that came up to our knees, and then we instinctively touched shields, made the wall, and I was gripping Wasp-Sting as the first Danes ran at us.

‘Kill them!’ Leofric shouted, and I thrust the shield forward and there was the great clash of iron boss on limewood, and an axe whirled overhead, but a man behind me caught it on his shield and I was stabbing under my shield, bringing the short sword up, but she rammed into a Danish shield. I wrenched her free, stabbed again, and felt a pain in my ankle as a blade sliced through water and boot. Blood swirled in the sea, but I was still standing, and I heaved forward, smelling the Danes, gulls screaming overhead, and more of the Danes were coming, but more of our men were joining us, some up to their waists in the tide, and the front of the battle was a shoving match now because no one had room to swing a weapon. It was a grunting, cursing shield battle, and Leofric, beside me, gave a shout and we heaved up and they stepped back a half-pace and our arrows slashed over our helmets and I slammed Wasp-Sting forward, felt her break through leather or mail, twisted her in flesh, pulled her back, pushed with the shield, kept my head down under the rim, pushed again, stabbed again, brute force, stout shield and good steel, nothing else. A man was drowning, blood streaming in the ripples from his twitching body, and I suppose we were shouting, but I never remember much about that. You remember the pushing, the smell, the snarling bearded faces, the anger, and then Cristenlic rammed her bows into the flank of the Danish line, crumpling men into the water, drowning and crushing them, and her crew jumped into the small waves with spears, swords and axes. A third boat arrived, more men landed, and I heard Alfred behind me, shouting at us to break their line, to kill them. I was ramming Wasp-Sting down at a man’s ankles, jabbing again and again, pushing with the shield, and then he stumbled and our line surged forward and he tried to stab up into my groin, but Leofric slammed his axe head down, turning the man’s face into a mask of blood and broken teeth. ‘Push!’ Leofric yelled, and we heaved at the enemy, and suddenly they were breaking away and running.

We had not beaten them. They were not running from our swords and spears, but rather because the rising tide was floating their ships and they ran to rescue them, and we stumbled after them, or rather I stumbled because my right ankle was bleeding and hurting, and we still did not have enough men ashore to overwhelm their crews and they were hurling themselves on board their ships, but one crew, brave men all, stayed on the sand to hold us back.

‘Are you wounded, Earsling?’ Leofric asked me.

‘It’s nothing.’

‘Stay back,’ he ordered me. He was forming Heahengel’s men into a new shield wall, a wall to thump into that one brave crew, and Alfred was there now, mail armour shining bright, and the Danes must have known he was a great lord, but they did not abandon their ships for the honour of killing him. I think that if Alfred had brought the dragon banner and fought beneath it, so that the Danes could recognise him as the king, they would have stayed and fought us and might very well have killed or captured Alfred, but the Danes were always wary of taking too many casualties and they hated losing their beloved ships, and so they just wanted to be away from that place. To which end they were willing to pay the price of the one ship to save the others, and that one ship was not Wind-Viper. I could see her being pushed into the channel, could see her creeping away backwards, see her oars striking against sand rather than water, and I splashed through the small waves, skirting our shield wall and leaving the fight to my right as I bellowed at the ship. ‘Ragnar! Ragnar!’

Arrows were flicking past me. One struck my shield, another glanced off my helmet with a click and that reminded me that he would not recognise me with the helmet on and so I dropped Wasp-Sting and bared my head. ‘Ragnar!’

The arrows stopped. The shield walls were crashing, men were dying, most of the Danes were escaping, and Earl Ragnar stared at me across the widening gap and I could not tell from his face what he was thinking, but he had stopped his handful of bowmen from shooting at me, and then he cupped his hands to his mouth. ‘Here!’ he shouted at me, ‘tomorrow’s dusk!’ Then his oars bit water, the Wind-Viper turned like a dancer, the blades dragged the sea and she was gone.

I retrieved Wasp-Sting and went to join the fight, but it was over. Our crews had massacred that one Danish crew, all except a handful of men who had been spared on Alfred’s orders. The rest were a bloody pile on the tideline and we stripped them of their armour and weapons, took off their clothes and left their white bodies to the gulls. Their ship, an old and leaking vessel, was towed back to Hamtun.

Alfred was pleased. In truth he had let six ships escape, but it had still been a victory and news of it would encourage his troops fighting in the north. One of his priests questioned the prisoners, noting their answers on parchment. Alfred asked some questions of his own, which the priest translated, and when he had learned all that he could he came back to where I was steering and looked at the blood staining the deck by my right foot. ‘You fight well, Uhtred.’

‘We fought badly, lord,’ I said, and that was true. Their shield wall had held, and if they had not retreated to rescue their ships they might even have beaten us back into the sea. I had not done well. There are days when the sword and shield seem clumsy, when the enemy seems quicker, and this had been one such day. I was angry with myself.

‘You were talking to one of them,’ Alfred said accusingly. ‘I saw you. You were talking to one of the pagans.’

‘I was telling him, lord,’ I said, ‘that his mother was a whore, his father a turd of hell and that his children are pieces of weasel shit.’

He flinched at that. He was no coward, Alfred, and he knew the anger of battle, but he never liked the insults that men shouted. I think he would have liked war to be decorous. He looked behind Heahengel where the dying sun’s light was rippling our long wake red. ‘The year you promised to give me will soon be finished,’ he said.

‘True, lord.’

‘I pray you will stay with us.’

‘When Guthrum comes, lord,’ I said, ‘he will come with a fleet to darken the sea and our twelve ships will be crushed.’ I thought perhaps that was what Leofric had been arguing about, about the futility of trying to stem a seaborne invasion with twelve ill-named ships. ‘If I stay,’ I asked, ‘what use will I be if the fleet dares not put to sea?’

‘What you say is true,’ Alfred said, suggesting that his argument with Leofric had been about something else, ‘but the crews can fight ashore. Leofric tells me you are as good a warrior as any he has seen.’

‘Then he has never seen himself, lord.’

‘Come to me when your time is up,’ he said, ‘and I will find a place for you.’

‘Yes, lord,’ I said, but in a tone which only acknowledged that I understood what he wanted, not that I would obey him.

‘But you should know one thing, Uhtred,’ his voice was stern, ‘if any man commands my troops that man must know how to read and write.’

I almost laughed at that. ‘So he can read the Psalms, lord?’ I asked sarcastically.

‘So he can read my orders,’ Alfred said coldly, ‘and send me news.’

‘Yes, lord,’ I said again.

They had lit beacons in Hamtun’s waters so we could find our way home, and the night wind stirred the liquid reflections of moon and stars as we slid to our anchorage. There were lights ashore, and fires, and ale, and food and laughter, and best of all the promise of meeting Ragnar next day.

Ragnar took a huge risk, of course, in going back to Heilincigae, though perhaps he reckoned, truthfully as it turned out, that our ships would need a day to recover from the fight. There were injured men to tend, weapons to sharpen, and so none of our fleet put to sea that day.

Brida and I rode horses to Hamanfunta, a village that lived off trapping eels, fishing and making salt, and a sliver of a coin found stabling for our horses and a fisherman willing to take us out to Heilincigae where no one now lived, for the Danes had slaughtered them all. The fisherman would not wait for us, too frightened of the coming night and the ghosts that would be moaning and screeching on the island, but he promised to return in the morning.

Brida, Nihtgenga and I wandered that low place, going past the previous day’s Danish dead that had already been pecked ragged by the gulls, past burned-out huts where folk had made a poor living from the sea and the marsh before the Vikings came and then, as the sun sank, we carried charred timbers to the shore and I used flint and steel to make a fire. The flames flared up in the dusk and Brida touched my arm to show me Wind-Viper, dark against the darkening sky, coming through the sea-lake’s entrance. The last of the daylight touched the sea red and caught the gilding on Wind-Viper’s beast-head.

I watched her, thinking of all the fear that such a sight brought on England. Wherever there was a creek, a harbour or a river mouth, men feared to see the Danish ships. They feared those beasts at the prow, feared the men behind the beasts and prayed to be spared the Northmen’s fury. I loved the sight. Loved Wind-Viper. Her oars rose and fell, I could hear the shafts creaking in their leather-lined holes, and I could see mailed men at her prow, and then the bows scrunched on the sand and the long oars went still.

Ragnar put the ladder against the prow. All Danish ships have a short ladder to let them climb down to a beach, and he came down the rungs slowly and alone. He was in full mail coat, helmeted, with a sword at his side and once ashore he paced to the small flames of our fire like a warrior come for vengeance. He stopped a spear’s length away and then stared at me through the black eyeholes of his helmet. ‘Did you kill my father?’ he asked harshly.

‘On my life,’ I said, ‘on Thor,’ I pulled out the hammer amulet and clutched it, ‘on my soul,’ I went on, ‘I did not.’

He pulled off his helmet, stepped forward and we embraced. ‘I knew you did not,’ he said.

‘Kjartan did it,’ I said, ‘and we watched him.’ We told him the whole story, how we had been in the high woods watching the charcoal cool, and how we had been cut off from the hall, and how it had been fired, and how the folk had been slaughtered.

‘If I could have killed one of them,’ I said, ‘I would, and I would have died doing it, but Ravn always said there should be at least one survivor to tell the tale.’

‘What did Kjartan say?’ Brida asked.

Ragnar was sitting now, and two of his men had brought bread and dried herrings and cheese and ale. ‘Kjartan said,’ Ragnar spoke softly, ‘that the English rose against the hall, encouraged by Uhtred, and that he revenged himself on the killers.’

‘And you believed him?’ I asked.

‘No,’ he admitted. ‘Too many men said he did it, but he is Earl Kjartan now, he leads three times more men than I do.’

‘And Thyra?’ I asked, ‘what does she say?’

‘Thyra?’ He stared at me, puzzled.

‘Thyra lived,’ I told him. ‘She was taken away by Sven.’

He just stared at me. He had not known that his sister lived and I saw the anger come on his face, and then he raised his eyes to the stars and he howled like a wolf.

‘It is true,’ Brida said softly, ‘your sister lived.’

Ragnar drew his sword and laid it on the sand and touched the blade with his right hand. ‘If it is the last thing I do,’ he swore, ‘I shall kill Kjartan, kill his son, and all his followers. All of them!’

‘I would help,’ I said. He looked at me through the flames. ‘I loved your father,’ I said, ‘and he treated me like a son.’

‘I will welcome your help, Uhtred,’ Ragnar said formally. He wiped the sand from the blade and slid it back into its fleece-lined scabbard. ‘You will sail with us now?’

I was tempted. I was even surprised at how strongly I was tempted. I wanted to go with Ragnar, I wanted the life I had lived with his father, but fate rules us. I was sworn to Alfred for a few more weeks, and I had fought alongside Leofric for all these months, and fighting next to a man in the shield wall makes a bond as tight as love. ‘I cannot come,’ I said, and wished I could have said the opposite.

‘I can,’ Brida said, and somehow I was not surprised by that. She had not liked being left ashore in Hamtun as we sailed to fight, she felt trammelled and useless, unwanted, and I think she yearned after the Danish ways. She hated Wessex. She hated its priests, hated their disapproval and hated their denial of all that was joy.

‘You are a witness of my father’s death,’ Ragnar said to her, still formal.

‘I am.’

‘Then I would welcome you,’ he said, and looked at me again.

I shook my head. ‘I am sworn to Alfred for the moment. By winter I shall be free of the oath.’

‘Then come to us in the winter,’ Ragnar said, ‘and we shall go to Dunholm.’

‘Dunholm?’

‘It is Kjartan’s fortress now. Ricsig lets him live there.’

I thought of Dunholm’s stronghold on its soaring crag, wrapped by its river, protected by its sheer rock and its high walls and strong garrison. ‘What if Kjartan marches on Wessex?’ I asked.

Ragnar shook his head. ‘He will not, because he does not go where I go, so I must go to him.’

‘He fears you then?’

Ragnar smiled, and if Kjartan had seen that smile he would have shivered. ‘He fears me,’ Ragnar said. ‘I hear he sent men to kill me in Ireland, but their boat was driven ashore and the skraelings killed the crew. So he lives in fear. He denies my father’s death, but he still fears me.’

‘There is one last thing,’ I said, and nodded at Brida who brought out the leather bag with its gold, jet and silver. ‘It was your father’s,’ I said, ‘and Kjartan never found it, and we did, and we have spent some of it, but what remains is yours.’ I pushed the bag towards him and made myself instantly poor.

Ragnar pushed it back without a thought, making me rich again. ‘My father loved you too,’ he said, ‘and I am wealthy enough.’

We ate, we drank, we slept, and in the dawn, when a light mist shimmered over the reed beds, the Wind-Viper went. The last thing Ragnar said to me was a question. ‘Thyra lives?’

‘She survived,’ I said, ‘so I think she must still live.’

We embraced, they went and I was alone.

I wept for Brida. I felt hurt. I was too young to know how to take abandonment. During the night I had tried to persuade her to stay, but she had a will as strong as Ealdwulf’s iron, and she had gone with Ragnar into the dawn mist and left me weeping. I hated the three spinners at that moment, for they wove cruel jests into their vulnerable threads, and then the fisherman came to fetch me and I went back home.

Autumn gales tore at the coast and Alfred’s fleet was laid up for the winter, dragged ashore by horses and oxen, and Leofric and I rode to Wintanceaster, only to discover that Alfred was at his estate at Cippanhamm. We were permitted into the Wintanceaster palace by the doorkeeper, who either recognised me or was terrified of Leofric, and we slept there, but the place was still haunted by monks, despite Alfred’s absence, and so we spent the day in a nearby tavern. ‘So what will you do, Earsling?’ Leofric asked me, ‘renew your oath to Alfred?’

‘Don’t know.’

‘Don’t know,’ he repeated sarcastically. ‘Lost your decision with your girl?’

‘I could go back to the Danes,’ I said.

‘That would give me a chance to kill you,’ he said happily.

‘Or stay with Alfred.’

‘Why not do that?’

‘Because I don’t like him,’ I said.

‘You don’t have to like him. He’s your king.’

‘He’s not my king,’ I said, ‘I’m a Northumbrian.’

‘So you are, Earsling, a Northumbrian Ealdorman, eh?’

I nodded, demanded more ale, tore a piece of bread in two and pushed one piece towards Leofric. ‘What I should do,’ I said, ‘is go back to Northumbria. There is a man I have to kill.’

‘A feud?’

I nodded again.

‘There is one thing I know about bloodfeuds,’ Leofric said, ‘which is that they last a lifetime. You will have years to make your killing, but only if you live.’

‘I’ll live,’ I said lightly.

‘Not if the Danes take Wessex, you won’t. Or maybe you will live, Earsling, but you’ll live under their rule, under their law and under their swords. If you want to be a free man, then stay here and fight for Wessex.’

‘For Alfred?’

Leofric leaned back, stretched, belched and took a long drink. ‘I don’t like him either,’ he admitted, ‘and I didn’t like his brothers when they were kings here, and I didn’t like his father when he was king, but Alfred’s different.’

‘Different?’

He tapped his scarred forehead. ‘The bastard thinks, Earsling, which is more than you or I ever do. He knows what has to be done, and don’t underestimate him. He can be ruthless.’

‘He’s a king,’ I said, ‘he should be ruthless.’

‘Ruthless, generous, pious, boring, that’s Alfred,’ Leofric spoke gloomily. ‘When he was a child his father gave him toy warriors. You know, carved out of wood? Just little things. He used to line them up and there wasn’t one out of place, not one, and not even a speck of dust on any of them!’ He seemed to find that appalling, for he scowled. ‘Then when he was fifteen or so he went wild for a time. Humped every slave girl in the palace, and I’ve no doubt he lined them up too and made sure they didn’t have any dust before he rammed them.’

‘He had a bastard too, I hear,’ I said.

‘Osferth,’ Leofric said, surprising me with his knowledge, ‘hidden away in Winburnan. Poor little bastard must be six, seven years old now? You’re not supposed to know he exists.’

‘Nor are you.’

‘It was my sister he whelped him on,’ Leofric said, then saw my surprise. ‘I’m not the only good-looking one in my family, Earsling.’ He poured more ale. ‘Eadgyth was a palace servant and Alfred claimed to love her.’ He sneered, then shrugged. ‘But he looks after her now. Gives her money, sends priests to preach to her. His wife knows all about the poor little bastard, but won’t let Alfred go near him.’

‘I hate Ælswith,’ I said.

‘A bitch from hell,’ he agreed happily.

‘And I like the Danes,’ I said.

‘You do? So why do you kill them?’

‘I like them,’ I said, ignoring his question, ‘because they’re not frightened of life.’

‘They’re not Christians, you mean.’

‘They’re not Christians,’ I agreed. ‘Are you?’

Leofric thought for a few heartbeats. ‘I suppose so,’ he said grudgingly, ‘but you’re not, are you?’ I shook my head, showed him Thor’s hammer and he laughed. ‘So what will you do, Earsling,’ he asked me, ‘if you go back to the pagans? Other than follow your bloodfeud?’

That was a good question and I thought about it as much as the ale allowed me. ‘I’d serve a man called Ragnar,’ I said, ‘as I served his father.’

‘So why did you leave his father?’

‘Because he was killed.’

Leofric frowned. ‘So you can stay there so long as your Danish lord lives, is that right? And without a lord you’re nothing?’

‘I’m nothing,’ I admitted. ‘But I want to be in Northumbria to take back my father’s fortress.’

‘Ragnar will do that for you?’

‘He might do. His father would have done, I think.’

‘And if you get back your fortress,’ he asked, ‘will you be lord of it? Lord of your own land? Or will the Danes rule you?’

‘The Danes will rule.’

‘So you settle to be a slave, eh? Yes, lord, no, lord, let me hold your prick while you piss all over me, lord?’

‘And what happens if I stay here?’ I asked sourly.

‘You’ll lead men,’ he said.

I laughed at that. ‘Alfred has lords enough to serve him.’

Leofric shook his head. ‘He doesn’t. He has some good warlords, true, but he needs more. I told him, that day on the boat when he let the bastards escape, I told him to send me ashore and give me men. He refused.’ He beat the table with a massive fist. ‘I told him I’m a proper warrior, but still the bastard refused me!’

So that, I thought, was what the argument had been about. ‘Why did he refuse you?’ I asked.

‘Because I can’t read,’ Leofric snarled, ‘and I’m not learning now! I tried once, and it makes no damn sense to me. And I’m not a lord, am I? Not even a thegn. I’m just a slave’s son who happens to know how to kill the king’s enemies, but that’s not good enough for Alfred. He says I can assist,’ he said that word as if it soured his tongue, ‘one of his Ealdormen, but I can’t lead men because I can’t read, and I can’t learn to read.’

‘I can,’ I said, or the drink said.

‘You take a long time to understand things, Earsling,’ Leofric said with a grin. ‘You’re a damned lord, and you can read, can’t you?’

‘No, not really. A bit. Short words.’

‘But you can learn?’

I thought about it. ‘I can learn.’

‘And we have twelve ships’ crews,’ he said, ‘looking for employment, so we give them to Alfred and we say that Lord Earsling is their leader and he gives you a book and you read out the pretty words, then you and I take the bastards to war and do some proper damage to your beloved Danes.’

I did not say yes, nor did I say no, because I was not sure what I wanted. What worried me was that I found myself agreeing with whatever the last person suggested I did; when I had been with Ragnar I had wanted to follow him and now I was seduced by Leofric’s vision of the future. I had no certainty, so instead of saying yes or no I went back to the palace and I found Merewenna, and discovered she was indeed the maid who had caused Alfred’s tears on the night that I had eavesdropped on him in the Mercian camp outside Snotengaham, and I did know what I wanted to do with her, and I did not cry afterwards.

And next day, at Leofric’s urging, we rode to Cippanhamm.

Nine

I suppose, if you are reading this, that you have learned your letters, which probably means that some damned monk or priest rapped your knuckles, cuffed you around the head or worse. Not that they did that to me, of course, for I was no longer a child, but I endured their sniggers as I struggled with letters. It was mostly Beocca who taught me, complaining all the while that I was taking him from his real work which was the making of a life of Swithun, who had been Bishop of Wintanceaster when Alfred was a child, and Beocca was writing the bishop’s life. Another priest was translating the book into Latin, Beocca’s mastery of that tongue not being good enough for the task, and the pages were being sent to Rome in hopes that Swithun would be named a saint. Alfred took a great interest in the book, forever coming to Beocca’s room and asking whether he knew that Swithun had once preached the gospel to a trout or chanted a psalm to a seagull, and Beocca would write the stories in a state of great excitement, and then, when Alfred was gone, reluctantly return to whatever text he was forcing me to decipher. ‘Read it aloud,’ he would say, then protest wildly. ‘No, no, no! Forliðan is to suffer shipwreck! This is a life of Saint Paul, Uhtred, and the apostle suffered shipwreck! Not the word you read at all!’

I looked at it again. ‘It’s not forlegnis?’

‘Of course it’s not!’ he said, going red with indignation. ‘That word means …’ he paused, realising that he was not teaching me English, but how to read it.

‘Prostitute,’ I said, ‘I know what it means. I even know what they charge. There’s a redhead in Chad’s tavern who …’

‘Forliðan,’ he interrupted me, ‘the word is forliðan. Read on.’

Those weeks were strange. I was a warrior now, a man, yet in Beocca’s room it seemed I was a child again as I struggled with the black letters crawling across the cracked parchments. I learned from the lives of the saints, and in the end Beocca could not resist letting me read some of his own growing life of Swithun. He waited for my praise, but instead I shuddered. ‘Couldn’t we find something more interesting?’ I asked him.

‘More interesting?’ Beocca’s good eye stared at me reproachfully.

‘Something about war,’ I suggested, ‘about the Danes. About shields and spears and swords.’

He grimaced. ‘I dread to think of such writings! There are some poems,’ he grimaced again and evidently decided against telling me about the belligerent poems, ‘but this,’ he tapped the parchment, ‘this will give you inspiration.’

‘Inspiration! How Swithun mended some broken eggs?’

‘It was a saintly act,’ Beocca chided me. ‘The woman was old and poor, the eggs were all she had to sell, and she tripped and broke them. She faced starvation! The saint made the eggs whole again and, God be praised, she sold them.’

‘But why didn’t Swithun just give her money?’ I demanded, ‘or take her back to his house and give her a proper meal?’

‘It is a miracle!’ Beocca insisted, ‘a demonstration of God’s power.’

‘I’d like to see a miracle,’ I said, remembering King Edmund’s death.

‘That is a weakness in you,’ Beocca said sternly. ‘You must have faith. Miracles make belief easy, which is why you should never pray for one. Much better to find God through faith than through miracles.’

‘Then why have miracles?’

‘Oh, read on, Uhtred,’ the poor man said tiredly, ‘for God’s sake, read on.’

I read on. But life in Cippanhamm was not all reading. Alfred hunted at least twice a week, though it was not hunting as I had known it in the north. He never pursued boar, preferring to shoot at stags with a bow. The prey was driven to him by beaters, and if a stag did not appear swiftly he would get bored and go back to his books. In truth I think he only went hunting because it was expected of a king, not because he enjoyed it, but he did endure it. I loved it, of course. I killed wolves, stags, foxes and boars and it was on one of those boar hunts that I met Æthelwold.

Æthelwold was Alfred’s oldest nephew, the boy who should have succeeded his father, King Æthelred, though he was no longer a boy for he was only a month or so younger than me, and in many ways he was like me, except that he had been sheltered by his father and by Alfred and so had never killed a man or even fought in a battle. He was tall, well-built, strong and as wild as an unbroken colt. He had long dark hair, his family’s narrow face, and strong eyes that caught the attention of serving girls. All girls, really. He hunted with me and with Leofric, drank with us, whored with us when he could escape the priests who were his guardians, and constantly complained about his uncle, though those complaints were only spoken to me, never to Leofric whom Æthelwold feared. ‘He stole the crown,’ Æthelwold said of Alfred.

‘The witan thought you were too young,’ I pointed out.

‘I’m not young now, am I?’ he asked indignantly, ‘so Alfred should step aside.’

I toasted that idea with a pot of ale, but said nothing.

‘They won’t even let me fight!’ Æthelwold said bitterly. ‘He says I ought to become a priest. The stupid bastard.’ He drank some ale before giving me a serious look. ‘Talk to him, Uhtred.’

‘What am I to say? That you don’t want to be a priest?’

‘He knows that. No, tell him I’ll fight with you and Leofric.’

I thought about that for a short while, then shook my head. ‘It won’t do any good.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because,’ I said, ‘he fears you making a name for yourself.’

Æthelwold frowned at me. ‘A name?’ he asked, puzzled.

‘If you become a famous warrior,’ I said, knowing I was right, ‘men will follow you. You’re already a prince, which is dangerous enough, but Alfred won’t want you to become a famous warrior prince, will he?’

‘The pious bastard,’ Æthelwold said. He pushed his long black hair off his face and gazed moodily at Eanflæd, the redhead who was given a room in the tavern and brought it a deal of business. ‘God, she’s pretty,’ he said. ‘He was caught humping a nun once.’

‘Alfred was? A nun?’

‘That’s what I was told. And he was always after girls. Couldn’t keep his breeches buttoned! Now the priests have got hold of him. What I ought to do,’ he went on gloomily, ‘is slit the bastard’s gizzard.’

‘Say that to anyone but me,’ I said, ‘and you’ll be hanged.’

‘I could run off and join the Danes,’ he suggested.

‘You could,’ I said, ‘and they’d welcome you.’

‘Then use me?’ he asked, showing that he was not entirely a fool.

I nodded. ‘You’ll be like Egbert or Burghred, or that new man in Mercia.’

‘Ceolwulf.’

‘King at their pleasure,’ I said. Ceolwulf, a Mercian Ealdorman, had been named king of his country now that Burghred was on his knees in Rome, but Ceolwulf was no more a real king than Burghred had been. He issued coins, of course, and he administered justice, but everyone knew there were Danes in his council chamber and he dared do nothing that would earn their wrath. ‘So is that what you want?’ I asked. ‘To run off to the Danes and be useful to them?’

He shook his head. ‘No.’ He traced a pattern on the table with spilt ale. ‘Better to do nothing,’ he suggested.

‘Nothing?’

‘If I do nothing,’ he said earnestly, ‘then the bastard might die. He’s always ill! He can’t live long, can he? And his son is just a baby. So if he dies I’ll be king! Oh, sweet Jesus!’ This blasphemy was uttered because two priests had entered the tavern, both of them in Æthelwold’s entourage, though they were more like jailers than courtiers and they had come to find him and take him off to his bed.

Beocca did not approve of my friendship with Æthelwold. ‘He’s a foolish creature,’ he warned me.

‘So am I, or so you tell me.’

‘Then you don’t need your foolishness encouraged, do you? Now let us read about how the holy Swithun built the town’s East Gate.’

By the Feast of the Epiphany I could read as well as a clever twelve-year-old, or so Beocca said, and that was good enough for Alfred who did not, after all, require me to read theological texts, but only to decipher his orders, should he ever decide to give me any, and that, of course, was the heart of the matter. Leofric and I wanted to command troops, to which end I had endured Beocca’s teaching and had come to appreciate the holy Swithun’s skill with trout, seagulls and broken eggs, but the granting of those troops depended on the king, and in truth there were not many troops to command.

The West Saxon army was in two parts. The first and smaller part was composed of the king’s own men, his retainers who guarded him and his family. They did nothing else because they were professional warriors, but they were not many and neither Leofric nor I wanted anything to do with them because joining the household guard would mean staying in close proximity to Alfred which, in turn, would mean going to church.

The second part of the army, and by far the largest, was the fyrd, and that, in turn, was divided among the shires. Each shire, under its Ealdorman and reeve, was responsible for raising the fyrd that was supposedly composed of every able-bodied man within the shire boundary. That could raise a vast number of men. Hamptonscir, for example, could easily put three thousand men under arms, and there were nine shires in Wessex capable of summoning similar numbers. Yet, apart from the troops who served the Ealdormen, the fyrd was mostly composed of farmers. Some had a shield of sorts, spears and axes were plentiful enough, but swords and armour were in short supply, and worse, the fyrd was always reluctant to march beyond its shire borders, and even more reluctant to serve when there was work to be done on the farm. At Æsc’s Hill, the one battle the West Saxons had won against the Danes, it had been the household troops who had gained the victory. Divided between Alfred and his brother they had spearheaded the fighting while the fyrd, as it usually did, looked menacing, but only became engaged when the real soldiers had already won the fight. The fyrd, in brief, was about as much use as a hole in a boat’s bottom, but that was where Leofric could expect to find men.

Except there were those ships’ crews getting drunk in Hamtun’s winter taverns and those were the men Leofric wanted, and to get them he had to persuade Alfred to relieve Hacca of their command, and luckily for us Hacca himself came to Cippanhamm and pleaded to be released from the fleet. He prayed daily, he told Alfred, never to see the ocean again. ‘I get seasick, lord.’

Alfred was always sympathetic to men who suffered sickness because he was so often ill himself, and he must have known that Hacca was an inadequate commander of ships, but Alfred’s problem was how to replace him. To which end he summoned four bishops, two abbots and a priest to advise him, and I learned from Beocca that they were all praying about the new appointment. ‘Do something!’ Leofric snarled at me.

‘What the devil am I supposed to do?’

‘You have friends who are priests! Talk to them. Talk to Alfred, Earsling.’ He rarely called me that any more, only when he was angry.

‘He doesn’t like me,’ I said. ‘If I ask him to put us in charge of the fleet he’ll give it to anyone but us. He’ll give it to a bishop, probably.’

‘Hell!’ Leofric said.

In the end it was Eanflæd who saved us. The redhead was a merry soul and had a particular fondness for Leofric, and she heard us arguing and sat down, slapped her hands on the table to silence us, and then asked what we were fighting about. Then she sneezed because she had a cold.

‘I want this useless earsling,’ Leofric jerked his thumb at me, ‘to be named commander of the fleet, only he’s too young, too ugly, too horrible and too pagan, and Alfred’s listening to a pack of bishops who’ll end up naming some wizened old fart who doesn’t know his prow from his prick.’

‘Which bishops?’ Eanflæd wanted to know.

‘Scireburnan, Wintanceaster, Winburnan and Exanceaster,’ I said.

She smiled, sneezed again, and two days later I was summoned to Alfred’s presence. It turned out that the Bishop of Exanceaster was partial to redheads.

Alfred greeted me in his hall; a fine building with beams, rafters and a central stone hearth. His guards watched us from the doorway where a group of petitioners waited to see the king, and a huddle of priests prayed at the hall’s other end, but the two of us were alone by the hearth where Alfred paced up and down as he talked. He said he was thinking of appointing me to command the fleet. Just thinking, he stressed. God, he went on, was guiding his choice, but now he must talk with me to see whether God’s advice chimed with his own intuition. He put great store by intuition. He once lectured me about a man’s inner eye, and how it could lead us to a higher wisdom, and I dare say he was right, but appointing a fleet commander did not need mystical wisdom, it needed finding a raw fighter willing to kill some Danes. ‘Tell me,’ he went on, ‘has learning to read bolstered your faith?’

‘Yes, lord,’ I said with feigned eagerness.

‘It has?’ He sounded dubious.

‘The life of Saint Swithun,’ I said, waving a hand as if to suggest it had overwhelmed me, ‘and the stories of Chad!’ I fell silent as if I could not think of praise sufficient for that tedious man.

‘The blessed Chad!’ Alfred said happily. ‘You know men and cattle were cured by the dust of his corpse?’

‘A miracle, lord,’ I said.

‘It is good to hear you say as much, Uhtred,’ Alfred said, ‘and I rejoice in your faith.’

‘It gives me great happiness, lord,’ I replied with a straight face.

‘Because it is only with faith in God that we shall prevail against the Danes.’

‘Indeed, lord,’ I said with as much enthusiasm as I could muster, wondering why he did not just name me commander of the fleet and be done with it.

But he was in a discursive mood. ‘I remember when I first met you,’ he said, ‘and I was struck by your childlike faith. It was an inspiration to me, Uhtred.’

‘I am glad of it, lord.’

‘And then,’ he turned and frowned at me, ‘I detected a lessening of faith in you.’

‘God tries us, lord,’ I said.

‘He does! He does!’ He winced suddenly. He was always a sick man. He had collapsed in pain at his wedding, though that might have been the horror of realising what he was marrying, but in truth he was prone to bouts of sudden griping agony. That, he had told me, was better than his first illness, which had been an affliction of ficus, which is a real endwerc, so painful and bloody that at times he had been unable to sit, and sometimes that ficus came back, but most of the time he suffered from the pains in his belly. ‘God does try us,’ he went on, ‘and I think God was testing you. I would like to think you have survived the trial.’

‘I believe I have, lord,’ I said gravely, wishing he would just end this ridiculous conversation.

‘But I still hesitate to name you,’ he admitted. ‘You are young! It is true you have proved your diligence by learning to read and that you are nobly born, but you are more likely to be found in a tavern than in a church. Is that not true?’

That silenced me, at least for a heartbeat or two, but then I remembered something Beocca had said to me during his interminable lessons and, without thinking, without even really knowing what they meant, I said the words aloud. ‘“The son of man is come eating and drinking”,’ I said, ‘“and …”’

‘“You say, look, a greedy man and a drinker!”’ Alfred finished the words for me. ‘You are right, Uhtred, right to chide me. Glory to God! Christ was accused of spending his time in taverns, and I forgot it. It is in the scriptures!’

The gods help me, I thought. The man was drunk on God, but he was no fool, for now he turned on me like a snake. ‘And I hear you spend time with my nephew. They say you distract him from his lessons.’

I put my hand on my heart. ‘I will swear an oath, lord,’ I said, ‘that I have done nothing except dissuade him from rashness.’ And that was true, or true enough. I had never encouraged Æthelwold in his wilder flights of fancy that involved cutting Alfred’s throat or running away to join the Danes. I did encourage him to ale, whores and blasphemy, but I did not count those things as rash. ‘My oath on it, lord,’ I said.

The word oath was powerful. All our laws depend on oaths. Life, loyalty and allegiance depend on oaths, and my use of the word persuaded him. ‘I thank you,’ he said earnestly, ‘and I should tell you, Uhtred, that to my surprise the Bishop of Exanceaster had a dream in which a messenger of God appeared to him and said that you should be made commander of the fleet.’

‘A messenger of God?’ I asked.

‘An angel, Uhtred.’

‘Praise God,’ I said gravely, thinking how Eanflæd would enjoy discovering that she was now an angel.

‘Yet,’ Alfred said, and winced again as pain flared in his arse or belly, ‘yet,’ he said again, and I knew something unexpected was coming. ‘I worry,’ he went on, ‘that you are of Northumbria, and that your commitment to Wessex is not of the heart.’

‘I am here, lord,’ I said.

‘But for how long?’

‘Till the Danes are gone, lord.’

He ignored that. ‘I need men bound to me by God,’ he said, ‘by God, by love, by duty, by passion and by land.’ He paused, looking at me, and I knew the sting was in that last word.

‘I have land in Northumbria,’ I said, thinking of Bebbanburg.

‘West Saxon land,’ he said, ‘land that you will own, land that you will defend, land that you will fight for.’

‘A blessed thought,’ I said, my heart sinking at what I suspected was coming.

Only it did not come immediately, instead he abruptly changed the subject and talked, very sensibly, about the Danish threat. The fleet, he said, had succeeded in reducing the Viking raids, but he expected the new year to bring a Danish fleet, and one much too large for our twelve ships to oppose. ‘I dare not lose the fleet,’ he said, ‘so I doubt we should fight their ships. I’m expecting a land army of pagans to come down the Temes and for their fleet to assault our south coast. I can hold one, but not the other, so the fleet commander’s job will be to follow their ships and harry them. Distract them. Keep them looking one way while I destroy their land army.’

I said I thought that was a good idea, which it probably was, though I wondered how twelve ships were supposed to distract a whole fleet, but that was a problem which would have to wait until the enemy fleet arrived. Alfred then returned to the matter of the land and that, of course, was the deciding factor which would give me or deny me the fleet. ‘I would tie you to me, Uhtred,’ he said earnestly.

‘I shall give you an oath, lord,’ I said.

‘You will indeed,’ he responded tartly, ‘but I still want you to be of Wessex.’

‘A high honour, lord,’ I said. What else could I say?

‘You must belong to Wessex,’ he said, then smiled as though he did me a favour. ‘There is an orphan in Defnascir,’ he went on, and here it came, ‘a girl, who I would see married.’

I said nothing. What is the point of protesting when the executioner’s sword is in mid swing?

‘Her name is Mildrith,’ he went on, ‘and she is dear to me. A pious girl, modest and faithful. Her father was reeve to Ealdorman Odda, and she will bring land to her husband, good land, and I would have a good man hold that good land.’

I offered a smile that I hoped was not too sickly. ‘He would be a fortunate man, lord,’ I said, ‘to marry a girl who is dear to you.’

‘So go to her,’ he commanded me, ‘and marry her,’ the sword struck, ‘and then I shall name you commander of the fleet.’

‘Yes, lord,’ I said.

Leofric, of course, laughed like a demented jackdaw. ‘He’s no fool, is he?’ he said when he had recovered. ‘He’s making you into a West Saxon. So what do you know about this Miltewærc.’ Miltewærc is a pain in the spleen.

‘Mildrith,’ I said, ‘and she’s pious.’

‘Of course she’s pious. He wouldn’t want you to marry her if she was a leg-spreader.’

‘She’s an orphan,’ I said, ‘and aged about sixteen or seventeen.’

‘Christ! That old? She must be an ugly sow! But poor thing, she must be wearing out her knees praying to be spared a rutting from an earsling like you. But that’s her fate! So let’s get you married, then we can kill some Danes.’

It was winter. We had spent the Christmas feast at Cippanhamm, and that was no Yule, and now we rode south through frost and rain and wind. Father Willibald accompanied us, for he was still priest to the fleet, and my plan was to reach Defnascir, do what was grimly necessary, and then ride straight to Hamtun to make certain the winter work on the twelve boats was being done properly. It is in winter that ships are caulked, scraped, cleaned, and made tight for the spring, and the thought of ships made me dream of the Danes, and of Brida, and I wondered where she was, what she did, and whether we would meet again. And I thought of Ragnar. Had he found Thyra? Did Kjartan live? Theirs was another world now, and I knew I drifted away from it and was being entangled in the threads of Alfred’s tidy life. He was trying to make me into a West Saxon, and he was half succeeding. I was sworn now to fight for Wessex and it seemed I must marry into it, but I still clung to that ancient dream of retaking Bebbanburg.

I loved Bebbanburg and I almost loved Defnascir as much. When the world was made by Thor from the carcass of Ymir he did well when he fashioned Defnascir and its shire next door, Thornsæta. Both were beautiful lands of soft hills and quick streams, of rich fields and thick soil, of high heaths and good harbours. A man could live well in either shire, and I could have been happy in Defnascir had I not loved Bebbanburg more. We rode down the valley of the River Uisc, through well-tended fields of red earth, past plump villages and high halls until we came to Exanceaster which was the shire’s chief town. It had been made by the Romans who had built a fortress on a hill above the Uisc and surrounded it with a wall of flint, stone and brick, and the wall was still there and guards challenged us as we reached the northern gate.

‘We come to see Ealdorman Odda,’ Willibald said.

‘On whose business?’

‘The king’s,’ Willibald said proudly, flourishing a letter that bore Alfred’s seal, though I doubt the guards would have recognised it, but they seemed properly impressed and let us through into a town of decaying Roman buildings amidst which a timber church reared tall next to Ealdorman Odda’s hall.

The Ealdorman made us wait, but at last he came with his son and a dozen retainers, and one of his priests read the king’s letter aloud. It was Alfred’s pleasure that Mildrith should be married to his loyal servant, the Ealdorman Uhtred, and Odda was commanded to arrange the ceremony with as little delay as possible. Odda was not pleased at the news. He was an elderly man, at least forty years old, with grey hair and a face made grotesque by bulbous wens. His son, Odda the Younger, was even less pleased, for he scowled at the news. ‘It isn’t seemly, father,’ he complained.

‘It is the king’s wish.’

‘But …’

‘It is the king’s wish!’

Odda the Younger fell silent. He was about my age, almost nineteen, good-looking, black-haired, and elegant in a black tunic that was as clean as a woman’s dress and edged with gold thread. A golden crucifix hung at his neck. He gave me a grim look, and I must have appeared travel-stained and ragged to him, and after inspecting me and finding me about as appealing as a wet mongrel, he turned on his heel and stalked from the hall.

‘Tomorrow morning,’ Odda announced unhappily, ‘the bishop can marry you. But you must pay the bride price first.’

‘The bride price?’ I asked. Alfred had mentioned no such thing, though of course it was customary.

‘Thirty-three shillings,’ Odda said flatly, and with the hint of a smirk.

Thirty-three shillings was a fortune. A hoard. The price of a good war horse or a ship. It took me aback and I heard Leofric give a gasp behind me. ‘Is that what Alfred says?’ I demanded.

‘It is what I say,’ Odda said, ‘for Mildrith is my goddaughter.’

No wonder he smirked. The price was huge and he doubted I could pay it, and if I could not pay it then the girl was not mine and, though Odda did not know it, the fleet would not be mine either. Nor, of course, was the price merely thirty-three shillings, or 396 silver pence, it was double that, for it was also customary for a husband to give his new wife an equivalent sum after the marriage was consummated. That second gift was none of Odda’s business and I doubted very much whether I would want to pay it, just as Ealdorman Odda was now certain, from my hesitation, that I would not be paying him the bride price without which there could be no marriage contract.

‘I can meet the lady?’ I asked.

‘You may meet her at the ceremony tomorrow morning,’ Odda said firmly, ‘but only if you pay the bride price. Otherwise, no.’

He looked disappointed as I opened my pouch and gave him one gold coin and thirty-six silver pennies. He looked even more disappointed when he saw that was not all the coin I possessed, but he was trapped now. ‘You may meet her,’ he told me, ‘in the cathedral tomorrow.’

‘Why not now?’ I asked.

‘Because she is at her prayers,’ the Ealdorman said, and with that he dismissed us.

Leofric and I found a place to sleep in a tavern close to the cathedral, which was the bishop’s church, and that night I got drunk as a spring hare. I picked a fight with someone, I have no idea who, and only remember that Leofric, who was not quite as drunk as me, pulled us apart and flattened my opponent, and after that I went into the stable yard and threw up all the ale I had just drunk. I drank some more, slept badly, woke to hear rain seething on the stable roof and then vomited again.

‘Why don’t we just ride to Mercia?’ I suggested to Leofric. The king had lent us horses and I did not mind stealing them.

‘What do we do there?’

‘Find men?’ I suggested. ‘Fight?’

‘Don’t be daft, Earsling,’ Leofric said. ‘We want the fleet. And if you don’t marry the ugly sow, I don’t get to command it.’

‘I command it,’ I said.

‘But only if you marry,’ Leofric said, ‘and then you’ll command the fleet and I’ll command you.’

Father Willibald arrived then. He had slept in the monastery next door to the tavern and had come to make sure I was ready, and looked alarmed at my ragged condition. ‘What’s that mark on your face?’ he asked.

‘Bastard hit me last night,’ I said, ‘I was drunk. So was he, but I was more drunk. Take my advice, father, never get into a fight when you’re badly drunk.’

I drank more ale for breakfast. Willibald insisted I wear my best tunic, which was not saying much for it was stained, crumpled and torn. I would have preferred to wear my coat of mail, but Willibald said that was inappropriate for a church, and I suppose he was right, and I let him brush me down and try to dab the worst stains out of the wool. I tied my hair with a leather lace, strapped on Serpent-Breath and Wasp-Sting, which again Willibald said I should not wear in a holy place, but I insisted on keeping the weapons, and then, a doomed man, I went to the cathedral with Willibald and Leofric.

It was raining as if the heavens were being drained of all their water. Rain bounced in the streets, flowed in streams down the gutters and leaked through the cathedral’s thatch. A brisk cold wind was coming from the east and it found every crack in the cathedral’s wooden walls so that the candles on the altars flickered and some blew out. It was a small church, not much bigger than Ragnar’s burned hall, and it must have been built on a Roman foundation for the floor was made of flagstones that were now being puddled by rainwater. The bishop was already there, two other priests fussed with the guttering candles on the high altar, and then Ealdorman Odda arrived with my bride.

Who took one look at me and burst into tears.

What was I expecting? A woman who looked like a sow, I suppose, a woman with a pox-scarred face and a sour expression and haunches like an ox. No one expects to love a wife, not if they marry for land or position, and I was marrying for land and she was marrying because she had no choice, and there really is no point in making too much of a fuss about it, because that is the way the world works. My job was to take her land, work it, make money, and Mildrith’s duty was to give me sons and make sure there was food and ale on my table. Such is the holy sacrament of marriage.

I did not want to marry her. By rights, as an Ealdorman of Northumbria, I could expect to marry a daughter of the nobility, a daughter who would bring much more land than twelve hilly hides in Defnascir. I might have expected to marry a daughter who could increase Bebbanburg’s holdings and power, but that was plainly not going to happen, so I was marrying a girl of ignoble birth who would now be known as the Lady Mildrith and she might have shown some gratitude for that, but instead she cried and even tried to pull away from Ealdorman Odda.

He probably sympathised with her, but the bride price had been paid, and so she was brought to the altar and the bishop, who had come back from Cippanhamm with a streaming cold, duly made us man and wife. ‘And may the blessing of God the Father,’ he said, ‘God the Son and God the Holy Ghost be on your union.’ He was about to say amen, but instead sneezed mightily.

‘Amen,’ Willibald said. No one else spoke.

So Mildrith was mine.

Odda the Younger watched as we left the church and he probably thought I did not see him, but I did, and I marked him down. I knew why he was watching.

For the truth of it, which surprised me, was that Mildrith was desirable. That word does not do her justice, but it is so very hard to remember a face from long ago. Sometimes, in a dream, I see her, and she is real then, but when I am awake and try to summon her face I cannot do it. I remember she had clear, pale skin, that her lower lip jutted out too much, that her eyes were very blue and her hair the same gold as mine. She was tall, which she disliked, thinking it made her unwomanly, and had a nervous expression, as though she constantly feared disaster, and that can be very attractive in a woman and I confess I found her attractive. That did surprise me, indeed it astonished me, for such a woman should have long been married. She was almost seventeen years old, and by that age most women have already given birth to three or four children or else been killed in the attempt, but as we rode to her holdings that lay to the west of the River Uisc’s mouth I heard some of her tale. She was being drawn in a cart by two oxen that Willibald had insisted garlanding with flowers. Leofric, Willibald and I rode alongside the cart, and Willibald asked her questions and she answered him readily enough for he was a priest and a kind man.

Her father, she said, had left her land and debts, and the debts were greater than the value of the land. Leofric sniggered when he heard the word debts. I said nothing, but just stared doggedly ahead.

The trouble, Mildrith said, had begun when her father had granted a tenth of his holdings as ælmesæcer, which is land devoted to the church. The church does not own it, but has the right to all that the land yields, whether in crops or cattle, and her father had made the grant, Mildrith explained, because all his children except her had died and he wanted to find favour with God. I suspected he had wanted to find favour with Alfred, for in Wessex an ambitious man was well advised to look after the church if he wanted the king to look after him.

But then the Danes had raided, cattle had been slaughtered, a harvest failed, and the church took her father to law for failing to provide the land’s promised yield. Wessex, I discovered, was very devoted to the law, and all the men of law are priests, every last one of them, which means that the law is the church, and when Mildrith’s father died the law had decreed that he owed the church a huge sum, quite beyond his ability to pay, and Alfred, who had the power to lift the debt, refused to do so. What this meant was that any man who married Mildrith married the debt, and no man had been willing to take that burden until a Northumbrian fool wandered into the trap like a drunk staggering downhill.

Leofric was laughing. Willibald looked worried.

‘So what is the debt?’ I asked.

‘Two thousand shillings, lord,’ Mildrith said in a very small voice.

Leofric almost choked laughing and I could have cheerfully killed him on the spot.

‘And it increases yearly?’ Willibald asked shrewdly.

‘Yes,’ Mildrith said, refusing to meet my eyes. A more sensible man would have explored Mildrith’s circumstances before the marriage contract was made, but I had just seen marriage as a route to the fleet. So now I had the fleet, I had the debt and I had the girl, and I also had a new enemy, Odda the Younger, who had plainly wanted Mildrith for himself, though his father, wisely, had refused to saddle his family with the crippling debt, nor, I suspected, did he want his son to marry beneath him.

There is a hierarchy among men. Beocca liked to tell me it reflected the hierarchy of heaven, and perhaps it does, but I know nothing of that, but I do know how men are ranked. At the top is the king, and beneath him are his sons, and then come the Ealdormen who are the chief nobles of the land and without land a man cannot be noble, though I was, because I have never abandoned my claim to Bebbanburg. The king and his Ealdormen are the power of a kingdom, the men who hold great lands and raise the armies, and beneath them are the lesser nobles, usually called reeves, and they are responsible for law in a lord’s land, though a man can cease to be a reeve if he displeases his lord. The reeves are drawn from the ranks of thegns, who are wealthy men who can lead followers to war, but who lack the wide holdings of noblemen like Odda or my father. Beneath the thegns are the ceorls, who are all free men, but if a ceorl loses his livelihood then he could well become a slave, which is the bottom of the dungheap. Slaves can be, and often are, freed, though unless a slave’s lord gives him land or money he will soon be a slave again. Mildrith’s father had been a thegn, and Odda had made him a reeve, responsible for keeping the peace in a wide swathe of southern Defnascir, but he had also been a thegn of insufficient land, whose foolishness had diminished the little he possessed, and so he had left Mildrith impoverished which made her unsuitable as a wife for an Ealdorman’s son, though she was reckoned good enough for an exiled lord from Northumbria. In truth she was just another pawn on Alfred’s chessboard and he had only given her to me so that I became responsible for paying the church a vast sum.

He was a spider, I thought sourly, a priestly-black spider spinning sticky webs, and I thought I had been so clever when I talked to him in the hall at Cippanhamm. In truth I could have prayed openly to Thor before pissing on the relics of Alfred’s altar and he would still have given me the fleet because he knew the fleet would have little to do in the coming war, and he had only wanted to trap me for his future ambitions in the north of England. So now I was trapped, and the bastard Ealdorman Odda had carefully let me walk into the trap.

The thought of Defnascir’s Ealdorman prompted a question from me. ‘What bride price did Odda give you?’ I asked Mildrith.

‘Fifteen shillings, lord.’

‘Fifteen shillings?’ I asked, shocked.

‘Yes, lord.’

‘The cheap bastard,’ I said.

‘Cut the rest out of him,’ Leofric snarled. A pair of very blue eyes looked at him, then at me, then vanished under the cloak again.

Her twelve hides of land, that were now mine, lay in the hills above the River Uisc’s sea-reach, in a place called Oxton which simply means a farm where oxen are kept. It was a shieling, as the Danes would say, a farmstead, and the house had a thatch so overgrown with moss and grass that it looked like an earth mound. There was no hall, and a nobleman needs a hall in which to feed his followers, but it did have a cattle shed and a pig shed and land enough to support sixteen slaves and five families of tenants, all of whom were summoned to greet me, as well as half a dozen household servants, most of whom were also slaves, and they welcomed Mildrith fondly for, since her father’s death, she had been living in the household of Ealdorman Odda’s wife while the farmstead was managed by a man called Oswald who looked about as trustworthy as a stoat.

That night we made a meal of peas, leeks, stale bread and sour ale, and that was my first marriage feast in my own house which was also a house under threat of debt. Next morning it had stopped raining and I breakfasted on more stale bread and sour ale, and then walked with Mildrith to a hilltop from where I could stare down at the wide sea-reach that lay across the land like the flattened grey blade of an axe. ‘Where do these folk go,’ I asked, meaning her slaves and tenants, ‘when the Danes come?’

‘Into the hills, lord.’

‘My name is Uhtred.’

‘Into the hills, Uhtred.’

‘You won’t go into the hills,’ I said firmly.

‘I won’t?’ Her eyes widened in alarm.

‘You will come with me to Hamtun,’ I said, ‘and we shall have a house there so long as I command the fleet.’

She nodded, plainly nervous, and then I took her hand, opened it, and poured in thirty-three shillings, so many coins that they spilt onto her lap. ‘Yours, wife,’ I said.

And so she was. My wife. And that same day we left, going eastwards, man and wife.

The story hurries now. It quickens like a stream coming to a fall in the hills and, like a cascade foaming down jumbled rocks, it gets angry and violent, confused even. For it was in that year, 876, that the Danes made their greatest effort yet to rid England of its last kingdom, and the onslaught was huge, savage and sudden.

Guthrum the Unlucky led the assault. He had been living in Grantaceaster, calling himself King of East Anglia, and Alfred, I think, assumed he would have good warning if Guthrum’s army left that place, but the West Saxon spies failed and the warnings did not come, and the Danish army was all mounted on horses, and Alfred’s troops were in the wrong place and Guthrum led his men south across the Temes and clear across all Wessex to capture a great fortress on the south coast. That fortress was called Werham and it lay not very far west of Hamtun, though between us and it lay a vast stretch of inland sea called the Poole. Guthrum’s army assaulted Werham, captured it, raped the nuns in Werham’s nunnery, and did it all before Alfred could react. Once inside the fortress Guthrum was protected by two rivers, one to the north of the town and the other to the south. To the east was the wide placid Poole and a massive wall and ditch guarded the only approach from the west.

There was nothing the fleet could do. As soon as we heard that the Danes were in Werham we readied ourselves for sea, but no sooner had we reached the open water than we saw their fleet and that ended our ambitions.

I have never seen so many ships. Guthrum had marched across Wessex with close to a thousand horsemen, but now the rest of his army came by sea and their ships darkened the water. There were hundreds of boats. Men later said three hundred and fifty, though I think there were fewer, but certainly there were more than two hundred. Ship after ship, dragon prow after serpent head, oars churning the dark sea white, a fleet going to battle, and all we could do was slink back into Hamtun and pray that the Danes did not sail up Hamtun Water to slaughter us.

They did not. The fleet sailed on to join Guthrum in Werham, so now a huge Danish army was lodged in southern Wessex, and I remembered Ragnar’s advice to Guthrum. Split their forces, Ragnar had said, and that surely meant another Danish army lay somewhere to the north, just waiting to attack, and when Alfred went to meet that second army, Guthrum would erupt from behind Werham’s walls to attack him in the rear.

‘It’s the end of England,’ Leofric said darkly. He was not much given to gloom, but that day he was downcast. Mildrith and I had taken a house in Hamtun, one close to the water, and he ate with us most nights we were in the town. We were still taking the ships out, now in a flotilla of twelve, always in hope of catching some Danish ships unawares, but their raiders only sallied out of the Poole in large numbers, never fewer than thirty ships, and I dared not lose Alfred’s navy in a suicidal attack on such large forces. In the height of the summer a Danish force came to Hamtun’s water, rowing almost to our anchorage, and we lashed our ships together, donned armour, sharpened weapons and waited for their attack. But they were no more minded for battle than we were. To reach us they would have to negotiate a mud-bordered channel and they could only put two ships abreast in that place and so they were content to jeer at us from the open water and then leave.

Guthrum waited in Werham and what he waited for, we later learned, was for Halfdan to lead a mixed force of Northmen and Britons out of Wales. Halfdan had been in Ireland, avenging Ivar’s death, and now he was supposed to bring his fleet and army to Wales, assemble a great army there and lead it across the Sæfern sea and attack Wessex. But, according to Beocca, God intervened. God or the three spinners. Fate is everything, for news came that Halfdan had died in Ireland, and of the three brothers only Ubba now lived, though he was still in the far wild north. Halfdan had been killed by the Irish, slaughtered along with scores of his men in a vicious battle, and so the Irish saved Wessex that year.

We knew none of that in Hamtun. We made our impotent forays and waited for news of the second blow that must fall on Wessex, and still it did not come, and then, as the first autumn gales fretted the coast, a messenger came from Alfred, whose army was camped to the west of Werham, demanding that I go to the king. The messenger was Beocca and I was surprisingly pleased to see him, though annoyed that he gave me the command verbally. ‘Why did I learn to read?’ I demanded of him, ‘if you don’t bring written orders?’

‘You learned to read, Uhtred,’ he said happily, ‘to improve your mind, of course,’ then he saw Mildrith and his mouth began to open and close like a landed fish. ‘Is this?’ he began, and was struck dumb as a stick.

‘The Lady Mildrith,’ I said.

‘Dear lady,’ Beocca said, then gulped for air and twitched like a puppy wanting a pat. ‘I have known Uhtred,’ he managed to say to her, ‘since he was a little child! Since he was just a little child.’

‘He’s a big one now,’ Mildrith said, which Beocca thought was a wonderful jest for he giggled immoderately.

‘Why,’ I managed to stem his mirth, ‘am I going to Alfred?’

‘Because Halfdan is dead, God be praised, and no army will come from the north, God be praised, and so Guthrum seeks terms! The discussions have already started, and God be praised for that too.’ He beamed at me as though he was responsible for this rush of good news, and perhaps he was because he went on to say that Halfdan’s death was the result of prayers. ‘So many prayers, Uhtred. You see the power of prayer?’

‘God be praised indeed,’ Mildrith answered instead of me. She was indeed very pious, but no one is perfect. She was also pregnant, but Beocca did not notice and I did not tell him.

I left Mildrith in Hamtun, and rode with Beocca to the West Saxon army. A dozen of the king’s household troops served as our escort, for the route took us close to the northern shore of the Poole and Danish boats had been raiding that shore before the truce talks opened. ‘What does Alfred want of me?’ I asked Beocca constantly, insisting, despite his denials, that he must have some idea, but he claimed ignorance and in the end I stopped asking.

We arrived outside Werham on a chill autumn evening. Alfred was at his prayers in a tent that was serving as his royal chapel and Ealdorman Odda and his son waited outside and the Ealdorman gave me a guarded nod while his son ignored me. Beocca went into the tent to join the prayers while I squatted, drew Serpent-Breath and sharpened her with the whetstone I carried in my pouch.

‘Expecting to fight?’ Ealdorman Odda asked me sourly.

I looked at his son. ‘Maybe,’ I said, then looked back to the father. ‘You owe my wife money,’ I said, ‘eighteen shillings.’ He reddened, said nothing, though the son put a hand to his sword hilt and that made me smile and stand, Serpent-Breath’s naked blade already in my grip. Ealdorman Odda pulled his son angrily away. ‘Eighteen shillings!’ I called after them, then squatted again and ran the stone down the sword’s long edge.

Women. Men fight for them, and that was another lesson to learn. As a child I thought men struggled for land or for mastery, but they fight for women just as much. Mildrith and I were unexpectedly content together, but it was clear that Odda the Younger hated me because I had married her, and I wondered if he would dare do anything about that hatred. Beocca once told me the tale of a prince from a far away land who stole a king’s daughter and the king led his army to the prince’s land and thousands of great warriors died in the struggle to get her back. Thousands! And all for a woman. Indeed the argument that began this tale, the rivalry between King Osbert of Northumbria and Ælla, the man who wanted to be king, all began because Ælla stole Osbert’s wife. I have heard some women complain that they have no power and that men control the world, and so they do, but women still have the power to drive men to battle and to the grave beyond.

I was thinking of these things as Alfred came from the tent. He had the look of beatific pleasure he usually wore when he had just said his prayers, but he was also walking stiffly, which probably meant the ficus was troubling him again, and he looked distinctly uncomfortable when we sat down to supper that night. The meal was an unspeakable gruel I would hesitate to serve to pigs, but there was bread and cheese enough so I did not starve. I did note that Alfred was distant with me, hardly acknowledging my presence, and I put that down to the fleet’s failure to achieve any real victory during that summer, yet he had still summoned me and I wondered why if all he intended to do was ignore me.

Yet, next morning, he summoned me after prayers and we walked up and down outside the royal tent where the dragon banner flew in the autumn sun. ‘The fleet,’ Alfred said, frowning, ‘can it prevent the Danes leaving the Poole?’

‘No, lord.’

‘No?’ That was said sharply. ‘Why not?’

‘Because, lord,’ I said, ‘we have twelve ships and they have over two hundred. We could kill a few of them, but in the end they’ll overwhelm us and you won’t have any fleet left and they’ll still have more than two hundred ships.’

I think Alfred knew that, but he still did not like my answer. He grimaced, then walked in silence for a few more paces. ‘I am glad you married,’ he said abruptly.

‘To a debt,’ I said sharply.

He did not like my tone, but allowed it. ‘The debt, Uhtred,’ he said reprovingly, ‘is to the church, so you must welcome it. Besides, you’re young, you have time to pay. The Lord, remember, loves a cheerful giver.’ That was one of his favourite sayings and if I heard it once I heard it a thousand times. He turned on his heel, then looked back. ‘I shall expect your presence at the negotiations,’ he said, but did not explain why, nor wait for any response, but just walked on.

He and Guthrum were talking. A canopy had been raised between Alfred’s camp and Werham’s western wall, and it was beneath that shelter that a truce was being hammered out. Alfred would have liked to assault Werham, but the approach was narrow, the wall high and in very good repair, and the Danes were numerous. It would have been a very risky fight, and one that the Danes could expect to win, and so Alfred had abandoned the idea. As for the Danes, they were trapped. They had been relying on Halfdan coming to attack Alfred in the rear, but Halfdan was dead in Ireland, and Guthrum’s men were too many to be carried away on their ships, big as their fleet was, and if they tried to break out by land they would be forced to fight Alfred on the narrow strip of land between the two rivers, and that would cause a great slaughter. I remembered Ravn telling me how the Danes feared to lose too many men for they could not replace them quickly. Guthrum could stay where he was, of course, but then Alfred would besiege him and Alfred had already ordered that every barn, granary or store-house within raiding distance of the Poole was to be emptied. The Danes would starve in the coming winter.

Which meant that both sides wanted peace, and Alfred and Guthrum had been discussing terms, and I arrived just as they were finishing the discussions. It was already too late in the year for the Danish fleet to risk a long journey around Wessex’s southern coast, and so Alfred had agreed that Guthrum could remain in Werham through the winter. He also agreed to supply them with food on condition that they made no raids, and he agreed to give them silver because he knew the Danes always wanted silver, and in return they promised that they would stay peaceably in Werham and leave peaceably in the spring when their fleet would go back to East Anglia and the rest of their army would march north through Wessex, guarded by our men, until they reached Mercia.

No one, on either side, believed the promises, so they had to be secured, and for that each side demanded hostages, and the hostages had to be of rank, or else their lives would be security for nothing. A dozen Danish Earls, none of whom I knew, were to be delivered to Alfred, and an equivalent number of English nobles given to Guthrum.

Which was why I had been summoned. Which was why Alfred had been so distant with me, for he knew all along that I was to be one of the hostages. My use to him had lessened that year, because of the fleet’s impotence, but my rank still had bargaining power, and so I was among the chosen. I was Ealdorman Uhtred, and only useful because I was a noble, and I saw Odda the Younger smiling broadly as my name was accepted by the Danes.

Guthrum and Alfred then swore oaths. Alfred insisted that the Danish leader made his oath with one hand on the relics that Alfred always carried in his baggage. There was a feather from the dove that Noah had released from the ark, a glove that had belonged to Saint Cedd and, most sacred of all, a toe-ring that had belonged to Mary Magdalene. The holy ring, Alfred called it, and a bemused Guthrum put his hand on the scrap of gold and swore he would keep his promises, then insisted that Alfred put a hand on the bone he hung in his hair and he made the King of Wessex swear on a dead Danish mother that the West Saxons would keep the treaty. Only when those oaths were made, sanctified by the gold of a saint and the bone of a mother, were the hostages exchanged, and as I walked across the space between the two sides Guthrum must have recognised me for he gave me a long, contemplative look, and then we were escorted, with ceremony, to Werham.

Where Earl Ragnar, son of Ragnar, welcomed me.

There was joy in that meeting. Ragnar and I embraced like brothers, and I thought of him as a brother, and he thumped my back, poured ale, and gave me news. Kjartan and Sven still lived and were still in Dunholm. Ragnar had confronted them in a formal meeting where both sides were forbidden to carry weapons, and Kjartan had sworn that he was innocent of the hall-burning and declared he knew nothing of Thyra. ‘The bastard lied,’ Ragnar told me, ‘and I know he lied. And he knows he will die.’

‘But not yet?’

‘How can I take Dunholm?’

Brida was there, sharing Ragnar’s bed, and she greeted me warmly, though not as hotly as Nihtgenga who leaped all over me and washed my face with his tongue. Brida was amused that I was going to be a father. ‘But it will be good for you,’ she said.

‘Good for me? Why?’

‘Because you’ll be a proper man.’

I thought I was that already, yet there was still one thing lacking, one thing I had never confessed to anyone, not to Mildrith, not to Leofric, and not now to Ragnar or Brida. I had fought the Danes, I had seen ships burn and watched men drown, but I had never fought in a great shield wall. I had fought in small ones, I had fought ship’s crew against ship’s crew, but I had never stood on a wide battlefield and watched the enemy’s banners hide the sun, and known the fear that comes when hundreds or thousands of men are coming to the slaughter. I had been at Eoferwic and at Æsc’s Hill and I had seen the shield walls clash, but I had not been in the front rank. I had been in fights, but they had all been small and small fights end quickly. I had never endured the long blood-letting, the terrible fights when thirst and weariness weaken a man and the enemy, no matter how many you kill, keeps on coming. Only when I had done that, I thought, could I call myself a proper man.

I missed Mildrith, and that surprised me. I also missed Leofric, though there was huge pleasure in Ragnar’s company, and the life of a hostage was not hard. We lived in Werham, received enough food and watched the grey of winter shorten the days. One of the hostages was a cousin of Alfred’s, a priest called Wælla, who fretted and sometimes wept, but the rest of us were content enough. Hacca, who had once commanded Alfred’s fleet, was among the hostages, and he was the only one I knew well, but I spent my time with Ragnar and his men who accepted me as one of them and even tried to make me a Dane again. ‘I have a wife,’ I told them.

‘So bring her!’ Ragnar said. ‘We never have enough women.’

But I was English now. I did not hate the Danes, indeed I preferred their company to the company of the other hostages, but I was English. That journey was done. Alfred had not changed my allegiance, but Leofric and Mildrith had, or else the three spinners had become bored with teasing me, though Bebbanburg still haunted me and I did not know how, if I was to keep my loyalty to Alfred, I would ever see that lovely place again.

Ragnar accepted my choice. ‘But if there’s peace,’ he said, ‘will you help me fight Kjartan?’

‘If?’ I repeated the word.

He shrugged. ‘Guthrum still wants Wessex. We all do.’

‘If there’s peace,’ I promised, ‘I will come north.’

Yet I doubted there would be peace. In the spring Guthrum would leave Wessex, the hostages would be freed, and then what? The Danish army still existed and Ubba yet lived, so the onslaught on Wessex must begin again, and Guthrum must have been thinking the same for he talked with all the hostages in an effort to discover Alfred’s strength. ‘It is a great strength,’ I told him, ‘you may kill his army and another will spring up.’ It was all nonsense, of course, but what else did he expect me to say?

I doubt I convinced Guthrum, but Wælla, the priest who was Alfred’s cousin, put the fear of God into him. Guthrum spent hours talking with Wælla, and I often interpreted for him, and Guthrum was not asking about troops or ships, but about God. Who was the Christian god? What did he offer? He was fascinated by the tale of the crucifixion and I think, had we been given time enough, Wælla could even have persuaded Guthrum to convert. Wælla certainly thought so himself for he enjoined me to pray for such a conversion. ‘It’s close, Uhtred,’ he told me excitedly, ‘and once he has been baptised then there will be peace!’

Such are the dreams of priests. My dreams were of Mildrith and the child she carried. Ragnar dreamed of revenge. And Guthrum?

Despite his fascination with Christianity, Guthrum dreamed of just one thing.

He dreamed of war.

PART THREE

The Shield Wall

Ten

Alfred’s army withdrew from Werham. Some West Saxons stayed to watch Guthrum, but very few, for armies are expensive to maintain and, once gathered, they always seem to fall sick, so Alfred took advantage of the truce to send the men of the fyrds back to their farms while he and his household troops went to Scireburnan that lay a half-day’s march north-west of Werham and, happily for Alfred, was home to a bishop and a monastery. Beocca told me that Alfred spent that winter reading the ancient law codes from Kent, Mercia and Wessex, and doubtless he was readying himself to compile his own laws, which he eventually did. I am certain he was happy that winter, criticising his ancestors’ rules and dreaming of the perfect society where the church told us what not to do and the king punished us for doing it.

Huppa, Ealdorman of Thornsæta, commanded the few men who were left facing Werham’s ramparts, while Odda the Younger led a troop of horsemen who patrolled the shores of the Poole, but the two bands made only a small force and they could do little except keep an eye on the Danes, and why should they do more? There was a truce, Guthrum had sworn on the holy ring, and Wessex was at peace.

The Yule feast was a thin affair in Werham, though the Danes did their best and at least there was plenty of ale so men got drunk, but my chief memory of that Yule is of Guthrum crying. The tears poured down his face as a harpist played a sad tune and a skald recited a poem about Guthrum’s mother. Her beauty, the skald said, was rivalled only by the stars, while her kindness was such that flowers sprang up in winter to pay her homage. ‘She was a rancid bitch,’ Ragnar whispered to me, ‘and ugly as a bucket of shit.’

‘You knew her?’

‘Ravn knew her. He always said she had a voice that could cut down a tree.’

Guthrum was living up to his name ‘the Unlucky’. He had come so close to destroying Wessex and it had only been Halfdan’s death that had cheated him of the prize, and that was not Guthrum’s fault, yet there was a simmering resentment among the trapped army. Men muttered that nothing could ever prosper under Guthrum’s leadership, and perhaps that distrust had made him gloomier than ever, or perhaps it was hunger.

For the Danes were hungry. Alfred kept his word and sent food, but there was never quite enough, and I did not understand why the Danes did not eat their horses that were left to graze on the winter marshes between the fortress and the Poole. Those horses grew desperately thin, their pathetic grazing supplemented by what little hay the Danes had discovered in the town and when that was gone they pulled the thatch from some of Werham’s houses, and that poor diet kept the horses alive until the first glimmerings of spring. I welcomed those new signs of the turning year; the song of a missel thrush, the dog violets showing in sheltered spots, the lambs’ tails on the hazel trees and the first frogs croaking in the marsh. Spring was coming, and when the land was green Guthrum would leave and we hostages would be freed.

We received little news other than what the Danes told us, but sometimes a message was delivered to one or other of the hostages, usually nailed to a willow tree outside the gate, and one such message was addressed to me and, for the first time, I was grateful that Beocca had taught me to read for Father Willibald had written and told me I had a son. Mildrith had given birth before Yule and the boy was healthy and she was also healthy and the boy was called Uhtred. I wept when I read that. I had not expected to feel so much, but I did, and Ragnar asked why I was crying and I told him and he produced a barrel of ale and we gave ourselves a feast, or as much of a feast as we could make, and he gave me a tiny silver arm ring as a gift for the boy. I had a son. Uhtred.

Next day I helped Ragnar relaunch Wind-Viper. She had been dragged ashore so her timbers could be caulked, and we stowed her bilges with the stones that served as ballast and rigged her mast and afterwards killed a hare that we had trapped in the fields where the horses tried to graze, and Ragnar poured the hare’s blood on the Wind-Viper’s stem and called on Thor to send her fair winds and for Odin to send her great victories. We ate the hare that night and drank the last of the ale, and next morning a dragon boat arrived, coming from the sea, and I was amazed that Alfred had not ordered our fleet to patrol the waters off the Poole’s mouth, but none of our boats was there, and so that single Danish ship came upriver and brought a message for Guthrum.

Ragnar was vague about the ship. It came from East Anglia, he said, which turned out to be untrue, and merely brought news of that kingdom, which was equally untrue. It had come from the west, around Cornwalum, from the lands of the Welsh, but I only learned that later and, at the time, I did not care, because Ragnar also told me that we should be leaving soon, very soon, and I only had thoughts for the son I had not seen. Uhtred Uhtredson.

That night Guthrum gave the hostages a feast, a good feast too, with food and ale that had been brought on the newly arrived dragon ship, and Guthrum praised us for being good guests and he gave each of us an arm ring, and promised we would all be free soon. ‘When?’ I asked.

‘Soon!’ His long face glistened in the firelight as he raised a horn of ale to me. ‘Soon! Now drink!’

We all drank, and after the feast we hostages went to the nunnery’s hall where Guthrum insisted we slept. In the daytime we were free to roam wherever we wanted inside the Danish lines, and free to carry weapons if we chose, but at night he wanted all the hostages in one place so that his black-cloaked guards could keep an eye on us, and it was those guards who came for us in the night’s dark heart. They carried flaming torches and they kicked us awake, ordering us outside, and one of them kicked Serpent-Breath away when I reached for her. ‘Get outside,’ he snarled, and when I reached for the sword again a spear stave cracked across my skull and two more spears jabbed my arse, and I had no choice but to stumble out of the door into a gusting wind that was bringing a cold, spitting rain, and the wind tore at the flaming torches which lit the street where at least a hundred Danes waited, all armed, and I could see they had saddled and bridled their thin horses and my first thought was that these were the men who would escort us back to the West Saxon lines.

Then Guthrum, cloaked in black, pushed through the helmeted men. No words were spoken. Guthrum, grim-faced, the white bone in his hair, just nodded, and his black-cloaked men drew their swords and poor Wælla, Alfred’s cousin, was the first hostage to die. Guthrum winced slightly at the priest’s death, for I think he had liked Wælla, but by then I was turning, ready to fight the men behind me even though I had no weapon and knew that fight could only end with my death. A sword was already coming for me, held by a Dane in a leather jerkin that was studded with metal rivets, and he was grinning as he ran the blade towards my unprotected belly and he was still grinning as the throwing axe buried its blade between his eyes. I remember the thump of that blade striking home, the spurt of blood in the flamelight, the noise as the man fell onto the flint and shingle street, and all the while the frantic protests from the other hostages as they were murdered, but I lived. Ragnar had hurled the axe and now stood beside me, sword drawn. He was in his war gear, in polished chain mail, in high boots and a helmet which he had decorated with a pair of eagle wings, and in the raw light of the wind-fretted fires he looked like a god come down to Midgard.

‘They must all die,’ Guthrum insisted. The other hostages were dead or dying, their hands bloodied from their hopeless attempts to ward off the blades, and a dozen war Danes, swords red, now edged towards me to finish the job.

‘Kill this one,’ Ragnar shouted, ‘and you must kill me first.’ His men came out of the crowd to stand beside their lord. They were outnumbered by at least five to one, but they were Danes and they showed no fear.

Guthrum stared at Ragnar. Hacca was still not dead and he twitched in his agony and Guthrum, irritated that the man lived, drew his sword and rammed it into Hacca’s throat. Guthrum’s men were stripping the arm rings from the dead, rings that had been gifts from their master just hours before. ‘They all must die,’ Guthrum said when Hacca was still. ‘Alfred will kill our hostages now, so it must be man for man.’

‘Uhtred is my brother,’ Ragnar said, ‘and you are welcome to kill him, lord, but you must first kill me.’

Guthrum stepped back. ‘This is no time for Dane to fight Dane,’ he said grudgingly, and sheathed his sword to show that I could live. I stepped across the street to find the man who had stolen Serpent-Breath, Wasp-Sting and my armour, and he gave them to me without protest.

Guthrum’s men were mounting their horses. ‘What’s happening?’ I asked Ragnar.

‘What do you think?’ he asked truculently.

‘I think you’re breaking the truce.’

‘We did not come this far,’ he said, ‘to march away like beaten dogs.’ He watched as I buckled Serpent-Breath’s belt. ‘Come with us,’ he said.

‘Come with you where?’

‘To take Wessex, of course.’

I do not deny that there was a tug on my heart strings, a temptation to join the wild Danes in their romp across Wessex, but the tug was easily resisted. ‘I have a wife,’ I told him, ‘a child.’

He grimaced. ‘Alfred has trapped you, Uhtred.’

‘No,’ I said, ‘the spinners did that.’ Urðr, Verðandi and Skuld, the three women who spin our threads at the foot of Yggdrasil, had decided my fate. Destiny is all. ‘I shall go to my woman,’ I said.

‘But not yet,’ Ragnar said with a half-smile, and he took me to the river where a small boat carried us to where the newly launched Wind-Viper was anchored. A half-crew was already aboard, as was Brida, who gave me a breakfast of bread and ale. At first light, when there was just enough grey in the sky to reveal the glistening mud of the river’s banks, Ragnar ordered the anchor raised and we drifted downstream on current and tide, gliding past the dark shapes of other Danish ships until we came to a reach wide enough to turn Wind-Viper and there the oars were fitted, men tugged and she swivelled gracefully, both oar banks began to pull and she shot out into the Poole where most of the Danish fleet rode at anchor. We did not go far, just to the barren shore of a big island that sits in the centre of the Poole, a place of squirrels, seabirds and foxes. Ragnar let the ship glide towards the shore and, when her prow touched the beach, he embraced me. ‘You are free,’ he said.

‘Thank you,’ I said fervently, remembering those bloodied corpses by Werham’s nunnery.

He held onto my shoulders. ‘You and I,’ he said, ‘are tied as brothers. Don’t forget that. Now go.’

I splashed through the shallows as the Wind-Viper, a ghostly grey in the dawn, backed away. Brida called a farewell, I heard the oars bite and the ship was gone.

That island was a forbidding place. Fishermen and fowlers had lived there once, and an anchorite, a monk who lives by himself, had occupied a hollow tree in the island’s centre, but the coming of the Danes had driven them all away and the remnants of the fishermen’s houses were nothing but charred timbers on blackened ground. I had the island to myself, and it was from its shore that I watched the vast Danish fleet row towards the Poole’s entrance, though they stopped there rather than go to sea because the wind, already brisk, had freshened even more and now it was a half-gale blowing from the south and the breakers were shattering wild and white above the spit of sand that protected their new anchorage. The Danish fleet had moved there, I surmised, because to stay in the river would have exposed their crews to the West Saxon bowmen who would be among the troops reoccupying Werham.

Guthrum had led his horsemen out of Werham, that much was obvious, and all the Danes who had remained in the town were now crammed onto the ships where they waited for the weather to calm so they could sail away, but to where, I had no idea.

All day that south wind blew, getting harder and bringing a slashing rain, and I became bored of watching the Danish fleet fret at its anchors and so I explored the island’s shore and found the remnants of a small boat half hidden in a thicket and I hauled the wreck down to the water and discovered it floated well enough, and the wind would take me away from the Danes and so I waited for the tide to turn and then, half swamped in the broken craft, I floated free. I used a piece of wood as a crude paddle, but the wind was howling now and it drove me wet and cold across that wide water until, as night fell, I came to the Poole’s northern shore and there I became one of the sceadugengan again, picking my way through reeds and marshes until I found higher ground where bushes gave me shelter for a broken sleep. In the morning I walked eastwards, still buffeted by wind and rain, and so came to Hamtun that evening.

Where I found that Mildrith and my son were gone.

Taken by Odda the Younger.

Father Willibald told me the tale. Odda had come that morning, while Leofric was down at the shore securing the boats against the bruising wind, and Odda had said that the Danes had broken out, that they would have killed their hostages, that they might come to Hamtun at any moment, and that Mildrith should flee. ‘She did not want to go, lord,’ Willibald said, and I could hear the timidity in his voice. My anger was frightening him. ‘They had horses, lord,’ he said, as if that explained it.

‘You didn’t send for Leofric?’

‘They wouldn’t let me, lord.’ He paused. ‘But we were scared, lord. The Danes had broken the truce and we thought you were dead.’

Leofric had set off in pursuit, but by the time he learned Mildrith was gone Odda had at least a half-morning’s start and Leofric did not even know where he would have gone. ‘West,’ I said, ‘back to Defnascir.’

‘And the Danes?’ Leofric asked, ‘where are they going?’

‘Back to Mercia?’ I guessed.

Leofric shrugged. ‘Across Wessex? With Alfred waiting? And you say they went on horseback? How fit were the horses?’

‘They weren’t fit. They were half starved.’

‘Then they haven’t gone to Mercia,’ he said firmly.

‘Perhaps they’ve gone to meet Ubba,’ Willibald suggested.

‘Ubba!’ I had not heard that name in a long time.

‘There were stories, lord,’ Willibald said nervously, ‘that he was among the Britons in Wales. That he had a fleet on the Sæfern.’

That made sense. Ubba was replacing his dead brother, Halfdan, and evidently leading another force of Danes against Wessex, but where? If he crossed the Sæfern’s wide sea then he would be in Defnascir, or perhaps he was marching around the river, heading into Alfred’s heartland from the north, but for the moment I did not care. I only wanted to find my wife and child. There was pride in that desire, of course, but more than pride. Mildrith and I were suited to each other, I had missed her, I wanted to see my child. That ceremony in the rain-dripping cathedral had worked its magic and I wanted her back and I wanted to punish Odda the Younger for taking her away. ‘Defnascir,’ I said again, ‘that’s where the bastard’s gone. And that’s where we go tomorrow.’ Odda, I was certain, would head for the safety of home. Not that he feared my revenge, for he surely assumed I was dead, but he would be worried about the Danes, and I was worried that they might have found him on his westward flight.

‘You and me?’ Leofric asked.

I shook my head. ‘We take Heahengel and a full fighting crew.’

Leofric looked sceptical. ‘In this weather?’

‘The wind’s dropping,’ I said, and it was, though it still tugged at the thatch and rattled the shutters, but it was calmer next morning, but not by much for Hamtun’s water was still flecked white as the small waves ran angrily ashore, suggesting that the seas beyond the Solente would be huge and furious. But there were breaks in the cloud, the wind had gone into the east, and I was in no mood to wait. Two of the crew, both seamen all their lives, tried to dissuade me from the voyage. They had seen this weather before, they said, and the storm would come back, but I refused to believe them and they, to their credit, came willingly as did Father Willibald, which was brave of him for he hated the sea and was facing rougher water than any he had seen before.

We rowed up Hamtun’s water, hoisted the sail in the Solente, brought the oars inboard and ran before that east wind as though the serpent Corpse-Ripper was at our stern. Heahengel hammered through the short seas, threw the white water high, raced, and that was while we were still in sheltered waters. Then we passed the white stacks at Wiht’s end, the rocks that are called the Nædles, and the first tumultuous seas hit us and the Heahengel bent to them. Yet still we flew, and the wind was dropping and the sun shone through rents in the dark clouds to glitter on the churning sea, and Leofric suddenly roared a warning and pointed ahead.

He was pointing to the Danish fleet. Like me they believed the weather was improving, and they must have been in a hurry to join Guthrum, for the whole fleet was coming out of the Poole and was now sailing south to round the rocky headland, which meant, like us, they were going west. Which could mean they were going to Defnascir or perhaps planning to sail clear about Cornwalum to join Ubba in Wales.

‘You want to tangle with them?’ Leofric asked me grimly.

I heaved on the steering oar, driving us south. ‘We’ll go outside them,’ I said, meaning we would head out to sea and I doubted any of their ships would bother with us. They were in a hurry to get wherever they were going and with luck, I thought, Heahengel would outrun them for she was a fast ship and they were still well short of the headland.

We flew downwind and there was joy in it, the joy of steering a boat through angry seas, though I doubt there was much joy for the men who had to bail Heahengel, chucking the water over the side, and it was one of those men who looked astern and called a sudden warning to me. I turned to see a black squall seething across the broken seas. It was an angry patch of darkness and rain, coming fast, so fast that Willibald, who had been clutching the ship’s side as he vomited overboard, fell to his knees, made the sign of the cross and began to pray. ‘Get the sail down!’ I shouted at Leofric, and he staggered forward, but too late, much too late, for the squall struck.

One moment the sun had shone, then we were abruptly thrust into the devil’s playground as the squall hit us like a shield wall. The ship shuddered, water and wind and gloom smashing us in sudden turmoil and Heahengel swung to the blow, going broadside to the sea and nothing I could do would hold her straight, and I saw Leofric stagger across the deck as the stærbord side went under water. ‘Bail!’ I shouted desperately, ‘bail!’ And then, with a noise like thunder, the great sail split into tatters that whipped off the yard, and the ship came slowly upright, but she was low in the water, and I was using all my strength to keep her coming round, creeping round, reversing our course so that I could put her bows into that turmoil of sea and wind, and the men were praying, making the sign of the cross, bailing water, and the remnants of the sail and the broken lines were mad things, ragged demons, and the sudden gale was howling like the furies in the rigging and I thought how futile it would be to die at sea so soon after Ragnar had saved my life.

Somehow we got six oars into the water and then, with two men to an oar, we pulled into that seething chaos. Twelve men pulled six oars, three men tried to cut the rigging’s wreckage away, and the others threw water over the side. No orders were given, for no voice could be heard above that shrieking wind that was flensing the skin from the sea and whipping it in white spindrift. Huge swells rolled, but they were no danger for the Heahengel rode them, but their broken tops threatened to swamp us, and then I saw the mast sway, its shrouds parting, and I shouted uselessly, for no one could hear me, and the great spruce spar broke and fell. It fell across the ship’s side and the water flowed in again, but Leofric and a dozen men somehow managed to heave the mast overboard and it banged down our flank, then jerked because it was still held to the ship by a tangle of seal-hide ropes. I saw Leofric pluck an axe from the swamped bilge and start to slash at that tangle of lines, but I screamed at him with all my breath to put the axe down.

Because the mast, tied to us and floating behind us, seemed to steady the ship. It held Heahengel into the waves and wind, and let the great seas go rolling beneath us, and we could catch our breath at last. Men looked at each other as if amazed to find themselves alive, and I could even let go of the steering oar because the mast, with the big yard and the remnants of its sail still attached, was holding us steady. I found my body aching. I was soaked through, must have been cold, but did not notice.

Leofric came to stand beside me. Heahengel’s prow was facing eastwards, but we were travelling westwards, driven backwards by the tide and wind, and I turned to make certain we had sea room, and then touched Leofric’s shoulder and pointed towards the shore.

Where we saw a fleet dying.

The Danes had been sailing south, following the shore from the Poole’s entrance to the rearing headland, and that meant they were on a lee shore, and in that sudden resurgence of the storm they stood no chance. Ship after ship was being driven ashore. A few had made it past the headland, and another handful were trying to row clear of the cliffs, but most were doomed. We could not see their deaths, but I could imagine them. The crash of hulls against rocks, the churning water breaking through the planks, the pounding of sea and wind and timber on drowning men, dragon prows splintering and the halls of the sea god filling with the souls of warriors and, though they were the enemy, I doubt any of us felt anything but pity. The sea gives a cold and lonely death.

Ragnar and Brida. I just gazed, but could not distinguish one ship from another through the rain and broken sea. We did watch one ship, which seemed to have escaped, suddenly sink. One moment she was on a wave, spray flying from her hull, oars pulling her free, and next she was just gone. She vanished. Other ships were banging each other, oars tangling and splintering. Some tried to turn and run back to the Poole and many of those were driven ashore, some on the sands and some on the cliffs. A few ships, pitifully few, beat their way clear, men hauling on the oars in a frenzy, but all the Danish ships were overloaded, carrying men whose horses had died, carrying an army we knew not where, and that army now died.

We were south of the headland now, being driven fast to the west, and a Danish ship, smaller than ours, came close and the steersman looked across and gave a grim smile as if to acknowledge there was only one enemy now, the sea. The Dane drifted ahead of us, not slowed, as we were, by trailing wreckage. The rain hissed down, a malevolent rain, stinging on the wind, and the sea was full of planks, broken spars, dragon prows, long oars, shields and corpses. I saw a dog swimming frantically, eyes white, and for a moment I thought it was Nihtgenga, then saw this dog had black ears while Nihtgenga had white. The clouds were the colour of iron, ragged and low, and the water was being shredded into streams of white and green-black, and the Heahengel reared to each sea, crashed down into the troughs and shook like a live thing with every blow, but she lived. She was well-built, she kept us alive, and all the while we watched the Danish ships die and Father Willibald prayed.

Oddly his sickness had passed. He looked pale, and doubtless felt wretched, but as the storm pummelled us his vomiting ended and he even came to stand beside me, steadying himself by holding onto the steering oar. ‘Who is the Danish god of the sea?’ he asked me over the wind’s noise.

‘Njorð!’ I shouted back.

He grinned. ‘You pray to him and I’ll pray to God.’

I laughed. ‘If Alfred knew you’d said that you’d never become a bishop!’

‘I won’t become a bishop unless we survive this! So pray!’

I did pray, and slowly, reluctantly, the storm eased. Low clouds raced over the angry water, but the wind died and we could cut away the wreckage of mast and yard and unship the oars and turn Heahengel to the west and row through the flotsam of a shattered war fleet. A score of Danish ships were in front of us, and there were others behind us, but I guessed that at least half their fleet had sunk, perhaps more, and I felt an immense fear for Ragnar and Brida. We caught up with the smaller Danish ships and I steered close to as many as I could and shouted across the broken seas. ‘Did you see Wind-Viper?’

‘No,’ they called back. No, came the answer, again and again. They knew we were an enemy ship, but did not care for there was no enemy out in that water except the water itself, and so we rowed on, a mastless ship, and left the Danes behind us and as night fell, and as a streak of sunlight leaked like seeping blood into a rift of the western clouds, I steered Heahengel into the crooked reach of the River Uisc, and once we were behind the headland the sea calmed and we rowed, suddenly safe, past the long spit of sand and turned into the river and I could look up into the darkening hills to where Oxton stood, and I saw no light there.

We beached Heahengel and staggered ashore and some men knelt and kissed the ground while others made the sign of the cross. There was a small harbour in the wide river reach and some houses by the harbour and we filled them, demanded that fires were lit and food brought, and then, in the darkness, I went back outside and saw the sparks of light flickering upriver. I realised they were torches being burned on the remaining Danish boats that had somehow found their way into the Uisc and now rowed inland, going north towards Exanceaster, and I knew that was where Guthrum must have ridden and that the Danes were there, and the fleet’s survivors would thicken his army and Odda the Younger, if he lived, might well have tried to go there too.

With Mildrith and my son. I touched Thor’s hammer and prayed they were alive.

And then, as the dark boats passed upstream, I slept.

In the morning we pulled Heahengel into the small harbour where she could rest on the mud when the tide fell. We were forty-eight men, tired but alive. The sky was ribbed with clouds, high and grey-pink, scudding before the storm’s dying wind.

We walked to Oxton through woods full of bluebells. Did I expect to find Mildrith there? I think I did, but of course she was not. There was only Oswald the steward and the slaves and none of them knew what was happening.

Leofric insisted on a day to dry clothes, sharpen weapons and fill bellies, but I was in no mood to rest so I took two men, Cenwulf and Ida, and walked north towards Exanceaster that lay on the far side of the Uisc. The river settlements were empty, for the folk had heard of the Danes coming and had fled into the hills, and so we walked the higher paths and asked them what had happened, but they knew nothing except that there were dragon ships in the river, and we could see those for ourselves. There was a storm-battered fleet drawn up on the riverbank beneath Exanceaster’s stone walls. There were more ships than I had suspected, suggesting that a good part of Guthrum’s fleet had survived by staying in the Poole when the storm struck, and a few of those ships were still arriving, their crews rowing up the narrow river. We counted hulls and reckoned there were close to ninety boats, which meant that almost half of Guthrum’s fleet had survived, and I tried to distinguish Wind-Viper’s hull among the others, but we were too far away.

Guthrum the Unlucky. How well he deserved that name, though in time he came close to earning a better, but for now he had been unfortunate indeed. He had broken out of Werham, had doubtless hoped to resupply his army in Exanceaster and then strike north, but the gods of sea and wind had struck him down and he was left with a crippled army. Yet it was still a strong army and, for the moment, safe behind Exanceaster’s Roman walls.

I wanted to cross the river, but there were too many Danes by their ships, so we walked further north and saw armed men on the road which led west from Exanceaster, a road which crossed the bridge beneath the city and led over the moors towards Cornwalum, and I stared a long time at those men, fearing they might be Danes, but they were staring east, suggesting that they watched the Danes and I guessed they were English and so we went down from the woods, shields slung on our backs to show we meant no harm.

There were eighteen men, led by a thegn named Withgil who had been the commander of Exanceaster’s garrison and who had lost most of his men when Guthrum attacked. He was reluctant to tell the story, but it was plain he had expected no trouble and had posted only a few guards on the eastern gate, and when they had seen the approaching horsemen the guards had thought they were English and so the Danes had been able to capture the gate and then pierce the town. Withgil claimed to have made a fight at the fort in the town’s centre, but it was obvious from his men’s embarrassment that it had been a pathetic resistance, if it amounted to any resistance at all, and the probable truth was that Withgil had simply run away.

‘Was Odda there?’ I asked.

‘Ealdorman Odda?’ Withgil asked. ‘Of course not.’

‘Where was he?’

Withgil frowned at me as if I had just come from the moon. ‘In the north, of course.’

‘The north of Defnascir?’

‘He marched a week ago. He led the fyrd.’

‘Against Ubba?’

‘That’s what the king ordered,’ Withgil said.

‘So where’s Ubba?’ I demanded.

It seemed that Ubba had brought his ships across the wide Sæfern sea and had landed far to the west in Defnascir. He had travelled before the storm struck, which suggested his army was intact, and Odda had been ordered north to block Ubba’s advance into the rest of Wessex, and if Odda had marched a week ago then surely Odda the Younger would know that and would have ridden to join his father? Which suggested that Mildrith was there, wherever there was. I asked Withgil if he had seen Odda the Younger, but he said he had neither seen nor heard of him since Christmas.

‘How many men does Ubba have?’ I asked.

‘Many,’ Withgil said, which was not helpful, but all he knew.

‘Lord,’ Cenwulf touched my arm and pointed east and I saw horsemen appearing on the low fields which stretched from the river towards the hill on which Exanceaster is built. A lot of horsemen, and behind them came a standard-bearer and, though we were too far away to see the badge on the flag, the green and white proclaimed that it was the West Saxon banner. So Alfred had come here? It seemed likely, but I was in no mind to cross the river and find out. I was only interested in searching for Mildrith.

War is fought in mystery. The truth can take days to travel, and ahead of truth flies rumour, and it is ever hard to know what is really happening, and the art of it is to pluck the clean bone of fact from the rotting flesh of fear and lies.

So what did I know? That Guthrum had broken the truce and had taken Exanceaster, and that Ubba was in the north of Defnascir. Which suggested that the Danes were trying to do what they had failed to do the previous year, split the West Saxon forces, and while Alfred faced one army the other would ravage the land or, perhaps, descend on Alfred’s rear, and to prevent that the fyrd of Defnascir had been ordered to block Ubba. Had that battle been fought? Was Odda alive? Was his son alive? Were Mildrith and my son alive? In any clash between Ubba and Odda I would have reckoned on Ubba. He was a great warrior, a man of legend among the Danes, and Odda was a fussy, worried, greying and ageing man.

‘We go north,’ I told Leofric when we were back at Oxton. I had no wish to see Alfred. He would be besieging Guthrum, and if I walked into his camp he would doubtless order me to join the troops ringing the city and I would sit there, wait, and worry. Better to go north and find Ubba.

So next morning, under a spring sun, the Heahengel’s crew marched north.

The war was between the Danes and Wessex. My war was with Odda the Younger, and I knew I was driven by pride. The preachers tell us that pride is a great sin, but the preachers are wrong. Pride makes a man, it drives him, it is the shield wall around his reputation and the Danes understood that. Men die, they said, but reputation does not die.

What do we look for in a lord? Strength, generosity, hardness and success, and why should a man not be proud of those things? Show me a humble warrior and I will see a corpse. Alfred preached humility, he even pretended to it, loving to appear in church with bare feet and prostrating himself before the altar, but he never possessed true humility. He was proud, and men feared him because of it, and men should fear a lord. They should fear his displeasure and fear that his generosity will cease. Reputation makes fear, and pride protects reputation, and I marched north because my pride was endangered. My woman and child had been taken from me, and I would take them back, and if they had been harmed then I would take my revenge and the stink of that man’s blood would make other men fear me. Wessex could fall for all I cared, my reputation was more important and so we marched, skirting Exanceaster, following a twisting cattle track into the hills until we reached Twyfyrde, a small place crammed with refugees from Exanceaster, and none of them had seen or heard news of Odda the Younger, nor had they heard of any battle to the north, though a priest claimed that lightning had struck thrice in the previous night which he swore was a sign that God had struck down the pagans.

From Twyfyrde we took paths that edged the great moor, walking through country that was deep-wooded, hilly and lovely. We would have made better time if we had possessed horses, but we had none, and the few we saw were old, sick and there were never enough for all our men and so we walked, sleeping that night in a deep combe bright with blossom and sifted with bluebells, and a nightingale sang us to sleep and the dawn chorus woke us and we walked on beneath the white mayflower, and that afternoon we came to the hills above the northern shore and we met folk who had fled the coastal lands, bringing with them their families and livestock, and their presence told us we must soon see the Danes.

I did not know it but the three spinners were making my fate. They were thickening the threads, twisting them tighter, making me into what I am, but staring down from that high hill I only felt a flicker of fear, for there was Ubba’s fleet, rowing east, keeping pace with the horsemen and infantry who marched along the shore.

The folk who had fled their homes told us that the Danes had come from the Welsh lands across the wide Sæfern sea, and that they had landed at a place called Beardastopol which lies far in Defnascir’s west, and there they had collected horses and supplies, but then their attack eastwards into the West Saxon heartland had been delayed by the great storm which had wrecked Guthrum’s fleet. Ubba’s ships had stayed in Beardastopol’s harbour until the storm passed and then, inexplicably, they had still waited even when the weather improved and I guessed that Ubba, who would do nothing without the consent of the gods, had cast the runesticks, found them unfavourable, and so waited until the auguries were better. Now the runes must have been good for Ubba’s army was on the move. I counted thirty-six ships which suggested an army of at least twelve or thirteen hundred men.

‘Where are they going?’ one of my men asked.

‘East,’ I grunted, what else could I say? East into Wessex. East into the rich heartland of England’s last kingdom. East to Wintanceaster or to any of the other plump towns where the churches, monasteries and nunneries were brimming with treasure, east to where the plunder waited, east to where there was food and more horses, east to invite more Danes to come south across Mercia’s frontier, and Alfred would be forced to turn around and face them, and then Guthrum’s army would come from Exanceaster and the army of Wessex would be caught between two hosts of Danes, except that the fyrd of Defnascir was somewhere on this coast and it was their duty to stop Ubba’s men.

We walked east, passing from Defnascir into Sumorsæte, and shadowing the Danes by staying on the higher ground, and that night I watched as Ubba’s ships came inshore and the fires were lit in the Danish camp, and we lit our own fires deep in a wood and were marching again before dawn and thus got ahead of our enemies and by midday we could see the first West Saxon forces. They were horsemen, presumably sent to scout the enemy, and they were now retreating from the Danish threat, and we walked until the hills dropped away to where a river flowed into the Sæfern sea, and it was there that we discovered that Ealdorman Odda had decided to make his stand, in a fort built by the old people on a hill near the river.

The river was called the Pedredan and close to its mouth was a small place called Cantucton, and near Cantucton was the ancient earth-walled fort that the locals said was named Cynuit. It was old, that fort, Father Willibald said it was older than the Romans, that it had been old when the world was young, and the fort had been made by throwing up earth walls on a hilltop and digging a ditch outside the walls. Time had worked on those walls, wearing them down and making the ditch shallower, and grass had overgrown the ramparts, and on one side the wall had been ploughed almost to nothing, ploughed until it was a mere shadow on the turf, but it was a fortress and the place where Ealdorman Odda had taken his forces and where he would die if he could not defeat Ubba, whose ships were already showing in the river’s mouth.

I did not go straight to the fort, but stopped in the shelter of some trees and dressed for war. I became Ealdorman Uhtred in his battle glory. The slaves at Oxton had polished my mail coat with sand and I pulled it on, and over it I buckled a leather sword belt for Serpent-Breath and Wasp-Sting. I pulled on tall boots, put on the shining helmet and picked up my iron-bossed shield and, when all the straps were tight and the buckles firm, I felt like a god dressed for war, dressed to kill. My men buckled their own straps, laced their boots, tested their weapons’ edges and even Father Willibald cut himself a stave, a great piece of ash that could break a man’s skull. ‘You won’t need to fight, father,’ I told him.

‘We all have to fight now, lord,’ he said. He took a step back and looked me up and down, and a small smile came to his face. ‘You’ve grown up,’ he said.

‘It’s what we do, father,’ I said.

‘I remember when I first saw you. A child. Now I fear you.’

‘Let’s hope the enemy does,’ I said, not quite sure what enemy I meant, whether Odda or Ubba, and I wished I had Bebbanburg’s standard, the snarling wolf’s head, but I had my swords and my shield and I led my men out of the wood and across the fields to where the fyrd of Defnascir would make its stand.

The Danes were a mile or so to our left, spilling from the coast road and hurrying to surround the hill called Cynuit, though they would be too late to bar our path. To my right were more Danes, ship-Danes, bringing their dragon-headed boats up the Pedredan.

‘They outnumber us,’ Willibald said.

‘They do,’ I agreed. There were swans on the river, corncrakes in the uncut hay and crimson orchids in the meadows. This was the time of year when men should be haymaking or shearing their sheep. I need not be here, I thought to myself. I need not go to this hilltop where the Danes will come to kill us. I looked at my men and wondered if they thought the same, but when they caught my eye they only grinned, or nodded, and I suddenly realised that they trusted me. I was leading them and they were not questioning me, though Leofric understood the danger. He caught up with me.

‘There’s only one way off that hilltop,’ he said softly.

‘I know.’

‘And if we can’t fight our way out,’ he said, ‘then we’ll stay there. Buried.’

‘I know,’ I said again, and I thought of the spinners and knew they were tightening the threads, and I looked up Cynuit’s slope and saw there were some women at the very top, women being sheltered by their men, and I thought Mildrith might be among them, and that was why I climbed the hill because I did not know where else to seek her.

But the spinners were sending me to that old earth fort for another reason. I had yet to stand in the big shield wall, in the line of warriors, in the heave and horror of a proper battle where to kill once is merely to invite another enemy to come. The hill of Cynuit was the road to full manhood and I climbed it because I had no choice, the spinners sent me.

Then a roar sounded to our right, down in the Pedredan’s valley, and I saw a banner being raised beside a beached ship. It was the banner of the raven. Ubba’s banner. Ubba, last and strongest and most frightening of the sons of Lothbrok, had brought his blades to Cynuit. ‘You see that boat?’ I said to Willibald, pointing to where the banner flew. ‘Ten years ago,’ I said, ‘I cleaned that ship. I scoured it, scrubbed it, cleaned it.’ Danes were taking their shields from the shield-strake and the sun glinted on their myriad spear blades. ‘I was ten years old,’ I told Willibald.

‘The same boat?’ he asked.

‘Maybe. Maybe not.’ Perhaps it was a new ship. It did not matter, really, all that mattered was that it had brought Ubba.

To Cynuit.

The men of Defnascir had made a line where the old fort’s wall had eroded away. Some, a few, had spades and were trying to remake the earth barrier, but they would not be given time to finish, not if Ubba assaulted the hill, and I pushed through them, using my shield to thrust men out of my way, ignoring all those who questioned who we were, and so we made our way to the hill’s summit where Odda’s banner of a black stag flew.

I pulled off my helmet as I neared him. I tossed the helmet to Father Willibald, then drew Serpent-Breath for I had seen Odda the Younger standing beside his father, and he was staring at me as though I were a ghost, and to him I must have appeared just that. ‘Where is she?’ I shouted, and I pointed Serpent-Breath at him. ‘Where is she?’

Odda’s retainers drew swords or levelled spears, and Leofric drew his battle-thinned blade, Dane-Killer.

‘No!’ Father Willibald shouted and he ran forward, his staff raised in one hand and my helmet in the other. ‘No!’ He tried to head me off, but I pushed him aside, only to find three of Odda’s priests barring my way. That was one thing about Wessex, there were always priests. They appeared like mice out of a burning thatch, but I thrust the priests aside and confronted Odda the Younger. ‘Where is she?’ I demanded.

Odda the Younger was in mail. Mail so brightly polished that it hurt the eye. He had a helmet inlaid with silver, boots to which iron plates were strapped and a blue cloak held about his neck by a great brooch of gold and amber.

‘Where is she?’ I asked a fourth time, and this time Serpent-Breath was a hand’s length from his throat.

‘Your wife is at Cridianton,’ Ealdorman Odda answered. His son was too scared to open his mouth.

I had no idea where Cridianton was. ‘And my son?’ I stared into Odda the Younger’s frightened eyes. ‘Where is my son?’

‘They are both with my wife at Cridianton!’ Ealdorman Odda answered, ‘and they are safe.’

‘You swear to that?’ I asked.

‘Swear?’ The Ealdorman was angry now, his ugly, bulbous face red. ‘You dare ask me to swear?’ He drew his own sword. ‘We can cut you down like a dog,’ he said and his men’s swords twitched.

I swept my own sword around till it pointed down to the river. ‘You know whose banner that is?’ I asked, raising my voice so that a good portion of the men on Cynuit’s hill could hear me. ‘That is the raven banner of Ubba Lothbrokson. I have watched Ubba Lothbrokson kill. I have seen him trample men into the sea, cut their bellies open, take off their heads, wade in their blood and make his sword screech with their death-song, and you would kill me who is ready to fight him alongside you? Then do it.’ I spread my arms, baring my body to the Ealdorman’s sword. ‘Do it,’ I spat at him, ‘but first swear my wife and child are safe.’

He paused a long time, then lowered his blade. ‘They are safe,’ he said, ‘I swear it.’

‘And that thing,’ I pointed Serpent-Breath at his son, ‘did not touch her?’

The Ealdorman looked at his son who shook his head. ‘I swear I did not,’ Odda the Younger said, finding his voice. ‘I only wanted her to be safe. We thought you were dead and I wanted her to be safe. That is all, I swear it.’

I sheathed Serpent-Breath. ‘You owe my wife eighteen shillings,’ I said to the Ealdorman, then turned away.

I had come to Cynuit. I had no need to be on that hilltop. But I was there. Because destiny is everything.

Eleven

Ealdorman Odda did not want to kill Danes. He wanted to stay where he was and let Ubba’s forces besiege him. That, he reckoned, would be enough. ‘Keep their army here,’ he said heavily, ‘and Alfred can march to attack them.’

‘Alfred,’ I pointed out, ‘is besieging Exanceaster.’

‘He will leave men there to watch Guthrum,’ Odda said loftily, ‘and march here.’ He did not like talking to me, but I was an Ealdorman and he could not bar me from his council of war that was attended by his son, the priests and a dozen thegns, all of whom were becoming irritated by my comments. I insisted Alfred would not come to our relief, and Ealdorman Odda was refusing to move from the hilltop because he was sure Alfred would come. His thegns, all of them big men with heavy coats of mail and grim, weather-hardened faces, agreed with him. One muttered that the women had to be protected.

‘There shouldn’t be any women here,’ I said.

‘But they are here,’ the man said flatly. At least a hundred women had followed their men and were now on the hilltop where there was no shelter for them or their children.

‘And even if Alfred comes,’ I asked, ‘how long will it take?’

‘Two days?’ Odda suggested. ‘Three?’

‘And what will we drink while he’s coming?’ I asked. ‘Bird piss?’

They all just stared at me, hating me, but I was right for there was no spring on Cynuit. The nearest water was the river, and between us and the river were Danes, and Odda understood well enough that we would be assailed by thirst, but he still insisted we stay. Perhaps his priests were praying for a miracle.

The Danes were just as cautious. They outnumbered us, but not by many, and we held the high ground which meant they would have to fight up Cynuit’s steep slope, and so Ubba chose to surround the hill rather than assault it. The Danes hated losing men, and I remembered Ubba’s caution at the Gewæsc where he had hesitated to attack Edmund’s forces up the two paths from the marsh, and perhaps that caution was reinforced by Storri, his sorcerer, if Storri still lived. Whatever the reason, instead of forming his men into the shield wall to assault the ancient fort, Ubba posted them in a ring about Cynuit and then, with five of his shipmasters, climbed the hill. He carried no sword or shield which showed he wanted to talk.

Ealdorman Odda, his son, two thegns and three priests went to meet Ubba and, because I was an Ealdorman, I followed them. Odda gave me a malevolent look, but again he was unable to deny me, and so we met halfway down the slope where Ubba offered no greeting and did not even waste time on the usual ritual insults, but pointed out that we were trapped and that our wisest course was to surrender. ‘You will give up your weapons,’ he said, ‘I shall take hostages, and you will all live.’

One of Odda’s priests translated the demands to the Ealdorman. I watched Ubba. He looked older than I remembered, with grey hairs among the black tangle of his beard, but he was still a frightening man; huge chested, confident and harsh.

Ealdorman Odda was plainly frightened. Ubba, after all, was a renowned Danish chieftain, a man who had ranged across long seas to give great slaughter, and now Odda was forced to confront him. He did his best to sound defiant, retorting that he would stay where he was and put his faith in the one true God.

‘Then I shall kill you,’ Ubba answered.

‘You may try,’ Odda said.

It was a feeble response and Ubba spat in scorn. He was about to turn away, but then I spoke and needed no interpreter. ‘Guthrum’s fleet is gone,’ I said. ‘Njorð reached from the deep, Ubba Lothbrokson, and he snatched Guthrum’s fleet down to the seabed. All those brave men are gone to Ran and Ægir.’ Ran was Njorð’s wife and Ægir, the giant who guarded the souls of drowned men. I brought out my hammer charm and held it up. ‘I speak the truth, Lord Ubba,’ I said. ‘I watched that fleet die and I saw its men go under the waves.’

He stared at me with his flat, hard eyes and the violence in his heart was like the heat of a forge. I could feel it, but I could also sense his fear, not of us, but of the gods. He was a man who did nothing without a sign from the gods, and that was why I had talked of the gods when I spoke about the fleet’s drowning. ‘I know you,’ he growled, pointing at me with two fingers to avert the evil of my words.

‘And I know you, Ubba Lothbrokson,’ I said, and I let go of the charm and held up three fingers. ‘Ivar dead,’ I folded one finger down, ‘Halfdan dead,’ the second finger, ‘and only you are left. What did the runes say? That by the new moon there will be no Lothbrok brother left in Midgard?’

I had touched a nerve, as I intended to, for Ubba instinctively felt for his own hammer charm. Odda’s priest was translating, his voice a low murmur, and the Ealdorman was staring at me with wide astonished eyes.

‘Is that why you want us to surrender?’ I asked Ubba. ‘Because the runesticks tell you we cannot be killed in battle?’

‘I shall kill you,’ Ubba said. ‘I shall cut you from your crotch to your gullet. I shall spill you like offal.’

I made myself smile, though that was hard when Ubba was making threats. ‘You may try, Ubba Lothbrokson,’ I said, ‘but you will fail. And I know. I cast the runes, Ubba, I cast the runes under last night’s moon, and I know.’

He hated it, for he believed my lie. He wanted to be defiant, but for a moment he could only stare at me in fear because his own runesticks, I guessed, had told him what I was telling him, that any attack on Cynuit would end in failure. ‘You’re Ragnar’s boy,’ he said, placing me at last.

‘And Ragnar the Fearless speaks to me,’ I said, ‘he calls from the corpse-hall, he wants vengeance, Ubba, vengeance on the Danes, for Ragnar was killed treacherously by his own folk. I’m his messenger now, a thing from the corpse-hall, and I have come for you.’

‘I didn’t kill him!’ Ubba snarled.

‘Why should Ragnar care?’ I asked. ‘He just wants vengeance and to him one Danish life is as good as another, so cast your runes again and then offer us your sword. You are doomed, Ubba.’

‘And you’re a piece of weasel shit,’ he said and said no more, but just turned and hurried away.

Ealdorman Odda was still staring at me. ‘You know him?’ he asked.

‘I’ve known Ubba since I was ten years old,’ I said, watching the Danish chieftain walk away. I was thinking that if I had a choice, that if I could follow my warrior’s heart, I would rather fight alongside Ubba than against him, but the spinners had decreed otherwise. ‘Since I was ten,’ I went on, ‘and the one thing I know about Ubba is that he fears the gods. He’s terrified now. You can attack him and his heart will let him down because he thinks he will lose.’

‘Alfred will come,’ Odda said.

‘Alfred watches Guthrum,’ I said. I was not certain of that, of course. For all I knew Alfred could be watching us now from the hills, but I doubted he would leave Guthrum free to plunder Wessex. ‘He watches Guthrum,’ I said, ‘because Guthrum’s army is twice as large as Ubba’s. Even with his fleet half drowned, Guthrum has more men, and why would Alfred let them loose from Exanceaster? Alfred won’t come,’ I finished, ‘and we shall all die of thirst before Ubba attacks us.’

‘We have water,’ his son said sulkily, ‘and ale.’ He had been watching me resentfully, awed that I had spoken so familiarly with Ubba.

‘You have ale and water for a day,’ I said scornfully and saw from the Ealdorman’s expression that I was right.

Odda turned and stared south down the Pedredan’s valley. He was hoping to see Alfred’s troops, yearning for a glimpse of sunlight on spear heads, but of course there was nothing there except the trees stirring in the wind.

Odda the Younger sensed his father’s uncertainty. ‘We can wait for two days,’ he urged.

‘Death will be no better after two days,’ Odda said heavily. I admired him then. He had been hoping not to fight, hoping that his king would rescue him, but in his heart he knew I was right and knew that these Danes were his responsibility and that the men of Defnascir held England in their hands and must preserve it. ‘Dawn,’ he said, not looking at me. ‘We shall attack at dawn.’

We slept in war gear. Or rather men tried to sleep when they were wearing leather or mail, with sword belts buckled, helmets and weapons close, and we lit no fires for Odda did not want the enemy to see that we were readied for battle, but the enemy had fires, and our sentries could watch down the slopes and use the enemy’s light to look for infiltrators. None came. There was a waning moon sliding in and out of ragged clouds. The Danish fires ringed us, heaviest to the south by Cantucton where Ubba camped. More fires burned to the east, beside the Danish ships, the flames reflecting off the gilded beast-heads and painted dragon prows. Between us and the river was a meadow at the far side of which the Danes watched the hill, and beyond them was a wide stretch of marsh and at the marsh’s far side was a strip of firmer land beside the river where some hovels offered the Danish ship-guards shelter. The hovels had belonged to fishermen, long fled, and fires were lit between them. A handful of Danes paced the bank beside those fires, walking beneath the carved prows and I stood on the ramparts and gazed at those long, graceful ships and prayed that Wind-Viper still lived.

I could not sleep. I was thinking of shields and Danes and swords and fear. I was thinking of my child that I had never seen and of Ragnar the Fearless, wondering if he watched me from Valhalla. I was worrying that I would fail next day when, at last, I came to the life-gate of a shield wall, and I was not the only one denied sleep for, at the heart of the night, a man climbed the grassy rampart to stand beside me and I saw it was Ealdorman Odda. ‘How do you know Ubba?’ he asked.

‘I was captured by the Danes,’ I said, ‘and was raised by them. The Danes taught me to fight.’ I touched one of my arm rings. ‘Ubba gave me this one.’

‘You fought for him?’ Odda asked, not accusingly, but with curiosity.

‘I fought to survive,’ I said evasively.

He looked back to the moon-touched river. ‘When it comes to a fight,’ he said, ‘the Danes are no fools. They will be expecting an attack at dawn.’ I said nothing, wondering whether Odda’s fears were changing his mind. ‘And they outnumber us,’ he went on.

I still said nothing. Fear works on a man, and there is no fear like the prospect of confronting a shield wall. I was filled with fear that night, for I had never fought man to man in the clash of armies. I had been at Æsc’s Hill, and at the other battles of that far off summer, but I had not fought in the shield wall. Tomorrow, I thought, tomorrow, and like Odda I wanted to see Alfred’s army rescue us, but I knew there would be no rescue. ‘They outnumber us,’ Odda said again, ‘and some of my men have nothing but reaping hooks as weapons.’

‘A reaping hook can kill,’ I said, though it was a stupid thing to say. I would not want to face a Dane if I carried nothing but a reaping hook. ‘How many have proper weapons?’ I asked.

‘Half?’ he guessed.

‘Then those men are our front ranks,’ I said, ‘and the rest pick up weapons from the enemy dead.’ I had no idea what I was speaking of, but only knew I must sound confident. Fear might work on a man, but confidence fights against fear.

Odda paused again, gazing at the dark ships below. ‘Your wife and son are well,’ he said after a while.

‘Good.’

‘My son merely rescued her.’

‘And prayed I was dead,’ I said.

He shrugged. ‘Mildrith lived with us after her father’s death and my son became fond of her. He meant no harm and he gave none.’ He held a hand out to me and I saw, in the small moonlight, that he offered me a leather purse. ‘The rest of the bride price,’ he said.

‘Keep it, lord,’ I said, ‘and give it to me after the battle, and if I die, give it to Mildrith.’

An owl went overhead, pale and fast, and I wondered what augury that was. Far off to the east, up the coast, far beyond the Pedredan, a tiny fire flickered and that too was an augury, but I could not read it.

‘My men are good men,’ Odda said, ‘but if they are outflanked?’ Fear was still haunting him. ‘It would be better,’ he went on, ‘if Ubba were to attack us.’

‘It would be better,’ I agreed, ‘but Ubba will do nothing unless the runesticks tell him to do it.’

Fate is all. Ubba knew that, which is why he read the signs from the gods, and I knew the owl had been a sign, and it had flown over our heads, across the Danish ships and gone towards that distant fire burning along the Sæfern’s shore, and I suddenly remembered King Edmund’s four boats coming to the East Anglian beach and the fire-arrows thumping into the beached Danish ships and I realised I could read the auguries after all. ‘If your men are outflanked,’ I said, ‘they will die. But if the Danes are outflanked, they will die. So we must outflank them.’

‘How?’ Odda asked bitterly. All he could see was slaughter in the dawn; an attack, a fight and a defeat, but I had seen the owl. The owl had flown from the ships to the fire, and that was the sign. Burn the ships. ‘How do we outflank them?’ Odda asked.

And still I remained silent, wondering if I should tell him. If I followed the augury it would mean splitting our forces, and that was the mistake the Danes had made at Æsc’s Hill, and so I hesitated, but Odda had not come to me because he suddenly liked me, but because I had been defiant with Ubba. I alone on Cynuit was confident of victory, or seemed to be, and that, despite my age, made me the leader on this hill. Ealdorman Odda, old enough to be my father, wanted my support. He wanted me to tell him what to do, me who had never been in a great shield wall, but I was young and I was arrogant and the auguries had told me what must be done, and so I told Odda.

‘Have you ever seen the sceadugengan?’ I asked him.

His response was to make the sign of the cross.

‘When I was a child,’ I said, ‘I dreamed of the sceadugengan. I went out at night to find them and I learned the ways of the night so I could join them.’

‘What has that to do with the dawn?’ he asked.

‘Give me fifty men,’ I said, ‘and they will join my men and at dawn they will attack there.’ I pointed towards the ships. ‘We’ll start by burning their ships.’

Odda looked down the hill at the nearer fires which marked where the enemy sentries were posted in the meadow to our east. ‘They’ll know you’re coming,’ he said, ‘and be ready for you.’ He meant that a hundred men could not cross Cynuit’s skyline, go downhill, break through the sentries and cross the marsh in silence. He was right. Before we had gone ten paces the sentries would have seen us and the alarm would be sounded and Ubba’s army, that was surely as ready for battle as our own, would stream from its southern encampment to confront my men in the meadow before they reached the marsh.

‘But when the Danes see their ships burning,’ I said, ‘they will go to the river’s bank, not to the meadow. And the riverbank is hemmed by marsh. They can’t outflank us there.’ They could, of course, but the marsh would give them uncertain footing so it would not be so dangerous as being outflanked in the meadow.

‘But you will never reach the riverbank,’ he said, disappointed in my idea.

‘A Shadow-Walker can reach it,’ I said.

He looked at me, said nothing.

‘I can reach it,’ I said, ‘and when the first ship burns every Dane will run to the bank, and that’s when the hundred men make their charge. The Danes will be running to save their ships, and that will give the hundred men time to cross the marsh. They go as fast as they can, they join me, we burn more ships, and the Danes will be trying to kill us.’ I pointed to the riverbank, showing where the Danes would go from their camp along the strip of firm ground to where the ships were beached, ‘and when the Danes are all on that bank,’ I went on, ‘between the river and the marsh, you lead the fyrd to take them in the rear.’

He brooded, watching the ships. If we attacked at all then the obvious place was down the southern slope, straight into the heart of Ubba’s forces, and that would be a battle of shield wall against shield wall, our nine hundred men against his twelve hundred, and at the beginning we would have the advantage for many of Ubba’s men were posted around the hill and it would take time for those men to hurry back and join the Danish ranks, and in that time we would drive deep into their camp, but their numbers would grow and we might well be stopped, outflanked and then would come the hard slaughter. And in that hard slaughter they would have the advantage of numbers and they would wrap around our ranks and our rearmost men, those with sickles instead of weapons, would begin to die.

But if I went down the hill and began to burn the boats then the Danes would race down the riverbank to stop me, and that would put them on the narrow strip of riverside land, and if the hundred men under Leofric joined me, then we might hold them long enough for Odda to reach their rear and then it would be the Danes who would die, trapped between Odda, my men, the marsh and the river. They would be trapped like the Northumbrian army had been trapped at Eoferwic.

But at Æsc’s Hill disaster had come to the side which first split its forces.

‘It could work,’ Odda said tentatively.

‘Give me fifty men,’ I urged him, ‘young ones.’

‘Young?’

‘They have to run down the hill,’ I said. ‘They have to go fast. They have to reach the ships before the Danes, and they must do it in the dawn.’ I spoke with a confidence I did not feel and I paused for his agreement, but he said nothing. ‘Win this, lord,’ I said, and I did not call him ‘lord’ because he outranked me, but because he was older than me, ‘then you will have saved Wessex. Alfred will reward you.’

He thought for a while and maybe it was the thought of a reward that persuaded him, for he nodded. ‘I will give you fifty men,’ he said.

Ravn had given me much advice and all of it was good, but now, in the night wind, I remembered just one thing he had said to me on the night we first met, something I had never forgotten.

Never, he had said, never fight Ubba.

The fifty men were led by the shire reeve, Edor, a man who looked as hard as Leofric and, like Leofric, had fought in the big shield walls. He carried a cut-off boar spear as his favourite weapon, though a sword was strapped to his side. The spear, he said, had the weight and strength to punch through mail and could even break through a shield.

Edor, like Leofric, had simply accepted my idea. It never occurred to me that they might not accept it, yet looking back I am astonished that the battle of Cynuit was fought according to the idea of a twenty-year-old who had never stood in a slaughter wall. Yet I was tall, I was a lord, I had grown up among warriors, and I had the arrogant confidence of a man born to battle. I am Uhtred, son of Uhtred, son of another Uhtred, and we had not held Bebbanburg and its lands by whimpering at altars. We are warriors.

Edor’s men and mine assembled behind Cynuit’s eastern rampart where they would wait until the first ship burned in the dawn. Leofric was on the right with the Heahengel’s crew, and I wanted him there because that was where the blow would fall when Ubba led his men to attack us at the river’s edge. Edor and the men of Defnascir were on the left and their chief job, apart from killing whoever they first met on the riverbank, was to snatch up flaming timbers from the Danish fires and hurl them into more ships. ‘We’re not trying to burn all the ships,’ I said, ‘just get four or five ablaze. That’ll bring the Danes like a swarm of bees.’

‘Stinging bees,’ a voice said from the dark.

‘You’re frightened?’ I asked scornfully. ‘They’re frightened! Their auguries are bad, they think they’re going to lose and the last thing they want is to face men of Defnascir in a grey dawn. We’ll make them scream like women, we’ll kill them, and we’ll send them to their Danish hell.’ That was the extent of my battle speech. I should have talked more, but I was nervous because I had to go down the hill first, first and alone. I had to live my childhood dream of shadow-walking, and Leofric and Edor would not lead the hundred men down to the river until they saw the Danes go to rescue their ships, and if I could not touch fire to the ships then there would be no attack and Odda’s fears would come back and the Danes would win and Wessex would die and there would be no more England. ‘So rest now,’ I finished lamely. ‘It will be three or four hours till dawn.’

I went back to the rampart and Father Willibald joined me there, holding out his crucifix that had been carved from an ox’s thigh bone. ‘You want God’s blessing?’ he asked me.

‘What I want, father,’ I said, ‘is your cloak.’ He had a fine woollen cloak, hooded and dyed a dark brown. He gave it me and I tied the cords around my neck, hiding the sheen of my mail coat. ‘And in the dawn, father,’ I said, ‘I want you to stay up here. The riverbank will be no place for priests.’

‘If men die there,’ he said, ‘then it is my place.’

‘You want to go to heaven in the morning?’

‘No.’

‘Then stay here,’ I spoke more savagely than I intended, but that was nervousness, and then it was time to go for, though the night was still dark and the dawn a long way off, I needed time to slink through the Danish lines. Leofric saw me off, walking with me to the northern flank of Cynuit that was in mooncast shadow. It was also the least guarded side of the hill, for the northern slope led to nothing except marshes and the Sæfern sea. I gave Leofric my shield. ‘I don’t need it,’ I said. ‘It will just make me clumsy.’

He touched my arm. ‘You’re a cocky bastard, Earsling, aren’t you?’

‘Is that a fault?’

‘No, lord,’ he said, and that last word was high praise. ‘God go with you,’ he added, ‘whichever god it is.’

I touched Thor’s hammer, then tucked it under my mail. ‘Bring the men fast when you see the Danes go to the ships,’ I said.

‘We’ll come fast,’ he promised me, ‘if the marsh lets us.’

I had seen Danes cross the marsh in the daylight and had noted that it was soft ground, but not rank bog-land. ‘You can cross it fast,’ I said, then pulled the cloak’s hood over my helmet. ‘Time to go,’ I said.

Leofric said nothing and I dropped down from the rampart into the shallow ditch. So now I would become what I had always wanted to be, a Shadow-Walker. Childhood’s dream had become life and death, and touching Serpent-Breath’s hilt for luck, I crossed the ditch’s lip. I went at a crouch, and halfway down the hill I dropped to my belly and slithered like a serpent, black against the grass, inching my way towards a space between two dying fires.

The Danes were sleeping, or close to sleep. I could see them sitting by the dying fires, and once I was out of the hill’s shadow there was enough moonlight to reveal me and there was no cover for the meadow had been cropped by sheep, but I moved like a ghost, a belly-crawling ghost, inching my way, making no noise, a shadow on the grass, and all they had to do was look, or walk between the fires, but they heard nothing, suspected nothing and so saw nothing. It took an age, but I slipped through them, never going closer to an enemy than twenty paces, and once past them I was in the marsh and there the tussocks offered shadow and I could move faster, wriggling through slime and shallow water, and the only scare came when I startled a bird from its nest and it leaped into the air with a cry of alarm and a swift whirr of wings. I sensed the Danes staring towards the marsh, but I was motionless, black and unmoving in the broken shadow, and after a while there was only silence. I waited, water seeping through my mail, and I prayed to Hoder, blind son of Odin and god of the night. Look after me, I prayed, and I wished I had made a sacrifice to Hoder, but I had not, and I thought that Ealdwulf would be looking down at me and I vowed to make him proud. I was doing what he had always wanted me to do, carrying Serpent-Breath against the Danes.

I worked my way eastwards, behind the sentries, going to where the ships were beached. No grey showed in the eastern sky. I still went slowly, staying on my belly, going slowly enough for the fears to work on me. I was aware of a muscle quivering in my right thigh, of a thirst that could not be quenched, of a sourness in the bowels. I kept touching Serpent-Breath’s hilt, remembering the charms that Ealdwulf and Brida had worked on the blade. Never, Ravn had said, never fight Ubba.

The east was still dark. I crept on, close to the sea now so I could gaze up the wide Sæfern and see nothing except the shimmer of the sinking moon on the rippled water that looked like a sheet of hammered silver. The tide was flooding, the muddy shore narrowing as the sea rose. There would be salmon in the Pedredan, I thought, salmon swimming with the tide, going back to the sea, and I touched the sword hilt for I was close to the strip of firm land where the hovels stood and the ship-guards waited. My thigh shivered. I felt sick.

But blind Hoder was watching over me. The ship-guards were no more alert than their comrades at the hill’s foot, and why should they be? They were further from Odda’s forces, and they expected no trouble, indeed they were there only because the Danes never left their ships unguarded, and these ship-guards had mostly gone into the fishermen’s hovels to sleep, leaving just a handful of men sitting by the small fires. Those men were motionless, probably half asleep, though one was pacing up and down beneath the high prows of the beached ships.

I stood.

I had shadow-walked, but now I was on Danish ground, behind their sentries, and I undid the cloak’s cords, took it off and wiped the mud from my mail and then walked openly towards the ships, my boots squelching in the last yards of marshland, and then I just stood by the northernmost boat, threw my helmet down in the shadow of the ship, and waited for the one Dane who was on his feet to discover me.

And what would he see? A man in mail, a lord, a shipmaster, a Dane, and I leaned on the ship’s prow and stared up at the stars. My heart thumped, my thigh quivered, and I thought that if I died this morning at least I would be with Ragnar again. I would be with him in Valhalla’s hall of the dead, except some men believed that those who did not die in battle went instead to Niflheim, that dreadful cold hell of the Northmen where the corpse goddess Hel stalks through the mists and the serpent Corpse-Ripper slithers across the frost to gnaw the dead, but surely, I thought, a man who died in a hall-burning would go to Valhalla, not to grey Niflheim? Surely Ragnar was with Odin, and then I heard the Dane’s footsteps and I glanced at him with a smile. ‘A chill morning,’ I said.

‘It is.’ He was an older man with a grizzled beard and he was plainly puzzled by my sudden appearance, but he was not suspicious.

‘All quiet,’ I said, jerking my head to the north to suggest I had been visiting the sentries on the Sæfern’s side of the hill.

‘They’re frightened of us,’ he said.

‘So they should be.’ I faked a huge yawn, then pushed myself away from the ship and walked a couple of paces north as though I was stretching tired limbs, then pretended to notice my helmet at the water’s edge. ‘What’s that?’

He took the bait, going into the ship’s shadow to bend over the helmet and I drew my knife, stepped close to him and drove the blade up into his throat. I did not slit his throat, but stabbed it, plunged the blade straight in and twisted it and at the same time I pushed him forward, driving his face into the water and I held him there so that if he did not bleed to death he would drown, and it took a long time, longer than I expected, but men are hard to kill. He struggled for a time and I thought the noise he made might bring the men from the nearest fire, but that fire was forty or fifty paces down the beach and the small waves of the river were loud enough to cover the Dane’s death throes, and so I killed him and no one knew of it, none but the gods saw it, and when his soul was gone I pulled the knife from his throat, retrieved my helmet, and went back to the ship’s prow.

And waited there until dawn lightened the eastern horizon. Waited till there was a rim of grey at the edge of England.

And it was time.

I strolled towards the nearest fire. Two men sat there. ‘Kill one,’ I sang softly, ‘and two then three, kill four and five, and then some more.’ It was a Danish rowing chant, one that I had heard so often on the Wind-Viper. ‘You’ll be relieved soon,’ I greeted them cheerfully.

They just stared at me. They did not know who I was, but just like the man I had killed, they were not suspicious even though I spoke their tongue with an English twist. There were plenty of English in the Danish armies.

‘A quiet night,’ I said, and leaned down and took the unburned end of a piece of flaming wood from the fire. ‘Egil left a knife on his ship,’ I explained, and Egil was a common enough name among the Danes to arouse no suspicion, and they just watched as I walked north, presuming I needed the flame to light my way onto the ships. I passed the hovels, nodded to three men resting beside another fire, and kept walking until I had reached the centre of the line of beached ships and there, whistling softly as though I did not have a care in the world, I climbed the short ladder left leaning on the ship’s prow and jumped down into the hull and made my way between the rowers’ benches. I had half expected to find men asleep in the ships, but the boat was deserted except for the scrabble of rats’ feet in the bilge.

I crouched in the ship’s belly where I thrust the burning wood beneath the stacked oars, but I doubted it would be sufficient to set those oars aflame and so I used my knife to shave kindling off a rowers’ bench and, when I had enough scraps of wood, I piled them over the flame and saw the fire spring up. I cut more, then hacked at the oar shafts to give the flames purchase, and no one shouted at me from the bank. Anyone watching must have thought I merely searched the bilge and the flames were still not high enough to cause alarm, but they were spreading and I knew I had very little time and so I sheathed the knife and slid over the boat’s side. I lowered myself into the Pedredan, careless what the water would do to my mail and weapons, and once in the river I waded northwards from ship’s stern to ship’s stern, until at last I had cleared the last boat and had come to where the grey-bearded corpse was thumping softly in the river’s small waves, and there I waited.

And waited. The fire, I thought, must have gone out. I was cold.

And still I waited. The grey on the world’s rim lightened, and then, suddenly, there was an angry shout and I moved out of the shadow and saw the Danes running towards the flames that were bright and high on the ship I had fired, and so I went to their abandoned fire and took another burning brand and hurled that into a second ship, and the Danes were scrambling onto the burning boat that was sixty paces away and none saw me. Then a horn sounded, sounded again and again, sounding the alarm and I knew Ubba’s men would be coming from their camp at Cantucton, and I carried a last piece of fiery wood to the ships, burned my hand as I thrust it under a pile of oars, then I waded back into the river to hide beneath the shadowed belly of a boat.

The horn still sounded. Men were scrambling from the fishermen’s hovels, going to save their fleet, and more men were running from their camp to the south, and so Ubba’s Danes fell into our trap. They saw their ships burning and went to save them. They streamed from the camp in disorder, many without weapons, intent only on quenching the flames that flickered up the rigging and threw lurid shadows on the bank. I was hidden, but knew Leofric would be coming, and now it was all timing. Timing and the blessing of the spinners, the blessing of the gods, and the Danes were using their shields to scoop water into the first burning ship, but then another shout sounded and I knew they had seen Leofric, and he had surely burst past the first line of sentries, slaughtering them as he went, and was now in the marsh. I waded out of the shadow, out from beneath the ship’s overhanging hull, and saw Leofric’s men coming, saw thirty or forty Danes running north to meet his charge, but then those Danes saw the new fires in the northernmost ships and they were assailed by panic because there was fire behind them and warriors in front of them, and most of the other Danes were still a hundred paces away and I knew that so far the gods were fighting for us.

I waded from the water. Leofric’s men were coming from the marsh and the first swords and spears clashed, but Leofric had the advantage of numbers and Heahengel’s crew overran the handful of Danes, chopping them with axe and sword, and one crewman turned fast, panic in his face when he saw me coming, and I shouted my name, stooped to pick up a Danish shield, and Edor’s men were behind us and I called to them to feed the ship-fires while the men of Heahengel formed a shield wall across the strip of firm land. Then we walked forward. Walked towards Ubba’s army that was only just realising that they were being attacked.

We marched forward. A woman scrambled from a hovel, screamed when she saw us and fled up the bank towards the Danes where a man was roaring at men to form a shield wall. ‘Edor!’ I shouted, knowing we would need his men now, and he brought them to thicken our line so that we made a solid shield wall across the strip of firm land, and we were a hundred strong and in front of us was the whole Danish army, though it was an army in panicked disorder, and I glanced up at Cynuit and saw no sign of Odda’s men. They would come, I thought, they would surely come, and then Leofric bellowed that we were to touch shields, and the limewood rattled on limewood and I sheathed Serpent-Breath and drew Wasp-Sting.

Shield wall. It is an awful place, my father had said, and he had fought in seven shield walls and was killed in the last one. Never fight Ubba, Ravn had said.

Behind us the northernmost ships burned and in front of us a rush of maddened Danes came for revenge and that was their undoing, for they did not form a proper shield wall, but came at us like mad dogs, intent only on killing us, sure they could beat us for they were Danes and we were West Saxons, and we braced and I watched a scar-faced man, spittle flying from his mouth as he screamed, charge at me and it was then that the battle-calm came. Suddenly there was no more sourness in my bowels, no dry mouth, no shaking muscles, but only the magical battle-calm. I was happy.

I was tired too. I had not slept. I was soaking wet. I was cold, yet suddenly I felt invincible. It is a wondrous thing, that battle-calm. The nerves go, the fear wings off into the void, and all is clear as precious crystal and the enemy has no chance because he is so slow, and I swept the shield left, taking the scar-faced man’s spear thrust, lunged Wasp-Sting forward and the Dane ran onto her point. I felt the impact run up my arm as her tip punctured his belly muscles, and I was already twisting her, ripping her up and free, sawing through leather, skin, muscle and guts, and his blood was warm on my cold hand, and he screamed, ale breath in my face, and I punched him down with the shield’s heavy boss, stamped on his groin, killed him with Wasp-Sting’s tip in his throat, and a second man was on my right, beating at my neighbour’s shield with an axe, and he was easy to kill, point into the throat, and then we were going forward. A woman, hair unbound, came at me with a spear and I kicked her brutally hard, then smashed her face with the shield’s iron rim so that she fell screaming into a dying fire and her unbound hair flared up bright as burning kindling, and Heahengel’s crew was with me, and Leofric was bellowing at them to kill and to kill fast. This was our chance to slaughter Danes who had made a foolish attack on us, who had not formed a proper shield wall, and it was axe work and sword work, butchers’ work with good iron, and already there were thirty or more Danish dead and seven ships were burning, their flames spreading with astonishing speed.

‘Shield wall!’ I heard the cry from the Danes. The world was light now, the sun just beneath the horizon. The northernmost ships had become a furnace. A dragon’s head reared in the smoke, its gold eyes bright. Gulls screamed above the beach. A dog chased along the ships, yelping. A mast fell, spewing sparks high into the silver air, and then I saw the Danes make their shield wall, saw them organise themselves for our deaths and saw the raven banner, the triangle of cloth which proclaimed that Ubba was here and coming to give us slaughter.

‘Shield wall!’ I shouted, and that was the first time I ever gave that order. ‘Shield wall!’ We had grown ragged, but now it was time to be tight. To be shield to shield. There were hundreds of Danes in front of us and they came to overwhelm us, and I banged Wasp-Sting against the metal rim of my shield. ‘They’re coming to die!’ I shouted, ‘they’re coming to bleed! They’re coming to our blades!’

My men cheered. We had started a hundred strong, but had lost half a dozen men in the early fighting, but the remaining men cheered even though five or six times their number came to kill them, and Leofric began the battle chant of Hegga, an English rowers’ chant, rhythmic and harsh, telling of a battle fought by our ancestors against the men who had held Britain before we came, and now we fought for our land again, and behind me a lone voice uttered a prayer and I turned to see Father Willibald holding a spear. I laughed at his disobedience.

Laughter in battle. That was what Ragnar had taught me, to take joy from the fight. Joy in the morning, for the sun was touching the east now, filling the sky with light, driving darkness beyond the world’s western rim and I hammered Wasp-Sting against my shield, making a noise to drown the shouts of the Danes, and I knew we would be hard hit and that we must hold until Odda came, but I was relying on Leofric to be the bastion on our right flank where the Danes were sure to try and lap around us by going through the marsh. Our left was safe, for that was by the ships, and the right was where we would be broken if we could not hold.

‘Shields!’ I bellowed, and we touched shields again for the Danes were coming and I knew they would not hesitate in their attack. We were too few to frighten them, they would not need to work up courage for this battle, they would just come.

And come they did. A thick line of men, shield to shield, new morning light touching axe heads and spear heads and swords.

The spears and throwing axes came first, but in the front rank we crouched behind shields and the second rank held their shields above ours and the missiles thumped home, banging hard, but doing no injury, and then I heard the wild war shout of the Danes, felt a last flutter of fear and then they were there.

The thunder of shield hitting shield, my shield knocked back against my chest, shouts of rage, a spear between my ankles, Wasp-Sting lunging forward and blocked by a shield, a scream to my left, an axe flailing overhead. I ducked, lunged again, hit shield again, pushed back with my own shield, twisted the sax free, stamped on the spear, stabbed Wasp-Sting over my shield into a bearded face and he twisted away, blood filling his mouth from his torn cheek and I took a half-pace forward, stabbed again, and a sword glanced off my helmet and thumped my shoulder and a man pulled me hard backwards because I was ahead of our line and the Danes were shouting, pushing, stabbing, and the first shield wall to break would be the shield wall to die and I knew Leofric was hard pressed on the right, but I had no time to look or help because the man with the torn cheek was thrashing at my shield with a short axe, trying to splinter it. I lowered the shield suddenly, spoiling his stroke, and slashed Wasp-Sting at his face a second time and she grated on skull-bone, drew blood and I hammered his shield with my own and he staggered back, was pushed forward by the men behind him and this time Wasp-Sting took his throat and he was bubbling blood and air from a slit gullet. He fell to his knees, and the man behind him slammed a spear forward that broke through my shield, but stuck there, and the Danes were still heaving, but their own dying man obstructed them and the spearman tripped on him, and the man to my right chopped his shield edge onto his head and I kicked him in the face then slashed Wasp-Sting down. A Dane pulled the spear from my shield, stabbed with it, was cut down by the man on my left. More Danes came and we were stepping back, bending back because there were Danes in the marshland who were turning our right flank, but Leofric brought the men steadily around till our backs were to the burning ships, and I could feel the heat of their burning and I thought we must die here. We would die with swords in our hands and flames at our backs and I hacked frantically at a red-bearded Dane, trying to shatter his shield, and Ida, the man to my right, was on the ground, guts spilling through torn leather, and a Dane came at me from that side and I flicked Wasp-Sting at his face, ducked, took his axe blow on my breaking shield, shouted at the men behind to fill the gap, and stabbed Wasp-Sting at the axeman’s feet, slicing into an ankle, and a spear took him in the side of the head and I gave a great shout and heaved at the oncoming Danes, but there was no space to fight, no space to see, just a grunting mass of men hacking and stabbing and dying and bleeding, and then Odda came.

The Ealdorman had waited till the Danes were crowded on the riverbank, waited till they were pushing each other in their eagerness to reach and to kill us, and then he launched his men across Cynuit’s brow and they came like thunder with swords and axes and sickles and spears. The Danes saw them and there were shouts of warning and almost immediately I felt the pressure lessen to my front as the rearward Danes turned to meet the new threat, and I rammed Wasp-Sting out to pierce a man’s shoulder, and she went deep in, grating against bone, but the man twisted away, snatching the blade out of my hand so I drew Serpent-Breath and shouted at my men to kill the bastards. This was our day, I shouted, and Odin was giving us victory.

Forward now. Forward to battle-slaughter. Beware the man who loves battle. Ravn had told me that only one man in three or perhaps one man in four is a real warrior and the rest are reluctant fighters, but I was to learn that only one man in twenty is a lover of battle. Such men were the most dangerous, the most skilful, the ones who reaped the souls and the ones to fear. I was such a one, and that day, beside the river where the blood flowed into the rising tide, and beside the burning boats, I let Serpent-Breath sing her song of death. I remember little except a rage, an exultation, a massacre. This was the moment the skalds celebrate, the heart of the battle that leads to victory, and the courage had gone from those Danes in a heartbeat. They had thought they were winning, thought they had trapped us by the burning ships and thought to send our miserable souls to the afterworld, and instead the fyrd of Defnascir came on them like a storm.

‘Forward!’ I shouted.

‘Wessex!’ Leofric bellowed, ‘Wessex!’ He was hacking with his axe, chopping men to the ground, leading the Heahengel’s crew away from the fiery ships.

The Danes were going backwards, trying to escape us, and we could choose our victims and Serpent-Breath was lethal that day. Hammer a shield forward, strike a man off balance, thrust the blade forward, push him down, stab into the throat, find the next man. I pushed a Dane into the smouldering remnants of a campfire, killed him while he screamed, and some Danes were now fleeing to their unburned ships, pushing them into the flooding tide, but Ubba was still fighting. Ubba was shouting at his men to form a new shield wall, to protect the boats, and such was Ubba’s hard will, such his searing anger, that the new shield wall held. We hit it hard, hammered it with sword and axe and spear, but again there was no space, just the heaving, grunting, breath-stinking struggle, only this time it was the Danes who stepped back, pace by pace, as Odda’s men joined mine to wrap around the Danes and hammer them with iron.

But Ubba was holding. Holding his rearguard firm, holding them under the raven banner, and in every moment that he held us off another ship was pushed away from the river’s bank. All he wanted to achieve now was to save men and ships, to let a part of his army escape, to let them get away from this press of shield and blade, and six Danish ships were already rowing out to the Sæfern sea, and more were filling with men and I screamed at my troops to break through, to kill them, but there was no space to kill, only blood-slicked ground and blades stabbing under shields, and men heaving at the opposing wall, and the wounded crawling away from the back of our line.

And then, with a roar of fury, Ubba hacked into our line with his great war axe. I remembered how he had done that in the fight beside the Gewæsc, how he had seemed to disappear into the ranks of the enemy only to kill them, and his huge blade was whirling again, making space, and our line went back and the Danes followed Ubba who seemed determined to win this battle on his own and to make a name that would never be forgotten among the annals of the Northmen. The battle-madness was on him, the runesticks were forgotten, and Ubba Lothbrokson was making his legend and another man went down, crushed by the axe, and Ubba bellowed defiance, the Danes stepped forward behind him, and now Ubba threatened to pierce our line clean through, and I shoved backwards, going through my men and went to where Ubba fought and there I shouted his name, called him the son of a goat, a turd of men, and he turned, eyes wild, and saw me.

‘You bastard whelp,’ he snarled, and the men in front of me ducked aside as he came forward, mail coat drenched in blood, a part of his shield missing, his helmet dented and his axe blade red.

‘Yesterday,’ I said, ‘I saw a raven fall.’

‘You bastard liar,’ he said and the axe came around and I caught it on the shield and it was like being struck by a charging bull. He wrenched the axe free and a great sliver of wood was torn away to let the new daylight through the broken shield.

‘A raven,’ I said, ‘fell from a clear sky.’

‘You whore’s pup,’ he said and the axe came again, and again the shield took it and I staggered back, the rent in the shield widening.

‘It called your name as it fell,’ I said.

‘English filth,’ he shouted and swung a third time, but this time I stepped back and flicked Serpent-Breath out in an attempt to cut off his axe hand, but he was fast, snake fast, and he pulled back just in time.

‘Ravn told me I would kill you,’ I said. ‘He foretold it. In a dream by Odin’s pit, among the blood, he saw the raven banner fall.’

‘Liar!’ he screamed and came at me, trying to throw me down with weight and brute force, and I met him, shield boss to shield boss, and I held him, swinging Serpent-Breath at his head, but the blow glanced off his helmet and I leaped back a heartbeat before the axe swung where my legs had been, lunged forward, took him clean on the chest with Serpent-Breath’s point, but I did not have any force in the blow and his mail took the lunge and stopped it, and he swung the axe up, trying to gut me from crotch to chest, but my ragged shield stopped his blow, and we both stepped back.

‘Three brothers,’ I said, ‘and you alone of them live. Give my regards to Ivar and to Halfdan. Say that Uhtred Ragnarson sent you to join them.’

‘Bastard,’ he said, and he stepped forward, swinging the axe in a massive sideways blow that was intended to crush my chest, but the battle-calm had come on me, and the fear had flown and the joy was there and I rammed the shield sideways to take his axe strike, felt the heavy blade plunge into what was left of the wood and I let go of the shield’s handle so that the half-broken tangle of metal and wood dangled from his blade, and then I struck at him. Once, twice, both of them huge blows using both hands on Serpent-Breath’s hilt and using all the strength I had taken from the long days at Heahengel’s oar, and I drove him back, cracked his shield, and he lifted his axe, my shield still cumbering it, and then slipped. He had stepped on the spilt guts of a corpse, and his left foot slid sideways and, while he was unbalanced, I stabbed Serpent-Breath forward and the blade pierced the mail above the hollow of his elbow and his axe arm dropped, all strength stolen from it. Serpent-Breath flicked back to slash across his mouth, and I was shouting, and there was blood in his beard and he knew then, knew he would die, knew he would see his brothers in the corpse-hall. He did not give up. He saw death coming and fought it by trying to hammer me with his shield again, but I was too quick, too exultant, and the next stroke was in his neck and he staggered, blood pouring onto his shoulder, more blood trickling between the links of his chain mail, and he looked at me as he tried to stay upright.

‘Wait for me in Valhalla, lord,’ I said.

He dropped to his knees, still staring at me. He tried to speak, but nothing came and I gave him the killing stroke.

‘Now finish them!’ Ealdorman Odda shouted, and the men who had been watching the duel screamed in triumph and rushed at the enemy and there was panic now as the Danes tried to reach their boats, and some were throwing down weapons and the cleverest were lying flat, pretending to be dead, and men with sickles were killing men with swords. The women from Cynuit’s summit were in the Danish camp now, killing and plundering.

I knelt by Ubba and closed his nerveless right fist about the handle of his war axe. ‘Go to Valhalla, lord,’ I said. He was not dead yet, but he was dying for my last stroke had pierced deep into his neck, and then he gave a great shudder and there was a croaking noise in his throat and I kept on holding his hand tight to the axe as he died.

A dozen more boats escaped, all crowded with Danes, but the rest of Ubba’s fleet was ours, and while a handful of the enemy fled into the woods where they were hunted down, the remaining Danes were either dead or prisoners, and the raven banner fell into Odda’s hands, and we had the victory that day, and Willibald, spear point reddened, was dancing with delight.

We took horses, gold, silver, prisoners, women, ships, weapons and mail. I had fought in the shield wall.

Ealdorman Odda had been wounded, struck on the head by an axe that had pierced his helmet and driven into his skull. He lived, but his eyes were white, his skin pale, his breath shallow and his head matted with blood. Priests prayed over him in one of the small village houses and I saw him there, but he could not see me, could not speak, perhaps could not hear, but I shoved two of the priests aside, knelt by his bed and thanked him for taking the fight to the Danes. His son, unwounded, his armour apparently unscratched in the battle, watched me from the darkness of the room’s far corner.

I straightened from his father’s low bed. My back ached and my arms were burning with weariness. ‘I am going to Cridianton,’ I told young Odda.

He shrugged as if he did not care where I went. I ducked under the low door where Leofric waited for me. ‘Don’t go to Cridianton,’ he told me.

‘My wife is there,’ I said. ‘My child is there.’

‘Alfred is at Exanceaster,’ he said.

‘So?’

‘So the man who takes news of this battle to Exanceaster gets the credit for it,’ he said.

‘Then you go,’ I said.

The Danish prisoners wanted to bury Ubba, but Odda the Younger had ordered the body to be dismembered and its pieces given to the beasts and birds. That had not been done yet, though the great battle-axe that I had put in Ubba’s dying hand was gone, and I regretted that, for I had wanted it, but I wanted Ubba treated decently as well and so I let the prisoners dig their grave. Odda the Younger did not confront me, but let the Danes bury their leader and make a mound over his corpse and thus send Ubba to his brothers in the corpse-hall.

And when it was done I rode south with a score of my men, all of us mounted on horses we had taken from the Danes.

I went to my family.

These days, so long after that battle at Cynuit, I employ a harpist. He is an old Welshman, blind, but very skilful, and he often sings tales of his ancestors. He likes to sing of Arthur and Guinevere, of how Arthur slaughtered the English, but he takes care not to let me hear those songs, instead praising me and my battles with outrageous flattery by singing the words of my poets who describe me as Uhtred Strong-Sword or Uhtred Death-Giver or Uhtred the Beneficent. I sometimes see the old blind man smiling to himself as his hands pluck the strings and I have more sympathy with his scepticism than I do with the poets who are a pack of snivelling sycophants.

But in the year 877 I employed no poets and had no harpist. I was a young man who had come dazed and dazzled from the shield wall, and who stank of blood as I rode south and yet, for some reason, as we threaded the hills and woods of Defnascir, I thought of a harp.

Every lord has a harp in the hall. As a child, before I went to Ragnar, I would sometimes sit by the harp in Bebbanburg’s hall and I was intrigued by how the strings would play themselves. Pluck one string and the others would shiver to give off a tiny music. ‘Wasting your time, boy?’ my father had snarled as I crouched by the harp one day, and I suppose I had been wasting it, but on that spring day in 877 I remembered my childhood’s harp and how its strings would quiver if just one was touched. It was not music, of course, just noise, and scarcely audible noise at that, but after the battle in Pedredan’s valley it seemed to me that my life was made of strings and if I touched one then the others, though separate, would make their sound. I thought of Ragnar the Younger and wondered if he lived, and whether his father’s killer, Kjartan, still lived, and how he would die if he did, and thinking of Ragnar made me remember Brida, and her memory slid on to an image of Mildrith, and that brought to mind Alfred and his bitter wife Ælswith, and all those separate people were a part of my life, strings strung on the frame of Uhtred, and though they were separate they affected each other and together they would make the music of my life.

Daft thoughts, I told myself. Life is just life. We live, we die, we go to the corpse-hall. There is no music, just chance. Fate is relentless.

‘What are you thinking?’ Leofric asked me. We were riding through a valley that was pink with flowers.

‘I thought you were going to Exanceaster?’ I said.

‘I am, but I’m going to Cridianton first, then taking you on to Exanceaster. So what are you thinking? You look gloomy as a priest.’

‘I’m thinking about a harp.’

‘A harp!’ He laughed. ‘Your head’s full of rubbish.’

‘Touch a harp,’ I said, ‘and it just makes noise, but play it and it makes music.’

‘Sweet Christ!’ He looked at me with a worried expression. ‘You’re as bad as Alfred. You think too much.’

He was right. Alfred was obsessed by order, obsessed by the task of marshalling life’s chaos into something that could be controlled. He would do it by the church and by the law, which are much the same thing, but I wanted to see a pattern in the strands of life. In the end I found one, and it had nothing to do with any god, but with people. With the people we love. My harpist is right to smile when he chants that I am Uhtred the Gift-Giver or Uhtred the Avenger or Uhtred the Widow-Maker, for he is old and he has learned what I have learned, that I am really Uhtred the Lonely. We are all lonely and all seek a hand to hold in the darkness. It is not the harp, but the hand that plays it.

‘It will give you a headache,’ Leofric said, ‘thinking too much.’

‘Earsling,’ I said to him.

Mildrith was well. She was safe. She had not been raped. She wept when she saw me, and I took her in my arms and wondered that I was so fond of her, and she said she had thought I was dead and told me she had prayed to her god to spare me, and she took me to the room where our son was in his swaddling clothes and, for the first time, I looked at Uhtred, son of Uhtred, and I prayed that one day he would be the lawful and sole owner of lands that are carefully marked by stones and by dykes, by oaks and by ash, by marsh and by sea. I am still the owner of those lands that were purchased with our family’s blood, and I will take those lands back from the man who stole them from me and I will give them to my sons. For I am Uhtred, Earl Uhtred, Uhtred of Bebbanburg, and destiny is everything.

Historical Note

Alfred, famously, is the only monarch in English history to be accorded the honour of being called ‘the Great’ and this novel, with the ones that follow, will try to show why he gained that title. I do not want to anticipate those other novels, but broadly, Alfred was responsible for saving Wessex and, ultimately, English society from the Danish assaults, and his son Edward, daughter Æthelflaed and grandson Æthelstan finished what he began to create which was, for the first time, a political entity they called ‘Englaland’. I intend Uhtred to be involved in the whole story.

But the tale begins with Alfred who was, indeed, a very pious man and frequently sick. A recent theory suggests that he suffered from Crohn’s Disease, which causes acute abdominal pains, and from chronic piles, details we can glean from a book written by a man who knew him very well, Bishop Asser, who came into Alfred’s life after the events described in this novel. Currently there is a debate whether Bishop Asser did write that life, or whether it was forged a hundred years after Alfred’s death, and I am utterly unqualified to judge the arguments of the contending academics, but even if it is a forgery it contains much that has the smack of truth, suggesting that whoever wrote it knew a great deal about Alfred. The author, to be sure, wanted to present Alfred in a glowing light, as warrior, scholar and Christian, but he does not shy away from his hero’s youthful sins. Alfred, he tells us, ‘was unable to abstain from carnal desire’ until God generously made him sick enough to resist temptation. Whether Alfred did have an illegitimate son, Osferth, is debatable, but it seems very possible.

The biggest challenge Alfred faced was an invasion of England by the Danes. Some readers may be disappointed that those Danes are called Northmen or pagans in the novel, but are rarely described as Vikings. In this I follow the early English writers who suffered from the Danes, and who rarely used the word Viking which, anyway, describes an activity rather than a people or a tribe. To go viking meant to go raiding, and the Danes who fought against England in the ninth century, though undoubtedly raiders, were pre-eminently invaders and occupiers. Much fanciful imagery has been attached to them, chief of which are the horned helmet, the berserker and the ghastly execution called the spread-eagle, by which a victim’s ribs were splayed apart to expose the lungs and heart. That seems to have been a later invention, as does the existence of the berserker, the crazed naked warrior who attacked in a mad frenzy. Doubtless there were insanely frenzied warriors, but there is no evidence that lunatic nudists made regular appearances on the battlefield. The same is true of the horned helmet for which there is not a scrap of contemporary evidence. Viking warriors were much too sensible to place a pair of protuberances on their helmets so ideally positioned as to enable an enemy to knock the helmet off. It is a pity to abandon the iconic horned helmets, but alas, they did not exist.

The assault on the church by the Danes is well recorded. The invaders were not Christians and saw no reason to spare churches, monasteries and nunneries from their attacks, especially as those places often contained considerable treasures. Whether the concerted attack on the northern monastic houses happened is debatable. The source is extremely late, a thirteenth-century chronicle written by Roger of Wendover, but what is certain is that many bishoprics and monasteries did disappear during the Danish assault, and that assault was not a great raid, but a deliberate attempt to eradicate English society and replace it with a Danish state.

Ivar the Boneless, Ubba, Halfdan, Guthrum, the various kings, Alfred’s nephew Æthelwold, Ealdorman Odda and the Ealdormen whose names begin with Æ (a vanished letter, called the ash), all existed. Alfred should properly be spelt Ælfred, but I preferred the usage by which he is known today. It is not certain how King Edmund of East Anglia died, though he was certainly killed by the Danes and in one ancient version the future saint was indeed riddled with arrows like Saint Sebastian. Ragnar and Uhtred are fictional, though a family with Uhtred’s name did hold Bebbanburg (now Bamburgh Castle) later in the Anglo-Saxon period, and as that family are my ancestors I decided to give them that magical place a little earlier than the records suggest. Most of the major events happened; the assault on York, the siege of Nottingham, the attacks on the four kingdoms, all are recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle or in Asser’s life of King Alfred which together are the major sources for the period.

I used both those sources and also consulted a host of secondary works. Alfred’s life is remarkably well documented for the period, some of that documentation written by Alfred himself, but even so, as Professor James Campbell wrote in an essay on the king, ‘arrows of insight have to be winged by the feathers of speculation’. I have feathered lavishly, as historical novelists must, yet as much of the novel as possible is based on real events. Guthrum’s occupation of Wareham, the exchange of hostages and his breaking of the truce, his murder of the hostages and occupation of Exeter all happened, as did the loss of most of his fleet in a great storm off Durlston Head near Swanage. The one large change I have made was to bring Ubba’s death forward by a year, so that, in the next book, Uhtred can be elsewhere, and, persuaded by the arguments in John Peddie’s book, Alfred, Warrior King, I placed that action at Cannington in Somerset rather than at the more traditional site of Countisbury Head in north Devon.

Alfred was the king who preserved the idea of England, which his son, daughter and grandson made explicit. At a time of great danger, when the English kingdoms were perilously near to extinction, he provided a bulwark which allowed the Anglo-Saxon culture to survive. His achievements were greater than that, but his story is far from over, so Uhtred will campaign again.

Copyright

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it, while at times based on historical figures, are the work of the author’s imagination.

Harper

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

77–85 Fulham Palace Road,

Hammersmith, London W6 8JB

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2004

Copyright © Bernard Cornwell 2004

Bernard Cornwell asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Ebook Edition © July 2009 ISBN: 9780007338818

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THE PALE HORSEMAN

THE PALE

HORSEMAN

BERNARD CORNWELL

THE PALE HORSEMAN

is for

George MacDonald Fraser,

in admiration

Ac her forlo berað; fugelas singað,

gylleð grœghama.

For here starts war, carrion birds sing,

and grey wolves howl.

From The Fight at Finnsburh

CONTENTS

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Map

Place-names

Part One: VIKING

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Part Two: THE SWAMP KING

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Part Three: THE FYRD

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Historical Note

Copyright

PLACE-NAMES

The spelling of place-names in Anglo-Saxon England was an uncertain business, with no consistency and no agreement even about the name itself. Thus London was variously rendered as Lundonia, Lundenberg, Lundenne, Lundene, Lundenwic, Lundenceaster and Lundres. Doubtless some readers will prefer other versions of the names listed below, but I have usually employed whichever spelling is cited in the Oxford Dictionary of English Place-Names for the years nearest or contained within Alfred’s reign, 871–899 AD, but even that solution is not foolproof. Hayling Island, in 956, was written as both Heilincigae and Hæglingaiggæ. Nor have I been consistent myself; I use England instead of Englaland, and have preferred the modern form Northumbria to Norðhymbralond to avoid the suggestion that the boundaries of the ancient kingdom coincide with those of the modern county. So this list, like the spellings themselves, is capricious.

Æsc’s Hill

Ashdown, Berkshire

Æthelingæg

Athelney, Somerset

Afen

River Avon, Wiltshire

Andefera

Andover, Wiltshire

Baðum (pronounced Bathum)

Bath, Avon

Bebbanburg

Bamburgh Castle, Northumberland

Brant

Brent Knoll, Somerset

Bru

River Brue, Somerset

Cippanhamm

Chippenham, Wiltshire

Contwaraburg

Canterbury, Kent

Cornwalum

Cornwall

Cracgelad

Cricklade, Wiltshire

Cridianton

Crediton, Devon

Cynuit

Cynuit Hillfort, nr. Cannington, Somerset

Dærentmora

Dartmoor, Devon

Defereal

Kingston Deverill, Wiltshire

Defnascir

Devonshire

Dornwaraceaster

Dorchester, Dorset

Dreyndynas

‘Fort of thorns’, fictional, set in Cornwall

Dunholm

Durham, County Durham

Dyfed

South-west Wales, mostly now Pembrokeshire

Dyflin

Dublin, Eire

Eoferwic

York (also the Danish Jorvic, pronounced Yorvik)

Ethandun

Edington, Wiltshire

Exanceaster

Exeter, Devon

Exanmynster

Exminster, Devon

Gewæsc

The Wash

Gifle

Yeovil, Somerset

Gleawecestre

Gloucester, Gloucestershire

Glwysing

Welsh kingdom, approximately Glamorgan and Gwent

Hamptonscir

Hampshire

Hamtun

Southampton, Hampshire

Lindisfarena

Lindisfarne (Holy Island), Northumberland

Lundene

London

Lundi

Lundy Island, Devon

Mærlebeorg

Marlborough, Wiltshire

Ocmundtun

Okehampton, Devon

Palfleot

Pawlett, Somerset

Pedredan

River Parrett

Penwith

Land’s End, Cornwall

Readingum

Reading, Berkshire

Sæfern

River Severn

Sceapig

Isle of Sheppey, Kent

Scireburnan

Sherborne, Dorset

Sillans

The Scilly Isles

Soppan Byrg

Chipping Sodbury, Gloucestershire

Sumorsæte

Somerset

Suth Seaxa

Sussex (South Saxons)

Tamur

River Tamar

Temes

River Thames

Thon

River Tone, Somerset

Thornsæta

Dorset

Uisc

River Exe

Werham

Wareham, Dorset

Wilig

River Wylye

Wiltunscir

Wiltshire

Winburnan

Wimborne Minster, Dorset

Wintanceaster

Winchester, Hampshire

PART ONE

Viking

One

These days I look at twenty-year-olds and think they are pathetically young, scarcely weaned from their mothers’ tits, but when I was twenty I considered myself a full-grown man. I had fathered a child, fought in the shield wall, and was loath to take advice from anyone. In short I was arrogant, stupid and headstrong. Which is why, after our victory at Cynuit, I did the wrong thing.

We had fought the Danes beside the ocean, where the river runs from the great swamp and the Sæfern Sea slaps on a muddy shore, and there we had beaten them. We had made a great slaughter and I, Uhtred of Bebbanburg, had done my part. More than my part, for at the battle’s end, when the great Ubba Lothbrokson, most feared of all the Danish leaders, had carved into our shield wall with his great war axe, I had faced him, beaten him and sent him to join the einherjar, that army of the dead who feast and swive in Odin’s corpse-hall.

What I should have done then, what Leofric told me to do, was ride hard to Exanceaster where Alfred, King of the West Saxons, was besieging Guthrum. I should have arrived deep in the night, woken the king from his sleep and laid Ubba’s battle banner of the black raven and Ubba’s great war axe, its blade still crusted with blood, at Alfred’s feet. I should have given the king the good news that the Danish army was beaten, that the few survivors had taken to their dragon-headed ships, that Wessex was safe and that I, Uhtred of Bebbanburg, had achieved all of those things.

Instead I rode to find my wife and child.

At twenty years old I would rather have been ploughing Mildrith than reaping the reward of my good fortune, and that is what I did wrong, but, looking back, I have few regrets. Fate is inexorable, and Mildrith, though I had not wanted to marry her and though I came to detest her, was a lovely field to plough.

So, in that late spring of the year 877, I spent the Saturday riding to Cridianton instead of going to Alfred. I took twenty men with me and I promised Leofric that we would be at Exanceaster by midday on Sunday and I would make certain Alfred knew we had won his battle and saved his kingdom.

‘Odda the Younger will be there by now,’ Leofric warned me. Leofric was almost twice my age, a warrior hardened by years of fighting the Danes. ‘Did you hear me?’ he asked when I said nothing. ‘Odda the Younger will be there by now,’ he said again, ‘and he’s a piece of goose shit who’ll take all the credit.’

‘The truth cannot be hidden,’ I said loftily.

Leofric mocked that. He was a bearded squat brute of a man who should have been the commander of Alfred’s fleet, but he was not well-born and Alfred had reluctantly given me charge of the twelve ships because I was an ealdorman, a noble, and it was only fitting that a high-born man should command the West Saxon fleet even though it had been much too puny to confront the massive array of Danish ships that had come to Wessex’s south coast. ‘There are times,’ Leofric grumbled, ‘when you are an earsling.’ An earsling was something that had dropped out of a creature’s backside and was one of Leofric’s favourite insults. We were friends.

‘We’ll see Alfred tomorrow,’ I said.

‘And Odda the Younger,’ Leofric said patiently, ‘has seen him today.’

Odda the Younger was the son of Odda the Elder who had given my wife shelter, and the son did not like me. He did not like me because he wanted to plough Mildrith, which was reason enough for him to dislike me. He was also, as Leofric said, a piece of goose shit, slippery and slick, which was reason enough for me to dislike him.

‘We shall see Alfred tomorrow,’ I said again, and next morning we all rode to Exanceaster, my men escorting Mildrith, our son and his nurse, and we found Alfred on the northern side of Exanceaster where his green and white dragon banner flew above his tents. Other banners snapped in the damp wind, a colourful array of beasts, crosses, saints and weapons announcing that the great men of Wessex were with their king. One of those banners showed a black stag, which confirmed that Leofric had been right and that Odda the Younger was here in south Defnascir. Outside the camp, between its southern margin and the city walls, was a great pavilion made of sail-cloth stretched across guyed poles, and that told me that Alfred, instead of fighting Guthrum, was talking to him. They were negotiating a truce, though not on that day, for it was a Sunday and Alfred would do no work on a Sunday if he could help it. I found him on his knees in a makeshift church made from another poled sail-cloth, and all his nobles and thegns were arrayed behind him, and some of those men turned as they heard our horses’ hooves. Odda the Younger was one of those who turned and I saw the apprehension show on his narrow face.

The bishop who was conducting the service paused to let the congregation make a response, and that gave Odda an excuse to look away from me. He was kneeling close to Alfred, very close, suggesting that he was high in the king’s favour, and I did not doubt that he had brought the dead Ubba’s raven banner and war axe to Exanceaster and claimed the credit for the fight beside the sea. ‘One day,’ I said to Leofric, ‘I shall slit that bastard from the crotch to the gullet and dance on his offal.’

‘You should have done it yesterday.’

A priest had been kneeling close to the altar, one of the many priests who always accompanied Alfred, and he saw me and slid backwards as unobtrusively as he could until he was able to stand and hurry towards me. He had red hair, a squint, a palsied left hand and an expression of astonished joy on his ugly face. ‘Uhtred!’ he called as he ran towards our horses, ‘Uhtred! We thought you were dead!’

‘Me?’ I grinned at the priest. ‘Dead?’

‘You were a hostage!’

I had been one of the dozen English hostages in Werham, but while the others had been murdered by Guthrum, I had been spared because of Earl Ragnar who was a Danish war-chief and as close to me as a brother. ‘I didn’t die, father,’ I said to the priest, whose name was Beocca, ‘and I’m surprised you did not know that.’

‘How could I know it?’

‘Because I was at Cynuit, father, and Odda the Younger could have told you that I was there and that I lived.’

I was staring at Odda as I spoke and Beocca caught the grimness in my voice. ‘You were at Cynuit?’ he asked nervously.

‘Odda the Younger didn’t tell you?’

‘He said nothing.’

‘Nothing!’ I kicked my horse forward, forcing it between the kneeling men and thus closer to Odda. Beocca tried to stop me, but I pushed his hand away from my bridle. Leofric, wiser than me, held back, but I pushed the horse into the back rows of the congregation until the press of worshippers made it impossible to advance further, and then I stared at Odda as I spoke to Beocca. ‘He didn’t describe Ubba’s death?’ I asked.

‘He says Ubba died in the shield wall,’ Beocca said, his voice a hiss so that he did not disturb the liturgy, ‘and that many men contributed to his death.’

‘Is that all he told you?’

‘He says he faced Ubba himself,’ Beocca said.

‘So who do men think killed Ubba Lothbrokson?’ I asked.

Beocca could sense trouble coming and he tried to calm me. ‘We can talk of these things later,’ he said, ‘but for now, Uhtred, join us in prayer.’ He used my name rather than calling me lord because he had known me since I was a child. Beocca, like me, was a Northumbrian, and he had been my father’s priest, but when the Danes took our country he had come to Wessex to join those Saxons who still resisted the invaders. ‘This is a time for prayer,’ he insisted, ‘not for quarrels.’

But I was in a mood for quarrels. ‘Who do men say killed Ubba Lothbrokson?’ I asked again.

‘They give thanks to God that the pagan is dead,’ Beocca evaded my question, and tried to hush my voice with frantic gestures from his palsied left hand.

‘Who do you think killed Ubba?’ I asked, and when Beocca did not answer, I provided the answer for him. ‘You think Odda the Younger killed him?’ I could see that Beocca did believe that, and the anger surged in me. ‘Ubba fought me man on man,’ I said, too loudly now, ‘one on one, just me and him. My sword against his axe. And he was unwounded when the fight began, father, and at the end of it he was dead. He had gone to his brothers in the corpse-hall.’ I was furious now and my voice had risen until I was shouting, and the distracted congregation all turned to stare at me. The bishop, whom I recognised as the bishop of Exanceaster, the same man who had married me to Mildrith, frowned nervously. Only Alfred seemed unmoved by the interruption, but then, reluctantly, he stood and turned towards me as his wife, the pinch-faced Ælswith, hissed into his ear.

‘Is there any man here,’ I was still shouting, ‘who will deny that I, Uhtred of Bebbanburg, killed Ubba Lothbrokson in single combat?’

There was silence. I had not intended to disrupt the service, but monstrous pride and ungovernable rage had driven me to defiance. The faces gazed at me, the banners flapped in the desultory wind and the small rain dripped from the edges of the sail-cloth awning. Still no one answered me, but men saw that I was staring at Odda the Younger and some looked to him for a response, but he was struck dumb. ‘Who killed Ubba?’ I shouted at him.

‘This is not seemly,’ Alfred said angrily.

‘This killed Ubba!’ I declared, and I drew Serpent-Breath.

And that was my next mistake.

In the winter, while I was mewed up in Werham as one of the hostages given to Guthrum, a new law had been passed in Wessex, a law which decreed that no man other than the royal bodyguards was to draw a weapon in the presence of the king. The law was not just to protect Alfred, but also to prevent the quarrels between his great men becoming lethal and, by drawing Serpent-Breath, I had unwittingly broken the law so that his household troops were suddenly converging on me with spears and drawn swords until Alfred, red-cloaked and bare-headed, shouted for every man to be still.

Then he walked towards me and I could see the anger on his face. He had a narrow face with a long nose and chin, a high forehead, and a thin-lipped mouth. He normally went clean-shaven, but he had grown a short beard that made him look older. He had not lived thirty years yet, but looked closer to forty. He was painfully thin, and his frequent illnesses had given his face a crabbed look. He looked more like a priest than the king of the West Saxons, for he had the irritated, pale face of a man who spends too much time out of the sun and poring over books, but there was an undoubted authority in his eyes. They were very light eyes, as grey as mail, unforgiving. ‘You have broken my peace,’ he said, ‘and offended the peace of Christ.’

I sheathed Serpent-Breath, mainly because Beocca had muttered at me to stop being a damned fool and to put my sword away, and now the priest was tugging my right leg, trying to make me dismount and kneel to Alfred, whom he adored. Ælswith, Alfred’s wife, was staring at me with pure scorn. ‘He should be punished,’ she called out.

‘You will go there,’ the king said, pointing towards one of his tents, ‘and wait for my judgment.’

I had no choice but to obey, for his household troops, all of them in mail and helmets, pressed about me and so I was taken to the tent where I dismounted and ducked inside. The air smelled of yellowed, crushed grass. The rain pattered on the linen roof and some leaked through onto an altar that held a crucifix and two empty candle-holders. The tent was evidently the king’s private chapel and Alfred made me wait there a long time. The congregation dispersed, the rain ended and a watery sunlight emerged between the clouds. A harp played somewhere, perhaps serenading Alfred and his wife as they ate. A dog came into the tent, looked at me, lifted its leg against the altar and went out again. The sun vanished behind cloud and more rain pattered on the canvas, then there was a flurry at the tent’s opening and two men entered. One was Æthelwold, the king’s nephew, and the man who should have inherited Wessex’s throne from his father except he had been reckoned too young and so the crown had gone to his uncle instead. He gave me a sheepish grin, deferring to the second man who was heavy-set, full-bearded and ten years older than Æthelwold. He introduced himself by sneezing, then blew his nose into his hand and wiped the snot onto his leather coat. ‘Call it springtime,’ he grumbled, then stared at me with a truculent expression. ‘Damned rain never stops. You know who I am?’

‘Wulfhere,’ I said, ‘Ealdorman of Wiltunscir.’ He was a cousin to the king and a leading power in Wessex.

He nodded. ‘And you know who this damn fool is?’ he asked, gesturing at Æthelwold who was holding a bundle of white cloth.

‘We know each other,’ I said. Æthelwold was only a month or so younger than I, and he was fortunate, I suppose, that his Uncle Alfred was such a good Christian or else he could have expected a knife in the night. He was much better looking than Alfred, but foolish, flippant and usually drunk, though he appeared sober enough on that Sunday morning.

‘I’m in charge of Æthelwold now,’ Wulfhere said, ‘and of you. And the king sent me to punish you.’ He brooded on that for a heartbeat. ‘What his wife wants me to do,’ he went on, ‘is pull the guts out of your smelly arse and feed them to the pigs.’ He glared at me. ‘You know what the penalty is for drawing a sword in the king’s presence?’

‘A fine?’ I guessed.

‘Death, you fool, death. They made a new law last winter.’

‘How was I supposed to know?’

‘But Alfred’s feeling merciful,’ Wulfhere ignored my question. ‘So you’re not to dangle off a gallows. Not today, anyhow. But he wants your assurance you’ll keep the peace.’

‘What peace?’

‘His damned peace, you fool. He wants us to fight the Danes, not slice each other up. So for the moment you have to swear to keep the peace.’

‘For the moment?’

‘For the moment,’ he said tonelessly, and I just shrugged. He took that for acceptance. ‘So you killed Ubba?’ he asked.

‘I did.’

‘That’s what I hear.’ He sneezed again. ‘You know Edor?’

‘I know him,’ I said. Edor was one of Ealdorman Odda’s battle chiefs, a warrior of the men of Defnascir, and he had fought beside us at Cynuit.

‘Edor told me what happened,’ Wulfhere said, ‘but only because he trusts me. For God’s sake stop fidgeting!’ This last shout was directed at Æthelwold who was poking beneath the altar’s linen cover, presumably in search of something valuable. Alfred, rather than murder his nephew, seemed intent on boring him to death. Æthelwold had never been allowed to fight, lest he make a reputation for himself, instead he had been forced to learn his letters, which he hated, and so he idled his time away, hunting, drinking, whoring and filled with resentment that he was not the king. ‘Just stand still, boy,’ Wulfhere snarled.

‘Edor told you,’ I said, unable to keep the outrage from my voice, ‘because he trusts you? You mean what happened at Cynuit is a secret? A thousand men saw me kill Ubba!’

‘But Odda the Younger took the credit,’ Wulfhere said, ‘and his father is badly wounded and if he dies then Odda the Younger will become one of the richest men in Wessex, and he’ll lead more troops and pay more priests than you can ever hope to do, so men won’t want to offend him, will they? They’ll pretend to believe him, to keep him generous. And the king already believes him, and why shouldn’t he? Odda arrived here with Ubba Lothbrokson’s banner and war axe. He dropped them at Alfred’s feet, then knelt and gave the praise to God, and promised to build a church and monastery at Cynuit, and what did you do? Ride a damned horse into the middle of mass and wave your sword about. Not a clever thing to do with Alfred.’

I half smiled at that, for Wulfhere was right. Alfred was uncommonly pious, and a sure way to succeed in Wessex was to flatter that piety, imitate it and ascribe all good fortune to God.

‘Odda’s a prick,’ Wulfhere growled, surprising me, ‘but he’s Alfred’s prick now, and you’re not going to change that.’

‘But I killed …’

‘I know what you did!’ Wulfhere interrupted me. ‘And Alfred probably suspects you’re telling the truth, but he believes Odda made it possible. He thinks Odda and you both fought Ubba. He may not even care if neither of you did, except that Ubba’s dead and that’s good news, and Odda brought that news and so the sun shines out of Odda’s arse, and if you want the king’s troops to hang you off a high branch then you’ll make a feud with Odda. Do you understand me?’

‘Yes.’

Wulfhere sighed. ‘Leofric said you’d see sense if I beat you over the head long enough.’

‘I want to see Leofric,’ I said.

‘You can’t,’ Wulfhere said sharply. ‘He’s being sent back to Hamtun where he belongs. But you’re not going back. The fleet will be put in someone else’s charge. You’re to do penance.’

For a moment I thought I had misheard. ‘I’m to do what?’ I asked.

‘You’re to grovel,’ Æthelwold spoke for the first time. He grinned at me. We were not exactly friends, but we had drunk together often enough and he seemed to like me. ‘You’re to dress like a girl,’ Æthelwold continued, ‘go on your knees and be humiliated.’

‘And you’re to do it right now,’ Wulfhere added.

‘I’ll be damned …’

‘You’ll be damned anyway,’ Wulfhere snarled at me, then snatched the white bundle from Æthelwold’s grasp and tossed it at my feet. It was a penitent’s robe, and I left it on the ground. ‘For God’s sake, lad,’ Wulfhere said, ‘have some sense. You’ve got a wife and land here, don’t you? So what happens if you don’t do the king’s bidding? You want to be outlawed? You want your wife in a nunnery? You want the church to take your land?’

I stared at him. ‘All I did was kill Ubba and tell the truth.’

Wulfhere sighed. ‘You’re a Northumbrian,’ he said, ‘and I don’t know how they did things up there, but this is Alfred’s Wessex. You can do anything in Wessex except piss all over his church, and that’s what you just did. You pissed, son, and now the church is going to piss all over you.’ He grimaced as the rain beat harder on the tent, then he frowned, staring at the puddle spreading just outside the entrance. He was silent a long time, before turning and giving me a strange look. ‘You think any of this is important?’

I did, but I was so astonished by his question, which had been asked in a soft, bitter voice, that I had nothing to say.

‘You think Ubba’s death makes any difference?’ he asked, and again I thought I had misheard. ‘And even if Guthrum makes peace,’ he went on, ‘you think we’ve won?’ His heavy face was suddenly savage. ‘How long will Alfred be king? How long before the Danes rule here?’

I still had nothing to say. Æthelwold, I saw, was listening intently. He longed to be king, but he had no following, and Wulfhere had plainly been appointed as his guardian to keep him from making trouble. But Wulfhere’s words suggested the trouble would come anyway. ‘Just do what Alfred wants,’ the ealdorman advised me, ‘and afterwards find a way to keep living. That’s all any of us can do. If Wessex falls we’ll all be looking for a way to stay alive, but in the meantime put on that damned robe and get it over with.’

‘Both of us,’ Æthelwold said, and he picked up the robe and I saw he had fetched two of them, folded together.

‘You?’ Wulfhere snarled at him. ‘Are you drunk?’

‘I’m penitent for being drunk. Or I was drunk, now I’m penitent.’ He grinned at me, then pulled the robe over his head. ‘I shall go to the altar with Uhtred,’ he said, his voice muffled by the linen.

Wulfhere could not stop him, but Wulfhere knew, as I knew, that Æthelwold was making a mockery of the rite. And I knew Æthelwold was doing it as a favour to me, though as far as I knew he owed me no favour. But I was grateful to him, so I put on the damned frock and, side by side with the king’s nephew, went to my humiliation.

I meant little to Alfred. He had a score of great lords in Wessex, while across the frontier in Mercia there were other lords and thegns who lived under Danish rule but who would fight for Wessex if Alfred gave them an opportunity. All of those great men could bring him soldiers, could rally swords and spears to the dragon banner of Wessex, while I could bring him nothing except my sword, Serpent-Breath. True, I was a lord, but I was from far off Northumbria and I led no men and so my only value to him was far in the future. I did not understand that yet. In time, as the rule of Wessex spread northwards, my value grew, but back then, in 877, when I was an angry twenty-year-old, I knew nothing except my own ambitions.

And I learned humiliation. Even today, a lifetime later, I remember the bitterness of that penitential grovel. Why did Alfred make me do it? I had won him a great victory, yet he insisted on shaming me, and for what? Because I had disturbed a church service? It was partly that, but only partly. He loved his god, loved the church and passionately believed that the survival of Wessex lay in obedience to the church and so he would protect the church as fiercely as he would fight for his country. And he loved order. There was a place for everything and I did not fit and he genuinely believed that if I could be brought to God’s heel then I would become part of his beloved order. In short he saw me as an unruly young hound that needed a good whipping before it could join the disciplined pack.

So he made me grovel.

And Æthelwold made a fool of himself.

Not at first. At first it was all solemnity. Every man in Alfred’s army was there to watch, and they made two lines in the rain. The lines stretched to the altar under the guyed sail-cloth where Alfred and his wife waited with the bishop and a gaggle of priests. ‘On your knees,’ Wulfhere said to me. ‘You have to go on your knees,’ he insisted tonelessly, ‘and crawl up to the altar. Kiss the altar cloth, then lie flat.’

‘Then what?’

‘Then God and the king forgive you,’ he said, and waited. ‘Just do it,’ he snarled.

So I did it. I went down on my knees and I shuffled through the mud, and the silent lines of men watched me, and then Æthelwold, close beside me, began to wail that he was a sinner. He threw his arms in the air, fell flat on his face, howled that he was penitent, shrieked that he was a sinner, and at first men were embarrassed and then they were amused. ‘I’ve known women!’ Æthelwold shouted at the rain, ‘and they were bad women! Forgive me!’

Alfred was furious, but he could not stop a man making a fool of himself before God. Perhaps he thought Æthelwold’s remorse was genuine? ‘I’ve lost count of the women!’ Æthelwold shouted, then beat his fists in the mud. ‘Oh God, I love tits! God, I love naked women, God, forgive me for that!’ The laughter spread, and every man must have remembered that Alfred, before piety caught him in its clammy grip, had been notorious for the women he had pursued. ‘You must help me, God!’ Æthelwold cried as we shuffled a few feet farther. ‘Send me an angel!’

‘So you can hump her?’ a voice called from the crowd and the laughter became a roar.

Ælswith was hurried away, lest she hear something unseemly. The priests whispered together, but Æthelwold’s penitence, though extravagant, seemed real enough. He was weeping. I knew he was really laughing, but he howled as though his soul was in agony. ‘No more tits, God!’ he called, ‘no more tits!’ He made a fool of himself, but, as men already thought him a fool, he did not mind. ‘Keep me from tits, God!’ he shouted, and now Alfred left, knowing that the solemnity of the day was ruined, and most of the priests left with him, so that Æthelwold and I crawled to an abandoned altar where Æthelwold turned in his mud-spattered robe and leaned against the table. ‘I hate him,’ he said softly, and I knew he referred to his uncle. ‘I hate him,’ he went on, ‘and now you owe me a favour, Uhtred.’

‘I do,’ I said.

‘I’ll think of one,’ he said.

Odda the Younger had not left with Alfred. He seemed bemused. My humiliation, which he had surely thought to enjoy, had turned into laughter and he was aware that men were watching him, judging his truthfulness, and he moved closer to a huge man who was evidently one of his bodyguards. That man was tall and very broad about the chest, but it was his face that commanded attention for it looked as though his skin had been stretched too tight across his skull, leaving his face incapable of making any expression other than one of pure hatred and wolfish hunger. Violence came off the man like the stench of a wet hound and when he looked at me it was like a beast’s soulless stare, and I instinctively understood that this was the man who would kill me if Odda found a chance to commit murder. Odda was nothing, a rich man’s spoiled son, but his money gave him the means to command men who were killers. Then Odda plucked at the tall man’s sleeve and they both turned and walked away.

Father Beocca had stayed by the altar. ‘Kiss it,’ he ordered me, ‘then lie flat.’

I stood up instead. ‘You can kiss my arse, father,’ I said. I was angry, and my anger frightened Beocca who backed away.

But I had done what the king wanted. I had been penitent.

The tall man beside Odda the Younger was named Steapa. Steapa Snotor, men called him, or Steapa the Clever. ‘It’s a joke,’ Wulfhere told me as I ripped off the penitent’s frock and pulled on my mail coat.

‘A joke?’

‘Because he’s dumb as an ox,’ Wulfhere said. ‘He’s got frog spawn instead of a brain. He’s stupid, but he’s not a stupid fighter. You didn’t see him at Cynuit?’

‘No,’ I said curtly.

‘So what’s Steapa to you?’ Wulfhere asked.

‘Nothing,’ I said. I had asked the ealdorman who Odda’s bodyguard was so that I could learn the name of the man who might try to kill me, but that possible murder was none of Wulfhere’s business.

Wulfhere hesitated, wanting to ask more, then deciding he would fetch no better answer. ‘When the Danes come,’ he said, ‘you’ll be welcome to join my men.’

Æthelwold, Alfred’s nephew, was holding my two swords and he drew Serpent-Breath from her scabbard and stared at the wispy patterns in her blade. ‘If the Danes come,’ he spoke to Wulfhere, ‘you must let me fight.’

‘You don’t know how to fight.’

‘Then you must teach me.’ He slid Serpent-Breath back into the scabbard. ‘Wessex needs a king who can fight,’ he said, ‘instead of pray.’

‘You should watch your tongue, lad,’ Wulfhere said, ‘in case it gets cut out.’ He snatched the swords from Æthelwold and gave them to me. ‘The Danes will come,’ he said, ‘so join me when they do.’

I nodded, but said nothing. When the Danes came, I thought, I planned to be with them. I had been raised by Danes after being captured at the age of ten and they could have killed me, but instead they had treated me well. I had learned their language and worshipped their gods until I no longer knew whether I was Danish or English. Had Earl Ragnar the Elder lived I would never have left them, but he had died, murdered in a night of treachery and fire, and I had fled south to Wessex. But now I would go back. Just as soon as the Danes left Exanceaster I would join Ragnar’s son, Ragnar the Younger, if he lived. Ragnar the Younger’s ship had been in the fleet which had been hammered in the great storm. Scores of ships had sunk, and the remnants of the fleet had limped to Exanceaster where the boats were now burned to ash on the riverbank beneath the town. I did not know if Ragnar lived. I hoped he lived, and I prayed he would escape Exanceaster and then I would go to him, offer him my sword, and carry that blade against Alfred of Wessex. Then, one day, I would dress Alfred in a frock and make him crawl on his knees to an altar of Thor. Then kill him.

Those were my thoughts as we rode to Oxton. That was the estate Mildrith had brought me in marriage and it was a beautiful place, but so saddled with debt that it was more of a burden than a pleasure. The farmland was on the slopes of hills facing east towards the broad sea-reach of the Uisc and above the house were thick woods of oak and ash from which flowed small clear streams that cut across the fields where rye, wheat and barley grew. The house, it was not a hall, was a smoke-filled building made from mud, dung, oak and rye-straw, and so long and low that it looked like a green, moss-covered mound from which smoke escaped through the roof’s central hole. In the attached yard were pigs, chickens and mounds of manure as big as the house. Mildrith’s father had farmed it, helped by a steward named Oswald who was a weasel, and he caused me still more trouble on that rainy Sunday as we rode back to the farm.

I was furious, resentful and vengeful. Alfred had humiliated me which made it unfortunate for Oswald that he had chosen that Sunday afternoon to drag an oak tree down from the high woods. I was brooding on the pleasures of revenge as I let my horse pick its way up the track through the trees and saw eight oxen hauling the great trunk towards the river. Three men were goading the oxen, while a fourth, Oswald, rode the trunk with a whip. He saw me and jumped off and, for a heartbeat, it looked as if he wanted to run into the trees, but then he realised he could not evade me and so he just stood and waited as I rode up to the great oak log.

‘Lord,’ Oswald greeted me. He was surprised to see me. He probably thought I had been killed with the other hostages, and that belief had made him careless.

My horse was nervous because of the stink of blood from the oxen’s flanks and he stepped backwards and forwards in small steps until I calmed him by patting his neck. Then I looked at the oak trunk that must have been forty feet long and as thick about as a man is tall. ‘A fine tree,’ I said to Oswald.

He glanced towards Mildrith who was twenty paces away. ‘Good day, lady,’ he said, clawing off the woollen hat he wore over his springy red hair.

‘A wet day, Oswald,’ she said. Her father had appointed the steward and Mildrith had an innocent faith in his reliability.

‘I said,’ I spoke loudly, ‘a fine tree. So where was it felled?’

Oswald tucked the hat into his belt. ‘On the top ridge, lord,’ he said vaguely.

‘The top ridge on my land?’

He hesitated. He was doubtless tempted to claim it came from a neighbour’s land, but that lie could easily have been exposed and so he said nothing.

‘From my land?’ I asked again.

‘Yes, lord,’ he admitted.

‘And where is it going?’

He hesitated again, but had to answer. ‘Wigulf’s mill.’

‘Wigulf buys it?’

‘He’ll split it, lord.’

‘I didn’t ask what he will do with it,’ I said, ‘but whether he will buy it.’

Mildrith, hearing the harshness in my voice, intervened to say that her father had sometimes sent timber to Wigulf’s mill, but I waved her to silence. ‘Will he buy it?’ I asked Oswald.

‘We need the timber, lord, to make repairs,’ the steward said, ‘and Wigulf takes his fee in split wood.’

‘And you drag the tree on a Sunday?’ He had nothing to say to that. ‘Tell me,’ I went on, ‘if we need planks for repairs, then why don’t we split the trunk ourselves? Do we lack men? Or wedges? Or mauls?’

‘Wigulf has always done it,’ Oswald said in a surly tone.

‘Always?’ I repeated and Oswald said nothing. ‘Wigulf lives in Exanmynster?’ I guessed. Exanmynster lay a mile or so northwards and was the nearest settlement to Oxton.

‘Yes, lord,’ Oswald said.

‘So if I ride to Exanmynster now,’ I said, ‘Wigulf will tell me how many similar trees you’ve delivered to him in the last year?’

There was silence, except for the rain dripping from leaves and the intermittent burst of birdsong. I edged my horse a few steps closer to Oswald, who gripped his whip’s handle as if readying it to lash out at me. ‘How many?’ I asked.

Oswald said nothing.

‘How many?’ I demanded, louder.

‘Husband,’ Mildrith called.

‘Quiet!’ I shouted at her and Oswald looked from me to her and back to me. ‘And how much has Wigulf paid you?’ I asked. ‘What does a tree like this fetch? Eight shillings? Nine?’

The anger that had made me act so impetuously at the king’s church service rose again. It was plain that Oswald was stealing the timber and being paid for it, and what I should have done was charge him with theft and have him arraigned before a court where a jury of men would decide his guilt or innocence, but I was in no mood for such a process. I just drew Serpent-Breath and kicked my horse forward. Mildrith screamed a protest, but I ignored her. Oswald ran, and that was a mistake, because I caught him easily, and Serpent-Breath swung once and opened up the back of his skull so I could see brains and blood as he fell. He twisted in the leaf mould and I wheeled the horse back and stabbed down into his throat.

‘That was murder!’ Mildrith shouted at me.

‘That was justice,’ I snarled at her, ‘something lacking in Wessex.’ I spat on Oswald’s body, which was still twitching. ‘The bastard’s been stealing from us.’

Mildrith kicked her horse, leading the nurse who carried our child uphill. I let her go. ‘Take the trunk up to the house,’ I ordered the slaves who had been goading the oxen. ‘If it’s too big to drag uphill then split it here and take the planks to the house.’

I searched Oswald’s house that evening and discovered fifty-three shillings buried in the floor. I took the silver, confiscated his cooking pots, spit, knives, buckles and a deerskin cloak, then drove his wife and three children off my land. I had come home.

Two

My anger was not slaked by Oswald’s killing. The death of a dishonest steward was no consolation for what I perceived as a monstrous injustice. For the moment Wessex was safe from the Danes, but it was only safe because I had killed Ubba Lothbrokson and my reward had been humiliation.

Poor Mildrith. She was a peaceable woman who thought well of everyone she met, and now she found herself married to a resentful, angry warrior. She was frightened of Alfred’s wrath, terrified that the church would punish me for disturbing its peace, and worried that Oswald’s relatives would demand a wergild from me. And so they would. A wergild was the blood price that every man, woman and child possessed. Kill a man and you must pay his price or else die yourself, and I had no doubt that Oswald’s family would go to Odda the Younger, who had been named the Ealdorman of Defnascir because his father was too badly wounded to continue as ealdorman, and Odda would instruct the shire reeve to pursue me and place me on trial, but I did not care. I hunted boar and deer, I brooded and waited for news of the negotiations at Exanceaster. I was expecting Alfred to do what he always did which was to make peace with the Danes and so release them, and when he did I would go to Ragnar.

And as I waited I found my first retainer. He was a slave and I discovered him in Exanmynster on a fine spring day. There was a hiring-fair where men looked for employment through the busy days of hay-making and harvest, and like all fairs there were jugglers, storytellers, stiltwalkers, musicians and acrobats. There was also a tall, white-haired man with a lined, serious face, who was selling enchanted leather bags that turned iron into silver. He showed us how it was done, and I saw him place two common nails into the bag and a moment later they were pure silver. He said we had to place a silver crucifix in the bag and then sleep one night with it tied around our necks before the magic worked and I paid him three silver shillings for one bag, and it never worked. I spent months searching for the man, but never found him. Even these days I come across such men and women, selling sorcerous pouches or boxes, and now I have them whipped and run off my land, but I was only twenty then and I believed my own eyes. That man had attracted a large crowd, but there were even more people gathered by the church gate where shouts erupted every few minutes. I pushed my horse into their rear ranks, getting dirty looks from folk who knew I had killed Oswald, but none dared accuse me of the murder for I carried both Serpent-Breath and Wasp-Sting.

A young man was by the church gate. He was stripped to the waist, barefooted and had a rope around his neck, and the rope was tied to the gatepost. In his hand was a short, stout stave. He had long unbound fair hair, blue eyes, a stubborn face and blood all over his chest, belly and arms. Three men guarded him. They too were fair-haired and blue-eyed, and they shouted in a strange accent. ‘Come and fight the heathen! Three pennies to make the bastard bleed! Come and fight!’

‘Who is he?’ I asked.

‘A Dane, lord, a pagan Dane.’ The man tugged off his hat when he spoke to me, then turned back to the crowd. ‘Come and fight him! Get your revenge! Make a Dane bleed! Be a good Christian! Hurt a pagan!’

The three men were Frisians. I suspected they had been in Alfred’s army and, now that he was talking to the Danes rather than fighting them, the three had deserted. Frisians come from across the sea and they come for one reason only, money, and this trio had somehow captured the young Dane and were profiting from him so long as he lasted. And that could have been some time, for he was good. A strong young Saxon paid his three pence and was given a sword with which he hacked wildly at the prisoner, but the Dane parried every blow, wood chips flying from his stave, and when he saw an opening he cracked his opponent around the head hard enough to draw blood from his ear. The Saxon staggered away, half stunned, and the Dane rammed the stave into his belly and, as the Saxon bent to gasp for breath, the stave whistled around in a blow that would have cracked his skull open like an egg, but the Frisians dragged on the rope so that the Dane fell backwards. ‘Do we have another hero?’ a Frisian shouted as the young Saxon was helped away. ‘Come on, lads! Show your strength! Beat a Dane bloody!’

‘I’ll beat him,’ I said. I dismounted and pushed through the crowd. I gave my horse’s reins to a boy, then drew Serpent-Breath. ‘Three pence?’ I asked the Frisians.

‘No, lord,’ one of them said.

‘Why not?’

‘We don’t want a dead Dane, do we?’ the man answered.

‘We do!’ someone shouted from the crowd. The folk in the Uisc valley did not like me, but they liked the Danes even less and they relished the prospect of watching a prisoner being slaughtered.

‘You can only wound him, lord,’ the Frisian said. ‘And you must use our sword.’ He held out the weapon. I glanced at it, saw its blunt edge, and spat.

‘Must?’ I asked.

The Frisian did not want to argue. ‘You can only draw blood, lord,’ he said.

The Dane flicked hair from his eyes and watched me. He held the stave low. I could see he was nervous, but there was no fear in his eyes. He had probably fought a hundred battles since the Frisians captured him, but those fights had been against men who were not soldiers, and he must have known, from my two swords, that I was a warrior. His skin was blotched with bruises and laced by blood and scars, and he surely expected another wound from Serpent-Breath, but he was determined to give me a fight.

‘What’s your name?’ I asked in Danish.

He blinked at me, surprised.

‘Your name, boy,’ I said. I called him ‘boy’, though he was not much younger than me.

‘Haesten,’ he said.

‘Haesten who?’

‘Haesten Storrison,’ he said, giving me his father’s name.

‘Fight him! Don’t talk to him!’ a voice shouted from the crowd.

I turned to stare at the man who had shouted and he could not meet my gaze, then I turned fast, very fast, and whipped Serpent-Breath in a quick sweep that Haesten instinctively parried so that Serpent-Breath cut through the stave as if it was rotten. Haesten was left with a stub of wood, while the rest of his weapon, a yard of thick ash, lay on the ground.

‘Kill him!’ someone shouted.

‘Just draw blood, lord,’ a Frisian said, ‘please, lord. He’s not a bad lad, for a Dane. Just make him bleed and we’ll pay you.’

I kicked the ash stave away from Haesten. ‘Pick it up,’ I said.

He looked at me nervously. To pick it up he would have to go to the end of his tether, then stoop, and at that moment he would expose his back to Serpent-Breath. He watched me, his eyes bitter beneath the fringe of dirty hair, then decided I would not attack him as he bent over. He went to the stave and, as he leaned down, I kicked it a few inches further away. ‘Pick it up,’ I ordered him again.

He still held the stub of ash and, as he took a further step, straining against the rope, he suddenly whipped around and tried to ram the broken end into my belly. He was fast, but I had half expected the move and caught his wrist in my left hand. I squeezed hard, hurting him. ‘Pick it up,’ I said a third time.

This time he obeyed, stooping to the stave, and to reach it he stretched his tether tight and I slashed Serpent-Breath onto the taut rope, severing it. Haesten, who had been straining forward, fell onto his face as the hide rope was cut. I put my left foot onto his back and let the tip of Serpent-Breath rest on his spine. ‘Alfred,’ I said to the Frisians, ‘has ordered that all Danish prisoners are to be taken to him.’

The three looked at me, said nothing.

‘So why have you not taken this man to the king?’ I demanded.

‘We didn’t know, lord,’ one of them said, ‘no one told us,’ which was not surprising because Alfred had given no such order.

‘We’ll take him to the king now, lord,’ another reassured me.

‘I’ll save you the trouble,’ I said. I took my foot off Haesten. ‘Get up,’ I told him in Danish. I threw a coin to the boy holding my horse and hauled myself into the saddle where I offered Haesten a hand. ‘Get up behind me,’ I ordered him.

The Frisians protested, coming at me with their swords drawn, so I pulled Wasp-Sting from her scabbard and gave it to Haesten who had still not mounted. Then I turned the horse towards the Frisians and smiled at them. ‘These people,’ I waved Serpent-Breath at the crowd, ‘already think I am a murderer. I’m also the man who met Ubba Lothbrokson beside the sea and killed him there. I tell you this so you may boast that you killed Uhtred of Bebbanburg.’

I lowered the sword so it pointed at the nearest man and he backed away. The others, no more eager to fight than the first, went with him. Haesten then pulled himself up behind me and I spurred the horse into the crowd, which parted reluctantly.

Once free of them I made Haesten dismount and give me back Wasp-Sting. ‘How did you get captured?’ I asked him.

He told me he had been on one of Guthrum’s ships caught in the storm, and his ship had sunk, but he had clung to some wreckage and been washed ashore where the Frisians had found him. ‘There were two of us, lord,’ he said, ‘but the other died.’

‘You’re a free man now,’ I told him.

‘Free?’

‘You’re my man,’ I said, ‘and you’ll give me an oath, and I’ll give you a sword.’

‘Why?’ he wanted to know.

‘Because a Dane saved me once,’ I said, ‘and I like the Danes.’

I also wanted Haesten because I needed men. I did not trust Odda the Younger, and I feared Steapa Snotor, Odda’s warrior, and so I would have swords at Oxton. Mildrith, of course, did not want sword-Danes at her house. She wanted ploughmen and peasants, milkmaids and servants, but I told her I was a lord, and a lord has swords.

I am indeed a lord, a lord of Northumbria. I am Uhtred of Bebbanburg. My ancestors, who can trace their lineage back to the god Woden, the Danish Odin, were once kings in northern England, and if my uncle had not stolen Bebbanburg from me when I was just ten years old I would have lived there still as a Northumbrian lord safe in his sea-washed fastness. The Danes had captured Northumbria, and their puppet king, Ricsig, ruled in Eoferwic, but Bebbanburg was too strong for any Dane and my uncle Ælfric ruled there, calling himself Ealdorman Ælfric, and the Danes left him in peace so long as he did not trouble them, and I often dreamed of going back to Northumbria to claim my birthright. But how? To capture Bebbanburg I would need an army, and all I had was one young Dane, Haesten.

And I had other enemies in Northumbria. There was Earl Kjartan and his son Sven, who had lost an eye because of me, and they would kill me gladly, and my uncle would pay them to do it, and so I had no future in Northumbria, not then. But I would go back. That was my soul’s wish, and I would go back with Ragnar the Younger, my friend, who still lived because his ship had weathered the storm. I heard that from a priest who had listened to the negotiations outside Exanceaster and he was certain that Earl Ragnar had been one of the Danish lords in Guthrum’s delegation. ‘A big man,’ the priest told me, ‘and very loud.’ That description convinced me that Ragnar lived and my heart was glad for it, for I knew that my future lay with him, not with Alfred. When the negotiations were finished and a truce made, the Danes would doubtless leave Exanceaster and I would give my sword to Ragnar and carry it against Alfred, who hated me. And I hated him.

I told Mildrith that we would leave Defnascir and go to Ragnar, that I would be his man and that I would pursue my bloodfeud against Kjartan and against my uncle under Ragnar’s eagle banner, and Mildrith responded with tears and more tears.

I cannot bear a woman’s crying. Mildrith was hurt and she was confused and I was angry and we snarled at each other like wildcats and the rain kept falling and I raged like a beast in a cage and wished Alfred and Guthrum would finish their talking because everyone knew that Alfred would let Guthrum go, and once Guthrum left Exanceaster then I could join the Danes and I did not care whether Mildrith came or not, so long as my son, who bore my name, went with me. So by day I hunted, at night I drank and dreamed of revenge and then one evening I came home to find Father Willibald waiting in the house.

Willibald was a good man. He had been chaplain to Alfred’s fleet when I commanded those twelve ships, and he told me he was on his way back to Hamtun, but he thought I would like to know what had unfolded in the long talks between Alfred and Guthrum. ‘There is peace, lord,’ he told me, ‘thanks be to God, there is peace.’

‘Thanks be to God,’ Mildrith echoed.

I was cleaning the blood from the blade of a boar spear and said nothing. I was thinking that Ragnar was released from the siege now and I could join him.

‘The treaty was sealed with solemn oaths yesterday,’ Willibald said, ‘and so we have peace.’

‘They gave each other solemn oaths last year,’ I said sourly. Alfred and Guthrum had made peace at Werham, but Guthrum had broken the truce and murdered the hostages he had been holding. Eleven of the twelve had died, and only I had lived because Ragnar was there to protect me. ‘So what have they agreed?’ I asked.

‘The Danes are to give up all their horses,’ Willibald said, ‘and march back into Mercia.’

Good, I thought, because that was where I would go. I did not say that to Willibald, but instead sneered that Alfred was just letting them march away. ‘Why doesn’t he fight them?’ I asked.

‘Because there are too many, lord. Because too many men would die on both sides.’

‘He should kill them all.’

‘Peace is better than war,’ Willibald said.

‘Amen,’ Mildrith said.

I began sharpening the spear, stroking the whetstone down the long blade. It seemed to me that Alfred had been absurdly generous. Guthrum, after all, was the one remaining leader of any stature on the Danish side, and he had been trapped, and if I had been Alfred there would have been no terms, only a siege, and at its end the Danish power in southern England would have been broken. Instead Guthrum was to be allowed to leave Exanceaster. ‘It is the hand of God,’ Willibald said.

I looked at him. He was a few years older than I was, but always seemed younger. He was earnest, enthusiastic and kind. He had been a good chaplain to the twelve ships, though the poor man was ever seasick and blanched at the sight of blood. ‘God made the peace?’ I asked sceptically.

‘Who sent the storm that sank Guthrum’s ships?’ Willibald retorted fervently, ‘who delivered Ubba into our hands?’

‘I did,’ I said.

He ignored that. ‘We have a godly king, lord,’ he said, ‘and God rewards those that serve him faithfully. Alfred has defeated the Danes! And they see it! Guthrum can recognise divine intervention! He has been making enquiries about Christ.’

I said nothing.

‘Our king believes,’ the priest went on, ‘that Guthrum is not far from seeing the true light of Christ.’ He leaned forward and touched my knee. ‘We have fasted, lord,’ he said, ‘we have prayed, and the king believes that the Danes will be brought to Christ and when that happens there will be a permanent peace.’

He meant every word of that nonsense and, of course, it was sweet music to Mildrith’s ears. She was a good Christian and had great faith in Alfred, and if the king believed that his god would bring victory then she would believe it too. It seemed madness to me, but I said nothing as a servant brought us barley ale, bread, smoked mackerel and cheese. ‘We shall have a Christian peace,’ Willibald said, making the sign of the cross above the bread before he ate, ‘sealed by hostages.’

‘We’ve given Guthrum hostages again?’ I asked, astonished.

‘No,’ Willibald said. ‘But he has agreed to give us hostages. Including six earls!’

I stopped sharpening the spear and looked at Willibald. ‘Six earls?’

‘Including your friend, Ragnar!’ Willibald seemed pleased by this news, but I was appalled. If Ragnar was not with the Danes then I could not go to them. He was my friend and his enemies were my enemies, but without Ragnar to protect me I would be horribly vulnerable to Kjartan and Sven, the father and son who had murdered Ragnar’s father and who wanted me dead. Without Ragnar, I knew, I could not leave Wessex.

‘Ragnar’s one of the hostages?’ I asked. ‘You’re sure?’

‘Of course I’m sure. He will be held by Ealdorman Wulfhere. All the hostages are to be held by Wulfhere.’

‘For how long?’

‘For as long as Alfred wishes, or until Guthrum is baptised. And Guthrum has agreed that our priests can talk to his men.’ Willibald gave me a pleading look. ‘We must have faith in God,’ he said. ‘We must give God time to work on the hearts of the Danes. Guthrum understands now that our god has power!’

I stood and went to the door, pulling aside the leather curtain and staring down at the wide sea-reach of the Uisc. I was sick at heart. I hated Alfred, did not want to be in Wessex, but now it seemed I was doomed to stay there. ‘And what do I do?’ I asked.

‘The king will forgive you, lord,’ Willibald said nervously.

‘Forgive me?’ I turned on him. ‘And what does the king believe happened at Cynuit? You were there, father,’ I said, ‘so did you tell him?’

‘I told him.’

‘And?’

‘He knows you are a brave warrior, lord,’ Willibald said, ‘and that your sword is an asset to Wessex. He will receive you again, I’m sure, and he will receive you joyfully. Go to church, pay your debts and show that you are a good man of Wessex.’

‘I’m not a West Saxon,’ I snarled at him, ‘I’m a Northumbrian!’

And that was part of the problem. I was an outsider. I spoke a different English. The men of Wessex were tied by family, and I came from the strange north and folk believed I was a pagan, and they called me a murderer because of Oswald’s death, and sometimes, when I rode about the estate, men would make the sign of the cross to avert the evil they saw in me. They called me Uhtredærwe, which means Uhtred the Wicked, and I was not unhappy with the insult, but Mildrith was. She assured them I was a Christian, but she lied, and our unhappiness festered all that summer. She prayed for my soul, I fretted for my freedom, and when she begged me to go with her to the church at Exanmynster I growled at her that I would never set foot in another church all my days. She would weep when I said that and her tears drove me out of the house to hunt, and sometimes the chase would take me down to the water’s edge where I would stare at Heahengel.

She lay canted on the muddy foreshore, lifted and dropped repeatedly by the tides, abandoned. She was one of Alfred’s fleet, one of the twelve large warships he had built to harry the Danish boats that raided Wessex’s coast, and Leofric and I had brought Heahengel up from Hamtun in pursuit of Guthrum’s fleet and we had survived the storm that sent so many Danes to their deaths and we had beached Heahengel here, left her mastless and without a sail, and she was still on the Uisc’s foreshore, rotting and apparently forgotten.

Archangel. That was what her name meant. Alfred had named her and I had always hated the name. A ship should have a proud name, not a snivelling religious word, and she should have a beast on her prow, high and defiant, a dragon’s head to challenge the sea or a snarling wolf to terrify an enemy. I sometimes climbed on board Heahengel and saw how the local villagers had plundered some of her upper strakes, and how there was water in her belly, and I remembered her proud days at sea and the wind whipping through her seal-hide rigging and the crash as we had rammed a Danish boat.

Now, like me, Heahengel had been left to decay, and sometimes I dreamed of repairing her, of finding new rigging and a new sail, of finding men and taking her long hull to sea. I wanted to be anywhere but where I was, I wanted to be with the Danes, and every time I said that Mildrith would weep again. ‘You can’t make me live among the Danes!’

‘Why not? I did.’

‘They’re pagans! My son won’t grow up a pagan!’

‘He’s my son too,’ I said, ‘and he will worship the gods I worship.’ There would be more tears then, and I would storm out of the house and take the hounds up to the high woods and wonder why love soured like milk. After Cynuit I had so wanted to see Mildrith, yet now I could not abide her misery and piety and she could not endure my anger. All she wanted me to do was till my fields, milk my cows and gather my harvest to pay the great debt she had brought me in marriage. That debt came from a pledge made by Mildrith’s father, a pledge to give the church the yield of almost half his land. That pledge was for all time, binding on his heirs, but Danish raids and bad harvests had ruined him. Yet the church, venomous as serpents, still insisted that the debt be paid, and said that if I could not pay then our land would be taken by monks, and every time I went to Exanceaster I could sense the priests and monks watching me and enjoying the prospect of their enrichment. Exanceaster was English again, for Guthrum had handed over the hostages and gone north so that peace of a sort had come to Wessex. The fyrds, the armies of each shire, had been disbanded and sent back to their farms. Psalms were being sung in all the churches and Alfred, to mark his victory, was sending gifts to every monastery and nunnery. Odda the Younger, who was being celebrated as the champion of Wessex, had been given all the land about the place where the battle had been fought at Cynuit and he had ordered a church to be built there, and it was rumoured that the church would have an altar of gold as thanks to God for allowing Wessex to survive.

Though how long would it survive? Guthrum lived and I did not share the Christian belief that God had sent Wessex peace. Nor was I the only one, for in midsummer Alfred returned to Exanceaster where he summoned his Witan, a council of the kingdom’s leading thegns and churchmen, and Wulfhere of Wiltunscir was one of the men summoned and I went into the city one evening and was told the ealdorman and his followers had lodgings in The Swan, a tavern by the east gate. He was not there, but Æthelwold, Alfred’s nephew, was doing his best to drain the tavern of ale. ‘Don’t tell me the bastard summoned you to the Witan?’ he greeted me sourly. The ‘bastard’ was Alfred who had snatched the throne from the young Æthelwold.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I came to see Wulfhere.’

‘The ealdorman is in church,’ Æthelwold said, ‘and I am not.’ He grinned and waved to the bench opposite him. ‘Sit and drink. Get drunk. Then we’ll find two girls. Three, if you like. Four, if you want?’

‘You forget I’m married,’ I said.

‘As if that ever stopped anyone.’

I sat and one of the maids brought me ale. ‘Are you in the Witan?’ I asked Æthelwold.

‘What do you think? You think that bastard wants my advice? “Lord king,” I’d say, “why don’t you jump off a high cliff and pray that God gives you wings.”’ He pushed a plate of pork ribs towards me. ‘I’m here so they can keep an eye on me. They’re making sure I’m not plotting treason.’

‘Are you?’

‘Of course I am.’ He grinned. ‘Are you going to join me? You do owe me a favour.’

‘You want my sword at your service?’ I asked.

‘Yes.’ He was serious.

‘So it’s you and me,’ I said, ‘against all Wessex. Who else will fight with us?’

He frowned, thinking, but came up with no names. He stared down at the table and I felt sorry for him. I had always liked Æthelwold, but no one would ever trust him for he was as careless as he was irresponsible. Alfred, I thought, had judged him right. Let him be free and he would drink and whore himself into irrelevance. ‘What I should do,’ he said, ‘is go and join Guthrum.’

‘Why don’t you?’

He looked up at me, but had no answer. Maybe he knew the answer, that Guthrum would welcome him, honour him, use him and eventually kill him. But maybe that was a better prospect than his present life. He shrugged and leaned back, pushing hair off his face. He was a startlingly handsome young man, and that too distracted him, for girls were attracted to him like priests to gold. ‘What Wulfhere thinks,’ he said, his voice slurring slightly, ‘is that Guthrum is going to come and kill us all.’

‘Probably,’ I said.

‘And if my uncle dies,’ he said, not bothering to lower his voice even though there were a score of men in the tavern, ‘his son is much too young to be king.’

‘True.’

‘So it’ll be my turn!’ He smiled.

‘Or Guthrum’s turn,’ I said.

‘So drink, my friend,’ he said, ‘because we’re all in the cesspit.’ He grinned at me, his charm suddenly evident. ‘So if you won’t fight for me,’ he asked, ‘how do you propose to pay back the favour?’

‘How would you like it paid?’

‘You could kill Abbot Hewald? Very nastily? Slowly?’

‘I could do that,’ I said. Hewald was abbot at Winburnan and famous for the harshness with which he taught boys to read.

‘On the other hand,’ Æthelwold went on, ‘I’d like to kill that scrawny bastard myself, so don’t do it for me, I’ll think of something that won’t make my uncle happy. You don’t like him, do you?’

‘No.’

‘Then we’ll brew up some mischief. Oh God,’ this last imprecation was because Wulfhere’s voice was suddenly loud just outside the door. ‘He’s angry at me.’

‘Why?’

‘One of the dairymaids is pregnant. I think he wanted to do it himself, but I churned her first.’ He drained his ale. ‘I’m going to the Three Bells. Want to come?’

‘I have to speak to Wulfhere.’

Æthelwold left by the back door as the ealdorman ducked through the front. Wulfhere was accompanied by a dozen thegns, but he saw me and crossed the room. ‘They’ve been reconsecrating the bishop’s church,’ he grumbled. ‘Hours upon damned hours! Nothing but chanting and prayers, hours of prayers just to get the taint of the Danes out of the place.’ He sat heavily. ‘Did I see Æthelwold here?’

‘Yes.’

‘Wanted you to join his rebellion, did he?’

‘Yes.’

‘Damned fool. So why are you here? Come to offer me your sword?’ He meant swear my allegiance to him and so become his warrior.

‘I want to see one of the hostages,’ I said, ‘so I seek your permission.’

‘Hostages,’ he snapped his fingers for ale. ‘Damned hostages. I’ve had to make new buildings to house them. And who pays for that?’

‘You do?’

‘Of course I do. And I’m supposed to feed them too? Feed them? Guard them? Wall them in? And does Alfred pay anything?’

‘Tell him you’re building a monastery,’ I suggested.

He looked at me as if I were mad, then saw the jest and laughed. ‘True enough, he’d pay me then, wouldn’t he? Have you heard about the monastery they’re building at Cynuit?’

‘I hear it’s to have an altar of gold.’

He laughed again. ‘That’s what I hear. I don’t believe it, but I hear it.’ He watched one of the tavern girls cross the floor. ‘It’s not my permission you need to see the hostages,’ he said, ‘but Alfred’s, and he won’t give it to you.’

‘Alfred’s permission?’ I asked.

‘They’re not just hostages,’ he said, ‘but prisoners. I have to wall them in and watch them day and night. Alfred’s orders. He might think God brought us peace, but he’s made damn sure he’s got high-born hostages. Six earls! You know how many retainers they have? How many women? How many mouths to feed?’

‘If I go to Wiltunscir,’ I said, ‘can I see Earl Ragnar?’

Wulfhere frowned at me. ‘Earl Ragnar? The noisy one? I like him. No, lad, you can’t, because no one’s allowed to see them except a damned priest who talks their language. Alfred sent him and he’s trying to make them into Christians, and if you go without my permission then Alfred will hear you’ve been there and he’ll want an explanation from me. No one can see the poor bastards.’ He paused to scratch at a louse under his collar. ‘I have to feed the priest too, and Alfred doesn’t pay for that either. He doesn’t even pay me to feed that lout Æthelwold!’

‘When I was a hostage in Werham,’ I explained, ‘Earl Ragnar saved my life. Guthrum killed the others, but Ragnar guarded me. He said they’d have to kill him before they killed me.’

‘And he looks like a hard man to kill,’ Wulfhere said, ‘but if Guthrum attacks Wessex that’s what I’m supposed to do. Kill the lot of them. Maybe not the women.’ He stared gloomily into the tavern’s yard where a group of his men were playing dice in the moonlight. ‘And Guthrum will attack,’ he added in a low voice.

‘That’s not what I hear.’

He looked at me suspiciously ‘And what do you hear, young man?’

‘That God has sent us peace.’

Wulfhere laughed at my mockery. ‘Guthrum’s in Gleawecestre,’ he said, ‘and that’s just a half day’s march from our frontier. And they say more Danish ships arrive every day. They’re in Lundene, they’re in the Humber, they’re in the Gewæsc.’ He scowled. ‘More ships, more men, and Alfred’s building churches! And there’s this fellow Svein.’

‘Svein?’

‘Brought his ships from Ireland. Bastard’s in Wales now, but he won’t stay there, will he? He’ll come to Wessex. And they say more Danes are joining him from Ireland.’ He brooded on this bad news. I did not know whether it was true, for such rumours were ever current, but Wulfhere plainly believed it. ‘We should march on Gleawecestre,’ he said, ‘and slaughter the lot of them before they slaughter us, but we’ve got a kingdom ruled by priests.’

That was true, I thought, just as it was certain that Wulfhere would not make it easy for me to see Ragnar. ‘Will you give a message to Ragnar?’ I asked.

‘How? I don’t speak Danish. I could ask the priest, but he’ll tell Alfred.’

‘Does Ragnar have a woman with him?’ I asked.

‘They all do.’

‘A thin girl,’ I said, ‘black hair. Face like a hawk.’

He nodded cautiously. ‘Sounds right. Has a dog, yes?’

‘She has a dog,’ I said, ‘and its name is Nihtgenga.’

He shrugged as if he did not care what the dog was called, then he understood the significance of the name. ‘An English name?’ he asked. ‘A Danish girl calls her dog Goblin?’

‘She isn’t Danish,’ I said. ‘Her name is Brida, and she’s a Saxon.’

He stared at me, then laughed. ‘The cunning little bitch. She’s been listening to us, hasn’t she?’

Brida was indeed cunning. She had been my first lover, an East Anglian girl who had been raised by Ragnar’s father and who now slept with Ragnar. ‘Talk to her,’ I said, ‘and give her my greetings, and say that if it comes to war …’ I paused, not sure what to say. There was no point in promising to do my best to rescue Ragnar, for if war came then the hostages would be slaughtered long before I could reach them.

‘If it comes to war?’ Wulfhere prompted me.

‘If it comes to war,’ I said, repeating the words he had spoken to me before my penance, ‘we’ll all be looking for a way to stay alive.’

Wulfhere stared at me for a long time and his silence told me that though I had failed to find a message for Ragnar I had given a message to Wulfhere. He drank ale. ‘So the bitch speaks English, does she?’

‘She’s a Saxon.’

As was I, but I hated Alfred and I would join Ragnar when I could, if I could, whatever Mildrith wanted, or so I thought. But deep under the earth, where the corpse serpent gnaws at the roots of Yggdrasil, the tree of life, there are three spinners. Three women who make our fate. We might believe we make choices, but in truth our lives are in the spinners’ fingers. They make our lives, and destiny is everything. The Danes know that, and even the Christians know it. Wyrd bið ful aræd, we Saxons say, fate is inexorable, and the spinners had decided my fate because, a week after the Witan had met, when Exanceaster was quiet again, they sent me a ship.

The first I knew of it was when a slave came running from Oxton’s fields saying that there was a Danish ship in the estuary of the Uisc and I pulled on boots and mail, snatched my swords from their peg, shouted for a horse to be saddled and rode to the foreshore where Heahengel rotted.

And where, standing in from the long sandspit that protects the Uisc from the greater sea, another ship approached. Her sail was furled on the long yard and her dripping oars rose and fell like wings and her long hull left a spreading wake that glittered silver under the rising sun. Her prow was high, and standing there was a man in full mail, a man with a helmet and spear, and behind me, where a few fisherfolk lived in hovels beside the mud, people were hurrying towards the hills and taking with them whatever few possessions they could snatch. I called to one of them. ‘It’s not a Dane!’

‘Lord?’

‘It’s a West Saxon ship,’ I called, though they did not believe me and hurried away with their livestock. For years they had done this. They would see a ship and they would run, for ships brought Danes and Danes brought death, but this ship had no dragon or wolf or eagle’s head on its prow. I knew the ship. It was the Eftwyrd, the best named of all Alfred’s ships which otherwise bore pious names like Heahengel or Apostol or Cristenlic. Eftwyrd meant judgement day which, though Christian in inspiration, accurately described what she had brought to many Danes.

The man in the prow waved and, for the first time since I had crawled on my knees to Alfred’s altar, my spirits lifted. It was Leofric, and then the Eftwyrd’s bows slid onto the mud and the long hull juddered to a halt. Leofric cupped his hands. ‘How deep is this mud?’

‘It’s nothing!’ I shouted back, ‘a hand’s depth, no more!’

‘Can I walk on it?’

‘Of course you can!’ I shouted back.

He jumped and, as I had known he would, sank up to his thighs in the thick black slime, and I bent over my saddle’s pommel in laughter, and the Eftwyrd’s crew laughed with me as Leofric cursed, and it took ten minutes to extricate him from the muck, by which time a score of us were plastered in the stinking stuff, but then the crew, who were mostly my old oarsmen and warriors, brought ale ashore, and bread and salted pork, and we made a midday meal beside the rising tide.

‘You’re an earsling,’ Leofric grumbled, looking at the mud clogging up the links of his mail coat.

‘I’m a bored earsling,’ I said.

‘You’re bored?’ Leofric said, ‘so are we.’ It seemed the fleet was not sailing. It had been given into the charge of a man named Burgweard who was a dull, worthy soldier whose brother was bishop of Scireburnan, and Burgweard had orders not to disturb the peace. ‘If the Danes aren’t off the coast,’ Leofric said, ‘then we aren’t.’

‘So what are you doing here?’

‘He sent us to rescue that piece of shit,’ he nodded at Heahengel. ‘He wants twelve ships again, see?’

‘I thought they were building more?’

‘They were building more, only it all stopped because some thieving bastards stole the timber while we were fighting at Cynuit, and then someone remembered Heahengel and here we are. Burgweard can’t manage with just eleven.’

‘If he isn’t sailing,’ I asked, ‘why does he want another ship?’

‘In case he has to sail,’ Leofric explained, ‘and if he does then he wants twelve. Not eleven, twelve.’

‘Twelve? Why?’

‘Because,’ Leofric paused to bite off a piece of bread, ‘because it says in the gospel book that Christ sent out his disciples two by two, and that’s how we have to go, two ships together, all holy, and if we’ve only got eleven then that means we’ve only got ten, if you follow me.’

I stared at him, not sure whether he was jesting. ‘Burgweard insists you sail two by two?’

Leofric nodded. ‘Because it says so in Father Willibald’s book.’

‘In the gospel book?’

‘That’s what Father Willibald tells us,’ Leofric said with a straight face, then saw my expression and shrugged. ‘Honest! And Alfred approves.’

‘Of course he does.’

‘And if you do what the gospel book tells you,’ Leofric said, still with a straight face, ‘then nothing can go wrong, can it?’

‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘So you’re here to rebuild Heahengel?’

‘New mast,’ Leofric said, ‘new sail, new rigging, patch up those timbers, caulk her, then tow her back to Hamtun. It could take a month!’

‘At least.’

‘And I never was much good at making things. Good at fighting, I am, and I can drink ale as well as any man, but I was never much good with a mallet and wedge or with adzes. They are.’ He nodded at a group of a dozen men who were strangers to me.

‘Who are they?’

‘Shipwrights.’

‘So they do the work?’

‘Can’t expect me to do it!’ Leofric protested. ‘I’m in command of the Eftwyrd!’

‘So,’ I said, ‘you’re planning to drink my ale and eat my food for a month while those dozen men do the work?’

‘You have any better ideas?’

I gazed at the Eftwyrd. She was a well-made ship, longer than most Danish boats and with high sides that made her a good fighting platform. ‘What did Burgweard tell you to do?’ I asked.

‘Pray,’ Leofric said sourly, ‘and help repair Heahengel.’

‘I hear there’s a new Danish leader in the Sæfern Sea,’ I said, ‘and I’d like to know if it’s true. A man called Svein. And I hear more ships are joining him from Ireland.’

‘He’s in Wales, this Svein?’

‘That’s what I hear.’

‘He’ll be coming to Wessex then,’ Leofric said.

‘If it’s true.’

‘So you’re thinking …’ Leofric said, then stopped when he realised just what I was thinking.

‘I’m thinking that it doesn’t do a ship or crew any good to sit around for a month,’ I said, ‘and I’m thinking that there might be plunder to be had in the Sæfern Sea.’

‘And if Alfred hears we’ve been fighting up there,’ Leofric said, ‘he’ll gut us.’

I nodded up river towards Exanceaster. ‘They burned a hundred Danish ships up there,’ I said, ‘and their wreckage is still on the riverbank. We should be able to find at least one dragon’s head to put on her prow.’

Leofric stared at the Eftwyrd. ‘Disguise her?’

‘Disguise her,’ I said, because if I put a dragon head on Eftwyrd no one would know she was a Saxon ship. She would be taken for a Danish boat, a sea raider, part of England’s nightmare.

Leofric smiled. ‘I don’t need orders to go on a patrol, do I?’

‘Of course not.’

‘And we haven’t fought since Cynuit,’ he said wistfully, ‘and no fighting means no plunder.’

‘What about the crew?’ I asked.

He turned and looked at them. ‘Most of them are evil bastards,’ he said, ‘they won’t mind. And they all need plunder.’

‘And between us and the Sæfern Sea,’ I said, ‘there are the Britons.’

‘And they’re all thieving bastards, the lot of them,’ Leofric said. He looked at me and grinned. ‘So if Alfred won’t go to war, we will?’

‘You have any better ideas?’ I asked.

Leofric did not answer for a long time. Instead, idly, as if he was just thinking, he tossed pebbles towards a puddle. I said nothing, just watched the small splashes, watched the pattern the fallen pebbles made, and knew he was seeking guidance from fate. The Danes cast rune sticks, we all watched for the flight of birds, we tried to hear the whispers of the gods, and Leofric was watching the pebbles fall to find his fate. The last one clicked on another and skidded off into the mud and the trail it left pointed south towards the sea. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I don’t have any better ideas.’

And I was bored no longer, because we were going to be Vikings.

We found a score of carved beasts’ heads beside the river beneath Exanceaster’s walls, all of them part of the sodden, tangled wreckage that showed where Guthrum’s fleet had been burned and we chose two of the least scorched carvings and carried them aboard Eftwyrd. Her prow and stern culminated in simple posts and we had to cut the posts down until the sockets of the two carved heads fitted. The creature at the stern, the smaller of the two, was a gape-mouthed serpent, probably intended to represent Corpse-Ripper, the monster that tore at the dead in the Danish underworld, while the beast we placed at the bow was a dragon’s head, though it was so blackened and disfigured by fire that it looked more like a horse’s head. We dug into the scorched eyes until we found unburned wood, and did the same with the open mouth and when we were finished the thing looked dramatic and fierce. ‘Looks like a fyrdraca now,’ Leofric said happily. A fire-dragon.

The Danes could always remove the dragon or beast-heads from the bows and sterns of their ships because they did not want the horrid-looking creatures to frighten the spirits of friendly land and so they only displayed the carved monsters when they were in enemy waters. We did the same, hiding our fyrdraca and serpent head in Eftwyrd’s bilges as we went back down river to where the shipwrights were beginning their work on Heahengel. We hid the beast-heads because Leofric did not want the shipwrights to know he planned mischief. ‘That one,’ he jerked his head towards a tall, lean, grey-haired man who was in charge of the work, ‘is more Christian than the Pope. He’d bleat to the local priests if he thought we were going off to fight someone, and the priests will tell Alfred and then Burgweard will take Eftwyrd away from me.’

‘You don’t like Burgweard?’

Leofric spat for answer. ‘It’s a good thing there are no Danes on the coast.’

‘He’s a coward?’

‘No coward. He just thinks God will fight the battles. We spend more time on our knees than at the oars. When you commanded the fleet we made money. Now even the rats on board are begging for crumbs.’

We had made money by capturing Danish ships and taking their plunder, and though none of us had become rich we had all possessed silver to spare. I was still wealthy enough because I had a hoard hidden at Oxton, a hoard that was the legacy of Ragnar the Elder, and a hoard that the church and Oswald’s relatives would make their own if they could, but a man can never have enough silver. Silver buys land, it buys the loyalty of warriors, it is the power of a lord, and without silver a man must bend the knee or else become a slave. The Danes led men by the lure of silver, and we were no different. If I was to be a lord, if I was to storm the walls of Bebbanburg, then I would need men and I would need a great hoard to buy the swords and shields and spears and hearts of warriors, and so we would go to sea and look for silver, though we told the shipwrights that we merely planned to patrol the coast. We shipped barrels of ale, boxes of hard-baked bread, cheeses, kegs of smoked mackerel and flitches of bacon. I told Mildrith the same story, that we would be sailing back and forth along the shores of Defnascir and Thornsæta. ‘Which is what we should be doing anyway,’ Leofric said, ‘just in case a Dane arrives.’

‘The Danes are lying low,’ I said.

Leofric nodded. ‘And when a Dane lies low you know there’s trouble coming.’

I believed he was right. Guthrum was not far from Wessex, and Svein, if he existed, was just a day’s voyage from her north coast. Alfred might believe his truce would hold and that the hostages would secure it, but I knew from my childhood how land-hungry the Danes were, and how they lusted after the lush fields and rich pastures of Wessex. They would come, and if Guthrum did not lead them then another Danish chieftain would gather ships and men and bring his swords and axes to Alfred’s kingdom. The Danes, after all, ruled the other three English kingdoms. They held my own Northumbria, they were bringing settlers to East Anglia and their language was spreading southwards through Mercia, and they would not want the last English kingdom flourishing to their south. They were like wolves, shadow-skulking for the moment, but watching a flock of sheep fatten.

I recruited eleven young men from my land and took them on board Eftwyrd, and brought Haesten too, and he was useful for he had spent much of his young life at the oars. Then, one misty morning, as the strong tide ebbed westwards, we slid Eftwyrd away from the river’s bank, rowed her past the low sandspit that guards the Uisc and so out to the long swells of the sea. The oars creaked in their leather-lined holes, the bow’s breast split the waves to shatter water white along the hull, and the steering oar fought against my touch and I felt my spirits rise to the small wind and I looked up into the pearly sky and said a prayer of thanks to Thor, Odin, Njord and Hoder.

A few small fishing boats dotted the inshore waters, but as we went south and west, away from the land, the sea emptied. I looked back at the low dun hills slashed brighter green where rivers pierced the coast, and then the green faded to grey, the land became a shadow and we were alone with the white birds crying and it was then we heaved the serpent’s head and the fyrdraca from the bilge and slotted them over the posts at stem and stern, pegged them into place and turned our bows westwards.

The Eftwyrd was no more. Now the Fyrdraca sailed, and she was hunting trouble.

Three

The crew of the Eftwyrd turned Fyrdraca had been at Cynuit with me. They were fighting men and they were offended that Odda the Younger had taken credit for a battle they had won. They had also been bored since the battle. Once in a while, Leofric told me, Burgweard exercised his fleet by taking it to sea, but most of the time they waited in Hamtun. ‘We did go fishing once, though,’ Leofric admitted.

‘Fishing?’

‘Father Willibald preached a sermon about feeding five thousand folk with two scraps of bread and a basket of herring,’ he said, ‘so Burgweard said we should take nets out and fish. He wanted to feed the town, see? Lots of hungry folk.’

‘Did you catch anything?’

‘Mackerel. Lots of mackerel.’

‘But no Danes?’

‘No Danes,’ Leofric said, ‘and no herring, only mackerel. The bastard Danes have vanished.’

We learned later that Guthrum had given orders that no Danish ships were to raid the Wessex coast and so break the truce. Alfred was to be lulled into a conviction that peace had come, and that meant there were no pirates roaming the seas between Kent and Cornwalum and their absence encouraged traders to come from the lands to the south to sell wine or to buy fleeces. The Fyrdraca took two such ships in the first four days. They were both Frankish ships, tubby in their hulls, and neither with more than six oars a side, and both believed the Fyrdraca was a Viking ship for they saw her beast-heads, and they heard Haesten and I talk Danish and they saw my arm rings. We did not kill the crews, but just stole their coins, weapons and as much of their cargo as we could carry. One ship was heaped with bales of wool, for the folk across the water prized Saxon fleeces, but we could take only three of the bales for fear of cluttering the Fyrdraca’s benches.

At night we found a cove or river’s mouth, and by day we rowed to sea and looked for prey, and each day we went further westwards until I was sure we were off the coast of Cornwalum, and that was enemy country. It was the old enemy that had confronted our ancestors when they first came across the North Sea to make England. That enemy spoke a strange language, and some Britons lived north of Northumbria and others lived in Wales or in Cornwalum, all places on the wild edges of the isle of Britain where they had been pushed by our coming. They were Christians, indeed Father Beocca had told me they had been Christians before we were and he claimed that no one who was a Christian could be a real enemy of another Christian, but nevertheless the Britons hated us. Sometimes they allied themselves with the Northmen to attack us, and sometimes the Northmen raided them, and sometimes they made war against us on their own, and in the past the men of Cornwalum had made much trouble for Wessex, though Leofric claimed they had been punished so badly that they now pissed themselves whenever they saw a Saxon.

Not that we saw any Britons at first. The places we sheltered were deserted, all except one river mouth where a skin boat pushed off shore and a half naked man paddled out to us and held up some crabs which he wanted to sell to us. We took a basketful of the beasts and paid him two pennies. Next night we grounded Fyrdraca on a rising tide and collected fresh water from a stream, and Leofric and I climbed a hill and stared inland. Smoke rose from distant valleys, but there was no one in sight, not even a shepherd. ‘What are you expecting,’ Leofric asked, ‘enemies?’

‘A monastery,’ I said.

‘A monastery!’ He was amused. ‘You want to pray?’

‘Monasteries have silver,’ I said.

‘Not down here, they don’t. They’re poor as stoats. Besides.’

‘Besides what?’

He jerked his head towards the crew. ‘You’ve got a dozen good Christians aboard. Lot of bad ones too, of course, but at least a dozen good ones. They won’t raid a monastery with you.’ He was right. A few of the men had showed some scruples about piracy, but I assured them that the Danes used trading ships to spy on their enemies. That was true enough, though I doubt either of our victims had been serving the Danes, but both ships had been crewed by foreigners and, like all Saxons, the crew of the Fyrdraca had a healthy dislike of foreigners, though they made an exception for Haesten and the dozen crewmen who were Frisians. The Frisians were natural pirates, bad as the Danes, and these twelve had come to Wessex to get rich from war and so were glad that the Fyrdraca was seeking plunder.

As we went west we began to see coastal settlements, and some were surprisingly large. Cenwulf, who had fought with us at Cynuit and was a good man, told us that the Britons of Cornwalum dug tin out of the ground and sold it to strangers. He knew that because his father had been a trader and had frequently sailed this coast. ‘If they sell tin,’ I said, ‘then they must have money.’

‘And men to guard it,’ Cenwulf said drily.

‘Do they have a king?’

No one knew. It seemed probable, though where the king lived or who he was we could not know, and perhaps, as Haesten suggested, there was more than one king. They did have weapons because, one night, as the Fyrdraca crept into a bay, an arrow flew from a clifftop to be swallowed in the sea beside our oars. We might never have known that arrow had been shot except I happened to be looking up and saw it, fledged with dirty grey feathers, flickering down from the sky to vanish with a plop. One arrow, and no others followed, so perhaps it was a warning, and that night we let the ship lie at its anchor and in the dawn we saw two cows grazing close to a stream and Leofric fetched his axe. ‘The cows are there to kill us,’ Haesten warned us in his new and not very good English.

‘The cows will kill us?’ I asked in amusement.

‘I have seen it before, lord. They put cows to bring us on land, then they attack.’

We granted the cows mercy, hauled the anchor and pulled towards the bay’s mouth and a howl sounded behind us and I saw a crowd of men appear from behind bushes and trees, and I took one of the silver rings from my left arm and gave it to Haesten. It was his first arm ring and, being a Dane, he was inordinately proud of it. He polished it all morning.

The coast became wilder and refuge more difficult to find, but the weather was placid. We captured a small eight-oared ship that was returning to Ireland and relieved it of sixteen pieces of silver, three knives, a heap of tin ingots, a sack of goose feathers and six goatskins. We were hardly becoming rich, though Fyrdraca’s belly was becoming cluttered with pelts, fleeces and ingots of tin. ‘We need to sell it all,’ Leofric said.

But to whom? We knew no one who traded here. What I needed to do, I thought, was land close to one of the larger settlements and steal everything. Burn the houses, kill the men, plunder the headman’s hall and go back to sea, but the Britons kept lookouts on the headlands and they always saw us coming, and whenever we were close to one of their towns we would see armed men waiting. They had learned how to deal with Vikings, which was why, Haesten told me, the Northmen now sailed in fleets of five or six ships.

‘Things will be better,’ I said, ‘when we turn the coast.’ I knew Cornwalum ended somewhere to the west and we could then sail up into the Sæfern Sea where we might find a Danish ship on its voyage from Ireland, but Cornwalum seemed to be without end. Whenever we saw a headland that I thought must mark the end of the land it turned out to be a false hope, for another cliff would lie beyond, and then another, and sometimes the tide flowed so strongly that even when we sailed due west we were driven back east. Being a Viking was more difficult than I thought, and then one day the wind freshened from the west and the waves heaved higher and their tops were torn ragged and rain squalls hissed dark from a low sky and we ran northwards to seek shelter in the lee of a headland. We dropped our anchor there and felt Fyrdraca jerk and tug like a fretful horse at her long rope of twisted hide.

All night and all next day the weather raged past the headland. Water shattered white on high cliffs. We were safe enough, but our food was getting low, and I had half decided we must abandon our plans to make ourselves rich and sail back to the Uisc where we could pretend we had only been patrolling the coast, but on our second dawn under the lee of that high cliff, as the wind subsided and the rain dropped to a chill drizzle, a ship appeared about the eastern spit of land.

‘Shields!’ Leofric shouted, and the men, cold and unhappy, found their weapons and lined the ship’s side.

The ship was smaller than ours, much smaller. She was squat, high-bowed, with a stumpy mast holding a wide yard on which a dirty sail was furled. A half-dozen oarsmen manned her, and the steersman was bringing her directly towards Fyrdraca, and then, as she came closer and as her small bows broke the water white, I saw a green bough had been tied to her short mast.

‘They want to talk,’ I said.

‘Let’s hope they want to buy,’ Leofric grumbled.

There was a priest in the small ship. I did not know he was a priest at first, for he looked as ragged as any of the crewmen, but he shouted that he wished to speak with us, and he spoke Danish, though not well, and I let the boat come up on the flank protected from the wind where her crewmen gazed up at a row of armed men holding shields. Cenwulf and I pulled the priest over our side. Two other men wanted to follow, but Leofric threatened them with a spear and they dropped back and the smaller ship drew away to wait while the priest spoke with us.

He was called Father Mardoc and, once he was aboard and sitting wetly on one of Fyrdraca’s rowing benches, I saw the crucifix about his neck. ‘I hate Christians,’ I said, ‘so why should we not feed you to Njord?’

He ignored that, or perhaps he did not know that Njord was one of the sea gods. ‘I bring you a gift,’ he said, ‘from my master,’ and he produced, from beneath his cloak, two battered arm rings.

I took them. They were poor things, mere ringlets of copper, old, filthy with verdigris and of almost no value, and for a moment I was tempted to toss them scornfully into the sea, but reckoned our voyage had made such small profit that even those scabby treasures must be kept. ‘Who is your master?’ I asked.

‘King Peredur.’

I almost laughed. King Peredur? A man can expect a king to be famous, but I had never heard of Peredur which suggested he was little more than a local chieftain with a high-sounding title. ‘And why does this Peredur,’ I asked, ‘send me miserable gifts?’

Father Mardoc still did not know my name and was too frightened to ask it. He was surrounded by men in leather, men in mail, and by shields and swords, axes and spears, and he believed all of us were Danes for I had ordered any of Fyrdraca’s crew who wore crosses or crucifixes to hide them beneath their clothes. Only Haesten and I spoke, and if Father Mardoc thought that strange he did not say anything of it, instead he told me how his lord, King Peredur, had been treacherously attacked by a neighbour called Callyn, and Callyn’s forces had taken a high fort close to the sea and Peredur would pay us well if we were to help him recapture the fort that was called Dreyndynas.

I sent Father Mardoc to sit in the Fyrdraca’s bow while we talked about his request. Some things were obvious. Being paid well did not mean we would become rich, but that Peredur would try to fob us off with as little as possible and, most likely, having given it to us he would then try to take it back by killing us all. ‘What we should do,’ Leofric advised, ‘is find this man Callyn and see what he’ll pay us.’

Which was good enough advice except none of us knew how to find Callyn, whom we later learned was King Callyn, which did not mean much for any man with a following of more than fifty armed men called himself a king in Cornwalum, and so I went to the Fyrdraca’s bows and talked with Father Mardoc again, and he told me that Dreyndynas was a high fort, built by the old people, and that it guarded the road eastwards, and so long as Callyn held the fort, so long were Peredur’s people trapped in their lands.

‘You have ships,’ I pointed out.

‘And Callyn has ships,’ he said, ‘and we cannot take cattle in ships.’

‘Cattle?’

‘We need to sell cattle to live,’ he said.

So Callyn had surrounded Peredur and we represented a chance to tip the balance in this little war. ‘So how much will your king pay us?’ I asked.

‘A hundred pieces of silver,’ he said.

I drew Serpent-Breath. ‘I worship the real gods,’ I told him, ‘and I am a particular servant of Hoder, and Hoder likes blood and I have given him none in many days.’

Father Mardoc looked terrified, which was sensible of him. He was a young man, though it was hard to tell for his hair and beard were so thick that most of the time he was just a broken nose and pair of eyes surrounded by a greasy black tangle. He told me he had learned to speak Danish when he had been enslaved by a chieftain called Godfred, but that he had managed to escape when Godfred raided the Sillans, islands that lay well out in the western sea-wastes. ‘Is there any wealth in the Sillans?’ I asked him. I had heard of the islands, though some men claimed they were mythical and others said the islands came and went with the moons, but Father Mardoc said they existed and were called the Isles of the Dead.

‘So no one lives there?’ I asked.

‘Some folk do,’ he said, ‘but the dead have their houses there.’

‘Do they have wealth as well?’

‘Your ships have taken it all,’ he said. This was after he had promised me that Peredur would be more generous, though he did not know how generous, but he said the king was willing to pay far more than a hundred silver coins for our help, and so we had him shout to his ship that they were to lead us around the coast to Peredur’s settlement. I did not let Father Mardoc go back to his ship for he would serve as a hostage if the tale he had told us was false and Peredur was merely luring us to an ambush.

He was not. Peredur’s home was a huddle of buildings built on a steep hill beside a bay and protected by a wall of thorn bushes. His people lived within the wall and some were fishermen and some were cattle herders and none was wealthy, though the king himself had a high hall where he welcomed us, though not before we had taken more hostages. Three young men, all of whom we were assured were Peredur’s sons, were delivered to Fyrdraca and I gave the crew orders that the three were to be killed if I did not return, and then I went ashore with Haesten and Cenwulf. I went dressed for war, with mail coat and helmet polished, and Peredur’s folk watched the three of us pass with frightened eyes. The place stank of fish and shit. The people were ragged and their houses mere hovels that were built up the side of the steep hill that was crowned with Peredur’s hall. There was a church beside the hall, its thatch thick with moss and its gable decorated with a cross made from sea-whitened driftwood.

Peredur was twice my age, a squat man with a sly face and a forked black beard. He greeted us from a throne, which was just a chair with a high back, and he waited for us to bow to him, but none of us did and that made him scowl. A dozen men were with him, evidently his courtiers, though none looked wealthy and all were elderly except for one much younger man who was in the robes of a Christian monk, and he stood out in that smoke-darkened hall like a raven in a clutch of gulls for his black robes were clean, his face close-shaven and his hair and tonsure neatly trimmed. He was scarcely older than I, was thin and stern-faced, and that face looked clever, and it also carried an expression of marked distaste for us. We were pagans, or at least Haesten and I were pagans and I had told Cenwulf to keep his mouth shut and his crucifix hidden, and so the monk assumed all three of us were heathen Danes. The monk spoke Danish, far better Danish than Father Mardoc. ‘The king greets you,’ he said. He had a voice as thin as his lips and as unfriendly as his pale green eyes. ‘He greets you and would know who you are.’

‘My name is Uhtred Ragnarson,’ I said.

‘Why are you here, Uhtred Ragnarson?’ the priest asked.

I contemplated him. I did not just look at him, but I studied him as a man might study an ox before killing it. I gave him a look which suggested I was wondering where to make the cuts, and he got my meaning and did not wait for an answer to his question, an answer which was obvious if we were Danes. We were here to thieve and kill, of course, what else did he think a Viking ship would be doing?

Peredur spoke to the monk and they muttered for some time and I looked around the hall, searching for any evidence of wealth. I saw almost nothing except for three whalebones stacked in a corner, but Peredur plainly had some treasure for he wore a great heavy torque of bronze about his neck and there were silver rings on his grubby fingers, an amber brooch at the neck of his cloak and a golden crucifix hidden in the cloak’s lice-ridden folds. He would keep his hoard buried, I thought, and I doubted any of us would become rich from this alliance, but in truth we were not becoming rich from our voyage either, and at least Peredur would have to feed us while we haggled.

‘The king,’ the monk interrupted my thoughts, ‘wishes to know how many men you can lead against the enemy.’

‘Enough,’ I said flatly.

‘Does that not depend,’ the monk observed slyly, ‘on how many enemy there are?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘It depends on this,’ and I slapped Serpent-Breath’s hilt. It was a good, arrogant reply, and probably what the monk expected. And, in truth, it was convincing for I was broad in the chest and a giant in this hall where I was a full head taller than any other man. ‘And who are you, monk?’ I demanded.

‘My name is Asser,’ he said. It was a British name, of course, and in the English tongue it meant a he-ass, and ever after I thought of him as the Ass. And there was to be a lot of the ever after for, though I did not know it, I had just met a man who would haunt my life like a louse. I had met another enemy, though on that day in Peredur’s hall he was just a strange British monk who stood out from his companions because he washed. He invited me to follow him to a small door at the side of the hall and, motioning Haesten and Cenwulf to stay where they were, I ducked through the door to find myself standing beside a dung-heap, but the point of taking me outside had been to show me the view eastwards.

I stared across a valley. On the nearer slope were the smoke-blackened roofs of Peredur’s settlement, then came the thorn fence that had been made along the stream which flowed to the sea. On the stream’s far side the hills rose gently to a far off crest and there, breaking the skyline like a boil, was Dreyndynas. ‘The enemy,’ Asser said.

A small fort, I noted. ‘How many men are there?’

‘Does it matter to you?’ Asser asked sourly, paying me back for my refusal to tell him how many men I led, though I assumed Father Mardoc had made a count of the crew while he was on board Fyrdraca, so my defiance had been pointless.

‘You Christians,’ I said, ‘believe that at death you go to heaven. Isn’t that right?’

‘What of it?’

‘You must surely welcome such a fate?’ I asked. ‘To be near your god?’

‘Are you threatening me?’

‘I don’t threaten vermin,’ I said, enjoying myself. ‘How many men are in that fort?’

‘Forty? Fifty?’ He plainly did not know. ‘We can assemble forty.’

‘So tomorrow,’ I said, ‘your king can have his fort back.’

‘He is not my king,’ Asser said, irritated by the assumption.

‘Your king or not,’ I said, ‘he can have his fort back so long as he pays us properly.’

That negotiation lasted until dark. Peredur, as Father Mardoc had said, was willing to pay more than a hundred shillings, but he feared we would take the money and leave without fighting and so he wanted some kind of surety from me. He wanted hostages, which I refused to give, and after an hour or more of argument we had still not reached an agreement, and it was then that Peredur summoned his queen. That meant nothing to me, but I saw the Ass stiffen as though he were offended, then sensed that every other man in the hall was strangely apprehensive. Asser made a protest, but the king cut him off with an abrupt slice of his hand and then a door at the back of the hall was opened and Iseult came to my life.

Iseult. Finding her there was like discovering a jewel of gold in a midden. I saw her and I forgot Mildrith. Dark Iseult, black-haired Iseult, huge-eyed Iseult. She was small, thin as an elf, with a luminous face and hair as black as a raven’s feathers. She wore a black cloak and had silver bands about her neck and silver bracelets at her wrists and silver rings at her ankles and the jewellery clinked gently as she walked towards us. She was maybe two or three years younger than me, but somehow, despite her youth, she managed to scare Peredur’s courtiers who backed away from her. The king looked nervous, while Asser, standing beside me, made the sign of the cross, then spat to ward off evil.

I just stared at her, entranced. There was pain on her face, as if she found life unbearable, and there was fear on her husband’s face when he spoke to her in a quiet, respectful voice. She shuddered when he talked and I thought that perhaps she was mad, for the grimace on her face was awful, disfiguring her beauty, but then she calmed and looked at me and the king spoke to Asser.

‘You will tell the queen who you are and what you will do for King Peredur,’ Asser told me in a distant, disapproving voice.

‘She speaks Danish?’ I asked.

‘Of course not,’ he snapped. ‘Just tell her and get this farce over.’

I looked into her eyes, those big, dark eyes, and had the uncanny suspicion that she could see right through my gaze and decipher my innermost thoughts. But at least she did not grimace when she saw me as she had when her husband spoke. ‘My name is Uhtred Ragnarson,’ I said, ‘and I am here to fight for your husband if he pays what I am worth. And if he doesn’t pay, we go.’

I thought Asser would translate, but the monk stayed silent.

Iseult still stared at me and I stared back. She had a flawless skin, untouched by illness, and a strong face, but sad. Sad and beautiful. Fierce and beautiful. She reminded me of Brida, the East Anglian who had been my lover and who was now with Ragnar, my friend. Brida was as full of fury as a scabbard is filled with blade, and I sensed the same in this queen who was so young and strange and dark and lovely.

‘I am Uhtred Ragnarson,’ I heard myself speaking again, though I had scarcely been aware of any urge to talk, ‘and I work miracles.’

Why I said that I do not know. I later learned that she had no idea what I had said, for at that time the only tongue she spoke was that of the Britons, but nevertheless she seemed to understand me and she smiled. Asser caught his breath. ‘Be careful, Dane,’ he hissed, ‘she is a queen.’

‘A queen?’ I asked, still staring at her, ‘or the queen?’

‘The king is blessed with three wives,’ the monk said disapprovingly.

Iseult turned away and spoke to the king. He nodded, then gestured respectfully towards the door through which Iseult had come. She was evidently dismissed and she obediently went to the door, but paused there and gave me a last, speculative look. Then she was gone.

And suddenly it was easy. Peredur agreed to pay us a hoard of silver. He showed us the hoard that had been hidden in a back room. There were coins, broken jewellery, battered cups and three candleholders which had been taken from the church, and when I weighed the silver, using a balance fetched from the market place, I discovered there was three hundred and sixteen shillings’ worth, which was not negligible. Asser divided it into two piles, one only half the size of the other. ‘We shall give you the smaller portion tonight,’ the monk said, ‘and the rest you will get when Dreyndynas is recovered.’

‘You think I am a fool?’ I asked, knowing that after the fight it would be hard to get the rest of the silver.

‘You take me for one?’ he retorted, knowing that if he gave us all the silver then Fyrdraca would vanish in the dawn.

We agreed in the end that we would take the one third now and that the other two thirds would be carried to the battlefield so that it was easily accessible. Peredur had hoped I would leave that larger portion in his hall, and then I would have faced an uphill fight through his dung-spattered streets, and that was a fight I would have lost, and it was probably the prospect of such a battle that had stopped Callyn’s men attacking Peredur’s hall. They hoped to starve him, or at least Asser believed that.

‘Tell me about Iseult,’ I demanded of the monk when the bargaining was done.

He sneered at that. ‘I can read you like a missal,’ he said.

‘Whatever a missal is,’ I said, pretending ignorance.

‘A book of prayers,’ he said, ‘and you will need prayers if you touch her.’ He made the sign of the cross. ‘She is evil,’ he said vehemently.

‘She’s a queen, a young queen,’ I said, ‘so how can she be evil?’

‘What do you know of the Britons?’

‘That they stink like stoats,’ I said, ‘and thieve like jackdaws.’

He gave me a sour look and, for a moment, I thought he would refuse to say more, but he swallowed his British pride. ‘We are Christians,’ he said, ‘and God be thanked for that great mercy, but among our people there are still some old superstitions. Pagan ways. Iseult is part of that.’

‘What part?’

He did not like talking about it, but he had raised the subject of Iseult’s evil and so he reluctantly explained. ‘She was born in the springtime,’ he said, ‘eighteen years ago, and at her birth there was an eclipse of the sun, and the folk here are credulous fools and they believe a dark child born at the sun’s death has power. They have made her into a,’ he paused, not knowing the Danish word, ‘a gwrach,’ he said, a word that meant nothing to me. ‘Dewines,’ he said irritably and, when I still showed incomprehension, he at last found a word. ‘A sorceress.’

‘A witch?’

‘And Peredur married her. Made her his shadow queen. That is what kings did with such girls. They take them into their households so they may use their power.’

‘What power?’

‘The skills the devil gives to shadow queens, of course,’ he said irritably. ‘Peredur believes she can see the future. But it is a skill she will retain only so long as she is a virgin.’

I laughed at that. ‘If you disapprove of her, monk, then I would be doing you a favour if I raped her.’ He ignored that, or at least he made no reply other than to give me a harsh scowl. ‘Can she see the future?’ I asked.

‘She saw you victorious,’ he said, ‘and told the king he could trust you, so you tell me?’

‘Then assuredly she can see the future,’ I said.

Brother Asser sneered at that answer. ‘They should have strangled her with her own birth-cord,’ he snarled. ‘She is a pagan bitch, a devil’s thing, evil.’

There was a feast that night, a feast to celebrate our pact and I hoped Iseult would be there, but she was not. Peredur’s older wife was present, but she was a sullen, grubby creature with two weeping boils on her neck and she hardly spoke. Yet it was a surprisingly good feast. There was fish, beef, mutton, bread, ale, mead and cheese, and while we ate Asser told me he had come from the kingdom of Dyfed, which lay north of the Sæfern Sea, and that his king, who had an impossible British name which sounded like a man coughing and spluttering, had sent him to Cornwalum to dissuade the British kings from supporting the Danes.

I was surprised by that, so surprised that I looked away from the girls serving the food. A harpist played at the hall’s end and two of the girls swayed in time to the music as they walked. ‘You don’t like Danes,’ I said.

‘You are pagans,’ Asser said scornfully.

‘So how come you speak the pagan tongue?’ I asked.

‘Because my abbot would have us send missionaries to the Danes.’

‘You should go,’ I said. ‘It would be a quick route to heaven for you.’

He ignored that. ‘I learned Danish among many other tongues,’ he said loftily, ‘and I speak the language of the Saxons too. And you, I think, were not born in Denmark?’

‘How do you know?’

‘Your voice,’ he said. ‘You are from Northumbria?’

‘I am from the sea,’ I said.

He shrugged. ‘In Northumbria,’ he said severely, ‘the Danes have corrupted the Saxons so that they think of themselves as Danes.’ He was wrong, but I was scarcely in a position to correct him. ‘Worse,’ he went on, ‘they have extinguished the light of Christ.’

‘Is the light of Thor too bright for you?’

‘The West Saxons are Christians,’ he said, ‘and it is our duty to support them, not because of a love for them, but because of our fellow love for Christ.’

‘You have met Alfred of Wessex?’ I asked sourly.

‘I look forward to meeting him,’ he said fervently, ‘for I hear he is a good Christian.’

‘I hear the same.’

‘And Christ rewards him,’ Asser went on.

‘Rewards him?’

‘Christ sent the storm that destroyed the Danish fleet,’ Asser said, ‘and Christ’s angels destroyed Ubba. That is proof of God’s power. If we fight against Alfred then we range ourselves against Christ, so we must not do it. That is my message to the kings of Cornwalum.’

I was impressed that a British monk at the end of the land of Britain knew so much of what happened in Wessex, and I reckoned Alfred would have been pleased to hear Asser’s nonsense, though of course Alfred had sent many messengers to the British. His messengers had all been priests or monks and they had preached the gospel of their god slaughtering the Danes, and Asser had evidently taken up their message enthusiastically. ‘So why are you fighting Callyn?’ I asked.

‘He would join the Danes,’ Asser said.

‘And we’re going to win,’ I said, ‘so Callyn is sensible.’

Asser shook his head. ‘God will prevail.’

‘You hope,’ I said, touching the small amulet of Thor’s hammer I wore on a thong around my neck. ‘But if you are wrong, monk, then we’ll take Wessex and Callyn will share the spoils.’

‘Callyn will share nothing,’ Asser said spitefully, ‘because you will kill him tomorrow.’

The Britons have never learned to love the Saxons. Indeed they hate us, and in those years when the last English kingdom was on the edge of destruction, they could have tipped the balance by joining Guthrum. Instead they held back their sword arms, and for that the Saxons can thank the church. Men like Asser had decided that the Danish heretics were a worse enemy than English Christians, and if I were a Briton I would resent that, because the Britons might have taken back much of their lost lands if they had allied themselves with the pagan Northmen. Religion makes strange bedfellows.

So does war, and Peredur offered Haesten and myself two of the serving girls to seal our bargain. I had sent Cenwulf back to Fyrdraca with a message for Leofric, warning him to be ready to fight in the morning, and I thought perhaps Haesten and I should retreat to the ship, but the serving girls were pretty and so we stayed, and I need not have worried for no one tried to kill us in the night, and no one even tried when Haesten and I carried the first third of the silver down to the water’s edge where a small boat carried us to our ship. ‘There’s twice as much as that waiting for us,’ I told Leofric.

He stirred the sack of silver with his foot. ‘And where were you last night?’

‘In bed with a Briton.’

‘Earsling,’ he said. ‘So who are we fighting?’

‘A pack of savages.’

We left ten men as ship guards. If Peredur’s men made a real effort to capture Fyrdraca then those ten would have had a hard fight, and probably a losing fight, but they had the three hostages who may or may not have been Peredur’s sons, so that was a risk we had to take, and it seemed safe enough because Peredur had assembled his army on the eastern side of the town. I say army, though it was only forty men, and I brought thirty more, and my thirty were well armed and looked ferocious in their leather. Leofric, like me, wore mail, as did half a dozen of my crewmen, and I had my fine helmet with its face-plate so I, at least, looked like a lord of battles.

Peredur was in leather, and he had woven black horsetails into his hair and onto the twin forks of his beard so that the horsetails hung down wild and long and scary. His men were mostly armed with spears, though Peredur himself possessed a fine sword. Some of his men had shields and a few had helmets, and though I did not doubt their bravery I did not reckon them formidable. My crewmen were formidable. They had fought Danish ships off the Wessex coast and they had fought in the shield wall at Cynuit and I had no doubt that we could destroy whatever troops Callyn had placed in Dreyndynas.

It was afternoon before we climbed the hill. We should have gone in the morning, but some of Peredur’s men were recovering from their night’s drinking, and the women of his settlement kept pulling others away, not wanting them to die, and then Peredur and his advisers huddled and talked about how they should fight the battle, though what there was to talk about I did not know. Callyn’s men were in the fort, we were outside it, so we had to assault the bastards. Nothing clever, just an attack, but they talked for a long time, and Father Mardoc said a prayer, or rather he shouted it, and then I refused to advance because the rest of the silver had not been fetched.

It came, carried in a chest by two men, and so at last, under the afternoon sun, we climbed the eastern hill. Some women followed us, shrieking their battle-screams, which was a waste of breath because the enemy was still too far away to hear them.

‘So what do we do?’ Leofric asked me.

‘Form a wedge,’ I guessed. ‘Our best men in the front rank and you and me in front of them, then kill the bastards.’

He grimaced. ‘Have you ever assaulted one of the old people’s forts?’

‘Never.’

‘It can be hard,’ he warned me.

‘If it’s too hard,’ I said, ‘we’ll just kill Peredur and his men and take their silver anyway.’

Brother Asser, his neat black robes muddied about their skirts, hurried over to me. ‘Your men are Saxons!’ he said accusingly.

‘I hate monks,’ I snarled at him. ‘I hate them more than I hate priests. I like killing them. I like slitting their bellies. I like watching the bastards die. Now run off and die before I cut your throat.’

He ran off to Peredur with his news that we were Saxons. The king stared at us morosely. He had thought he had recruited a crew of Danish Vikings, and now he discovered we were West Saxons and he was not happy, so I drew Serpent-Breath and banged her blade against my limewood shield. ‘You want to fight this battle or not?’ I asked him through Asser.

Peredur decided he wanted to fight, or rather he wanted us to fight the battle for him, and so we slogged on up the hill which had a couple of false crests so it was well into the afternoon before we emerged onto the long, shallow summit and could see Dreyndynas’s green turf walls on the skyline. A banner flew there. It was a triangle of cloth, supported on its pole by a small cross-staff, and the banner showed a white horse prancing on a green field.

I stopped then. Peredur’s banner was a wolf’s tail hung from a pole, I carried none, though, like most Saxons, mine would have been a rectangular flag. I only knew one people who flew triangular banners and I turned on Brother Asser as he sweated up the hill. ‘They’re Danes,’ I accused him.

‘So?’ he demanded. ‘I thought you were a Dane, and all the world knows the Danes will fight anyone for silver, even other Danes. But are you frightened of them, Saxon?’

‘Your mother didn’t give birth to you,’ I told him, ‘but farted you out of her shrivelled arsehole.’

‘Frightened or not,’ Asser said, ‘you’ve taken Peredur’s silver, so you must fight them now.’

‘Say one more word, monk,’ I said, ‘and I’ll cut off your scrawny balls.’ I was gazing uphill, trying to estimate numbers. Everything had changed since I had seen the white horse banner because instead of fighting against half-armed British savages we would have to take on a crew of lethal Danes, but if I was surprised by that, then the Danes were equally surprised to see us. They were crowding Dreyndynas’s wall, which was made of earth fronted with a ditch and topped with a thorn fence. It would be a hard wall to attack, I thought, especially if it was defended by Danes. I counted over forty men on the skyline and knew there would be others I could not see, and the numbers alone told me this assault would fail. We could attack, and we might well get as far as the thorn palisade, but I doubted we could hack our way through, and the Danes would kill a score of us as we tried, and we would be lucky to retreat down the hill without greater loss.

‘We’re in a cesspit,’ Leofric said to me.

‘Up to our necks.’

‘So what do we do? Turn on them and take the money?’

I did not answer because the Danes had dragged a section of the thorn fence aside and three of them now jumped down from the ramparts and strolled towards us. They wanted to talk.

‘Who the hell is that?’ Leofric asked.

He was staring at the Danish leader. He was a huge man, big as Steapa Snotor, and dressed in a mail coat that had been polished with sand until it shone. His helmet, as highly polished as his mail, had a face-plate modelled as a boar’s mask with a squat, broad snout, and from the helmet’s crown there flew a white horsetail. He wore arm rings over his mail, rings of silver and gold that proclaimed him to be a warrior chief, a sword-Dane, a lord of war. He walked the hillside as if he owned it, and in truth, he did own it because he possessed the fort.

Asser hurried to meet the Danes, going with Peredur and two of his courtiers. I went after them and found Asser trying to convert the Danes. He told them that God had brought us and we would slaughter them all and their best course was to surrender now and yield their heathen souls to God. ‘We shall baptise you,’ Asser said, ‘and there will be much rejoicing in heaven.’

The Danish leader slowly pulled off his helmet and his face was almost as frightening as the boar-snouted mask. It was a broad face, hardened by sun and wind, with the blank, expressionless eyes of a killer. He was around thirty years old, had a tightly-cropped beard and a scar running from the corner of his left eye down across his cheek. He gave the helmet to one of his men and, without saying a word, hauled up the skirt of his mail coat and began pissing on Asser’s robe. The monk leaped back.

The Dane, still pissing, looked at me. ‘Who are you?’

‘Uhtred Ragnarson. And you?’

‘Svein of the White Horse,’ he said it defiantly, as though I would know his reputation, and for a heartbeat I said nothing. Was this the same Svein who was said to be gathering troops in Wales? Then what was he doing here?

‘You’re Svein of Ireland?’ I asked.

‘Svein of Denmark,’ he said. He let the mail coat drop and glared at Asser who was threatening the Danes with heaven’s vengeance. ‘If you want to live,’ he told Asser, ‘shut your filthy mouth.’ Asser shut his mouth. ‘Ragnarson,’ Svein looked back to me. ‘Earl Ragnar? Ragnar Ravnson? The Ragnar who served Ivar?’

‘The same,’ I said.

‘Then you are the Saxon son?’

‘I am. And you?’ I asked. ‘You’re the Svein who has brought men from Ireland?’

‘I have brought men from Ireland,’ he admitted.

‘And gather forces in Wales?’

‘I do what I do,’ he said vaguely. He looked at my men, judging how well they would fight, then he looked me up and down, noting my mail and helmet, and noting especially my arm rings, and when the inspection was done he jerked his head to indicate that he and I should walk away a few paces and talk privately.

Asser objected, saying anything that was spoken should be heard by all, but I ignored him and followed Svein uphill. ‘You can’t take this fort,’ Svein told me.

‘True.’

‘So what do you do?’

‘Go back to Peredur’s settlement, of course.’

He nodded. ‘And if I attack the settlement?’

‘You’ll take it,’ I said, ‘but you’ll lose men. Maybe a dozen?’

‘Which will mean a dozen fewer oarsmen,’ he said, thinking, and then he looked past Peredur to where two men carried the box. ‘Is that your battle price?’

‘It is.’

‘Split it?’ he suggested.

I hesitated a heartbeat. ‘And we’ll split what’s in the town?’ I asked.

‘Agreed,’ he said, then looked at Asser who was hissing urgently at Peredur. ‘He knows what we’re doing,’ he said grimly, ‘so a necessary deception is about to happen.’ I was still trying to understand what he meant when he struck me in the face. He struck hard, and my hand went to Serpent-Breath and his two men ran to him, swords in hand.

‘I’ll come out of the fort and join you,’ Svein said to me softly. Then, louder, ‘You bastard piece of goat-dropping.’

I spat at him as his two men pretended to drag him away, then I stalked back to Asser. ‘We kill them all,’ I said savagely. ‘We kill them all!’

‘What did he say to you?’ Asser asked. He had feared, rightly as it happened, that Svein and I had made our own alliance, but Svein’s quick display had put doubts in the monk’s mind, and I fed the doubts by raging like a madman, screaming at the retreating Svein that I would send his miserable soul to Hel who was the goddess of the dead. ‘Are you going to fight?’ Asser demanded.

‘Of course we’re going to fight!’ I shouted at him, then I crossed to Leofric. ‘We’re on the same side as the Danes,’ I told him quietly. ‘We kill these Britons, capture their settlement and split everything with the Danes. Tell the men, but tell them quietly.’

Svein, true to his word, brought his men out of Dreyndynas. That should have warned Asser and Peredur of treachery, for no sensible man would abandon a fine defensive position like a thorn-topped earth wall to fight a battle on open ground, but they put it down to Danish arrogance. They assumed Svein believed he could destroy us all in open battle, and he made that assumption more likely by parading a score of his men on horseback, suggesting that he intended to tear our shield wall open with his swords and axes and then pursue the survivors with spear-armed cavalry. He made his own shield wall in front of the horsemen, and I made another shield wall on the left of Peredur’s line, and once we were in the proper array we shouted insults at each other. Leofric was going down our line, whispering to the men, and I sent Cenwulf and two others to the rear with their own orders, and just then Asser ran across to us.

‘Attack,’ the monk demanded, pointing at Svein.

‘When we’re ready,’ I said, for Leofric had not yet given every man his orders.

‘Attack now!’ Asser spat at me, and I almost gutted the bastard on the spot and would have saved myself a good deal of future trouble if I had, but I kept my patience and Asser went back to Peredur where he began praying, both hands held high in the air, demanding that God send fire from heaven to consume the pagans.

‘You trust Svein?’ Leofric had come back to my side.

‘I trust Svein,’ I said. Why? Only because he was a Dane and I liked the Danes. These days, of course, we are all agreed that they are the spawn of Satan, untrustworthy pagans, savages, and anything else we care to call them, but in truth the Danes are warriors and they like other warriors, and though it is true that Svein might have persuaded me to attack Peredur so that he could then attack us, I did not believe it. Besides, there was something I wanted in Peredur’s hall and, to get her, I needed to change sides.

‘Fyrdraca!’ I shouted, and that was our signal, and we swung our shield wall around to the right and went at it.

It was, of course, an easy slaughter. Peredur’s men had no belly for a fight. They had been hoping that we would take the brunt of the Danish assault and that they could then scavenge for plunder among Svein’s wounded, but instead we turned on them, attacked them, and cut them down, and Svein came on their right, and Peredur’s men fled. That was when Svein’s horsemen kicked back their heels, levelled their spears and charged.

It was not a fight, it was a massacre. Two of Peredur’s men put up some resistance, but Leofric swatted their spears aside with his axe and they died screaming, and Peredur went down to my sword, and he put up no fight at all, but seemed resigned to his death that I gave him quickly enough. Cenwulf and his two companions did what I had ordered them to do, which was to intercept the chest of silver, and we rallied around them as Svein’s riders chased down the fugitives. The only man to escape was Asser, the monk, which he managed by running north instead of west. Svein’s horsemen were ranging down the hill, spearing Peredur’s men in the backs, and Asser saw that only death lay that way and so, with surprising quickness, he changed direction and sprinted past my men, his skirts clutched up about his knees, and I shouted at the men on the right of the line to kill the bastard, but they simply looked at me and let him go. ‘I said kill him!’ I snarled.

‘He’s a monk!’ One of them answered. ‘You want me to go to hell?’

I watched Asser run slantwise into the valley and, in truth, I did not much care whether he lived or died. I thought Svein’s horsemen would catch him, but perhaps they did not see him. They did catch Father Mardoc and one of them took off the priest’s head with a single swing of his sword which made some of my men cross themselves.

The horsemen made their killing, but Svein’s other Danes made a shield wall that faced us, and in its centre, beneath the white horse banner, was Svein himself in his boar-mask helmet. His shield had a white horse painted on its boards and his weapon was an axe, the largest war axe I had ever seen. My men shifted nervously. ‘Stand still!’ I snarled at them.

‘Up to our necks in it,’ Leofric said quietly.

Svein was staring at us and I could see the death light in his eyes. He was in a killing mood, and we were Saxons, and there was a knocking sound as his men hefted shields to make the wall, and so I tossed Serpent-Breath into the air. Tossed her high so that the big blade whirled about in the sun, and of course they were all wondering whether I would catch her or whether she would thump onto the grass.

I caught her, winked at Svein and slid the blade into her scabbard. He laughed and the killing mood passed as he realised he could not afford the casualties he would inevitably take in fighting us. ‘Did you really think I was going to attack you?’ he called across the springy turf.

‘I was hoping you would attack me,’ I called back, ‘so I wouldn’t have to split the plunder with you.’

He dropped the axe and walked towards us, and I walked towards him and we embraced. Men on both sides lowered weapons. ‘Shall we take the bastard’s miserable village?’ Svein asked.

So we all went back down the hill, past the bodies of Peredur’s men, and there was no one defending the thorn wall about the settlement so it was an easy matter to get inside, and a few men tried to protect their homes, but very few. Most of the folk fled to the beach, but there were not enough boats to take them away, and so Svein’s Danes rounded them up and began sorting them into the useful and the dead. The useful were the young women and those who could be sold as slaves, the dead were the rest.

I took no part in that. Instead, with all of my men, I went straight to Peredur’s hall. Some Danes, reckoning that was where the silver would be, were also climbing the hill, but I reached the hall first, pushed open the door and saw Iseult waiting there.

I swear she was expecting me for her face showed no fear and no surprise. She was sitting in the king’s throne, but stood as if welcoming me as I walked up the hall. Then she took the silver from her neck and her wrists and her ankles and held it mutely out as an offering and I took it all and tossed it to Leofric. ‘We divide it with Svein,’ I said.

‘And her?’ He sounded amused. ‘Do we share her too?’

For answer I took the cloak from about Iseult’s neck. Beneath it she wore a black dress. I still had Serpent-Breath drawn and I used the bloodied blade to slash at the cloak until I could tear a strip from its hem. Iseult watched me, her face showing nothing. When the strip was torn away I gave her back the cloak, then tied one end of the cloth strip about her neck and tied the other end to my belt. ‘She’s mine,’ I said.

More Danes were coming into the hall and some stared wolfishly at Iseult, and then Svein arrived and snarled at his men to start digging up the hall floor to search for hidden coins or silver. He grinned when he saw Iseult’s leash. ‘You can have her, Saxon,’ he said. ‘She’s pretty, but I like them with more meat on the bone.’

I kept Iseult with me as we feasted that night. There was a good deal of ale and mead in the settlement and so I ordered my men not to fight with the Danes, and Svein told his men not to fight with us, and on the whole we were obeyed, though inevitably some men quarrelled over the captured women and one of the boys I had brought from my estate got a knife in his belly and died in the morning.

Svein was amused that we were a West Saxon ship. ‘Alfred sent you?’ he asked me.

‘No.’

‘He doesn’t want to fight, does he?’

‘He’ll fight,’ I said, ‘except he thinks his god will do the fighting for him.’

‘Then he’s an idiot,’ Svein said, ‘the gods don’t do our bidding. I wish they did.’ He sucked on a pork bone. ‘So what are you doing here?’ he asked.

‘Looking for money,’ I said, ‘the same as you.’

‘I’m looking for allies,’ he said.

‘Allies?’

He was drunk enough to speak more freely than he had when we first met, and I realised this was indeed the Svein who was said to be gathering men in Wales. He admitted as much, but added he did not have enough warriors. ‘Guthrum can lead two thousand men to battle, maybe more! I have to match that.’

So he was a rival to Guthrum. I tucked that knowledge away. ‘You think the Cornishmen will fight with you?’

‘They promised they would,’ he said, spitting out a shred of gristle. ‘That’s why I came here. But the bastards lied. Callyn isn’t a proper king, he’s a village chief! I’m wasting my time here.’

‘Could the two of us beat Callyn?’ I asked.

Svein thought about it, then nodded. ‘We could.’ He frowned suddenly, staring into the hall’s shadows, and I saw he was looking at one of his men who had a girl on his lap. He evidently liked the girl for he slapped the table, pointed to her, beckoned, and the man reluctantly brought her. Svein sat her down, pulled her tunic open so he could see her breasts, then gave her his pot of ale. ‘I’ll think about it,’ he told me.

‘Or are you thinking of attacking me?’ I asked.

He grinned. ‘You are Uhtred Ragnarson,’ he said, ‘and I heard about the fight on the river where you killed Ubba.’

I evidently had more of a reputation among my enemies than I did among my so-called friends. Svein insisted I tell the tale of Ubba’s death, which I did, and I told him the truth which was that Ubba had slipped and fallen, and that had let me take his life.

‘But men say you fought well,’ Svein said.

Iseult listened to all this. She did not speak our language, but her big eyes seemed to follow every word. When the feast was over I took her to the small rooms at the back of the hall and she used my makeshift leash to pull me into her wood-walled chamber. I made a bed from our cloaks. ‘When this is done,’ I told her in words she could not understand, ‘you’ll have lost your power.’

She touched a finger to my lips to silence me and she was a queen so I obeyed her.

In the morning we finished ravaging the town. Iseult showed me which houses might have something of value and generally she was right though the search meant demolishing the houses, for folk hide their small treasures in their thatch, so we scattered rats and mice as we hauled down the mouldy straw and sifted through it, and afterwards we dug under every hearth, or wherever else a man might bury silver, and we collected every scrap of metal, every cooking pot or fish-hook, and the search took all day. That night we divided the hoard on the beach.

Svein had evidently thought about Callyn and, being sober by the time he did his thinking, he had decided that the king was too strong. ‘We can easily beat him,’ he said, ‘but we’ll lose men.’

A ship’s crew can only endure so many losses. We had lost none in the fight against Peredur, but Callyn was a stronger king and he was bound to be suspicious of Svein which meant that he would have his household troops ready and armed. ‘And he’s got little enough to take,’ Svein said scornfully.

‘He’s paying you?’

‘He’s paying me,’ Svein said, ‘just as Peredur paid you.’

‘I split that with you,’ I said.

‘Not the money he paid you before the fight,’ Svein said with a grin, ‘you didn’t split that.’

‘What money?’ I asked.

‘So we’re even,’ he said, and we had both done well enough out of Peredur’s death, for Svein had slaves and we each now possessed over nine hundred shillings’ worth of silver and metal, which was not a fortune, especially once it was divided among the men, but it was better than I had done so far on the voyage. I also had Iseult. She was no longer leashed to me, but she stayed beside me and I sensed that she was happy about that. She had taken a vicious pleasure in seeing her home destroyed and I decided she must have hated Peredur. He had feared her and she had hated him, and if it was true that she had been able to see the future then she had seen me and given her husband bad advice to make that future come true.

‘So where do you go now?’ Svein asked. We were walking along the beach, past the huddled slaves who watched us with dark, resentful eyes.

‘I have a mind,’ I said, ‘to go into the Sæfern Sea.’

‘There’s nothing left there,’ he said scornfully.

‘Nothing?’

‘It’s been scoured,’ he said, meaning that Danish and Norse ships had bled the coasts dry of any treasure. ‘All you’ll find in the Sæfern Sea,’ he went on, ‘are our ships bringing men from Ireland.’

‘To attack Wessex?’

‘No!’ He grinned at me. ‘I’ve a mind to start trading with the Welsh kingdoms.’

‘And I have a mind,’ I said, ‘to take my ship to the moon and build a feasting hall there.’

He laughed. ‘But speaking of Wessex,’ he said, ‘I hear they’re building a church where you killed Ubba?’

‘I hear the same.’

‘A church with an altar of gold?’

‘I’ve heard that too,’ I allowed. I hid my surprise that he knew of Odda the Younger’s plans, but I should not have been surprised. A rumour of gold would spread like couch grass. ‘I’ve heard it,’ I said again, ‘but I don’t believe it.’

‘Churches have money,’ he said thoughtfully, then frowned, ‘but that’s a strange place to build a church.’

‘Strange, why?’

‘So close to the sea? An easy place to attack?’

‘Or perhaps they want you to attack,’ I said, ‘and have men ready to defend it?’

‘A lure, you mean?’ He thought about that.

‘And hasn’t Guthrum given orders that the West Saxons aren’t to be provoked,’ I said.

‘Guthrum can order what he wants,’ Svein said harshly, ‘but I am Svein of the White Horse and I don’t take orders from Guthrum.’ He walked on, frowning as he threaded the fishing nets that men now dead had hung to dry. ‘Men say Alfred is not a fool.’

‘Nor is he.’

‘If he has put valuables beside the sea,’ he said, ‘he will not leave them unguarded.’ He was a warrior, but like the best warriors he was no madman. When folk speak of the Danes these days they have an idea that they were all savage pagans, unthinking in their terrible violence, but most were like Svein and feared losing men. That was always the great Danish fear, and the Danish weakness. Svein’s ship was called the White Horse and had a crew of fifty-three men, and if a dozen of those men were to be killed or gravely wounded, then the White Horse would be fatally weakened. Once in a fight, of course, he was like all Danes, terrifying, but there was always a good deal of thinking before there was any fighting. He scratched at a louse, then gestured towards the slaves his men had taken. ‘Besides, I have these.’

He meant he would not go to Cynuit. The slaves, once they were sold, would bring him silver and he must have reckoned Cynuit was not worth the casualties.

Svein needed my help next morning. His own ship was in Callyn’s harbour and he asked me to take him and a score of his men to fetch it. We left the rest of his crew at Peredur’s settlement. They guarded the slaves he would take away, and they also burned the place as we carried Svein east up the coast to Callyn’s settlement. We waited a day there as Svein settled his accounts with Callyn, and we used the time to sell fleeces and tin to Callyn’s traders and, though we received a poor enough price, it was better to travel with silver than with bulky cargo. The Fyrdraca was glittering with silver now and the crewmen, knowing they would receive their proper share, were happy. Haesten wanted to go with Svein, but I refused his request. ‘I saved your life,’ I told him, ‘and you have to serve me longer to pay for that.’ He accepted that and was pleased when I gave him a second arm ring as a reward for the men he had killed at Dreyndynas.

Svein’s White Horse was smaller than Fyrdraca. Her prow had a carved horse’s head and her stern a wolf’s head, while at her masthead was a wind-vane decorated with a white horse. I asked Svein about the horse and he laughed. ‘When I was sixteen,’ he said, ‘I wagered my father’s stallion against our king’s white horse. I had to beat the king’s champion at wrestling and swordplay. My father beat me for making the wager, but I won! So the white horse is lucky. I ride only white horses.’ And so his ship was the White Horse and I followed her back up the coast to where a thick plume of smoke marked where Peredur had ruled.

‘Are we staying with him?’ Leofric asked, puzzled that we were going back west rather than turning towards Defnascir.

‘I have a mind to see where Britain ends,’ I said, and I had no wish to return to the Uisc and to Mildrith’s misery.

Svein put the slaves into the belly of his boat. We spent one last night in the bay, under the thick smoke, and in the morning, as the rising sun flickered across the sea, we rowed away. As we passed the western headland, going into the wide ocean, I saw a man watching us from the cliff’s top and I saw he was robed in black and, though he was a long way off, I thought I recognised Asser. Iseult saw him too and she hissed like a cat, made a fist and threw it at him, opening her fingers at the last moment as if casting a spell at the monk.

Then I forgot him because Fyrdraca was back in the open sea and we were going to the place where the world ended.

And I had a shadow queen for company.

PART TWO

The Swamp King

Four

I love the sea. I grew up beside it, though in my memories the seas off Bebbanburg are grey, usually sullen, and rarely sunlit. They are nothing like the great waters that roll from beyond the Isles of the Dead to thunder and shatter against the rocks at the west of Britain. The sea heaves there, as if the ocean gods flexed their muscles, and the white birds cry endlessly, and the wind rattles the spray against the cliffs and Fyrdraca, running before that bright wind, left a path in the sea and the steering oar fought me, pulsing with the life of the water and the flexing of the ship and the joy of the passage. Iseult stared at me, astonished by my happiness, but then I gave her the oar and watched her thin body heave against the sea’s strength until she understood the power of the oar and could move the ship, and then she laughed. ‘I would live on the sea,’ I told her, though she did not understand me. I had given her an arm ring from Peredur’s hoard and a silver toe ring and a necklace of monster’s teeth, all sharp and long and white, strung on a silver wire.

I turned and watched Svein’s White Horse cut through the water. Her bows would sometimes break from a wave so that the forepart of her hull, all green and dark with growth, would rear skywards with her horse’s head snarling at the sun, and then she would crash down and the seas would explode white about her timbers. Her oars, like ours, were inboard and the oar-holes plugged, and we both ran under sail and Fyrdraca was the faster ship, which was not because she was more cunningly built, but because her hull was longer.

There is such joy in a good ship, and a greater joy to have the ship’s belly fat with other men’s silver. It is the Viking joy, driving a dragon-headed hull through a wind-driven sea towards a future full of feasts and laughter. The Danes taught me that and I love them for it, pagan swine though they might be. At that moment, running before Svein’s White Horse, I was as happy as a man could be, free of all the churchmen and laws and duties of Alfred’s Wessex, but then I gave orders that the sail was to be lowered and a dozen men uncleated the lines and the big yard scraped down the mast. We had come to Britain’s ending and I would turn about, and I waved to Svein as the White Horse swept past us. He waved back, watching the Fyrdraca wallow in the long ocean swells.

‘Seen enough?’ Leofric asked me.

I was staring at the end of Britain where the rocks endured the sea’s assault. ‘Penwith,’ Iseult said, giving me the British name for the headland.

‘You want to go home?’ I asked Leofric.

He shrugged. The crew was turning the yard, lining it fore and aft so it could be stowed on its crutches while other men were binding the sail so it did not flap. The oars were being readied to take us eastwards and the White Horse was getting smaller as it swept up into the Sæfern Sea.

I stared after Svein, envying him. ‘I need to be rich,’ I said to Leofric.

He laughed at that.

‘I have a path to follow,’ I said, ‘and it goes north. North back to Bebbanburg. And Bebbanburg has never been captured, so I need many men to take it. Many good men and many sharp swords.’

‘We have silver,’ he said, gesturing into the boat’s bilge.

‘Not enough,’ I answered sourly. My enemies had money and Alfred claimed that I owed the church money, and the courts of Defnascir would be chasing me for wergild. I could only go home if I had enough silver to pay off the church, to bribe the courts and to attract men to my banner. I stared at the White Horse, which was now little more than a sail above the wind-fretted sea and I felt the old temptation to go with the Danes. Wait till Ragnar was free and give him my sword arm, but then I would be fighting against Leofric and I would still need to make money, raise men, go north and fight for my birthright. I touched Thor’s hammer and prayed for a sign.

Iseult spat. That was not quite true. She said a word which sounded like someone clearing their throat, spitting and choking all at the same time, and she was pointing over the ship’s side and I saw a strange fish arching out of the water. The fish was as big as a deerhound and had a triangular fin. ‘Porpoise,’ Leofric said.

‘Llamhydydd,’ Iseult said again, giving the fish its British name.

‘They bring sailors luck,’ Leofric said.

I had never seen a porpoise before, but suddenly there were a dozen of the creatures. They were grey and their backs glistened in the sun and they were all going north.

‘Put the sail back up,’ I told Leofric.

He stared at me. The crew was unlashing the oars and taking the plugs from the oar-holes. ‘You want the sail up?’ Leofric asked.

‘We’re going north.’ I had prayed for a sign and Thor had sent me the porpoise.

‘There’s nothing in the Sæfern Sea,’ Leofric said. ‘Svein told you that.’

‘Svein told me there was no plunder in the Sæfern Sea,’ I said, ‘because the Danes have taken it all, so that means the Danes have the plunder.’ I felt a surge of happiness so intense that I punched Leofric’s shoulder and gave Iseult a hug. ‘And he told me that their ships are coming from Ireland.’

‘So?’ Leofric rubbed his shoulder.

‘Men from Ireland!’ I told Leofric. ‘Danes coming from Ireland to attack Wessex. And if you brought a ship’s crew from Ireland, what would you bring with you?’

‘Everything you possess,’ Leofric said flatly.

‘And they don’t know we’re here! They’re sheep, and we are a fire-dragon.’

He grinned. ‘You’re right,’ he said.

‘Of course I’m right! I’m a lord! I’m right and I’m going to be rich! We’re all going to be rich! We shall eat off gold plates, piss down our enemies’ throats and make their wives into our whores.’ I was shouting this nonsense as I walked down the boat’s centre, casting off the sail’s lashings. ‘We’ll all be rich with silver shoes and golden bonnets. We’ll be richer than kings! We’ll wallow in silver, shower our whores with gold and shit lumps of amber! Tie those oars up! Plug the holes, we’re going north, we’re going to be rich as bishops, every man of us!’ The men were grinning, pleased because I was roaring my enthusiasm, and men like to be led.

They did have qualms about going north, for that would take us out of sight of land, and I had never been that far from the shore, and I was frightened too, for Ragnar the Elder had often told me tales of Norsemen who had been tempted out into the sea-wastes, to sail ever farther westwards, and he said there were lands out there, lands beyond the Isles of the Dead, lands where ghosts walked, but I am not sure if he told the truth. I am sure, though, that he told me that many of those ships never returned. They voyage into the dying sun and they go onwards because they cannot bear to turn back and so they sail to where the lost ships die at the world’s dark ending.

Yet the world did not end to the north. I knew that, though I was not certain what did lie northwards. Dyfed was there, somewhere, and Ireland, and there were other places with barbarous names and savage people who lived like hungry dogs on the wild edges of the land, but there was also a waste of sea, a wilderness of empty waves and so, once the sail was hoisted and the wind was thrusting the Fyrdraca northwards, I leaned on the oar to take her somewhat to the east for fear we would otherwise be lost in the ocean’s vastness.

‘You know where you’re going?’ Leofric asked me.

‘No.’

‘Do you care?’

I grinned at him for answer. The wind, which had been southerly, came more from the west, and the tide took us eastwards, so that by the afternoon I could see land, and I thought it must be the land of the Britons on the north side of the Sæfern, but as we came closer I saw it was an island. I later discovered it was the place the Northmen call Lundi, because that is their word for the puffin, and the island’s high cliffs were thick with the birds, which shrieked at us when we came into a cove on the western side of the island. It was an uncomfortable place to anchor for the night because the big seas rolled in and so we dropped the sail, took out the oars, and rowed around the cliffs until we found shelter on the eastern side.

I went ashore with Iseult and we dug some puffin burrows to find eggs, though all were hatched so we contented ourselves with killing a pair of goats for the evening meal. There was no one living on the island, though there had been because there were the remains of a small church and a field of graves. The Danes had burned everything, pulled down the church and dug up the graves in search of gold. We climbed to a high place and I searched the evening sea for ships, but saw none, though I wondered if I could see land to the south. It was hard to be sure for the southern horizon was thick with dark cloud, but a darker strip within the cloud could have been hills and I assumed I was looking at Cornwalum or the western part of Wessex. Iseult sang to herself.

I watched her. She was gutting one of the dead goats, doing it clumsily for she was not accustomed to such work. She was thin, so thin that she looked like the ælfcynn, the elf-kind, but she was happy. In time I would learn just how much she had hated Peredur. He had valued her and made her a queen, but he had also kept her a prisoner in his hall so that he alone could profit from her powers. Folk would pay Peredur to hear Iseult’s prophecies and one of the reasons Callyn had fought his neighbour was to take Iseult for himself. Shadow queens were valued among the Britons for they were part of the old mysteries, the powers that had brooded over the land before the monks arrived, and Iseult was one of the last shadow queens. She had been born in the sun’s darkness, but now she was free and I was to find she had a soul as wild as a falcon. Mildrith, poor Mildrith, wanted order and routine. She wanted the hall swept, the clothes clean, the cows milked, the sun to rise, the sun to set and for nothing to change, but Iseult was different. She was strange, shadow-born, and full of mystery. Nothing she said to me those first days made any sense, for we had no language in common, but on the island, as the sun set and I took the knife to finish cutting the entrails from the goat, she plucked twigs and wove a small cage. She showed me the cage, broke it and then, with her long white fingers, mimed a bird flying free. She pointed to herself, tossed the twig scraps away and laughed.

Next morning, still ashore, I saw boats. There were two of them and they were sailing to the west of the island, going northwards. They were small craft, probably traders from Cornwalum, and they were running before the south-west wind towards the hidden shore where I assumed Svein had taken the White Horse.

We followed the two small ships. By the time we had waded out to Fyrdraca, raised her anchor and rowed her from the lee of the island both boats were almost out of sight, but once our sail was hoisted we began to overhaul them. They must have been terrified to see a dragon ship shoot out from behind the island, but I lowered the sail a little to slow us down and so followed them for much of the day until, at last, a blue-grey line showed at the sea’s edge. Land. We hoisted the sail fully and seethed past the two small, tubby boats and so, for the first time, I came to the shore of Wales. The Britons had another name for it, but we simply called it Wales which means ‘foreigners’, and much later I worked out that we must have made that landfall in Dyfed, which is the name of the churchman who converted the Britons of Wales to Christianity and had the westernmost kingdom of the Welsh named for him.

We found a deep inlet for shelter. Rocks guarded the entrance, but once inside we were safe from wind and sea. We turned the ship so that her bows faced the open sea, and the cove was so narrow that our stern scraped stone as we slewed Fyrdraca about, and then we slept on board, men and their women sprawled under the rowers’ benches. There were a dozen women aboard, all captured from Peredur’s tribe, and one of them managed to escape that night, presumably sliding over the side and swimming to shore. It was not Iseult. She and I slept in the small black space beneath the steering platform, a hole screened by a cloak, and Leofric woke me there in the dawn, worried that the missing woman would raise the country against us. I shrugged. ‘We won’t be here long.’

But we stayed in the cove all day. I wanted to ambush ships coming around the coast and we saw two, but they travelled together and I could not attack more than one ship at a time. Both ships were under sail, riding the south-west wind, and both were Danish, or perhaps Norse, and both were laden with warriors. They must have come from Ireland, or perhaps from the east coast of Northumbria, and doubtless they travelled to join Svein, lured by the prospect of capturing good West Saxon land. ‘Burgweard should have the whole fleet up here,’ I said. ‘He could tear through these bastards.’

Two horsemen came to look at us in the afternoon. One had a glinting chain about his neck, suggesting he was of high rank, but neither man came down to the shingle beach. They watched from the head of the small valley that fell to the cove and after a while they went away. The sun was low now, but it was summer so the days were long. ‘If they bring men,’ Leofric said as the two horsemen rode away, but he did not finish the thought.

I looked up at the high bluffs on either side of the cove. Men could rain rocks down from those heights and the Fyrdraca would be crushed like an egg. ‘We could put sentries up there,’ I suggested, but just then Eadric, who led the men who occupied the forward steorbord benches, shouted that there was a ship in sight. I ran forward and there she was.

The perfect prey.

She was a large ship, not so big as Fyrdraca, but large all the same, and she was riding low in the water for she was so heavily laden. Indeed, she carried so many people that her crew had not dared raise the sail for, though the wind was not heavy, it would have bent her leeward side dangerously close to the water. So she was being rowed and now she was close inshore, evidently looking for a place where she could spend the night and her crew had plainly been tempted by our cove and only now realised that we already filled it. I could see a man in her bows pointing further up the coast and meanwhile my men were arming themselves, and I shouted at Haesten to take the steering oar. He knew what to do and I was confident he would do it well, even though it might mean the death of fellow Danes. We cut the lines that had tethered us to the shore as Leofric brought me my mail coat, helmet and shield. I dressed for battle as the oars were shipped, then pulled on my helmet so that suddenly the edges of my vision were darkened by its face-plate.

‘Go!’ I shouted, and the oars bit and the Fyrdraca surged out. Some of the oar blades struck rock as we pulled, but none broke, and I was staring at the ship ahead, so close now, and her prow was a snarling wolf, and I could see men and women staring at us, not believing what they saw. They thought they saw a Danish ship, one of their own, yet we were armed and we were coming for them. A man shouted a warning and they scrambled for their weapons, and Leofric yelled at our men to put their hearts into the oars, and the long shafts bent under the strain as Fyrdraca leaped across the small waves and I yelled at the men to leave the oars, to come to the bows, and Cenwulf and the twelve men he commanded were already there as our big bows slammed through the enemy oars, snapping them.

Haesten had done well. I had told him to steer for the forward part of the ship, where her freeboard was low, and our bows rode up across her strakes, plunging her low in the water, and we staggered with the impact, but then I jumped down into the wolf-headed ship’s belly. Cenwulf and his men were behind me, and there we began the killing.

The enemy ship was so loaded with men that they probably outnumbered us, but they were bone weary from a long day’s rowing, they had not expected an attack, and we were hungry for wealth. We had done this before and the crew was well trained, and they chopped their way down the boat, swords and axes swinging, and the sea was slopping over the side so that we waded through water as we clambered over the rowers’ benches. The water about our feet grew red. Some of our victims jumped overboard and clung to shattered oars in an attempt to escape us. One man, big-bearded and wild-eyed, came at us with a great sword and Eadric drove a spear into his chest and Leofric struck the man’s head with his axe, struck again, and blood sprayed up to the sail that was furled fore and aft on its long yard. The man sank to his knees and Eadric ground the spear deeper so that blood spilled down to the water. I almost fell as a wave tilted the half-swamped ship. A man screamed and lunged a spear at me, I took it on my shield, knocked it aside and rammed Serpent-Breath at his face. He half fell, trying to escape the lunge, and I knocked him over the side with my shield’s heavy boss. I sensed movement to my right and swung Serpent-Breath like a reaping scythe and struck a woman in the head. She went down like a felled calf, a sword in her hand. I kicked the sword away and stamped on the woman’s belly. A child screamed and I shoved her aside, lunged at a man in a leather jerkin, raised my shield to block his axe blow and then spitted him on Serpent-Breath. The sword went deep into his belly, so deep that the blade stuck and I had to stand on him to tug it free. Cenwulf went past me, his snarling face covered in blood, sword swinging. The water was up to my knees, and then I staggered and almost fell as the whole ship lurched and I realised we had drifted ashore and struck rocks. Two horses were tethered in the ship’s belly and the beasts screamed at the smell of blood. One broke its tether and jumped overboard, swimming white-eyed towards the open sea.

‘Kill them! Kill them!’ I heard myself shouting. It was the only way to take a ship, to empty her of fighting men, but she was now emptying herself as the survivors jumped onto the rocks and clambered away through the sucking backwash of blood-touched water. A half-dozen men had been left aboard Fyrdraca and they were fending her off the rocks with oars. A blade stabbed the back of my right ankle and I turned to see a wounded man trying to hamstring me with a short knife and I stabbed down again and again, butchering him in the weltering water, and I think he was the last man to die on board, though a few Danes were still clinging to the ship’s side and those we cut away.

The Fyrdraca was seaward of the doomed ship now, and I shouted at the men aboard to bring her close. She heaved up and down, much higher than the half-sunk ship, and we threw our plunder up and over the side. There were sacks, boxes and barrels. Many were heavy, and some clinked with coin. We stripped the enemy dead of their valuables, taking six coats of mail and a dozen helmets and we found another three coats of mail in the flooded bilge. I took eight arm rings off dead men. We tossed weapons aboard Fyrdraca, then cut away the captured ship’s rigging. I loosed the remaining horse that stood shivering as the water rose. We took the ship’s yard and sail, and all the time her survivors watched from the shore where some had found a precarious refuge above the sea-washed rocks. I went to the space beneath her sleeping platform and found a great war-helm there, a beautiful thing with a decorated face-plate and a wolf’s head moulded in silver on the crown, and I tossed my old helmet onto Fyrdraca and donned the new one, and then passed out sacks of coin. Beneath the sacks was what I thought must be a small shield wrapped in black cloth and I half thought of leaving it where it was, then threw it into Fyrdraca anyway. We were rich.

‘Who are you?’ a man shouted from onshore.

‘Uhtred,’ I called back.

He spat at me and I laughed. Our men were climbing back on board Fyrdraca now. Some were retrieving oars from the water, and Leofric was pushing Fyrdraca away, fearful that she would be caught on the rocks. ‘Get on board!’ he shouted at me, and I saw I was the last man, and so I took hold of Fyrdraca’s stern, put a foot on an oar, and heaved myself over her side. ‘Row!’ Leofric shouted, and so we pulled away from the wreck.

Two young women had been thrown up with the plunder and I found them weeping by Fyrdraca’s mast. One spoke no language that I recognised and later we discovered she was from Ireland, but the other was Danish and, as soon as I squatted beside her, she lashed out at me and spat in my face. I slapped her back, and that made her lash out again. She was a tall girl, strong, with a tangled mass of fair hair and bright blue eyes. She tried to claw her fingers through the eye-holes of my new helmet and I had to slap her again, which made my men laugh. Some were shouting at her to keep fighting me, but instead she suddenly burst into tears and leaned back against the mast root. I took off the helmet and asked her name, and her only answer was to wail that she wanted to die, but when I said she was free to throw herself off the ship she did not move. Her name was Freyja, she was fifteen years old, and her father had been the owner of the ship we had sunk. He had been the big man with the sword, and his name had been Ivar and he had held land at Dyflin, wherever that was, and Freyja began to weep again when she looked at my new helmet which had belonged to her father. ‘He died without cutting his nails,’ she said accusingly, as if I were responsible for that ill luck, and it was bad fortune indeed because now the grim things of the underworld would use Ivar’s nails to build the ship that would bring chaos at the world’s end.

‘Where were you going?’ I asked her.

To Svein, of course. Ivar had been unhappy in Dyflin, which was in Ireland and had more Norsemen than Danes and also possessed savagely unfriendly native tribes, and he had been lured by the prospect of land in Wessex and so he had abandoned his Irish steading, put all his goods and wealth aboard his ships, and sailed eastwards.

‘Ships?’ I asked her.

‘There were three when we left,’ Freyja said, ‘but we lost the others in the night.’

I guessed they were the two ships we had seen earlier, but the gods had been good to me for Freyja confirmed that her father had put his most valuable possessions into his own ship, and that was the one we had captured, and we had struck lucky for there were barrels of coin and boxes of silver. There was amber, jet and ivory. There were weapons and armour. We made a rough count as the Fyrdraca wallowed offshore and we could scarce believe our fortune. One box contained small lumps of gold, roughly shaped as bricks, but best of all was the wrapped bundle which I had thought was a small shield, but which, when we unwrapped the cloth, proved to be a great silver plate on which was modelled a crucifixion. All about the death scene, ringing the plate’s heavy rim, were saints. Twelve of them. I assumed they were the apostles and that the plate had been the treasure of some Irish church or monastery before Ivar had captured it. I showed the plate to my men. ‘This,’ I said reverently, ‘is not part of the plunder. This must go back to the church.’

Leofric caught my eye, but did not laugh.

‘It goes back to the church,’ I said again, and some of my men, the more pious ones, muttered that I was doing the right thing. I wrapped the plate and put it under the steering platform.

‘How much is your debt to the church?’ Leofric asked me.

‘You have a mind like a goat’s arsehole,’ I told him.

He laughed, then looked past me. ‘Now what do we do?’ he asked.

I thought he was asking what we should do with the rest of our charmed lives, but instead he was gazing at the shore where, in the evening light, I could see armed men lining the clifftop. The Britons of Dyfed had come for us, but too late. Yet their presence meant we could not go back into our cove, and so I ordered the oars to be manned and for the ship to row eastwards. The Britons followed us along the shore. The woman who had escaped in the night must have told them we were Saxons and they must have been praying we would seek refuge on land so they could kill us. Few ships stayed at sea overnight, not unless they were forced to, but I dared not seek shelter and so I turned south and rowed away from the shore, while in the west the sun leaked red fire through rifts in the cloud so that the whole sky glowed as if a god had bled across the heavens.

‘What will you do with the girl?’ Leofric asked me.

‘Freyja?’

‘Is that her name? You want her?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘I do.’

‘She’ll eat you alive,’ I warned him. She was probably a head taller than Leofric.

‘I like them like that,’ he said.

‘All yours,’ I said, and such is life. One day Freyja was the pampered daughter of an earl and the next she was a slave.

I gave the coats of mail to those who deserved them. We had lost two men, and another three were badly injured, but that was a light cost. We had, after all, killed twenty or thirty Danes and the survivors were ashore where the Britons might or might not treat them well. Best of all we had become rich and that knowledge was a consolation as night fell.

Hoder is the god of the night and I prayed to him. I threw my old helmet overboard as a gift to him, because all of us were scared of the dark that swallowed us, and it was a complete dark because clouds had come from the west to smother the sky. No moon, no stars. For a time there was the gleam of firelight on the northern shore, but that vanished and we were blind. The wind rose, the seas heaved us, and we brought the oars inboard and let the air and water carry us for we could neither see nor steer. I stayed on deck, peering into the dark, and Iseult stayed with me, under my cloak, and I remembered the look of delight on her face when we had gone into battle.

Dawn was grey and the sea was white-streaked grey and the wind was cold, and there was no land in sight, but two white birds flew over us and I took them for a sign and rowed in the direction they had gone, and late that day, in a bitter sea and cold rain, we saw land and it was the Isle of Puffins again where we found shelter in the cove and made fires ashore.

‘When the Danes know what we’ve done,’ Leofric said.

‘They’ll look for us,’ I finished the sentence for him.

‘Lots of them will look for us.’

‘Then it’s time to go home,’ I said.

The gods had been good to us and, next dawn, in a calming sea, we rowed south to the land and followed the coast towards the west. We would go around the wild headlands where the porpoises swam, turn east and so find home.

Much later I discovered what Svein had done after we parted company and, because what he did affected my life and made the enmity between me and Alfred worse, I shall tell it here.

I suspect that the thought of a gold altar at Cynuit had gnawed into his heart, for he carried the dream back to Glwysing where his men gathered. Glwysing was another kingdom of the Britons in the south of Wales, a place where there were good harbours and where the king welcomed the Danes for their presence prevented Guthrum’s men from raiding across the Mercian border.

Svein ordered a second ship and its crew to accompany him and together they attacked Cynuit. They came in the dawn, hidden by a mist, and I can imagine their beast-headed ships appearing in the early greyness like monsters from a nightmare. They went up river, oars splashing, then grounded the boats and the crews streamed ashore, men in mail and helmets, spear-Danes, sword-Danes, and they found the half-built church and monastery.

Odda the Younger was making the place, but he knew it was too close to the sea and so he had decided to make it a fortified building. The church’s tower was to be of stone, and high enough for men to keep a watch from its summit, and the priests and monks were to be surrounded by a palisade and a flooded ditch, but when Svein came ashore none of the work was finished and so it was indefensible, and besides, there were scarce forty troops there and those all died or fled within minutes of the Danes landing. The Danes then burned what work had been done and cut down the high wooden cross which customarily marked a monastery and which had been the first thing the builders had made.

The builders were monks, many of them novices, and Svein herded them together and demanded they show him where the valuables were hidden and promised them mercy if they told the truth. Which they did. There was not much of value, certainly no altar of gold, but supplies and timber needed to be purchased and so the monks had a chest of silver pennies which was reward enough for the Danes, who then pulled down the half-constructed church tower, wrecked the unfinished palisade and slaughtered some cattle. Then Svein asked the monks where Ubba was buried and was met by sullen silence, and the swords were drawn again and the question asked a second time, and the monks were forced to confess that the church was being built directly over the dead chieftain’s grave. That grave had been an earth mound, but the monks had dug it up and thrown the body into the river, and when the Danes heard that story the mercy fled from their souls.

The monks were made to wade in the river until some bones were found, and those bones were placed on a funeral pyre made from the timbers of the half-constructed buildings. It was, by all accounts, a huge pyre, and when it was lit, and when the bones were at the heart of a furnace blaze, the monks were thrown onto the flames. While their bodies burned the Danes selected two girls, captured from the soldiers’ shelters, raped them and then strangled them, sending their souls to be company for Ubba in Valhalla. We heard all this from two children who survived by hiding in a nettle patch, and some folk from the nearby town who were dragged to see the end of the funeral pyre. ‘Svein of the White Horse did this,’ they were told, and made to repeat the words. It was a Danish custom to leave some witnesses to their horror, so that the tales would spread fear and make cowards of other folk who might be attacked, and sure enough the story of the burned monks and murdered girls went through Wessex like a high wind through dry grass. It became exaggerated as such tales do. The number of dead monks went from sixteen to sixty, the raped girls from two to twenty, and the stolen silver from a chest of pennies to a hoard worthy of the gods. Alfred sent a message to Guthrum, demanding to know why he should not slaughter the hostages he held, and Guthrum sent him a present of gold, two captured gospel books and a grovelling letter in which he claimed that the two ships had not been from his forces, but were pirates from beyond the sea. Alfred believed him and so the hostages lived and the peace prevailed, but Alfred commanded that a curse should be pronounced on Svein in every church of Wessex. The Danish chieftain was to be damned through all eternity, his men were to burn in the fires of hell and his children, and his children’s children, were all to bear the mark of Cain. I asked a priest what the mark was, and he explained that Cain was the son of Adam and Eve and the first murderer, but he did not know what mark he had carried. He thought God would recognise it.

So Svein’s two ships sailed away, leaving a pillar of smoke on the Wessex shore, and I knew none of it. In time I would know all of it, but for now I was going home.

We went slowly, sheltering each night, retracing our steps that took us past the blackened hillside where Peredur’s settlement had stood, and on we went, under a summer’s sun and rain, until we had returned to the Uisc.

The Heahengel was afloat now and her mast was stepped, which meant Leofric could take her and the Eftwyrd, for the Fyrdraca was no more, back to Hamtun. We divided the plunder first and, though Leofric and I took the greater share, every man went away wealthy. I was left with Haesten and Iseult, and I took them up to Oxton where Mildrith wept with relief because she had thought I might be dead. I told her we had been patrolling the coast, which was true enough, and that we had captured a Danish ship laden with wealth, and I spilled the coins and gold bricks onto the floor and gave her a bracelet of amber and a necklace of jet, and the gifts distracted her from Iseult who watched her with wide, dark eyes, and if Mildrith saw the British girl’s jewellery she said nothing.

We had come back in time for the harvest, though it was poor for there had been much rain that summer. There was a black growth on the rye which meant it could not even be fed to the animals, though the straw was good enough to thatch the hall I built. I have always enjoyed building. I made the hall from clay, gravel and straw, all packed together to make thick walls. Oak beams straddled the walls, and oak rafters held a high, long roof that looked golden when the thatch was first combed into place. The walls were painted with powdered lime in water, and one of the local men poured ox-blood into the mix so that the walls were the colour of a summer sky at sunset. The hall’s great door faced east towards the Uisc and I paid a man from Exanceaster to carve the doorposts and lintels with writhing wolves, for the banner of Bebbanburg, my banner, is a wolf’s head. Mildrith wanted the carving to show saints, but she got wolves. I paid the builders well, and when other men heard that I had silver they came looking for employment, and though they were there to build my hall I took only those who had experience of fighting. I equipped them with spades, axes, adzes, weapons and shields.

‘You are making an army,’ Mildrith accused me. Her relief at my homecoming had soured quickly when it was apparent that I was no more a Christian than when I had left her.

‘Seventeen men? An army?’

‘We are at peace,’ she said. She believed that because the priests preached it, and the priests only said what they were told to say by the bishops, and the bishops took their orders from Alfred. A travelling priest sought shelter with us one night and he insisted that the war with the Danes was over.

‘We still have Danes on the border,’ I said.

‘God has calmed their hearts,’ the priest insisted and told me that God had killed the Lothbrok brothers, Ubba, Ivar and Halfdan, and that the rest of the Danes were so shocked by the deaths that they no longer dared to fight against Christians. ‘It is true, lord,’ the priest said earnestly, ‘I heard it preached in Cippanhamm, and the king was there and he praised God for the truth of it. We are to beat our swords into ard points and our spear blades into reaping hooks.’

I laughed at the thought of melting Serpent-Breath into a tool to plough Oxton’s fields, but then I did not believe the priest’s nonsense. The Danes were biding their time, that was all, yet it did seem peaceful as the summer slid imperceptibly into autumn. No enemies crossed the frontier of Wessex and no ships harried our coasts. We threshed the corn, netted partridges, hunted deer on the hill, staked nets in the river and practised with our weapons. The women span thread, gathered nuts, and picked mushrooms and blackberries. There were apples and pears, for this was the time of plenty, the time when the livestock was fattened before the winter slaughter. We ate like kings and, when my hall was finished, I gave a feast and Mildrith saw the ox head over the door and knew it was an offering to Thor, but said nothing.

Mildrith hated Iseult, which was hardly surprising, for I had told Mildrith that Iseult was a queen of the Britons and that I held her for the ransom that the Britons would offer. I knew no such ransom would ever come, but the story went some way to explaining Iseult’s presence, but Mildrith resented that the British girl was given her own house. ‘She is a queen,’ I said.

‘You take her hunting,’ Mildrith said resentfully.

I did more than that, but Mildrith chose to be blind to much of it. Mildrith wanted little more than her church, her baby and an unvarying routine. She had charge of the women who milked the cows, churned the butter, span wool and collected honey, and she took immense pride that those things were done well. If a neighbour visited there would be a flurry of panic as the hall was cleaned, and she worried much about those neighbours’ opinions. She wanted me to pay Oswald’s wergild. It did not matter to Mildrith that the man had been caught thieving, because to pay the wergild would make peace in the valley of the Uisc. She even wanted me to visit Odda the Younger. ‘You could be friends,’ she pleaded.

‘With that snake?’

‘And Wirken says you have not paid the tithe.’

Wirken was the priest in Exanmynster, and I hated him. ‘He eats and drinks the tithe,’ I snarled. The tithe was the payment all landholders were supposed to make to the church, and by rights I should have sent Wirken part of my harvest, but I had not. Yet the priest was often at Oxton, coming when he thought I was hunting, and he ate my food and drank my ale and was growing fat on them.

‘He comes to pray with us,’ Mildrith said.

‘He comes to eat,’ I said.

‘And he says the bishop will take the land if we don’t pay the debt.’

‘The debt will be paid,’ I said.

‘When? We have the money!’ She gestured at the new hall. ‘When?’ she insisted.

‘When I want to,’ I snarled. I did not tell her when, or how, because if I had, then Wirken the priest would know, and the bishop would know. It was not enough to pay the debt. Mildrith’s father had foolishly donated part of our land’s future produce to the church, and I wanted that burden taken away so the debt would not go on through eternity, and to do that I needed to surprise the bishop, and so I kept Mildrith ignorant, and inevitably those arguments would end with her tears. I was bored with her and she knew it. I found her beating Iseult’s maid one day. The girl was a Saxon I had given to Iseult as a servant, but she also worked in the dairy and Mildrith was beating her because some cheeses had not been turned. I dragged Mildrith away, and that, of course, provoked another argument and Mildrith proved not to be so blind after all for she accused me of trying to whelp bastards on Iseult, which was true enough, but I reminded her that her own father had sired enough bastards, half a dozen of whom now worked for us. ‘You leave Iseult and her maid alone,’ I said, causing more tears. They were not happy days.

It was the time when Iseult learned to speak English, or at least the Northumbrian version of English for she learned it mostly from me. ‘You’re my mon,’ she said. I was Mildrith’s man and Iseult’s mon. She said she had been born again on the day I came into Peredur’s hall. ‘I had dreamed of you,’ she said, ‘tall and golden haired.’

‘Now you don’t dream?’ I asked, knowing that her powers of scrying came from dreams.

‘I do still dream,’ she said earnestly, ‘my brother speaks to me.’

‘Your brother?’ I asked, surprised.

‘I was born a twin,’ she told me, ‘and my brother came first and then, as I was born, he died. He went to the shadow world and he speaks to me of what he sees there.’

‘What does he see?’

‘He sees your king.’

‘Alfred,’ I said sourly, ‘is that good or bad?’

‘I don’t know. The dreams are shadowy.’

She was no Christian. Instead she believed that every place and every thing had its own god or goddess; a nymph for a stream, a dryad for a wood, a spirit for a tree, a god for the fire and another for the sea. The Christian god, like Thor or Odin, was just one more deity among this unseen throng of powers, and her dreams, she said, were like eavesdropping on the gods. One day, as she rode beside me on the hills above the empty sea, she suddenly said that Alfred would give me power.

‘He hates me,’ I told her, ‘he’ll give me nothing.’

‘He will give you power,’ she said flatly. I stared at her and she gazed to where the clouds met the waves. Her black hair was unbound and the sea wind stirred it. ‘My brother told me,’ she said. ‘Alfred will give you power and you will take back your northern home and your woman will be a creature of gold.’

‘My woman?’

She looked at me and there was sadness in her face. ‘There,’ she said, ‘now you know,’ and she kicked back her heels and made the horse run along the ridge top, her hair streaming, her eyes wet with tears. I wanted to know more, but she said she had told me what she had dreamed and I must be content.

At summer’s end we drove the swine into the forests to feed on the fallen beechnuts and acorns. I bought bags of salt because the killing time was coming and the meat of our pigs and cattle would have to be salted into barrels to feed us through the winter. Some of that food would come from the men who rented land at the edge of the estate, and I visited them all so they would know I expected payment of wheat, barley and livestock, and, to show them what would happen if they tried to cheat me, I bought a dozen good swords from a smith in Exanceaster. I gave the swords to my men, and in the shortening days we practised with them. Mildrith might not believe war was coming, but I did not think God had changed Danish hearts.

The late autumn brought heavy rain and the shire-reeve to Oxton. The reeve was called Harald and he was charged with keeping the peace of Defnascir, and he came on horseback and with him were six other horsemen, all in mail coats and helmets, and all with swords or spears. I waited for him in the hall, making him dismount and come into the smoky shadows. He came cautiously, expecting an ambush, then his eyes became accustomed to the gloom and he saw me standing by the central hearth. ‘You are summoned to the shire court,’ he told me.

His men had followed Harald into the hall. ‘You bring swords into my house?’ I asked.

Harald looked around the hall and he saw my men armed with their spears and axes. I had seen the horsemen approaching and summoned my men and ordered them to arm themselves.

Harald had the reputation of being a decent man, sensible and fair, and he knew how weapons in a hall could lead to slaughter. ‘You will wait outside,’ he told his men, and I gestured for my men to put their weapons down. ‘You are summoned …’ Harald began again.

‘I heard you,’ I said.

‘There is a debt to be paid,’ he said, ‘and a man’s death to make good.’

I said nothing. One of my hounds growled softly and I put a hand into its fur to silence it.

‘The court will meet on All Saints’ Day,’ Harald said, ‘at the cathedral.’

‘I shall be there,’ I said.

He took off his helmet to reveal a balding pate fringed with brown hair. He was at least ten years older than I, a big man, with two fingers missing from his shield hand. He limped slightly as he walked towards me. I calmed the hounds, waited.

‘I was at Cynuit,’ he said to me, speaking softly.

‘So was I,’ I said, ‘though men pretend I was not.’

‘I know what you did,’ he said.

‘So do I.’

He ignored my surliness. He was showing me sympathy, though I was too proud to show I appreciated it. ‘The ealdorman has sent men,’ he warned me, ‘to take this place once judgment is given.’

There was a gasp behind me and I realised Mildrith had come into the hall. Harald bowed to her.

‘The hall will be taken?’ Mildrith asked.

‘If the debt is not paid,’ Harald said, ‘the land will be given to the church.’ He stared up at the newly hewn rafters as if wondering why I would build a hall on land doomed to be given to God.

Mildrith came to stand beside me. She was plainly distressed by Harald’s summons, but she made a great effort to compose herself. ‘I am sorry,’ she said, ‘about your wife.’

A flicker of pain crossed Harald’s face as he made the sign of the cross. ‘She was sick a long time, lady. It was merciful of God, I think, to take her.’

I had not known he was a widower, nor did I care much. ‘She was a good woman,’ Mildrith said.

‘She was,’ Harald said.

‘And I pray for her.’

‘I thank you for that,’ Harald said.

‘As I pray for Odda the Elder,’ Mildrith went on.

‘God be praised, he lives,’ Harald made the sign of the cross again. ‘But he is feeble and in pain.’ He touched his scalp showing where Odda the Elder had been wounded.

‘So who is the judge?’ I asked harshly, interrupting the two.

‘The bishop,’ Harald said.

‘Not the ealdorman?’

‘He is at Cippanhamm.’

Mildrith insisted on giving Harald and his men ale and food. She and Harald talked a long time, sharing news of neighbours and family. They were both from Defnascir and I was not, and so I knew few of the folk they talked about, but I pricked up my ears when Harald said that Odda the Younger was marrying a girl from Mercia. ‘She’s in exile here,’ he said, ‘with her family.’

‘Well born?’ Mildrith asked.

‘Exceedingly,’ Harald said.

‘I wish them much joy,’ Mildrith said with evident sincerity. She was happy that day, warmed by Harald’s company, though when he had gone she chided me for being churlish. ‘Harald is a good man,’ she insisted, ‘a kind man. He would have given you advice. He would have helped you!’

I ignored her, but two days later I went into Exanceaster with Iseult and all my men. Including Haesten I now had eighteen warriors and I had armed them, given them shields and leather coats, and I led them through the market that always accompanied the court’s sittings. There were stiltwalkers and jugglers, a man who ate fire, and a dancing bear. There were singers, harpists, storytellers, beggars, and pens of sheep, goats, cattle, pigs, geese, ducks and hens. There were fine cheeses, smoked fish, bladders of lard, pots of honey, trays of apples and baskets of pears. Iseult, who had not been to Exanceaster before, was amazed at the size of the city, and the life of it, and the seething closeness of its houses, and I saw folk make the sign of the cross when they saw her for they had heard of the shadow queen held at Oxton and they knew her for a foreigner and a pagan.

Beggars crowded at the bishop’s gate. There was a crippled woman with a blind child, men who had lost arms or legs in the wars, a score of them, and I threw them some pence, then, because I was on horseback, ducked under the archway of the courtyard beside the cathedral where a dozen chained felons were awaiting their fate. A group of young monks, nervous of the chained men, were plaiting beehives, while a score of armed men were clustered around three fires. They eyed my followers suspiciously as a young priest, his hands flapping, hurried across the puddles. ‘Weapons are not to be brought into the precinct!’ he told me sternly.

‘They’ve got weapons,’ I nodded at the men warming themselves by the flames.

‘They are the reeve’s men.’

‘Then the sooner you deal with my business,’ I said, ‘the sooner my weapons will be gone.’

He looked up at me, his face anxious. ‘Your business?’

‘Is with the bishop.’

‘The bishop is at prayer,’ the priest said reprovingly, as though I should have known that. ‘And he cannot see every man who comes here. You can talk to me.’

I smiled and raised my voice a little. ‘In Cippanhamm, two years ago,’ I said, ‘your bishop was friends with Eanflæd. She has red hair and works her trade out of the Corncrake tavern. Her trade is whoring.’

The priest’s hands were flapping again in an attempt to persuade me to lower my voice.

‘I’ve been with Eanflæd,’ I said, ‘and she told me about the bishop. She said …’

The monks had stopped making beehives and were listening, but the priest cut me off by half shouting. ‘The bishop might have a moment free.’

‘Then tell him I’m here,’ I said pleasantly.

‘You are Uhtred of Oxton?’ he asked.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I am the Lord Uhtred of Bebbanburg.’

‘Yes, lord.’

‘Sometimes known as Uhtredærwe,’ I added mischievously. Uhtred the Wicked.

‘Yes, lord,’ the priest said again and hurried away.

The bishop was called Alewold and he was really the bishop of Cridianton, but that place had not been thought as safe as Exanceaster and so for years the bishops of Cridianton had lived in the larger town which, as Guthrum had shown, was not the wisest decision. Guthrum’s Danes had pillaged the cathedral and the bishop’s house, which was still scantily furnished and I discovered Alewold sitting behind a table that looked as if it had once belonged to a butcher, for its hefty top was scored with knife cuts and stained with old blood. He looked at me indignantly. ‘You should not be here,’ he said.

‘Why not?’

‘You have business before the court tomorrow.’

‘Tomorrow,’ I said, ‘you sit as a judge. Today you are a bishop.’

He acknowledged that with a small nod. He was an elderly man with a heavy jowled face and a reputation as a severe judge. He had been with Alfred in Scireburnan when the Danes arrived in Exanceaster, which is why he was still alive, and, like all the bishops in Wessex, he was a fervent supporter of the king, and I had no doubt that Alfred’s dislike of me was known to Alewold, which meant I could expect little clemency when the court sat.

‘I am busy,’ Alewold said, gesturing at the parchments on the stained table. Two clerks shared the table and a half-dozen resentful priests had gathered behind the bishop’s chair.

‘My wife,’ I said, ‘inherited a debt to the church.’

Alewold looked at Iseult who alone had come into the house with me. She looked beautiful, proud and wealthy. There was silver at her throat and in her hair, and her cloak was fastened with two brooches, one of jet and the other of amber. ‘Your wife?’ the bishop asked snidely.

‘I would discharge the debt,’ I said, ignoring his question, and I tipped a bag onto his butcher’s table and the big silver plate we had taken from Ivar slid out. The silver made a satisfying noise as it thumped down and suddenly, in that small dark room ill-lit by three rush lights and a small, wood-barred window, it seemed as if the sun had come out. The heavy silver glowed and Alewold just stared at it.

There are good priests. Beocca is one and Willibald another, but I have discovered in my long life that most churchmen preach the merits of poverty while they lust after wealth. They love money and the church attracts money like a candle brings moths. I knew Alewold was a greedy man, as greedy for wealth as he was for the delights of a red-haired whore in Cippanhamm, and he could not take his eyes from that plate. He reached out and caressed the thick rim as if he scarce believed what he was seeing, and then he pulled the plate towards him and examined the twelve apostles. ‘A pyx,’ he said reverently.

‘A plate,’ I said casually.

One of the other priests leaned over a clerk’s shoulder. ‘Irish work,’ he said.

‘It looks Irish,’ Alewold agreed, then looked suspiciously at me. ‘You are returning it to the church?’

‘Returning it?’ I asked innocently.

‘The plate was plainly stolen,’ Alewold said, ‘and you do well, Uhtred, to bring it back.’

‘I had the plate made for you,’ I said.

He turned the plate over, which took some effort for it was heavy, and once it was inverted he pointed to the scratches in the silver. ‘It is old,’ he said.

‘I had it made in Ireland,’ I said grandly, ‘and doubtless it was handled roughly by the men who brought it across the sea.’

He knew I was lying. I did not care. ‘There are silversmiths in Wessex who could have made you a pyx,’ one of the priests snapped.

‘I thought you might want it,’ I said, then leaned forward and pulled the plate out of the bishop’s hands, ‘but if you prefer West Saxon work,’ I went on, ‘then I can …’

‘Give it back!’ Alewold said and, when I made no move to obey, his voice became pleading. ‘It is a beautiful thing.’ He could see it in his church, or perhaps in his hall, and he wanted it. There was silence as he stared at it. If he had known that the plate existed, if I had told Mildrith of it, then he would have had a response ready, but as it was he was overwhelmed by desire for the heavy silver. A maid brought in a flagon and he waved her out of the room. She was, I noted, red-haired. ‘You had the plate made,’ Alewold said sceptically.

‘In Dyflin,’ I said.

‘Is that where you went in the king’s ship?’ the priest who had snapped at me asked.

‘We patrolled the coast,’ I said, ‘nothing more.’

‘The value of the plate,’ Alewold began, then stopped.

‘Is far and above the debt Mildrith inherited,’ I said. That was probably not true, but it was close to the amount, and I could see Alewold did not care. I was going to get what I wanted.

The debt was discharged. I insisted on having that written down, and written three times, and I surprised them by being able to read and so discovering that the first scrap of parchment made no mention of the church yielding their rights to the future produce of my estate, but that was corrected and I let the bishop keep one copy while I took two. ‘You will not be arraigned for debt,’ the bishop said as he pressed his seal into the wax of the last copy, ‘but there is still the matter of Oswald’s wergild.’

‘I rely on your good and wise judgment, bishop,’ I said, and I opened the purse hanging at my waist and took out a small lump of gold, making sure he could see there was more gold inside as I placed the small lump on the plate. ‘Oswald was a thief.’

‘His family will make oaths that he was not,’ the priest said.

‘And I will bring men who will swear he was,’ I said. A trial relied heavily on oaths, but both sides would bring as many liars as they could muster, and judgment usually went to the better liars or, if both sides were equally convincing, to the side who had the sympathy of the onlookers. It was better, though, to have the sympathy of the judge. Oswald’s family would have many supporters around Exanceaster, but gold is much the best argument in a law court.

And so it proved. To Mildrith’s astonishment the debt was paid and Oswald’s family denied two hundred shillings of wergild. I did not even bother to go to the court, relying on the persuasive power of gold, and sure enough the bishop peremptorily dismissed the demand for wergild, saying it was well known that Oswald had been a thief, and so I won. That did not make me any more popular. To the folk who lived in the Uisc’s valley I was a Northumbrian interloper and, worse, it was known I was a pagan, but none dared confront me for I went nowhere beyond the estate without my men and my men went nowhere without their swords.

The harvest was in the storehouses. Now was the time for the Danes to come, when they could be sure to find food for their armies, but neither Guthrum nor Svein crossed the frontier. The winter came instead and we slaughtered the livestock, salted the meat, scraped hides and made calves’ foot jelly. I listened for the sound of church bells ringing at an unusual time, for that would have been a sign that the Danes had attacked, but the bells did not ring.

Mildrith prayed that the peace would continue and I, being young and bored, prayed it would not. She prayed to the Christian god and I took Iseult to the high woods and made a sacrifice to Hoder, Odin and Thor and the gods were listening, for in the dark beneath the gallows tree, where the three spinners make our lives, a red thread was woven into my life. Fate is everything, and just after Yule the spinners brought a royal messenger to Oxton and he, in turn, brought me a summons. It seemed possible that Iseult’s dream was true, and that Alfred would give me power for I was ordered to Cippanhamm to see the king. I was summoned to the Witan.

Five

Mildrith was excited by the summons. The Witan gave the king advice and her father had never been wealthy or important enough to receive such a summons, and she was overjoyed that the king wanted my presence. The witanegemot, as the meeting was called, was always held on the Feast of St Stephen, the day after Christmas, but my summons required me to be there on the twelfth day of Christmas and that gave Mildrith time to wash clothes for me. They had to be boiled and scrubbed and dried and brushed, and three women did the work and it took three days before Mildrith was satisfied that I would not disgrace her by appearing at Cippanhamm looking like a vagabond. She was not summoned, nor did she expect to accompany me, but she made a point of telling all our neighbours that I was to give counsel to the king. ‘You mustn’t wear that,’ she told me, pointing to my Thor’s hammer amulet.

‘I always wear it,’ I said.

‘Then hide it,’ she said, ‘and don’t be belligerent!’

‘Belligerent?’

‘Listen to what others say,’ she said. ‘Be humble. And remember to congratulate Odda the Younger.’

‘For what?’

‘He’s to be married. Tell him I pray for them both.’ She was happy again, sure that by paying the church its debt I had regained Alfred’s favour and her good mood was not even spoilt when I announced I would take Iseult with me. She bridled slightly at the news, then said that it was only right that Iseult should be taken to Alfred. ‘If she is a queen,’ Mildrith said, ‘then she belongs in Alfred’s court. This isn’t a fit place for her.’ She insisted on taking silver coins to the church in Exanceaster where she donated the money to the poor and gave thanks that I had been restored to Alfred’s favour. She also thanked God for the good health of our son, Uhtred. I saw little of him, for he was still a baby and I have never had much patience for babies, but the women of Oxton constantly assured me that he was a lusty, strong boy.

We allowed two days for the journey. I took Haesten and six men as an escort for, though the shire-reeve’s men patrolled the roads, there were plenty of wild places where outlaws preyed on travellers. We were in mail coats or leather tunics, with swords, spears, axes and shields. We all rode. Iseult had a small black mare I had bought for her, and I had also given her an otterskin cloak, and when we passed through villages, folk would stare at her for she rode like a man, her black hair bound up with a silver chain. They would kneel to her, as well as to me, and call out for alms. She did not take her maid for I remembered how crowded every tavern and house had been in Exanceaster when the Witan met, and I persuaded Iseult that we would be hard-pressed to find accommodation for ourselves, let alone a maid.

‘What does the king want of you?’ she asked as we rode up the Uisc valley. Rainwater puddled in the long furrows, gleaming in the winter sunshine, while the woods were glossy with holly leaves and bright with the berries of rowan, thorn, elder and yew.

‘Aren’t you supposed to tell me that?’ I asked her.

She smiled. ‘Seeing the future,’ she said, ‘is like travelling a strange road. Usually you cannot see far ahead, and when you can it is only a glimpse. And my brother doesn’t give me dreams about everything.’

‘Mildrith thinks the king has forgiven me,’ I said.

‘Has he?’

I shrugged. ‘Perhaps.’ I hoped so, not because I wanted Alfred’s forgiveness, but because I wanted to be given command of the fleet again. I wanted to be with Leofric. I wanted the wind in my face and the sea rain on my cheek. ‘It’s odd, though,’ I went on, ‘that he didn’t want me there for the whole witanegemot.’

‘Maybe,’ Iseult suggested, ‘they discussed religious things at first?’

‘He wouldn’t want me there for that,’ I said.

‘So that’s it,’ she said. ‘They talk about their god, but at the end they will talk of the Danes, and that is why he summoned you. He knows he needs you.’

‘Or perhaps he just wants me there for the feast,’ I suggested.

‘The feast?’

‘The Twelfth Night feast,’ I explained, and that seemed to me the likeliest explanation; that Alfred had decided to forgive me and, to show he now approved of me, would let me attend the winter feast. I secretly hoped that was true, and it was a strange hope. I had been ready to kill Alfred only a few months before, yet now, though I still hated him, I wanted his approval. Such is ambition. If I could not rise with Ragnar then I would make my reputation with Alfred.

‘Your road, Uhtred,’ Iseult went on, ‘is like a bright blade across a dark moor. I see it clearly.’

‘And the woman of gold?’

She said nothing to that.

‘Is it you?’ I asked.

‘The sun dimmed when I was born,’ she said, ‘so I am a woman of darkness and of silver, not of gold.’

‘So who is she?’

‘Someone far away, Uhtred, far away,’ and she would say no more. Perhaps she knew no more, or perhaps she was guessing.

We reached Cippanhamm late on the eleventh day of Yule. There was still frost on the furrows and the sun was a gross red ball poised low above the tangling black branches as we came to the town’s western gate. The city was full, but I was known in the Corncrake tavern where the red-headed whore called Eanflæd worked and she found us shelter in a half-collapsed cattle byre where a score of hounds had been kennelled. The hounds, she said, belonged to Huppa, Ealdorman of Thornsæta, but she reckoned the animals could survive a night or two in the yard. ‘Huppa may not think so,’ she said, ‘but he can rot in hell.’

‘He doesn’t pay?’ I asked her.

She spat for answer, then looked at me curiously. ‘I hear Leofric’s here?’

‘He is?’ I said, heartened by the news.

‘I haven’t seen him,’ she said, ‘but someone said he was here. In the royal hall. Maybe Burgweard brought him?’ Burgweard was the new fleet commander, the one who wanted his ships to sail two by two in imitation of Christ’s disciples. ‘Leofric had better not be here,’ Eanflæd finished.

‘Why not?’

‘Because he hasn’t come to see me!’ she said indignantly, ‘that’s why.’ She was five or six years older than I with a broad face, a high forehead and springy hair. She was popular, so much so that she had a good deal of freedom in the tavern, that owed its profits more to her abilities than to the quality of the ale. I knew she was friendly with Leofric, but I suspected from her tone that she wanted to be more than friends. ‘Who’s she?’ she asked, jerking her head at Iseult.

‘A queen,’ I said.

‘That’s another name for it, I suppose. How’s your wife?’

‘Back in Defnascir.’

‘You’re like all the rest, aren’t you?’ She shivered. ‘If you’re cold tonight bring the hounds back in to warm you. I’m off to work.’

We were cold, but I slept well enough and, next morning, the twelfth after Christmas, I left my six men at the Corncrake and took Iseult and Haesten to the king’s buildings that lay behind their own palisade to the south of the town where the river curled about the walls. A man expected to attend the witanegemot with retainers, though not usually with a Dane and a Briton, but Iseult wanted to see Alfred and I wanted to please her. Besides, there was the great feast that evening and, though I warned her that Alfred’s feasts were poor things, Iseult still wanted to be there. Haesten, with his mail coat and sword, was there to protect her, for I suspected she might not be allowed into the hall while the witanegemot debated and so might have to wait until evening for her chance to glimpse Alfred.

The gatekeeper demanded that we surrender our weapons, a thing I did with a bad grace, but no man, except the king’s own household troops, could go armed in Alfred’s presence. The day’s talking had already begun, the gatekeeper told us, and so we hurried past the stables and past the big new royal chapel with its twin towers. A group of priests was huddled by the main door of the great hall and I recognised Beocca, my father’s old priest, among them. I smiled in greeting, but his face, as he came towards us, was drawn and pale. ‘You’re late,’ he said sharply.

‘You’re not pleased to see me?’ I asked sarcastically.

He looked up at me. Beocca, despite his squint, red hair and palsied left hand, had grown into a stern authority. He was now a royal chaplain, confessor and a confidant to the king, and the responsibilities had carved deep lines on his face. ‘I prayed,’ he said, ‘never to see this day.’ He made the sign of the cross. ‘Who’s that?’ he stared at Iseult.

‘A queen of the Britons,’ I said.

‘She’s what?’

‘A queen. She’s with me. She wants to see Alfred.’

I don’t know whether he believed me, but he seemed not to care. Instead he was distracted, worried, and, because he lived in a strange world of kingly privilege and obsessive piety, I assumed his misery had been caused by some petty theological dispute. He had been Bebbanburg’s mass priest when I was a child and, after my father’s death, he had fled Northumberland because he could not abide living among the pagan Danes. He had found refuge in Alfred’s court where he had become a friend of the king. He was also a friend to me, a man who had preserved the parchments that proved my claim to the lordship of Bebbanburg, but on that twelfth day of Yule he was anything but pleased to see me. He plucked my arm, drawing me towards the door. ‘We must go in,’ he said, ‘and may God in his mercy protect you.’

‘Protect me?’

‘God is merciful,’ Beocca said, ‘and you must pray for that mercy,’ and then the guards opened the door and we walked into the great hall. No one stopped Iseult and, indeed, there were a score of other women watching the proceedings from the edge of the hall.

There were also more than a hundred men there, though only forty or fifty comprised the witanegemot, and those thegns and senior churchmen were on chairs and benches set in a half circle in front of the dais where Alfred sat with two priests and with Ælswith, his wife, who was pregnant. Behind them, draped with a red cloth, was an altar on which stood thick candles and a heavy silver cross, while all about the walls were platforms where, in normal times, folk slept or ate to be out of the fierce draughts. This day, though, the platforms were crammed with the followers of the thegns and noblemen of the Witan and among them, of course, were a lot of priests and monks, for Alfred’s court was more like a monastery than a royal hall. Beocca gestured that Iseult and Haesten should join those spectators, then he drew me towards the half circle of privileged advisers.

No one noticed my arrival. It was dark in the hall, for little of the wintry sunshine penetrated the small high windows. Braziers tried to give some warmth, but failed, succeeding only in thickening the smoke in the high rafters. There was a large central hearth, but the fire had been taken away to make room for the witanegemot’s circle of stools, chairs and benches. A tall man in a blue cloak was on his feet as I approached. He was talking of the necessity of repairing bridges, and how local thegns were skimping the duty, and he suggested that the king appoint an official to survey the kingdom’s roads. Another man interrupted to complain that such an appointment would encroach on the privileges of the shire ealdormen, and that started a chorus of voices, some for the proposal, most against, and two priests, seated at a small table beside Alfred’s dais, tried to write down all the comments. I recognised Wulfhere, the Ealdorman of Wiltunscir, who yawned prodigiously. Close to him was Alewold, the Bishop of Exanceaster, who was swathed in furs. Still no one noticed me. Beocca had held me back, as if waiting for a lull in the proceedings before finding me a seat. Two servants brought in baskets of logs to feed the braziers, and it was then that Ælswith saw me and she leaned across and whispered in Alfred’s ear. He had been paying close attention to the discussion, but now looked past his council to stare at me.

And a silence fell on that great hall. There had been a murmur of voices when men saw the king being distracted from the argument about bridges and they had all turned to look at me and then there was the silence that was broken by a priest’s sneeze and a sudden odd scramble as the men closest to me, those sitting beside the cold stones of the hearth, moved to one side. They were not making way for me, but avoiding me.

Ælswith was smiling and I knew I was in trouble then. My hand instinctively went to my left side, but of course I had no sword so could not touch her hilt for luck. ‘We shall talk of bridges later,’ Alfred said. He stood. He wore a bronze circlet as a crown and had a fur-trimmed blue robe, matching the gown worn by his wife.

‘What is happening?’ I asked Beocca.

‘You will be silent!’ It was Odda the Younger who spoke. He was dressed in his war-glory, in shining mail covered by a black cloak, in high boots and with a red-leather sword belt from which hung his weapons, for Odda, as commander of the king’s troops, was permitted to go armed in the royal hall. I looked into his eyes and saw triumph there, the same triumph that was on the Lady Ælswith’s pinched face, and I knew I had not been brought to receive the king’s favour, but summoned to face my enemies.

I was right. A priest was called from the dark gaggle beside the door. He was a young man with a pouchy, scowling face. He moved briskly, as if the day did not have enough hours to complete his work. He bowed to the king, then took a parchment from the table where the two clerks sat and came to stand in the centre of the Witan’s circle.

‘There is an urgent matter,’ Alfred said, ‘which, with the Witan’s permission, we shall deal with now.’ No one there was likely to disagree, so a low murmur offered approval of interrupting the more mundane discussions. Alfred nodded. ‘Father Erkenwald will read the charges,’ the king said, and took his throne again.

Charges? I was confused like a boar trapped between hounds and spears, and I seemed incapable of movement so I just stood there as Father Erkenwald unrolled the parchment and cleared his throat. ‘Uhtred of Oxton,’ he said, speaking in a high and precise voice, ‘you are this day charged with the crime of taking a king’s ship without our king’s consent, and with taking that ship to the country of Cornwalum and there making war against the Britons, again without our king’s consent, and this we can prove by oaths.’ There was a small murmur in the hall, a murmur that was stilled when Alfred raised a thin hand. ‘You are further charged,’ Erkenwald went on, ‘with making an alliance with the pagan called Svein, and with his help you murdered Christian folk in Cornwalum, despite those folk living in peace with our king, and this also we can prove by oaths.’ He paused, and now there was complete silence in the hall. ‘And you are charged,’ Erkenwald’s voice was lower now, as though he could scarce believe what he was reading, ‘with joining the pagan Svein in an attack on our blessed king’s realm by committing vile murder and impious church-robbery at Cynuit.’ This time there was no murmur, but a loud outburst of indignation and Alfred made no move to check it, so Erkenwald had to raise his voice to finish the indictment. ‘And this also,’ he was shouting now, and men hushed to listen, ‘we shall prove by oaths.’ He lowered the parchment, gave me a look of pure loathing, then walked back to the edge of the dais.

‘He’s lying,’ I snarled.

‘You will have a chance to speak,’ a fierce-looking churchman sitting beside Alfred said. He was in monk’s robes, but over them he wore a priest’s half cape richly embroidered with crosses. He had a full head of white hair and a deep, stern voice.

‘Who’s that?’ I asked Beocca.

‘The most holy Æthelred,’ Beocca said softly and, seeing I did not recognise the name, ‘Archbishop of Contwaraburg, of course.’

The archbishop leaned over to speak with Erkenwald. Ælswith was staring at me. She had never liked me, and now she was watching my destruction and taking a great pleasure from it. Alfred, meanwhile, was studying the roof beams as though he had never noticed them before, and I realised he intended to take no part in this trial, for trial it was. He would let other men prove my guilt, but doubtless he would pronounce sentence, and not just on me, it seemed, because the archbishop scowled. ‘Is the second prisoner here?’

‘He is held in the stables,’ Odda the Younger said.

‘He should be here,’ the archbishop said indignantly. ‘A man has a right to hear his accusers.’

‘What other man?’ I demanded.

It was Leofric, who was brought into the hall in chains, and there was no outcry against him because men perceived him as my follower. The crime was mine, Leofric had been snared by it, and now he would suffer for it, but he plainly had the sympathy of the men in the hall as he was brought to stand beside me. They knew him, he was of Wessex, while I was a Northumbrian interloper. He gave me a rueful glance as the guards led him to my side. ‘Up to our arses in it,’ he muttered.

‘Quiet!’ Beocca hissed.

‘Trust me,’ I said.

‘Trust you?’ Leofric asked bitterly.

But I had glanced at Iseult and she had given me the smallest shake of her head, an indication, I reckoned, that she had seen the outcome of this day and it was good. ‘Trust me,’ I said again.

‘The prisoners will be silent,’ the archbishop said.

‘Up to our royal arses,’ Leofric said quietly.

The archbishop gestured at Father Erkenwald. ‘You have oath-makers?’ he asked.

‘I do, lord.’

‘Then let us hear the first.’

Erkenwald gestured to another priest who was standing by the door leading to the passage at the back of the hall. The door was opened and a slight figure in a dark cloak entered. I could not see his face for he wore a hood. He hurried to the front of the dais and there bowed low to the king and went on his knees to the archbishop who held out a hand so that his heavy, jewelled ring could be kissed. Only then did the man stand, push back his hood and turn to face me.

It was the Ass. Asser, the Welsh monk. He stared at me as yet another priest brought him a gospel-book on which he laid a thin hand. ‘I make oath,’ he said in accented English, still staring at me, ‘that what I say is truth, and God so help me in that endeavour and condemn me to the eternal fires of hell if I dissemble.’ He bent and kissed the gospel-book with the tenderness of a man caressing a lover.

‘Bastard,’ I muttered.

Asser was a good oath-maker. He spoke clearly, describing how I had come to Cornwalum in a ship that bore a beast-head on its prow and another on its stern. He told how I had agreed to help King Peredur, who was being attacked by a neighbour assisted by the pagan Svein, and how I had betrayed Peredur by allying myself with the Dane. ‘Together,’ Asser said, ‘they made great slaughter, and I myself saw a holy priest put to death.’

‘You ran like a chicken,’ I said to him, ‘you couldn’t see a thing.’

Asser turned to the king and bowed. ‘I did run, lord king. I am a brother monk, not a warrior, and when Uhtred turned that hillside red with Christian blood I did take flight. I am not proud of that, lord king, and I have earnestly sought God’s forgiveness for my cowardice.’

Alfred smiled and the archbishop waved away Asser’s remarks as if they were nothing. ‘And when you left the slaughter,’ Erkenwald asked, ‘what then?’

‘I watched from a hilltop,’ Asser said, ‘and I saw Uhtred of Oxton leave that place in the company of the pagan ship. Two ships sailing westwards.’

‘They sailed westwards?’ Erkenwald asked.

‘To the west,’ Asser confirmed.

Erkenwald glanced at me. There was silence in the hall as men leaned forward to catch each damning word. ‘And what lay to the west?’ Erkenwald asked.

‘I cannot say,’ Asser said. ‘But if they did not go to the end of the world then I assume they turned about Cornwalum to go into the Sæfern Sea.’

‘And you know no more?’ Erkenwald asked.

‘I know I helped bury the dead,’ Asser said, ‘and I said prayers for their souls, and I saw the smouldering embers of the burned church, but what Uhtred did when he left the place of slaughter I do not know. I only know he went westwards.’

Alfred was pointedly taking no part in the proceedings, but he plainly liked Asser for, when the Welshman’s testimony was done, he beckoned him to the dais and rewarded him with a coin and a moment of private conversation. The Witan talked among themselves, sometimes glancing at me with the curiosity we give to doomed men. The Lady Ælswith, suddenly so gracious, smiled on Asser.

‘You have anything to say?’ Erkenwald demanded of me when Asser had been dismissed.

‘I shall wait,’ I said, ‘till all your lies are told.’

The truth, of course, was that Asser had told the truth, and told it plainly, clearly and persuasively. The king’s councillors had been impressed, just as they were impressed by Erkenwald’s second oath-maker.

It was Steapa Snotor, the warrior who was never far from Odda the Younger’s side. His back was straight, his shoulders square and his feral face with its stretched skin was grim. He glanced at me, bowed to the king, then laid a huge hand on the gospel-book and let Erkenwald lead him through the oath, and he swore to tell the truth on pain of hell’s eternal agony, and then he lied. He lied calmly in a flat, toneless voice. He said he had been in charge of the soldiers who guarded the place at Cynuit where the new church was being built, and how two ships had come in the dawn and how warriors streamed from the ships, and how he had fought against them and killed six of them, but there were too many, far too many, and he had been forced to retreat, but he had seen the attackers slaughter the priests and he had heard the pagan leader shout his name as a boast. ‘Svein, he was called.’

‘And Svein brought two ships?’

Steapa paused and frowned, as though he had trouble counting to two, then nodded. ‘He had two ships.’

‘He led both?’

‘Svein led one of the ships,’ Steapa said, then he pointed a finger at me. ‘And he led the other.’

The audience seemed to growl and the noise was so threatening that Alfred slapped the arm of his chair and finally stood to restore quiet. Steapa seemed unmoved. He stood, solid as an oak, and though he had not told his tale as convincingly as Brother Asser, there was something very damning in his testimony. It was so matter-of-fact, so unemotionally told, so straightforward, and none of it was true.

‘Uhtred led the second ship,’ Erkenwald said, ‘but did Uhtred join in the killing?’

‘Join it?’ Steapa asked. ‘He led it.’ He snarled those words and the men in the hall growled their anger.

Erkenwald turned to the king. ‘Lord king,’ he said, ‘he must die.’

‘And his land and property must be forfeited!’ Bishop Alewold shouted in such excitement that a whirl of his spittle landed and hissed in the nearest brazier. ‘Forfeited to the church!’

The men in the hall thumped their feet on the ground to show their approbation. Ælswith nodded vigorously, but the archbishop clapped his hands for silence. ‘He has not spoken,’ he reminded Erkenwald, then nodded at me. ‘Say your piece,’ he ordered curtly.

‘Beg for mercy,’ Beocca advised me quietly.

When you are up to your arse in shit there is only one thing to do. Attack, and so I admitted I had been at Cynuit, and that admission provoked some gasps in the hall. ‘But I was not there last summer,’ I went on. ‘I was there in the spring, at which time I killed Ubba Lothbrokson, and there are men in this hall who saw me do it! Yet Odda the Younger claimed the credit. He took Ubba’s banner, which I laid low, and he took it to his king and he claimed to have killed Ubba. Now, lest I spread the truth, which is that he is a coward and a liar, he would have me murdered by lies.’ I pointed to Steapa. ‘His lies.’

Steapa spat to show his scorn. Odda the Younger was looking furious, but he said nothing and some men noted it. To be called a coward and a liar is to be invited to do battle, but Odda stayed still as a stump.

‘You cannot prove what you say,’ Erkenwald said.

‘I can prove I killed Ubba,’ I said.

‘We are not here to discuss such things,’ Erkenwald said loftily, ‘but to determine whether you broke the king’s peace by an impious attack on Cynuit.’

‘Then summon my crewmen,’ I demanded. ‘Bring them here, put them on oath, and ask what they did in the summer.’ I waited, and Erkenwald said nothing. He glanced at the king as if seeking help, but Alfred’s eyes were momentarily closed. ‘Or are you in so much of a hurry to kill me,’ I went on, ‘that you dare not wait to hear the truth?’

‘I have Steapa’s sworn testimony,’ Erkenwald said, as if that made any other evidence unnecessary. He was flustered.

‘And you can have my oath,’ I said, ‘and Leofric’s oath, and the oath of a crewman who is here.’ I turned and beckoned Haesten who looked frightened at being summoned, but at Iseult’s urging came to stand beside me. ‘Put him on oath,’ I demanded of Erkenwald.

Erkenwald did not know what to do, but some men in the Witan called out that I had the right to summon oath-makers and the newcomer must be heard, and so a priest brought the gospel-book to Haesten. I waved the priest away. ‘He will swear on this,’ I said, and took out Thor’s amulet.

‘He’s not a Christian?’ Erkenwald demanded in astonishment.

‘He is a Dane,’ I said.

‘How can we trust the word of a Dane?’ Erkenwald demanded.

‘But our lord king does,’ I retorted. ‘He trusts the word of Guthrum to keep the peace, so why should this Dane not be trusted?’

That provoked some smiles. Many in the Witan thought Alfred far too trusting of Guthrum and I felt the sympathy in the hall move to my side, but then the archbishop intervened to declare that the oath of a pagan was of no value. ‘None whatsoever,’ he snapped. ‘He must stand down.’

‘Then put Leofric under oath,’ I demanded, ‘and then bring our crew here and listen to their testimony.’

‘And you will all lie with one tongue,’ Erkenwald said, ‘and what happened at Cynuit is not the only matter on which you are accused. Do you deny that you sailed in the king’s ship? That you went to Cornwalum and there betrayed Peredur and killed his Christian people? Do you deny that Brother Asser told the truth?’

‘But what if Peredur’s queen were to tell you that Asser lies?’ I asked. ‘What if she were to tell you that he lies like a hound at the hearth?’ Erkenwald stared at me. They all stared at me and I turned and gestured at Iseult who stepped forward, tall and delicate, the silver glinting at her neck and wrists. ‘Peredur’s queen,’ I announced, ‘whom I demand that you hear under oath, and thus hear how her husband was planning to join the Danes in an assault on Wessex.’

That was rank nonsense, of course, but it was the best I could invent at that moment, and Iseult, I knew, would swear to its truth. Quite why Svein would fight Peredur if the Briton planned to support him was a dangerously loose plank in the argument, but it did not really matter for I had confused the proceedings so much that no one was sure what to do. Erkenwald was speechless. Men stood to look at Iseult, who looked calmly back at them, and the king and the archbishop bent their heads together. Ælswith, one hand clapped to her pregnant belly, hissed advice at them. None of them wanted to summon Iseult for fear of what she would say, and Alfred, I suspect, knew that the trial, which had already become mired in lies, could only get worse.

‘You’re good, earsling,’ Leofric muttered, ‘you’re very good.’

Odda the Younger looked at the king, then at his fellow members of the Witan, and he must have known I was slithering out of his snare for he pulled Steapa to his side. He spoke to him urgently. The king was frowning, the archbishop looked perplexed, Ælswith’s blotched face showed fury while Erkenwald seemed helpless. Then Steapa rescued them. ‘I do not lie!’ he shouted.

He seemed uncertain what to say next, but he had the hall’s attention. The king gestured to him, as if inviting him to continue, and Odda the Younger whispered in the big man’s ear.

‘He says I lie,’ Steapa said, pointing at me, ‘and I say I do not, and my sword says I do not.’ He stopped abruptly, having made what was probably the longest speech of his life, but it was enough. Feet drummed on the floor and men shouted that Steapa was right, which he was not, but he had reduced the whole tangled morass of lies and accusations to a trial by combat and they all liked that. The archbishop still looked troubled, but Alfred gestured for silence.

He looked at me. ‘Well?’ he asked. ‘Steapa says his sword will support his truth. Does yours?’

I could have said no. I could have insisted on letting Iseult speak and then allowing the Witan to advise the king which side had spoken the greater truth, but I was ever rash, ever impetuous, and the invitation to fight cut through the whole entanglement. If I fought and won then Leofric and I were innocent of every charge.

I did not even think about losing. I just looked at Steapa. ‘My sword,’ I told him, ‘says I tell the truth, and that you are a stinking bag of wind, a liar from hell, a cheat and a perjurer who deserves death.’

‘Up to our arses again,’ Leofric said.

Men cheered. They liked a fight to the death, and it was much better entertainment than listening to Alfred’s harpist chant the psalms. Alfred hesitated, and I saw Ælswith look from me to Steapa, and she must have thought him the greater warrior for she leaned forward, touched Alfred’s elbow, and whispered urgently.

And the king nodded. ‘Granted,’ he said. He sounded weary, as if he was dispirited by the lies and the insults. ‘You will fight tomorrow. Swords and shields, nothing else.’ He held up a hand to stop the cheering. ‘My lord Wulfhere?’

‘Sire?’ Wulfhere struggled to his feet.

‘You will arrange the fight. And may God grant victory to the truth.’ Alfred stood, pulled his robe about him and left.

And Steapa, for the first time since I had seen him, smiled.

‘You’re a damned fool,’ Leofric told me. He had been released from his chains and allowed to spend the evening with me. Haesten was there, as was Iseult and my men who had been brought from the town. We were lodged in the king’s compound, in a cattle byre that stank of dung, but I did not notice the smell. It was Twelfth Night so there was the great feast in the king’s hall, but we were left out in the cold, watched there by two of the royal guards. ‘Steapa’s good,’ Leofric warned me.

‘I’m good.’

‘He’s better,’ Leofric said bluntly. ‘He’ll slaughter you.’

‘He won’t,’ Iseult said calmly.

‘Damn it, he’s good!’ Leofric insisted, and I believed him.

‘It’s that God-damned monk’s fault,’ I said bitterly. ‘He went bleating to Alfred, didn’t he?’ In truth, Asser had been sent by the King of Dyfed to assure the West Saxons that Dyfed was not planning war, but Asser had taken the opportunity of his embassy to recount the tale of the Eftwyrd and from that it was a small jump to conclude that we had stayed with Svein while he attacked Cynuit. Alfred had no proof of our guilt, but Odda the Younger had seen a chance to destroy me and so persuaded Steapa to lie.

‘Now Steapa will kill you,’ Leofric grumbled, ‘whatever she says.’ Iseult did not bother to answer him. She was using handfuls of grubby straw to clean my mail coat. The armour had been fetched from the Corncrake tavern and given to me, but I would have to wait till morning to get my weapons, which meant they would not be newly sharpened. Steapa, because he served Odda the Younger, was one of the king’s bodyguard, so he would have all night to put an edge on his sword. The royal kitchens had sent us food, though I had no appetite. ‘Just take it slow in the morning,’ Leofric told me.

‘Slow?’

‘You fight in a rage,’ he said, ‘and Steapa’s always calm.’

‘So better to get in a rage,’ I said.

‘That’s what he wants. He’ll fend you off and fend you off and wait till you’re tired, then he’ll finish you off. It’s how he fights.’

Harald told us the same thing. Harald was the shire-reeve of Defnascir, the widower who had summoned me to the court in Exanceaster, but he had also fought alongside us at Cynuit and that makes a bond, and sometime in the dark he splashed through the rain and mud and came into the light of the small fire that lit the cattle shed without warming it. He stopped in the doorway and gazed at me reproachfully. ‘Were you with Svein at Cynuit?’ he asked.

‘No,’ I said.

‘I didn’t think so.’ Harald came into the byre and sat by the fire. The two royal guards were at the door and he ignored them, and that was interesting. All of them served Odda, and the young ealdorman would not be pleased to hear that Harald had come to us, yet plainly Harald trusted the two guards not to tell, which suggested that there was unhappiness in Odda’s ranks. Harald put a pot of ale on the floor. ‘Steapa’s sitting at the king’s table,’ he said.

‘So he’s eating badly,’ I said.

Harald nodded, but did not smile. ‘It’s not much of a feast,’ he admitted. He stared into the fire for a moment, then looked at me. ‘How’s Mildrith?’

‘Well.’

‘She is a dear girl,’ he said, then glanced at Iseult’s dark beauty before staring into the fire again. ‘There will be a church service at dawn,’ he said, ‘and after that you and Steapa will fight.’

‘Where?’

‘In a field on the other side of the river,’ he said, then pushed the pot of ale towards me. ‘He’s left-handed.’

I could not remember fighting against a man who held his sword in his left hand, but nor could I see a disadvantage in it. We would both have our shields facing the other man’s shield instead of his weapon, but that would be a problem to both of us. I shrugged.

‘He’s used to it,’ Harald explained, ‘and you’re not. And he wears mail down to here,’ he touched his calf, ‘and he has an iron strip on his left boot.’

‘Because that’s his vulnerable foot?’

‘He plants it forward,’ Harald said, ‘inviting attack, then chops at your sword arm.’

‘So he’s a hard man to kill,’ I said mildly.

‘No one’s done it yet,’ Harald said gloomily.

‘You don’t like him?’

He did not answer at first, but drank ale then passed the pot to Leofric. ‘I like the old man,’ he said, meaning Odda the Elder. ‘He’s foul-tempered, but he’s fair enough. But the son?’ he shook his head sadly. ‘I think the son is untested. Steapa? I don’t dislike him, but he’s like a hound. He only knows how to kill.’

I stared into the feeble fire, looking for a sign from the gods in the small flames, but none came, or none that I saw. ‘He must be worried though,’ Leofric said.

‘Steapa?’ Harald asked, ‘why should he be worried?’

‘Uhtred killed Ubba.’

Harald shook his head. ‘Steapa doesn’t think enough to be worried. He just knows he’ll kill Uhtred tomorrow.’

I thought back to the fight with Ubba. He had been a great warrior, with a reputation that glowed wherever Norsemen sailed, and I had killed him, but the truth was that he had put a foot into the spilled guts of a dying man and slipped. His leg had shot sideways, he had lost his balance and I had managed to cut the tendons in his arm. I touched the hammer amulet and thought that the gods had sent me a sign after all. ‘An iron strip in his boot?’ I asked.

Harald nodded. ‘He doesn’t care how much you attack him. He knows you’re coming from his left and he’ll block most of your attacks with his sword. Big sword, heavy thing. But some blows will get by and he won’t care. You’ll waste them on iron. Heavy mail, helmet, boot, doesn’t matter. It’ll be like hitting an oak tree, and after a while you’ll make a mistake. He’ll be bruised and you’ll be dead.’

He was right, I thought. Striking an armoured man with a sword rarely achieved much except to make a bruise because the edge would be stopped by mail or helmet. Mail cannot be chopped open by a sword, which was why so many men carried axes into battle, but the rules of trial by combat said the fight had to be with swords. A sword lunge would pierce mail, but Steapa was not going to make himself an easy target for a lunge. ‘Is he quick?’ I asked.

‘Quick enough,’ Harald said, then shrugged. ‘Not as quick as you,’ he added grudgingly, ‘but he isn’t slow.’

‘What does the money say?’ Leofric asked, though he surely knew the answer.

‘No one’s wagering a penny on Uhtred,’ Harald said.

‘You should,’ I retorted.

He smiled at that, but I knew he would not take the advice. ‘The big money,’ he said, ‘is what Odda will give Steapa when he kills you. A hundred shillings.’

‘Uhtred’s not worth it,’ Leofric said with rough humour.

‘Why does he want me dead so badly?’ I wondered aloud. It could not be Mildrith, I thought, and the argument over who had killed Ubba was long in the past, yet still Odda the Younger conspired against me.

Harald paused a long time before answering. He had his bald head bowed and I thought he was in prayer, but then he looked up. ‘You threaten him,’ he said quietly.

‘I haven’t even seen him for months,’ I protested, ‘so how do I threaten him?’

Harald paused again, choosing his words carefully. ‘The king is frequently ill,’ he said after the pause, ‘and who can say how long he will live? And if, God forbid, he should die soon, then the Witan will not choose his infant son to be king. They’ll choose a nobleman with a reputation made on the battlefield. They’ll choose a man who can stand up to the Danes.’

‘Odda?’ I laughed at the thought of Odda as king.

‘Who else?’ Harald asked. ‘But if you were to stand before the Witan and swear an oath to the truth about the battle where Ubba died, they might not choose him. So you threaten him, and he fears you because of that.’

‘So now he’s paying Steapa to chop you to bits,’ Leofric added gloomily.

Harald left. He was a decent man, honest and hard-working, and he had taken a risk by coming to see me, and I had been poor company for I did not appreciate the gesture he made. It was plain he thought I must die in the morning, and he had done his best to prepare me for the fight, but despite Iseult’s confident prediction that I would live I did not sleep well. I was worried, and it was cold. The rain turned to sleet in the night and the wind whipped into the byre. By dawn the wind and sleet had stopped and instead there was a mist shrouding the buildings and icy water dripping from the mossy thatch. I made a poor breakfast of damp bread and it was while I was eating that Father Beocca came and said Alfred wished to speak with me.

I was sour. ‘You mean he wants to pray with me?’

‘He wants to speak with you,’ Beocca insisted and, when I did not move, he stamped his lamed foot. ‘It is not a request, Uhtred. It is a royal order!’

I put on my mail, not because it was time to arm for the fight, but because its leather lining offered some warmth on a cold morning. The mail was not very clean, despite Iseult’s efforts. Most men wore their hair short, but I liked the Danish way of leaving it long and so I tied it behind with a lace and Iseult plucked the straw scraps from it. ‘We must hurry,’ Beocca said and I followed him through the mud past the great hall and the newly built church to some smaller buildings made of timber that had still not weathered grey. Alfred’s father had used Cippanhamm as a hunting lodge, but Alfred was expanding it. The church had been his first new building, and he had built that even before he repaired and extended the palisade, and that was an indication of his priorities. Even now, when the nobility of Wessex was gathered just a day’s march from the Danes, there seemed to be more churchmen than soldiers in the place, and that was another indication of how Alfred thought to protect his realm. ‘The king is gracious,’ Beocca hissed at me as we went through a door, ‘so be humble.’

Beocca knocked on another door, did not wait for an answer, but pushed it open and indicated I should step inside. He did not follow me, but closed the door, leaving me in a gloomy half darkness.

A pair of beeswax candles flickered on an altar and by their light I saw two men kneeling in front of the plain wooden cross that stood between the candles. The men had their backs to me, but I recognised Alfred by his fur-trimmed blue cloak. The second man was a monk. They were both praying silently and I waited. The room was small, evidently a private chapel, and its only furniture was the draped altar and a kneeling stool on which was a closed book.

‘In the name of the Father,’ Alfred broke the silence.

‘And of the Son,’ the monk said, and he spoke English with an accent and I recognised the voice of the Ass.

‘And of the Holy Ghost,’ Alfred concluded, ‘amen.’

‘Amen,’ Asser echoed, and both men stood, their faces suffused with the joy of devout Christians who have said their prayers well, and Alfred blinked as though he were surprised to see me, though he must have heard Beocca’s knocking and the sound of the door opening and closing.

‘I trust you slept well, Uhtred?’ he said.

‘I trust you did, lord.’

‘The pains kept me awake,’ Alfred said, touching his belly, then he went to one side of the room and hauled open a big pair of wooden shutters, flooding the chapel with a wan, misty light. The window looked onto a courtyard and I was aware of men out there. The king shivered, for it was freezing in the chapel. ‘It is Saint Cedd’s feast day,’ he told me.

I said nothing.

‘You have heard of Saint Cedd?’ he asked me and, when my silence betrayed ignorance, he smiled indulgently. ‘He was an East Anglian, am I not right, brother?’

‘The most blessed Cedd was indeed an East Angle, lord,’ Asser confirmed.

‘And his mission was in Lundene,’ Alfred went on, ‘but he concluded his days at Lindisfarena. You must know that house, Uhtred?’

‘I know it, lord,’ I said. The island was a short ride from Bebbanburg and not so long before I had ridden to its monastery with Earl Ragnar and watched the monks die beneath Danish swords. ‘I know it well,’ I added.

‘So Cedd is famous in your homeland?’

‘I’ve not heard of him, lord.’

‘I think of him as a symbol,’ Alfred said, ‘a man who was born in East Anglia, did his life’s work in Mercia and died in Northumbria.’ He brought his long, pale hands together so that the fingers embraced. ‘The Saxons of England, Uhtred, gathered together before God.’

‘And united in joyful prayer with the Britons,’ Asser added piously.

‘I beseech Almighty God for that happy outcome,’ the king said, smiling at me, and by now I recognised what he was saying. He stood there, looking so humble, with no crown, no great necklace, no arm rings, nothing but a small garnet brooch holding the cloak at his neck, and he spoke of a happy outcome, but what he was really seeing was the Saxon people gathered under one king. A king of Wessex. Alfred’s piety hid a monstrous ambition.

‘We must learn from the saints,’ Alfred told me. ‘Their lives are a guide to the darkness that surrounds us, and Saint Cedd’s holy example teaches that we must be united, so I am loathe to shed Saxon blood on Saint Cedd’s feast day.’

‘There need be no bloodshed, lord,’ I said.

‘I am pleased to hear it,’ Alfred interjected.

‘If the charges against me are retracted.’

The smile went from his face and he walked to the window and stared into the misty courtyard and I looked where he looked and saw that a small display was being mounted for my benefit. Steapa was being armoured. Two men were dropping a massive mail coat over his wide shoulders, while a third stood by with an outsized shield and a monstrous sword.

‘I talked with Steapa last night,’ the king said, turning from the window, ‘and he told me there was a mist when Svein attacked at Cynuit. A morning mist like this one.’ He waved at the whiteness sifting into the chapel.

‘I wouldn’t know, lord,’ I said.

‘So it is possible,’ the king went on, ‘that Steapa was mistaken when he thought he saw you.’ I almost smiled. The king knew Steapa had lied, though he would not say as much. ‘Father Willibald also spoke to the crew of the Eftwyrd,’ the king went on, ‘and not one of them confirmed Steapa’s tale.’

The crew was still in Hamtun, so Willibald’s report must have come from there and that meant the king had known I was innocent of the slaughter at Cynuit even before I was charged. ‘So I was falsely arraigned?’ I said harshly.

‘You were accused,’ the king corrected me, ‘and accusations must be proven or refuted.’

‘Or withdrawn.’

‘I can withdraw the charges,’ Alfred agreed. Steapa, outside the window, was making sure his mail coat was seated comfortably by swinging his great sword. And it was great. It was huge, a hammer of a blade. Then the king half-closed the shutter, hiding Steapa. ‘I can withdraw the accusation about Cynuit,’ he said, ‘but I do not think Brother Asser lied to us.’

‘I have a queen,’ I said, ‘who says he does.’

‘A shadow queen,’ Asser hissed, ‘a pagan! A sorceress!’ He looked at Alfred. ‘She is evil, lord,’ he said, ‘a witch! Maleficos non patieris vivere!’

‘Thou shalt not permit a witch to live,’ Alfred translated for my benefit. ‘That is God’s commandment, Uhtred, from the holy scriptures.’

‘Your answer to the truth,’ I sneered, ‘is to threaten a woman with death?’

Alfred flinched at that. ‘Brother Asser is a good Christian,’ he said vehemently, ‘and he tells the truth. You went to war without my orders. You used my ship, my men, and you behaved treacherously! You are the liar, Uhtred, and you are the cheat!’ He spoke angrily, but managed to control his anger. ‘It is my belief,’ he went on, ‘that you have paid your debt to the church with goods stolen from other good Christians.’

‘Not true,’ I said harshly. I had paid the debt with goods stolen from a Dane.

‘So resume the debt,’ the king said, ‘and we shall have no death on this blessed day of Saint Cedd.’

I was being offered life. Alfred waited for my response, smiling. He was sure I would accept his offer because to him it seemed reasonable. He had no love for warriors, weapons and killing. Fate decreed that he must spend his reign fighting, but it was not to his taste. He wanted to civilise Wessex, to give it piety and order, and two men fighting to the death on a winter’s morning was not his idea of a well-run kingdom.

But I hated Alfred. I hated him for humiliating me at Exanceaster when he had made me wear a penitent’s robe and crawl on my knees. Nor did I think of him as my king. He was a West Saxon and I was a Northumbrian, and I reckoned so long as he was king then Wessex had small chance of surviving. He believed God would protect him from the Danes, while I believed they had to be defeated by swords. I also had an idea how to defeat Steapa, just an idea, and I had no wish to take on a debt I had already paid, and I was young and I was foolish and I was arrogant and I was never able to resist a stupid impulse. ‘Everything I have said is the truth,’ I lied, ‘and I would defend that truth with my sword.’

Alfred flinched from my tone. ‘Are you saying Brother Asser lied?’ he demanded.

‘He twists truth,’ I said, ‘like a woman wrings a hen’s neck.’

The king pulled the shutter open, showing me the mighty Steapa in his gleaming war glory. ‘You really want to die?’ he asked me.

‘I want to fight for the truth, lord king,’ I said stubbornly.

‘Then you are a fool,’ Alfred said, his anger showing again. ‘You are a liar, a fool and a sinner.’ He strode past me, pulled open the door and shouted at a servant to tell Ealdorman Wulfhere that the fight was to take place after all. ‘Go,’ he added to me, ‘and may your soul receive its just reward.’

Wulfhere had been charged with arranging the fight, but there was a delay because the ealdorman had disappeared. The town was searched, the royal buildings were searched, but there was no sign of him until a stable slave nervously reported that Wulfhere and his men had ridden away from Cippanhamm before dawn. No one knew why, though some surmised that Wulfhere wanted no part in a trial by combat, which made little sense to me for the ealdorman had never struck me as a squeamish man. Ealdorman Huppa of Thornsæta was appointed to replace him, and so it was close to midday when my swords were brought to me and we were escorted down to the meadow that lay across the bridge which led from the town’s eastern gate. A huge crowd had gathered on the river’s far bank. There were cripples, beggars, jugglers, women selling pies, dozens of priests, excited children and, of course, the assembled warriors of the West Saxon nobility, all of them in Cippanhamm for the meeting of the Witan, and all eager to see Steapa Snotor show off his renowned skill.

‘You’re a damned fool,’ Leofric said to me.

‘Because I insisted on fighting?’

‘You could have walked away.’

‘And men would have called me a coward,’ I said. And that too was the truth, that a man cannot step back from a fight and stay a man. We make much in this life if we are able. We make children and wealth and amass land and build halls and assemble armies and give great feasts, but only one thing survives us. Reputation. I could not walk away.

Alfred did not come to the fight. Instead, with the pregnant Ælswith and their two children, and escorted by a score of guards and as many priests and courtiers, he had ridden westwards. He was accompanying Brother Asser on the start of the monk’s return journey to Dyfed, and the king was making a point that he preferred the company of the British churchman to watching two of his warriors fight like snarling hounds. But no one else in Wessex wanted to miss the battle. They were eager for it, but Huppa wanted everything to be orderly and so he insisted that the crowd push back from the damp ground beside the river to give us space. Eventually the folk were massed on a green bank overlooking the trampled grass and Huppa went to Steapa to enquire if he was ready.

He was ready. His mail shone in the weak sunlight. His helmet was glistening. His shield was a huge thing, bossed and rimmed with iron, a shield that must have weighed as much as a sack of grain and was a weapon in itself if he managed to hit me with it, but his chief weapon was his great sword that was longer and heavier than any I had seen.

Huppa, trailed by two guards, came to me. His feet squelched in the grass and I thought that the ground would prove treacherous. ‘Uhtred of Oxton,’ he said, ‘are you ready?’

‘My name,’ I said, ‘is Uhtred of Bebbanburg.’

‘Are you ready?’ he demanded, ignoring my correction.

‘No,’ I said.

A murmur went through the folk nearest to me, and the murmur spread, and after a few heartbeats the whole crowd was jeering me. They thought me a coward, and that thought was reinforced when I dropped my shield and sword and made Leofric help as I stripped off the heavy coat of mail. Odda the Younger, standing beside his champion, was laughing. ‘What are you doing?’ Leofric asked me.

‘I hope you put money on me,’ I said.

‘Of course I didn’t.’

‘Are you refusing to fight?’ Huppa asked me.

‘No,’ I said, and when I was stripped of my armour I took Serpent-Breath back from Leofric. Just Serpent-Breath. No helmet, no shield, just my good sword. Now I was unburdened. The ground was heavy, Steapa was armoured, but I was light and I was fast and I was ready.

‘I’m ready,’ I told Huppa.

He went to the meadow’s centre, raised an arm, dropped it, and the crowd cheered.

I kissed the hammer around my neck, trusted my soul to the great god Thor and walked forwards.

Steapa came steadily towards me, shield up, sword held out to his left. There was no trace of concern in his eyes. He was a workman at his trade and I wondered how many men he had killed, and he must have thought my death would be easy for I had no protection, not even a shield. And so we walked towards each other until, a dozen paces from him, I ran. I ran at him, feinted right towards his sword and then broke hard to my left, still running, going past him now and I was aware of the huge blade swinging fast after me as he turned, but then I was behind him, he was still turning and I dropped to my knees, ducked, heard the blade go over my head and I was up again, lunging.

The sword pierced his mail, drew blood from just behind his left shoulder, but he was quicker than I had expected and had already checked that first great swing and was bringing the sword back and his turn pulled Serpent-Breath free. I had scratched him.

I danced back two paces. I went left again and he charged me, hoping to crush me with the weight of his shield, but I ran back to the right, fending off the sword with Serpent-Breath and the crack of the blades was like the bell of doomsday, and I lunged again, this time aiming at his waist, but he stepped back quickly. I kept going to the right, my arm jarred by the clash of the swords. I went fast, making him turn, and I feinted a lunge, brought him forward and went back to the left. The ground was boggy. I feared slipping, but speed was my weapon. I had to keep him turning, keep him swinging into empty air, and snatch what chances I could to use Serpent-Breath’s point. Bleed him enough, I thought, and he would tire, but he guessed my tactics and started making short rushes to frustrate me, and each rush would be accompanied by the hiss of that huge sword. He wanted to make me parry and hoped he could break Serpent-Breath when the blades met. I feared the same. She was well made, but even the best sword can break.

He forced me back, trying to crowd me against the spectators on the bank so he could hack me to pieces in front of them. I let him drive me, then dodged to my right where my left foot slipped and I went down on that knee and the crowd, close behind me now, took in a great breath and a woman screamed because Steapa’s huge sword was swinging like an axe onto my neck, only I had not slipped, merely pretended to, and I pushed off with my right foot, came out from under the blow and around his right flank, and he thrust the shield out, catching my shoulder with the rim and I knew I would have a bruise there, but I also had a heartbeat of opportunity and I darted Serpent-Breath forward and her point punctured his mail again to scrape against the ribs of his back and he roared as he turned, wrenching my blade free of his mail, but I was already going backwards.

I stopped ten paces away. He stopped too and watched me. There was a slight puzzlement on his big face now. There was still no worry there, just puzzlement. He pushed his left foot forward, as Harald had warned me, and he was hoping I would attack it and he would rely on the hidden iron strip in the boot to protect him while he thumped and hacked and bludgeoned me to death. I smiled at him and threw Serpent-Breath from my right hand into my left and held her there, and that was a new puzzle for him. Some men could fight with either hand, and perhaps I was one of them? He drew his foot back. ‘Why do they call you Steapa Snotor?’ I asked, ‘you’re not clever. You’ve got the brains of an addled egg.’

I was trying to enrage him and hoped that anger would make him careless, but my insult bounced off him. Instead of rushing me in fury he came slowly, watching the sword in my left hand, and the men on the hill called for him to kill me and I suddenly ran at him, broke right and he swung at me a little late, thinking I was going to go left at the last moment and I swept Serpent-Breath back and she caught his sword arm and I could feel her blade scraping through the rings of his mail, but she did not slice through them and then I was away from him and put her back into my right hand, turned, charged him and swerved away at the last moment so that his massive swing missed me by a yard.

He was still puzzled. This was like a bull-baiting and he was the bull, and his problem was to get me in a place where he could use his greater strength and weight. I was the dog, and my job was to lure him, tease him and bite him until he weakened. He had thought I would come with mail and shield and we would batter each other for a few moments until my strength faded and he could drive me to the ground with massive blows and chop me to scraps with the big sword, but so far his blade had not touched me. But nor had I weakened him. My two cuts had drawn blood, but they were mere scratches. So now he came forward again, hoping to herd me back to the river. A woman screamed from the top of the bank, and I assumed she was trying to encourage him, and the screaming grew louder and I just went back faster, making Steapa lumber forward, but I had slipped away to his right and was coming back at him, making him turn, and then he suddenly stopped and stared past me and his shield went down and his sword dropped too, and all I had to do was lunge. He was there for the killing. I could thrust Serpent-Breath into his chest or throat, or ram her into his belly, but I did none of those things. Steapa was no fool at fighting and I guessed he was luring me and I did not take the bait. If I lunged, I thought, he would crush me between his shield and sword. He wanted me to think him defenceless so that I could come into range of his weapons, but instead I stopped and spread my arms, inviting him to attack me as he was inviting me to attack him.

But he ignored me. He just stared past my shoulder. And the woman’s screaming was shrill now and there were men shouting, and Leofric was yelling my name, and the spectators were no longer watching us, but running in panic.

So I turned my back on Steapa and looked towards the town on its hill that was cradled by the river’s bend.

And I saw that Cippanhamm was burning. Smoke was darkening the winter sky and the horizon was filled with men, mounted men, men with swords and axes and shields and spears and banners, and more horsemen were coming from the eastern gate to thunder across the bridge.

Because all Alfred’s prayers had failed and the Danes had come to Wessex.

Six

Steapa recovered his wits before I did. He stared open-mouthed at the Danes crossing the bridge and then just ran towards his master, Odda the Younger, who was shouting for his horses. The Danes were spreading out from the bridge, galloping across the meadow with drawn swords and levelled spears. Smoke poured into the low wintry clouds from the burning town. Some of the king’s buildings were alight. A riderless horse, stirrups flapping, galloped across the grass, then Leofric grabbed my elbow and pulled me northwards beside the river. Most of the folk had gone south and the Danes had followed them, so north seemed to offer more safety. Iseult had my mail coat and I took it from her, leaving her to carry Wasp-Sting, and behind us the screaming rose as the Danes chopped into the panicked mass. Folk scattered. Escaping horsemen thumped past us, the hooves throwing up spadefuls of damp earth and grass with every step. I saw Odda the Younger swerve away with three other horsemen. Harald, the shire-reeve, was one of them, but I could not see Steapa and for a moment I feared the big man was looking for me. Then I forgot him as a band of Danes turned north in pursuit of Odda. ‘Where are our horses?’ I shouted at Leofric, who looked bemused and I remembered he had not travelled to Cippanhamm with me. The beasts were probably still in the yard behind the Corncrake tavern, which meant they were lost.

There was a fallen willow in a stand of leafless alders by the river and we paused there for breath, hidden by the willow’s trunk. I pulled on the mail coat, buckled on my swords and took my helmet and shield from Leofric. ‘Where’s Haesten?’ I asked.

‘He ran,’ Leofric said curtly. So had the rest of my men. They had joined the panic and were gone southwards. Leofric pointed northwards. ‘Trouble,’ he said curtly. There was a score of Danes riding down our bank of the river, blocking our escape, but they were still some distance away, while the men pursuing Odda had vanished, so Leofric led us across the water meadow to a tangle of thorns, alders, nettles and ivy. At its centre was an old wattle hut, perhaps a herdsman’s shelter, and though the hut had half collapsed it offered a better hiding place than the willow and so the three of us plunged into the nettles and crouched behind the rotting timbers.

A bell was ringing in the town. It sounded like the slow tolling which announced a funeral. It stopped abruptly, started again and then finally ended. A horn sounded. A dozen horsemen galloped close to our hiding place and all had black cloaks and black painted shields, the marks of Guthrum’s warriors.

Guthrum. Guthrum the Unlucky. He called himself King of East Anglia, but he wanted to be King of Wessex and this was his third attempt to take the country and this time, I thought, his luck had turned. While Alfred had been celebrating the twelfth night of Yule, and while the Witan met to discuss the maintenance of bridges and the punishment of malefactors, Guthrum had marched. The army of the Danes was in Wessex, Cippanhamm had fallen, and the great men of Alfred’s kingdom had been surprised, scattered or slaughtered. The horn sounded again and the dozen black-cloaked horsemen turned and rode towards the sound.

‘We should have known the Danes were coming,’ I said angrily.

‘You always said they would,’ Leofric said.

‘Didn’t Alfred have spies at Gleawecestre?’

‘He had priests praying here instead,’ Leofric said bitterly, ‘and he trusted Guthrum’s truce.’

I touched my hammer amulet. I had taken it from a boy in Eoferwic. I had been a boy myself then, newly captured by the Danes, and my opponent had fought me in a whirl of fists and feet and I had hammered him down into the riverbank and taken his amulet. I still have it. I touch it often, reminding Thor that I live, but that day I touched it because I thought of Ragnar. The hostages would be dead, and was that why Wulfhere had ridden away at dawn? But how could he have known the Danes were coming? If Wulfhere had known then Alfred would have known and the West Saxon forces would have been ready. None of it made sense, except that Guthrum had again attacked during a truce and the last time he had broken a truce he had showed that he was willing to sacrifice the hostages held to prevent just such an attack. It seemed certain he had done it again and so Ragnar would be dead and my world was diminished.

So many dead. There were corpses in the meadow between our hiding place and the river, and still the slaughter went on. Some of the Saxons had run back towards the town, discovered the bridge was guarded and tried to escape northwards and we watched them being ridden down by the Danes. Three men tried to resist, standing in a tight group with swords ready, but a Dane gave a great whoop and charged them with his horse, and his spear went through one man’s mail, crushing his chest and the other two were thrown aside by the horse’s weight and immediately more Danes closed on them, swords and axes rose, and the horsemen spurred on. A girl screamed and ran in terrified circles until a Dane, long hair flying, leaned from his saddle and pulled her dress up over her head so she was blind and half naked. She staggered in the damp grass and a half-dozen Danes laughed at her, then one slapped her bare rump with his sword and another dragged her southwards, her screams muffled by the entangling dress. Iseult was shivering and I put a mail-clad arm around her shoulders.

I could have joined the Danes in the meadow. I spoke their language and, with my long hair and my arm rings, I looked like a Dane. But Haesten was somewhere in Cippanhamm and he might betray me, and Guthrum had no great love for me, and even if I survived then it would go hard with Leofric and Iseult. These Danes were in a rampant mood, flushed by their easy success and if a dozen decided they wanted Iseult then they would take her whether they thought I was a Dane or not. They were hunting in packs and so it was best to stay hidden until the frenzy had passed. Across the river, at the top of the low hill on which Cippanhamm was built, I could see the town’s largest church burning. The thatched roof was whirling into the sky in great ribbons of flame and plumes of spark-riddled smoke.

‘What in God’s name were you doing back there?’ Leofric asked me.

‘Back there?’ his question confused me.

‘Dancing around Steapa like a gnat! He could have endured that all day!’

‘I wounded him,’ I said, ‘twice.’

‘Wounded him? Sweet Christ, he’s hurt himself worse when he was shaving!’

‘Doesn’t matter now, does it?’ I said. I guessed Steapa was dead by now. Or perhaps he had escaped. I did not know. None of us knew what was happening except that the Danes had come. And Mildrith? My son? They were far away, and presumably they would receive warning of the Danish attack, but I had no doubt that the Danes would keep going deep into Wessex and there was nothing I could do to protect Oxton. I had no horse, no men, and no chance of reaching the south coast before Guthrum’s mounted soldiers.

I watched a Dane ride past with a girl across his saddle. ‘What happened to that Danish girl you took home?’ I asked Leofric, ‘the one we captured off Wales?’

‘She’s still in Hamtun,’ he said, ‘and now that I’m not there she’s probably in someone else’s bed.’

‘Probably? Certainly.’

‘Then the bastard’s welcome to her,’ he said. ‘She cries a lot.’

‘Mildrith does that,’ I said and then, after a pause, ‘Eanflæd was angry with you.’

‘Eanflæd? Angry with me! Why?’

‘Because you didn’t go to see her.’

‘How could I? I was in chains.’ He looked satisfied that the whore had asked after him. ‘Eanflæd doesn’t cry, does she?’

‘Not that I’ve seen.’

‘Good girl that. I reckon she’d like Hamtun.’

If Hamtun still existed. Had a Danish fleet come from Lundene? Was Svein attacking across the Sæfern Sea? I knew nothing except that Wessex was suffering chaos and defeat. It began to rain again, a thin winter’s rain, cold and stinging. Iseult crouched lower and I sheltered her with my shield. Most of the folk who had gathered to watch the fight by the river had fled south and only a handful had come our way, which meant there were fewer Danes near our hiding place, and those that were in the northern river meadows were now gathering their spoils. They stripped corpses of weapons, belts, mail, clothes, anything of value. A few Saxon men had survived, but they were being led away with the children and younger women to be sold as slaves. The old were killed. A wounded man was crawling on hands and knees and a dozen Danes tormented him like cats playing with an injured sparrow, nicking him with swords and spears, bleeding him to a slow death. Haesten was one of the tormentors. ‘I always liked Haesten,’ I said sadly.

‘He’s a Dane,’ Leofric said scornfully.

‘I still liked him.’

‘You kept him alive,’ Leofric said, ‘and now he’s gone back to his own. You should have killed him.’ I watched as Haesten kicked the wounded man who called out in agony, begging to be killed, but the group of young men went on jabbing him, laughing, and the first ravens came. I have often wondered if ravens smell blood, for the sky can be clear of them all day, but when a man dies they come from nowhere on their shining black wings. Perhaps Odin sends them, for the ravens are his birds, and now they flapped down to start feasting on eyes and lips, the first course of every raven feast. The dogs and foxes would soon follow.

‘The end of Wessex,’ Leofric said sadly.

‘The end of England,’ I said.

‘What do we do?’ Iseult asked.

There was no answer from me. Ragnar must be dead, which meant I had no refuge among the Danes, and Alfred was probably dead or else a fugitive, and my duty now was to my son. He was only a baby, but he was my son and he carried my name. Bebbanburg would be his if I could take it back, and if I could not take it back then it would be his duty to recapture the stronghold, and so the name Uhtred of Bebbanburg would go on till the last weltering chaos of the dying world.

‘We must get to Hamtun,’ Leofric said, ‘find the crew.’

Except the Danes would surely be there already? Or else on their way. They knew where the power of Wessex lay, where the great lords had their halls, where the soldiers gathered, and Guthrum would be sending men to burn and kill and so disarm the Saxons’ last kingdom.

‘We need food,’ I said, ‘food and warmth.’

‘Light a fire here,’ Leofric grumbled, ‘and we’re dead.’

So we waited. The small rain turned to sleet. Haesten and his new companions, now that their victim was dead, wandered away, leaving the meadow empty but for the corpses and their attendant ravens. And still we waited, but Iseult, who was as thin as Alfred, was shivering uncontrollably and so, in the late afternoon, I took off my helmet and unbound my hair so it hung loose.

‘What are you doing?’ Leofric asked.

‘For the moment,’ I said, ‘we’re Danes. Just keep your mouth shut.’

I led them towards the town. I would have preferred to wait until dark, but Iseult was too cold to wait longer, and I just hoped the Danes had calmed down. I might look like a Dane, but it was still dangerous. Haesten might see me, and if he told others how I had ambushed the Danish ship off Dyfed then I could expect nothing but a slow death. So we went nervously, stepping past bloodied bodies along the riverside path. The ravens protested as we approached, flapped indignantly into the winter willows, and returned to their feast when we had passed. There were more corpses piled by the bridge where the young folk captured for slavery were being made to dig a grave. The Danes guarding them were drunk and none challenged us as we went across the wooden span and under the gate arch that was still hung with holly and ivy in celebration of Christmas.

The fires were dying now, damped by rain or else extinguished by the Danes who were ransacking houses and churches. I stayed in the narrowest alleys, edging past a smithy, a hide-dealer’s shop and a place where pots had been sold. Our boots crunched through the pottery shards. A young Dane was vomiting in the alley’s entrance and he told me that Guthrum was in the royal compound where there would be a feast that night. He straightened up, gasping for breath, but was sober enough to offer me a bag of coins for Iseult. There were women screaming or sobbing in houses and their noise was making Leofric angry, but I told him to stay quiet. Two of us could not free Cippanhamm, and if the world had been turned upside down and it had been a West Saxon army capturing a Danish town it would have sounded no different. ‘Alfred wouldn’t allow it,’ Leofric said sullenly.

‘You’d do it anyway,’ I said. ‘You’ve done it.’

I wanted news, but none of the Danes in the street made any sense. They had come from Gleawecestre, leaving long before dawn, they had captured Cippanhamm and now they wanted to enjoy whatever the town offered. The big church had burned, but men were raking through the smoking embers looking for silver. For lack of anywhere else to go we climbed the hill to the Corncrake tavern where we always drank and found Eanflæd, the red-headed whore, being held on a table by two young Danes while three others, none of them more than seventeen or eighteen, took turns to rape her. Another dozen Danes were drinking peaceably enough, taking scant notice of the rape.

‘You want her,’ one of the young men said, ‘you’ll have to wait.’

‘I want her now,’ I said.

‘Then you can jump in the shit-pit,’ he said. He was drunk. He had a wispy beard and insolent eyes. ‘You can jump in the shit-pit,’ he said again, evidently liking the insult, then pointed to Iseult, ‘and I’ll have her while you drown.’ I hit him, breaking his nose and spattering his face with blood, and while he gasped I kicked him hard between the legs. He went down, whimpering, and I hit a second man in the belly while Leofric loosed all his day’s frustration in a savage attack on another. The two who had been holding Eanflæd turned on us and one of them squealed when Eanflæd grabbed his hair and hooked sharp fingernails into his eyes. Leofric’s opponent was on the floor and he stamped on the boy’s throat and I head-slapped my boy until I had him by the door, then I thumped another in the ribs, rescued Eanflæd’s victim and broke his jaw, then went back to the lad who had threatened to rape Iseult. I ripped a silver loop from his ear, took off his one arm ring and stole his pouch that clinked with coins. I dropped the silver into Eanflæd’s lap, then kicked the groaning man between the legs, did it again, and hauled him out into the street.

‘Go jump in a shit-pit,’ I told him, then slammed the door. The other Danes, still drinking on the tavern’s far side, had watched the fight with amusement, and now gave us ironic applause.

‘Bastards,’ Eanflæd said, evidently talking of the men we had driven away. ‘I’m sore as hell. What are you two doing here?’

‘They think we’re Danes,’ I said.

‘We need food,’ Leofric said.

‘They’ve had most of it,’ Eanflæd said, jerking her head at the seated Danes, ‘but there might be something left in the back.’ She tied her girdle. ‘Edwulf’s dead.’ Edwulf had owned the tavern. ‘And thanks for helping me, you spavined bastards!’ She shouted this at the Danes, who did not understand her and just laughed at her, then she went towards the back room to find us food, but one of the men held out a hand to stop her.

‘Where are you going?’ he asked her in Danish.

‘She’s going past you,’ I called.

‘I want ale,’ he said, ‘and you? Who are you?’

‘I’m the man who’s going to cut your throat if you stop her fetching food,’ I said.

‘Quiet, quiet!’ an older man said, then frowned at me. ‘Don’t I know you?’

‘I was with Guthrum at Readingum,’ I said, ‘and at Werham.’

‘That must be it. He’s done better this time, eh?’

‘He’s done better,’ I agreed.

The man pointed at Iseult. ‘Yours?’

‘Not for sale.’

‘Just asking, friend, just asking.’

Eanflæd brought us stale bread, cold pork, wrinkled apples and a rock-hard cheese in which red worms writhed. The older man carried a pot of ale to our table, evidently as a peace offering, and he sat and talked with me and I learned a little more of what was happening. Guthrum had brought close to three thousand men to attack Cippanhamm. Guthrum himself was now in Alfred’s hall and half his men would stay in Cippanhamm as a garrison while the rest planned to ride either south or west in the morning. ‘Keep the bastards on the run, eh?’ the man said, then frowned at Leofric. ‘He doesn’t say much.’

‘He’s dumb,’ I said.

‘I knew a man who had a dumb wife. He was ever so happy.’ He looked jealously at my arm rings. ‘So who do you serve?’

‘Svein of the White Horse.’

‘Svein? He wasn’t at Readingum. Or at Werham.’

‘He was in Dyflin,’ I said, ‘but I was with Ragnar the Older then.’

‘Ah, Ragnar! Poor bastard.’

‘I suppose his son’s dead now?’ I asked.

‘What else?’ the man said. ‘Hostages, poor bastards.’ He thought for a heartbeat then frowned again. ‘What’s Svein doing here? I thought he was coming by ship?’

‘He is,’ I said. ‘We’re just here to talk to Guthrum.’

‘Svein sends a dumb man to talk to Guthrum?’

‘He sent me to talk,’ I said, ‘and sent him,’ I jerked a thumb at the glowering Leofric, ‘to kill people who ask too many questions.’

‘All right, all right!’ The man held up a hand to ward off my belligerence.

We slept in the stable loft, warmed by straw, and we left before dawn, and at that moment fifty West Saxons could have retaken Cippanhamm for the Danes were drunk, sleeping, and oblivious to the world. Leofric stole a sword, axe and shield from a man snoring in the tavern, then we walked unchallenged out of the western gate. In a field outside we found over a hundred horses, guarded by two men sleeping in a thatched hut, and we could have taken all the beasts, but we had no saddles or bridles and so, reluctantly, I knew we must walk. There were four of us now, because Eanflæd had decided to come with us. She had swathed Iseult in two big cloaks, but the British girl was still shivering.

We walked west and south along a road that twisted through small hills. We were heading for Baðum, and from there I could strike south towards Defnascir and my son, but it was clear the Danes were already ahead of us. Some must have ridden this way the previous day for in the first village we reached there were no cocks crowing, no sound at all, and what I had taken for a morning mist was smoke from burned cottages. Heavier smoke showed ahead, suggesting the Danes might already have reached Baðum, a town they knew well for they had negotiated one of their truces there. Then, that afternoon, a horde of mounted Danes appeared on the road behind us and we were driven west into the hills to find a hiding place.

We wandered for a week. We found shelter in hovels. Some were deserted while others still had frightened folk, but every short winter’s day was smeared with smoke as the Danes ravaged Wessex. One day we discovered a cow, trapped in its byre in an otherwise deserted homestead. The cow was with calf and bellowing with hunger, and that night we feasted on fresh meat. Next day we could not move for it was bitterly cold and a slanting rain slashed on an east wind and the trees thrashed as if in agony and the building that gave us shelter leaked and the fire choked us and Iseult just sat, eyes wide and empty, staring into the small flames.

‘You want to go back to Cornwalum?’ I asked her.

She seemed surprised I had spoken. It took her a few heartbeats to gather her thoughts, then she shrugged. ‘What is there for me?’

‘Home,’ Eanflæd said.

‘Uhtred is home for me.’

‘Uhtred is married,’ Eanflæd said harshly.

Iseult ignored that. ‘Uhtred will lead men,’ she said, rocking back and forth, ‘hundreds of men. A bright horde. I want to see that.’

‘He’ll lead you into temptation, that’s all he’ll do,’ Eanflæd said. ‘Go home, girl, say your prayers and hope the Danes don’t come.’

We kept trying to go southwards and we made some small progress every day, but the bitter days were short and the Danes seemed to be everywhere. Even when we travelled across countryside far from any track or path, there would be a patrol of Danes in the distance, and to avoid them we were constantly driven west. To our east was the Roman road that ran from Baðum and eventually to Exanceaster, the main thoroughfare in this part of Wessex, and I supposed the Danes were using it and sending patrols out to either side of the road, and it was those patrols that drove us ever nearer the Sæfern Sea, but there could be no safety there, for Svein would surely have come from Wales.

I also supposed that Wessex had finally fallen. We met a few folk, fugitives from their villages and hiding in the woods, but none had any news, only rumour. No one had seen any West Saxon soldiers, no one had heard about Alfred, they only saw Danes and the ever-present smoke. From time to time we would come across a ravaged village or a burned church. We would see ragged ravens flapping black and follow them to find rotting bodies. We were lost and any hope I had of reaching Oxton was long gone, and I assumed Mildrith had fled west into the hills as the folk around the Uisc always did when the Danes came. I hoped she was alive, I hoped my son lived, but what future he had was as dark as the long winter nights.

‘Maybe we should make our peace,’ I suggested to Leofric one night. We were in a shepherd’s hut, crouched around a small fire that filled the low turf-roofed building with smoke. We had roasted a dozen mutton ribs cut from a sheep’s half-eaten corpse. We were all filthy, damp and cold. ‘Maybe we should find the Danes,’ I said, ‘and swear allegiance.’

‘And be made slaves?’ Leofric answered bitterly.

‘We’ll be warriors,’ I said.

‘Fighting for a Dane?’ He poked the fire, throwing up a new burst of smoke. ‘They can’t have taken all Wessex,’ he protested.

‘Why not?’

‘It’s too big. There have to be some men fighting back. We just have to find them.’

I thought back to the long ago arguments in Lundene. Back then I had been a child with the Danes, and their leaders had argued that the best way to take Wessex was to attack its western heartland and there break its power. Others had wanted to start the assault by taking the old kingdom of Kent, the weakest part of Wessex and the part which contained the great shrine of Contwaraburg, but the boldest argument had won. They had attacked in the west and that first assault had failed, but now Guthrum had succeeded. Yet how far had he succeeded? Was Kent still Saxon? Defnascir?

‘And what happens to Mildrith if you join the Danes?’ Leofric asked.

‘She’ll have hidden,’ I spoke dully and there was a silence, but I saw Eanflæd was offended and I hoped she would hold her tongue.

She did not. ‘Do you care?’ she challenged me.

‘I care,’ I said.

Eanflæd scorned that answer. ‘Grown dull, has she?’

‘Of course he cares,’ Leofric tried to be a peacemaker.

‘She’s a wife,’ Eanflæd retorted, still looking at me. ‘Men tire of wives,’ she went on and Iseult listened, her big dark eyes going from me to Eanflæd.

‘What do you know of wives?’ I asked.

‘I was married,’ Eanflæd said.

‘You were?’ Leofric asked, surprised.

‘I was married for three years,’ Eanflæd said, ‘to a man who was in Wulfhere’s guard. He gave me two children, then died in the battle that killed King Æthelred.’

‘Two children?’ Iseult asked.

‘They died,’ Eanflæd said harshly. ‘That’s what children do. They die.’

‘You were happy with him?’ Leofric asked, ‘your husband?’

‘For about three days,’ she said, ‘and in the next three years I learned that men are bastards.’

‘All of them?’ Leofric asked.

‘Most.’ She smiled at Leofric, then touched his knee. ‘Not you.’

‘And me?’ I asked.

‘You?’ She looked at me for a heartbeat. ‘I wouldn’t trust you as far as I could spit,’ she said, and there was real venom in her voice, leaving Leofric embarrassed and me surprised. There comes a moment in life when we see ourselves as others see us. I suppose that is part of growing up, and it is not always comfortable. Eanflæd, at that moment, regretted speaking so harshly for she tried to soften it. ‘I don’t know you,’ she said, ‘except you’re Leofric’s friend.’

‘Uhtred is generous,’ Iseult said loyally.

‘Men are usually generous when they want something,’ Eanflæd retorted.

‘I want Bebbanburg,’ I said.

‘Whatever that is,’ Eanflæd said, ‘and to get it you’d do anything. Anything.’

There was silence. I saw a snowflake show at the half-covered door. It fluttered into the firelight and melted. ‘Alfred’s a good man,’ Leofric broke the awkward silence.

‘He tries to be good,’ Eanflæd said.

‘Only tries?’ I asked sarcastically.

‘He’s like you,’ she said. ‘He’d kill to get what he wants, but there is a difference. He has a conscience.’

‘He’s frightened of the priests, you mean.’

‘He’s frightened of God. And we should all be that. Because one day we’ll answer to God.’

‘Not me,’ I said.

Eanflæd sneered at that, but Leofric changed the conversation by saying it was snowing, and after a while we slept. Iseult clung to me in her sleep and she whimpered and twitched as I lay awake, half dreaming, thinking of her words that I would lead a bright horde. It seemed an unlikely prophecy, indeed I reckoned her powers must have gone with her virginity, and then I slept too, waking to a world made white. The twigs and branches were edged with snow, but it was already melting, dripping into a misty dawn. When I went outside I found a tiny dead wren just beyond the door and I feared it was a grim omen.

Leofric emerged from the hut, blinking at the dawn’s brilliance. ‘Don’t mind Eanflæd,’ he said.

‘I don’t.’

‘Her world’s come to an end.’

‘Then we must remake it,’ I said.

‘Does that mean you won’t join the Danes?’

‘I’m a Saxon,’ I said.

Leofric half smiled at that. He undid his breeches and had a piss. ‘If your friend Ragnar was alive,’ he asked, watching the steam rise from his urine, ‘would you still be a Saxon?’

‘He’s dead, isn’t he?’ I said bleakly, ‘sacrificed to Guthrum’s ambition.’

‘So now you’re a Saxon?’

‘I’m a Saxon,’ I said again, sounding more certain than I felt, for I did not know what the future held. How can we? Perhaps Iseult had told the truth and Alfred would give me power and I would lead a shining horde and have a woman of gold, but I was beginning to doubt Iseult’s powers. Alfred might already be dead and his kingdom was doomed, and all I knew at that moment was that the land stretched away south to a snow-covered ridge line, and there it ended in a strange empty brightness. The skyline looked like the world’s rim, poised above an abyss of pearly light. ‘We’ll keep going south,’ I said. There was nothing else to do except walk towards the brightness.

We did. We followed a sheep track to the ridge top and there I saw that the hills fell steeply away, dropping to the vast marshes of the sea. We had come to the great swamp, and the brightness I had seen was the winter light reflecting from the long meres and winding creeks.

‘What now?’ Leofric asked, and I had no answer and so we sat under the berries of a wind-bent yew and stared at the immensity of bog, water, grass and reeds. This was the vast swamp that stretched inland from the Sæfern, and if I was to reach Defnascir I either had to go around it or try to cross it. If we went around it then we would have to go to the Roman road, and that was where the Danes were, but if we tried to cross the swamp we would face other dangers. I had heard a thousand stories of men being lost in its wet tangles. It was said there were spirits there, spirits that showed at night as flickering lights, and there were paths that led only to quicksands or to drowning pools, but there were also villages in the swamp, places where folk trapped fish and eels. The people of the swamp were protected by the spirits and by the sudden surges in the tide that could drown a road in an eyeblink. Now, as the last snows melted from the reed-banks, the swamp looked like a great stretch of waterlogged land, its streams and meres swollen by the winter rains, but when the tide rose it would resemble an inland sea dotted with islands. We could see one of those islands not so far off and there was a cluster of huts on that speck of higher ground, and that would be a place to find food and warmth if we could ever reach it. Eventually we might cross the whole swamp, finding a way from island to island, but it would take far longer than a day, and we would have to find refuge at every high tide. I gazed at the long, cold stretches of water, almost black beneath the leaden clouds that came from the sea and my spirits sank for I did not know where we were going, or why, or what the future held.

It seemed to get colder as we sat, and then a light snow began drifting from the dark clouds. Just a few flakes, but enough to convince me that we had to find shelter soon. Smoke was rising from the nearest swamp village, evidence that some folk still lived there. There would be food in their hovels and a meagre warmth. ‘We have to get to that island,’ I said, pointing.

But the others were staring westwards to where a flock of pigeons had burst from the trees at the foot of the slope. The birds rose and flew in circles. ‘Someone’s there,’ Leofric said.

We waited. The pigeons settled in the trees higher up the hill. ‘Maybe it’s a boar?’ I suggested.

‘Pigeons won’t fly from a boar,’ Leofric said. ‘Boars don’t startle pigeons, any more than stags do. There are folk there.’

The thought of boars and stags made me wonder what had happened to my hounds. Had Mildrith abandoned them? I had not even told her where I had hidden the remains of the plunder we had taken off the coast of Wales. I had dug a hole in a corner of my new hall and buried the gold and silver down by the post-stone, but it was not the cleverest hiding place and if there were Danes in Oxton then they were bound to delve into the edges of the hall floor, especially if a probing spear found a place where the earth had been disturbed. A flight of ducks flew overhead. The snow was falling harder, blurring the long view across the swamp.

‘Priests,’ Leofric said.

There were a half-dozen men off to the west. They were robed in black and had come from the trees to walk along the swamp’s margin, plainly seeking a path into its tangled vastness, but there was no obvious track to the small village on its tiny island and so the priests came nearer to us, skirting the ridge’s foot. One of them was carrying a long staff and, even at a distance, I could see a glint at its head and I suspected it was a bishop’s staff, the kind with a heavy silver cross. Another three carried heavy sacks. ‘You think there’s food in those bundles?’ Leofric asked wistfully.

‘They’re priests,’ I said savagely. ‘They’ll be carrying silver.’

‘Or books,’ Eanflæd suggested. ‘Priests like books.’

‘It could be food,’ Leofric said, though not very convincingly.

A group of three women and two children now appeared. One of the women was wearing a swathing cloak of silver fur, while another carried the smaller child. The women and children were not far behind the priests, who waited for them and then they all walked eastwards until they were beneath us and there they discovered some kind of path twisting into the marshes. Five of the priests led the women into the swamp while the sixth man, evidently younger than the others, hurried back westwards. ‘Where’s he going?’ Leofric asked.

Another skein of ducks flighted low overhead, skimming down the slope to the long meres of the swamp. Nets, I thought. There must be nets in the swamp villages and we could trap fish and wildfowl. We could eat well for a few days. Eels, duck, fish, geese. If there were enough nets we could even trap deer by driving them into the tangling meshes.

‘They’re not going anywhere,’ Leofric said scornfully, nodding at the priests who had stranded themselves a hundred paces out in the swamp. The path was deceptive. It had offered an apparent route to the village, but then petered out amidst a patch of reeds where the priests huddled. They did not want to come back and did not want to go forward, and so they stayed where they were, lost and cold and despairing. They looked as though they were arguing.

‘We must help them,’ Eanflæd said and, when I said nothing, she protested that one of the women was holding a baby. ‘We have to help them!’ she insisted.

I was about to retort that the last thing we needed was more hungry mouths to feed, but her harsh words in the night had persuaded me that I had to do something to show her I was not as treacherous as she evidently believed, so I stood, hefted my shield and started down the hill. The others followed, but before we were even halfway down I heard shouts from the west. The lone priest who had gone that way was now with four soldiers and they turned as horsemen came from the trees. There were six horsemen, then eight more appeared, then another ten and I realised a whole column of mounted soldiers was streaming from the dead winter trees. They had black shields and black cloaks, so they had to be Guthrum’s men. One of the priests stranded in the swamp ran back along the path and I saw he had a sword and was going to help his companions.

It was a brave thing for the lone priest to do, but quite useless. The four soldiers and the single priest were surrounded now. They were standing back to back and the Danish horsemen were all around them, hacking down, and then two of the horsemen saw the priest with his sword and spurred towards him. ‘Those two are ours,’ I said to Leofric.

That was stupid. The four men were doomed, as was the priest if we did not intervene, but there were only two of us and, even if we killed the two horsemen, we would still face overwhelming odds, but I was driven by Eanflæd’s scorn and I was tired of skulking through the winter countryside and I was angry and so I ran down the hill, careless of the noise I made as I crashed through brittle undergrowth. The lone priest had his back to the swamp now and the horsemen were charging at him as Leofric and I burst from the trees and came at them from their left side.

I hit the nearest horse’s flank with my heavy shield. There was a scream from the horse and an explosion of wet soil, grass, snow and hooves as man and beast went down sideways. I was also on the ground, knocked there by the impact, but I recovered first and found the rider tangled with his stirrups, one leg trapped under the struggling horse and I chopped Serpent-Breath down hard. I cut into his throat, stamped on his face, chopped again, slipped in his blood, then left him and went to help Leofric who was fending off the second man who was still on horseback. The Dane’s sword thumped on Leofric’s shield, then he had to turn his horse to face me and Leofric’s axe took the horse in the face and the beast reared, the rider slid backwards and I met his spine with Serpent-Breath’s tip. Two down. The priest with the sword, not a half-dozen paces away, had not moved. He was just staring at us. ‘Get back into the marsh!’ I shouted at him. ‘Go! Go!’ Iseult and Eanflæd were with us now and they seized the priest and hurried him towards the path. It might lead nowhere, but it was better to face the remaining Danes there than on the firm ground at the hill’s foot.

And those black-cloaked Danes were coming. They had slaughtered the handful of soldiers, seen their two men killed and now came for vengeance. ‘Come on!’ I snarled at Leofric and, taking the wounded horse by the reins, I ran onto the small twisting path.

‘A horse won’t help you here,’ Leofric said.

The horse was nervous. Its face was wounded and the path was slippery, but I dragged it along the track until we were close to the small patch of land where the refugees huddled, and by now the Danes were also on the path, following us. They had dismounted. They could only come two abreast and, in places, only one man could use the track and in one of those places I stopped the horse and exchanged Serpent-Breath for Leofric’s axe. The horse looked at me with a big brown eye. ‘This is for Odin,’ I said, and I swung the axe into its neck, chopping down through mane and hide, and a woman screamed behind me as the blood spurted bright and high in the dull day. The horse whinnied, tried to rear and I swung again and this time the beast went down, thrashing hooves, blood and water splashing. Snow turned red as I axed it a third time, finally stilling it, and now the dying beast was an obstacle athwart the track and the Danes would have to fight across its corpse. I took Serpent-Breath back.

‘We’ll kill them one by one,’ I told Leofric.

‘For how long?’ He nodded westwards and I saw more Danes coming, a whole ship’s crew of mounted Danes streaming along the swamp’s edge. Fifty men? Maybe more, but even so they could only use the path in ones or twos and they would have to fight over the dead horse into Serpent-Breath and Leofric’s axe. He had lost his own axe, taken from him when he was brought to Cippanhamm, but he seemed to like his stolen weapon. He made the sign of the cross, touched the blade, then hefted his shield as the Danes came.

Two young men came first. They were wild and savage, wanting to make a reputation, but the first to come was stopped by Leofric’s axe banging into his shield and I swept Serpent-Breath beneath the shield to slice his ankle and he fell, cursing, to tangle his companion and Leofric wrenched the wide-bladed axe free and slashed it down again. The second man stumbled on the horse, and Serpent-Breath took him under the chin, above his leather coat, and the blood ran down her blade in a sudden flood and now there were two Danish corpses added to the horseflesh barricade. I was taunting the other Danes, calling them corpse-worms, telling them I had known children who could fight better. Another man came, screaming in rage as he leaped over the horse and he was checked by Leofric’s shield and Serpent-Breath met his sword with a dull crack and his blade broke, and two more men were trying to get past the horse, struggling in water up to their knees and I rammed Serpent-Breath into the belly of the first, pushing her through his leather armour, left him to die, and swung right at the man trying to get through the water. Serpent-Breath’s tip flicked across his face to spray blood into the thickening snowfall. I went forward, feet sinking, lunged again and he could not move in the mire and Serpent-Breath took his gullet. I was screaming with joy because the battle calm had come, the same blessed stillness I had felt at Cynuit. It is a joy, that feeling, and the only other joy to compare is that of being with a woman.

It is as though life slows. The enemy moves as if he is wading in mud, but I was kingfisher fast. There is rage, but it is a controlled rage, and there is joy, the joy that the poets celebrate when they speak of battle, and a certainty that death is not in that day’s fate. My head was full of singing, a keening note, high and shrill, death’s anthem. All I wanted was for more Danes to come to Serpent-Breath and it seemed to me that she took on her own life in those moments. To think was to act. A man came across the horse’s flank, I thought to slice at his ankle, knew he would drop his shield and so open his upper body to an attack, and before the thought was even coherent it was done and Serpent-Breath had taken one of his eyes. She had gone down and up, was already moving to the right to counter another man trying to get around the horse, and I let him get past the stallion’s bloodied head then scornfully drove him down into the water and there I stood on him, holding his head under my boot as he drowned. I screamed at the Danes, told them I was Valhalla’s gatekeeper, that they had been weaned on coward’s milk and that I wanted them to come to my blade. I begged them to come, but six men were dead around the horse and the others were now wary.

I stood on the dead horse and spread my arms. I held the shield high to my left and the sword to my right, and my mail coat was spattered with blood and the snow fell about my wolf-crested helmet and all I knew was the young man’s joy of slaughter. ‘I killed Ubba Lothbrokson!’ I shouted at them. ‘I killed him! So come and join him! Taste his death! My sword wants you!’

‘Boats,’ Leofric said. I did not hear him. The man I thought I had drowned was still alive and he suddenly reared from the marsh, choking and vomiting water, and I jumped down off the horse and put my foot on his head again.

‘Let him live!’ A voice shouted behind me. ‘I want a prisoner!’

The man tried to fight my foot, but Serpent-Breath put him down. He struggled again and I broke his spine with Serpent-Breath and he was still.

‘I said I wanted a prisoner,’ the voice behind protested.

‘Come and die!’ I shouted at the Danes.

‘Boats,’ Leofric said again and I glanced behind and saw three punts coming through the marsh. They were long flat boats, propelled by men with poles, and they grounded on the other side of the huddled refugees who hurried aboard. The Danes, knowing Leofric and I had to retreat if we were to gain the safety of the boats, readied for a charge and I smiled at them, inviting them.

‘One boat left,’ Leofric said. ‘Room for us. You’ll have to run like hell.’

‘I’ll stay here,’ I shouted, but in Danish. ‘I’m enjoying myself.’

Then there was a stir on the path as a man came to the front rank of the Danes and the others edged aside to give him room. He was in chain mail and had a silvered helmet with a raven’s wing at its crown, but as he came closer he took the helmet off and I saw the gold-tipped bone in his hair. It was Guthrum himself. The bone was one of his mother’s ribs and he wore it out of love for her memory. He stared at me, his gaunt face sad, and then looked down at the men we had killed. ‘I shall hunt you like a dog, Uhtred Ragnarson,’ he said, ‘and I shall kill you like a dog.’

‘My name,’ I said, ‘is Uhtred Uhtredson.’

‘We have to run,’ Leofric hissed at me.

The snow whirled above the swamp, thick enough now so that I could hardly see the ridge top from where we had glimpsed the pigeons circling. ‘You are a dead man, Uhtred,’ Guthrum said.

‘I never met your mother,’ I called to him, ‘but I would have liked to meet her.’

His face took on the reverent look that any mention of his mother always provoked. He seemed to regret that he had spoken so harshly to me for he made a conciliatory gesture. ‘She was a great woman,’ he said.

I smiled at him. At that moment, looking back, I could have changed sides so easily and Guthrum would have welcomed me if I had just given his mother a compliment, but I was a belligerent young man and the battle joy was on me. ‘I would have spat in her ugly face,’ I told Guthrum, ‘and now I piss on your mother’s soul, and tell you that the beasts of Niflheim are humping her rancid bones.’

He screamed with rage and they all charged, some splashing through the shallows, all desperate to reach me and avenge the terrible insult, but Leofric and I were running like hunted boars, and we charged through the reeds and into the water and hurled ourselves onto the last punt. The first two were gone, but the third had waited for us and, as we sprawled on its damp boards, the man with the pole pushed hard and the craft slid away into the black water. The Danes tried to follow, but we were going surprisingly fast, gliding through the snowfall, and Guthrum was shouting at me and a spear was thrown, but the marshman poled again and the spear plunged harmlessly into the mud.

‘I shall find you!’ Guthrum shouted.

‘Why should I care?’ I called back. ‘Your men only know how to die!’ I raised Serpent-Breath and kissed her sticky blade, ‘and your mother was a whore to dwarves!’

‘You should have let that one man live,’ a voice said behind me, ‘because I wanted to question him.’ The punt only contained the one passenger besides Leofric and myself, and that one man was the priest who had carried a sword and now he was sitting in the punt’s flat bow, frowning at me. ‘There was no need to kill that man,’ he said sternly and I looked at him with such fury that he recoiled. Damn all priests, I thought. I had saved the bastard’s life and all he did was reprove me, and then I saw that he was no priest at all.

It was Alfred.

The punt slid over the swamp, sometimes gliding across black water, sometimes rustling through grass or reeds. The man poling it was a bent, dark-skinned creature with a massive beard, otterskin clothes and a toothless mouth. Guthrum’s Danes were far behind now, carrying their dead back to firmer ground. ‘I need to know what they plan to do,’ Alfred complained to me. ‘The prisoner could have told us.’

He spoke more respectfully. Looking back I realised I had frightened him for the front of my mail coat was sheeted in blood and there was more blood on my face and helmet.

‘They plan to finish Wessex,’ I said curtly. ‘You don’t need a prisoner to tell you that.’

‘Lord,’ he said.

I stared at him.

‘I am a king!’ he insisted. ‘You address a king with respect.’

‘A king of what?’ I asked.

‘You’re not hurt, lord?’ Leofric asked Alfred.

‘No, thank God. No.’ He looked at the sword he carried. ‘Thank God.’ I saw he was not wearing priest’s robes, but a swathing black cloak. His long face was very pale. ‘Thank you, Leofric,’ he said, then looked up at me and seemed to shudder. We were catching up with the other two punts and I saw that Ælswith, pregnant and swathed in a silver fox-fur cloak, was in one. Iseult and Eanflæd were also in that punt while the priests were crowded onto the other and I saw that Bishop Alewold of Exanceaster was one of them.

‘What happened, lord?’ Leofric asked.

Alfred sighed. He was shivering now, but he told his story. He had ridden from Cippanhamm with his family, his bodyguard and a score of churchmen to accompany the monk Asser on the first part of his journey. ‘We had a service of thanksgiving,’ he said, ‘in the church at Soppan Byrg. It’s a new church,’ he added earnestly to Leofric, ‘and very fine. We sang psalms, said prayers, and Brother Asser went on his way rejoicing.’ He made the sign of the cross. ‘I pray he’s safe.’

‘I hope the lying bastard’s dead,’ I snarled.

Alfred ignored that. After the church service they had all gone to a nearby monastery for a meal, and it was while they were there that the Danes had come. The royal group had fled, finding shelter in nearby woods while the monastery burned. After that they had tried to ride east into the heart of Wessex but, like us, they had constantly been headed off by patrolling Danes. One night, sheltering in a farm, they had been surprised by Danish troops who had killed some of Alfred’s guards and captured all his horses and ever since they had been wandering, as lost as us, until they came to the swamp. ‘God knows what will happen now,’ Alfred said.

‘We fight,’ I said. He just looked at me and I shrugged. ‘We fight,’ I said again.

Alfred stared across the swamp. ‘Find a ship,’ he said, but so softly that I hardly heard him. ‘Find a ship and go to Frankia.’ He pulled the cloak tighter around his thin body. The snow was thickening as it fell, though it melted as soon as it met the dark water. The Danes had vanished, lost in the snow behind. ‘That was Guthrum?’ Alfred asked me.

‘That was Guthrum,’ I said. ‘And he knew it was you he pursued?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘What else would draw Guthrum here?’ I asked. ‘He wants you dead. Or captured.’

Yet, for the moment, we were safe. The island village had a score of damp hovels thatched with reeds and a few storehouses raised on stilts. The buildings were the colour of mud, the street was mud, the goats and the people were mud-covered, but the place, poor as it was, could provide food, shelter and a meagre warmth. The men of the village had seen the refugees and, after a discussion, decided to rescue them. I suspect they wanted to pillage us rather than save our lives, but Leofric and I looked formidable and, once the villagers understood that their king was their guest, they did their clumsy best for him and his family. One of them, in a dialect I could scarcely understand, wanted to know the king’s name. He had never heard of Alfred. He knew about the Danes, but said their ships had never reached the village, or any of the other settlements in the swamp. He told us the villagers lived off deer, goats, fish, eels and wildfowl, and they had plenty of food, though fuel was scarce.

Ælswith was pregnant with her third child, while her first two were in the care of nurses. There was Edward, Alfred’s heir, who was three years old and sick. He coughed, and Ælswith worried about him, though Bishop Alewold insisted it was just a winter’s cold. Then there was Edward’s elder sister, Æthelflaed, who was now six and had a bright head of golden curls, a beguiling smile and clever eyes. Alfred adored her, and in those first days in the swamp, she was his one ray of light and hope. One night, as we sat by a small, dying fire and Æthelflaed slept with her golden head in her father’s lap, he asked me about my son.

‘I don’t know where he is,’ I said. There were only the two of us, everyone else was sleeping, and I was sitting by the door staring across the frost-bleached marsh that lay black and silver under a half-moon.

‘You want to go and find him?’ he asked earnestly.

‘You truly want me to do that?’ I asked. He looked puzzled. ‘These folk are giving you shelter,’ I explained, ‘but they’d as soon cut your throats. They won’t do that while I’m here.’

He was about to protest, then understood I probably spoke the truth. He stroked his daughter’s hair. Edward coughed. He was in his mother’s hut. The coughing had become worse, much worse, and we all suspected it was the whooping cough that killed small children. Alfred flinched at the sound. ‘Did you fight Steapa?’ he asked.

‘We fought,’ I said curtly, ‘the Danes came, and we never finished. He was bleeding, I was not.’

‘He was bleeding?’

‘Ask Leofric. He was there.’

He was silent a long time, then, softly, ‘I am still king.’

Of a swamp, I thought, and said nothing.

‘And it is customary to call a king “lord”,’ he went on.

I just stared at his thin, pale face that was lit by the dying fire. He looked so solemn, but also frightened, as if he were making a huge effort to hold onto the shreds of his dignity. Alfred never lacked for bravery, but he was not a warrior and he did not much like the company of warriors. In his eyes I was a brute; dangerous, uninteresting, but suddenly indispensable. He knew I was not going to call him lord, so he did not insist. ‘What do you notice about this place?’ he asked.

‘It’s wet,’ I said.

‘What else?’

I looked for the trap in the question and found none. ‘It can only be reached by punts,’ I said, ‘and the Danes don’t have punts. But when they do have punts it’ll need more than Leofric and me to fight them off.’

‘It doesn’t have a church,’ he said.

‘I knew I liked it,’ I retorted.

He ignored that. ‘We know so little of our own kingdom,’ he said in wonderment. ‘I thought there were churches everywhere.’ He closed his eyes for a few heartbeats, then looked at me plaintively. ‘What should I do?’

I had told him to fight, but I could see no fight in him now, just despair. ‘You can go south,’ I said, thinking that was what he wanted to hear, ‘go south across the sea.’

‘To be another exiled Saxon king,’ he said bitterly.

‘We hide here,’ I said, ‘and when we think the Danes aren’t watching, we go to the south coast and find a ship.’

‘How do we hide?’ he asked. ‘They know we’re here. And they’re on both sides of the swamp.’ The marshman had told us that a Danish fleet had landed at Cynuit, which lay at the swamp’s western edge. That fleet, I assumed, was led by Svein and he would surely be wondering how to find Alfred. The king, I reckoned, was doomed, and his family too. If Æthelflaed was lucky she would be raised by a Danish family, as I had been, but more probably they would all be killed so that no Saxon could ever again claim the crown of Wessex. ‘And the Danes will be watching the south coast,’ Alfred went on.

‘They will,’ I agreed.

He looked out at the marsh where the night wind rippled the waters, shaking the long reflection of a winter moon. ‘The Danes can’t have taken all Wessex,’ he said, then flinched because Edward was coughing so painfully.

‘Probably not,’ I agreed.

‘If we could find men,’ he said, then fell silent.

‘What would we do with men?’ I asked.

‘Attack the fleet,’ he said, pointing west. ‘Get rid of Svein, if it is Svein at Cynuit, then hold the hills of Defnascir. Gain one victory and more men will come. We get stronger and one day we can face Guthrum.’

I thought about it. He had spoken dully, as if he did not really believe in the words he had said, but I thought they made a perverse kind of sense. There were men in Wessex, men who were leaderless, but they were men who wanted a leader, men who would fight, and perhaps we could secure the swamp, then defeat Svein, then capture Defnascir, and so, piece by piece, take back Wessex. Then I thought about it more closely and reckoned it was a dream. The Danes had won. We were fugitives.

Alfred was stroking his daughter’s golden hair. ‘The Danes will hunt us here, won’t they?’

‘Yes.’

‘Can you defend us?’

‘Just me and Leofric?’

‘You’re a warrior, aren’t you? Men tell me it was really you who defeated Ubba.’

‘You knew I killed Ubba?’ I asked.

‘Can you defend us?’

I would not be deflected. ‘Did you know I won your victory at Cynuit?’ I demanded.

‘Yes,’ he said simply.

‘And my reward was to crawl to your altar? To be humiliated?’ My anger made my voice too loud and Æthelflaed opened her eyes and stared at me.

‘I have made mistakes,’ Alfred said, ‘and when this is all over, and when God returns Wessex to the West Saxons, I shall do the same. I shall put on the penitent’s robe and submit myself to God.’

I wanted to kill the pious bastard then, but Æthelflaed was watching me with her big eyes. She had not moved, so her father did not know she was awake, but I did, so instead of giving my anger a loose rein I cut it off abruptly. ‘You’ll find that penitence helps,’ I said.

He brightened at that. ‘It helped you?’ he asked.

‘It gave me anger,’ I said, ‘and it taught me to hate. And anger is good. Hatred is good.’

‘You don’t mean that,’ he said.

I half drew Serpent-Breath and little Æthelflaed’s eyes grew wider. ‘This kills,’ I said, letting the sword slide back into its fleece-lined scabbard, ‘but anger and hate are what gives it the strength to kill. Go into battle without anger and hate and you’ll be dead. You need all the blades, anger and hate you can muster if we’re to survive.’

‘But can you do it?’ he asked. ‘Can you defend us here? Long enough to evade the Danes while we decide what to do?’

‘Yes,’ I said. I had no idea whether I spoke the truth, indeed I doubted that I did, but I had a warrior’s pride so gave a warrior’s answer. Æthelflaed had not taken her eyes from me. She was only six, but I swear she understood all that we talked about.

‘So I give you charge of that task,’ Alfred said. ‘Here and now I appoint you as the defender of my family. Do you accept that responsibility?’

I was an arrogant brute. Still am. He was challenging me, of course, and he knew what he was doing even if I did not. I just bridled. ‘Of course I accept it,’ I said, ‘yes.’

‘Yes what?’ he asked.

I hesitated, but he had flattered me, given me a warrior’s responsibility and so I gave him what he wanted and what I had been determined not to give to him. ‘Yes, lord,’ I said.

He held out his hand. I knew he wanted more now. I had never meant to grant him this wish, but I had called him ‘lord’ and so I knelt to him and, across Æthelflaed’s body, I took his hand in both mine.

‘Say it,’ he demanded, and he put the crucifix that hung about his neck between our hands.

‘I swear to be your man,’ I said, looking into his pale eyes, ‘until your family is safe.’

He hesitated. I had given him the oath, but I had qualified it. I had let him know that I would not remain his man for ever, but he accepted my terms. He should have kissed me on both cheeks, but that would have disturbed Æthelflaed and so he raised my right hand and kissed the knuckles, then kissed the crucifix. ‘Thank you,’ he said.

The truth, of course, was that Alfred was finished, but, with the perversity and arrogance of foolish youth, I had just given him my oath and promised to fight for him.

And all, I think, because a six-year-old stared at me. And she had hair of gold.

Seven

The kingdom of Wessex was now a swamp and, for a few days, it possessed a king, a bishop, four priests, two soldiers, the king’s pregnant wife, two nurses, a whore, two children, one of whom was sick, and Iseult.

Three of the four priests left the swamp first. Alfred was suffering, struck by the fever and belly pains that so often afflicted him, and he seemed incapable of rousing himself to any decision so I gathered the three youngest priests, told them they were useless mouths we could not afford to feed, and ordered them to leave the swamp and discover what was happening on dry ground. ‘Find soldiers,’ I told them, ‘and say the king wants them to come here.’ Two of the priests begged to be spared the mission, claiming they were scholars incapable of surviving the winter or of confronting the Danes or of enduring discomfort or of doing any real work, and Alewold, the Bishop of Exanceaster, supported them, saying that their joint prayers were needed to keep the king healthy and safe, so I reminded the bishop that Eanflæd was present.

‘Eanflæd?’ He blinked at me as though he had never heard the name.

‘The whore,’ I said, ‘from Cippanhamm.’ He still looked ignorant. ‘Cippanhamm,’ I went on, ‘where you and she rutted in the Corncrake tavern and she says …’

‘The priests will travel,’ he said hastily.

‘Of course they will,’ I said, ‘but they’ll leave their silver here.’

‘Silver?’

The priests had been carrying Alewold’s hoard which included the great pyx I had given him to settle Mildrith’s debts. That hoard was my next weapon. I took it all and displayed it to the marshmen. There would be silver, I said, for the food they gave us and the fuel they brought us and the punts they provided and the news they told us, news of the Danes on the swamp’s far side. I wanted the marshmen on our side, and the sight of the silver encouraged them, but Bishop Alewold immediately ran to Alfred and complained that I had stolen from the church. The king was too low in spirits to care, so Ælswith, his wife, entered the fray. She was a Mercian and Alfred had married her to tighten the bonds between Wessex and Mercia, though that did little good for us now because the Danes ruled Mercia. There were plenty of Mercians who would fight for a West Saxon king, but none would risk their lives for a king reduced to a soggy realm in a tidal swamp. ‘You will return the pyx!’ Ælswith ordered me. She looked ragged, her greasy hair tangled, her belly swollen and her clothes filthy. ‘Give it back now. This instant!’

I looked at Iseult. ‘Should I?’

‘No,’ Iseult said.

‘She has no say here!’ Ælswith shrieked.

‘But she’s a queen,’ I said, ‘and you’re not.’ That was one cause of Ælswith’s bitterness, that the West Saxons never called the king’s wife a queen. She wanted to be Queen Ælswith and had to be content with less. She tried to snatch back the pyx, but I tossed it on the ground and, when she reached for it, I swung Leofric’s axe. The blade chewed into the big plate, mangling the silver crucifixion, and Ælswith squealed in alarm and backed away as I hacked again. It took several blows, but I finally reduced the heavy plate into shreds of mangled silver that I tossed onto the coins I had taken from the priests. ‘Silver for your help!’ I told the marshmen.

Ælswith spat at me, then went back to her son. Edward was three years old and it was evident now that he was dying. Alewold had claimed it was a mere winter’s cold, but it was plainly worse, much worse. Every night we would listen to the coughing, an extraordinary hollow racking sound from such a small child, and all of us lay awake, dreading the next bout, flinching from the desperate, rasping sound, and when the coughing fits ended we feared they would not start again. Every silence was like the coming of death, yet somehow the small boy lived, clinging on through those cold wet days in the swamp. Bishop Alewold and the women tried all they knew. A gospel book was laid on his chest and the bishop prayed. A concoction of herbs, chicken dung and ash was pasted on his chest and the bishop prayed. Alfred travelled nowhere without his precious relics, and the toe ring of Mary Magdalen was rubbed on the child’s chest and the bishop prayed, but Edward just became weaker and thinner. A woman of the swamp, who had a reputation as a healer, tried to sweat the cough from him, and when that did not work she attempted to freeze it from him, and when that did not work she tied a live fish to his chest and commanded the cough and the fever to flee to the fish, and the fish certainly died, but the boy went on coughing and the bishop prayed and Alfred, as thin as his sick son, was in despair. He knew the Danes would search for him, but so long as the child was ill he dared not move, and he certainly could not contemplate the long walk south to the coast where he might find a ship to carry him and his family into exile.

He was resigned to that fate now. He had dared to hope he might recover his kingdom, but the cold reality was more persuasive. The Danes held Wessex and Alfred was king of nothing, and his son was dying. ‘It is a retribution,’ he said. It was the night after the three priests had left and Alfred unburdened his soul to me and Bishop Alewold. We were outside, watching the moon silver the marsh mists, and there were tears on Alfred’s face. He was not really talking to either of us, only to himself.

‘God would not take a son to punish the father,’ Alewold said.

‘God sacrificed his own son,’ Alfred said bleakly, ‘and he commanded Abraham to kill Isaac.’

‘He spared Isaac,’ the bishop said.

‘But he is not sparing Edward,’ Alfred said, and flinched as the awful coughing sounded from the hut. He put his head in his hands, covering his eyes.

‘Retribution for what?’ I asked, and the bishop hissed in reprimand for such an indelicate question.

‘Æthelwold,’ Alfred said bleakly. Æthelwold was his nephew, the drunken, resentful son of the old king.

‘Æthelwold could never have been king,’ Alewold said. ‘He is a fool!’

‘If I name him king now,’ Alfred said, ignoring what the bishop had said, ‘perhaps God will spare Edward?’

The coughing ended. The boy was crying now, a gasping, grating, pitiful crying, and Alfred covered his ears with his hands.

‘Give him to Iseult,’ I said.

‘A pagan!’ Alewold warned Alfred, ‘an adulteress!’ I could see Alfred was tempted by my suggestion, but Alewold was having the better of the argument. ‘If God will not cure Edward,’ the bishop said, ‘do you think he will let a witch succeed?’

‘She’s no witch,’ I said.

‘Tomorrow,’ Alewold said, ignoring me, ‘is Saint Agnes’s Eve. A holy day, lord, a day of miracles! We shall pray to Saint Agnes and she will surely unleash God’s power on the boy.’ He raised his hands to the dark sky. ‘Tomorrow, lord, we shall summon the strength of the angels, we shall call heaven’s aid to your son and the blessed Agnes will drive the evil sickness from young Edward.’

Alfred said nothing, just stared at the swamp’s pools that were edged with a thin skim of ice that seemed to glow in the wan moonlight.

‘I have known the blessed Agnes perform miracles!’ the bishop pressed the king, ‘there was a child in Exanceaster who could not walk, but the saint gave him strength and now he runs!’

‘Truly?’ Alfred asked.

‘With my own eyes,’ the bishop said, ‘I witnessed the miracle.’

Alfred was reassured. ‘Tomorrow then,’ he said.

I did not stay to see the power of God unleashed. Instead I took a punt and went south to a place called Æthelingæg which lay at the southern edge of the swamp and was the biggest of all the marsh settlements. I was beginning to learn the swamp. Leofric stayed with Alfred, to protect the king and his family, but I explored, discovering scores of track-ways through the watery void. The paths were called beamwegs and were made of logs that squelched underfoot, but by using them I could walk for miles. There were also rivers that twisted through the low land, and the biggest of those, the Pedredan, flowed close to Æthelingæg which was an island, much of it covered with alders in which deer and wild goats lived, but there was also a large village on the island’s highest spot and the headman had built himself a great hall there. It was not a royal hall, not even as big as the one I had made at Oxton, but a man could stand upright beneath its beams and the island was large enough to accommodate a small army.

A dozen beamwegs led away from Æthelingæg, but none led directly to the mainland. It would be a hard place for Guthrum to attack, because he would have to thread the swamp, but Svein, who we now knew commanded the Danes at Cynuit, at the Pedredan’s mouth, would find it an easy place to approach for he could bring his ships up the river and, just north of Æthelingæg, he could turn south onto the River Thon which flowed past the island. I took the punt into the centre of the Thon and discovered, as I had feared, that it was more than deep enough to float the Dane’s beast-headed ships.

I walked back to the place where the Thon flowed into the Pedredan. Across the wider river was a sudden hill, steep and high, which stood in the surrounding marshland like a giant’s burial mound. It was a perfect place to make a fort, and if a bridge could be built across the Pedredan then no Danish ship could pass up river.

I walked back to the village where I discovered that the headman was a grizzled and stubborn old man called Haswold who was disinclined to help. I said I would pay good silver to have a bridge made across the Pedredan, but Haswold declared the war between Wessex and the Danes did not affect him. ‘There is madness over there,’ he said, waving vaguely at the eastern hills. ‘There’s always madness over there, but here in the swamp we mind our own business. No one minds us and we don’t mind them.’ He stank of fish and smoke. He wore otterskins that were greasy with fish oil and his greying beard was flecked by fish scales. He had small cunning eyes in an old cunning face, and he also had a half-dozen wives, the youngest of whom was a child who could have been his own granddaughter, and he fondled her in front of me as if her existence proved his manhood. ‘I’m happy,’ he said, leering at me, ‘so why should I care for your happiness?’

‘The Danes could end your happiness.’

‘The Danes?’ He laughed at that, and the laugh turned into a cough. He spat. ‘If the Danes come,’ he went on, ‘then we go deep into the swamp and the Danes go.’ He grinned at me and I wanted to kill him, but that would have done no good. There were fifty or more men in the village and I would have lasted all of a dozen heartbeats, though the man I really feared was a tall, broad-shouldered, stooping man with a puzzled look on his face. What frightened me about him was that he carried a long hunting bow. Not one of the short fowling bows that many of the marshmen possessed, but a stag killer, as tall as a man, and capable of shooting an arrow clean through a mail coat. Haswold must have sensed my fear of the bow for he summoned the man to stand beside him. The man looked confused by the summons, but obeyed. Haswold pushed a gnarled hand under the young girl’s clothes then stared at me as he fumbled, laughing at what he perceived as my impotence. ‘The Danes come,’ he said again, ‘and we go deep into the swamp and the Danes go away.’ He thrust his hand deeper into the girl’s goatskin dress and mauled her breasts. ‘Danes can’t follow us, and if they do follow us then Eofer kills them.’ Eofer was the archer and, hearing his name, he looked startled, then worried. ‘Eofer’s my man,’ Haswold boasted, ‘he puts arrows where I tell him to put them.’ Eofer nodded.

‘Your king wants a bridge made,’ I said, ‘a bridge and a fort.’

‘King?’ Haswold stared about the village. ‘I know no king. If any man is king here, ’tis me.’ He cackled with laughter at that and I looked at the villagers and saw nothing but dull faces. None shared Haswold’s amusement. They were not, I thought, happy under his rule and perhaps he sensed what I was thinking for he suddenly became angry, thrusting his girl-bride away. ‘Leave us!’ he shouted at me. ‘Just go away!’

I went away, returning to the smaller island where Alfred sheltered and where Edward lay dying. It was nightfall and the bishop’s prayers to Saint Agnes had failed. Eanflæd told me how Alewold had persuaded Alfred to give up one of his most precious relics, a feather from the dove that Noah had released from the ark. Alewold cut the feather into two parts, returning one part to the king, while the other was scorched on a clean pan and, when it was reduced to ash, the scraps were stirred into a cup of holy water which Ælswith forced her son to drink. He had been wrapped in lambskin, for the lamb was the symbol of Saint Agnes who had been a child martyr in Rome.

But neither feather nor lambskin had worked. If anything, Eanflæd said, the boy was worse. Alewold was praying over him now. ‘He’s given him the last rites,’ Eanflæd said. She looked at me with tears in her eyes. ‘Can Iseult help?’

‘The bishop won’t allow it,’ I said.

‘He won’t allow it?’ she asked indignantly. ‘He’s not the one who’s dying!’

So Iseult was summoned, and Alfred came from the hut and Alewold, scenting heresy, came with him. Edward was coughing again, the sound terrible in the evening silence. Alfred flinched at the noise, then demanded to know if Iseult could cure his son’s illness.

Iseult did not reply at once. Instead she turned and gazed across the swamp to where the moon rose above the mists. ‘The moon gets bigger,’ she said.

‘Do you know a cure?’ Alfred pleaded.

‘A growing moon is good,’ Iseult said dully, then turned on him. ‘But there will be a price.’

‘Whatever you want!’ he said.

‘Not a price for me,’ she said, irritated that he had misunderstood her. ‘But there’s always a price. One lives? Another must die.’

‘Heresy!’ Alewold intervened.

I doubt Alfred understood Iseult’s last three words, or did not care what she meant, he only snatched the tenuous hope that perhaps she could help. ‘Can you cure my son?’ he demanded.

She paused, then nodded. ‘There is a way,’ she said.

‘What way?’

‘My way.’

‘Heresy!’ Alewold warned again.

‘Bishop!’ Eanflæd said warningly, and the bishop looked abashed and fell silent.

‘Now?’ Alfred demanded of Iseult.

‘Tomorrow night,’ Iseult said. ‘It takes time. There are things to do. If he lives till nightfall tomorrow I can help. You must bring him to me at moonrise.’

‘Not tonight?’ Alfred pleaded.

‘Tomorrow,’ Iseult said firmly.

‘Tomorrow is the Feast of Saint Vincent,’ Alfred said, as though that might help, and somehow the child survived that night and, next day, Saint Vincent’s Day, Iseult went with me to the eastern shore where we gathered lichen, burdock, celandine and mistletoe. She would not let me use metal to scrape the lichen or cut the herbs, and before any was collected we had to walk three times around the plants which, because it was winter, were poor and shrivelled things. She also made me cut thorn boughs, and I was allowed to use a knife for that because the thorns were evidently not as important as the lichen or herbs. I watched the skyline as I worked, looking for any Danes, but if they patrolled the edge of the swamp none appeared that day. It was cold, a gusting wind clutching at our clothes. It took a long time to find the plants Iseult needed, but at last her pouch was full and I dragged the thorn bushes back to the island and took them into the hut where she instructed me to dig two holes in the floor. ‘They must be as deep as the child is tall,’ she said, ‘and as far apart from each other as the length of your forearm.’

She would not tell me what the pits were for. She was subdued, very close to tears. She hung the celandine and burdock from a roof beam, then pounded the lichen and the mistletoe into a paste that she moistened with spittle and urine, and she chanted long charms in her own language over the shallow wooden bowl. It all took a long time and sometimes she just sat exhausted in the darkness beyond the hearth and rocked to and fro. ‘I don’t know that I can do it,’ she said once.

‘You can try,’ I said helplessly.

‘And if I fail,’ she said, ‘they will hate me more than ever.’

‘They don’t hate you,’ I said.

‘They think I am a sinner and a pagan,’ she said, ‘and they hate me.’

‘So cure the child,’ I said, ‘and they will love you.’

I could not dig the pits as deep as she wanted, for the soil became ever wetter and, just a couple of feet down, the two holes were filling with brackish water. ‘Make them wider,’ Iseult ordered me, ‘wide enough so the child can crouch in them.’ I did as she said, and then she made me join the two holes by knocking a passage in the damp earth wall that divided them. That had to be done carefully to ensure that an arch of soil remained to leave a tunnel between the holes. ‘It is wrong,’ Iseult said, not talking of my excavation, but of the charm she planned to work. ‘Someone will die, Uhtred. Somewhere a child will die so this one will live.’

‘How do you know that?’ I asked.

‘Because my twin died when I was born,’ she said, ‘and I have his power. But if I use it he reaches from the dark world and takes the power back.’

Darkness fell and the boy went on coughing, though to my ears it sounded feebler now as though there was not enough life left in his small body. Alewold was praying still. Iseult crouched in the door of our hut, staring into the rain, and when Alfred came close she waved him away.

‘He’s dying,’ the king said helplessly.

‘Not yet,’ Iseult said, ‘not yet.’

Edward’s breath rasped. We could all hear it, and we all thought every harsh breath would be his last, and still Iseult did not move, and then at last a rift showed in the rain clouds and a feeble wash of moonlight touched the marsh and she told me to fetch the boy.

Ælswith did not want Edward to go. She wanted him cured, but when I said Iseult insisted on working her charms alone, Ælswith wailed that she did not want her son to die apart from his mother. Her crying upset Edward who began to cough again. Eanflæd stroked his forehead. ‘Can she do it?’ she demanded of me.

‘Yes,’ I said and did not know if I spoke the truth.

Eanflæd took hold of Ælswith’s shoulders. ‘Let the boy go, my lady,’ she said, ‘let him go.’

‘He’ll die!’

‘Let him go,’ Eanflæd said, and Ælswith collapsed into the whore’s arms and I picked up Alfred’s son who felt as light as the feather that had not cured him. He was hot, yet shivering, and I wrapped him in a wool robe and carried him to Iseult.

‘You can’t stay here,’ she told me. ‘Leave him with me.’

I waited with Leofric in the dark. Iseult insisted we could not watch through the hut’s entrance, but I dropped my helmet outside the door and, by crouching under the eaves I could just see a reflection of what happened inside. The small rain died and the moon grew brighter.

The boy coughed. Iseult stripped him naked and rubbed her herb paste on his chest, and then she began to chant in her own tongue, an endless chant it seemed, rhythmic, sad and so monotonous that it almost put me to sleep. Edward cried once, and the crying turned to coughing and his mother screamed from her hut that she wanted him back, and Alfred calmed her and then came to join us and I waved him down so that he would not shadow the moonlight before Iseult’s door.

I peered at the helmet and saw, in the small reflected firelight, that Iseult, naked herself now, was pushing the boy into one of the pits and then, still chanting, she drew him through the earth passage. Her chanting stopped and, instead, she began to pant, then scream, then pant again. She moaned, and Alfred made the sign of the cross, and then there was silence and I could not see properly, but suddenly Iseult cried aloud, a cry of relief, as if a great pain was ended, and I dimly saw her pull the naked boy out of the second pit. She laid him on her bed and he was silent as she crammed the thorn bushes into the tunnel of earth. Then she lay beside the boy and covered herself with my large cloak.

There was silence. I waited, and waited, and still there was silence. And the silence stretched until I understood that Iseult was sleeping, and the boy was sleeping too, or else he was dead, and I picked up the helmet and went to Leofric’s hut. ‘Shall I fetch him?’ Alfred asked nervously.

‘No.’

‘His mother …’ he began.

‘Must wait till morning, lord.’

‘What can I tell her?’

‘That her son is not coughing, lord.’

Ælswith screamed that Edward was dead, but Eanflæd and Alfred calmed her, and we all waited, and still there was silence, and in the end I fell asleep.

I woke in the dawn. It was raining as if the world was about to end, a torrential grey rain that swept in vast curtains from the Sæfern Sea, a rain that drummed on the ground and poured off the reed thatch and made streams on the small island where the little huts crouched. I went to the door of Leofric’s shelter and saw Ælswith watching from her doorway. She looked desperate, like a mother about to hear that her child had died, and there was nothing but silence from Iseult’s hut, and Ælswith began to weep, the terrible tears of a bereaved mother, and then there was a strange sound. At first I could not hear properly, for the seething rain was loud, but then I realised the sound was laughter. A child’s laughter, and a heartbeat later Edward, still naked as an egg, and all muddy from his rebirth through the earth’s passage, ran from Iseult’s hut and went to his mother.

‘Dear God,’ Leofric said.

Iseult, when I found her, was weeping, and would not be consoled. ‘I need you,’ I told her harshly.

She looked up at me. ‘Need me?’

‘To build a bridge.’

She frowned. ‘You think a bridge can be made with spells?’

‘My magic this time,’ I said. ‘I want you healthy. I need a queen.’

She nodded. And Edward, from that day forward, thrived.

The first men came, summoned by the priests I had sent onto the mainland. They came in ones and twos, struggling through the winter weather and the swamp, bringing tales of Danish raids, and when we had two days of sunshine they came in groups of six or seven so that the island became crowded. I sent them out on patrol, but ordered none to go too far west for I did not want to provoke Svein, whose men were camped beside the sea. He had not attacked us yet, which was foolish of him, for he could have brought his ships up the rivers and then struggled through the marsh, but I knew he would attack us when he was ready, and so I needed to make our defences. And for that I needed Æthelingæg.

Alfred was recovering. He was still sick, but he saw God’s favour in his son’s recovery and it never occurred to him that it had been pagan magic that caused the recovery. Even Ælswith was generous and, when I asked her for the loan of her silver fox-fur cloak and what few jewels she possessed, she yielded them without fuss. The fur cloak was dirty, but Eanflæd brushed and combed it.

There were over twenty men on our island now, probably enough to capture Æthelingæg from its sullen headman, but Alfred did not want the marshmen killed. They were his subjects, he said, and if the Danes attacked they might yet fight for us, which meant the large island and its village must be taken by trickery and so, a week after Edward’s rebirth, I took Leofric and Iseult south to Haswold’s settlement. Iseult was dressed in the silver fur and had a silver chain in her hair and a great garnet brooch at her breast. I had brushed her hair till it shone and in that winter’s gloom she looked like a princess come from the bright sky.

Leofric and I, dressed in mail and helmets, did nothing except walk around Æthelingæg, but after a while a man came from Haswold and said the chieftain wished to talk with us. I think Haswold expected us to go to his stinking hut, but I demanded he come to us instead. He could have taken from us whatever he wanted, of course, for there were only the three of us and he had his men, including Eofer the archer, but Haswold had at last understood that dire things were happening in the world beyond the swamp and that those events could pierce even his watery fastness, and so he chose to talk. He came to us at the settlement’s northern gate which was nothing more than a sheep hurdle propped against decaying fish traps and there, as I expected, he gazed at Iseult as though he had never seen a woman before. His small cunning eyes flickered at me and back to her. ‘Who is she?’ he asked.

‘A companion,’ I said carelessly. I turned to look at the sudden steep hill across the river where I wanted the fort made.

‘Is she your wife?’ Haswold asked.

‘A companion,’ I said again. ‘I have a dozen like her,’ I added.

‘I will pay you for her,’ Haswold said. A score of men were behind him, but only Eofer was armed with anything more dangerous than an eel spear.

I turned Iseult to face him, then I stood behind her and put my hands over her shoulders and undid the big garnet brooch. She shivered slightly and I whispered that she was safe and, when the brooch pin slid out of the heavy hide, I pulled her fur cloak apart. I showed her nakedness to Haswold and he dribbled into his fish-scaled beard and his dirty fingers twitched in his foul otterskin furs, and then I closed the cloak and let Iseult fasten the brooch. ‘How much will you pay me?’ I asked him.

‘I can just take her,’ Haswold said, jerking his head at his men.

I smiled at that. ‘You could,’ I said, ‘but many of you will die before we die, and our ghosts will come back to kill your women and make your children scream. Have you not heard that we have a witch with us? You think your weapons can fight magic?’

None of them moved.

‘I have silver,’ Haswold said.

‘I don’t need silver,’ I said. ‘What I want is a bridge and a fort.’ I turned and pointed to the hill across the river. ‘What is that hill called?’

He shrugged. ‘The hill,’ he said, ‘just the hill.’

‘It must become a fort,’ I said, ‘and it must have walls of logs and a gate of logs and a tower so that men can see a long way down river. And then I want a bridge leading to the fort, a bridge strong enough to stop ships.’

‘You want to stop ships?’ Haswold asked. He scratched his groin and shook his head. ‘Can’t build a bridge.’

‘Why not?’

‘Too deep.’ That was probably true. It was low tide now and the Pedredan flowed sullenly between steep and deep mud banks. ‘But I can block the river,’ Haswold went on, his eyes still on Iseult.

‘Block the river,’ I said, ‘and build a fort.’

‘Give her to me,’ Haswold promised, ‘and you will have both.’

‘Do what I want,’ I said, ‘and you can have her, her sisters and her cousins. All twelve of them.’

Haswold would have drained the whole swamp and built a new Jerusalem for the chance to hump Iseult, but he had not thought beyond the end of his prick. But that was far enough for me, and I have never seen work done so quickly. It was done in days. He blocked the river first and did it cleverly by making a floating barrier of logs and felled trees, complete with their tangling branches, all of them lashed together with goathide ropes. A ship’s crew could eventually dismantle such a barrier, but not if they were being assailed by spears and arrows from the fort on the hill that had a wooden palisade, a flooded ditch and a flimsy tower made of alder logs bound together with leather ropes. It was all crude work, but the wall was solid enough, and I began to fear that the small fort would be finished before enough West Saxons arrived to garrison it, but the three priests were doing their job and the soldiers still came, and I put a score of them in Æthelingæg and told them to help finish the fort.

When the work was done, or nearly done, I took Iseult back to Æthelingæg and I dressed her as she had been dressed before, only this time she wore a deerskin tunic beneath the precious fur, and I stood her in the centre of the village and said Haswold could take her. He looked at me warily, then looked at her. ‘She’s mine?’ he asked.

‘All yours,’ I said, and stepped away from her.

‘And her sisters?’ he asked greedily, ‘her cousins?’

‘I shall bring them tomorrow.’

He beckoned Iseult towards his hut. ‘Come,’ he said.

‘In her country,’ I said, ‘it is the custom for the man to lead the woman to his bed.’

He stared at Iseult’s lovely, dark-eyed face above the swathing silver cloak. I stepped further back, abandoning her, and he darted forward, reaching for her, and she brought her hands out from under the thick fur and she was holding Wasp-Sting and its blade sliced up into Haswold’s belly. She gave a cry of horror and surprise as she brought the blade up, and I saw her hesitate, shocked by the effort required to pierce a man’s belly and by the reality of what she had done. Then she gritted her teeth and ripped the blade hard, opening him up like a gutted carp, and he gave a strange mewing cry as he staggered back from her vengeful eyes. His intestines spilled into the mud, and I was beside her then with Serpent-Breath drawn. She was gasping, trembling. She had wanted to do it, but I doubted she would want to do it again.

‘You were asked,’ I snarled at the villagers, ‘to fight for your king.’ Haswold was on the ground, twitching, his blood soaking his otterskin clothes. He made a mewing noise again and one of his filthy hands scrabbled among his own spilt guts. ‘For your king!’ I repeated. ‘When you are asked to fight for your king it is not a request, but a duty! Every man here is a soldier and your enemy is the Danes and if you will not fight them then you will fight against me!’

Iseult still stood beside Haswold who jerked like a dying fish. I edged her away and stabbed Serpent-Breath down to slit his throat. ‘Take his head,’ she told me.

‘His head?’

‘Strong magic.’

We mounted Haswold’s head on the fort wall so that it stared towards the Danes, and in time eight more heads appeared there. They were the heads of Haswold’s chief supporters, murdered by the villagers who were glad to be rid of them. Eofer, the archer, was not one of them. He was a simpleton, incapable of speaking sense, though he grunted and, from time to time, made howling noises. He could be led by a child, but when asked to use his bow he proved to have a terrible strength and uncanny accuracy. He was Æthelingæg’s hunter, capable of dropping a full-grown boar at a hundred paces, and that was what his name meant; boar.

I left Leofric to command the garrison at Æthelingæg and took Iseult back to Alfred’s refuge. She was silent and I thought her sunk in misery, but then she suddenly laughed. ‘Look!’ she pointed at the dead man’s blood matted and sticky in Ælswith’s fur.

She still had Wasp-Sting. That was my short sword, a sax, and it was a wicked blade in a close fight where men are so crammed together that there is no room to swing a long sword or an axe. She trailed the blade in the water, then used the hem of Ælswith’s fur to scrub the diluted blood from the steel. ‘It is harder than I thought,’ she said, ‘to kill a man.’

‘It takes strength.’

‘But I have his soul now.’

‘Is that why you did it?’

‘To give life,’ she said, ‘you must take it from somewhere else.’ She gave me back Wasp-Sting.

Alfred was shaving when we returned. He had been growing a beard, not for a disguise, but because he had been too low in spirits to bother about his appearance, but when Iseult and I reached his refuge he was standing naked to the waist beside a big wooden tub of heated water. His chest was pathetically thin, his belly hollow, but he had washed himself, combed his hair and was now scratching at his stubble with an ancient razor he had borrowed from a marshman. His daughter Æthelflaed was holding a scrap of silver that served as a mirror. ‘I am feeling better,’ he told me solemnly.

‘Good, lord,’ I said, ‘so am I.’

‘Does that mean you’ve killed someone?’

‘She did,’ I jerked my head at Iseult.

He gave her a speculative look. ‘My wife,’ he said, dipping the razor in the water, ‘was asking whether Iseult is truly a queen.’

‘She was,’ I said, ‘but that means little in Cornwalum. She was queen of a dung-heap.’

‘And she’s a pagan?’

‘It was a Christian kingdom,’ I said. ‘Didn’t Brother Asser tell you that?’

‘He said they were not good Christians.’

‘I thought that was for God to judge.’

‘Good, Uhtred, good!’ He waved the razor at me, then stooped to the silver mirror and scraped at his upper lip. ‘Can she foretell the future?’

‘She can.’

He scraped in silence for a few heartbeats. Æthelflaed watched Iseult solemnly. ‘So tell me,’ Alfred said, ‘does she say I will be king in Wessex again?’

‘You will,’ Iseult said tonelessly, surprising me.

Alfred stared at her. ‘My wife,’ he said, ‘says that we can look for a ship now that Edward is better. Look for a ship, go to Frankia and perhaps travel on to Rome. There is a Saxon community in Rome.’ He scraped the blade against his jawbone. ‘They will welcome us.’

‘The Danes will be defeated,’ Iseult said, still tonelessly, but without a quiver of doubt in her voice.

Alfred rubbed his face. ‘The example of Boethius tells me she’s right,’ he said.

‘Boethius?’ I asked, ‘is he one of your warriors?’

‘He was a Roman, Uhtred,’ Alfred said in a tone which chided me for not knowing, ‘and a Christian and a philosopher and a man rich in book-learning. Rich indeed!’ He paused, contemplating the story of Boethius. ‘When the pagan Alaric overran Rome,’ he went on, ‘and all civilisation and true religion seemed doomed, Boethius alone stood against the sinners. He suffered, but he won through, and we can take heart from him. Indeed we can.’ He pointed the razor at me. ‘We must never forget the example of Boethius, Uhtred, never.’

‘I won’t, lord,’ I said, ‘but do you think book-learning will get you out of here?’

‘I think,’ he said, ‘that when the Danes are gone, I shall grow a proper beard. Thank you, my sweet,’ this last was to Æthelflaed. ‘Give the mirror back to Eanflæd, will you?’

Æthelflaed ran off and Alfred looked at me with some amusement. ‘Does it surprise you that my wife and Eanflæd have become friends?’

‘I’m glad of it, lord.’

‘So am I.’

‘But does your wife know Eanflæd’s trade?’ I asked.

‘Not exactly,’ he said. ‘She believes Eanflæd was a cook in a tavern. Which is truth enough. So we have a fort at Æthelingæg?’

‘We do. Leofric commands there and has forty-three men.’

‘And we have twenty-eight here. The very hosts of Midian!’ He was evidently amused. ‘So we shall move there.’

‘Maybe in a week or two.’

‘Why wait?’ he asked.

I shrugged. ‘This place is deeper in the swamp. When we have more men, when we know we can hold Æthelingæg, that is the time for you to go there.’

He pulled on a grubby shirt. ‘Your new fort can’t stop the Danes?’

‘It will slow them, lord. But they could still struggle through the marsh.’ They would find it difficult, though, for Leofric was digging ditches to defend Æthelingæg’s western edge.

‘You’re telling me Æthelingæg is more vulnerable than this place?’

‘Yes, lord.’

‘Which is why I must go there,’ he said. ‘Men can’t say their king skulked in an unreachable place, can they?’ He smiled at me. ‘They must say he defied the Danes. That he waited where they could reach him, that he put himself into danger.’

‘And his family?’ I asked.

‘And his family,’ he said firmly. He thought for a moment. ‘If they come in force they could take all the swamp, isn’t that true?’

‘Yes, lord.’

‘So no place is safer than another. But how large a force does Svein have?’

‘I don’t know, lord.’

‘Don’t know?’ It was a reproof, gentle enough, but still a reproof.

‘I haven’t gone close to them, lord,’ I explained, ‘because till now we’ve been too weak to resist them, and so long as they leave us undisturbed then so long do we leave them undisturbed. There’s no point in kicking a wild bees’ nest, not unless you’re determined to get the honey.’

He nodded acceptance of that argument. ‘But we need to know how many bees there are, don’t we?’ he said. ‘So tomorrow we shall take a look at our enemy. You and me, Uhtred.’

‘No, lord,’ I said firmly. ‘I shall go. You shouldn’t risk yourself.’

‘That is exactly what I need to do,’ he said, ‘and men must know I do it for I am the king, and why would men want a king who does not share their danger?’ He waited for an answer, but I had none. ‘So let’s say our prayers,’ he finished, ‘then we shall eat.’

It was fish stew. It was always fish stew.

And next day we went to find the enemy.

There were six of us. The man who poled the punt, Iseult and I, two of the newly-arrived household troops and Alfred. I tried once again to make him stay behind, but he insisted. ‘If anyone should stay,’ he said, ‘it is Iseult.’

‘She comes,’ I said.

‘Evidently.’ He did not argue, and we all climbed into a large punt and went westwards, and Alfred stared at the birds, thousands of birds. There were coot, moorhen, dabchicks, ducks, grebes and herons, while off to the west, white against the sullen sky, was a cloud of gulls.

The marshman slid us silent and fast through secret channels. There were times when he seemed to be taking us directly into a bank of reeds or grass, yet the shallow craft would slide through into another stretch of open water. The incoming tide rippled through the gaps, bringing fish to the hidden nets and basket traps. Beneath the gulls, far off to the west, I could see the masts of Svein’s fleet, which had been dragged ashore on the coast.

Alfred saw them too. ‘Why don’t they join Guthrum?’

‘Because Svein doesn’t want to take Guthrum’s orders,’ I said.

‘You know that?’

‘He told me so.’

Alfred paused, perhaps thinking of my trial in front of the Witan. He gave me a rueful look. ‘What sort of man is he?’

‘Formidable.’

‘So why hasn’t he attacked us here?’

I had been wondering the same thing. Svein had missed a golden chance to invade the swamp and hunt Alfred down. So why had he not even tried? ‘Because there’s easier plunder elsewhere,’ I suggested, ‘and because he won’t do Guthrum’s bidding. They’re rivals. If Svein takes Guthrum’s orders then he acknowledges Guthrum as his king.’

Alfred stared at the distant masts which showed as small scratches against the sky, then I mutely pointed towards a hill that reared steeply from the western water flats and the marshman obediently went that way, and when the punt grounded we clambered through thick alders and past some sunken hovels where sullen folk in dirty otter fur watched us pass. The marshman knew no name for the place, except to call it Brant, which meant steep, and it was steep. Steep and high, offering a view southwards to where the Pedredan coiled like a great snake through the swamp’s heart. And at the river’s mouth, where sand and mud stretched into the Sæfern Sea, I could see the Danish ships.

They were grounded on the far bank of the Pedredan in the same place that Ubba had grounded his ships before meeting his death in battle. From there Svein could easily row to Æthelingæg, for the river was wide and deep, and he would meet no challenge until he reached the river barrier beside the fort where Leofric waited. I wanted Leofric and his garrison to have some warning if the Danes attacked, and this high hill offered a view of Svein’s camp, but was far enough away so that it would not invite an attack from the enemy. ‘We should make a beacon here,’ I said to Alfred. A fire lit here would give Æthelingæg two or three hours’ warning of a Danish attack.

He nodded, but said nothing. He stared at the distant ships, but they were too far off to count. He looked pale, and I knew he had found the climb to the summit painful, so now I urged him downhill to where the hovels leaked smoke. ‘You should rest here, lord,’ I told him. ‘I’m going to count ships. But you should rest.’

He did not argue and I suspected his stomach pains were troubling him again. I found a hovel that was occupied by a widow and her four children, and I gave her a silver coin and said her king needed warmth and shelter for the day, and I do not think she understood who he was, but she knew the value of a shilling and so Alfred went into her house and sat by the fire. ‘Give him broth,’ I told the widow, whose name was Elwide, ‘and let him sleep.’

She scorned that. ‘Folk can’t sleep while there’s work!’ she said. ‘There are eels to skin, fish to smoke, nets to mend, traps to weave.’

‘They can work,’ I said, pointing to the two household troops, and I left them all to Elwide’s tender mercies while Iseult and I took the punt southwards and, because the Pedredan’s mouth was only three or four miles away, and because Brant was such a clear landmark, I left the marshman to help skin and smoke eels.

We crossed a smaller river and then poled through a long mere broken by marram grass and by now I could see the hill on the Pedredan’s far bank where we had been trapped by Ubba, and I told Iseult the story of the fight as I poled the punt across the shallows. The hull grounded twice and I had to push it into deeper water until I realised the tide was falling fast and so I tied the boat to a rotting stake, then we walked across a drying waste of mud and sea lavender towards the Pedredan. I had grounded farther from the river than I had wanted, and it was a long walk into a cold wind, but we could see all we needed once we reached the steep bank at the river’s edge. The Danes could also see us. I was not in mail, but I did have my swords, and the sight of me brought men to the further shore where they hurled insults across the swirling water. I ignored them. I was counting ships and saw twenty-four beast-headed boats hauled up on the strip of ground where we had defeated Ubba the year before. Ubba’s burned ships were also there, their black ribs half buried in the sand where the men capered and shouted their insults.

‘How many men can you see?’ I asked Iseult.

There were a few Danes in the half wrecked remnants of the monastery where Svein had killed the monks, but most were by the boats. ‘Just men?’ she asked.

‘Forget the women and children,’ I said. There were scores of women, mostly in the small village that was a little way upstream.

She did not know the English words for the bigger numbers, so she gave me her estimate by opening and closing her fingers six times. ‘Sixty?’ I said, and nodded. ‘At most seventy. And there are twenty-four ships.’ She frowned, not understanding the point I made. ‘Twenty-four ships,’ I said, ‘means an army of what? Eight hundred? Nine hundred men? So those sixty or seventy men are the ship-guards. And the others? Where are the others?’ I asked the question of myself, watching as five of the Danes dragged a small boat to the river’s edge. They planned to row across and capture us, but I did not intend to stay that long. ‘The others,’ I answered my own question, ‘have gone south. They’ve left their women behind and gone raiding. They’re burning, killing, getting rich. They’re raping Defnascir.’

‘They’re coming,’ Iseult said, watching the five men clamber into the small boat.

‘You want me to kill them?’

‘You can?’ She looked hopeful.

‘No,’ I said, ‘so let’s go.’

We started back across the long expanse of mud and sand. It looked smooth, but there were runnels cutting through and the tide had turned and the sea was sliding back into the land with surprising speed. The sun was sinking, tangling with black clouds and the wind pushed the flood up the Sæfern and the water gurgled and shivered as it filled the small creeks. I turned to see that the five Danes had abandoned their chase and gone back to the western bank where their fires looked delicate against the evening’s fading light. ‘I can’t see the boat,’ Iseult said.

‘Over there,’ I said, but I was not certain I was right because the light was dimming and our punt was tied against a background of reeds, and now we were jumping from one dry spot to another, and the tide went on rising and the dry spots shrank and then we were splashing through the water and still the wind drove the tide inland.

The tides are big in the Sæfern. A man could make a house at low tide, and by high it would have vanished beneath the waves. Islands appear at low tide, islands with summits thirty feet above the water, and at the high tide they are gone, and this tide was pushed by the wind and it was coming fast and cold and Iseult began to falter so I picked her up and carried her like a child. I was struggling and the sun was behind the low western clouds and it seemed now that I was wading through an endless chill sea, but then, perhaps because the darkness was falling, or perhaps because Hoder, the blind god of the night, favoured me, I saw the punt straining against its tether.

I dropped Iseult into the boat and hauled myself over the low side. I cut the rope, then collapsed, cold and wet and frightened and let the punt drift on the tide.

‘You must get back to the fire,’ Iseult chided me. I wished I had brought the marshman now for I had to find a route across the swamp and it was a long, cold journey in the day’s last light. Iseult crouched beside me and stared far across the waters to where a hill reared up green and steep against the eastern land. ‘Eanflæd told me that hill is Avalon,’ she said reverently.

‘Avalon?’

‘Where Arthur is buried.’

‘I thought you believed he was sleeping?’

‘He does sleep,’ she said fervently. ‘He sleeps in his grave with his warriors.’ She gazed at the distant hill that seemed to glow because it had been caught by the day’s last errant shaft of sunlight spearing from the west beneath the furnace of glowing clouds. ‘Arthur,’ she said in a whisper. ‘He was the greatest king who ever lived. He had a magic sword.’ She told me tales of Arthur, how he had pulled his sword from a stone, and how he had led the greatest warriors to battle, and I thought that his enemies had been us, the English Saxons, yet Avalon was now in England, and I wondered if, in a few years, the Saxons would recall their lost kings and claim they were great and all the while the Danes would rule us. When the sun vanished Iseult was singing softly in her own tongue, but she told me the song was about Arthur and how he had placed a ladder against the moon and netted a swathe of stars to make a cloak for his queen, Guinevere. Her voice carried us across the twilit water, sliding between reeds, and behind us the fires of the Danish ship-guards faded in the encroaching dark and far off a dog howled and the wind sighed cold and a spattering of rain shivered the black mere.

Iseult stopped singing as Brant loomed. ‘There’s going to be a great fight,’ she said softly and her words took me by surprise and I thought she was still thinking of Arthur and imagining that the sleeping king would erupt from his earthy bed in gouts of soil and steel. ‘A fight by a hill,’ she went on, ‘a steep hill, and there will be a white horse and the slope will run with blood and the Danes will run from the Sais.’

The Sais were us, the Saxons. ‘You dreamed this?’ I asked.

‘I dreamed it,’ she said.

‘So it is true?’

‘It is fate,’ she said, and I believed her, and just then the bow of the punt scraped on the island’s shore.

It was pitch dark, but there were fish-smoking fires on the beach, and by their dying light we found our way to Elwide’s house. It was made of alder logs thatched with reeds and I found Alfred sitting by the central hearth where he stared absently into the flames. Elwide, the two soldiers and the marshman were all skinning eels at the hut’s further end where three of the widow’s children were plaiting willow withies into traps and the fourth was gutting a big pike.

I crouched by the fire, wanting its warmth to bring life to my frozen legs.

Alfred blinked as though he was surprised to see me. ‘The Danes?’ he asked.

‘Gone inland,’ I said. ‘Left sixty or seventy men as ship-guards.’ I crouched by the fire, shivering, wondering if I would ever be warm again.

‘There’s food here,’ Alfred said vaguely.

‘Good,’ I said, ‘because we’re starving.’

‘No, I mean there’s food in the marshes,’ he said. ‘Enough food to feed an army. We can raid them, Uhtred, gather men and raid them. But that isn’t enough. I have been thinking. All day, I’ve been thinking.’ He looked better now, less pained, and I suspected he had wanted time to think and had found it in this stinking hovel. ‘I’m not going to run away,’ he said firmly. ‘I’m not going to Frankia.’

‘Good,’ I said, though I was so cold I was not really listening to him.

‘We’re going to stay here,’ he said, ‘raise an army, and take Wessex back.’

‘Good,’ I said again. I could smell burning. The hearth was surrounded by flat stones and Elwide had put a dozen oat bannocks on the stones to cook and the edges nearest the flames were blackening. I moved one of them, but Alfred frowned and gestured for me to stop for fear of distracting him. ‘The problem,’ he said, ‘is that I cannot afford to fight a small war.’

I did not see what other war he could fight, but kept silent.

‘The longer the Danes stay here,’ he said, ‘the firmer their grip. Men will start giving Guthrum their allegiance. I can’t have that.’

‘No, lord.’

‘So they have to be defeated.’ He spoke grimly. ‘Not beaten, Uhtred, but defeated!’

I thought of Iseult’s dream, but said nothing, then I thought how often Alfred had made peace with the Danes instead of fighting them, and still I said nothing.

‘In spring,’ he went on, ‘they’ll have new men and they’ll spread through Wessex until, by summer’s end, there’ll be no Wessex. So we have to do two things.’ He was not so much telling me as just thinking aloud. ‘First,’ he held out one long finger, ‘we have to stop them from dispersing their armies. They have to fight us here. They have to be kept together so they can’t send small bands across the country and take estates.’ That made sense. Right now, from what we heard from the land beyond the swamp, the Danes were raiding all across Wessex, but they were going fast, snatching what plunder they could before other men could take it, but in a few weeks they would start looking for places to live. By keeping their attention on the swamp Alfred hoped to stop that process. ‘And while they look at us,’ he said, ‘the fyrd must be gathered.’

I stared at him. I had supposed he would stay in the swamp until the Danes either overwhelmed us or we gained enough strength to take back a shire, and then another shire, a process of years, but his vision was much grander. He would assemble the army of Wessex under the Danish noses and take everything back at once. It was like a game of dice and he had decided to take everything he had, little as it was, and risk it all on one throw. ‘We shall make them fight a great battle,’ he said grimly, ‘and with God’s help we shall destroy them.’

There was a sudden scream. Alfred, as if startled from a reverie, looked up, but too late, because Elwide was standing over him, screaming that he had burned the oatcakes. ‘I told you to watch them!’ she shouted and, in her fury, she slapped the king with a skinned eel. The blow made a wet sound as it struck and had enough force to knock Alfred sideways. The two soldiers jumped up, hands going to their swords, but I waved them back as Elwide snatched the burned cakes from the stones. ‘I told you to watch them!’ she shrieked, and Alfred lay where he had fallen and I thought he was crying, but then I saw he was laughing. He was helpless with laughter, weeping with laughter, as happy as ever I saw him.

Because he had a plan to take back his kingdom.

Æthelingæg’s garrison now had seventy-three men. Alfred moved there with his family, and sent six of Leofric’s men to Brant armed with axes and orders to make a beacon. He was at his best in those days, calm and confident, the panic and despair of the first weeks of January swept away by his irrational belief that he would regain his kingdom before summer touched the land. He was immensely cheered too by the arrival of Father Beocca who came limping from the landing stage, face beaming, to fall prostrate at the king’s feet. ‘You live, lord!’ Beocca said, clutching the king’s ankles, ‘God be praised, you live!’

Alfred raised him and embraced him, and both men wept and next day, a Sunday, Beocca preached a sermon which I could not help hearing because the service was held in the open air, under a clear cold sky, and Æthelingæg’s island was too small to escape the priest’s voice. Beocca said how David, King of Israel, had been forced to flee his enemies, how he had taken refuge in the cave of Adullam, and how God had led him back into Israel and to the defeat of his enemies. ‘This is our Adullam!’ Beocca said, waving his good hand at Æthelingæg’s thatched roofs, ‘and this is our David!’ he pointed to the king, ‘and God will lead us to victory!’

‘It’s a pity, father,’ I said to Beocca afterwards, ‘that you weren’t this belligerent two months ago.’

‘I rejoice,’ he said loftily, ‘to find you in the king’s good graces.’

‘He’s discovered the value,’ I said, ‘of murderous bastards like me, so perhaps he’ll learn to distrust the advice of snivelling bastards like you who told him the Danes could be defeated by prayer.’

He sniffed at that insult, then looked disapprovingly at Iseult. ‘You have news of your wife?’

‘None.’

Beocca had some news, though none of Mildrith. He had fled south in front of the invading Danes, getting as far as Dornwaraceaster in Thornsæta where he had found refuge with some monks. The Danes had come, but the monks had received warning of their approach and had hidden in an ancient fort that lay near the town. The Danes had sacked Dornwaraceaster, taking silver, coins and women, then they had moved eastwards and shortly after that Huppa, the Ealdorman of Thornsæta, had come to the town with fifty warriors. Huppa had set the monks and townspeople to mending the old Roman walls. ‘The folk there are safe for the moment,’ Beocca told me, ‘but there is not sufficient food if the Danes return and lay siege.’ Then Beocca had heard that Alfred was in the great swamps and Beocca had travelled alone, though on his last day of walking he had met six soldiers going to Alfred and so he had finished his journey with them. He brought no news of Wulfhere, but he had been told that Odda the Younger was somewhere on the upper reaches of the Uisc in an ancient fort built by the old people. Beocca had seen no Danes on his journey. ‘They raid everywhere,’ he said gloomily, ‘but God be praised we saw none of them.’

‘Is Dornwaraceaster a large place?’ I asked.

‘Large enough. It had three fine churches, three!’

‘A market?’

‘Indeed, it was prosperous before the Danes came.’

‘Yet the Danes didn’t stay there?’

‘Nor were they at Gifle,’ he said, ‘and that’s a goodly place.’

Guthrum had surprised Alfred, defeated the forces at Cippanhamm and driven the king into hiding, but to hold Wessex he needed to take all her walled towns, and if Beocca could walk three days across country and see no Danes then it suggested Guthrum did not have the men to hold all he had taken. He could bring more men from Mercia or East Anglia, but then those places might rise against their weakened Danish overlords, so Guthrum had to be hoping that more ships would come from Denmark. In the meantime, we learned, he had garrisons in Baðum, Readingum, Mærlebeorg and Andefera, and doubtless he held other places, and Alfred suspected, rightly as it turned out, that most of eastern Wessex was in Danish hands, but great stretches of the country were still free of the enemy. Guthrum’s men were making raids into those stretches, but they did not have sufficient force to garrison towns like Wintanceaster, Gifle or Dornwaraceaster. In the early summer, Alfred knew, more ships would bring more Danes, so he had to strike before then, to which end, on the day after Beocca arrived, he summoned a council.

There were now enough men on Æthelingæg for a royal formality to prevail. I no longer found Alfred sitting outside a hut in the evening, but instead had to seek an audience with him. On the Monday of the council he gave orders that a large house was to be made into a church, and the family that lived there was evicted and some of the newly-arrived soldiers were ordered to make a great cross for the gable and to carve new windows in the walls. The council itself met in what had been Haswold’s hall, and Alfred had waited till we were assembled before making his entrance, and we had all stood as he came in and waited as he took one of the two chairs on the newly-made dais. Ælswith sat beside him, her pregnant belly swathed in the silver fur cloak that was still stained with Haswold’s blood.

We were not allowed to sit until the Bishop of Exanceaster said a prayer, and that took time, but at last the king waved us down. There were six priests in the half circle and six warriors. I sat beside Leofric, while the other four soldiers were newly-arrived men who had served in Alfred’s household troops. One of those was a grey-bearded man called Egwine who told me he had led a hundred men at Æsc’s Hill and plainly thought he should now lead all the troops gathered in the swamp. I knew he had urged his case with the king and with Beocca who sat just below the dais at a rickety table on which he was trying to record what was said at the council. Beocca was having difficulties for his ink was ancient and faded, his quill kept splitting and his parchments were wide margins torn from a missal, so he was unhappy, but Alfred liked to reduce arguments to writing.

The king formally thanked the bishop for his prayer, then announced, sensibly enough, that we could not hope to deal with Guthrum until Svein was defeated. Svein was the immediate threat for, though most of his men had gone south to raid Defnascir, he still had the ships with which to enter the swamp. ‘Twenty-four ships,’ Alfred said, raising an eyebrow at me.

‘Twenty-four, lord,’ I confirmed.

‘So, when his men are assembled, he can muster near a thousand men.’ Alfred let that figure linger awhile. Beocca frowned as his split quill spattered ink on his tiny patch of parchment.

‘But a few days ago,’ Alfred went on, ‘there were only seventy ship-guards at the mouth of the Pedredan.’

‘Around seventy,’ I said. ‘There could be more we didn’t see.’

‘Fewer than a hundred, though?’

‘I suspect so, lord.’

‘So we must deal with them,’ Alfred said, ‘before the rest return to their ships.’ There was another silence. All of us knew how weak we were. A few men arrived every day, like the half-dozen who had come with Beocca, but they came slowly, either because the news of Alfred’s existence was spreading slowly, or else because the weather was cold and men do not like to travel on wet, cold days. Nor were there any thegns among the newcomers, not one. Thegns were noblemen, men of property, men who could bring scores of well-armed followers to a fight, and every shire had its thegns who ranked just below the reeve and ealdorman, who were themselves thegns. Thegns were the power of Wessex, but none had come to Æthelingæg. Some, we heard, had fled abroad, while others tried to protect their property. Alfred, I was certain, would have felt more comfortable if he had a dozen thegns about him, but instead he had me and Leofric and Egwine. ‘What are our forces now?’ Alfred asked us.

‘We have over a hundred men,’ Egwine said brightly.

‘Of whom only sixty or seventy are fit to fight,’ I said. There had been an outbreak of sickness, men vomiting and shivering and hardly able to control their bowels. Whenever troops gather such sickness seems to strike.

‘Is that enough?’ Alfred asked.

‘Enough for what, lord?’ Egwine was not quick-witted.

‘Enough to get rid of Svein, of course,’ Alfred said, and again there was silence because the question was absurd.

Then Egwine straightened his shoulders. ‘More than enough, lord!’

Ælswith bestowed a smile on him.

‘And how would you propose doing it?’ Alfred asked.

‘Take every man we have, lord,’ Egwine said, ‘every fit man, and attack them. Attack them!’

Beocca was not writing. He knew when he was hearing nonsense and he was not going to waste scarce ink on bad ideas.

Alfred looked at me. ‘Can it be done?’

‘They’ll see us coming,’ I said, ‘they’ll be ready.’

‘March inland,’ Egwine said, ‘come from the hills.’

Again Alfred looked at me. ‘That will leave Æthelingæg undefended,’ I said, ‘and it will take at least three days, at the end of which our men will be cold, hungry and tired, and the Danes will see us coming when we emerge from the hills, and that’ll give them time to put on armour and gather weapons. And at best it will be equal numbers. At worst?’ I just shrugged. After three or four days the rest of Svein’s forces might have returned and our seventy or eighty men would be facing a horde.

‘So how do you do it?’ Alfred asked.

‘We destroy their boats,’ I said.

‘Go on.’

‘Without boats,’ I said, ‘they can’t come up the rivers. Without boats, they’re stranded.’

Alfred nodded. Beocca was scratching away again. ‘So how do you destroy the boats?’ the king asked.

I did not know. We could take seventy men to fight their seventy, but at the end of the fight, even if we won, we would be lucky to have twenty men still standing. Those twenty could burn the boats, of course, but I doubted we would survive that long. There were scores of Danish women at Cynuit and, if it came to a fight, they would join in and the odds were that we would be defeated. ‘Fire,’ Egwine said enthusiastically. ‘Carry fire in punts and throw the fire from the river.’

‘There are ship-guards,’ I said tiredly, ‘and they’ll be throwing spears and axes, sending arrows, and you might burn one boat, but that’s all.’

‘Go at night,’ Egwine said.

‘It’s almost a full moon,’ I said, ‘and they’ll see us coming. And if the moon is clouded we won’t see their fleet.’

‘So how do you do it?’ Alfred demanded again.

‘God will send fire from heaven,’ Bishop Alewold said, and no one responded.

Alfred stood. We all got to our feet. Then he pointed at me. ‘You will destroy Svein’s fleet,’ he said, ‘and I would know how you plan to do it by this evening. If you cannot do it then you,’ he pointed to Egwine, ‘will travel to Defnascir, find Ealdorman Odda and tell him to bring his forces to the river mouth and do the job for us.’

‘Yes, lord,’ Egwine said.

‘By tonight,’ Alfred said to me coldly, and then he walked out.

He left me angry. He had meant to leave me angry. I stalked up to the newly-made fort with Leofric and stared across the marshes to where the clouds heaped above the Sæfern. ‘How are we to burn twenty-four ships?’ I demanded.

‘God will send fire from heaven,’ Leofric said, ‘of course.’

‘I’d rather he sent a thousand troops.’

‘Alfred won’t summon Odda,’ Leofric said. ‘He just said that to annoy you.’

‘But he’s right, isn’t he?’ I said grudgingly. ‘We have to get rid of Svein.’

‘How?’

I stared at the tangled barricade that Haswold had made from felled trees. The water, instead of flowing downstream, was coming upstream because the tide was on the flood and so the ripples ran eastwards from the tangled branches. ‘I remember a story,’ I said, ‘from when I was a small child.’ I paused, trying to recall the tale which, I assume, had been told to me by Beocca. ‘The Christian god divided a sea, isn’t that right?’

‘Moses did,’ Leofric said.

‘And when the enemy followed,’ I said, ‘they were drowned.’

‘Clever,’ Leofric said.

‘So that’s how we’ll do it,’ I said.

‘How?’

But instead of telling him I summoned the marshmen and talked with them, and by that night I had my plan and, because it was taken from the scriptures, Alfred approved it readily. It took another day to get everything ready. We had to gather sufficient punts to carry forty men and I also needed Eofer, the simple-minded archer. He was unhappy, not understanding what I wanted, and he gibbered at us and looked terrified, but then a small girl, perhaps ten or eleven years old, took his hand and explained that he had to go hunting with us. ‘He trusts you?’ I asked the child.

‘He’s my uncle,’ she said. Eofer was holding her hand and he was calm again.

‘Does Eofer do what you tell him?’

She nodded, her small face serious, and I told her she must come with us to keep her uncle happy.

We left before the dawn. We were twenty marshmen, skilled with boats, twenty warriors, a simple-minded archer, a child and Iseult. Alfred, of course, did not want me to take Iseult, but I ignored him and he did not argue. Instead he watched us leave, then went to Æthelingæg’s church that now boasted a newly-made cross of alder-wood nailed to its gable.

And low in the sky above the cross was the full moon. She was low and ghostly pale, and as the sun rose she faded even more, but as the ten punts drifted down the river I stared at her and said a silent prayer to Hoder because the moon is his woman and it was she who must give us victory. Because, for the first time since Guthrum had struck in a winter’s dawn, the Saxons were fighting back.

Eight

Before the Pedredan reaches the sea it makes a great curve through the swamp, a curve that is almost three-quarters of a circle and on the inside of the bank where the curve begins there was another tiny settlement; just a half-dozen hovels built on stilts sunk into a slight rise in the ground. The settlement was called Palfleot, which means ‘the place with the stakes’, for the folk who had once lived there had staked eel and fish traps in the nearby streams, but the Danes had driven those folk away and burned their houses, so that Palfleot was now a place of charred pilings and blackened mud. We landed there, shivering in the dawn. The tide was falling, exposing the great banks of sand and mud across which Iseult and I had struggled, while the wind was coming from the west, cold and fresh, hinting of rain, though for now there was a slanting sunlight throwing long shadows of marram grass and reeds across the marshes. Two swans flew south and I knew they were a message from the gods, but what their message was I could not tell.

The punts pushed away, abandoning us. They were now going north and east, following intricate waterways known only to the marshmen. We stayed for a while in Palfleot, doing nothing in particular, but doing it energetically so that the Danes, a long way off across the great bend in the river, would be sure to see us. We pulled down the blackened timbers and Iseult, who had acute eyesight, watched the place where the Danish ships’ masts showed as scratches against the western clouds. ‘There’s a man up a mast,’ she said after a while, and I stared, saw the man clinging to the mast top and knew we had been spotted. The tide was falling, exposing more mud and sand, and now that I was sure we had been seen we walked across the drying expanse that was cradled by the river’s extravagant bend.

As we drew closer I could see more Danes in their ships’ rigging. They were watching us, but would not yet be worried for they outnumbered my few forces and the river lay between us and them, but whoever commanded in the Danish camp would also be ordering his men to arm themselves. He would want to be ready for whatever happened, but I also hoped he would be clever. I was laying a trap for him, and for the trap to work he had to do what I wanted him to do, but at first, if he was clever, he would do nothing. He knew we were impotent, separated from him by the Pedredan, and so he was content to watch as we closed on the river’s bank opposite his grounded ships and then slipped and slid down the steep muddy bluff that the ebbing tide had exposed. The river swirled in front of us, grey and cold.

There were close to a hundred Danes watching now. They were on their grounded boats, shouting insults. Some were laughing, for it seemed clear to them that we had walked a long way to achieve nothing, but that was because they did not know Eofer’s skills. I called the big bowman’s niece to my side. ‘What I want your Uncle Eofer to do,’ I explained to the small girl, ‘is kill some of those men.’

‘Kill them?’ She stared up at me with wide eyes.

‘They’re bad men,’ I said, ‘and they want to kill you.’

She nodded solemnly, then took the big man by the hand and led him to the water’s edge where he sank up to his calves in the mud. It was a long way across the river and I wondered, pessimistically, if it was too far for even his massive bow, but Eofer strung the great stave and then waded into the Pedredan until he found a shallow spot which meant he could go even farther into the river and there he took an arrow from his sheaf, put it on the string and hauled it back. He made a grunting noise as he released and I watched the arrow twitch off the cord, then the fledging caught the air and the arrow soared across the stream and plunged into a group of Danes standing on the steering platform of a ship. There was a cry of anger as the arrow cut down. It did not hit any of the group, but Eofer’s next arrow struck a man in his shoulder, and the Danes hurried back from their vantage point by the ship’s sternpost. Eofer, who was compulsively nodding his shaggy head and making small animal noises, turned his aim to another ship. He had extraordinary strength. The distance was too great for any accuracy, but the danger of the long white-fledged arrows drove the Danes back and it was our turn to jeer at them. One of the Danes fetched a bow and tried to shoot back, but his arrow sliced into the river twenty yards short and we taunted them, laughed at them, and capered up and down as Eofer’s arrows slammed into ships’ timbers. Only the one man had been wounded, but we had driven them backwards and that was humiliating to them. I let Eofer loose twenty arrows, then I waded into the river and took hold of his bow. I stood in front of him so the Danes could not see what I was doing.

‘Tell him not to worry,’ I told the girl, and she soothed Eofer, who was frowning at me and trying to remove his bow from my grasp.

I drew a knife and that alarmed him even more. He growled at me, then plucked the bow from my hand. ‘Tell him it’s all right,’ I told the girl, and she soothed her uncle who then let me half sever the woven hemp bowstring. I stepped away from him and pointed at a group of Danes. ‘Kill them,’ I said.

Eofer did not want to draw the bow. Instead he fumbled under his greasy woollen cap and produced a second bowstring, but I shook my head and the small girl persuaded him he must use the half-severed cord and so he pulled it nervously back and, just before it reached the full draw, the string snapped and the arrow span crazily into the sky to float away on the river.

The tide had turned and the water was rising. ‘We go!’ I shouted to my men.

It was now the Danes’ turn to jeer at us. They thought we were retreating because our one bowstring had broken, and so they shouted insults as we clambered back up the muddy bluff, and then I saw two men running along the far beach and I hoped they were carrying the orders I wanted.

They were. The Danes, released from the threat of Eofer’s terrible bow, were going to launch two of their smaller ships. We had stung them, laughed at them and now they would kill us.

All warriors have pride. Pride and rage and ambition are the goads to a reputation, and the Danes did not want us to think we had stung them without being punished for our temerity. They wanted to teach us a lesson. But they also wanted more. Before we left Æthelingæg I had insisted that my men be given every available coat of mail. Egwine, who had stayed behind with the king, had been reluctant to give up his precious armour, but Alfred had ordered it and so sixteen of my men were dressed in chain mail. They looked superb, like an elite group of warriors, and the Danes would win renown if they defeated such a group and captured the precious armour. Leather offers some protection, but chain mail over leather is far better and far more expensive, and by taking sixteen coats of mail to the river’s edge I had given the Danes an irresistible lure.

And they snapped at it.

We were going slowly, deliberately seeming to struggle in the soft ground as we headed back towards Palfleot. The Danes were also struggling, shoving their two ships down the riverbank’s thick mud, but at last the boats were launched and then, on the hurrying flood tide, the Danes did what I had hoped they would do.

They did not cross the river. If they had crossed, then they would merely have found themselves on the Pedredan’s eastern bank and we would have been half a mile ahead and out of reach, so instead the commander did what he thought was the clever thing to do. He tried to cut us off. They had seen us land at Palfleot and they reckoned our boats must still be there, and so they rowed their ships up river to find those boats and destroy them.

Except our punts were not at Palfleot. They had been taken north and east, so that they were waiting for us in a reed-fringed dyke, but now was not the time to use them. Instead, as the Danes went ashore at Palfleot, we made a huddle on the sand, watching them, and they thought we were trapped, and now they were on the same side of the river as us and the two ships’ crews outnumbered us by over two to one, and they had all the confidence in the world as they advanced from the burned pilings of Palfleot to kill us in the swamp.

They were doing exactly what I wanted them to do.

And we now retreated. We went back raggedly, sometimes running to open a distance between us and the confident Danes. I counted seventy-six of them and we were only thirty strong because some of my men were with the hidden punts, and the Danes knew we were dead men and they hurried across the sand and creeks, and we had to go faster, ever faster, to keep them away from us. It began to rain, the drops carried on the freshening west wind and I kept looking into the rain until at last I saw a silver bar of light glint and spill across the swamp’s edge and knew the incoming tide was beginning its long fast race across the barren flats.

And still we went back, and still the Danes pursued us, but they were tiring now. A few shouted at us, daring us to stand and fight, but others had no breath to shout, just a savage intent to catch and kill us, but we were slanting eastwards now towards a line of buckthorn and reeds, and there, in a flooding creek, were our punts.

We dropped into the boats, exhausted, and the marshmen poled us back down the creek that was a tributary of the River Bru which barred the northern part of the swamp, and the flat-bottomed craft took us fast south, against the current, hurrying us past the Danes who could only watch from a quarter-mile away and do nothing to stop us, and the farther we went from them, the more isolated they looked in that wide, barren place where the rain fell and the tide seethed as it flowed into the creek beds. The wind-driven water was running deep into the swamp now, a tide made bigger by the full moon, and suddenly the Danes saw their danger and turned back towards Palfleot.

But Palfleot was a long way off, and we had already left the stream and were carrying the punts to a smaller creek, one that ran down to the Pedredan, and that stream took us to where the blackened pilings leaned against the weeping sky, and where the Danes had tied their two ships. The two craft were guarded by only four men, and we came from the punts with a savage shout and drawn swords and the four men ran. The other Danes were still out in the swamp, only now it was not a swamp, but a tidal flat and they were wading through water.

And I had two ships. We hauled the punts aboard, and then the marshmen, divided between the ships, took the oars, and I steered one and Leofric took the other, and we rowed against that big tide towards Cynuit where the Danish ships were now unguarded except for a few men and a crowd of women and children who watched the two ships come and did not know they were crewed by their enemy. They must have wondered why so few oars bit the water, but how could they imagine that forty Saxons would defeat nearly eighty Danes? And so none opposed us as we ran the ships into the bank, and there I led my warriors ashore. ‘You can fight us,’ I shouted at the few ship-guards left, ‘or you can live.’

I was in chain mail, with my new helmet. I was a warlord. I banged Serpent-Breath against the big shield and stalked towards them. ‘Fight if you want!’ I shouted. ‘Come and fight us!’

They did not. They were too few and so they retreated south and could only watch as we burned their ships. It took most of the day to ensure that the ships burned down to their keels, but burn they did, and their fires were a signal to the western part of Wessex that Svein had been defeated. He was not at Cynuit that day, but somewhere to the south, and as the ships burned I watched the wooded hills in fear that he would come with hundreds of men, but he was still far off and the Danes at Cynuit could do nothing to stop us. We burned twenty-three ships, including the White Horse, and the twenty-fourth, which was one of the two we had captured, carried us away as evening fell. We took good plunder from the Danish camp; food, rigging ropes, hides, weapons and shields.

There were a score of Danes stranded on the low island of Palfleot. The rest had died in the rising water. The survivors watched us pass, but did nothing to provoke us, and I did nothing to hurt them. We rowed on towards Æthelingæg and behind us, under a darkening sky, the water sheeted the swamp where white gulls cried above the drowned men and where, in the dusk, two swans flighted northwards, their wings like drumbeats in the sky.

The smoke of the burned boats drifted to the clouds for three days, and on the second day Egwine took the captured ship downstream with forty men and they landed on Palfleot and killed all the surviving Danes, except for six who were taken prisoner, and five of those six were stripped of their armour and lashed to stakes in the river at low tide so that they drowned slowly on the flood. Egwine lost three men in that fight, but brought back mail, shields, helmets, weapons, arm rings and one prisoner who knew nothing except that Svein had ridden towards Exanceaster. That prisoner died on the third day, the day that Alfred had prayers said in thanks to God for our victory. For now we were safe. Svein could not attack us for he had lost his ships, Guthrum had no way of penetrating the swamp and Alfred was pleased with me.

‘The king is pleased with you,’ Beocca told me. Two weeks before, I thought, the king would have told me that himself. He would have sat with me by the water’s edge and talked, but now a court had formed and the king was hedged with priests.

‘He should be pleased,’ I said. I had been practising weapon-craft when Beocca sought me out. We practised every day, using stakes instead of swords, and some men grumbled that they did not need to play at fighting, and those I opposed myself and, when they had been beaten down to the mud, I told them they needed to play more and complain less.

‘He’s pleased with you,’ Beocca said, leading me down the path beside the river, ‘but he thinks you are squeamish.’

‘Me! Squeamish?’

‘For not going to Palfleot and finishing the job.’

‘The job was finished,’ I said. ‘Svein can’t attack us without ships.’

‘But not all the Danes drowned,’ Beocca said.

‘Enough died,’ I said. ‘Do you know what they endured? The terror of trying to outrun the tide?’ I thought of my own anguish in the swamp, the inexorable tide, the cold water spreading and the fear gripping the heart. ‘They had no ships! Why kill stranded men?’

‘Because they are pagans,’ Beocca said, ‘because they are loathed by God and by men, and because they are Danes.’

‘And only a few weeks ago,’ I said, ‘you believed they would become Christians and all our swords would be beaten into ard points to plough fields.’

Beocca shrugged that off. ‘So what will Svein do now?’ he wanted to know.

‘March around the swamp,’ I said, ‘and join Guthrum.’

‘And Guthrum is in Cippanhamm.’ We were fairly certain of that. New men were coming to the swamp and they all brought news. Much of it was rumour, but many had heard that Guthrum had strengthened Cippanhamm’s walls and was wintering there. Large raiding parties still ravaged parts of Wessex, but they avoided the bigger towns in the south of the country where West Saxon garrisons had formed. There was one such garrison at Dornwaraceaster and another at Wintanceaster, and Beocca believed Alfred should go to one of those towns, but Alfred refused, reckoning that Guthrum would immediately besiege him. He would be trapped in a town, but the swamp was too big to be besieged and Guthrum could not hope to penetrate the marshes. ‘You have an uncle in Mercia, don’t you?’ Beocca asked, changing the subject abruptly.

‘Æthelred. He’s my mother’s brother, and an ealdorman.’

He heard the flat tone of my voice. ‘You’re not fond of him?’

‘I hardly know him.’ I had spent some weeks in his house, just long enough to quarrel with his son who was also called Æthelred.

‘Is he a friend of the Danes?’

I shook my head. ‘They suffer him to live and he suffers them.’

‘The king has sent messengers to Mercia,’ Beocca said.

I grimaced. ‘If he wants them to rise against the Danes they won’t. They’ll get killed.’

‘He’d rather they brought men south in the springtime,’ Beocca said and I wondered how a few Mercian warriors were supposed to get past the Danes to join us, but said nothing. ‘We look to the springtime for our salvation,’ Beocca went on, ‘but in the meantime the king would like someone to go to Cippanhamm.’

‘A priest?’ I asked sourly, ‘to talk to Guthrum?’

‘A soldier,’ Beocca said, ‘to gauge their numbers.’

‘So send me,’ I offered.

Beocca nodded, then limped along the riverbank where the willow fish traps had been exposed by the falling tide. ‘It’s so different from Northumbria,’ he said wistfully.

I smiled at that. ‘You miss Bebbanburg?’

‘I would like to end my days at Lindisfarena,’ he said. ‘I would like to say my dying prayer on that island.’ He turned and gazed at the eastern hills. ‘The king would go to Cippanhamm himself,’ he said, almost as an afterthought.

I thought I had misheard, then realised I had not. ‘That’s madness,’ I protested.

‘It’s kingship,’ he said.

‘Kingship?’

‘The Witan chooses the king,’ Beocca said sternly, ‘and the king must have the trust of the people. If Alfred goes to Cippanhamm and walks among his enemies, then folk will know he deserves to be king.’

‘And if he’s captured,’ I said, ‘then folk will know he’s a dead king.’

‘So you must protect him,’ he said. I said nothing. It was indeed madness, but Alfred was determined to show he deserved to be king. He had, after all, usurped the throne from his nephew, and in those early years of his reign he was ever mindful of that. ‘A small group will travel,’ Beocca said, ‘you, some other warriors, a priest and the king.’

‘Why the priest?’

‘To pray, of course.’

I sneered at that. ‘You?’

Beocca patted his lamed leg. ‘Not me. A young priest.’

‘Better to send Iseult,’ I said.

‘No.’

‘Why not? She’s keeping the king healthy.’ Alfred was in sudden good health, better than he had been in years, and it was all because of the medicines that Iseult made. The celandine and burdock she had gathered on the mainland had taken away the agony in his arse, while other herbs calmed the pains in his belly. He walked confidently, had bright eyes and looked strong.

‘Iseult stays here,’ Beocca said.

‘If you want the king to live,’ I said, ‘send her with us.’

‘She stays here,’ Beocca said, ‘because we want the king to live.’ It took me a few heartbeats to understand what he had said, and when I did realise his meaning I turned on him with such fury that he stumbled backwards. I said nothing, for I did not trust myself to speak, or perhaps I feared that speech would turn to violence. Beocca tried to look severe, but only looked fearful. ‘These are difficult times,’ he said plaintively, ‘and the king can only put his trust in men who serve God. In men who are bound to him by their love of Christ.’

I kicked at an eel trap, sending it spinning over the bank into the river. ‘For a time,’ I said, ‘I almost liked Alfred. Now he’s got his priests back and you’re dripping poison into him.’

‘He …’ Beocca began.

I turned on him, silencing him. ‘Who rescued the bastard? Who burned Svein’s ships? Who, in the name of your luckless god, killed Ubba? And you still don’t trust me?’

Beocca was trying to calm me now, making flapping gestures. ‘I fear you are a pagan,’ he said, ‘and your woman is assuredly a pagan.’

‘My woman healed Edward,’ I snarled, ‘does that mean nothing?’

‘It could mean,’ he said, ‘that she did the devil’s work.’

I was astonished into silence by that.

‘The devil does his work in the land,’ Beocca said earnestly, ‘and it would serve the devil well if Wessex were to vanish. The devil wants the king dead. He wants his own pagan spawn all across England! There is a greater war, Uhtred. Not the fight between Saxon and Dane, but between God and the devil, between good and evil! We are part of it!’

‘I’ve killed more Danes than you can dream of,’ I told him.

‘But suppose,’ he said, pleading with me now, ‘that your woman has been sent by the devil? That the evil one allowed her to heal Edward so that the king would trust her? And then, when the king, in all innocence, goes to spy on the enemy, she betrays him!’

‘You think she would betray him?’ I asked sourly, ‘or do you mean I might betray him?’

‘Your love of the Danes is well known,’ Beocca said stiffly, ‘and you spared the men on Palfleot.’

‘So you think I can’t be trusted?’

‘I trust you,’ he said, without conviction. ‘But other men?’ he waved his palsied hand in an impotent gesture. ‘But if Iseult is here,’ he shrugged, not ending the thought.

‘So she’s to be a hostage,’ I said.

‘A surety, rather.’

‘I gave the king my oath,’ I pointed out.

‘And you have sworn oaths before, and you are known as a liar, and you have a wife and child, yet live with a pagan whore, and you love the Danes as you love yourself, and do you really think we can trust you?’ This all came out in a bitter rush. ‘I have known you, Uhtred,’ he said, ‘since you crawled on Bebbanburg’s rush floors. I baptised you, taught you, chastised you, watched you grow, and I know you better than any man alive and I do not trust you.’ Beocca stared at me belligerently. ‘If the king does not return, Uhtred, then your whore will be given to the dogs.’ He had delivered his message now, and he seemed to regret the force of it for he shook his head. ‘The king should not go. You’re right. It’s a madness. It is stupidity! It is,’ he paused, searching for a word, and came upon one of the worst condemnations in his vocabulary, ‘it is irresponsible! But he insists, and if he goes then you must also go for you’re the only man here who can pass as a Dane. But bring him back, Uhtred, bring him back, for he is dear to God and to all Saxons.’

Not to me, I thought, he was not dear to me. That night, brooding on Beocca’s words, I was tempted to flee the swamp, to go away with Iseult, find a lord, give Serpent-Breath a new master, but Ragnar had been a hostage and so I had no friend among my enemies, and if I fled I would break my oath to Alfred and men would say Uhtred of Bebbanburg could never be trusted again and so I stayed. I tried to persuade Alfred not to go to Cippanhamm. It was, as Beocca had said, irresponsible, but Alfred insisted. ‘If I stay here,’ he said, ‘men will say I hid from the Danes. Others face them, but I hide? No. Men must see me, must know that I live, and know that I fight.’ For once Ælswith and I were in agreement, and we both tried to keep him in Æthelingæg, but Alfred would not be dissuaded. He was in a strange mood, suffused with happiness, utterly confident that God was on his side, and, because his sickness had abated, he was full of energy and confidence.

He took six companions. The priest was a young man called Adelbert who carried a small harp wrapped in leather. It seemed ridiculous to take a harp to the enemy, but Adelbert was famed for his music and Alfred blithely said that we should sing God’s praises while we were among the Danes. The other four were all experienced warriors who had been part of his royal guard. They were called Osferth, Wulfrith, Beorth and the last was Egwine who swore to Ælswith that he would bring the king home, which made Ælswith throw a bitter glance at me. Whatever favour I had gained by Iseult’s cure of Edward had evaporated under the influence of the priests.

We dressed for war in mail and helmets, while Alfred insisted on wearing a fine blue cloak, trimmed with fur, which made him conspicuous, but he wanted folk to see a king. The best horses were selected, one for each of us and three spare mounts, and we swam them across the river, then followed log roads until we came at last to firm ground close to the island where Iseult said Arthur was buried. I had left Iseult with Eanflæd who shared quarters with Leofric.

It was February now. There had been a spell of fine weather after the burning of Svein’s fleet and I had thought we should travel then, but Alfred insisted on waiting until the eighth day of February, because that was the feast of Saint Cuthman, a Saxon saint from East Anglia, and Alfred reckoned that must be a propitious day. Perhaps he was right, for the day turned out wet and bitterly cold, and we were to discover that the Danes were reluctant to leave their quarters in the worst weather. We went at dawn and by mid morning we were in the hills overlooking the swamp which was half hidden by a mist thickened by the smoke from the cooking fires of the small villages. ‘Are you familiar with Saint Cuthman?’ Alfred asked me cheerfully.

‘No, lord.’

‘He was a hermit,’ Alfred said. We were riding north, keeping on the high ground with the swamp to our left. ‘His mother was crippled and so he made her a wheelbarrow.’

‘A wheelbarrow? What could a cripple do with a wheelbarrow?’

‘No, no, no! He pushed her about in it! So she could be with him as he preached. He pushed her everywhere.’

‘She must have liked that.’

‘There’s no written life of him that I know of,’ Alfred said, ‘but we must surely compose one. He could be a saint for mothers?’

‘Or for wheelbarrows, lord.’

We saw our first evidence of the Danes just after midday. We were still on the high ground, but in a valley that sloped to the marshes we saw a substantial house with limewashed walls and thick thatch. Smoke came from the roof, while in a fenced apple orchard were a score of horses. No Dane would ever leave such a place unplundered, which suggested the horses belonged to them and that the farm was garrisoned. ‘They’re there to watch the swamp,’ Alfred suggested.

‘Probably.’ I was cold. I had a thick woollen cloak, but I was still cold.

‘We shall send men here,’ Alfred said, ‘and teach them not to steal apples.’

We stayed that night in a small village. The Danes had been there and the folk were frightened. At first, when we rode up the rutted track between the houses, they hid, thinking we were Danes, but when they heard our voices they crept out and stared at us as if we had just ridden down from the moon. Their priest was dead, killed by the pagans, so Alfred insisted that Adelbert hold a service in the burned-out remnants of the church. Alfred himself acted as precentor, accompanying his chanting with the priest’s small harp. ‘I learned to play as a child,’ he told me. ‘My stepmother insisted, but I’m not very good.’

‘You’re not,’ I agreed, which he did not like.

‘There is never enough time to practise,’ he complained.

We lodged in a peasant’s house. Alfred, reckoning that the Danes would have taken the harvest from wherever we visited, had laden the spare horses with smoked fish, smoked eels and oatcakes, so we provided most of the food and, after we had eaten, the peasant couple knelt to me and the woman tentatively touched the skirt of my mail coat. ‘My children,’ she whispered, ‘there are two of them. My daughter is about seven years old and my boy is a little older. They are good children.’

‘What of them?’ Alfred intervened.

‘The pagans took them, lord,’ the woman said. She was crying. ‘You can find them, lord,’ she said, tugging my mail, ‘you can find them and bring them back? My little ones? Please?’

I promised to try, but it was an empty promise for the children would have long gone to the slave market and, by now, would either be working on some Danish estate or, if they were pretty, sent overseas where heathen men pay good silver for Christian children.

We learned that the Danes had come to the village shortly after Twelfth Night. They had killed, captured, stolen and ridden on southwards. A few days later they had returned, going back northwards, driving a band of captives and a herd of captured horses laden with plunder. Since then the villagers had seen no Danes except for the few on the swamp’s edge. Those Danes, they said, caused no trouble, perhaps because they were so few and dared not stir up the enmity of the country about them. We heard the same tale in other villages. The Danes had come, they had pillaged, then had gone back north.

But on our third day we at last saw a force of the enemy riding on the Roman road which cuts straight eastwards across the hills from Baðum. There were close to sixty of them, and they rode hard in front of dark clouds and the gathering night. ‘Going back to Cippanhamm,’ Alfred said. It was a foraging party, and their packhorses carried nets stuffed with hay to feed their war horses, and I remembered my childhood winter in Readingum, when the Danes first invaded Wessex, and how hard it had been to keep horses and men alive in the cold. We had cut feeble winter grass and pulled down thatch to feed our horses, which still became skeletal and weak. I have often listened to men declare that all that is needed to win a war is to assemble men and march against the enemy, but it is never that easy. Men and horses must be fed, and hunger can defeat an army much faster than spears. We watched the Danes go north, then turned aside to a half-ruined barn that offered us shelter for the night.

It began to snow that night, a relentless soft snow, silent and thick, so that by dawn the world was white under a pale blue sky. I suggested we waited till the snow had thawed before we rode further, but Egwine, who came from this part of the country, said we were only two or three hours south of Cippanhamm and Alfred was impatient. ‘We go,’ he insisted. ‘We go there, look at the town and ride away.’

So we rode north, our hooves crunching the newly fallen snow, riding through a world made new and clean. Snow clung to every twig and branch while ice skimmed the ditches and ponds. I saw a fox’s trail crossing a field and thought that the spring would bring a plague of the beasts for there would have been no one to hunt them, and the lambs would die bloodily and the ewes would bleat pitifully.

We came in sight of Cippanhamm before midday, though the great pall of smoke, made by hundreds of cooking fires, had shown in the sky all morning. We stopped south of the town, just where the road emerged from a stand of oaks, and the Danes must have noticed us, but none came from the gates to see who we were. It was too cold for men to stir themselves. I could see guards on the walls, though none stayed there long, retreating to whatever warmth they could find between their short forays along the wooden ramparts. Those ramparts were bright with round shields painted blue and white and blood-red and, because Guthrum’s men were there, black. ‘We should count the shields,’ Alfred said.

‘It won’t help,’ I said. ‘They carry two or three shields each and hang them on the walls to make it look as if they have more men.’

Alfred was shivering and I insisted we find some shelter. We turned back into the trees, following a path which led to the river and a mile or so upstream we came across a mill. The millstone had been taken away, but the building itself was whole and it was well made, with stone walls and a turf roof held up by stout rafters. There was a hearth in a room where the miller’s family had lived, but I would not let Egwine light a fire in case the trickle of smoke brought curious Danes from the town. ‘Wait till dark,’ I said.

‘We’ll freeze by then,’ he grumbled.

‘Then you shouldn’t have come,’ I snapped.

‘We have to get closer to the town,’ Alfred said.

‘You don’t,’ I said, ‘I do.’ I had seen horses paddocked to the west of the walls and I reckoned I could take our best horse and ride about the town’s western edge and count every horse I saw. That would give a rough estimate of the Danish numbers, for almost every man would have a horse. Alfred wanted to come, but I shook my head. It was pointless for more than one man to go, and sensible that the one man who did go should speak Danish, so I told him I would see him back in the mill before nightfall and then I rode north. Cippanhamm was built on a hill that was almost encircled by the river, so I could not ride clear around the town, but I went as close to the walls as I dared and stared across the river and saw no horses on its farther bank which suggested that the Danes were keeping all of their beasts on the western side of the town. I went there, keeping in the snowy woods, and though the Danes must have seen me they could not be bothered to ride into the snow to chase one man, and so I was able to find the paddocks where their horses shivered. I spent the day counting. Most of the horses were in fields beside the royal compound and there were hundreds of them. By late afternoon I had estimated that there were twelve hundred, and those were only the ones I could see, and the best horses would be in the town, but my reckoning was good enough. It would give Alfred an idea of how large Guthrum’s force was. Say two thousand men? And elsewhere in Wessex, in the towns the Danes had occupied, there must be another thousand. That was a strong force, but not quite strong enough to capture all the kingdom. That would have to wait until spring when reinforcements would come from Denmark or from the three conquered kingdoms of England. I rode back to the watermill as dusk fell. There was a frost and the air was still. Three rooks flew across the river as I dismounted. I reckoned one of Alfred’s men could rub my horse down; all I wanted was to find some warmth and it was plain Alfred had risked lighting a fire, for smoke was pouring out of the hole in the turf roof.

They were all crouched about the small fire and I joined them, stretching my hands to the flames. ‘Two thousand men,’ I said, ‘more or less.’

No one answered.

‘Didn’t you hear me?’ I asked, and looked around the faces.

There were five faces. Only five.

‘Where’s the king?’ I asked.

‘He went,’ Adelbert said helplessly.

‘He did what?’

‘He went to the town,’ the priest said. He was wearing Alfred’s rich blue cloak and I assumed Alfred had taken Adelbert’s plain garment.

I stared at him. ‘You let him go?’

‘He insisted,’ Egwine said.

‘How could we stop him?’ Adelbert pleaded. ‘He’s the king!’

‘You hit the bastard, of course,’ I snarled. ‘You hold him down till the madness passes. When did he go?’

‘Just after you left,’ the priest said miserably, ‘and he took my harp,’ he added.

‘And when did he say he’d be back?’

‘By nightfall.’

‘It is nightfall,’ I said. I stood and stamped out the fire. ‘You want the Danes to come and investigate the smoke?’ I doubted the Danes would come, but I wanted the damned fools to suffer. ‘You,’ I pointed to one of the four soldiers, ‘rub my horse down. Feed it.’

I went back to the door. The first stars were bright and the snow glinted under a sickle moon.

‘Where are you going?’ Adelbert had followed me.

‘To find the king, of course.’

If he lived. And if he did not, then Iseult was dead.

I had to beat on Cippanhamm’s western gate, provoking a disgruntled voice from the far side demanding to know who I was.

‘Why aren’t you up on the ramparts?’ I asked in return.

The bar was lifted and the gate opened a few inches. A face peered out, then vanished as I pushed the gate hard inwards, banging it against the suspicious guard. ‘My horse went lame,’ I said, ‘and I’ve walked here.’

He recovered his balance and pushed the gate shut. ‘Who are you?’ he asked again.

‘Messenger from Svein.’

‘Svein!’ He lifted the bar and dropped it into place. ‘Has he caught Alfred yet?’

‘I’ll tell Guthrum that news before I tell you.’

‘Just asking,’ he said.

‘Where is Guthrum?’ I asked. I had no intention of going anywhere near the Danish chieftain for, after my insults to his dead mother, the best I could hope for was a swift death, and the likelihood was a very slow one.

‘He’s in Alfred’s hall,’ the man said, and pointed south. ‘That side of town, so you’ve still farther to walk.’ It never occurred to him that any messenger from Svein would never ride alone through Wessex, that such a man would come with an escort of fifty or sixty men, but he was too cold to think, and besides, with my long hair and my thick arm rings I looked like a Dane. He retreated into the house beside the gate where his comrades were clustered around a hearth and I walked on into a town made strange. Houses were missing, burned in the first fury of the Danish assault, and the large church by the market place on the hilltop was nothing but blackened beams touched white by the snow. The streets were frozen mud, and only I moved there, for the cold was keeping the Danes in the remaining houses. I could hear singing and laughter. Light leaked past shutters or glowed through smoke-holes in low roofs. I was cold and I was angry. There were men here who could recognise me, and men who might recognise Alfred, and his stupidity had put us both in danger. Would he have been mad enough to go back to his own hall? He must have guessed that was where Guthrum would be living and he would surely not risk being recognised by the Danish leader, which suggested he would be in the town rather than the royal compound.

I was walking towards Eanflæd’s old tavern when I heard the roars. They were coming from the east side of town and I followed the sound which led me to the nunnery by the river wall. I had never been inside the convent, but the gate was open and the courtyard inside was lit by two vast fires which offered some warmth to the men nearest the flames. And there were at least a hundred men in the courtyard, bellowing encouragement and insults at two other men who were fighting in the mud and melted snow between the fires. They were fighting with swords and shields, and every clash of blade against blade or of blade against wood brought raucous shouts. I glanced briefly at the fighters, then searched for faces in the crowd. I was looking for Haesten, or anyone else who might recognise me, but I saw no one, though it was hard to distinguish faces in the flickering shadows. There was no sign of any nuns and I assumed they had either fled, were dead or had been taken away for the conquerors’ amusement.

I slunk along the courtyard wall. I was wearing my helmet and its face-plate was an adequate disguise, but some men threw me curious glances, for it was unusual to see a helmeted man off a battlefield. In the end, seeing no one I recognised, I took the helmet off and hung it from my belt. The nunnery church had been turned into a feasting hall, but there was only a handful of drunks inside, oblivious to the noise outside. I stole half a loaf of bread from one of the drunks and took it back outside and watched the fighting.

Steapa Snotor was one of the two men. He no longer wore his mail armour, but was in a leather coat and he fought with a small shield and a long sword, but around his waist was a chain that led to the courtyard’s northern side where two men held it and, whenever Steapa’s opponent seemed to be in danger, they yanked on the chain to pull the huge Saxon off balance. He was being made to fight as Haesten had been fighting when I first discovered him, and doubtless Steapa’s captors were making good money from fools who wanted to try their prowess against a captured warrior. Steapa’s current opponent was a thin, grinning Dane who tried to dance around the huge man and slide his sword beneath the small shield, doing what I had done when I had fought Steapa, but Steapa was doggedly defending himself, parrying each blow and, when the chain allowed him, counterattacking fast. Whenever the Danes jerked him backwards the crowd jeered and once, when the men yanked the chain too hard and Steapa turned on them, only to be faced by three long spears, the crowd gave him a great cheer. He whipped back to parry the next attack, then stepped backwards, almost to the spear points, and the thin man followed fast, thinking he had Steapa at a disadvantage, but Steapa suddenly checked, slammed the shield down onto his opponent’s blade and brought his left hand around, sword hilt foremost, to hit the man on the head. The Dane went down, Steapa reversed the sword to stab and the chain dragged him off his feet and the spears threatened him with death if he finished the job. The crowd liked it. He had won.

Money changed hands. Steapa sat by the fire, his grim face showing nothing, and one of the men holding the chain shouted for another opponent. ‘Ten pieces of silver if you wound him! Fifty if you kill him!’

Steapa, who probably did not understand a word, just stared at the crowd, daring another man to take him on, and sure enough a half drunken brute came grinning from the crowd. Bets were made as Steapa was prodded to his feet. It was like a bull-baiting, except Steapa was being given only one opponent at a time. They would doubtless have set three or four men on him, except that the Danes who had taken him prisoner did not want him dead so long as there were still fools willing to pay to fight him.

I was sidling around the courtyard’s edge, still looking at faces. ‘Six pennies?’ a voice said behind me and I turned to see a man grinning beside a door. It was one of a dozen similar doors, evenly spaced along the limewashed wall.

‘Six pennies?’ I asked, puzzled.

‘Cheap,’ he said, and he pushed back a small shutter on the door and invited me to look inside.

I did. A tallow candle lit the tiny room which must have been where a nun had slept, and inside was a low bed and on the bed was a naked woman who was half covered by a man who had dropped his breeches. ‘He won’t be long,’ the man said.

I shook my head and moved away from the shutter.

‘She was a nun here,’ the man said. ‘Nice and young? Pretty too. Screams like a pig usually.’

‘No,’ I said.

‘Four pennies? She won’t put up a fight. Not now she won’t.’

I walked on, convinced I was wasting my time. Had Alfred been and gone? More likely, I thought grimly, the fool had gone back to his hall and I wondered if I dared go there, but the thought of Guthrum’s revenge deterred me. The new fight had started. The Dane was crouching low, trying to cut Steapa’s feet from under him, but Steapa was swatting his blows easily enough and I sidled past the men holding his chains and saw another room off to my left, a large room, perhaps where the nuns had eaten, and a glint of gold in the light of its dying fire drew me inside.

The gold was not metal. It was the gilding on the frame of a small harp that had been stamped on so hard that it broke. I looked around the shadows and saw a man lying in a heap at the far end and went to him. It was Alfred. He was barely conscious, but he was alive and, so far as I could see, unwounded, but he was plainly stunned and I dragged him to the wall and sat him up. He had no cloak and his boots were gone. I left him there, went back to the church and found a drunk to befriend. I helped him to his feet, put my arm around his shoulders and persuaded him I was taking him to his bed, then took him through the back door to the latrine yard of the nunnery where I punched him three times in the belly and twice in the face, then carried his hooded cloak and tall boots back to Alfred.

The king was conscious now. His face was bruised. He looked up at me without showing any surprise, then rubbed his chin. ‘They didn’t like the way I played,’ he said.

‘That’s because the Danes like good music,’ I said. ‘Put these on.’ I threw the boots beside him, draped him with the cloak and made him pull the hood over his face. ‘You want to die?’ I asked him angrily.

‘I want to know about my enemies,’ he said.

‘And I found out for you,’ I said. ‘There are roughly two thousand of them.’

‘That’s what I thought,’ he said, then grimaced. ‘What’s on this cloak?’

‘Danish vomit,’ I said.

He shuddered. ‘Three of them attacked me,’ he sounded surprised. ‘They kicked and punched me.’

‘I told you, the Danes like good music,’ I said, helping him to his feet. ‘You’re lucky they didn’t kill you.’

‘They thought I was Danish,’ he said, then spat blood that trickled from his swollen lower lip.

‘Were they drunk?’ I asked. ‘You don’t even look like a Dane.’

‘I pretended I was a musician who couldn’t speak,’ he mouthed silently at me, then grinned bloodily, proud of his deception. I did not grin back and he sighed. ‘They were very drunk, but I need to know their mood, Uhtred. Are they confident? Are they readying to attack?’ He paused to wipe more blood from his lips. ‘I could only find that out by coming to see them for myself. Did you see Steapa?’

‘Yes.’

‘I want to take him back with us.’

‘Lord,’ I said savagely, ‘you are a fool. He’s in chains. He’s got half a dozen guards.’

‘Daniel was in a lion’s den, yet he escaped. Saint Paul was imprisoned, yet God freed him.’

‘Then let God look after Steapa,’ I said. ‘You’re coming back with me. Now.’

He bent to relieve a pain in his belly. ‘They punched me in the stomach,’ he said as he straightened. In the morning, I thought, he would have a rare black eye to display. He flinched as a huge cheer sounded from the courtyard and I guessed Steapa had either died or downed his last opponent. ‘I want to see my hall,’ Alfred said stubbornly.

‘Why?’

‘I’m a man who would look at his own home. You can come or stay.’

‘Guthrum’s there! You want to be recognised? You want to die?’

‘Guthrum will be inside, and I just want to look at the outside.’

He would not be dissuaded and so I led him through the courtyard to the street, wondering if I should simply pick him up and carry him away, but in his obdurate mood he would probably struggle and shout until men came to find out the cause of the noise. ‘I wonder what happened to the nuns,’ he said as we left the nunnery.

‘One of them is being whored in there for pennies,’ I said.

‘Oh, dear God.’ He made the sign of the cross and turned back and I knew he was thinking of rescuing the woman, so I dragged him onwards. ‘This is madness!’ I protested.

‘It is a necessary madness,’ he said calmly, then stopped to lecture me. ‘What does Wessex believe? It thinks I am defeated, it thinks the Danes have won, it readies itself for the spring and the coming of more Danes. So they must learn something different. They must learn that the king lives, that he walked among his enemies and that he made fools of them.’

‘That he got given a bloody nose and a black eye,’ I said.

‘You won’t tell them that,’ he said, ‘any more than you’ll tell folk about that wretched woman who hit me with an eel. We must give men hope, Uhtred, and in the spring that hope will blossom into victory. Remember Boethius, Uhtred, remember Boethius! Never give up hope.’

He believed it. He believed that God was protecting him, that he could walk among his enemies without fear or harm, and to an extent he was right for the Danes were well supplied with ale, birch wine and mead, and most were much too drunk to care about a bruised man carrying a broken harp.

No one stopped us going into the royal compound, but there were six black-cloaked guards at the hall door and I refused to let Alfred get close to them. ‘They’ll take one look at your bloodied face,’ I said, ‘and finish what the others began.’

‘Then let me at least go to the church.’

‘You want to pray?’ I asked sarcastically.

‘Yes,’ he said simply.

I tried to stop him. ‘If you die here,’ I said, ‘then Iseult dies.’

‘That wasn’t my doing,’ he said.

‘You’re the king, aren’t you?’

‘The bishop thought you would join the Danes,’ he said. ‘And others agreed.’

‘I have no friends left among the Danes,’ I said. ‘They were your hostages and they died.’

‘Then I shall pray for their pagan souls,’ he said, and pulled away from me and went to the church door where he instinctively pushed the hood off his head to show respect. I snatched it back over his hair, shadowing his bruises. He did not resist, but just pushed the door open and made the sign of the cross.

The church was being used to shelter more of Guthrum’s men. There were straw mattresses, heaps of chain mail, stacks of weapons and a score of men and women gathered around a newly-made hearth in the nave. They were playing dice and none took any particular interest in our arrival until someone shouted that we should shut the door.

‘We’re leaving,’ I said to Alfred. ‘You can’t pray here.’

He did not answer. He was gazing reverently to where the altar had been, and where a half-dozen horses were now tethered.

‘We’re leaving!’ I insisted again.

And just then a voice hailed me. It was a voice full of astonishment and I saw one of the dice players stand and stare at me. A dog ran from the shadows and began to jump up and down, trying to lick me, and I saw the dog was Nihtgenga and that the man who had recognised me was Ragnar. Earl Ragnar, my friend.

Who I had thought was dead.

Nine

Ragnar embraced me. There were tears in both our eyes and for a moment neither of us could speak, though I retained enough sense to look behind me to make sure Alfred was safe. He was squatting beside the door, deep in the shadow of a bale of wool, with his cloak’s hood drawn over his face. ‘I thought you were dead!’ I said to Ragnar.

‘I hoped you would come,’ he said at the same moment, and for a time we both talked and neither listened, and then Brida walked from the back of the church and I watched her, seeing a woman instead of a girl, and she laughed to see me and gave me a decorous kiss.

‘Uhtred,’ she said my name as a caress. We had been lovers once, though we had been little more than children then. She was Saxon, but she had chosen the Danish side to be with Ragnar. The other women in the hall were hung with silver, garnet, jet, amber and gold, but Brida wore no jewellery other than an ivory comb that held her thick black hair in a pile. ‘Uhtred,’ she said again.

‘Why aren’t you dead?’ I asked Ragnar. He had been a hostage, and the hostages’ lives had been forfeit the moment Guthrum crossed the frontier.

‘Wulfhere liked us,’ Ragnar said. He put an arm around my shoulder and drew me to the central hearth where the fire blazed. ‘This is Uhtred,’ he announced to the dice players, ‘a Saxon, which makes him scum, of course, but he is also my friend and my brother. Ale,’ he pointed to jars, ‘wine. Wulfhere let us live.’

‘And you let him live?’

‘Of course we did! He’s here. Feasting with Guthrum.’

‘Wulfhere? Is he a prisoner?’

‘He’s an ally!’ Ragnar said, thrusting a pot into my hand and pulling me down beside the fire. ‘He’s with us now.’ He grinned at me, and I laughed for the sheer joy of finding him alive. He was a big man, golden-haired, open-faced, and as full of mischief, life and kindness as his father had been. ‘Wulfhere used to talk to Brida,’ Ragnar went on, ‘and through her to me. We liked each other. Hard to kill a man you like.’

‘You persuaded him to change sides?’

‘Didn’t need a great deal of persuasion,’ Ragnar said. ‘He could see we were going to win, and by changing sides he keeps his land, doesn’t he? Are you going to drink that ale or just stare at it?’

I pretended to drink, letting some of the ale drip down my beard, and I remembered Wulfhere telling me that when the Danes came we must all make what shifts we could to survive. But Wulfhere? Alfred’s cousin and the Ealdorman of Wiltunscir? He had changed sides? So how many other thegns had followed his example and now served the Danes?

‘Who’s that?’ Brida asked. She was staring at Alfred. He was in shadow, but there was something oddly mysterious about the way he squatted alone and silent.

‘A servant,’ I said.

‘He can come by the fire.’

‘He cannot,’ I said harshly. ‘I’m punishing him.’

‘What did you do?’ Brida called to him in English. His face came up and he stared at her, but the hood still shadowed him.

‘Speak, you bastard,’ I said, ‘and I’ll whip you till your bones show.’ I could just see his eyes in the hood’s shadow. ‘He insulted me,’ I spoke in Danish again, ‘and I’ve sworn him to silence, and for every word he utters he receives ten blows of the whip.’

That satisfied them. Ragnar forgot the strange hooded servant and told me how he had persuaded Wulfhere to send a messenger to Guthrum, promising to spare the hostages, and how Guthrum had warned Wulfhere when the attack would come to make sure that the ealdorman had time to remove the hostages from Alfred’s revenge. That, I thought, was why Wulfhere had left so early on the morning of the attack. He had known the Danes were coming. ‘You call him an ally,’ I said. ‘Does that make him just a friend? Or a man who will fight for Guthrum?’

‘He’s an ally,’ Ragnar said, ‘and he’s sworn to fight for us. At least he’s sworn to fight for the Saxon king.’

‘The Saxon king?’ I asked, confused, ‘Alfred?’

‘Not Alfred, no. The true king. The boy who was the other one’s son.’

Ragnar meant Æthelwold, who had been heir to Alfred’s brother, King Æthelred, and of course the Danes would want Æthelwold. Whenever they captured a Saxon kingdom they appointed a Saxon as king, and that gave their conquest a cloak of legality, though the Saxon never lasted long. Guthrum, who already called himself King of East Anglia, wanted to be King of Wessex too, but by putting Æthelwold on the throne he might attract other West Saxons who could convince themselves they were fighting for the true heir. And once the fight was over and Danish rule established Æthelwold would be quietly killed.

‘But Wulfhere will fight for you?’ I persisted.

‘Of course he will! If he wants to keep his land,’ Ragnar said, then grimaced. ‘But what fighting? We just sit here like sheep and do nothing!’

‘It’s winter.’

‘Best time to fight. Nothing else to do.’ He wanted to know where I had been since Yule and I said I had been deep inside Defnascir. He assumed I had been making sure my family was safe, and he also assumed I had now come to Cippanhamm to join him. ‘You’re not sworn to Alfred, are you?’ he asked.

‘Who knows where Alfred is?’ I evaded the question.

‘You were sworn to him,’ he said reproachfully.

‘I was sworn to him,’ I said, truthfully enough, ‘but only for a year, and that year has long ended.’ That was no lie, I just did not tell Ragnar I had sworn myself to Alfred once again.

‘So you can join me?’ he asked eagerly. ‘You’ll give me your oath?’

I took the question lightly, though in truth it worried me. ‘You want my oath?’ I asked, ‘just so I can sit here like a sheep doing nothing?’

‘We make some raids,’ Ragnar said defensively, ‘and men are guarding the swamp. That’s where Alfred is. In the swamps. But Svein will dig him out.’ So Guthrum and his men had yet to hear that Svein’s fleet was ashes beside the sea.

‘So why are you just sitting here?’ I asked.

‘Because Guthrum won’t divide his army,’ Ragnar said. I half smiled at that because I remembered Ragnar’s grandfather advising Guthrum never to divide an army again. Guthrum had done that at Æsc’s Hill and that had been the first victory of the West Saxons over the Danes. He had done it again when he abandoned Werham to attack Exanceaster, and the part of his army that went by sea was virtually destroyed by the storm. ‘I’ve told him,’ Ragnar said, ‘that we should split the army into a dozen parts. Take a dozen more towns and garrison them. All those places in southern Wessex, we should capture them, but he won’t listen.’

‘Guthrum holds the north and east,’ I said, as if I was defending him.

‘And we should have the rest! But instead we’re waiting till spring in hope more men will join us. Which they will. There’s land here, good land. Better than the land up north.’ He seemed to have forgotten the matter of my oath. I knew he would want me to join him, but instead he talked of what happened in Northumbria, how our enemies, Kjartan and Sven, thrived in Dunholm, and how that father and son dared not leave the fortress for fear of Ragnar’s revenge. They had taken his sister captive and, so far as Ragnar knew, they held her still, and Ragnar, like me, was sworn to kill them. He had no news of Bebbanburg other than that my treacherous uncle still lived and held the fortress. ‘When we’ve finished with Wessex,’ Ragnar promised me, ‘we shall go north. You and I together. We’ll carry swords to Dunholm.’

‘Swords to Dunholm,’ I said and raised my pot of ale.

I did not drink much, or if I did it seemed to have little effect. I was thinking, sitting there, that with one sentence I could finish Alfred for ever. I could betray him, I could have him dragged in front of Guthrum and then watch as he died. Guthrum would even forgive me the insults to his mother if I gave him Alfred, and thus I could finish Wessex, for without Alfred there was no man about whom the fyrd would muster. I could stay with my friend, Ragnar, I could earn more arm rings, I could make a name that would be celebrated wherever Northmen sailed their long ships, and all it would take was one sentence.

And I was so tempted that night in Cippanhamm’s royal church. There is such joy in chaos. Stow all the world’s evils behind a door and tell men that they must never, ever, open the door, and it will be opened because there is pure joy in destruction. At one moment, when Ragnar was bellowing with laughter and slapping my shoulder so hard that it hurt, I felt the words form on my tongue. That is Alfred, I would have said, pointing at him, and all my world would have changed and there would have been no more England. Yet, at the last moment, when the first word was on my tongue, I choked it back. Brida was watching me, her shrewd eyes calm, and I caught her gaze and I thought of Iseult. In a year or two, I thought, Iseult would look like Brida. They had the same tense beauty, the same dark colouring and the same smouldering fire in the soul. If I spoke, I thought, Iseult would be dead, and I could not bear that. And I thought of Æthelflaed, Alfred’s daughter, and knew she would be enslaved, and also knew that wherever the remnants of the Saxons gathered about their fires of exile my name would be cursed. I would be Uhtredærwe for ever, the man who destroyed a people.

‘What were you about to say?’ Brida asked.

‘That we have never known such a hard winter in Wessex.’

She gazed at me, not believing my answer. Then she smiled. ‘Tell me, Uhtred,’ she spoke in English, ‘if you thought Ragnar was dead then why did you come here?’

‘Because I don’t know where else to be,’ I said.

‘So you came here? To Guthrum? Whom you insulted?’

So they knew about that. I had not expected them to know and I felt a surge of fear. I said nothing.

‘Guthrum wants you dead,’ Brida said, speaking in Danish now.

‘He doesn’t mean it,’ Ragnar said.

‘He does mean it,’ Brida insisted.

‘Well I won’t let him kill Uhtred,’ Ragnar said. ‘You’re here now!’ He slapped me on the back again and glared at his men as if daring any of them to betray my presence to Guthrum. None of them moved, but they were nearly all of them drunk and some already asleep.

‘You’re here now,’ Brida said, ‘yet not so long ago you were fighting for Alfred and insulting Guthrum.’

‘I was on my way to Defnascir,’ I said, as if that explained anything.

‘Poor Uhtred,’ Brida said. Her right hand fondled the black and white fur at the back of Nihtgenga’s neck. ‘And I thought you’d be a hero to the Saxons.’

‘A hero? Why?’

‘The man who killed Ubba?’

‘Alfred doesn’t want heroes,’ I said, loudly enough for him to hear, ‘only saints.’

‘So tell us about Ubba!’ Ragnar demanded, and so I had to describe Ubba’s death, and the Danes, who love a good story of a fight, wanted every detail. I told the tale well, making Ubba into a great hero who had almost destroyed the West Saxon army, and I said he had been fighting like a god, and told how he had broken our shield wall with his great axe. I described the burning ships, their smoke drifting over the battle slaughter like a cloud from the netherworld, and I said I had found myself facing Ubba in his victory charge. That was not true, of course, and the Danes knew it was not true. I had not just found myself opposing Ubba, but had sought him out, but when a story is told it must be seasoned with modesty and the listeners, understanding that custom, murmured approval. ‘I have never known such fear,’ I said, and I told how we had fought, Serpent-Breath against Ubba’s axe, and how he had chopped my shield into firewood, and then I described, truthfully, how he had lost his footing in the spilled guts of a dead man. The Danes about the fire sighed with disappointment. ‘I cut the tendons of his arm,’ I said, chopping my left hand into the crook of my right elbow to show where I had cut him, ‘and then beat him down.’

‘He died well?’ a man asked anxiously.

‘As a hero,’ I said, and I told how I had put the axe back into his dying hand so that he would go to Valhalla. ‘He died very well,’ I finished.

‘He was a warrior,’ Ragnar said. He was drunk now. Not badly drunk, but tired drunk. The fire was dying, thickening the shadows at the western end of the church where Alfred sat. More stories were told, the fire died and the few candles guttered. Men were sleeping, and still I sat until Ragnar lay back and began to snore. I waited longer, letting the room go to sleep, and only then did I go back to Alfred. ‘We go now,’ I said. He did not argue.

No one appeared to notice as we went into the night, closing the door quietly behind us. ‘Who were you talking with?’ Alfred asked me.

‘Earl Ragnar.’

He stopped, puzzled. ‘Wasn’t he one of the hostages?’

‘Wulfhere let them live,’ I said.

‘He let them live?’ he asked, astonished.

‘And Wulfhere is now on Guthrum’s side.’ I gave him the bad news. ‘He’s here, in the hall. He’s agreed to fight for Guthrum.’

‘Here?’ Alfred could scarce believe what I said. Wulfhere was his cousin, he had married Alfred’s niece, he was family. ‘He’s here?’

‘He’s on Guthrum’s side,’ I said harshly.

He just stared at me. ‘No,’ he mouthed the word, rather than said it. ‘And Æthelwold?’ he asked.

‘He’s a prisoner,’ I said.

‘A prisoner!’ he asked the question sharply, and no wonder, for Æthelwold had no value to the Danes as a prisoner unless he had agreed to become their token king on the West Saxon throne.

‘A prisoner,’ I said. It was not true, of course, but I liked Æthelwold and I owed him a favour. ‘He’s a prisoner,’ I went on, ‘and there’s nothing we can do about it, so let’s get away from here.’ I pulled him towards the town, but too late, for the church door opened and Brida came out with Nihtgenga.

She told the dog to stay at her heels as she walked towards me. Like me she was not drunk, though she must have been very cold for she wore no cloak over her plain blue woollen dress. The night was brittle with frost, but she did not shiver. ‘You’re going?’ She spoke in English. ‘You’re not staying with us?’

‘I have a wife and child,’ I said.

She smiled at that. ‘Whose names you have not mentioned all evening, Uhtred. So what happened?’ I gave no answer and she just stared at me, and there was something very unsettling in her gaze. ‘So what woman is with you now?’ she asked.

‘Someone who looks like you,’ I admitted.

She laughed at that. ‘And she would have you fight for Alfred?’

‘She sees the future,’ I said, evading the question. ‘She dreams it.’

Brida stared at me. Nihtgenga whined softly and she put down a hand to calm him. ‘And she sees Alfred surviving?’

‘More than surviving,’ I said. ‘She sees him winning.’ Beside me Alfred stirred and I hoped he had the sense to keep his head lowered.

‘Winning?’

‘She sees a green hill of dead men,’ I said, ‘a white horse, and Wessex living again.’

‘Your woman has strange dreams,’ Brida said, ‘but you never answered my first question, Uhtred. If you thought Ragnar was dead, why did you come here?’

I had no ready answer so made none.

‘Who did you expect to find here?’ she asked.

‘You?’ I suggested glibly.

She shook her head, knowing I lied. ‘Why did you come?’ I still had no answer and Brida smiled sadly. ‘If I were Alfred,’ she said, ‘I would send a man who spoke Danish to Cippanhamm, and that man would go back to the swamp and tell all he had seen.’

‘If you think that,’ I said, ‘then why don’t you tell them?’ I nodded towards Guthrum’s black-cloaked men guarding the hall door.

‘Because Guthrum is a nervous fool,’ she said savagely. ‘Why help Guthrum? And when Guthrum fails, Ragnar will take command.’

‘Why doesn’t he command now?’

‘Because he is like his father. He’s decent. He gave his word to Guthrum and he won’t break his word. And tonight he wanted you to give him an oath, but you didn’t.’

‘I do not want Bebbanburg to be a gift of the Danes,’ I answered.

She thought about that, and understood it. ‘But do you think,’ she asked scornfully, ‘that the West Saxons will give you Bebbanburg? It’s at the other end of Britain, Uhtred, and the last Saxon king is rotting in a swamp.’

‘This will give it to me,’ I said, pulling back my cloak to show Serpent-Breath’s hilt.

‘You and Ragnar can rule the north,’ she said.

‘Maybe we will,’ I said. ‘So tell Ragnar that when this is all finished, when all is decided, I shall go north with him. I shall fight Kjartan. But in my own time.’

‘I hope you live to keep that promise,’ she said, then leaned forward and kissed my cheek. Then, without another word, she turned and walked back to the church.

Alfred let out a breath. ‘Who is Kjartan?’

‘An enemy,’ I said shortly. I tried to lead him away, but he stopped me.

He was staring at Brida who was nearing the church. ‘That is the girl who was with you at Wintanceaster?’

‘Yes.’ He was talking of the time when I had first come to Wessex and Brida had been with me.

‘And does Iseult truly see the future?’

‘She has not been wrong yet.’

He made the sign of the cross, then let me lead him back through the town. It was quieter now, but he would not go with me to the western gate, insisting we return to the nunnery where, for a moment, we both crouched near one of the dying fires in the courtyard to get what warmth we could from the embers. Men slept in the nunnery church, but the courtyard was now deserted and quiet, and Alfred took a piece of half-burning wood and, using it as a torch, went to the row of small doors that led to the nuns’ sleeping cells. One door had been fastened with two hasps and a short length of thick chain and Alfred paused there.

‘Draw your sword,’ he ordered me.

When Serpent-Breath was naked he unwound the chain from the hasps and pushed the door inwards. He entered cautiously, pushing the hood back from his face. He held the torch high, and in its light I saw the big man huddled on the floor.

‘Steapa!’ Alfred hissed.

Steapa was only pretending to be asleep and he uncoiled from the floor with wolf-like speed, lashing out at Alfred, and I rammed the sword towards his breast, but then he saw Alfred’s bruised face and he froze, oblivious of the blade. ‘Lord?’

‘You’re coming with us,’ Alfred said.

‘Lord!’ Steapa fell to his knees in front of his king.

‘It’s cold out there,’ Alfred said. It was freezing inside the cell as well. ‘You can sheath your sword, Uhtred.’ Steapa looked at me and seemed vaguely surprised to find I was the man he had been fighting when the Danes came. ‘The two of you will be friends,’ Alfred said sternly, and the big man nodded. ‘And we have one other person to fetch,’ Alfred said, ‘so come.’

‘One other person?’ I asked.

‘You spoke of a nun,’ Alfred said.

So I had to find the nun’s cell, and she was still there, lying crushed against the wall by a Dane who was snoring flabbily. The flame-light showed a small, frightened face half-hidden by the Dane’s beard. His beard was black and her hair was gold, pale gold, and she was awake and, seeing us, gasped, and that woke the Dane who blinked in the flame-light and then snarled at us as he tried to throw off the thick cloaks serving as blankets. Steapa hit him and it was like the sound of a bullock being clubbed, wet and hard at the same time. The man’s head snapped back and Alfred pulled the cloaks away and the nun tried to hide her nakedness. Alfred hurriedly put the cloaks back. He had been embarrassed and I had been impressed, for she was young and very beautiful and I wondered why such a woman would waste her sweetness on religion. ‘You know who I am?’ Alfred asked her. She shook her head. ‘I am your king,’ he said softly, ‘and you will come with us, sister.’

Her clothes were long gone, so we swathed her in the heavy cloaks. The Dane was dead by now, his throat cut by Wasp-Sting, and I had found a pouch of coins strung around his neck on a leather thong. ‘That money goes to the church,’ Alfred said.

‘I found it,’ I said, ‘and I killed him.’

‘It is the money of sin,’ he said patiently, ‘and must be redeemed.’ He smiled at the nun. ‘Are there any other sisters here?’ he asked.

‘Only me,’ she said in a small voice.

‘And now you are safe, sister.’ He straightened. ‘We can go.’

Steapa carried the nun who was called Hild. She clung to him, whimpering, either from the cold or, more likely, from the memory of her ordeal.

We could have captured Cippanhamm that night with a hundred men. It was so bitterly cold that no guards stood on the ramparts. The gate sentries were in a house by the wall, crouched by the fire, and all the notice they took of the bar being lifted was to shout a bad-tempered question wanting to know who we were. ‘Guthrum’s men,’ I called back, and they did not bother us further. A half-hour later we were in the watermill, reunited with Father Adelbert, Egwine and the three soldiers.

‘We should give thanks to God for our deliverance,’ Alfred said to Father Adelbert, who had been aghast to see the blood and bruises on the king’s face. ‘Say a prayer, father,’ Alfred ordered.

Adelbert prayed, but I did not listen. I just crouched by the fire, thought I would never be warm again, and then slept.

It snowed all next day. Thick snow. We made a fire, careless that the Danes might see the smoke, for no Dane was going to struggle through the bitter cold and deepening snow to investigate one small, far-off trickle of grey against a grey sky.

Alfred brooded. He spoke little that day, though once he frowned and asked me if it could really be true about Wulfhere. ‘We didn’t see him with Guthrum,’ he added plaintively, desperately hoping that the ealdorman had not betrayed him.

‘The hostages lived,’ I said.

‘Dear God,’ he said, convinced by that argument, and leaned his head against the wall. He watched the snow through one of the small windows. ‘He’s family!’ he said after a while, then fell silent again.

I fed the horses the last of the hay we had brought with us, then sharpened my swords for lack of anything else to do. Hild wept. Alfred tried to comfort her, but he was awkward and had no words, and oddly it was Steapa who calmed her. He talked to her softly, his voice a deep grumble, and when Serpent-Breath and Wasp-Sting were as sharp as I could make them, and as the snow sifted endlessly onto a silent world, I brooded like Alfred.

I thought of Ragnar wanting my oath. I thought of him wanting my allegiance.

The world began in chaos and it will end in chaos. The gods brought the world into existence, and they will end it when they fight among themselves, but in between the chaos of the world’s birth and the chaos of the world’s death is order, and order is made by oaths, and oaths bind us like the buckles of a harness.

I was bound to Alfred by an oath, and before I gave that oath I had wanted to bind myself to Ragnar, but now I felt affronted that he had even asked me. That was pride growing in me and changing me. I was Uhtred of Bebbanburg, slayer of Ubba, and while I would give an oath to a king I was reluctant to make an oath to an equal. The oath-giver is subservient to the man who accepts the oath. Ragnar would have said I was a friend, he would treat me like a brother, but his assumption that I would give him an oath demonstrated that he still believed I was his follower. I was a lord of Northumbria, but he was a Dane, and to a Dane all Saxons are lesser men, and so he had demanded an oath. If I gave him an oath then he would be generous, but I would be expected to show gratitude, and I could only ever hold Bebbanburg because he allowed me to hold it. I had never thought it all through before, but suddenly, on that cold day, I understood that among the Danes I was as important as my friends, and without friends I was just another landless, masterless warrior. But among the Saxons I was another Saxon, and among the Saxons I did not need another man’s generosity.

‘You look thoughtful, Uhtred,’ Alfred interrupted my reverie.

‘I was thinking, lord,’ I said, ‘that we need warm food.’ I fed the fire, then went outside to the stream where I knocked away the skim of ice and scooped water into a pot. Steapa had followed me outside, not to talk, but to piss, and I stood behind him. ‘At the witanegemot,’ I said, ‘you lied about Cynuit.’

He tied the scrap of rope that served as a belt and turned to look at me. ‘If the Danes had not come,’ he said in his growling voice, ‘I would have killed you.’

I did not argue with that, for he was probably right. ‘At Cynuit,’ I said instead, ‘when Ubba died, where were you?’

‘There.’

‘I didn’t see you,’ I said. ‘I was in the thick of the battle, but I didn’t see you.’

‘You think I wasn’t there?’ he was angry.

‘You were with Odda the Younger?’ I asked, and he nodded. ‘You were with him,’ I guessed, ‘because his father told you to protect him?’ He nodded again. ‘And Odda the Younger,’ I said, ‘stayed a long way from any danger. Isn’t that right?’

He did not answer, but his silence told me I was right. He decided he had nothing more to say to me so started back towards the mill, but I pulled on his arm to stop him. He was surprised by that. Steapa was so big and so strong and so feared that he was unused to men using force on him, and I could see the slow anger burning in him. I fed it. ‘You were Odda’s nursemaid,’ I sneered. ‘The great Steapa Snotor was a nursemaid. Other men faced and fought the Danes and you just held Odda’s hand.’

He just stared at me. His face, so tight-skinned and expressionless, was like an animal’s gaze, nothing there but hunger and anger and violence. He wanted to kill me, especially after I used his nickname, but I understood something more about Steapa Snotor. He was truly stupid. He would kill me if he was ordered to kill me, but without someone to instruct him he did not know what to do, so I thrust the pot of water at him. ‘Carry that inside,’ I told him. He hesitated. ‘Don’t stand there like a dumb ox!’ I snapped. ‘Take it! And don’t spill it.’ He took the pot. ‘It has to go on the fire,’ I told him, ‘and next time we fight the Danes you’ll be with me.’

‘You?’

‘Because we are warriors,’ I said, ‘and our job is to kill our enemies, not be nursemaids to weaklings.’

I collected firewood, then went inside to find Alfred staring at nothing and Steapa sitting beside Hild who now seemed to be consoling him rather than being consoled. I crumbled oatcakes and dried fish into the water and stirred the mess with a stick. It was a gruel of sorts and tasted horrible, but it was hot.

That night it stopped snowing and next morning we went home.

Alfred need not have gone to Cippanhamm. Anything he learned there he could have discovered by sending spies, but he had insisted on going himself and he came back more worried than before. He had learned some good things, that Guthrum did not have the men to subjugate all Wessex and so was waiting for reinforcements, but he had also learned that Guthrum was trying to turn the nobility of Wessex to his side. Wulfhere was sworn to the Danes, who else?

‘Will the fyrd of Wiltunscir fight for Wulfhere?’ he asked us.

Of course they would fight for Wulfhere. Most of the men in Wiltunscir were loyal to their lord, and if their lord ordered them to follow his banner to war then they would march. Those men who were in the parts of the shire not occupied by the Danes might go to Alfred, but the rest would do what they always did, follow their lord. And other ealdormen, seeing that Wulfhere had not lost his estates, would reckon that their own future, and their family’s safety, lay with the Danes. The Danes had ever worked that way. Their armies were too small and too disorganised to defeat a great kingdom so they recruited lords of the kingdom, flattered them, even made them into kings, and only when they were secure did they turn on those Saxons and kill them.

So back in Æthelingæg Alfred did what he did best. He wrote letters. He wrote letters to all his nobility, and messengers were sent into every corner of Wessex to find ealdormen, thegns and bishops, and deliver the letters. I am alive, the scraps of parchment said, and after Easter I shall take Wessex from the pagans, and you will help me. We waited for the replies.

‘You must teach me to read,’ Iseult said when I told her about the letters.

‘Why?’

‘It is a magic,’ she said.

‘What magic? So you can read psalms?’

‘Words are like breath,’ she said, ‘you say them and they’re gone. But writing traps them. You could write down stories, poems.’

‘Hild will teach you,’ I said, and the nun did, scratching letters in the mud. I watched them sometimes and thought they could have been taken for sisters except one had hair black as a raven’s wing and the other had hair of pale gold.

So Iseult learned her letters and I practised the men with their weapons and shields until they were too tired to curse me, and we also made a new fortress. We restored one of the beamwegs that led south to the hills at the edge of the swamp, and where that log road met dry land we made a strong fort of earth and tree-trunks. None of Guthrum’s men tried to stop the work, though we saw Danes watching us from the higher hills, and by the time Guthrum understood what we were doing the fort was finished. In late February a hundred Danes came to challenge it, but they saw the thorn palisade protecting the ditch, saw the strength of the log wall behind the ditch, saw our spears thick against the sky and rode away.

Next day I took sixty men to the farm where we had seen the Danish horses. They were gone, and the farm was burned out. We rode inland, seeing no enemy. We found newborn lambs slaughtered by foxes, but no Danes, and from that day on we rode ever deeper into Wessex, carrying the message that the king lived and fought, and some days we met Danish bands, but we only fought if we outnumbered them for we could not afford to lose men.

Ælswith gave birth to a daughter whom she and Alfred called Æthelgifu. Ælswith wanted to leave the swamp. She knew that Huppa of Thornsæta was holding Dornwaraceaster for the ealdorman had replied to Alfred’s letter saying that the town was secure and, as soon as Alfred demanded it, the fyrd of Thornsæta would march to his aid. Dornwaraceaster was not so large as Cippanhamm, but it had Roman walls and Ælswith was tired of living in the marshes, tired of the endless damp, of the chill mists, and she said her newborn baby would die of the cold, and that Edward’s sickness would come back, and Bishop Alewold supported her. He had a vision of a large house in Dornwaraceaster, of warm fires and priestly comfort, but Alfred refused. If he moved to Dornwaraceaster then the Danes would immediately abandon Cippanhamm and besiege Alfred and starvation would soon threaten the garrison, but in the swamp there was food. In Dornwaraceaster Alfred would be a prisoner of the Danes, but in the swamp he was free, and he wrote more letters, telling Wessex he lived, that he grew stronger and that after Easter, but before Pentecost, he would strike the pagans.

It rained that late winter. Rain and more rain. I remember standing on the muddy parapet of the new fort and watching the rain just falling and falling. Mail coats rusted, fabrics rotted and food went mouldy. Our boots fell apart and we had no men skilled in making new ones. We slid and splashed through greasy mud, our clothes were never dry, and still grey swathes of rain marched from the west. Thatch dripped, huts flooded, the world was sullen. We ate well enough, though as more men came to Æthelingæg, the food became scarcer, but no one starved and no one complained except Bishop Alewold who grimaced whenever he saw another fish stew. There were no deer left in the swamp, all had been netted and eaten, but at least we had fish, eels and wildfowl, while outside the swamp, in those areas the Danes had plundered, folk starved. We practised with our weapons, fought mock battles with staves, watched the hills, and welcomed the messengers who brought news. Burgweard, the fleet commander, wrote from Hamtun saying that the town was garrisoned by Saxons, but that Danish ships were off the coast. ‘I don’t suppose he’s fighting them,’ Leofric remarked glumly when he heard that news.

‘He doesn’t say so,’ I said.

‘Doesn’t want to get his nice ships dirty,’ Leofric guessed.

‘At least he still has the ships.’

A letter came from a priest in distant Kent saying that Vikings from Lundene had occupied Contwaraburg and others had settled on the Isle of Sceapig, and that the ealdorman had made his peace with the invaders. News came from Suth Seaxa of more Danish raids, but also a reassurance from Arnulf, Ealdorman of Suth Seaxa, that his fyrd would gather in the spring. He sent a gospel book to Alfred as a token of his loyalty, and for days Alfred carried the book until the rain soaked into the pages and made the ink run. Wiglaf, Ealdorman of Sumorsæte, appeared in early March and brought seventy men. He claimed to have been hiding in the hills south of Baðum and Alfred ignored the rumours which said Wiglaf had been negotiating with Guthrum. All that mattered was that the ealdorman had come to Æthelingæg and Alfred gave him command of the troops that continually rode inland to shadow the Danes and to ambush their forage parties. Not all the news was so encouraging. Wilfrith of Hamptonscir had fled across the water to Frankia, as had a score of other ealdormen and thegns.

But Odda the Younger, Ealdorman of Defnascir, was still in Wessex. He sent a priest who brought a letter reporting that the ealdorman was holding Exanceaster. ‘God be praised,’ the letter read, ‘but there are no pagans in the town’.

‘So where are they?’ Alfred asked the priest. We knew that Svein, despite losing his ships, had not marched to join Guthrum, which suggested he was still skulking in Defnascir.

The priest, a young man who seemed terrified of the king, shrugged, hesitated, then stammered that Svein was close to Exanceaster.

‘Close?’ the king asked.

‘Nearby,’ the priest managed to say.

‘They besiege the town?’ Alfred asked.

‘No, lord.’

Alfred read the letter a second time. He always had great faith in the written word and he was trying to find some hint of the truth that had escaped him in the first reading. ‘They are not in Exanceaster,’ he concluded, ‘but the letter does not say where they are. Nor how many they are. Nor what they’re doing.’

‘They are nearby, lord,’ the priest said hopelessly. ‘To the west, I think.’

‘The west?’

‘I think they’re to the west.’

‘What’s to the west?’ Alfred asked me.

‘The high moor,’ I said.

Alfred threw the letter down in disgust. ‘Maybe you should go to Defnascir,’ he told me, ‘and find out what the pagans are doing.’

‘Yes, lord,’ I said.

‘It will be a chance to discover your wife and child,’ Alfred said.

There was a sting there. As the winter rains fell the priests hissed their poison into Alfred’s ears and he was willing enough to hear their message, which was that the Saxons would only defeat the Danes if God willed it. And God, the priests said, wanted us to be virtuous. And Iseult was a pagan, as was I, and she and I were not married, while I had a wife, and so the accusation was whispered about the swamp that it was Iseult who stood between Alfred and victory. No one said it openly, not then, yet Iseult sensed it. Hild was her protector in those days, because Hild was a nun, a Christian, and a victim of the Danes, but many thought Iseult was corrupting Hild. I pretended to be deaf to the whispers until Alfred’s daughter told me of them.

Æthelflæd was almost seven and her father’s favourite child. Ælswith was fonder of Edward, and in those wet winter days she worried about her son’s health and the health of her newborn child, which gave Æthelflæd a deal of freedom. She would stay at her father’s side much of the time, but she also wandered about Æthelingæg where she was spoiled by soldiers and villagers. She was a bright ripple of sunlight in those rain-sodden days. She had golden hair, a sweet face, blue eyes and no fear. One day I found her at the southern fort, watching a dozen Danes who had come to watch us. I told her to go back to Æthelingæg and she pretended to obey me, but an hour later, when the Danes had gone, I found her hiding in one of the turf-roofed shelters behind the wall. ‘I hoped the Danes would come,’ she told me.

‘So they could take you away?’

‘So I could watch you kill them.’

It was one of the rare days when it was not raining. There was sunshine on the green hills and I sat on the wall, took Serpent-Breath from her fleece-lined scabbard and began sharpening her two edges with a whetstone. Æthelflaed insisted on trying the whetstone and she laid the long blade on her lap and frowned in concentration as she drew the stone down the sword. ‘How many Danes have you killed?’ she asked.

‘Enough.’

‘Mama says you don’t love Jesus.’

‘We all love Jesus,’ I said evasively.

‘If you loved Jesus,’ she said seriously, ‘then you could kill more Danes. What’s this?’ She had found the deep nick in one of Serpent-Breath’s edges.

‘It’s where she hit another sword,’ I said. It had happened at Cippanhamm during my fight with Steapa and his huge sword had bitten deep into Serpent-Breath.

‘I’ll make her better,’ she said, and worked obsessively with the whetstone, trying to smooth the nick’s edges. ‘Mama says Iseult is an aglæcwif.’ She stumbled over the word, then grinned in triumph because she had managed to say it. I said nothing. An aglæcwif was a fiend, a monster. ‘The bishop says it too,’ Æthelflaed said earnestly. ‘I don’t like the bishop.’

‘You don’t?’

‘He dribbles.’ She tried to demonstrate and managed to spit onto Serpent-Breath. She rubbed the blade. ‘Is Iseult an aglæcwif?’

‘Of course not. She made Edward better.’

‘Jesus did that, and Jesus sent me a baby sister.’ She scowled because all her efforts had made no impression on the nick in Serpent-Breath.

‘Iseult is a good woman,’ I said.

‘She’s learning to read. I can read.’

‘You can?’

‘Almost. If she reads then she can be a Christian. I’d like to be an aglæcwif.’

‘You would?’ I asked, surprised.

For answer she growled at me and crooked a small hand so that her fingers looked like claws. Then she laughed. ‘Are those Danes?’ She had seen some horsemen coming from the south.

‘That’s Wiglaf,’ I said.

‘He’s nice.’

I sent her back to Æthelingæg on Wiglaf’s horse and I thought of what she had said and wondered, for the thousandth time, why I was among Christians who believed I was an offence to their god. They called my gods dwolgods, which meant false gods, so that made me Uhtredærwe, living with an aglæcwif and worshipping dwolgods. I flaunted it, though, always wearing my hammer amulet openly, and that night Alfred, as ever, flinched when he saw it. He had summoned me to his hall where I found him bent over a tafl board. He was playing against Beocca, who had the larger set of pieces. It seems a simple game, tafl, where one player has a king and a dozen other pieces, and the other has double the pieces, but no king, and then you move the pieces about the chequered board until one or other player has all his wooden pieces surrounded. I had no patience for it, but Alfred was fond of the game, though when I arrived he seemed to be losing and so was relieved to see me. ‘I want you to go to Defnascir,’ he said.

‘Of course, lord.’

‘I fear your king is threatened, lord,’ Beocca said happily.

‘Never mind,’ Alfred said irritably. ‘You’re to go to Defnascir,’ he said, turning back to me, ‘but Iseult must stay here.’

I bridled at that. ‘She’s to be a hostage again?’ I asked.

‘I need her medicines,’ Alfred said.

‘Even though they’re made by an aglæcwif?’

He gave me a sharp look. ‘She is a healer,’ he said, ‘and that means she is God’s instrument, and with God’s help she will come to the truth. Besides, you must travel fast and don’t need a woman for company. You will go to Defnascir and find Svein, and once you’ve found him you will instruct Odda the Younger to raise the fyrd. Tell him Svein must be driven from the shire, and once Odda has achieved that, he is to come here with his household troops. He commands my bodyguard, he should be here.’

‘You want me to give Odda orders?’ I asked, partly in surprise, partly with scorn.

‘I do,’ Alfred said, ‘and I order you to make your peace with him.’

‘Yes, lord,’ I replied.

He heard the sarcasm in my voice. ‘We are all Saxons, Uhtred, and now, more than ever, is the time to heal our wounds.’

Beocca, realising that defeating Alfred at tafl would not help the king’s mood, was taking the pieces from the board. ‘A house divided against itself,’ he interjected, ‘will be destroyed. Saint Matthew said that.’

‘Praise God for that truth,’ Alfred said, ‘and we must be rid of Svein.’ That was a greater truth. Alfred wanted to march against Guthrum after Easter, but he could scarcely do that if Svein’s forces were behind him. ‘You find Svein,’ the king told me, ‘and Steapa will accompany you.’

‘Steapa!’

‘He knows the country,’ Alfred said, ‘and I have told him he is to obey you.’

‘It’s best that two of you go,’ Beocca said earnestly. ‘Remember that Joshua sent two spies against Jericho.’

‘You’re delivering me to my enemies,’ I said bitterly, though when I thought about it I decided that using me as a spy made sense. The Danes in Defnascir would be looking out for Alfred’s scouts, but I could speak the enemy’s language and could pass for one of them and so I was safer than anyone else in Alfred’s force. As for Steapa, he was from Defnascir, he knew the country and he was Odda’s sworn man, so he was best suited for carrying a message to the ealdorman.

And so the two of us rode south from Æthelingæg on a day of driving rain.

Steapa did not like me and I did not like him and so we had nothing to say to each other except when I suggested what path we take, and he never disagreed. We kept close to the large road, the road the Romans had made, though I went cautiously for such roads were much used by Danish bands seeking forage or plunder. This was also the route Svein must take if he marched to join Guthrum, but we saw no Danes. We saw no Saxons either. Every village and farm on the road had been pillaged and burned so that we journeyed through a land of the dead.

On the second day Steapa headed westwards. He did not explain the sudden change of direction, but doggedly pushed up into the hills and I followed him because he knew the countryside and I supposed he was taking the small paths that would lead to the high bleakness of Dærentmora. He rode urgently, his hard face grim, and I called to him once that we should take more care in case there were Danish forage parties in the small valleys, but he ignored me. Instead, almost at a gallop, he rode down into one of those small valleys until he came in sight of a farmstead.

Or what had been a farmstead. Now it was wet ashes in a green place. A deep green place where narrow pastures were shadowed by tall trees on which the very first haze of spring was just showing. Flowers were thick along the pasture edges, but there were none where the few small buildings had stood. There were only embers and the black smear of ash in mud, and Steapa, abandoning his horse, walked among the ashes. He had lost his great sword when the Danes captured him at Cippanhamm, so now he carried a huge war axe and he prodded the wide blade into the dark piles.

I rescued his horse, tied both beasts to the scorched trunk of an ash that had once grown by the farmyard, and watched him. I said nothing, for I sensed that one word would release all his fury. He crouched by the skeleton of a dog and just stared at the fire-darkened bones for a few minutes, then reached out and stroked the bared skull. There were tears on Steapa’s face, or perhaps it was the rain that fell softly from low cloud.

A score of people had once lived there. A larger house had stood at the southern end of the settlement and I explored its charred remains, seeing where the Danes had dug down by the old posts to find hidden coins. Steapa watched me. He was by one of the smaller patches of charred timbers and I guessed he had grown up there, in a slave hovel. He did not want me near him, and I pointedly stayed away, wondering if I dared suggest to him that we rode on. But he began digging instead, hacking the damp red soil with his huge war axe and scooping the earth out with bare hands until he had made a shallow grave for the dog. It was a skeleton now. There were still patches of fur on the old bones, but the flesh had been eaten away so that the ribs were scattered, so this had all happened weeks before. Steapa gathered the bones and laid them tenderly in the grave.

That was when the people came. You can ride through a landscape of the dead and see no one, but they will see you. Folk hide when enemies come. They go up into the woods and they wait there, and now three men came from the trees.

‘Steapa,’ I said. He turned on me, furious that I had interrupted him, then saw I was pointing westwards.

He gave a roar of recognition and the three men, who were holding spears, ran towards him. They dropped their weapons and they hugged the huge man, and for a time they all spoke together, but then they calmed down and I took one aside and questioned him. The Danes had come soon after Yule, he told me. They had come suddenly, before anyone was even aware that there were pagans in Defnascir. These men had escaped because they had been felling a beech tree in a nearby wood, and they had heard the slaughter. Since then they had been living in the forests, scared of the Danes who still rode about Defnascir in search of food. They had seen no Saxons.

They had buried the folk of the farm in a pasture to the south, and Steapa went there and knelt in the wet grass. ‘His mother died,’ the man told me. He spoke English with such a strange accent that I continually had to ask him to repeat himself, but I understood those three words. ‘Steapa was good to his mother,’ the man said. ‘He brought her money. She was no slave any more.’

‘His father?’

‘He died long time back. Long time.’

I thought Steapa was going to dig up his mother, so I crossed and stood in front of him. ‘We have a job to do,’ I said.

He looked up at me, his harsh face expressionless.

‘There are Danes to kill,’ I said. ‘The Danes who killed folk here must be killed themselves.’

He nodded abruptly, then stood, towering over me again. He cleaned the blade of his axe and climbed into his saddle. ‘There are Danes to kill,’ he said and, leaving his mother in her cold grave, we went to find them.

Ten

We rode south. We went cautiously, for folk said the Danes were still seen in this part of the shire, though we saw none. Steapa was silent until, in a river meadow, we rode past a ring of stone pillars, one of the mysteries left behind by the old people. Such rings stand all across England and some are huge, though this one was a mere score of lichen-covered stones, none taller than a man, standing in a circle some fifteen paces wide. Steapa glanced at them, then astonished me by speaking. ‘That’s a wedding,’ he said.

‘A wedding?’

‘They were dancing,’ he growled, ‘and the devil turned them to stone.’

‘Why did the devil do that?’ I asked cautiously.

‘Because they wed on a Sunday, of course. Folk never should wed on a Sunday, never! Everyone knows that.’ We rode on in silence, then, surprising me again, he began to talk about his mother and father and how they had been serfs of Odda the Elder. ‘But life was good for us,’ he said.

‘It was?’

‘Ploughing, sowing, weeding, harvest, threshing.’

‘But Ealdorman Odda didn’t live back there,’ I said, jerking my thumb towards Steapa’s destroyed homestead.

‘No! Not him!’ Steapa was amused I should even ask such a question. ‘He wouldn’t live there, not him! Had his own big hall. Still does. But he had a steward there. Man to give us orders. He was a big man! Very tall!’

I hesitated. ‘But your father was short?’

Steapa looked surprised. ‘How did you know that?’

‘I just guessed.’

‘He was a good worker, my father.’

‘Did he teach you to fight?’

‘He didn’t, no. No one did. I just learned myself.’

The land was less damaged the farther we went south. And that was strange, for the Danes had come this way. We knew that, for folk said the Danes were still in the southern part of the shire, but life suddenly seemed normal. We saw men spreading dung on fields, and other men ditching or hedging. There were lambs in the pastures. To the north the foxes had become fat on dead lambs, but here the shepherds and their dogs were winning that ceaseless battle.

And the Danes were in Cridianton.

A priest told us that in a village hard under a great oak-covered hill beside a stream. The priest was nervous because he had seen my long hair and arm rings and he presumed I was a Dane, and my northern accent did not persuade him otherwise, but he was reassured by Steapa. The two talked, and the priest gave his opinion that it would be a wet summer.

‘It will,’ Steapa agreed. ‘The oak greened before the ash.’

‘Always a sign,’ the priest said.

‘How far is Cridianton?’ I broke into the conversation.

‘A morning’s walk, lord.’

‘You’ve seen the Danes there?’ I asked.

‘I’ve seen them, lord, I have,’ he said.

‘Who leads them?’

‘Don’t know, lord.’

‘They have a banner?’ I asked.

He nodded. ‘It hangs on the bishop’s hall, lord. It shows a white horse.’

So it was Svein. I did not know who else it could have been, but the white horse confirmed that Svein had stayed in Defnascir rather than try to join Guthrum. I twisted in the saddle and looked at the priest’s village that was unscarred by war. No thatch had been burned, no granaries emptied and the church was still standing. ‘Have the Danes come here?’ I asked.

‘Oh yes, lord, they came. Came more than once.’

‘Did they rape? Steal?’

‘No, lord. But they bought some grain. Paid silver for it.’

Well-behaved Danes. That was another strange thing. ‘Are they besieging Exanceaster?’ I asked. That would have made a sort of sense. Cridianton was close enough to Exanceaster to give most of the Danish troops shelter while the rest invested the larger town.

‘No, lord,’ the priest said, ‘not that I know of.’

‘Then what are they doing?’ I asked.

‘They’re just in Cridianton, lord.’

‘And Odda is in Exanceaster?’

‘No, lord. He’s in Ocmundtun. He’s with Lord Harald.’

I knew the shire-reeve’s hall was in Ocmundtun that lay beneath the northern edge of the great moor. But Ocmundtun was also a long journey from Cridianton and no place to be if a man wanted to harry the Danes.

I believed the priest when he said Svein was at Cridianton, but we still rode there to see for ourselves. We used wooded, hilly tracks and came to the town at mid afternoon and saw the smoke rising from cooking fires, then saw the Danish shields hanging from the palisade. Steapa and I were hidden in the high woods and could see men guarding the gate, and other men standing watch in a pasture where forty or fifty horses were grazing on the first of the spring grass. I could see Odda the Elder’s hall where I had been reunited with Mildrith after the fight at Cynuit, and I could also see a triangular Danish banner flying above the larger hall that was the bishop’s home. The western gate was open, though well guarded, and despite the sentries and the shields on the wall the town looked like a place at peace, not at war. There should be Saxons on this hill, I thought, Saxons watching the enemy, ready to attack. Instead the Danes were living undisturbed. ‘How far to Ocmundtun?’ I asked Steapa.

‘We can make it by nightfall.’

I hesitated. If Odda the Younger was at Ocmundtun then why go there? He was my enemy and sworn to my death. Alfred had given me a scrap of parchment on which he had written words commanding Odda to greet me peaceably, but what force did writing have against hatred?

‘He won’t kill you,’ Steapa said, surprising me again. He had evidently guessed my thoughts. ‘He won’t kill you,’ he said again.

‘Why not?’

‘Because I won’t bide him killing you,’ Steapa said and turned his horse west.

We reached Ocmundtun at dusk. It was a small town built along a river and guarded by a high spur of limestone on which a stout palisade offered a refuge if attackers came. No one was on the limestone spur now and the town, which had no walls, looked placid. There might be war in Wessex, but Ocmundtun, like Cridianton, was evidently at peace. Harald’s hall was close to the fort on its hill and no one challenged us as we rode into the forecourt where servants recognised Steapa. They greeted him warily, but then a steward came from the hall door and, seeing the huge man, clapped his hands twice in a sign of delight. ‘We heard you were taken by the pagans,’ the steward said.

‘I was.’

‘They let you go?’

‘My king freed me,’ Steapa growled as though he resented the question. He slid from his horse and stretched. ‘Alfred freed me.’

‘Is Harald here?’ I asked the steward.

‘My lord is inside,’ the steward was offended that I had not called the reeve ‘lord’.

‘Then so are we,’ I said, and led Steapa into the hall. The steward flapped at us because custom and courtesy demanded that he seek his lord’s permission for us to enter the hall, but I ignored him.

A fire burned in the central hearth and dozens of rushlights stood on the platforms at the hall’s edges. Boar spears were stacked against the wall on which hung a dozen deerskins and a bundle of valuable pine-marten pelts. A score of men were in the hall, evidently waiting for supper, and a harpist played at the far end. A pack of hounds rushed to investigate us and Steapa beat them off as we walked to the fire to warm ourselves. ‘Ale,’ Steapa said to the steward.

Harald must have heard the noise of the hounds for he appeared at a door leading from the private chamber at the back of the hall. He blinked when he saw us. He had thought the two of us were enemies, then he had heard that Steapa was captured, yet here we were, side by side. The hall fell silent as he limped towards us. It was only a slight limp, the result of a spear wound in some battle that had also taken two fingers of his sword hand. ‘You once chided me,’ he said, ‘for carrying weapons into your hall. Yet you bring weapons into mine.’

‘There was no gatekeeper,’ I said.

‘He was having a piss, lord,’ the steward explained.

‘There are to be no weapons in hall,’ Harald insisted.

That was customary. Men get drunk in hall and can do enough damage to each other with the knives we use to cut meat, and drunken men with swords and axes can turn a supper table into a butcher’s yard. We gave the steward our weapons, then I hauled off my mail coat and told the steward to hang it on a frame to dry, then have a servant clean its links.

Harald formally welcomed us when our weapons were gone. He said the hall was ours and that we should eat with him as honoured guests. ‘I would hear your news,’ he said, beckoning a servant who brought us pots of ale.

‘Is Odda here?’ I demanded.

‘The father is, yes. Not the son.’

I swore. We had come here with a message for Ealdorman Odda, Odda the Younger, only to discover that it was the wounded father, Odda the Elder, who was in Ocmundtun. ‘So where is the son?’ I asked.

Harald was offended by my brusqueness, but he remained courteous. ‘The ealdorman is in Exanceaster.’

‘Is he besieged there?’

‘No.’

‘And the Danes are in Cridianton?’

‘They are.’

‘And are they besieged?’ I knew the answer to that, but wanted to hear Harald admit it.

‘No,’ he said.

I let the ale pot drop. ‘We come from the king,’ I said. I was supposedly speaking to Harald, but I strode down the hall so that the men on the platforms could hear me. ‘We come from Alfred,’ I said, ‘and Alfred wishes to know why there are Danes in Defnascir. We burned their ships, we slaughtered their ship-guards and we drove them from Cynuit, yet you allow them to live here? Why?’

No one answered. There were no women in the hall, for Harald was a widower who had not remarried, and so the supper guests were all his warriors or else thegns who led men of their own. Some looked at me with loathing, for my words imputed cowardice to them, while others looked down at the floor. Harald glanced at Steapa as if seeking the big man’s support, but Steapa just stood by the fire, his savage face showing nothing. I turned back to stare at Harald. ‘Why are there Danes in Defnascir?’ I demanded.

‘Because they are welcome here,’ a voice said behind me.

I turned to see an old man standing in the door. White hair showed beneath the bandage that swathed his head, and he was so thin and so weak that he had to lean on the door frame for support. At first I did not recognise him, for when I had last spoken to him he had been a big man, well-built and vigorous, but Odda the Elder had taken an axe blow to the skull at Cynuit and he should have died from such a wound, yet somehow he had lived, and here he was, though now he was skeletal, pale, haggard and feeble. ‘They are here,’ Odda said, ‘because they are welcome. As are you, Lord Uhtred, and you, Steapa.’

A woman was tending Odda the Elder. She had tried to pull him away from the door and take him back to his bed, but now she edged past him into the hall and stared at me. Then, seeing me, she did what she had done the very first time she saw me. She did what she had done when she came to marry me. She burst into tears.

It was Mildrith.

Mildrith was robed like a nun in a pale grey dress, belted with rope, over which she wore a large wooden cross. She had a close-fitting grey bonnet from which strands of her fair hair escaped. She stared at me, burst into tears, made the sign of the cross and vanished. A moment later Odda the Elder followed her, too frail to stand any longer, and the door closed.

‘You are indeed welcome here,’ Harald said, echoing Odda’s words.

‘But why are the Danes welcome here?’ I asked.

Because Odda the Younger had made a truce. Harald explained it as we ate. No one in this part of Defnascir had heard how Svein’s ships had been burned at Cynuit, they only knew that Svein’s men, and their women and children, had marched south, burning and plundering, and Odda the Younger had taken his troops to Exanceaster and he had prepared for a siege, but instead Svein had offered to talk. The Danes, quite suddenly, had stopped raiding. Instead they had settled in Cridianton and sent an embassy to Exanceaster, and Svein and Odda had made their private peace.

‘We sell them horses,’ Harald said, ‘and they pay well for them. Twenty shillings a stallion, fifteen a mare.’

‘You sell them horses,’ I said flatly.

‘So they will go away,’ Harald explained.

Servants threw a big birch log onto the fire. Sparks exploded outwards, scattering the hounds who lay just beyond the ring of hearth stones.

‘How many men does Svein lead?’ I asked.

‘Many,’ Harald said.

‘Eight hundred?’ I asked, ‘nine?’ Harald shrugged. ‘They came in twenty-four ships,’ I went on, ‘only twenty-four. So how many men can he have? No more than a thousand, and we killed a few, and others must have died in the winter.’

‘We think he has eight hundred,’ Harald said reluctantly.

‘And how many men in the fyrd? Two thousand?’

‘Of which only four hundred are seasoned warriors,’ Harald said. That was probably true. Most men of the fyrd are farmers, while every Dane is a sword-warrior, but Svein would never have pitted his eight hundred men against two thousand. Not because he feared losing, but because he feared that in gaining victory he would lose a hundred men. That was why he had stopped plundering and made his truce with Odda, because in southern Defnascir he could recover from his defeat at Cynuit. His men could rest, feed, make weapons and get horses. Svein was husbanding his men and making them stronger. ‘It was not my choice,’ Harald said defensively. ‘The ealdorman ordered it.’

‘And the king,’ I retorted, ‘ordered Odda to drive Svein out of Defnascir.’

‘What do we know of the king’s orders?’ Harald asked bitterly, and it was my turn to give him news, to tell how Alfred had escaped Guthrum and was in the great swamp.

‘And some time after Easter,’ I said, ‘we shall gather the shire fyrds and we shall cut Guthrum into pieces.’ I stood. ‘There will be no more horses sold to Svein,’ I said it loudly so that every man in the big hall could hear me.

‘But …’ Harald began, then shook his head. He had doubtless been about to say that Odda the Younger, Ealdorman of Defnascir, had ordered the horses to be sold, but his voice trailed away.

‘What are the king’s orders?’ I demanded of Steapa.

‘No more horses,’ he thundered.

There was silence until Harald irritably gestured at the harpist who struck a chord and began playing a melancholy tune. Someone began singing, but no one joined in and his voice trailed away. ‘I must look to the sentinels,’ Harald said, and he threw me an inquisitive look which I took as an invitation to join him, and so I buckled on my swords and then walked with him down Ocmundtun’s long street to where three spearmen stood guard beside a wooden hut. Harald talked to them for a moment, then led me further east, away from the light of the sentinels’ fire. A moon silvered the valley, lighting the empty road until the track vanished among trees. ‘I have thirty fighting men,’ Harald said suddenly.

He was telling me he was too weak to fight. ‘How many men does Odda have in Exanceaster?’ I asked.

‘A hundred? Hundred and twenty?’

‘The fyrd should have been raised.’

‘I had no orders,’ Harald said.

‘Did you seek any?’

‘Of course I did.’ He was angry with me now. ‘I told Odda we should drive Svein away, but he wouldn’t listen.’

‘Did he tell you the king ordered the fyrd raised?’

‘No.’ Harald paused, staring down the moonlit road. ‘We heard nothing of Alfred, except that he’d been defeated and was hiding. And we heard the Danes were all across Wessex, and that more were gathering in Mercia.’

‘Odda didn’t think to attack Svein when he landed?’

‘He thought to protect himself,’ Harald said, ‘and sent me to the Tamur.’

The Tamur was the river which divided Wessex from Cornwalum. ‘The Britons are quiet?’ I asked.

‘Their priests are telling them not to fight us.’

‘But priests or no priests,’ I said, ‘they’ll cross the river if the Danes look like winning.’

‘Aren’t they winning already?’ Harald asked bitterly.

‘We’re still free men,’ I said.

He nodded at that. Behind us, in the town, a dog began howling and he turned as if the noise indicated trouble, but the howling stopped with a sharp yelp. He kicked a stone in the road. ‘Svein frightens me,’ he admitted suddenly.

‘He’s a frightening man,’ I agreed.

‘He’s clever,’ Harald said, ‘clever, strong and savage.’

‘A Dane,’ I said drily.

‘A ruthless man,’ Harald went on.

‘He is,’ I agreed, ‘and do you think that after you have fed him, supplied him with horses and given him shelter, he will leave you alone?’

‘No,’ he said, ‘but Odda believes that.’

Then Odda was a fool. He was nursing a wolf cub that would tear him to shreds when it was strong enough. ‘Why didn’t Svein march north to join Guthrum?’ I asked.

‘I wouldn’t know.’

But I knew. Guthrum had been in England for years now. He had tried to take Wessex before, and he had failed, but now, on the very brink of success, he had paused. Guthrum the Unlucky, he was called, and I suspected he had not changed. He was wealthy, led many men, but he was cautious. Svein, though, came from the Norsemen’s settlements in Ireland and was a very different creature. He was younger than Guthrum, less wealthy than Guthrum, and led fewer men, but he was undoubtedly the better warrior. Now, bereft of his ships, he was weakened, but he had persuaded Odda the Younger to give him refuge and he gathered his strength so that when he did meet Guthrum he would not be a defeated leader in need of help, but a spear-Dane of power. Svein, I thought, was a far more dangerous man than Guthrum, and Odda the Younger was only making him more dangerous.

‘Tomorrow,’ I said, ‘we must start raising the fyrd. Those are the king’s orders.’

Harald nodded. I could not see his face in the darkness, but I sensed he was not happy, yet he was a sensible man and must have known that Svein had to be driven out of the shire. ‘I shall send the messages,’ he said, ‘but Odda might stop the fyrd assembling. He’s made his truce with Svein and he won’t want me breaking it. Folk will obey him before they obey me.’

‘And what of his father?’ I asked. ‘Will they obey him?’

‘They will,’ he said, ‘but he’s a sick man. You saw that. It’s a miracle he lives at all.’

‘Maybe because my wife nurses him?’

‘Yes,’ he said, and fell silent. There was something odd in the air now, something unexpressed, a discomfort. ‘Your wife nurses him well,’ he finished awkwardly.

‘He’s her godfather,’ I said.

‘So he is.’

‘It is good to see her,’ I said, not because I meant it, but because it was the proper thing to say and I could think of nothing else. ‘And it will be good to see my son,’ I added with more warmth.

‘Your son,’ Harald said flatly.

‘He’s here, isn’t he?’

‘Yes.’ Harald flinched. He turned away to look at the moon and I thought he would say no more, but then he summoned his courage and looked back to me. ‘Your son, Lord Uhtred,’ he said, ‘is in the churchyard.’

It took a few heartbeats for that to make sense, and then it did not make any sense at all, but left me confused. I touched my hammer amulet. ‘In the churchyard?’

‘It is not my place to tell you.’

‘But you will tell me,’ I said, and my voice sounded like Steapa’s growl.

Harald stared at the moon-touched river, silver-white beneath the black trees. ‘Your son died,’ he said. He waited for my response, but I neither moved nor spoke. ‘He choked to death.’

‘Choked?’

‘A pebble,’ Harald said. ‘He was just a baby. He must have picked the pebble up and swallowed it.’

‘A pebble?’ I asked.

‘A woman was with him, but …’ Harald’s voice tailed away. ‘She tried to save him, but she could do nothing. He died.’

‘On Saint Vincent’s Day,’ I said.

‘You knew?’

‘No,’ I said, ‘I didn’t know.’ But Saint Vincent’s Day had been the day when Iseult drew Alfred’s son, the Ætheling Edward, through the earth. And somewhere, Iseult had told me, a child must die so that the king’s heir, the Ætheling, could live.

And it had been my child. Uhtred the Younger. Whom I had hardly known. Edward had been given breath and Uhtred had twitched and fought and gasped and died.

‘I’m sorry,’ Harald said. ‘It was not my place to tell you, but you needed to know before you saw Mildrith again.’

‘She hates me,’ I said bleakly.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘she does.’ He paused. ‘I thought she would go mad with grief, but God has preserved her. She would like …’

‘Like what?’

‘To join the sisters at Cridianton. When the Danes leave. They have a nunnery there, a small house.’

I did not care what Mildrith did. ‘And my son is buried here?’

‘Under the yew tree,’ he turned and pointed, ‘beside the church.’

So let him stay there, I thought. Let him rest in his short grave to wait the chaos of the world’s ending.

‘Tomorrow,’ I said, ‘we raise the fyrd.’

Because there was a kingdom to save.

Priests were summoned to Harald’s hall and the priests wrote the summons for the fyrd. Most thegns could not read, and many of their priests would probably struggle to decipher the few words, but the messengers would tell them what the parchments said. They were to arm their men and bring them to Ocmundtun, and the wax seal on the summons was the authority for those orders. The seal showed Odda the Elder’s badge of a stag. ‘It will take a week,’ Harald warned me, ‘for most of the fyrd to reach here, and the ealdorman will try to stop it happening at all.’

‘What will he do?’

‘Tell the thegns to ignore it, I suppose.’

‘And Svein? What will he do?’

‘Try to kill us?’

‘And he has eight hundred men who can be here tomorrow,’ I said.

‘And I have thirty men,’ Harald said bleakly.

‘But we do have a fortress,’ I said, pointing to the limestone ridge with its palisade.

I did not doubt that the Danes would come. By summoning the fyrd we threatened their safety, and Svein was not a man who would take a threat lightly, and so, while the messages were carried north and south, the townsfolk were told to take their valuables up to the fort beside the river. Some men were set to strengthening the palisade, others took livestock up onto the moor so the beasts could not be taken by the Danes, and Steapa went to every nearby settlement and demanded that men of fighting age go to Ocmundtun with any weapon they possessed, so that by that afternoon the fort was manned by over eighty men. Few were warriors, most had no weapons other than an axe, but from the foot of the hill they looked formidable enough. Women carried food and water to the fort, and most of the town reckoned to sleep up there, despite the rain, for fear that the Danes would come in the night.

Odda the Elder refused to go to the fort. He was too sick, he said, and too feeble, and if he was supposed to die then he would die in Harald’s hall. Harald and I tried to persuade him, but he would not listen. ‘Mildrith can go,’ he said.

‘No,’ she said. She sat by Odda’s bed, her hands clutched tight under the sleeves of her grey robe. She stared at me, challenge in her eyes, daring me to give her an order to abandon Odda and go to the fortress.

‘I am sorry,’ I said to her.

‘Sorry?’

‘About our son.’

‘You were not a father to him,’ she accused me. Her eyes glistened. ‘You wanted him to be a Dane! You wanted him to be a pagan! You didn’t even care for his soul!’

‘I cared for him,’ I said, but she ignored that. I had not sounded convincing, even to myself.

‘His soul is safe,’ Harald said gently. ‘He is in the Lord Jesus’s arms. He is happy.’

Mildrith looked at him and I saw how Harald’s words had comforted her, though she still began crying. She caressed her wooden cross, then Odda the Elder reached out and patted her arm. ‘If the Danes come, lord,’ I said to him, ‘I shall send men for you.’ I turned then and went from the sickroom. I could not cope with Mildrith crying or with the thought of a dead son. Such things are difficult, much more difficult than making war, and so I buckled on my swords, picked up my shield and put on my splendid wolf-crested helmet so that, when Harald came from Odda’s chamber, he checked to see me standing like a warlord by his hearth. ‘If we make a big fire at the eastern end of town,’ I said, ‘we’ll see the Danes come. It will give us time to carry Lord Odda to the fort.’

‘Yes.’ He looked up at the great rafters of his hall, and perhaps he was thinking that he would never see it thus again, for the Danes would come and the hall would burn. He made the sign of the cross.

‘Fate is inexorable,’ I told him. What else was there to say? The Danes might come, the hall might burn, but they were small things in the balance of a kingdom, and so I went to order the fire that would illuminate the eastern road, but the Danes did not come that night. It rained softly all through the darkness, so that in the morning the folk in the fort were wet, cold and unhappy. Then, in the dawn, the first men of the fyrd arrived. It might take days for the farther parts of the shire to receive their summons and to arm men and despatch them to Ocmundtun, but the nearer places sent men straight away so that by late morning there were close to three hundred beneath the fort. No more than seventy of those could be called warriors, men who had proper weapons, shields and at least a leather coat. The rest were farm labourers with hoes or sickles or axes.

Harald sent foraging parties to find grain. It was one thing to gather a force, quite another to feed it, and none of us knew how long we would have to keep the men assembled. If the Danes did not come to us, then we would have to go to them and force them from Cridianton, and for that we would need the whole fyrd of Defnascir. Odda the Younger, I thought, would never allow that to happen.

Nor did he. For, as the rain ended and the noontime prayers were said, Odda himself came to Ocmundtun and he did not come alone, but rode with sixty of his warriors in chain mail and as many Danes in their war-glory. The sun came out as they appeared from the eastern trees and it shone on mail and on spear points, on bridle chains and stirrup irons, on polished helmets and bright shield bosses. They spread into the pastures on either side of the road and advanced on Ocmundtun in a wide line, and at its centre were two standards. One, the black stag, was the banner of Defnascir, while the other was a Danish triangle and displayed the white horse.

‘There’ll be no fight,’ I told Harald.

‘There won’t?’

‘Not enough of them. Svein can’t afford to lose men, so he’s come to talk.’

‘I don’t want to meet them here,’ he gestured at the fort. ‘We should be in the hall.’

He ordered that the best armed men should go down to the town, and there we filled the muddy street outside the hall as Odda and the Danes came from the east. The horsemen had to break their line to enter the town, making a column instead, and the column was led by three men. Odda was in the centre and he was flanked by two Danes, one of them Svein of the White Horse.

Svein looked magnificent, a silver-white warrior. He rode a white horse, wore a white woollen cloak, and his mail and boar-snouted helmet had been scrubbed with sand until they glowed silver in the watery sunlight. His shield bore a silvered boss around which a white horse had been painted. The leather of his bridle, saddle and scabbard had been bleached pale. He saw me, but showed no recognition, just looked along the line of men barring the street and seemed to dismiss them as useless. His banner of the white horse was carried by the second horseman who had the same darkened face as his master, a face hammered by sun and snow, ice and wind.

‘Harald.’ Odda the Younger had ridden ahead of the two Danes. He was sleek as ever, gleaming in mail, and with a black cloak draping his horse’s rump. He smiled as though he welcomed the meeting. ‘You have summoned the fyrd. Why?’

‘Because the king commanded it,’ Harald said.

Odda still smiled. He glanced at me, appeared not to notice I was present, then looked to the hall door where Steapa had just appeared. The big man had been talking with Odda the Elder, and now he stared at Odda the Younger with astonishment. ‘Steapa!’ Odda the Younger said. ‘Loyal Steapa! How good to see you!’

‘You too, lord.’

‘My faithful Steapa,’ Odda said, plainly pleased to be reunited with his erstwhile bodyguard. ‘Come here!’ he commanded, and Steapa pushed past us and knelt in the mud by Odda’s horse and reverently kissed his master’s boot. ‘Stand,’ Odda said, ‘stand. With you beside me, Steapa, who can hurt us?’

‘No one, lord.’

‘No one,’ Odda repeated, then smiled at Harald. ‘You said the king ordered the fyrd summoned? There is a king in Wessex?’

‘There is a king in Wessex,’ Harald said firmly.

‘There is a king skulking in the marshes!’ Odda said, loudly enough for all Harald’s men to hear. ‘He is the king of frogs, perhaps? A monarch of eels? What kind of king is that?’

I answered for Harald, only I answered in Danish. ‘A king who ordered me to burn Svein’s boats. Which I did. All but one, which I kept and still have.’

Svein took off his boar-snouted helmet and looked at me and again there was no recognition. His gaze was like that of the great serpent of death that lies at the foot of Yggdrasil. ‘I burned the White Horse,’ I told him, ‘and warmed my hands on its flames.’ Svein spat for answer. ‘And the man beside you,’ I spoke to Odda now, using English, ‘is the man who burned your church at Cynuit, the man who killed the monks. The man who is cursed in heaven, in hell and in this world, yet now he is your ally?’

‘Does that goat-turd speak for you?’ Odda demanded of Harald.

‘These men speak for me,’ Harald said, indicating the warriors behind him.

‘But by what right do you raise the fyrd?’ Odda asked. ‘I am ealdorman!’

‘And who made you ealdorman?’ Harald asked. He paused, but Odda gave no answer. ‘The king of frogs?’ Harald asked. ‘The monarch of eels? If Alfred has no authority then you have lost yours with his.’

Odda was plainly surprised by Harald’s defiance, and he was probably irritated by it, but he gave no sign of annoyance. He just went on smiling. ‘I do believe,’ he said to Harald, ‘that you have misunderstood what happens in Defnascir.’

‘Then explain to me,’ Harald said.

‘I shall,’ Odda said, ‘but we shall talk with ale and food.’ He looked up at the sky. The brief sun was gone behind cloud and a chill wind was gusting the thatch of the street. ‘And we should talk under a roof,’ Odda suggested, ‘before it rains again.’

There were matters to be agreed first, though that was done soon enough. The Danish horsemen would withdraw to the eastern end of the town while Harald’s men would retreat to the fort. Each side could take ten men into the hall, and all of those men were to leave their weapons heaped in the street where they were to be guarded by six Danes and as many Saxons.

Harald’s servants brought ale, bread, and cheese. There was no meat offered, for it was the season of Lent. Benches were placed at either side of the hearth. Svein crossed to our side of the fire as the benches were brought and at long last deigned to recognise me. ‘It was really you who burned the ships?’ he asked.

‘Including yours.’

‘The White Horse took a year and a day to build,’ he said, ‘and she was made of trees from which we’d hung Odin’s sacrifices. She was a good ship.’

‘She’s all ash on the seashore now,’ I said.

‘Then one day I shall repay you,’ he retorted, and though he spoke mildly, there was a world of threat in his voice. ‘And you were wrong,’ he added.

‘Wrong?’ I asked. ‘Wrong to burn your ships?’

‘There was no altar of gold at Cynuit.’

‘Where you burned the monks,’ I said.

‘I burned them alive,’ he agreed, ‘and warmed my hands on their flames.’ He smiled at that memory. ‘You could join me again?’ he suggested. ‘I shall forgive you burning my ship, and you and I can fight side by side once more? I need good men. I pay well.’

‘I am sworn to Alfred.’

‘Ah,’ he nodded. ‘So be it. Enemies.’ He went back to Odda’s benches.

‘You would see your father before we talk?’ Harald asked Odda, gesturing towards the door at the hall’s end.

‘I shall see him,’ Odda said, ‘when our friendship is repaired. And you and I must be friends.’ He said the last words loudly and they prompted men to sit on the benches. ‘You summoned the fyrd,’ he spoke to Harald, ‘because Uhtred brought you orders from Alfred?’

‘He did.’

‘Then you did the right thing,’ Odda said, ‘and that is to be praised.’ Svein, listening to the translation that was provided by one of his own men, stared flatly at us. ‘And now you will do the right thing again,’ Odda continued, ‘and send the fyrd home.’

‘The king has ordered otherwise,’ Harald said.

‘What king?’ Odda asked.

‘Alfred, who else?’

‘But there are other kings in Wessex,’ Odda said. ‘Guthrum is King of East Anglia, and he is in Wessex, and some say Æthelwold will be crowned king before the summer.’

‘Æthelwold?’ Harald asked.

‘You’d not heard?’ Odda asked. ‘Wulfhere of Wiltunscir has sided with Guthrum, and both Guthrum and Wulfhere have said Æthelwold will be King of Wessex. And why not? Is not Æthelwold the son of our last king? Should he not be king?’

Harald, uncertain, looked at me. He had not heard of Wulfhere’s defection, and it was hard news for him. I nodded. ‘Wulfhere is with Guthrum,’ I said.

‘So Æthelwold, son of Æthelred, will be king in Wessex,’ Odda said, ‘and Æthelwold has thousands of swords at his command. Ælfrig of Kent is with the Danes. There are Danes in Lundene, on Sceapig and on the walls of Contwaraburg. All northern Wessex is in Danish hands. There are Danes here, in Defnascir. What, tell me, is Alfred king of?’

‘Of Wessex,’ I said.

Odda ignored me, looking at Harald. ‘Alfred has our oaths,’ Harald said stubbornly.

‘And I have your oath,’ Odda reminded him. He sighed. ‘God knows, Harald, no one was more loyal to Alfred than I. Yet he failed us! The Danes came and the Danes are here, and where is Alfred? Hiding! In a few weeks their armies will march! They will come from Mercia, from Lundene, from Kent! Their fleets will be off our coast. Armies of Danes and fleets of Vikings! What will you do then?’

Harald shifted uneasily. ‘What will you do?’ he retorted.

Odda gestured at Svein who, the question translated, spoke for the first time. I interpreted for Harald. Wessex is doomed, Svein said in his grating voice. By summer it will be swarming with Danes, with men newly come from the north, and the only Saxons who will live will be those men who aid the Danes now. Those who fight against the Danes, Svein said, will be dead, and their women will be whores and their children will be slaves and their homes will be lost and their names shall be forgotten like the smoke of an extinguished fire.

‘And Æthelwold will be king?’ I asked scornfully. ‘You think we will all bow to a whoring drunkard?’

Odda shook his head. ‘The Danes are generous,’ he said, and he drew back his cloak and I saw that he wore six golden arm rings. ‘To those who help them,’ he said, ‘there will be the rewards of land, wealth and honour.’

‘And Æthelwold will be king?’ I asked again.

Odda again gestured at Svein. The big Dane seemed bored, but he stirred himself. ‘It is right,’ he said, ‘that Saxons should be ruled by a Saxon. We shall make a king here.’

I scorned that. They had made Saxon kings in Northumbria and in Mercia and those kings were feeble, leashed to the Danes, and then I understood what Svein meant and I laughed aloud. ‘He’s promised you the throne!’ I accused Odda.

‘I’ve heard more sense from a pig’s fart,’ Odda retorted, but I knew I was right. Æthelwold was Guthrum’s candidate for the throne of Wessex, but Svein was no friend of Guthrum and would want his own Saxon as king. Odda.

‘King Odda,’ I said jeeringly, then spat into the fire.

Odda would have killed me for that, but we met under the terms of a truce and so he forced himself to ignore the insult. He looked at Harald. ‘You have a choice, Harald,’ he said, ‘you can die or you can live.’

Harald was silent. He had not known about Wulfhere, and the news had appalled him. Wulfhere was the most powerful ealdorman in Wessex, and if he thought Alfred was doomed, then what was Harald to think? I could see the shire-reeve’s uncertainty. His decency wanted him to declare loyalty to Alfred, but Odda had suggested that nothing but death would follow such a choice. ‘I …’ Harald began, then fell silent, unable to say what he thought for he did not know his own mind.

‘The fyrd is raised,’ I spoke for him, ‘at the king’s orders, and the king’s orders are to drive the Danes from Defnascir.’

Odda spat into the fire for answer.

‘Svein has been defeated,’ I said. ‘His ships are burned. He is like a whipped dog and you give him comfort.’ Svein, when that was translated, gave me a look like the stroke of a whip. ‘Svein,’ I went on as though he was not present, ‘must be driven back to Guthrum.’

‘You have no authority here,’ Odda said.

‘I have Alfred’s authority,’ I said, ‘and a written order telling you to drive Svein from your shire.’

‘Alfred’s orders mean nothing,’ Odda said, ‘and you croak like a swamp frog.’ He turned to Steapa. ‘You have unfinished business with Uhtred.’

Steapa looked uncertain for a heartbeat, then understood what his master meant. ‘Yes, lord,’ he said.

‘Then finish it now.’

‘Finish what now?’ Harald asked.

‘Your king,’ Odda said the last word sarcastically, ‘ordered Steapa and Uhtred to fight to the death. Yet both live! So your king’s orders have not been obeyed.’

‘There is a truce!’ Harald protested.

‘Either Uhtred stops interfering in the affairs of Defnascir,’ Odda said forcefully, ‘or I shall have Defnascir kill Uhtred. You want to know who is right? Alfred or me? You want to know who will be king in Wessex, Æthelwold or Alfred? Then put it to the test, Harald. Let Steapa and Uhtred finish their fight and see which man God favours. If Uhtred wins then I shall support you, and if he loses?’ He smiled. He had no doubt who would win.

Harald stayed silent. I looked at Steapa and, as on the first time I met him, saw nothing on his face. He had promised to protect me, but that was before he had been reunited with his master. The Danes looked happy. Why should they mind two Saxons fighting? Harald, though, still hesitated, and then the weary, feeble voice sounded from the doorway at the back of the hall. ‘Let them fight, Harald, let them fight.’ Odda the Elder, swathed in a wolfskin blanket, stood at the door. He held a crucifix. ‘Let them fight,’ he said again, ‘and God will guide the victor’s arm.’

Harald looked at me. I nodded. I did not want to fight, but a man cannot back down from combat. What was I to do? Say that to expect God to indicate a course of action through a duel was nonsense? To appeal to Harald? To claim that everything Odda had said was wrong and that Alfred would win? If I had refused to fight I was granting the argument to Odda, and in truth he had half convinced me that Alfred was doomed, and Harald, I am sure, was wholly convinced. Yet there was more than mere pride making me fight in the hall that day. There was a belief, deep in my soul, that somehow Alfred would survive. I did not like him, I did not like his god, but I believed fate was on his side. So I nodded again, this time to Steapa. ‘I do not want to fight you,’ I said to him, ‘but I have given an oath to Alfred, and my sword says he will win and that Danish blood will dung our fields.’

Steapa said nothing. He just flexed his huge arms, then waited as one of Odda’s men went outside and returned with two swords. No shields, just swords. He had taken a pair of blades at random from the pile and he offered them to Steapa first who shook his head, indicating that I should have the choice. I closed my eyes, groped, and took the first hilt that I touched. It was a heavy sword, weighted towards its tip. A slashing weapon, not a piercing blade, and I knew I had chosen wrong.

Steapa took the other and scythed it through the air so that the blade sang. Svein, who had betrayed little emotion so far, looked impressed, while Odda the Younger smiled. ‘You can put the sword down,’ he told me, ‘and thus yield the argument to me.’

Instead I walked to the clear space beside the hearth. I had no intention of attacking Steapa, but would let him come to me. I felt weary and resigned. Fate is inexorable.

‘For my sake,’ Odda the Elder spoke behind me, ‘make it fast.’

‘Yes, lord,’ Steapa said, and he took a step towards me and then turned as fast as a striking snake and his blade whipped in a slash that took Odda the Younger’s throat. The sword was not as sharp as it could have been, so that the blow drove Odda down, but it also ripped his gullet open so that blood spurted a blade’s length into the air, then splashed into the fire where it hissed and bubbled. Odda was on the floor-rushes now, his legs twitching, his hands clutching at his throat that still pumped blood. He made a gargling noise, turned on his back and went into a spasm so that his heels drummed against the floor and then, just as Steapa stepped forward to finish him, he gave a last jerk and was dead.

Steapa drove the sword into the floor, leaving it quivering there. ‘Alfred rescued me,’ he announced to the hall. ‘Alfred took me from the Danes. Alfred is my king.’

‘And he has our oaths,’ Odda the Elder added, ‘and my son had no business making peace with the pagans.’

The Danes stepped back. Svein glanced at me, for I was still holding a sword, then he looked at the boar spears leaning against the wall, judging whether he could snatch one before I attacked him. I lowered the blade. ‘We have a truce,’ Harald said loudly.

‘We have a truce,’ I told Svein in Danish.

Svein spat on the bloody rushes, then he and his standard-bearer took another cautious backwards pace.

‘But tomorrow,’ Harald said, ‘there will be no truce, and we shall come to kill you.’

The Danes rode from Ocmundtun. And next day they also went from Cridianton. They could have stayed if they wished. There were more than enough of them to defend Cridianton and make trouble in the shire, but Svein knew he would be besieged and, man by man, worn down until he had no force at all, and so he went north, going to join Guthrum, and I rode to Oxton. The land had never looked more beautiful, the trees were hazed with green and bullfinches were feasting on the first tight fruit buds, while anemones, stitchwort and white violets glowed in sheltered spots. Lambs ran from the buck hares in the pastures. The sun shimmered on the wide sea-reach of the Uisc and the sky was full of lark song beneath which the foxes took lambs, magpies and jays feasted on other birds’ eggs, and ploughmen impaled crows at the edges of the fields to ensure a good harvest.

‘There’ll be butter soon,’ a woman told me. She really wanted to know if I was returning to the estate, but I was not. I was saying farewell. There were slaves living there, doing their jobs, and I assured them Mildrith would appoint a steward sooner or later, then I went to the hall and I dug beside the post and found my hoard untouched. The Danes had not come to Oxton. Wirken, the sly priest of Exanmynster, heard I was at the hall and rode a donkey up to the estate. He assured me he had kept a watchful eye on the place, and doubtless he wanted a reward. ‘It belongs to Mildrith now,’ I told him.

‘The Lady Mildrith? She lives?’

‘She lives,’ I said curtly, ‘but her son is dead.’

‘God rest his poor soul,’ Wirken said, making the sign of the cross. I was eating a scrap of ham and he looked at it hungrily, knowing I broke the rules of Lent. He said nothing, but I knew he was cursing me for a pagan.

‘And the Lady Mildrith,’ I went on, ‘would live a chaste life now. She says she will join the sisters in Cridianton.’

‘There are no sisters in Cridianton,’ Wirken said. ‘They’re all dead. The Danes saw to that before they left.’

‘Other nuns will settle there,’ I said. Not that I cared, for the fate of a small nunnery was none of my business. Oxton was no longer my business. The Danes were my business, and the Danes had gone north and I would follow them.

For that was my life. That spring I was twenty-one years old and for half my life I had been with armies. I was not a farmer. I watched the slaves tearing the couch-grass from the home fields and knew the tasks of farming bored me. I was a warrior, and I had been driven from my home of Bebbanburg to the southern edge of England and I think I knew, as Wirken babbled on about how he had guarded the storehouses through the winter, that I was now going north again. Ever north. Back home.

‘You lived off these storehouses all winter,’ I accused the priest.

‘I watched them all winter, lord.’

‘And you got fat as you watched,’ I said. I climbed into my saddle. Behind me were two bags, ripe with money, and they stayed there as I rode to Exanceaster and found Steapa in The Swan. Next morning, with six other warriors from Ealdorman Odda’s guard, we rode north. Our way was marked by pillars of smoke, for Svein was burning and plundering as he went, but we had done what Alfred had wanted us to do. We had driven Svein back to Guthrum, so that now the two largest Danish armies were united. If Alfred had been stronger he might have left them separate and marched against each in turn, but Alfred knew he had only one chance to take back his kingdom, and that was to win one battle. He had to overwhelm all the Danes and destroy them in one blow, and his weapon was an army that existed only in his head. He had sent demands that the fyrd of Wessex would be summoned after Easter and before Pentecost, but no one knew whether it would actually appear. Perhaps we would ride from the swamp and find no one at the meeting place. Or perhaps the fyrd would come, and there would be too few men. The truth was that Alfred was too weak to fight, but to wait longer would only make him weaker. So he had to fight or lose his kingdom.

So we would fight.

Eleven

‘You will have many sons,’ Iseult told me. It was dark, though a half-moon was hazed by a mist. Somewhere to the north-east a dozen fires burned in the hills, evidence that a strong Danish patrol was watching the swamp. ‘But I am sorry about Uhtred,’ she said.

I wept for him then. I do not know why the tears had taken so long to come, but suddenly I was overwhelmed by the thought of his helplessness, his sudden smile and the pity of it all. Both my half-brothers and my half-sister had died when they were babies and I do not remember my father crying, though perhaps he did. I do remember my stepmother shrieking in grief, and how my father, disgusted by the sound, had gone hunting with his hawks and hounds.

‘I saw three kingfishers yesterday,’ Iseult said.

Tears were running down my cheeks, blurring the misted moon. I said nothing.

‘Hild says the blue of the kingfisher’s feathers is for the virgin and the red is for Christ’s blood.’

‘And what do you say?’

‘That your son’s death is my doing.’

‘Wyrd bið ful aræd,’ I said. Fate is fate. It cannot be changed or cheated. Alfred had insisted I marry Mildrith so I would be tied to Wessex and would put roots deep into its rich soil, but I already had roots in Northumbria, roots twisted into the rock of Bebbanburg, and perhaps my son’s death was a sign from the gods that I could not make a new home. Fate wanted me to go to my northern stronghold and until I reached Bebbanburg I would be a wanderer. Men fear wanderers for they have no rules. The Danes came as strangers, rootless and violent, and that, I thought, was why I was always happier in their company. Alfred could spend hours worrying about the righteousness of a law, whether it concerned the fate of orphans or the sanctity of boundary markers, and he was right to worry because folk cannot live together without law, or else every straying cow would lead to bloodshed, but the Danes hacked through the law with swords. It was easier that way, though once they had settled a land they started to make their own laws. ‘It was not your fault,’ I said. ‘You don’t command fate.’

‘Hild says there is no such thing as fate,’ Iseult said.

‘Then Hild is wrong.’

‘There is only the will of God,’ Iseult said, ‘and if we obey that we go to heaven.’

‘And if we choose not to,’ I said, ‘isn’t that fate?’

‘That’s the devil,’ she said. ‘We are sheep, Uhtred, and we choose our shepherd, a good one or a bad one.’

I thought Hild must have soured Iseult with Christianity, but I was wrong. It was a priest who had come to Æthelingæg while I had been in Defnascir who had filled her head with his religion. He was a British priest from Dyfed, a priest who spoke Iseult’s native tongue and also knew both English and Danish. I was ready to hate him as I hated Brother Asser, but Father Pyrlig stumbled into our hut next morning booming that he had found five goose eggs and was dying of hunger. ‘Dying! That’s what I am, dying of starvation!’ He looked pleased to see me. ‘You’re the famous Uhtred, eh? And Iseult tells me you hate Brother Asser? Then you’re a friend of mine. Why Abraham doesn’t take Asser to his bosom I do not know, except maybe Abraham doesn’t want the little bastard clinging to his bosom. I wouldn’t. It would be like suckling a serpent, it would. Did I say I was hungry.’

He was twice my age and a big man, big-bellied and bighearted. His hair stuck out in ungovernable clumps, he had a broken nose, only four teeth, and a broad smile. ‘When I was a child,’ he told me, ‘ever such a little child, I used to eat mud. Can you believe that? Do Saxons eat mud? Of course they do, and I thought I don’t want to eat mud. Mud is for toads, it is. So eventually I became a priest. And you know why? Because I never saw a hungry priest! Never! Did you ever see a hungry priest? Nor me!’ All this tumbled out without any introduction, then he spoke earnestly to Iseult in her own tongue and I was sure he was pouring Christianity into her, but then he translated for me. ‘I’m telling her that you can make a marvellous dish with goose eggs. Break them up, stir them well and add just a little crumbled cheese. So Defnascir is safe?’

‘Unless the Danes send a fleet,’ I said.

‘Guthrum has that in mind,’ Pyrlig said. ‘He wants the Danes in Lundene to send their ships to the south coast.’

‘You know that?’

‘I do indeed, I do indeed! He told me! I’ve just spent ten days in Cippanhamm. I speak Danish, see, because I’m clever, and so I was an ambassador for my king. How about that! Me, who used to eat mud, an ambassador! Crumble the cheese finer, my love. That’s right. I had to discover, you see, how much money Guthrum would pay us to bring our spearmen over the hills and start skewering Saxons. Now that’s a fine ambition for a Briton, skewering Saxons, but the Danes are pagans, and God knows we can’t have pagans loose in the world.’

‘Why not?’

‘It’s just a fancy of mine,’ he said, ‘just a fancy.’ He stabbed his finger into a tiny pot of butter, then licked it. ‘It isn’t really sour,’ he told Iseult, ‘not very, so stir it in.’ He grinned at me. ‘What happens when you put two bulls to a herd of cows?’

‘One bull dies.’

‘There you are! Gods are the same, which is why we don’t want pagans here. We’re cows and the gods are bulls.’

‘So we get humped?’

He laughed. ‘Theology’s difficult. Anyway, God is my bull so here I am, telling the Saxons about Guthrum.’

‘Did Guthrum offer you money?’ I asked.

‘He offered me the kingdoms of the world! He offered me gold, silver, amber and jet! He even offered me women, or boys if I had that taste, which I don’t. And I didn’t believe a single promise he made. Not that it mattered. The Britons aren’t going to fight anyway. God doesn’t want us to. No! My embassy was all a pretence. Brother Asser sent me. He wanted me to spy on the Danes, see? Then tell Alfred what I saw, so that’s what I’m doing.’

‘Asser sent you?’

‘He wants Alfred to win. Not because he loves the Saxons, even Brother Asser isn’t that curdled, but because he loves God.’

‘And will Alfred win?’

‘If God has anything to do with it, yes,’ Pyrlig said cheerfully, then gave a shrug. ‘But the Danes are strong in men. A big army! But they’re not happy, I can tell you that. And they’re all hungry. Not starving, mind you, but pulling their belts tighter than they’d like, and now Svein’s there so there’ll be even less food. Their own fault, of course. Too many men in Cippanhamm! And too many slaves! They have scores of slaves. But he’s sending the slaves to Lundene, to sell them there. They need some baby eels, eh? That’ll fatten them up.’ The elvers were swarming into the Sæfern Sea and slithering up the shallow waterways of the swamp where they were being netted in abundance. There was no hunger in Æthelingæg, not if you gorged on elvers. ‘I caught three basketfuls yesterday,’ Pyrlig said happily, ‘and a frog. It had a face just like Brother Asser so I gave it a blessing and threw it back. Don’t just stir the eggs, girl! Beat them! I hear your son died?’

‘Yes,’ I answered stiffly.

‘I am sorry,’ he said with genuine feeling, ‘I am truly sorry, for to lose a child is a desperate hard thing. I sometimes think God must like children. He takes so many to him. I believe there’s a garden in heaven, a green garden where children play all the time. He’s got two sons of mine up there, and I tell you, the youngest must be making the angels scream. He’ll be pulling the girls’ hair and beating up the other boys like they were goose eggs.’

‘You lost two sons?’

‘But I kept three others and four daughters. Why do you think I’m never home?’ He grinned at me. ‘Noisy little things they are, children, and such appetites! Sweet Jesus, they’d eat a horse a day if they could! There are some folk who say priests shouldn’t marry and there are times I think they’re right. Do you have any bread, dearest?’

Iseult pointed to a net hanging from the roof. ‘Cut the mould off,’ she told me.

‘I like to see a man obeying a woman,’ Father Pyrlig said as I fetched the loaf.

‘Why’s that?’ I asked.

‘Because it means I’m not alone in this sorry world. Good God, but that Ælswith was weaned on gall juice, wasn’t she? Got a tongue in her like a starving weasel! Poor Alfred.’

‘He’s happy enough.’

‘Good God, man, that’s the last thing he is! Some folk catch God like a disease, and he’s one of them. He’s like a cow after winter, he is.’

‘He is?’

‘You know when the late spring grass comes in? All green and new and rich? And you put the poor cow out to eat and she blows up like a bladder? She’s nothing but shit and wind and then she gets the staggers and drops down dead if you don’t take her off the grass for a while. That’s Alfred. He got too much of the good green grass of God, and now he’s sick on it. But he’s a good man, a good man. Too thin, he is, but good. A living saint, no less. Ah, good girl, let’s eat.’ He scooped some of the eggs with his fingers, then passed the pot to me. ‘Thank God it’s Easter next week,’ he said with his mouth full so that scraps of egg lodged in his huge beard, ‘and then we can eat meat again. I’m wasting away without meat. You know Iseult will be baptised at Easter?’

‘She told me,’ I said shortly.

‘And you don’t approve? Just think of it as a good wash, then maybe you won’t mind so much.’

I was not in Æthelingæg for Iseult’s baptism, nor did I wish to be, for I knew Easter with Alfred would be nothing but prayers and psalms and priests and sermons. Instead I took Steapa and fifty men up into the hills, going towards Cippanhamm, for Alfred had ordered that the Danes were to be harried mercilessly in the next few weeks. He had decided to assemble the fyrd of Wessex close to Ascension Day, which was just six weeks away, and those were the weeks in which Guthrum would be hoping to revive his hungry horses on the spring grass, and so we rode to ambush Danish forage parties. Kill one forage party and the next must be protected by a hundred extra horsemen, and that wearies the horses even more and so requires still more forage. It worked for a while, but then Guthrum began sending his foragers north into Mercia where they were not opposed.

It was a time of waiting. There were two smiths in Æthelingæg now and, though neither had all the equipment they wanted, and though fuel for their furnaces was scarce, they were making good spear points. One of my jobs was to take men to cut ash poles for the spear shafts.

Alfred was writing letters, trying to discover how many men the shires could bring to battle, and he sent priests to Frankia to persuade the thegns who had fled there to return. More spies came from Cippanhamm confirming that Svein had joined Guthrum, and that Guthrum was strengthening his horses and raising men from the Danish parts of England. He was ordering his West Saxon allies like Wulfhere to arm their men, and warning his garrisons in Wintanceaster, Readingum and Baðum that they must be ready to abandon their ramparts and march to his aid. Guthrum had his own spies and must have known Alfred was planning to assemble an army, and I dare say he welcomed that news for such an army would be Alfred’s last hope and, should Guthrum destroy the fyrd, Wessex would fall never to rise again.

Æthelingæg seethed with rumour. Guthrum, it was said, had five thousand men. Ships had come from Denmark and a new army of Norsemen had sailed from Ireland. The Britons were marching. The fyrd of Mercia was on Guthrum’s side, and it was said the Danes had set up a great camp at Cracgelad on the River Temes where thousands of Mercian troops, both Danish and Saxon, were assembling. The rumours of Guthrum’s strength crossed the sea and Wilfrith of Hamptonscir wrote from Frankia begging Alfred to flee Wessex. ‘Take ship to this coast,’ he wrote, ‘and save your family.’

Leofric rarely rode on patrols with us, but stayed in Æthelingæg for he had been named commander of the king’s bodyguard. He was proud of that, as he should have been, for he had been peasant-born and he could neither read nor write, and Alfred usually insisted that his commanders were literate. Eanflæd’s influence was behind the appointment, for she had become a confidante of Ælswith. Alfred’s wife went nowhere without Eanflæd, even in church the one-time whore sat just behind Ælswith, and when Alfred held court, Eanflæd was always there. ‘The queen doesn’t like you,’ Eanflæd told me one rare day when I found her alone.

‘She’s not a queen,’ I said. ‘Wessex doesn’t have queens.’

‘She should be a queen,’ she said resentfully, ‘it would be right and proper.’ She was carrying a heap of plants and I noticed her forearms were a pale green. ‘Dyeing,’ she explained brusquely, and I followed her to where a great cauldron was bubbling on a fire. She threw in the plants and began stirring the mess in the pot. ‘We’re making green linen,’ she said.

‘Green linen?’

‘Alfred must have a banner,’ she said indignantly. ‘He can’t fight without a banner.’ The women were making two banners. One was the great green dragon flag of Wessex, while the other bore the cross of Christianity. ‘Your Iseult’s working on the cross,’ Eanflæd told me.

‘I know.’

‘You should have been at her baptism.’

‘I was killing Danes.’

‘But I’m glad she’s baptised. Come to her senses, she has.’

In truth, I thought, Iseult had been battered into Christianity. For weeks she had endured the rancour of Alfred’s churchmen, had been accused of witchcraft and of being the devil’s instrument, and it had worn her down. Then came Hild with her gentler Christianity, and Pyrlig who spoke of God in Iseult’s tongue, and Iseult had been persuaded. That meant I was the only pagan left in the swamp and Eanflæd glanced pointedly at my hammer amulet. She said nothing of it, instead asking me whether I truly believed we could defeat the Danes.

‘Yes,’ I said confidently, though of course I did not know.

‘How many men will Guthrum have?’

I knew the questions were not Eanflæd’s, but Ælswith’s. Alfred’s wife wanted to know if her husband had any chance of survival or whether they should take the ship we had captured from Svein and sail to Frankia. ‘Guthrum will lead four thousand men,’ I said, ‘at least.’

‘At least?’

‘Depends how many come from Mercia,’ I said, then thought for a heartbeat, ‘but I expect four thousand.’

‘And Wessex?’

‘The same,’ I said. I was lying. With enormous luck we could assemble three thousand, but I doubted it. Two thousand? Not likely, but possible. My real fear was that Alfred would raise his banner and no one would come, or that only a few hundred men would arrive. We could lead three hundred from Æthelingæg, but what could three hundred do against Guthrum’s great army?

Alfred also worried about numbers, and he sent me to Hamptonscir to discover how much of the shire was occupied by the Danes. I found them well entrenched in the north, but the south of the shire was free of them and in Hamtun, where Alfred’s fleet was based, the warships were still drawn up on the beach. Burgweard, the fleet’s commander, had over a hundred men in the town, all that was left of his crews, and he had them manning the palisade. He claimed he could not leave Hamtun for fear that the Danes would attack and capture the ships, but I had Alfred’s scrap of parchment with his dragon seal on it, and I used it to order him to keep thirty men to protect the ships and bring the rest to Alfred.

‘When?’ he asked gloomily.

‘When you’re summoned,’ I said, ‘but it will be soon. And you’re to raise the local fyrd too. Bring them.’

‘And if the Danes come here?’ he asked, ‘if they come by sea?’

‘Then we lose the fleet,’ I said, ‘and we build another.’

His fear was real enough. Danish ships were off the south coast again. For the moment, rather than attempt an invasion, they were being Vikings. They landed, raided, raped, burned, stole and went to sea again, but they were numerous enough for Alfred to worry that a whole army might land somewhere on the coast and march against him. We were harassed by that fear and by the knowledge that we were few and the enemy numerous, and that the enemy’s horses were fattening on the new grass.

‘Ascension Day,’ Alfred announced on the day I returned from Hamtun.

That was the day we should be ready in Æthelingæg, and on the Sunday after, which was the Feast of Saint Monica, we would gather the fyrd, if there was a fyrd. Reports said the Danes were readying to march and it was plain they would launch their attack south towards Wintanceaster, the town that was the capital of Wessex, and to protect it, to bar Guthrum’s road south, the fyrd would gather at Egbert’s Stone. I had never heard of the place, but Leofric assured me it was an important spot, the place where King Egbert, Alfred’s grandfather, had given judgements. ‘It isn’t one stone,’ he said, ‘but three.’

‘Three?’

‘Two big pillars and another boulder on top. The giants made it in the old days.’

And so the summons was issued. Bring every man, the parchments instructed, bring every weapon and say your prayers, for what is left of Wessex will meet at Egbert’s Stone to carry battle to the Danes, and no sooner was the summons sent than disaster struck. It came just a week before the fyrd was to gather.

Huppa, Ealdorman of Thornsæta, wrote that forty Danish ships were off his coast, and that he dared not lead the fyrd away from their threat. Worse, because the Danes were so numerous, he had begged Harald of Defnascir to lend him men.

That letter almost destroyed Alfred’s spirits. He had clung to his dream of surprising Guthrum by raising an unexpectedly powerful army, but all his hopes were now shredding away. He had always been thin, but suddenly he looked haggard and he spent hours in the church, wrestling with God, unable to understand why the Almighty had so suddenly turned against him. And two days after the news of the Danish fleet, Svein of the White Horse led three hundred mounted men in a raid against the hills on the edge of the swamp and, because scores of men from the Sumorsæte fyrd had gathered in Æthelingæg, Svein discovered and stole their horses. We had neither the room nor the forage to keep many horses in Æthelingæg itself, and so they were pastured beyond the causeway, and I watched from the fort as Svein, riding a white horse and wearing his white-plumed helmet and white cloak, rounded up the beasts and drove them away. There was nothing I could do to stop him. I had twenty men in the fort and Svein was leading hundreds.

‘Why were the horses not guarded?’ Alfred wanted to know.

‘They were,’ Wiglaf, Ealdorman of Sumorsæte, said, ‘and the guards died.’ He saw Alfred’s anger, but not his despair. ‘We haven’t seen a Dane here for weeks!’ he pleaded, ‘how were we to know they’d come in force?’

‘How many men died?’

‘Only twelve.’

‘Only?’ Alfred asked, wincing, ‘and how many horses lost?’

‘Sixty-three.’

On the night before Ascension Day Alfred walked beside the river. Beocca, faithful as a hound, followed him at a distance, wanting to offer the king God’s reassurance, but instead Alfred called to me. There was a moon, and its light shadowed his cheeks and made his pale eyes look almost white. ‘How many men will we have?’ he asked abruptly.

I did not need to think about the answer. ‘Two thousand.’

He nodded. He knew that number as well as I did.

‘Maybe a few more,’ I suggested.

He grunted at that. We would lead three hundred and fifty men from Æthelingæg and Wiglaf, Ealdorman of Sumorsæte, had promised a thousand, though in truth I doubted if that many would come. The fyrd of Wiltunscir had been weakened by Wulfhere’s defection, but the southern part of the shire should yield five hundred men, and we could expect some from Hamptonscir, but beyond that we would depend on whatever few men made it past the Danish garrisons that now ringed the heartland of Wessex. If Defnascir and Thornsæta had sent their fyrds then we would have numbered closer to four thousand, but they were not coming.

‘And Guthrum?’ Alfred asked, ‘how many will he have?’

‘Four thousand.’

‘More like five,’ Alfred said. He stared at the river that was running low between the muddy banks. The water rippled about the wicker fish traps. ‘So should we fight?’

‘What choice do we have?’

He smiled at that. ‘We have a choice, Uhtred,’ he assured me. ‘We can run away. We can go to Frankia. I could become a king in exile and pray that God brings me back.’

‘You think God will?’

‘No,’ he admitted. If he ran away then he knew he would die in exile.

‘So we fight,’ I said.

‘And on my conscience,’ he said, ‘I will for ever bear the weight of all those men who died in a hopeless cause. Two thousand against five thousand? How can I justify leading so few against so many?’

‘You know how.’

‘So I can be king?’

‘So that we are not slaves in our own land,’ I said.

He pondered that for a while. An owl flew low overhead, a sudden surprise of white feathers and the rush of air across stubby wings. It was an omen, I knew, but of what kind? ‘Perhaps we are being punished,’ Alfred said.

‘For what?’

‘For taking the land from the Britons?’

That seemed nonsense to me. If Alfred’s god wanted to punish him for his ancestors having taken the land from the Britons, then why send the Danes? Why not send the Britons? God could resurrect Arthur and let his people have their revenge, but why send a new people to take the land? ‘Do you want Wessex or not?’ I asked harshly.

He said nothing for a while, then gave a sad smile. ‘In my conscience,’ he said, ‘I can find no hope for this fight, but as a Christian I must believe we can win it. God will not let us lose.’

‘Nor will this,’ I said, and I slapped Serpent-Breath’s hilt.

‘So simple?’ he asked.

‘Life is simple,’ I said. ‘Ale, women, sword and reputation. Nothing else matters.’

He shook his head and I knew he was thinking about God and prayer and duty, but he did not argue. ‘So if you were I, Uhtred,’ he said, ‘would you march?’

‘You’ve already made up your mind, lord,’ I said, ‘so why ask me?’

He nodded. A dog barked in the village and he turned to stare at the cottages and the hall and the church he had made with its tall alder cross. ‘Tomorrow,’ he said, ‘you will take a hundred horsemen and patrol ahead of the army.’

‘Yes, lord.’

‘And when we meet the enemy,’ he went on, still staring at the cross, ‘you will choose fifty or sixty men from the bodyguard. The best you can find. And you will guard my banners.’

He did not say more, but nor did he need to. What he meant was that I was to take the best warriors, the most savage men, the dangerous warriors who loved battle, and I was to lead them in the place where the fight would be hardest, for an enemy loves to capture his foe’s banners. It was an honour to be asked and, if the battle was lost, an almost certain death sentence. ‘I shall do it gladly, lord,’ I said, ‘but ask a favour of you in return.’

‘If I can,’ he said guardedly.

‘If you can,’ I said, ‘don’t bury me. Burn my body on a pyre, and put a sword in my hand.’

He hesitated, then nodded, knowing he had agreed to a pagan funeral. ‘I never told you,’ he said, ‘that I am sorry about your son.’

‘So am I, lord.’

‘But he is with God, Uhtred, he is assuredly with God.’

‘So I’m told, lord, so I’m told.’

And next day we marched. Fate is inexorable, and though numbers and reason told us we could not win, we dared not lose and so we marched to Egbert’s Stone.

We marched with ceremony. Twenty-three priests and eighteen monks formed our vanguard and chanted a psalm as they led Alfred’s forces away from the fort guarding the southern trackway and east towards the heartland of Wessex.

They chanted in Latin so the words meant nothing to me, but Father Pyrlig had been given use of one of Alfred’s horses and, dressed in a leather coat and with a great sword strapped to his side and with a stout-shafted boar spear on one shoulder, he rode alongside me and translated the words. ‘“God,”’ he said, ‘“you have abandoned me, you have scattered us, you are angry with us, now turn to us again.” That sounds a reasonable request, doesn’t it? You’ve kicked us in the face, so now give us a cuddle, eh?’

‘It really means that?’

‘Not the bit about kicks and cuddles. That was me.’ He grinned at me. ‘I do miss war. Isn’t that a sin?’

‘You’ve seen war?’

‘Seen it? I was a warrior before I joined the church! Pyrlig the Fearless, they called me. I killed four Saxons in a day once. All by myself and I had nothing but a spear. And they had swords and shields, they did. Back home they made a song about me, but mind you, the Britons will sing about anything. I can sing you the song, if you like? It tells how I slaughtered three hundred and ninety-four Saxons in one day, but it’s not entirely accurate.’

‘So how many did you kill?’

‘I told you. Four.’ He laughed.

‘So how did you learn English?’

‘My mother was a Saxon, poor thing. She was taken in a raid on Mercia and became a slave.’

‘So why did you stop being a warrior?’

‘Because I found God, Uhtred. Or God found me. And I was becoming too proud. Songs about yourself go to your head and I was wickedly proud of myself, and pride is a terrible thing.’

‘It’s a warrior’s weapon,’ I said.

‘It is indeed,’ he agreed, ‘and that is why it is a terrible thing, and why I pray God purges me of it.’

We were well ahead of the priests now, climbing towards the nearest hilltop to look north and east for the enemy, but the churchmen’s voices followed us, their chant strong in the morning air. ‘“Through God we shall do bravely,”’ Father Pyrlig interpreted for me, ‘“and God shall trample down our enemies”. Now there’s a blessed thought for a fine morning, Lord Uhtred!’

‘The Danes are saying their own prayers, father.’

‘But to what god, eh? No point in shouting at a deaf man, is there?’ He curbed his horse at the hilltop and stared northwards. ‘Not even a mouse stirring.’

‘The Danes are watching,’ I said, ‘we can’t see them, but they can see us.’

If they were watching then what they could see was Alfred’s three hundred and fifty men riding or walking away from the swamp, and in the distance another five or six hundred men who were the fyrd from the western part of Sumorsæte who had camped to the south of the swamp and now marched to join our smaller column. Most of the men from Æthelingæg were real soldiers, trained to stand in the shield wall, but we also had fifty of the marshmen. I had wanted Eofer, the strong bowman, to come with us, but he could not fight without his niece telling him what to do and I had no intention of taking a child to war and so we had left Eofer behind. A good number of women and children were following the column, though Alfred had sent Ælswith and his children south to Scireburnan under a guard of forty men. We could hardly spare those men, but Alfred insisted his family go. Ælswith was to wait in Scireburnan and, if news came that her husband was defeated and the Danes victorious, she was to flee south to the coast and find a ship that would take her to Frankia. She was also instructed to take with her whatever books she could find in Scireburnan, for Alfred reckoned the Danes would burn every book in Wessex and so Ælswith was to rescue the gospel books and saints’ lives and church fathers and histories and philosophers and thus raise her son Edward to become a learned king in exile.

Iseult was with the army, walking with Hild and with Eanflæd who had upset Ælswith by insisting on following Leofric. The women led packhorses which carried the army’s shields, food and spare spears. Nearly every woman was equipped with some kind of weapon. Even Hild, a nun, wanted to take revenge on the Danes who had whored her and so carried a long, narrow-bladed knife. ‘God help the Danes,’ Father Pyrlig had said when he saw the women gather, ‘if that lot get among them.’

He and I now trotted eastwards. I had horsemen ringing the column, riding on every crest, staying in sight of each other, and ready to signal if they saw any sign of the enemy, but there was none. We rode or marched under a spring sky, through a land bright with flowers, and the priests and monks kept up their chanting, and sometimes the men behind, who followed Alfred’s two standard bearers, would start singing a battle song.

Father Pyrlig beat his hand in time to the singing, then gave me a big grin. ‘I expect Iseult sings to you, doesn’t she?’

‘She does.’

‘We Britons love to sing! I must teach her some hymns.’ He saw my sour look and laughed. ‘Don’t worry, Uhtred, she’s no Christian.’

‘She isn’t?’ I asked, surprised.

‘Well, she is, for the moment. I’m sorry you didn’t come to her baptism. It was cold, that water! Fair froze me!’

‘She’s baptised,’ I said, ‘but you say she’s no Christian?’

‘She is and she isn’t,’ Pyrlig said with a grin. ‘She is now, see, because she’s among Christians. But she’s still a shadow queen, and she won’t forget it.’

‘You believe in shadow queens?’

‘Of course I do! Good God, man! She is one!’ He made the sign of the cross.

‘Brother Asser called her a witch,’ I said, ‘a sorceress.’

‘Well he would, wouldn’t he? He’s a monk! Monks don’t marry. He’s terrified of women, Brother Asser, unless they’re very ugly and then he bullies them. But show him a pretty young thing and he goes all addled. And of course he hates the power of women.’

‘Power?’

‘Not just tits, I mean. God knows tits are powerful enough, but the real thing. Power! My mother had it. She was no shadow queen, mind you, but she was a healer and a scryer.’

‘She saw the future?’

He shook his head. ‘She knew what was happening far off. When my father died she suddenly screamed. Screamed fit to kill herself because she knew what had happened. She was right, too. The poor man was cut down by a Saxon. But she was best as a healer. Folk came to her from miles around. It didn’t matter that she was born a Saxon, they’d walk for a week to fetch the touch of her hand. Me? I got it for free! She banged me about, she did, and I dare say I deserved it, but she was a rare healer. And, of course, the priests don’t like that.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because we priests tell folk that all power comes from God, and if it doesn’t come from God then it must be evil, see? So when folk are ill the church wants them to pray and to give the priests money. Priests don’t like it when they don’t understand things, and they don’t like folk going to the women to be healed. But what else are folk to do? My mother’s hand, God rest her Saxon soul, was better than any prayer! Better than the touch of the sacraments! I wouldn’t stop folk going to see a healer. I’d tell them to!’ He stopped talking because I raised my hand. I had seen movement on a hillside to the north, but it was only a deer. I dropped my hand and kicked the horse on. ‘Now your Iseult,’ Pyrlig went on, ‘she’s been raised with the power and she won’t lose it.’

‘Didn’t the baptism wash it out of her?’

‘Not at all! It just made her a bit colder and cleaner. Nothing wrong with a scrub once or twice a year.’ He laughed. ‘But she was frightened back there in the swamp. You were gone and all around were Saxons and they were spitting that she was a pagan, so what did you think she would do? She wants to be one of them, she wants folk to stop spitting at her, so she said she’d be baptised. And maybe she really is a Christian? I’d praise God for that mercy, but I’d rather praise him for making her happy.’

‘You don’t think she is?’

‘Of course she isn’t! She’s in love with you!’ He laughed. ‘And being in love with you means living among the Saxons, doesn’t it? Poor girl. She’s like a beautiful young hind that finds herself living among grunting pigs.’

‘What a gift for words you have,’ I said.

He laughed, delighted with his insult. ‘Win your war, Lord Uhtred,’ he said, ‘then take her away from us priests and give her lots of children. She’ll be happy, and one day she’ll be truly wise. That’s the women’s real gift, to be wise, and not many men have it.’

And my gift was to be a warrior, though there was no fighting that day. We saw no Danes, though I was certain they had seen us and that by now Guthrum would have been told that Alfred had at last come from the swamp and was marching inland. We were giving him the opportunity to destroy us, to finish Wessex, and I knew that the Danes would be readying to march on us.

We spent that night in an earthen fort built by the old people, and next morning went north and east through a hungry land. I rode ahead, going into the hills to look for the enemy, but again the world seemed empty. Rooks flew, hares danced and cuckoos called from the woods that were thick with bluebells, but there were no Danes. I rode along a high ridge, gazing northwards, and saw nothing, and when the sun was at its height I turned east. There were ten of us in my band and our guide was a man from Wiltunscir who knew the country and he led us towards the valley of the Wilig where Egbert’s Stone stands.

A mile or so short of the valley we saw horsemen, but they were to the south of us and we galloped across ungrazed pastureland to find it was Alfred, escorted by Leofric, five soldiers and four priests. ‘Have you been to the stone?’ Alfred called out eagerly as we closed on him.

‘No, lord.’

‘Doubtless there are men there,’ he said, disappointed that I could not bring him news.

‘I didn’t see any Danes either, lord.’

‘It’ll take them two days to organise,’ he said dismissively. ‘But they’ll come! They’ll come! And we shall beat them!’ He twisted in his saddle to look at Father Beocca, who was one of the priests. ‘Are you sore, father?’

‘Mightily sore, lord.’

‘You’re no horseman, Beocca, no horseman, but it’s not much farther. Not much farther, then you can rest!’ Alfred was in a feverish mood. ‘Rest before we fight, eh! Rest and pray, father, then pray and fight. Pray and fight!’ He kicked his horse into a gallop and we pounded after him through a pink-blossomed orchard and up a slope, then across a long hilltop where the bones of dead cattle lay in the new grass. White mayflower edged the woods at the foot of the hill and a hawk slanted away from us, sliding across the valley towards the charred remains of a barn.

‘It’s just across the crest, lord!’ my guide shouted at me.

‘What is?’

‘Defereal, lord!’

Defereal was the name of the settlement in the valley of the River Wilig where Egbert’s Stone waited, and Alfred now spurred his horse so that his blue cloak flapped behind him. We were all galloping, spread across the hilltop, racing to be the first over the crest to see the Saxon forces, then Father Beocca’s horse stumbled. He was, as Alfred said, a bad horseman, but that was no surprise for he was both lame and palsied, and when the horse tipped forward Beocca tumbled from the saddle. I saw him rolling in the grass and turned my horse back. ‘I’m not hurt,’ he shouted at me, ‘not hurt! Not much. Go on, Uhtred, go on!’

I caught his horse. Beocca was on his feet now, limping as fast as he could to where Alfred and the other horsemen stood in a line gazing into the valley beyond. ‘We should have brought the banners,’ Beocca said as I gave him his reins.

‘The banners?’

‘So the fyrd knows their king has come,’ he said breathlessly. ‘They should see his banners on the skyline, Uhtred, and know he has come. The cross and the dragon, eh? In hoc signo! Alfred will be the new Constantine, Uhtred, a warrior of the cross! In hoc signo, God be praised, God be praised, God indeed be mightily praised.’

I had no idea what he meant, and nor did I care.

For I had reached the hilltop and could stare down into the long lovely valley of the Wilig.

Which was empty.

Not a man in sight. Just the river and the willows and the water meadows and the alders and a heron flying and the grass bending in the wind and the triple stone of Egbert on a slope above the Wilig where an army was supposed to gather. And there was not one man there. Not one single man in sight. The valley was empty.

The men we had brought from Æthelingæg straggled into the valley, and with them now was the fyrd of Sumorsæte. Together they numbered just over a thousand men, and about half were equipped to fight in the shield wall while the rest were only good for shoving the front ranks forward or for dealing with the enemy wounded or, more likely, dying.

I could not face Alfred’s disappointment. He said nothing about it, but his thin face was pale and set hard as he busied himself deciding where the thousand men should camp, and where our few horses should be pastured. I rode up a high hill that lay to the north of the encampment, taking a score of men including Leofric, Steapa and Father Pyrlig. The hill was steep, though that had not stopped the old people from making one of their strange graves high on the slope. The grave was a long mound and Pyrlig made a wide detour rather than ride past it. ‘Full of dragons, it is,’ he explained to me.

‘You’ve seen a dragon?’ I asked.

‘Would I be alive if I had? No one sees a dragon and lives!’

I turned in the saddle and stared at the mound. ‘I thought folk were buried there?’

‘They are! And their treasures! So the dragon guards the hoard. That’s what dragons do. Bury gold and you hatch a dragon, see?’

The horses had a struggle to climb the steep slope, but at its summit we were rewarded by a stretch of firm turf that offered views far to the north. I had climbed the hill to watch for Danes. Alfred might believe that it would be two or three days before we saw them, but I expected their scouts to be close and it was possible that a war-band might try to harass the men camping by the Wilig.

Yet I saw no one. To the north-east were great downs, sheep hills, while straight ahead was the lower ground where the cloud shadows raced across fields and over blossoming mayflower and darkened the bright green new leaves.

‘So what happens now?’ Leofric asked me.

‘You tell me.’

‘A thousand men? We can’t fight the Danes with a thousand men.’

I said nothing. Far off, on the northern horizon, there were dark clouds.

‘We can’t even stay here!’ Leofric said, ‘so where do we go?’

‘Back to the swamp?’ Father Pyrlig suggested.

‘The Danes will bring more ships,’ I said, ‘and eventually they’ll capture the swamp. If they send a hundred ships up the rivers then the swamp is theirs.’

‘Go to Defnascir,’ Steapa growled.

And the same thing would happen there, I thought. We would be safe for a time in Defnascir’s tangle of hills and woods, but the Danes would come and there would be a succession of little fights and bit by bit Alfred would be bled to death. And once the Danes across the sea knew that Alfred was pinned into a corner of Wessex they would bring more ships to take the good land that he could not hold. And that, I thought, was why he had been right to try and end the war in one blow, because he dared not let Wessex’s weakness become known.

Except we were weak. We were a thousand men. We were pathetic. We were dreams fallen to earth, and suddenly I began to laugh. ‘What is it?’ Leofric asked.

‘I was thinking that Alfred insisted I learn to read,’ I said, ‘and for what?’

He smiled, remembering. It was one of Alfred’s rules that every man who commanded sizeable bodies of troops must be able to read, though it was a rule he had ignored when he made Leofric commander of his bodyguard. It seemed funny at that moment. All that effort so I could read his orders and he had never sent me one. Not one. ‘Reading is useful,’ Pyrlig said.

‘What for?’

He thought about it. The wind gusted, flapping his hair and beard. ‘You can read all those good stories in the gospel-book,’ he suggested brightly, ‘and the saints’ lives! How about those, eh? They’re full of lovely things, they are. There was Saint Donwen! Beautiful woman she was, and she gave her lover a drink that turned him into ice.’

‘Why did she do that?’ Leofric asked.

‘Didn’t want to marry him, see?’ Pyrlig said, trying to cheer us up, but no one wanted to hear more about the frigid Saint Donwen so he turned and stared northwards. ‘That’s where they’ll come from, is it?’ he asked.

‘Probably,’ I said, and then I saw them, or thought I did. There was a movement on the far hills, something stirring in the cloud shadow and I wished Iseult was on the hilltop for she had remarkable eyesight, but she would have needed a horse to climb to that summit and there were no horses to spare for women. The Danes had thousands of horses, all the beasts they had captured from Alfred at Cippanhamm, and all the animals they had stolen across Wessex, and now I was watching a group of horsemen on that far hill. Scouts, probably, and they would have seen us. Then they were gone. It had been a glimpse, no more, and so far away that I could not be sure of what I had seen. ‘Or perhaps they won’t come at all,’ I went on, ‘perhaps they’ll march around us. Capture Wintanceaster and everywhere else.’

‘The bastards will come,’ Leofric said grimly, and I thought he was probably right. The Danes would know we were here, they would want to destroy us, and after that all would be easy for them.

Pyrlig turned his horse as if to ride back down to the valley, then paused. ‘So it’s hopeless, is it?’ he asked.

‘They’ll outnumber us four or five to one,’ I said.

‘Then we must fight harder!’

I smiled. ‘Every Dane who comes to Britain, father,’ I explained, ‘is a warrior. The farmers stay in Denmark, but the wild men come here. And us? We’re nearly all farmers and it takes three or four farmers to beat down a warrior.’

‘You’re a warrior,’ he said, ‘all of you! You’re warriors! You all know how to fight! You can inspire men, and lead men, and kill your enemies. And God is on your side. With God on your side, who can beat you, eh? You want a sign?’

‘Give me a sign,’ I said.

‘Then look,’ he said, and pointed down to the Wilig, and I turned my horse and there, in the afternoon sun, was the miracle we had wanted. Men were coming. Men in their hundreds. Men from the east and men from the south, men streaming down from the hills, men of the West Saxon fyrd, coming at their king’s command to save their country.

‘Now it’s only two farmers to one warrior!’ Pyrlig said cheerfully.

‘Up to our arseholes,’ Leofric said.

But we were not alone any longer. The fyrd was gathering.

The site of the Battle of Ethandun, 878

PART THREE

The Fyrd

Twelve

Most men came in large groups, led by their thegns, while others arrived in small bands, but together they swelled into an army. Arnulf, Ealdorman of Suth Seaxa, brought close to four hundred men and apologised that it could not be more, but there were Danish ships off his coast and he had been forced to leave some of his fyrd to guard the shore. The men of Wiltunscir had been summoned by Wulfhere to join Guthrum’s army, but the reeve, a grim man named Osric, had scoured the southern part of the shire and over eight hundred men had ignored their ealdorman’s summons and came to Alfred instead. More arrived from the distant parts of Sumorsæte to join Wiglaf’s fyrd that now numbered a thousand men, while half that many came from Hamptonscir, including Burgweard’s garrison in which were Eadric and Cenwulf, crewmen from the Heahengel, and both embraced me, and with them was Father Willibald, eager and nervous. Almost every man came on foot, weary and hungry, with their boots falling apart, but they had swords and axes and spears and shields, and by mid afternoon there were close to three thousand men in the Wilig valley and more were still coming as I rode towards the distant hill where I thought I had seen the Danish scouts.

Alfred sent me and, at the last moment, Father Pyrlig had offered to accompany me and Alfred had looked surprised, appeared to think about it for a heartbeat, then nodded assent. ‘Bring Uhtred home safe, father,’ he had said stiffly.

I said nothing as we rode through the growing camp, but once we were on our own I gave Pyrlig a sour look. ‘That was all arranged,’ I said.

‘What was?’

‘You coming with me. He had your horse already saddled! So what does Alfred want?’

Pyrlig grinned. ‘He wants me to talk you into becoming a Christian, of course. The king has great faith in my powers of speech.’

‘I am a Christian,’ I said.

‘Are you now?’

‘I was baptised, wasn’t I? Twice, as it happens.’

‘Twice! Doubly holy, eh? How come you got it twice?’

‘Because my name was changed when I was a child and my stepmother thought heaven wouldn’t recognise me under my old name.’

He laughed. ‘So they washed the devil out of you the first time and slopped him back in the second?’ I said nothing to that and Pyrlig rode in silence for a time. ‘Alfred wants me to make you a good Christian,’ he said after a while, ‘because he wants God’s blessing.’

‘He thinks God will curse us because I’m fighting for him?’

Pyrlig shook his head. ‘He knows, Uhtred, that the enemy are pagans. If they win then Christ is defeated. This isn’t just a war over land, it’s a war about God. And Alfred, poor man, is Christ’s servant so he will do all he can for his master, and that means trying to turn you into a pious example of Christian humility. If he can get you onto your knees then it’ll be easy to make the Danes grovel.’

I laughed, as he had meant me to. ‘If it encourages Alfred,’ I said, ‘tell him I’m a good Christian.’

‘I planned to tell him that anyway,’ Pyrlig said, ‘just to cheer him up, but in truth I wanted to come with you.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I miss this life. God, I miss it! I loved being a warrior. All that irresponsibility! I relished it. Kill and make widows, frighten children! I was good at it, and I miss it. And I was always good at scouting. We’d see you Saxons blundering away like swine and you never knew we were watching you. Don’t worry, I’m not going to talk Christ into you, whatever the king wants.’

Our job was to find the Danes, if they were near. Alfred had marched to the Wilig valley to block any advance Guthrum made into the heartland of Wessex, but he still feared that the Danes might resist the lure of destroying his small army and instead march around us to take southern Wessex, which would leave us stranded and surrounded by Danish garrisons. That uncertainty meant Alfred was desperate for news of the enemy, so Pyrlig and I rode north and east up the valley until we came to where a smaller river flowed south into the Wilig and we followed that lesser stream past a large village that had been reduced to ashes. The small river passed through good farmland, but there were no cattle, no sheep and the fields were unploughed and thick with weeds. We went slowly, for the horses were tired and we were well north of our army now. The sun was low in the west, though it was early May so the days were lengthening. There were mayfly on the river and trout rising to them, and then a scuffling sound made us both pause, but it was only a pair of otter cubs scrabbling down to the water through the roots of a willow. Doves were nesting in the blackthorn, and warblers called from the riverbank, and somewhere a woodpecker drummed intermittently. We rode in silence for a while, turning away from the river to go into an orchard where wrynecks sang among the pink blossom.

Pyrlig curbed his horse under the trees and pointed at a muddy patch in the grass and I saw hoofprints sifted with fallen petals. The prints were fresh and there were a lot of them. ‘Bastards were here, weren’t they?’ he said, ‘and not so long ago.’

I looked up the valley. There was no one in sight. The hills rose steeply on either side with thick woods on their lower slopes. I had the sudden uncomfortable feeling that we were being watched, that we were blundering and the wolves were close. ‘If I were a Dane,’ Pyrlig spoke softly, and I suspected he shared my discomfort, ‘I’d be over there,’ he jerked his head to the western trees.

‘Why?’

‘Because when you saw them, they saw us, and that’s the way to where they saw us. Does that make sense?’ He laughed wryly. ‘I don’t know, Uhtred, I just think the bastards are over there.’

So we went east. We rode slowly, as if we did not have a care in the world, but once we were in the woods we turned north. We both searched the ground for more hoofprints, but saw none, and the feeling of being watched had gone now, though we did wait for a long time to see if anyone was following us. There was only the wind in the trees. Yet I knew the Danes were near, just as a hall’s hounds know when there are wolves in the nearby darkness. The hair on their necks stands up, they bare their teeth, they quiver.

We came to a place where the trees ended and we dismounted, tied the horses, and went to the wood’s edge and just watched.

And at last we saw them.

Thirty or forty Danes were on the valley’s farther side, above the woods, and they had plainly ridden to the top of the hills, looked southwards, and were now coming back. They were scattered in a long line that was riding down into the woods. ‘Scouting party,’ Pyrlig said.

‘They can’t have seen much from that hilltop.’

‘They saw us,’ he said.

‘I think so.’

‘But they didn’t attack us?’ He was puzzled. ‘Why not?’

‘Look at me,’ I said.

‘I get a treat every day.’

‘They thought I was a Dane,’ I said. I was not in mail and had no helmet, so my long hair fell free down my leather-clad back and my arms were bright with rings. ‘And they probably thought you were my performing bear,’ I added.

He laughed. ‘So shall we follow them?’

The only risk was crossing the valley, but if the enemy saw us they would probably still assume I was a fellow Dane, so we cantered over the open ground, then rode up into the further woods. We heard the Danes before we saw them. They were careless, talking and laughing, unaware that any Saxons were close. Pyrlig tucked his crucifix beneath his leather coat, then we waited until we were sure the last of the Danes had passed before kicking the horses uphill to find their tracks and so follow them. The shadows were lengthening, and that made me think that the Danish army must be close for the scouting party would want to reach safety before dark, but as the hilly country flattened we saw that they had no intention of joining Guthrum’s forces that evening. The patrolling Danes had their own camp, and as we approached it we were nearly caught by another group of mounted scouts who rode in from the east. We heard the newcomers and swerved aside into a thicket and watched a dozen men ride by, and then we dismounted and crept through the trees to see how many enemy were in the camp.

There were perhaps a hundred and fifty Danes in a small pasture. The first fires were being lit, suggesting they planned to spend the night where they were. ‘All scouting parties,’ Pyrlig suggested.

‘Confident bastards,’ I said. These men had been sent ahead to explore the hills, and they felt safe to camp in the open countryside, sure that no Saxon would attack them. And they were right. The West Saxon army was a long way south and we had no war-band in the area, and so the Danes would have a quiet night and, in the morning, their scouts would ride again to watch Alfred’s movements.

‘But if they’re here,’ Pyrlig suggested, ‘then it means Guthrum is following them.’

‘Maybe,’ I said. Or perhaps Guthrum was marching well to the east or west and had sent these men to make sure that Alfred was ignorant of his movements.

‘We should go back,’ Pyrlig said. ‘Be dark soon.’

But I had heard voices and I held up a hand to silence him, and then went to my right, keeping to the places where the undergrowth was thickest, and heard what I thought I had heard. English. ‘They’ve got Saxons here,’ I said.

‘Wulfhere’s men?’

Which made sense. We were in Wiltunscir and Wulfhere’s men would know this country, and who better to guide the Danes as they watched Alfred?

The Saxons were coming into the wood and we stayed behind some hawthorn bushes until we heard the sound of axes. They were cutting firewood. There seemed to be about a dozen of them. Most of the men who followed Wulfhere would probably be reluctant to fight Alfred, but some would have embraced their ealdorman’s new cause and doubtless those were the men who had been despatched to guide the Danish scouting parties. Wulfhere would only have sent men he could trust, fearing that less loyal men would desert to Alfred or just run away, so these Saxons were probably from the ealdorman’s household troops, the warriors who would profit most from being on the winner’s side in the war between the Danes and the West Saxons.

‘We should get back to Alfred before it’s dark,’ Pyrlig whispered.

But just then a voice sounded close and petulant. ‘I will go tomorrow,’ the voice said.

‘You won’t, lord,’ a man answered. There was the sound of splashing and I realised one of the two men had come to the bushes for a piss and the other had followed him. ‘You’ll go nowhere tomorrow,’ the second man went on, ‘you’ll stay here.’

‘I just want to see them!’ the petulant voice pleaded.

‘You’ll see them soon enough. But not tomorrow. You’ll stay here with the guards.’

‘You can’t make me.’

‘I can do what I like with you, lord. You might command here, but you take my orders all the same.’ The man’s voice was hard and deep. ‘And my orders are that you’re staying here.’

‘I’ll go if I want,’ the first voice insisted weakly and was ignored.

Very slowly, so that the blade made no noise against the scabbard’s throat, I drew Serpent-Breath. Pyrlig watched me, puzzled. ‘Walk away,’ I whispered to him, ‘and make some noise.’ He frowned in puzzlement at that, but I jerked my head and he trusted me. He stood and walked towards our horses, whistling softly, and immediately the two men followed. The one with the deep voice led. He was an old warrior, scar-faced and bulky. ‘You!’ he shouted, ‘stop!’ And just then I stepped out from behind the hawthorn and swung Serpent-Breath once and her blade cut under his beard and into his throat, and cut so deep that I felt her scrape against his spine and the blood, sudden and bright in the spring dusk, sprayed across the leaf mould. The man went down like a felled ox. The second man, the petulant man, was following close behind and he was too astonished and much too scared to run away and so I seized his arm and pulled him down behind the bushes.

‘You can’t,’ he began and I placed the flat of Serpent-Breath’s bloody blade against his mouth so that he whimpered with terror.

‘Not a sound,’ I said to him, ‘or you’re dead.’ Pyrlig came back then, sword drawn.

Pyrlig looked at the dead man whose breeches were still untied. He stooped to him and made the sign of the cross on his forehead. The man’s death had been quick, and the capture of his companion had been quiet, and none of the woodcutters seemed to have taken alarm. Their axes went on thumping, the echoes rattling in the trees. ‘We’re taking this one back to Alfred,’ I told Pyrlig, then I moved Serpent-Breath to my captive’s throat. ‘Make one sound,’ I said, pressing the blade into his skin, ‘and I’ll gut you from your over-used gullet to your over-used crotch. Do you understand?’

He nodded.

‘Because I’m doing you the favour I owe you,’ I explained, and smiled nicely.

Because my captive was Æthelwold, Alfred’s nephew and the would-be king of the West Saxons.

The man I had killed was named Osbergh and he had been the commander of Wulfhere’s household troops. His job on the day of his death was to make certain Æthelwold got into no trouble.

Æthelwold had a talent for misfortune. By rights he should have been the King of Wessex, though I daresay he would have been the last king for he was impetuous and foolish, and the twin solaces for having lost the throne to his uncle Alfred were ale and women. Yet he had ever wanted to be a warrior. Alfred had denied him the chance, for he dared not let Æthelwold make a name for himself on the battlefield. Æthelwold, the true king, had to be kept foolish so that no man saw in him a rival for Alfred’s throne. It would have been far easier to have killed Æthelwold, but Alfred was sentimental about family. Or perhaps it was his Christian conscience. But for whatever reason, Æthelwold had been allowed to live and had rewarded his uncle’s mercy by constantly making a fool of himself.

But in these last months he had been released from Alfred’s leash and his thwarted ambition had been given encouragement. He dressed in mail and carried swords. He was a startling looking man, handsome and tall, and he looked the part of the warrior, though he had no warrior’s soul. He had pissed himself when I put Serpent-Breath to his throat, and now that he was my captive he showed no defiance. He was submissive, frightened and glad to be led.

He told us how he had pestered Wulfhere to be allowed to fight, and when Osbergh had brought a score of men to guide the Danes in the hills, he had been given notional charge of them. ‘Wulfhere said I was in command,’ Æthelwold said sullenly, ‘but I still had to obey Osbergh.’

‘Wulfhere was a damned fool to let you go so far from him,’ I said.

‘I think he was tired of me,’ Æthelwold admitted.

‘Tired of you? You were humping his women?’

‘She’s only a servant! But I wanted to join the scouting parties, and Wulfhere said I could learn a lot from Osbergh.’

‘You’ve just learned never to piss into a hawthorn bush,’ I said, ‘and that’s worth knowing.’

Æthelwold was riding Pyrlig’s horse and the Welsh priest was leading the beast by its reins. I had tied Æthelwold’s hands. There was still a hint of light in the western sky, just enough to make our journey down the smaller river easy. I explained to Pyrlig who Æthelwold was, and the priest grinned up at him. ‘So you’re a prince of Wessex, eh?’

‘I should be king,’ Æthelwold said sullenly.

‘No you shouldn’t,’ I said.

‘My father was! And Guthrum promised to crown me.’

‘And if you believed him,’ I said, ‘you’re a damned fool. You’d be king as long as he needed you, then you’d be dead.’

‘Now Alfred will kill me,’ he said miserably.

‘He ought to,’ I said, ‘but I owe you a favour.’

‘You think you can persuade him to let me live?’ he asked eagerly.

‘You’ll do the persuading,’ I said. ‘You’ll kneel to him, and you’re going to say that you’ve been waiting for a chance to escape the Danes, and at last you succeeded, and you got away, found us, and have come to offer him your sword.’

Æthelwold just stared at me.

‘I owe you a favour,’ I explained, ‘and so I’m giving you life. I’ll untie your hands, you go to Alfred, and you say you’re joining him because that’s what you’ve wanted to do ever since Christmas. You understand that?’

Æthelwold frowned. ‘But he hates me!’

‘Of course he does,’ I agreed, ‘but if you kneel to him and swear you never broke your allegiance to him, then what can he do? He’ll embrace you, reward you and be proud of you.’

‘Truly?’

‘So long as you tell him where the Danes are,’ Pyrlig put in.

‘I can do that,’ Æthelwold said, ‘they’re coming south from Cippanhamm. They marched this morning.’

‘How many?’

‘Five thousand.’

‘Coming here?’

‘They’re going to wherever Alfred is. They reckon they’ll have a chance to destroy him, and after that it’s just a summer of women and silver.’ He said the last three words plaintively and I knew he had been relishing the prospect of plundering Wessex. ‘So how many men does Alfred have?’ he asked.

‘Three thousand,’ I said.

‘Sweet Jesus,’ he said fearfully.

‘You always wanted to be a warrior,’ I said, ‘and what name can you make for yourself fighting a smaller army?’

‘Jesus Christ!’

The last of the light went. There was no moon, but by keeping the river on our left we knew we could not get lost and after a while we saw the glow of firelight showing over the loom of the hills and knew we were seeing Alfred’s encampment. I twisted in the saddle then and thought I saw another such glow far to the north. Guthrum’s army.

‘If you let me go,’ Æthelwold asked sulkily, ‘what’s to stop me going back to Guthrum?’

‘Absolutely nothing,’ I said, ‘except the certainty that I’ll hunt you down and kill you.’

He thought about that for a short while. ‘You’re sure my uncle will welcome me?’

Pyrlig answered for me. ‘With open arms!’ he said. ‘It will be like the return of the prodigal son. You’ll be welcomed by slaughtered calves and psalms of rejoicing. Just tell Alfred what you told us, about Guthrum marching towards us.’

We reached the Wilig and the going was easy now for the light of the campfires was much brighter. I cut Æthelwold free at the edge of the encampment, then gave him back his swords. He carried two, as I did, a long one and a short sax. ‘Well, my prince,’ I said, ‘time to grovel, eh?’

We found Alfred at the camp’s centre. There was no pomp here. We did not have the animals to drag wagons loaded with tents or furniture, so Alfred was seated on a spread cloak between two fires. He looked dispirited and later I learned that he had assembled the army in the twilight and made them a speech, but the speech, even Beocca admitted, had been less than successful. ‘It was more a sermon than a speech,’ Beocca told me glumly. Alfred had invoked God, spoken of Saint Augustine’s doctrine of a righteous war and talked about Boethius and King David, and the words had flown over the heads of the tired, hungry troops. Now Alfred sat with the leading men of the army, all of them eating stale hard bread and smoked eel. Father Adelbert, the priest who had accompanied us to Cippanhamm, was playing a lament on a small harp. A bad choice of music, I thought, then Alfred saw me and waved Adelbert to silence. ‘You have news?’ he asked.

For answer I stood aside and bowed to Æthelwold, gesturing him towards the king. ‘Lord,’ I said to Alfred, ‘I bring you your nephew.’

Alfred stood. He was taken aback, especially as Æthelwold was plainly no prisoner for he wore his swords. Æthelwold looked good, indeed he looked more like a king than Alfred. He was well made and handsome, while Alfred was much too thin and his face was so haggard that he looked much older than his twenty-nine years. And of the two it was Æthelwold who knew how to behave at that moment. He unbuckled his swords and threw them with a great clatter at his uncle’s feet, then he went to his knees and clasped his hands and looked up into the king’s face. ‘I have found you!’ he said with what sounded like utter joy and conviction.

Alfred, bemused, did not know what to say so I stepped forward. ‘We discovered him, lord,’ I said, ‘in the hills. He was searching for you.’

‘I escaped Guthrum,’ Æthelwold said, ‘God be praised, I escaped the pagan.’ He pushed his swords to Alfred’s feet. ‘My blades are yours, lord king.’

This extravagant display of loyalty gave Alfred no choice except to raise his nephew and embrace him. The men around the fires applauded, then Æthelwold gave his news, which was useful enough. Guthrum was on the march and Svein of the White Horse came with him. They knew where Alfred was and so they came, five thousand strong, to give him battle in the hills of Wiltunscir.

‘When will they get here?’ Alfred wanted to know.

‘They should reach these hills tomorrow, lord,’ Æthelwold said.

So Æthelwold was seated beside the king and given water to drink, which was hardly a fit welcome for a prodigal prince and caused him to throw me a wry glance, and it was then that I saw Harald, shire-reeve of Defnascir, among the king’s companions. ‘You’re here?’ I asked surprised.

‘With five hundred men,’ he said proudly.

We had expected no men from either Defnascir or Thornsæta, but Harald, the shire-reeve, had brought four hundred of his own fyrd and a hundred more from Thornsæta. ‘There’s enough men left to protect the coast against the pagan fleet,’ he said, ‘and Odda insisted we help defeat Guthrum.’

‘How is Mildrith?’

‘She prays for her son,’ Harald said, ‘and for all of us.’

There were prayers after the meal. There were always prayers when Alfred was around, and I tried to escape them, but Pyrlig made me stay. ‘The king wants to talk with you,’ he said.

So I waited while Bishop Alewold droned, and afterwards Alfred wanted to know whether Æthelwold had truly run away from the Danes.

‘That’s what he told me lord,’ I said, ‘and I can only say we found him.’

‘He didn’t run from us,’ Pyrlig offered, ‘and he could have done.’

‘So there’s good in the boy,’ Alfred said.

‘God be praised for that,’ Pyrlig said.

Alfred paused, gazing down into the glowing embers of a campfire. ‘I spoke to the army tonight,’ he told us.

‘I heard you did, lord,’ I said.

He looked up at me sharply. ‘What did you hear?’

‘That you preached to them, lord.’

He flinched at that, then seemed to accept the criticism. ‘What do they want to hear?’ he asked.

‘They want to hear,’ Pyrlig answered, ‘that you are ready to die for them.’

‘Die?’

‘Men follow, kings lead,’ Pyrlig said. Alfred waited. ‘They don’t care about Saint Augustine,’ Pyrlig went on, ‘they only care that their women and children are safe, that their lands are safe, and that they’ll have a future of their own. They want to know that they’ll win. They want to know the Danes are going to die. They want to hear that they’ll be rich on plunder.’

‘Greed, revenge and selfishness?’ Alfred asked.

‘If you had an army of angels, lord,’ Pyrlig went on, ‘then a rousing speech about God and Saint Augustine would doubtless fire their ardour, but you have to fight with mere men, and there’s nothing quite like greed, revenge and selfishness to inspire mortals.’

Alfred frowned at that advice, but did not argue with it. ‘So I can trust my nephew?’ he asked me.

‘I don’t know that you can trust him,’ I said, ‘but nor can Guthrum. And Æthelwold did seek you out, lord, so be content with that.’

‘I shall, I shall.’ He bade us goodnight, going to his hard bed.

The fires in the valley were dying. ‘Why didn’t you tell Alfred the truth about Æthelwold?’ I asked Pyrlig.

‘I thought I would trust your judgement,’ he said.

‘You’re a good man.’

‘And that constantly astonishes me.’

I went to find Iseult, then slept.

Next day the whole of the northern sky was dark with cloud, while over our army, and above the hills, was sunlight.

The West Saxon army, now almost three and a half thousand strong, marched up the Wilig, then followed the smaller river that Pyrlig and I had explored the previous evening. We could see the Danish scouts on the hills, and knew they would be sending messengers back to Guthrum.

I led fifty men to one of the hilltops. We were all mounted, all armed, all with shields and helmets, and we rode ready to fight, but the Danish scouts yielded the ground. There were only a dozen of them and they rode off the hill long before we reached the summit where a host of blue butterflies flickered above the springy turf. I gazed northwards at the ominous dark sky, and watched a sparrowhawk stoop. Down the bird went, and I followed its plunging fall and suddenly saw, beneath the folded wings and reaching claws, our enemy.

Guthrum’s army was coming south.

The fear came then. The shield wall is a terrible place. It is where a warrior makes his reputation, and reputation is dear to us. Reputation is honour, but to gain that honour a man must stand in the shield wall where death runs rampant. I had been in the shield wall at Cynuit and I knew the smell of death, the stink of it, the uncertainty of survival, the horror of the axes and swords and spears, and I feared it. And it was coming.

I could see it coming, for in the lowlands north of the hills, in the green ground stretching long and level towards distant Cippanhamm, was an army. The Great Army, the Danes called it, the pagan warriors of Guthrum and Svein, the wild horde of wild men from beyond the sea.

They were a dark smear on the landscape. They were coming through the fields, band after band of horsemen, spread across the country, and because their leading men were only just emerging into the sunlight it seemed as if their horde sprang from the shadowlands. Spears and helmets and mail and metal reflected the light, a myriad glints of broken sunlight that spread and multiplied as yet more men came from beneath the clouds. They were nearly all mounted.

‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph,’ Leofric said.

Steapa said nothing. He just glowered at them.

Osric, the shire-reeve of Wiltunscir, made the sign of the cross. ‘Someone has to tell Alfred,’ he said.

‘I’ll go,’ Father Pyrlig offered.

‘Tell him the pagans have crossed the Afen,’ Osric said. ‘Tell him they’re heading towards,’ he paused, trying to judge where the horde was going, ‘Ethandun,’ he finally said.

‘Ethandun,’ Pyrlig repeated the name.

‘And remind him there’s a fort of the old people there,’ Osric said. This was his shire, his country, and he knew its hills and fields, and he sounded grim, doubtless wondering what would happen if the Danes found the old fortress and occupied it. ‘God help us,’ Osric said. ‘They’ll be in the hills tomorrow morning, tell him.’

‘Tomorrow morning, at Ethandun,’ Pyrlig said, then turned his horse and spurred away.

‘Where’s the fort?’ I asked.

Osric pointed. ‘You can see it.’ From this distance the ancient fastness looked like nothing more than green wrinkles on a far hilltop. All across Wessex there were such forts with their massive earthen walls, and this one was built at the top of the escarpment that climbed from the lowlands, a place guarding the sudden edge of the chalk downs. ‘Some of the bastards will get up there tonight,’ Osric said, ‘but most won’t make it till morning. Let’s just hope they ignore the fort.’

We had all thought that Alfred would find a place where Guthrum must attack him, a slope made for defence, a place where our smaller numbers would be helped by the difficult ground, but the sight of that distant fort was a reminder that Guthrum might adopt the same tactics. He might find a place where it would be hard for us to attack him, and Alfred would have a grim choice then. To attack would be to court disaster, while to retreat would guarantee it. Our food would be exhausted in a day or two, and if we tried to withdraw south through the hills, Guthrum would release a horde of horsemen against us. And even if the army of Wessex escaped unscathed it would be a beaten army. If Alfred brought the fyrd together, then marched it away from the enemy, men would take it for a defeat and begin to slip away to protect their homes. We had to fight, because to decline battle was a defeat.

The army camped that evening to the north of the woods where I had found Æthelwold. He was in the king’s entourage now, and went with Alfred and his war-leaders to the hilltop to watch the Danish army as it closed on the hills. Alfred looked a long time. ‘How far away are they?’ he asked.

‘From here?’ Osric answered. ‘Four miles. From your army? Six.’

‘Tomorrow, then,’ Alfred said, making the sign of the cross. The northern clouds were spreading, darkening the evening, but the slanting light reflected from spears and axes at the old people’s fort. It seemed Guthrum had not ignored the place after all.

We went back down to the encampment to find yet more men arriving. Not many now, just small bands, but still they came, and one such band, travel-weary and dusty, was mounted on horses and all sixteen men had chain mail and good helmets.

They were Mercians and they had ridden far to the east, crossed the Thames, then looped through Wessex, ever avoiding Danes, and so come to help Alfred. Their leader was a short young man, wide in the chest, round-faced, and with a pugnacious expression. He knelt to Alfred, then grinned at me, and I recognised my cousin, Æthelred.

My mother was a Mercian, though I never knew her, and her brother Æthelred was a power in the southern part of that country and I had spent a short time in his hall when I first fled from Northumbria. Back then I had quarrelled with my cousin, called Æthelred like his father, but he seemed to have forgotten our youthful enmity and embraced me instead. The top of his head just came up to my collar-bone. ‘We’ve come to fight,’ he told me, his voice muffled by my chest.

‘You’ll have a fight,’ I promised him.

‘Lord,’ he let go of me and turned back to Alfred, ‘my father would have sent more men, but he must protect his land.’

‘He must,’ Alfred said.

‘But he sent the best he has,’ Æthelred went on. He was young and bumptious, a little strut of a youth, but his confidence pleased Alfred, as did the gleaming silver crucifix hanging over Æthelred’s chain mail. ‘Allow me to present Tatwine,’ my cousin went on, ‘the chief of my father’s household troops.’

I remembered Tatwine, a barrel of a man and a real fighter, whose arms were smothered in blotchy black marks, each made with a needle and ink and representing a man killed in battle. He gave me a crooked smile. ‘Still alive, lord?’

‘Still alive, Tatwine.’

‘Be good to fight alongside you again.’

‘Good to have you here,’ I said, and it was. Few men are natural-born warriors, and a man like Tatwine was worth a dozen others.

Alfred had ordered the army to assemble again. He did it partly so the men could see their own numbers and take heart from that, and he did it, too, because he knew his speech the previous night had left men confused and uninspired. He would try again. ‘I wish he wouldn’t,’ Leofric grumbled. ‘He can make sermons, but he can’t make speeches.’

We gathered at the foot of a small hill. The light was fading. Alfred had planted his two banners, the dragon and the cross, on the summit of the hill, but there was a small wind so the flags stirred rather than flew. He climbed to stand between them. He was alone, dressed in a mail coat over which he wore the faded blue cloak. A group of priests began to follow him, but he waved them back to the hill’s foot, then he just stared at us huddled in the meadow beneath him and for a time he said nothing and I sensed the discomfort in the ranks. They wanted fire put into their souls and expected holy water instead.

‘Tomorrow!’ he said suddenly. His voice was high, but it carried clearly enough. ‘Tomorrow we fight! Tomorrow! The Feast of St John the Apostle!’

‘Oh God,’ Leofric grumbled next to me, ‘up to our arseholes in more saints.’

‘John the Apostle was condemned to death!’ Alfred said, ‘he was condemned to be boiled in oil! Yet he survived the ordeal! He was plunged into the boiling oil and he lived! He came from the cauldron a stronger man! And we shall do the same.’ He paused, watching us, and no one responded, we all just gazed at him, and he must have known that his homily on Saint John was not working for he made an abrupt gesture with his right hand as if he were sweeping all the saints aside. ‘And tomorrow,’ he went on, ‘is also a day for warriors. A day to kill your enemies. A day to make the pagans wish they had never heard of Wessex!’

He paused again, and this time there were some murmurs of agreement.

‘This is our land! We fight for our homes! For our wives! For our children! We fight for Wessex!’

‘We do,’ someone shouted.

‘And not just Wessex!’ Alfred’s voice was stronger now. ‘We have men from Mercia, men from Northumbria, men from East Anglia!’ I knew of none from East Anglia and only Beocca and I were from Northumbria, but no one seemed to care. ‘We are the men of England,’ Alfred shouted, ‘and we fight for all Saxons.’

Silence again. The men liked what they heard, but the idea of England was in Alfred’s head, not theirs. He had a dream of one country, but it was too big a dream for the army in the meadow. ‘And why are the Danes here?’ Alfred asked. ‘They want your wives for their pleasure, your children for their slaves and your homes for their own, but they do not know us!’ He said the last six words slowly, spacing them out, shouting each one distinctly. ‘They do not know our swords,’ he went on, ‘they do not know our axes, our spears, our fierceness! Tomorrow we teach them! Tomorrow we kill them! Tomorrow we hack them into pieces! Tomorrow we make the ground red with their blood and make them whimper! Tomorrow we shall make them call for our mercy!’

‘None!’ a man called out.

‘No mercy!’ Alfred shouted, and I knew he did not mean it. He would have offered every mercy to the Danes, he would have offered them the love of God and tried to reason with them, but in the last few minutes he had at last learned how to talk to warriors.

‘Tomorrow,’ he shouted, ‘you do not fight for me! I fight for you! I fight for Wessex! I fight for your wives, for your children and your homes! Tomorrow we fight and, I swear to you on my father’s grave and on my children’s lives, tomorrow we shall win!’

And that started the cheering. It was not, in all honesty, a great battle speech, but it was the best Alfred ever gave and it worked. Men stamped the ground and those who carried their shields beat them with swords or spears so that the twilight was filled with a rhythmic thumping as men shouted, ‘No mercy!’ The sound echoed back from the hills. ‘No mercy, no mercy.’

We were ready. And the Danes were ready.

That night it clouded over. The stars vanished one by one, and the thin moon was swallowed in the darkness. Sleep came hard. I sat with Iseult who was cleaning my mail while I sharpened both swords. ‘You will win tomorrow,’ Iseult said in a small voice.

‘You dreamed that?’

She shook her head. ‘The dreams don’t come since I was baptised.’

‘So you made it up?’

‘I have to believe it,’ she said.

The stone scraped down the blades. All around me other men were sharpening weapons. ‘When this is over,’ I said, ‘you and I will go away. We shall make a house.’

‘When this is over,’ she said, ‘you will go north. Ever north. Back to your home.’

‘Then you’ll come with me.’

‘Perhaps.’ She heaved the mail coat to start on a new patch, scrubbing it with a scrap of fleece to make the links shine. ‘I can’t see my own future. It’s all dark.’

‘You shall be the lady of Bebbanburg,’ I said, ‘and I shall dress you in furs and crown you with bright silver.’

She smiled, but I saw there were tears on her face. I took it for fear. There was plenty of that in the camp that night, especially when men noticed the glow of light showing where the Danes had lit their fires in the nearby hills. We did sleep, but I was woken long before dawn by a small rain. No one slept through it, but all stirred and pulled on war gear.

We marched in the grey light. The rain came and went, spiteful and sharp, but always at our backs. Most of us walked, using our few horses to carry shields. Osric and his men went first, for they knew the shire. Alfred had said that the men of Wiltunscir would be on the right of the battle line, and with them would be the men of Suth Seaxa. Alfred was next, leading his bodyguard that was made of all the men who had come to him in Æthelingæg, and with him was Harald and the men of Defnascir and Thornsæta. Burgweard and the men from Hamptonscir would also fight with Alfred, as would my cousin Æthelred from Mercia, while on the left would be the strong fyrd of Sumorsæte under Wiglaf. Three and a half thousand men. The women came with us. Some carried their men’s weapons, others had their own.

No one spoke much. It was cold that morning, and the rain made the grass slippery. Men were hungry and tired. We were all fearful.

Alfred had told me to collect fifty or so men to lead, but Leofric was unwilling to lose that many from his ranks, so I took them from Burgweard instead. I took the men who had fought with me in the Heahengel when she had been the Fyrdraca, and twenty-six of those men had come from Hamtun. Steapa was with us, for he had taken a perverse liking to me, and I had Father Pyrlig, who was dressed as a warrior, not a priest. We were fewer than thirty men, but as we climbed past a green-mounded grave of the old folk, Æthelwold came to us. ‘Alfred said I could fight with you,’ he said.

‘He said that?’

‘He said I’m not to leave your side.’

I smiled at that. If I wanted a man by my side it would be Eadric or Cenwulf, Steapa or Pyrlig, men I could trust to keep their shields firm. ‘You’re not to leave my back,’ I said to Æthelwold.

‘Your back?’

‘And in the shield wall you stay close behind me. Ready to take my place.’

He took that as an insult, ‘I want to be in the front,’ he insisted.

‘Have you ever fought in a shield wall?’

‘You know I haven’t.’

‘Then you don’t want to be in the front,’ I said, ‘and besides, if Alfred dies, who’ll be king?’

‘Ah.’ He half smiled. ‘So I stay behind you?’

‘You stay behind me.’

Iseult and Hild were leading my horse. ‘If we lose,’ I told them, ‘you both get in the saddle and ride.’

‘Ride where?’

‘Just ride. Take the money,’ I said. My silver and treasures, all I possessed, were in the horse’s saddlebags, ‘take it and ride with Hild.’

Hild smiled at that. She looked pale and her fair hair was plastered tight to her scalp by the rain. She had no hat, and was dressed in a white shift belted with rope. I was surprised that she had come with the army, thinking she would have preferred to find a convent, but she had insisted on coming. ‘I want to see them dead,’ she told me flatly. ‘And the one called Erik I want to kill myself.’ She patted the long, narrow-bladed knife hanging from her belt.

‘Erik is the one who …’ I began, then hesitated.

‘The one who whored me,’ she said.

‘So he wasn’t the one we killed that night?’

She shook her head. ‘That was the steersman of Erik’s ship. But I’ll find Erik, and I won’t go back to a convent till I see him screaming in his own blood.’

‘Full of hate, she is,’ Father Pyrlig told me as we followed Hild and Iseult up the hill.

‘Isn’t that bad in a Christian?’

Pyrlig laughed. ‘Being alive is bad in a Christian! We say a person is a saint if they’re good, but how few of us become saints? We’re all bad! Some of us just try to be good.’

I glanced at Hild. ‘She’s wasted as a nun,’ I said.

‘You do like them thin, don’t you?’ Pyrlig said, amused. ‘Now I like them meaty as well-fed heifers! Give me a nice dark Briton with hips like a pair of ale barrels and I’m a happy priest. Poor Hild. Thin as a ray of sunlight, she is, but I pity a Dane who crosses her path today.’

Osric’s scouts came back to Alfred. They had ridden ahead and seen the Danes. The enemy was waiting, they reported, at the edge of the escarpment, where the hills were highest and where the old people’s fort stood. Their banners, the scouts said, were numberless. They had also seen Danish scouts, so Guthrum and Svein must have known we were coming.

On we went, ever higher, climbing into the chalk downs, and the rain stopped, but no sun appeared for the whole sky was a turmoil of grey and black. The wind gusted from the west. We passed whole rows of graves from the ancient days and I wondered if they contained warriors who had gone to battle as we did, and I wondered if in the thousands of years to come other men would toil up these hills with swords and shields. Of warfare there is no end, and I looked into the dark sky for a sign from Thor or Odin, hoping to see a raven fly, but there were no birds. Just clouds.

And then I saw Osric’s men slanting away to the right. We were in a fold of the hills and they were going around the right-hand hill and, as we reached the saddle between the two low slopes, I saw the level ground and there, ahead of me, was the enemy.

I love the Danes. There are no better men to fight with, drink with, laugh with or live with. Yet that day, as on so many others of my life, they were the enemy and they waited for me in a gigantic shield wall arrayed across the down. There were thousands of Danes, spear-Danes and sword-Danes, Danes who had come to make this land theirs, and we had come to keep it ours. ‘God give us strength,’ Father Pyrlig said when he saw the enemy who had begun shouting as we appeared. They clashed spears and swords against limewood shields, making a thunder on the hilltop. The ancient fort was the right wing of their army, and men were thick on the green turf walls. Many of those men had black shields and above them was a black banner, so that was where Guthrum was, while their left wing, which faced our right, was strung out on the open down and it was there I could see a triangular banner, supported by a small cross-staff, showing a white horse. So Svein commanded their left, while to the Danish right, our left, the escarpment dropped to the river plains. It was a steep drop, a tumbling hill. We could not hope to outflank the Danes on that side, for no one could fight on such a slope. We had to attack straight ahead, directly into the shield wall and against the earthen ramparts and onto the spears and the swords and the war axes of our outnumbering enemy.

I looked for Ragnar’s eagle-wing banner and thought I saw it in the fort, but it was hard to be certain, for every crew of Danes flew their standard, and the small flags were crowded together and the rain had started to fall again, obscuring the symbols, but off to my right, outside the fort and close to the bigger standard of the white horse, was a Saxon flag. It was a green flag with an eagle and a cross, which meant Wulfhere was there with that part of the Wiltunscir fyrd which had followed him. There were other Saxon banners in the enemy horde. Not many, maybe a score, and I guessed that the Danes had brought men from Mercia to fight for them. All the Saxon banners were in the open ground, none was inside the fort.

We were still a long way apart, much farther than a man could shoot an arrow, and none of us could hear what the Danes were shouting. Osric’s men were making our right wing as Wiglaf led his Sumorsæte fyrd off to the left. We were making a line to oppose their line, but ours would inevitably be shorter. The odds were not quite two Danes to one Saxon, but it was close. ‘God help us,’ Pyrlig said, touching his crucifix.

Alfred summoned his commanders, gathering them under the rain-sodden banner of the dragon. The Danish thunder went on, the clattering of thousands of weapons against shields, as the king asked his army’s leaders for advice.

Arnulf of Suth Seaxa, a wiry man with a short beard and a perpetual scowl, advised attack. ‘Just attack,’ he said, waving at the fort. ‘We’ll lose some men on the walls, but we’ll lose men anyway.’

‘We’ll lose a lot of men,’ my cousin Æthelred warned. He only led a small band, but his status as the son of a Mercian ealdorman meant he had to be included in Alfred’s council of war.

‘We do better defending,’ Osric growled. ‘Give a man land to defend and he stands, so let the bastards come to us.’ Harald nodded agreement.

Alfred cast a courteous eye on Wiglaf of Sumorsæte who looked surprised to be consulted. ‘We shall do our duty, lord,’ he said, ‘do our duty whatever you decide.’ Leofric and I were present, but the king did not invite our opinion so we kept silent.

Alfred gazed at the enemy, then turned back to us. ‘In my experience,’ he said, ‘the enemy expect something of us.’ He spoke pedantically, in the same tone he used when he was discussing theology with his priests. ‘They want us to do certain things. What are those things?’

Wiglaf shrugged, while Arnulf and Osric looked bemused. They had both expected something fiercer from Alfred. Battle, for most of us, was a hammering rage, nothing clever, a killing orgy, but Alfred saw it as a competition of wisdom, or perhaps as a game of tafl that took cleverness to win. That, I am sure, was how he saw our two armies, as tafl pieces on their chequered board.

‘Well?’ he asked.

‘They expect us to attack!’ Osric said uncertainly.

‘They expect us to attack Wulfhere,’ I said.

Alfred rewarded me with a smile. ‘Why Wulfhere?’

‘Because he’s a traitor and a bastard and a piece of whore-begotten goat-shit,’ I said.

‘Because we do not believe,’ Alfred corrected me, ‘that Wulfhere’s men will fight with the same passion as the Danes. And we’re right, they won’t. His men will pull back from killing fellow Saxons.’

‘But Svein is there,’ I said.

‘Which tells us?’ he asked.

The others stared at him. He knew the answer, but he could never resist being a teacher, and so he waited for a response. ‘It tells us,’ I supplied it again, ‘that they want us to attack their left, but they don’t want their left to break. That’s why Svein is there. He’ll hold us and they’ll launch an assault out of the fort to hit the flank of our attack. That breaks the right of our army and then the whole damned lot come and kill the rest of us.’

Alfred did not respond, but looked worried, suggesting that he agreed with me. The other men turned and looked at the Danes, as if some magical answer might suggest itself, but none did.

‘So do as Lord Arnulf suggests,’ Harald said, ‘attack the fort.’

‘The walls are steep,’ Wiglaf warned. The Ealdorman of Sumorsæte was a man of sunny disposition, frequent laughter and casual generosity, but now, with his men arrayed opposite the fort’s green ramparts, he was downcast.

‘Guthrum would dearly like us to assail the fort,’ the king observed.

This caused some confusion for it seemed, according to Alfred, that the Danes wanted us to attack their right just as much as they wanted us to attack their left. The Danes, meanwhile, were jeering at us for not attacking at all. One or two ran towards our lines and screamed insults, and their whole shield wall was still banging weapons in a steady, threatening rhythm. The rain made the colours of the shields darker. The colours were black and red and blue and brown and dirty yellow.

‘So what do we do?’ Æthelred asked plaintively.

There was silence and I realised that Alfred, though he understood the problem, had no answer to it. Guthrum wanted us to attack and probably did not care whether we went against Svein’s seasoned warriors on the left of the enemy line or against the steep, slippery ditches in front of the fort’s walls. And Guthrum must also have known that we dared not retreat because his men would pursue and break us like a horde of wolves savaging a frightened flock.

‘Attack their left,’ I said.

Alfred nodded as though he had already come to that conclusion. ‘And?’ he invited me.

‘Attack it with every man we’ve got,’ I said. There were probably two thousand men outside the fort and at least half of those were Saxons. I thought we should assault them in one violent rush, and overwhelm them by numbers. Then the weakness of the Danish position would be revealed, for they were on the very lip of the escarpment and once they were forced over the edge they had nowhere to go but down the long, precipitous slope. We could have destroyed those two thousand men, then reformed our lines for the harder task of attacking the three thousand inside the fort.

‘Employ all our men?’ Alfred asked. ‘But then Guthrum will attack our flank with every man he has.’

‘Guthrum won’t,’ I said. ‘He’ll send some men to attack our flank, but he’ll keep most of his troops inside the fort. He’s cautious. He won’t abandon the fort, and he won’t risk much to save Svein. They don’t like each other.’

Alfred thought about it, but I could see he did not like the gamble. He feared that while we attacked Svein the other Danes would charge from the fort and overwhelm our left. I still think he should have taken my advice, but fate is inexorable and he decided to imitate Guthrum by being cautious. ‘We will attack on our right,’ he said, ‘and drive off Wulfhere’s men, but we must be ready for their counter-stroke and so our left stays where it is.’

So it was decided. Osric and Arnulf, with the men of Wiltunscir and Suth Seaxa, would give battle to Svein and Wulfhere on the open land to the east of the fort, but we suspected that some Danes would come from behind the ramparts to attack Osric’s flank and so Alfred would take his own bodyguard to be a bulwark against that assault. Wigulf, meanwhile, would stay where he was, which meant a third of our men were doing nothing. ‘If we can defeat them,’ Alfred said, ‘then their remnant will retreat into the fort and we can besiege it. They have no water there, do they?’

‘None,’ Osric confirmed.

‘So they’re trapped,’ Alfred said as though the whole problem was neatly resolved and the battle as good as won. He turned to Bishop Alewold. ‘A prayer, bishop, if you would be so kind.’

Alewold prayed, the rain fell, the Danes went on jeering, and I knew the awful moment, the clash of the shield walls, was close. I touched Thor’s hammer, then Serpent-Breath’s hilt, for death was stalking us. God help me, I thought, touching the hammer again, Thor help us all, for I did not think we could win.

Thirteen

The Danes made their battle thunder and we prayed. Alewold harangued God for a long time, mostly begging him to send angels with flaming swords, and those angels would have been useful, though none appeared. It would be up to us to do the job.

We readied for battle. I took my shield and helmet from the horse that Iseult led, but first I teased out a thick hank of her black hair. ‘Trust me,’ I said to her, because she was nervous, and I used a small knife to cut the tress. I tied one end of the hair to Serpent-Breath’s hilt and made a loop with the other end. Iseult watched. ‘Why?’ she asked.

‘I can put the loop over my wrist,’ I showed her, ‘then I can’t lose the sword. And your hair will bring me luck.’

Bishop Alewold was angrily demanding that the women go back. Iseult stood on tiptoe to buckle my wolf-crested helmet in place, then she pulled my head down and kissed me through the gap in the face-plate. ‘I shall pray for you,’ she said.

‘So will I,’ Hild said.

‘Pray to Odin and Thor,’ I urged them, then watched as they led the horse away. The women would hold the horses a quarter-mile behind our shield wall and Alfred insisted they went that far back so that no man was tempted to make a sudden dash for a horse and gallop away.

It was time to make the shield wall, and that is a cumbersome business. Some men offer to be in the front rank, but most try to be behind, and Osric and his battle-leaders were shoving and shouting as they tried to settle the men. ‘God is with us!’ Alfred was shouting at them. He was still mounted and rode down Osric’s slowly-forming shield wall to encourage the fyrd. ‘God is with us!’ he shouted again, ‘we cannot lose! God is with us!’ The rain fell harder. Priests were walking down the lines offering blessings and adding to the rain by throwing handfuls of holy water at the shields. Osric’s fyrd was mostly five ranks thick, and behind them was a scatter of men with spears. Their job, as the two sides met, was to hurl the spears over their comrades’ heads, and the Danes would have similar spear-throwers readying their own weapons. ‘God is with us!’ Alfred shouted, ‘He is on our side! Heaven watches over us! The holy saints pray for us! The angels guard us! God is with us!’ His voice was already hoarse. Men touched amulets for luck, closed their eyes in silent prayer and tugged at buckles. In the front rank they obsessively touched their shields against their neighbour’s shields. The right-hand edge of every man’s shield was supposed to overlap the next shield so that the Danes were confronted with a solid wall of iron-reinforced limewood. The Danes would make the same wall, but they were still jeering at us, daring us to attack. A young man stumbled from the back of Osric’s fyrd and vomited. Two dogs ran to eat the vomit. A spear-thrower was on his knees, shaking and praying.

Father Beocca stood beside Alfred’s standards with his hands raised in prayer. I was in front of the standards with Steapa to my right and Pyrlig to my left. ‘Bring fire on them, oh most holy Lord!’ Beocca wailed, ‘bring fire on them and strike them down! Punish them for their iniquities.’ His eyes were tight closed and his face raised to the rain so that he did not see Alfred gallop back to us and push through our ranks. The king would stay mounted so he could see what happened, and Leofric and a dozen other men were also on horseback so that their shields could protect Alfred from thrown spears and axes.

‘Forward!’ Alfred shouted.

‘Forward!’ Leofric repeated the order because the king’s voice was so hoarse.

No one moved. It was up to Osric and his men to begin the advance, but men are ever reluctant to go against an enemy shield wall. It helps to be drunk. I have been in battles where both sides struggled in a reeking daze of birch wine and ale, but we had little of either and our courage had to be summoned out of sober hearts and there was not much to be found on that cold wet morning.

‘Forward!’ Leofric shouted again, and this time Osric and his commanders took up the shout and the men of Wiltunscir shuffled a few paces forward and the Danish shields clattered into the wall and locked together and the sight of that skjaldborg checked the advance. That is what the Danes call their shield wall, the skjaldborg or shield fort. The Danes roared mockery, and two of their younger warriors strutted out of their line to taunt us and invite a duel. ‘Stay in the wall!’ Leofric roared.

‘Ignore them!’ Osric shouted.

Horsemen rode from the fort, perhaps a hundred of them, and they trotted behind the skjaldborg that was formed of Svein’s warriors and Wulfhere’s Saxons. Svein joined the horsemen. I could see his white horse, the white cloak and the white horsetail plume. The presence of the horsemen told me that Svein expected our line to break and he wanted to ride our fugitives down just as his riders had slaughtered Peredur’s broken Britons at Dreyndynas. The Danes were full of confidence, and so they should have been for they outnumbered us and they were all warriors, while our ranks were filled with men more used to the plough than the sword.

‘Forward!’ Osric shouted. His line quivered, but did not advance more than a yard.

Rain dripped from the rim of my helmet. It ran down inside the face-plate, worked itself inside my mail coat and ran in shivers down my chest and belly.

‘Strike them hard, lord!’ Beocca shouted, ‘slaughter them without mercy! Break them in pieces!’

Pyrlig was praying, at least I think he was praying for he was speaking in his own tongue, but I heard the word duw repeated over and over and I knew, from Iseult, that duw was the Britons’ word for god. Æthelwold was behind Pyrlig. He was supposed to be behind me, but Eadric had insisted on being at my back, so Æthelwold would protect Pyrlig instead. He was chattering incessantly, trying to cover his nervousness, and I turned on him. ‘Keep your shield up,’ I told him.

‘I know, I know.’

‘You protect Pyrlig’s head, understand?’

‘I know!’ He was irritated that I had given him the advice. ‘I know,’ he repeated petulantly.

‘Forward! Forward!’ Osric called. Like Alfred he was on horseback and he went up and down behind his line, sword drawn, and I thought he would jab the blade at his men to goad them onwards. They went a few paces and the Danish shields came up again and the limewood made a knocking sound as the skjaldborg was made and once again our line faltered. Svein and his horsemen were now at the very far flank, but Osric had placed a group of picked warriors there, ready to guard the open end of his line.

‘For God! For Wiltunscir!’ Osric shouted, ‘forward!’

Alfred’s men were on the left of Osric’s fyrd where we were bent slightly back, ready to receive the expected flank attack from the fort. We went forward readily enough, but then, we were mostly warriors and knew we could not advance in front of Osric’s more nervous troops. I almost stepped into a scrap of the ground where, astonishingly, three leverets lay low and quivering. I stared at them and hoped that the men behind me would avoid the little beasts and knew they would not. I do not know why hares leave their young in the open, but they do and there they lay, three sleek leverets in a hollow of the downs, doubtless the first things to die in that day of wind and rain.

‘Shout at them!’ Osric called. ‘Tell them they’re bastards! Call them sons of whores! Say they’re shit from the north! Shout at them!’ He knew that was one way to get men moving. The Danes were screaming at us, calling us women, saying we had no courage, and no one in our ranks was shouting back, but Osric’s men started now and the wet sky was filled with the noise of weapons banging on shields and men calling insults.

I had hung Serpent-Breath on my back. In the crush of battle a sword is easier to draw over the shoulder than from the hip, and the first stroke can then be a vicious downward hack. I carried Wasp-Sting in my right hand. Wasp-Sting was a sax, a short-sword, a stout blade for stabbing, and in the press of men heaving against an enemy shield wall a short-sword can do more damage than a long blade. My shield, iron-rimmed, was held on my left forearm by two leather loops. The shield had a metal boss the size of a man’s head, a weapon in itself. Steapa, to my right, had a long sword, not as long as the one with which he had fought me at Cippanhamm, but still a hefty blade, though in his big hand it looked almost puny. Pyrlig carried a boar spear, short and stout and with a wide blade. He was saying the same phrase over and over. ‘Ein tad, yr hwn wyt yn y nefoedd, sancteiddier dy enw.’ I learned later it was the prayer Jesus had taught his disciples. Steapa was muttering that the Danes were bastards. ‘Bastards,’ he said, then, ‘God help me, bastards.’ He kept saying it. Over and over. ‘Bastards, God help me, bastards.’ My mouth was suddenly too dry to speak, and my stomach felt sour and my bowels loose.

‘Forward! Forward!’ Osric called and we shuffled on, shields touching, and we could see the enemies’ faces now. We could see men’s unkempt beards and yellow-toothed snarls, see their scarred cheeks, pocked skin and broken noses. My face-plate meant I could only see directly ahead. Sometimes it is better to fight without a face-plate, to see the attacks coming from the side, but in the clash of shield walls a face-plate is useful. The helmet was lined with leather. I was sweating. Arrows flicked from the Danish line. They did not have many bowmen and the arrows were scattered, but we raised shields to protect our faces. None came near me, but we were bent back from the line to watch the fort’s green walls that were rimmed with men, thick with sword-Danes, and I could see Ragnar’s eagle-wing banner there and I wondered what would happen if I found myself face to face with him. I could see the axes and spears and swords, the blades that sought our souls. Rain drummed on helmets and shields.

The line paused again. Osric’s shield wall and Svein’s skjaldborg were only twenty paces apart now and men could see their immediate foes, could see the face of the man they must kill or the man who would kill them. Both sides were screaming, spitting anger and insults, and the spear-throwers had their first missiles hefted.

‘Keep close!’ someone shouted.

‘Shields touching!’

‘God is with us!’ Beocca called.

‘Forward!’ Another two paces, more of a shuffle forward than stepping.

‘Bastards,’ Steapa said, ‘God help me, bastards.’

‘Now!’ Osric screamed. ‘Now! Forward and kill them! Forward and kill them! Go! Go! Go!’ And the men of Wiltunscir went. They let out a great war shout, as much to hearten themselves as to frighten the enemy, and suddenly, after so long, the shield wall went forward fast, men screaming, and the spears came over the Danish line and our own spears were hurled back and then came the clash, the real battle thunder as shield wall met skjaldborg. The shock of the collision shook our whole line so that even my troops, who were not yet engaged, staggered. I heard the first screams, the clangour of blades, the thump of metal driving into shield-wood, the grunting of men, and then I saw the Danes coming over the green ramparts, a flood of Danes charging us, intent on hacking into the flank of our attack, but that was why Alfred had put us on the left of Osric’s force.

‘Shields!’ Leofric roared.

I hoisted my shield, touched Steapa’s and Pyrlig’s shields, then crouched to receive the charge. Head down, body covered by wood, legs braced, Wasp-Sting ready. Behind us and to our right Osric’s men fought. I could smell blood and shit. Those are the smells of battle, then I forgot Osric’s fight for the rain was in my face, and the Danes were coming at a run, no shield wall formed, just a frenzied charge intent on winning the battle in one furious assault. There were hundreds of them, and then our spear-throwers let their missiles go.

‘Now!’ I shouted, and we stepped one pace forward to meet the charge and my left arm was crushed into my chest as a Dane hit me, shield against shield, and he slammed an axe down and I rammed Wasp-Sting forward, past his shield, into his flank and his axe buried itself in Eadric’s shield that was above my head. I twisted Wasp-Sting’s blade, pulled her free and stabbed again. I could smell ale on the Dane’s sour breath. His face was a grimace. He yanked his axe free. I stabbed again and twisted the sax’s tip into mail or bone, I could not tell which. ‘Your mother was a piece of pig-shit,’ I told the Dane, and he screamed in rage and tried to bring the axe down onto my helmet, but I ducked and shoved forward, and Eadric protected me with his shield, and Wasp-Sting was red now, warm and sticky with blood, and I ripped her upwards.

Steapa was screaming incoherently, his sword slashing left and right, and the Danes avoided him. My enemy stumbled, went down onto his knees, and I hit him with the shield boss, breaking his nose and teeth, then shoved Wasp-Sting into his bloody mouth. Another man immediately took his place, but Pyrlig buried his boar spear in the newcomer’s belly.

‘Shields!’ I shouted, and Steapa and Pyrlig instinctively lined their shields with mine. I had no idea what happened elsewhere on the hilltop. I only knew what happened within Wasp-Sting’s reach.

‘Back one! Back one!’ Pyrlig called, and we stepped back one pace so that the next Danes, taking the place of the men we had wounded or killed, would trip over the fallen bodies of their comrades, and then we stepped forward as they came so that we met them when they were off balance. That was how to do it, the way of the warrior, and we in Alfred’s immediate force were his best soldiers. The Danes had charged us wildly, not bothering to lock shields in the belief that their fury alone would overwhelm us. They had been drawn, too, by the sight of Alfred’s banners and the knowledge that should those twin flags topple then the battle was as good as won, but their assault hit our shield wall like an ocean wave striking a cliff, and it shattered there. It left men on the turf and blood on the grass, and now the Danes at last made a proper shield wall and came at us more steadily.

I heard the enemy shields touching, saw the Danes’ wild eyes over the round rims, saw their grimaces as they gathered their strength. Then they shouted and came to kill us.

‘Now!’ I shouted and we thrust forward to meet them.

The shield walls crashed together. Eadric was at my back, pressing me forward, and the art of fighting now was to keep a space between my body and my shield with a strong left arm, and then to stab under the shield with Wasp-Sting. Eadric could fight over my shoulder with his sword. I had space to my right for Steapa was left-handed which meant his shield was on his right arm, and he kept moving it away from me to give his long sword room to strike. That gap, no wider than a man’s foot is long, was an invitation to the Danes, but they were scared of Steapa and none tried to burst through the small space. His height alone made him distinctive, and his skull-tight face made him fearsome. He was bellowing like a calf being gelded, half shriek and half belligerence, inviting the Danes to come and be killed. They refused. They had learned the danger of Pyrlig, Steapa and I, and they were cautious. Elsewhere along Alfred’s shield wall there were men dying and screaming, swords and axes clanging like bells, but in front of me the Danes hung back and merely jabbed with spears to keep us at bay. I shouted that they were cowards, but that did not goad them onto Wasp-Sting, and I glanced left and right and saw that all along Alfred’s line we were holding them. Our shield wall was strong. All that practice in Æthelingæg was proving itself, and for the Danes the fight grew ever more difficult for they were attacking us, and to reach us they had to step over the bodies of their own dead and wounded. A man does not see where he treads in battle for he is watching the enemy, and some Danes stumbled, and others slipped on the rain-slicked grass and when they were off balance we struck hard, spears and swords like snake-tongues, making more bodies to trip the enemy.

We of Alfred’s household troops were good. We were steady. We were beating the Danes, but behind us, in Osric’s larger force, Wessex was dying.

Because Osric’s shield wall unravelled.

Wulfhere’s men did it. They did not break Osric’s shield wall by fighting it, but by trying to join it. Few of them wanted to fight for the Danes and, now that the battle was joined, they shouted at their countrymen that they were no enemy and wanted to change sides, and the shield wall opened to let them through, and Svein’s men went for the gaps like wildcats. One after the other those gaps widened as sword-Danes burst through. They cut Wulfhere’s men down from behind, they prised open Osric’s ranks and spread death like a plague. Svein’s Vikings were warriors among farmers, hawks among pigeons, and all of Alfred’s right wing shattered. Arnulf saved the men of Suth Seaxa by leading them to the rear of our ranks, and they were safe enough there, but Osric’s fyrd was broken, harried and driven away east and south.

The rain had stopped and a cold damp wind scoured the edge of the downs now. Alfred’s men, reinforced by Arnulf’s four hundred and a dozen or so of Osric’s fugitives, stood alone as the Wiltunscir fyrd retreated. They were being driven away from us, and Svein and his horsemen were panicking them. The fyrd had been eight hundred strong, ranked firm, and now they were shattered into small groups that huddled together for protection and tried to fend off the galloping horsemen who thrust with their long spears. Bodies lay all across the turf. Some of Osric’s men were wounded and crawled south as if there might be safety where the women and horses were gathered around a mounded grave of the old folk, but the horsemen turned and speared them, and the unmounted Danes were making new shield walls to attack the fugitives. We could do nothing to help, for we were still fighting Guthrum’s men who had come from the fort and, though we were winning that fight, we could not turn our backs on the enemy. So we thrust and hacked and pushed, and slowly they went backwards, and then they realised that they were dying man by man, and I heard the Danish shouts to go back to the fort, and we let them go. They retreated from us, walking backwards, and when they saw we would not follow, they turned and ran to the green walls. They left a tideline of corpses, sixty or seventy Danes on the turf, and we had lost no more than twenty men. I took a silver chain off one corpse, two arm rings from another and a fine bone-handled knife with a knob of amber in its hilt from a third.

‘Back!’ Alfred called.

It was not till we retreated to where we had begun the fight that I realised the disaster on our right. We had been the centre of Alfred’s army, but now we were its right wing, and what had been our strong right flank was splintered chaos. Many of Osric’s men had retreated to where the women and horses waited, and they made a shield wall there which served to protect them, but most of the fyrd had fled farther east and was being carved into smaller and smaller groups.

Svein at last hauled his men back from the pursuit, but by then nearly all our right wing was gone. Many of those men lived, but they had been driven from the field and would be reluctant to come back and take more punishment. Osric himself had survived, and he brought the two hundred men who had retreated to the women and horses back to Alfred, but that was all he had left. Svein formed his men again, facing us, and I could see him haranguing them. ‘They’re coming for us,’ I said.

‘God will protect us,’ Pyrlig said. He had blood on his face. A sword or axe had pierced his helmet and cut open his scalp so that blood was crusted thick on his left cheek.

‘Where was your shield?’ I demanded of Æthelwold.

‘I’ve got it,’ he said. He looked pale and frightened.

‘You’re supposed to protect Pyrlig’s head,’ I snarled at him.

‘It’s nothing,’ Pyrlig tried to calm my anger.

Æthelwold looked as if he would protest, then suddenly jerked forward and vomited. I turned away from him. I was angry, but I was also disappointed. The bowel-loosening fear was gone, but the fighting had seemed half-hearted and ineffective. We had seen off the Danes who had attacked us, but we had not hurt them so badly that they would abandon the fight. I wanted to feel the battle-rage, the screaming joy of killing, and instead all seemed ponderous and difficult.

I had looked for Ragnar during the fight, fearing having to fight my friend, and when the Danes had gone back to the fort I saw he had been engaged further down the line. I could see him now, on the rampart, staring at us, then I looked right, expecting to see Svein lead his men in an assault on us, but instead I saw Svein galloping to the fort and I suspected he went to demand reinforcements from Guthrum.

The battle was less than an hour old, yet now it paused. Some women brought us water and mouldy bread while the wounded sought what help they could find. I wrapped a rag around Eadric’s left arm where an axe blade had gone through the leather of his sleeve. ‘It was aimed at you, lord,’ he said, grinning at me toothlessly.

I tied the rag into place. ‘Does it hurt?’

‘Bit of an ache,’ he said, ‘but not bad. Not bad.’ He flexed his arm, found it worked and picked up his shield. I looked again at Svein’s men, but they seemed in no hurry to resume their attack. I saw a man tip a skin of water or ale to his mouth. Just ahead of us, among the line of dead, a man suddenly sat up. He was Danish and had plaited black hair that had been tied in knots and decorated with ribbons. I had thought he was dead, but he sat up and stared at us with a look of indignation and then, seemingly, yawned. He was looking straight at me, his mouth open, and then a flood of blood rimmed and spilled over his lower lip to soak his beard. His eyes rolled white and he fell backwards. Svein’s men were still not moving. There were some eight hundred of them arrayed in their line. They were still the left wing of Guthrum’s army, but that wing was much smaller now that it had been shorn of Wulfhere’s men, and so I turned and pushed through our ranks to find Alfred. ‘Lord!’ I called, getting his attention. ‘Attack those men!’ I pointed to Svein’s troops. They were a good two hundred paces from the fort and, for the moment at least, without their leader because Svein was still inside the ramparts. Alfred looked down on me from his saddle and I urged him to attack with every man in the centre division of our army. The Danes had the escarpment at their back and I reckoned we could tip them down that treacherous slope. Alfred listened to me, looked at Svein’s men, then shook his head dumbly. Beocca was on his knees, hands spread wide and face screwed tight in an intensity of prayer.

‘We can drive them off, lord,’ I insisted.

‘They’ll come from the fort,’ Alfred said, meaning that Guthrum’s Danes would come to help Svein’s men.

Some would, but I doubted enough would come. ‘But we want them out of the fort,’ I insisted. ‘They’re easier to kill in open ground, lord.’

Alfred just shook his head again. I think, at that moment, he was almost paralysed by the fear of doing the wrong thing, and so he chose to do nothing. He wore a plain helmet with a nasal, no other protection for his face, and he looked sickly pale. He could not see an obvious opportunity, and so he would let the enemy make the next decision.

It was Svein who made it. He brought more Danes out of the fort, three or four hundred of them. Most of Guthrum’s men stayed behind the ramparts, but those men who had made the first attack on Alfred’s bodyguard now streamed onto the open downland where they joined Svein’s troops and made their shield wall. I could see Ragnar’s banner among them.

‘They’re going to attack, aren’t they?’ Pyrlig said. The rain had washed much of the blood from his face, but the split in his helmet looked gory. ‘I’m all right,’ he said, seeing me glance at the damage, ‘I’ve had worse from a row with the wife. But those bastards are coming, aren’t they? They want to keep killing us from our right.’

‘We can beat them, lord,’ I called back to Alfred. ‘Put all our men against them. All of them!’

He seemed not to hear.

‘Bring Wiglaf’s fyrd across, lord!’ I appealed to him.

‘We can’t move Wiglaf,’ he said indignantly.

He feared that if he moved the Sumorsæte fyrd from its place in front of the fort then Guthrum would lead all his men out to assault our left flank, but I knew Guthrum was far too cautious to do any such thing. He felt safe behind the turf ramparts and he wanted to stay safe while Svein won the battle for him. Guthrum would not move until our army was broken, then he would launch an assault. But Alfred would not listen. He was a clever man, perhaps as clever as any man born, but he did not understand battle. He did not understand that battle is not just about numbers, it is not about moving tafl pieces, and it is not even about who has the advantage in ground, but about passion and madness and a screaming, ungovernable rage.

And so far I had felt none of those things. We in Alfred’s household troops had fought well enough, but we had merely defended ourselves. We had not carried slaughter to the enemy, and it is only when you attack that you win. Now, it seemed, we were to defend ourselves again, and Alfred stirred himself to order me and my men to the right of his line. ‘Leave the standards with me,’ he said, ‘and make sure our flank is safe.’

There was honour in that. The right end of the line was where the enemy might try to wrap around us and Alfred needed good men to hold that open flank, and so we formed a tight knot there. Far off across the down I could see the remnants of Osric’s fyrd. They were watching us. Some of them, I thought, would return if they thought we were winning, but for the moment they were too full of fear to rejoin Alfred’s army.

Svein rode his white horse up and down the face of his shield wall. He was shouting at his troops, encouraging them. Telling them we were weaklings who needed only one push to topple.

‘And I looked,’ Pyrlig said to me, ‘and I saw a pale horse, and the rider’s name was death.’ I stared at him in astonishment. ‘It’s from the gospel book,’ he explained sheepishly, ‘and it just came to my mind.’

‘Then put it out of your mind,’ I said harshly, ‘because our job is to kill him, not fear him.’ I turned to tell Æthelwold to make certain he kept his shield up, but saw he had taken a new place in the rear rank. He was better there, I decided, so left him alone. Svein was shouting that we were lambs waiting to be slaughtered, and his men had begun beating weapons against their shields. There were just over a thousand men in Svein’s ranks now, and they would be assaulting Alfred’s division that numbered about the same, but the Danes still had the advantage, for every man in their shield wall was a warrior, while over half our men were from the fyrds of Defnascir, Thornsæta and Hamptonscir. If we had brought Wiglaf’s fyrd to join us we could have overwhelmed Svein, but by the same token he could have swamped us if Guthrum had the courage to leave the fort. Both sides were being cautious. Neither was willing to throw everything into the battle for fear of losing everything.

Svein’s horsemen were on the left flank, opposite my men. He wanted us to feel threatened by the riders, but a horse will not charge into a shield wall. It will sheer away, and I would rather face horsemen than foot-soldiers. One horse was tossing its head and I could see blood on its neck. Another horse was lying dead out where the corpses lay in the cold wind that was bringing the first ravens from the north. Black wings in a dull sky. Odin’s birds.

‘Come and die!’ Steapa suddenly shouted. ‘Come and die, you bastards! Come on!’

His shout prompted others along our line to call insults to the Danes. Svein turned, apparently surprised by our sudden defiance. His men had started forward, but stopped again, and I realised, with surprise, that they were just as fearful as we were. I had always held the Danes in awe, reckoning them the greatest fighting men under the sky. Alfred, in a moment of gloom, once told me it took four Saxons to beat one Dane, and there was a truth in that, but it was not a binding truth, and it was not true that day for there was no passion in Svein’s men. There was unhappiness there, a reluctance to advance, and I reckoned that Guthrum and Svein had quarrelled. Or perhaps the cold, damp wind had quelled everyone’s ardour. ‘We’re going to win this battle!’ I shouted, and surprised myself by shouting it.

Men looked at me, wondering if I had been sent a vision by my gods.

‘We’re going to win!’ I was hardly aware of speaking. I had not meant to make a speech, but I made one anyway. ‘They’re frightened of us!’ I called out, ‘they’re scared! Most of them are skulking in the fort because they daren’t come out to face Saxon blades! And those men,’ I gestured at Svein’s ranks with Wasp-Sting, ‘know they’re going to die! They’re going to die!’ I took a few paces forward and spread my arms to get the Danes’ attention. I held my shield out to the left and Wasp-Sting to the right. ‘You’re going to die!’ I shouted it in Danish, loud as I could, then in English. ‘You’re going to die!’

And all Alfred’s men took up that shout. ‘You’re going to die! You’re going to die!’

Something odd happened then. Beocca and Pyrlig claimed that the spirit of God wafted through our army, and maybe that did happen, or else we suddenly began to believe in ourselves. We believed we could win and as the chant was shouted at the enemy we began to go forward, step by step, beating swords against shields and shouting that the enemy would die. I was ahead of my men, taunting the enemy, screaming at them, dancing as I went, and Alfred called me back to the ranks. Later, when all was done, Beocca told me that Alfred called me repeatedly, but I was capering and shouting, out ahead on the grass where the corpses lay, and I did not hear him. And Alfred’s men were following me and he did not call them back though he had not ordered them forward.

‘You bastards!’ I screamed, ‘you goat-turds! You fight like girls!’ I do not know what insults I shouted that day, only that I shouted them and that I went ahead, on my own, asking just one of them to come and fight me man to man.

Alfred never approved of those duels between the shield walls. Perhaps, sensibly, he disapproved because he knew he could not have fought one himself, but he also saw them as dangerous. When a man invites an enemy champion to a fight, man on man, he invites his own death, and if he dies he takes the heart from his own side and gives courage to the enemy, and so Alfred ever forbade us to accept Danish challenges, but on that cold wet day one man did accept my challenge.

It was Svein himself. Svein of the White Horse, and he turned the white horse and spurred towards me with his sword in his right hand. I could hear the hooves thumping, see the clods of wet turf flying behind, see the stallion’s mane tossing and I could see Svein’s boar-masked helmet above the rim of his shield. Man and horse coming for me, and the Danes were jeering and just then Pyrlig shouted at me. ‘Uhtred! Uhtred!’

I did not turn to look at him. I was too busy sheathing Wasp-Sting and was about to pull Serpent-Breath from her scabbard, but just then Pyrlig’s thick-shafted boar spear skidded beside me in the wet grass, and I understood what he was trying to tell me. I left Serpent-Breath on my shoulder and snatched up the Briton’s spear just as Svein closed on me. All I could hear was the thunder of hooves, see the white cloak spreading, the bright shine of the lofted blade, the tossing horsehair plume, white eyes on the horse, teeth bared, and then Svein twitched the stallion to his left and cut the sword at me. His eyes were glitters behind the eye-pieces of his helmet as he leaned to kill me, but as his sword came I threw myself into his horse and rammed the spear into the beast’s guts. I had to do it one-handed, for I had my shield on my left arm, but the wide blade pierced hide and muscle, and I was screaming, trying to drive it deeper, and then Svein’s sword struck my lifted shield like a hammer blow and his right knee struck my helmet so that I was thrown hard back to sprawl on the grass. I had let go of the spear, but it was well buried in the horse’s belly and the animal was screaming and shaking, bucking and tossing, and thick blood was pouring down the spear’s shaft that banged and bounced along the grass.

The horse bolted. Svein somehow stayed in the saddle. There was blood on the beast’s belly. I had not hurt Svein, I had not touched him, but he was fleeing from me, or rather his white horse was bolting in pain and it ran straight at Svein’s own shield wall. A horse will instinctively swerve away from a shield wall, but this horse was blinded by pain, and then, just short of the Danish shields, it half fell. It slid on the wet grass and skidded hard into the skjaldborg, breaking it open. Men scattered from the animal. Svein tumbled from the saddle, and then the horse somehow managed to get back on its feet, and it reared and screamed. Blood was flying from its belly, and its hooves were flailing at the Danes, and now we were charging them at the run. I was on my feet, Serpent-Breath in my right hand, and the horse was thrashing and twisting, and the Danes backed away from it, and that opened their shield wall as we hit them.

Svein was just getting to his feet as Alfred’s men arrived. I did not see it, but men said Steapa’s sword took Svein’s head off in one blow. A blow so hard that the helmeted head flew into the air, and perhaps that was true, but what was certain was that the passion was on us now. The blinding, seething passion of battle. The blood lust, the killing rage, and the horse was doing the work for us, breaking the Danish shield wall apart so all we had to do was ram into the gaps and kill.

And so we killed. Alfred had not meant this to happen. He had expected to wait for the Danish attack and hoped we would resist it, but instead we had thrown off his leash and were doing his work, and he had the wit to send Arnulf’s men out to the right because my men were among the enemy. The horsemen had tried to come around our rear, but the men of Suth Seaxa saw them off with shields and swords, then guarded the open flank as all Alfred’s men from Æthelingæg, and all Harald’s men from Defnascir and Thornsæta joined the slaughter. My cousin was there, with his Mercians, and he was a stout fighter. I watched him parry, stab, put down a man, take on another, kill him, and go on steadily. We were making the hilltop rich with Danish blood because we had the fury and they did not, and the men who had fled the field, Osric’s men, were coming back to join the fight.

The horsemen went. I did not see them go, though their tale will be told. I was fighting, screaming, shouting at Danes to come and be killed, and Pyrlig was beside me, holding a sword now, and the whole left-hand side of Svein’s shield wall had broken and its survivors were making small groups, and we attacked them. I charged one group with the shield, using its boss to slam a man back and stabbing with Serpent-Breath, feeling her break through mail and leather, and Leofric appeared from somewhere, axe swinging, and Pyrlig was ramming his sword’s tip into a man’s face, and for every Dane there were two Saxons and the enemy stood no chance. One man shouted for mercy and Leofric broke his helmet apart with the axe so that blood and brains oozed onto the jagged metal and I kicked the man aside and plunged Serpent-Breath into a man’s groin so that he screamed like a woman in childbirth. The poets often sing of that battle, and for once they get something right when they tell of the sword joy, the blade song, the slaughter. We tore Svein’s men to bloody ruin, and we did it with passion, skill and savagery. The battle-calm was on me at last and I could do no wrong. Serpent-Breath had her own life and she stole it from the Danes who tried to oppose me, but those Danes were broken and running and all the left wing of Svein’s vaunted troops was defeated.

And there was suddenly no enemy near me except for the dead and injured. Alfred’s nephew, Æthelwold, was jabbing his sword at one of the wounded Danes. ‘Either kill him,’ I snarled, ‘or let him live.’ The man had a broken leg and had an eye hanging down his bloody cheek and he was no danger to anyone.

‘I have to kill one pagan,’ Æthelwold said. He prodded the man with the sword tip and I kicked his blade aside, and would have helped the wounded man except it was then that I saw Haesten.

He was at the hill’s edge, a fugitive, and I shouted his name. He turned and saw me, or saw a blood-drenched warrior in mail and a wolf-crested helmet, and he stared at me, then perhaps he recognised the helmet for he fled. ‘Coward!’ I shouted at him. ‘You treacherous, bastard coward! You swore me an oath! I made you rich! I saved your rotten life!’

He turned then, half grinned at me and waved his left arm on which hung the splintered remnants of a shield, then he ran to what remained of the right-hand side of Svein’s shield wall, and that was still in good order, its shields locked tight. There were five or six hundred men there, and they had swung back, then retreated towards the fort, but now they checked because Alfred’s men, having no one left to kill, were turning on them. Haesten joined the Danish ranks, pushing through the shields, and I saw the eagle-wing banner above them and knew that Ragnar, my friend, was leading those survivors.

I paused. Leofric was shouting at men to form a shield wall and I knew this attack had lost its fury, but we had damaged them. We had killed Svein and a good number of his men, and the Danes were now penned back against the fort. I went to the hill’s edge, following a trail of blood on the wet grass, and saw that the white horse had bolted over the down’s lip and now lay, its legs grotesquely cocked in the air and its white pelt spattered with blood, a few yards down the slope.

‘That was a good horse,’ Pyrlig said. He had joined me on the edge of the hill. I had thought this crest was the top of the escarpment, but the land was tangled here, as though a giant had kicked the hillside with a massive boot. The ground fell away to make a steep valley that suddenly climbed to a farther crest that was the real edge of the downs, and the steep valley sloped up to the fort’s eastern corner, and I wondered whether it would offer a way into the fastness. Pyrlig was still staring at the dead horse. ‘You know what we say at home?’ he asked me. ‘We say that a good horse is worth two good women, that a good woman is worth two good hounds, and that a good hound is worth two good horses.’

‘You say what?’

‘Never mind,’ he touched my shoulder. ‘For a Saxon, Uhtred, you fight well. Like a Briton.’

I decided the valley offered no advantage over a direct assault and turned away to see that Ragnar was retreating step by step towards the fort. I knew this was the moment to attack him, to keep the battle-anger alive and the slaughter fresh, but our men were plundering the dead and the dying and none had the energy to renew the assault, and that meant we would have the harder task of killing Danes protected by a rampart. I thought of my father, killed in an attack on a wall. He had not shown much liking for me, probably because I had been a small child when he died, and now I would have to follow him into the death-trap of a well protected wall. Fate is inexorable.

Svein’s banner of the white horse had been captured and a man was waving it towards the Danes. Another had Svein’s helmet on the tip of a spear, and at first I thought it was Svein’s head, then I saw it was only the helmet. The white horsetail plume was pink now. Father Willibald was holding his hands to heaven, saying a prayer of thanks, and that was premature, I thought, for all we had done was break Svein’s men and Guthrum’s troops still waited for us behind their walls. And Ragnar was there too, safe in the fort. Its walls made a semi-circle jutting into the downs, ending at the escarpment’s lip. They were high walls, protected by a ditch. ‘It’ll be a bastard crossing those ramparts,’ I said.

‘Maybe we won’t have to,’ Pyrlig answered.

‘Of course we have to.’

‘Not if Alfred can talk them out of there,’ Pyrlig said, and he pointed and I saw that the king, accompanied by two priests and by Osric and Harald, was approaching the fort. ‘He’s going to let them surrender,’ Pyrlig said.

I could not believe this was the time to talk. This was the killing time, not a place for negotiations. ‘They won’t surrender,’ I said, ‘of course they won’t! They still think they can beat us.’

‘Alfred will try to persuade them,’ Pyrlig said.

‘No,’ I shook my head. ‘He’ll offer them a truce.’ I spoke angrily. ‘He’ll offer to take hostages. He’ll preach to them. It’s what he always does.’ I thought about going to join him, if for nothing else to add some sourness to his reasonable suggestions, but I could not summon the effort. Three Danes had gone to talk to him, but I knew they would not accept his offer. They were not beaten, far from it. They still had more men than we did and they had the walls of the fort, and the battle was still theirs to win.

Then I heard the shouts. Shouts of anger and screams of pain, and I turned and saw that the Danish horsemen had reached our women, and the women were screaming and there was nothing we could do.

The Danish horsemen had expected to slaughter the broken remnants of Alfred’s shield wall, but instead it had been Svein’s men who had been broken and the riders, out on Svein’s left flank, had retreated into the downs. They must have thought to circle about our army and rejoin Guthrum from the west, and on the way they had seen our women and horses and smelled easy plunder.

Yet our women had weapons, and there were a few wounded men there, and together they had resisted the horsemen. There was a brief flurry of killing, then the Danish riders, with nothing to show for their attack, rode away westwards. It had taken a few moments, nothing more, but Hild had snatched up a spear and run at a horseman, screaming hate for the horrors the Danes had inflicted on her in Cippanhamm, and Eanflæd, who saw it all, said that Hild sank the spear in a Dane’s leg and the man had chopped down with his sword, and Iseult, who had gone to help Hild, had parried the blow with another sword, and a second Dane caught her from behind with an axe, and then a rush of screaming women drove the Danes away. Hild lived, but Iseult’s skull had been broken open and her head almost split into two. She was dead.

‘She has gone to God,’ Pyrlig told me when Leofric brought us the news. I was weeping, but I did not know whether it was sorrow or anger that consumed me. I could say nothing. Pyrlig held my shoulders. ‘She is with God, Uhtred.’

‘Then the men who sent her there must go to hell,’ I said. ‘Any hell. Freeze or burn, the bastards!’

I pulled away from Pyrlig and strode towards Alfred. I saw Wulfhere then. He was a prisoner, guarded by two of Alfred’s bodyguard, and he brightened when he saw me as though he thought I was a friend, but I just spat at him and walked on past.

Alfred frowned when I joined him. He was escorted by Osric and Harald, and by Father Beocca and Bishop Alewold, none of whom spoke Danish, but one of the Danes was an English-speaker. There were three of them, all strangers to me, but Beocca told me their spokesman was called Hrothgar Ericson and I knew he was one of Guthrum’s chieftains. ‘They attacked the women,’ I told Alfred. The king just stared at me, perhaps not understanding what I had said. ‘They attacked the women!’ I repeated.

‘He’s whimpering,’ the Danish interpreter spoke to his two companions, ‘that the women were attacked.’

‘If I whimper,’ I turned on the man in fury, ‘then you will scream.’ I spoke in Danish. ‘I shall pull your guts out of your arsehole, wrap them around your filthy neck and feed your eyeballs to my hounds. Now if you want to translate, you shrivelled bastard, translate properly, or else go back to your vomit.’

The man blinked, but said nothing. Hrothgar, resplendent in mail and silvered helmet, half smiled. ‘Tell your king,’ he said, ‘that we might agree to withdraw to Cippanhamm, but we shall want hostages.’

I turned on Alfred. ‘How many men does Guthrum still have?’

He was still unhappy that I had joined him, but he took the question seriously. ‘Enough,’ he said.

‘Enough to hold Cippanhamm and a half-dozen other towns. We break them now.’

‘You are welcome to try,’ Hrothgar said when my words were translated.

I turned back to him. ‘I killed Ubba,’ I said, ‘and I put Svein down, and next I shall cut Guthrum’s throat and send him to his whore-mother. We’ll try.’

‘Uhtred.’ Alfred did not know what I had said, but he had heard my tone and he tried to calm me.

‘There’s work to be done, lord,’ I said. It was anger speaking in me, a fury at the Danes and an equal fury at Alfred, who was once again offering the enemy terms. He had done it so often. He would beat them in battle and immediately make a truce because he believed they would become Christians and live in brotherly peace. That was his desire, to live in a Christian Britain devoted to piety, but on that day I was right. Guthrum was not beaten, he still outnumbered us, and he had to be destroyed.

‘Tell them,’ Alfred said, ‘that they can surrender to us now. Tell them they can lay down their weapons and come out of the fort.’

Hrothgar treated that proposal with the scorn it deserved. Most of Guthrum’s men had yet to fight. They were far from defeated, and the green walls were high and the ditches were deep, and it was the sight of those ramparts that had prompted Alfred to speak with the enemy. He knew men must die, many men, and that was the price he had been unwilling to pay a year before when Guthrum had been trapped in Exanceaster, but it was a price that had to be paid. It was the price of Wessex.

Hrothgar had nothing more to say, so turned away. ‘Tell Earl Ragnar,’ I called after him, ‘that I am still his brother.’

‘He will doubtless see you in Valhalla one day,’ Hrothgar called back, then waved a negligent hand to me. I suspected that the Danes had never intended to negotiate a truce, let alone a surrender, but when Alfred offered to talk they had accepted because it gave them time to organise their defences.

Alfred scowled at me. He was plainly annoyed that I had intervened, but before he could say anything Beocca spoke. ‘What happened to the women?’ he asked.

‘They fought the bastards off,’ I said, ‘but Iseult died.’

‘Iseult,’ Alfred said, and then he saw the tears in my eyes and did not know what to say. He flinched, stuttered incoherently, then closed his eyes as if in prayer. ‘I am glad,’ he said after he had collected his thoughts, ‘that she died a Christian.’

‘Amen,’ Beocca said.

‘I would rather she was a live pagan,’ I snarled, and then we went back to our army and Alfred again summoned his commanders.

There was really no choice. We had to assault the fort. Alfred talked for a time about establishing a siege, but that was not practical. We would have to sustain an army on the summit of the downs and, though Osric insisted the enemy had no springs inside the fort, neither did we have springs close by. Both armies would be thirsty, and we did not have enough men to stop Danes going down the steep embankment at night to fetch water. And if the siege lasted longer than a week, then men of the fyrd would begin to slip home to look after their fields, and Alfred would be tempted to mercy, especially if Guthrum promised to convert to Christianity.

So we urged an assault on Alfred. There could be nothing clever. Shield walls must be made and men sent against the ramparts, and Alfred knew that every man in the army must join the attack. Wiglaf and the men of Sumorsæte would attack on the left, Alfred’s men in the centre, while Osric, whose fyrd had gathered again and was now reinforced by the men who had deserted from Guthrum’s army, would assault on the right. ‘You know how to do it,’ Alfred said, though without any enthusiasm for he knew he was ordering us into a feast of death, ‘put your best men in the centre, let them lead, and make the others press behind and on either side.’

No one said anything. Alfred offered a bitter smile. ‘God has smiled on us so far,’ he said, ‘and he will not desert us.’

Yet he had deserted Iseult. Poor, fragile Iseult, shadow queen and lost soul, and I pushed into the front rank because the only thing I could do for her now was to take revenge. Steapa, as smothered in blood as I was, pushed into the rank beside me. Leofric was to my left and Pyrlig was now behind me. ‘Spears and long swords,’ Pyrlig advised us, ‘not those short things.’

‘Why not?’ Leofric asked.

‘You climb that steep wall,’ he said, ‘and all you can do is go for their ankles. Bring them down. I’ve done it before. You need a long reach and a good shield.’

‘Jesus help us,’ Leofric said. We were all fearful, for there is little in warfare as daunting as an assault on a fortress. If I had been in my senses I would have been reluctant to make that attack, but I was filled with a keening sorrow for Iseult and nothing except revenge filled my mind. ‘Let’s go,’ I said, ‘let’s go.’

But we could not go. Men were collecting spears thrown in the earlier fighting, and the bowmen were being brought forward. Whenever we attacked we wanted a shower of spears to precede us, and a plague of stinging arrows to annoy the enemy, but it took time to array the spearmen and archers behind the men who would make the assault.

Then, ominously for our archers, it began to rain again. Their bows would still work, but water weakened the strings. The sky became darker as a great belly of black cloud settled over the down and the rain started to drum on helmets. The Danes were lining the ramparts, clashing their weapons against shields as our army curled about their fastness.

‘Forward!’ Alfred shouted, and we went towards the ramparts, but stopped just out of bowshot. Rain beaded the rim of my shield. There was a new, bright scar in the iron there, a blade strike, but I had not been aware of the blow. The Danes mocked us. They knew what was coming, and they probably welcomed it. Ever since Guthrum had climbed the escarpment and discovered the fort he had probably imagined Alfred’s men assaulting its walls and his men cutting the enemy down as we struggled up the steep banks. This was Guthrum’s battle now. He had placed his rival, Svein, and his Saxon ally, Wulfhere, outside the fort, and doubtless he had hoped they could destroy a good part of our army before the assault on the ramparts, but it would not matter much to Guthrum that those men had been destroyed themselves. Now his own men would fight the battle he had always envisaged.

‘In the name of God!’ Alfred called, then said no more for suddenly a clap of thunder crashed, a vast sound that consumed the heavens and was so loud that some of us flinched. A crack of lightning splintered white inside the fort. The rain pelted now, a cloudburst that hammered and soaked us, and more thunder rolled away in the distance, and perhaps we thought that noise and savage light was a message from God for suddenly the whole army started forward. No one had given a command, unless Alfred’s invocation was an order. We just went.

Men were shouting as they advanced. They were not calling insults, but just making a noise to give themselves courage. We did not run, but walked, because the shields had to be kept close. Then another bellow of thunder deafened us, and the rain seemed to have a new and vicious intensity. It seethed on the dead and the living, and we were close now, very close, yet the rain was so thick it was hard to see the waiting Danes. Then I saw the ditch, already flooding, and the bows sounded and the spears flew and we were splashing down the ditch’s side and Danish spears were thumping into us. One stuck in my shield, fell away and I stumbled on its shaft, half sprawled in the water, then recovered and began the climb.

Not all the army tried to cross the ditch. Many men’s courage faltered at the brink, but a dozen or more groups went into the attack. We were what the Danes call the svinfylkjas, the swine-wedges, the elite warriors who try to pierce the skjaldborg like a boar trying to gouge the hunter with its tusks. But this time we not only had to gouge the skjaldborg, but cross the rain-flooded ditch and clamber up the bank.

We held our shields over our heads as we splashed through the ditch. Then we climbed, but the wet bank was so slippery that we constantly fell back, and the Danish spears kept coming, and someone pushed me from behind and I was crawling up the bank on my knees, the shield over my head, and Pyrlig’s shield was covering my spine and I heard a thumping above me and thought it was thunder. Except the shield kept banging against my helmet and I knew a Dane was hacking at me, trying to break through the limewood to drive his axe or sword into my spine, and I crawled again, lifted the shield’s lower edge and saw boots. I lunged with Serpent-Breath, tried to stand, felt a blow on my leg and fell again. Steapa was roaring beside me. There was mud in my mouth, and the rain hammered at us and I could hear the crash of blades sinking in shields and I knew we had failed, but I tried to stand again and lunged with Serpent-Breath and on my left Leofric gave a shrill cry and I saw blood streaming into the grass. The blood was instantly washed away by the rain, and another peal of thunder crashed overhead as I slithered back to the ditch.

The bank was scarred where we had tried to climb, the grass had been gouged down to the white chalk. We had failed utterly and the Danes were screaming defiance, then another rush of men splashed through the ditch and the banging of blades and shields began again. I climbed a second time, trying to dig my boots into the chalk, and my shield was raised so I did not see the Danes coming down to meet me, and the first I knew was when an axe struck the shield so hard that the boards splintered, and a second axe gave me a glancing blow on the helmet and I fell backwards and would have lost Serpent-Breath if it had not been for the loop of Iseult’s hair about my wrist. Steapa managed to seize a Danish spear and pulled its owner down the bank where a half-dozen Saxons hacked and stabbed in fury so that the ditch was churning with water, blood and blades, and someone shouted for us to go again, and I saw it was Alfred, dismounted, coming to cross the ditch and I roared for my men to protect him.

Pyrlig and I managed to get in front of the king and we stayed there, protecting him as we tried to climb that blood-fouled bank a third time. Pyrlig was screaming in his native tongue, I was cursing in Danish, and somehow we got halfway up and stayed on our feet, and someone, perhaps it was Alfred, was pushing me from behind. Rain hammered us, soaked us. A peal of thunder shook the heavens and I swung Serpent-Breath, trying to hack the Danish shields aside, then swung again, and the shock of the blade striking a shield boss jarred up my arm. A Dane, all beard and wide eyes, lunged a spear at me. I lunged back with the sword, shouted Iseult’s name, tried to climb and the spear-Dane slammed his spear forward again, and the blade struck my helmet’s forehead and my head snapped back and another Dane hit me on the side of the head and all the world went drunken and dark. My feet slid and I was half aware of falling down into the ditch-water. Someone pulled me clear and dragged me back to the ditch’s far side, and there I tried to stand, but fell again.

The king. The king. He had to be protected and he had been in the ditch when I had last seen him, and I knew Alfred was no warrior. He was brave, but he did not love the slaughter as a warrior loves it. I tried to stand again, and this time succeeded, but blood squelched in my right boot and flowed over the boot-top when I put my weight on that leg. The ditch bottom was thick with dead and dying men, half drowned by the flood, but the living had fled from the ditch and the Danes were laughing at us. ‘To me!’ I shouted. There had to be one last effort. Steapa and Pyrlig closed on me, and Eadric was there, and I was groggy and my head was filled with a ringing sound and my arm seemed feeble, but we had to make that last effort. ‘Where’s the king?’ I asked.

‘I threw him out of the ditch,’ Pyrlig said.

‘Is he safe?’

‘I told the priests to hold him down. Told them to hit him if he tried to go again.’

‘One more attack,’ I said. I did not want to make it. I did not want to clamber over the bodies in the ditch and try to climb that impossible wall, and I knew it was stupid, knew I would probably die if I went again, but we were warriors and warriors will not be beaten. It is reputation. It is pride. It is the madness of battle. I began beating Serpent-Breath against my half-broken shield, and other men took up the rhythm, and the Danes, so close, were inviting us to come and be killed, and I shouted that we were coming. ‘God help us,’ Steapa said.

‘God help us,’ Pyrlig echoed.

I did not want to go. I was frightened, but I feared being called a coward more than I feared the ramparts, and so I screamed at my men to slaughter the bastards, and then I ran. I jumped over the corpses in the ditch, lost my footing on the far side, fell on my shield and rolled aside so that no Dane could plunge a spear into my unprotected back. I hauled myself up and my helmet had skewed in the fall so that the face-plate half blinded me, and I fumbled it straight with my sword hand as I began to climb and Steapa was there, and Pyrlig was with me, and I waited for the first hard Danish blow.

It did not come. I struggled up the bank, the shield over my head, and I expected the death blow, but there was silence and I lifted the shield and thought I must have died for all I saw was the rain-filled sky. The Danes had gone. One moment they had been sneering at us, calling us women and cowards, and boasting how they would slice open our bellies and feed our guts to the ravens, and now they were gone. I clambered to the top of the wall and saw a second ditch and second wall beyond, and the Danes were scrambling up that inner rampart and I supposed that they intended to make a defence there, but instead they vanished over its top and Pyrlig grabbed my arm and pulled me on. ‘They’re running!’ he shouted, ‘by God, the bastards are running!’ He had to shout to make himself heard over the rain.

‘On! On!’ someone shouted, and we ran into the second flooded ditch and up over the undefended inner bank and I saw Osric’s men, the fyrd of Wiltunscir that had been defeated in the opening moments of the fight, had managed to cross the fort’s walls. We learned later that they had gone into the valley where the white horse lay dead, and in the blinding rain they had made it to the fort’s eastern corner which, because Guthrum thought it unapproachable, was only lightly defended. The rampart was lower there, hardly more than a grassy ridge on the valley’s slope, and they had flooded over the wall and so got behind the other defenders.

Who now ran. If they had stayed then they would have been slaughtered to a man, so they fled across the fort’s wide interior, and some were slow to realise that the battle was lost and those we trapped. I just wanted to kill for Iseult’s sake, and I put two fugitives down, hacking them with Serpent-Breath with such fury that she cut through mail, leather and flesh to bite as deep as an axe. I was screaming my anger, wanting more victims, but we were too many and the trapped Danes were too few. The rain kept falling and the thunder bellowed as I looked about for enemies to kill, and then I saw one last group of them, back to back, fighting off a swarm of Saxons, and I ran towards them and suddenly saw their banner. The eagle’s wing. It was Ragnar.

His men, outnumbered and overwhelmed, were dying. ‘Let him live!’ I shouted, ‘let him live!’ and three Saxons turned towards me and they saw my long hair and my arm rings bright on my mailed sleeves, and they must have thought I was a Dane for they ran at me, and I fended off the first with Serpent-Breath. The second hammered my shield with his axe, and the third circled behind me and I turned fast, scything Serpent-Breath, shouted that I was a Saxon, but they did not hear me. Then Steapa slammed into them and they scattered, and Pyrlig grabbed my arm, but I shook him off and ran towards Ragnar, who was snarling at the ring of enemies, inviting any one of them to try and kill him. His banner had fallen and his crewmen were dead, but he looked like a war god in his shining mail and with his splintered shield and his long sword and his defiant face, and then the ring began to close. I ran, shouting, and he turned towards me, thinking I had come to kill him, and he raised his sword and I brushed it aside with my shield, threw my arms around him and drove him to the turf.

Steapa and Pyrlig guarded us. They fended off the Saxons, telling them to look for other victims, and I rolled away from Ragnar, who sat up and looked at me with astonishment. I saw that his shield hand was bloody. A blade, cutting through the limewood, had sliced into his palm, hacking down between the fingers so that it looked as though he had two small hands instead of one. ‘I must bind that wound,’ I said.

‘Uhtred,’ he just said, as if he did not really believe it was me.

‘I looked for you,’ I told him, ‘because I did not want to fight you.’

He flinched as he shook the shattered remnants of the shield away from his wounded hand. I could see Bishop Alewold running across the fort in mud-spattered robes, waving his arms and shouting that God had delivered the pagans into our hands. ‘I told Guthrum to fight outside the fort,’ Ragnar said. ‘We would have killed you all.’

‘You would,’ I agreed. By staying in the fort, Guthrum had let us defeat his army piece by piece, but even so it was a miracle that the day was ours.

‘You’re bleeding,’ Ragnar said. I had taken a spear blade in the back of my right thigh. I have the scar to this day.

Pyrlig cut a strip of cloth from a dead man’s jerkin and used it to bind Ragnar’s hand. He wanted to bandage my thigh, but the bleeding had lessened and I managed to stand, though the pain, which I had not felt ever since the wound had been given, suddenly struck me. I touched Thor’s hammer. We had won. ‘They killed my woman,’ I told Ragnar. He said nothing, but just stood beside me and, because my thigh was agony and I suddenly felt weak, I put an arm about his shoulders. ‘Iseult, she was called,’ I said, ‘and my son is dead too.’ I was glad it was raining or else the tears on my face would have shown. ‘Where’s Brida?’

‘I sent her down the hill,’ Ragnar told me. We were limping together towards the fort’s northern ramparts.

‘And you stayed?’

‘Someone had to stay as a rearguard,’ he said bleakly. I think he was crying too, because of the shame of the defeat. It was a battle Guthrum could not lose, yet he had.

Pyrlig and Steapa were still with me, and I could see Eadric stripping a dead Dane of his mail, but there was no sign of Leofric. I asked Pyrlig where he was, and Pyrlig gave me a pained look and shook his head.

‘Dead?’ I asked.

‘An axe,’ he said, ‘in the spine.’ I was numb, too numb to speak, for it did not seem possible that the indestructible Leofric was dead, but he was, and I wished I could give him a Danish funeral, a fire-funeral, so that the smoke of his corpse would rise to the halls of the gods. ‘I’m sorry,’ Pyrlig said.

‘The price of Wessex,’ I said, and then we climbed the northern ramparts, that were crowded with Alfred’s soldiers.

The rain was lessening, though it still fell in great swathes across the plain below. It was as if we stood on the rim of the world, and ahead of us was an immensity of cloud and rain, while beneath us, on the long steep slope, hundreds of Danes scrambled to the foot of the escarpment where their horses had been left.

‘Guthrum,’ Ragnar said bitterly.

‘He lives?’

‘He was the first to run,’ he said. ‘Svein told him we should fight outside the walls,’ he went on, ‘but Guthrum feared defeat more than he ever wanted victory.’

A cheer sounded as Alfred’s banners were carried across the captured fort to the northern ramparts. Alfred, mounted again, and with a bronze circlet about his helmet, rode with the flags. Beocca was on his knees giving thanks, while Alfred had a dazed smile and a look of disbelief, and I swear he wept as his standards were rammed into the turf at the world’s edge. The dragon and the cross flew above his kingdom that had almost been lost, but had been saved so that there was still one Saxon king in England.

But Leofric was dead and Iseult was a corpse and a hard rain fell across the land we had rescued.

Wessex.

Historical Note

The Westbury white horse is cut into the chalk of the escarpment beneath Bratton Camp on the edge of the Wiltshire Downs. From the north it can be seen for miles. The present horse, a handsome beast, is over a hundred feet long and almost two hundred feet high and was cut in the 1770s, making it the oldest of Wiltshire’s ten white horses, but local legend says that it replaced a much older horse that was blazoned into the chalk hillside after the battle of Ethandun in 878.

I should like to think that legend is true, but no historian can be certain of the location of the battle of Ethandun, where Alfred met Guthrum’s Danes, though Bratton Camp, above the village of Edington, is the prime candidate. Bratton Camp is an Iron Age fortress which still stands just above the Westbury white horse. John Peddie, in his useful book, Alfred, Warrior King, places Ethandun at Bratton Camp, and Edgar’s Stone at Kingston Deverill in the Wylye valley, and I am persuaded by his reasoning.

There is no debate about the location of Æthelingæg. That is now Athelney, in the Somerset Levels, near Taunton, and if Bratton Camp is substantially unaltered since 878, the levels are changed utterly. Today, mostly thanks to the medieval monks who dyked and drained the land, they make a wide, fertile plain, but in the ninth century they were a vast swamp mingled with tidal flats, an almost impenetrable marsh into which Alfred retreated after the disaster at Chippenham.

That disaster was the result of his generosity in agreeing the truce which allowed Guthrum to leave Exeter and retreat to Gloucester in Danish-held Mercia. That truce was secured by Danish hostages, but Guthrum, just as he had broken the truce arranged at Wareham in 876, again proved untrustworthy and, immediately after Twelfth Night, attacked and captured Chippenham, thus precipitating the greatest crisis of Alfred’s long reign. The king was defeated and most of his country taken by the Danes. Some great nobles, Wulfhere, the Ealdorman of Wiltshire, among them, defected to the enemy, and Alfred’s kingdom was reduced to the watery wastes of the Somerset Levels. Yet in the spring, just four months after the disaster at Chippenham, Alfred assembled an army, led it to Ethandun, and there defeated Guthrum. All that happened. What, sadly, did not probably happen is the burning of the cakes. That story, how a peasant woman struck Alfred after he allowed her cakes to burn, is the most famous folk tale attached to Alfred, but its source is very late and thus very unreliable.

Alfred, Ælswith, Wulfhere, Æthelwold and Brother (later Bishop) Asser all existed, as did Guthrum. Svein is a fictional character. The great Danish enemies before Guthrum had been the three Lothbrok brothers, and the defeat of the last of them at the battle of Cynuit occurred while Alfred was at Athelney. For fictional reasons I moved that Saxon victory forward a year, and it forms the ending of The Last Kingdom, the novel which precedes The Pale Horseman, which meant I had to invent a character, Svein, and a skirmish, the burning of Svein’s ships, to replace Cynuit.

The two primary sources for Alfred’s reign are the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and Bishop Asser’s life of the king, and neither, alas, tells us much about how Alfred defeated Guthrum at Ethandun. Both armies, by later standards, were small, and it is almost certain that Guthrum considerably outnumbered Alfred. The West Saxon fyrd that won Ethandun was mostly drawn from Somerset, Wiltshire and western Hampshire, suggesting that all eastern Wessex, and most of the north of the country, had been subdued by the Danes. We know the fyrd of Devonshire was intact (it had won the victory at Cynuit), as was the fyrd of Dorset, yet neither are mentioned as part of Alfred’s army, suggesting that they were held back to deter a seaborne attack. The lack of the fyrds from those two powerful shires, if indeed they were absent, only confirms what a remarkable victory Alfred won.

The Saxons had been in Britain since the fifth century. By the ninth century they ruled almost all of what is now England, but then the Danes came and the Saxon kingdoms crumbled. The Last Kingdom tells of the defeat of Northumbria, Mercia and East Anglia, and The Pale Horseman describes how Wessex almost followed those northern neighbours into history’s oblivion. For a few months in early 878 the idea of England, its culture and language, were reduced to a few square miles of swamp. One more defeat and there would probably never have been a political entity called England. We might have had a Daneland instead, and this novel would probably have been written in Danish. Yet Alfred survived, he won, and that is why history awarded him the honorific ‘the Great’. His successors were to finish his work, they were to take back the three northern kingdoms and so, for the first time, unite the Saxon lands into one kingdom called England, but that work was begun by Alfred the Great.

Yet in 878, even after the victory at Ethandun, that must have seemed an impossible dream. It is a long way from Ethandun’s white horse to the bleak moors north of Hadrian’s Wall, so Uhtred and his companions must campaign again.

Copyright

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it, while at times based on historical figures, are the work of the author’s imagination.

Harper

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

77–85 Fulham Palace Road,

Hammersmith, London W6 8JB

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2005

Copyright © Bernard Cornwell 2005

Bernard Cornwell asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Ebook Edition © July 2009 ISBN: 9780007338825

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THE LORDS OF THE NORTH

THE LORDS OF

THE NORTH

BERNARD CORNWELL

For Ed Breslin

. . . . . Com on wanre niht scriðan sceadugenga

From out of the wan night slides the shadow walker

Beowulf

CONTENTS

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Map

Place-names

Part One: THE SLAVE KING

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Part Two: THE RED SHIP

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Part Three: SHADOW-WALKER

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Historical Note

Copyright

PLACE-NAMES

The spelling of place names in Anglo Saxon England was an uncertain business, with no consistency and no agreement even about the name itself. Thus London was variously rendered as Lundonia, Lundenberg, Lundenne, Lundene, Lundenwic, Lundenceaster and Lundres. Doubtless some readers will prefer other versions of the names listed below, but I have usually employed whichever spelling is cited in either the Oxford Dictionary of English Place-Names or the Cambridge Dictionary of English Place-Names for the years nearest or contained within Alfred’s reign, AD 871–899, but even that solution is not foolproof. Hayling Island, in 956, was written as both Heilincigae and Hæglingaiggæ. Nor have I been consistent myself; I should spell England as Englaland, and have preferred the modern form Northumbria to Norðhymbralond to avoid the suggestion that the boundaries of the ancient kingdom coincide with those of the modern county. So this list, like the spellings themselves, is capricious.

Æthelingæg

Athelney, Somerset

Alclyt

Bishop Auckland, County Durham

Baðum (pronounced Bathum)

Bath, Avon

Bebbanburg

Bamburgh Castle, Northumberland

Berrocscire

Berkshire

Cair Ligualid

Carlisle, Cumbria

Cetreht

Catterick, Yorkshire

Cippanhamm

Chippenham, Wiltshire

Contwaraburg

Canterbury, Kent

Cumbraland

Cumbria

Cuncacester

Chester-le-Street, County Durham

Cynuit

Cynuit Hillfort, nr Cannington, Somerset

Defnascir

Devonshire

Dornwaraceaster

Dorchester, Dorset

Dunholm

Durham, County Durham

Dyflin

Dublin, Eire

Eoferwic

York

Ethandun

Edington, Wiltshire

Exanceaster

Exeter, Devon

Fifhidan

Fyfield, Wiltshire

Gleawecestre

Gloucester, Gloucestershire

Gyruum

Jarrow, County Durham

Hamptonscir

Hampshire

Haithabu

Hedeby, trading town in southern Denmark

Heagostealdes

Hexham, Northumberland

Hedene

River Eden, Cumbria

Hocchale

Houghall, County Durham

Horn

Hofn, Iceland

Hreapandune

Repton, Derbyshire

Kenet

River Kennet

Lindisfarena

Lindisfarne (Holy Island), Northumberland

Lundene

London

Onhripum

Ripon, Yorkshire

Pedredan

River Parrett

Readingum

Reading, Berkshire

Scireburnan

Sherborne, Dorset

Snotengaham

Nottingham, Nottinghamshire

Strath Clota

Strathclyde

Sumorsæte

Somerset

Suth Seaxa

Sussex (South Saxons)

Synningthwait

Swinithwaite, Yorkshire

Temes

River Thames

Thornsæta

Dorset

Thresk

Thirsk, Yorkshire

Tine

River Tyne

Tuede

River Tweed

Wiire

River Wear

Wiltun

Wilton, Wiltshire

Wiltunscir

Wiltshire

Wintanceaster

Winchester, Hampshire

PART ONE

The Slave King

I wanted darkness. There was a half-moon that summer night and it kept sliding from behind the clouds to make me nervous. I wanted darkness.

I had carried two leather bags to the small ridge which marked the northern boundary of my estate. My estate. Fifhaden, it was called, and it was King Alfred’s reward for the service I had done him at Ethandun where, on the long green hill, we had destroyed a Danish army. It had been shield wall against shield wall, and at its end Alfred was king again and the Danes were beaten, and Wessex lived, and I dare say that I had done more than most men. My woman had died, my friend had died, I had taken a spear thrust in my right thigh, and my reward was Fifhaden.

Five hides. That was what the name meant. Five hides! Scarce enough land to support the four families of slaves who tilled the soil and sheared the sheep and trapped fish in the River Kenet. Other men had been given great estates and the church had been rewarded with rich woodlands and deep pastures, while I had been given five hides. I hated Alfred. He was a miserable, pious, tight-fisted king who distrusted me because I was no Christian, because I was a northerner, and because I had given him his kingdom back at Ethandun. And as reward he had given me Fifhaden. Bastard.

So I had carried the two bags to the low ridge that had been cropped by sheep and was littered with enormous grey boulders that glowed white when the moon escaped the wispy clouds. I crouched by one of the vast stones and Hild knelt beside me.

She was my woman then. She had been a nun in Cippanhamm, but the Danes had captured the town and they had whored her. Now she was with me. Sometimes, in the night, I would hear her praying and her prayers were all tears and despair, and I reckoned she would go back to her god in the end, but for the moment I was her refuge. ‘Why are we waiting?’ she asked.

I touched a finger to my lips to silence her. She watched me. She had a long face, large eyes and golden hair under a scrap of scarf. I reckoned she was wasted as a nun. Alfred, of course, wanted her back in the nunnery. That was why I let her stay. To annoy him. Bastard.

I was waiting to make certain that no one watched us. It was unlikely, for folk do not like to venture into the night when things of horror stalk the earth. Hild clutched at her crucifix, but I was comfortable in the dark. From the time I was a small child I had taught myself to love the night. I was a sceadugengan, a shadow-walker, one of the creatures other men feared.

I waited a long time until I was certain no one else was on the low ridge, then I drew Wasp-Sting, my short-sword, and I cut out a square of turf that I laid to one side. Then I dug into the ground, piling the soil onto my cloak. The blade kept striking chalk and flints and I knew Wasp-Sting’s blade would be chipped, but I went on digging until I had made a hole large enough for a child’s burial. We put the two bags into the earth. They were my hoard. My silver and gold, my wealth, and I did not wish to be burdened with it. I possessed five hides, two swords, a mail coat, a shield, a helmet, a horse and a thin nun, but I had no men to protect a hoard and so I had to hide it instead. I kept only a few silver coins and the rest I put into the ground’s keeping, and we covered the hoard over and stamped the soil down and then replaced the turf. I waited for the moon to sail out from behind a cloud and then I looked at the turf and reckoned no one would know it had been disturbed, and I memorised the place, marking it in my mind by the nearby boulders. One day, when I had the means to protect that treasure, I would return for it. Hild stared at the hoard’s grave. ‘Alfred says you must stay here,’ she said.

‘Alfred can piss down his own throat,’ I said, ‘and I hope the bastard chokes on it and dies.’ He would probably die soon enough for he was a sick man. He was only twenty-nine, eight years older than I was, yet he looked closer to fifty and I doubt any of us would have given him more than two or three years to live. He was forever griping about his belly pains or running to the shithole or shivering in a fever.

Hild touched the turf where the hoard was buried. ‘Does this mean we’re coming back to Wessex?’ she asked.

‘It means,’ I said, ‘that no man travels among enemies with his hoard. It’s safer here, and if we survive, we’ll fetch it. And if I die, you fetch it.’ She said nothing, and we carried the earth that was left on the cloak back to the river and threw it into the water.

In the morning we took our horses and rode eastwards. We were going to Lundene, for in Lundene all roads start. It was fate that drove me. It was the year 878, I was twenty-one years old and believed my swords could win me the whole world. I was Uhtred of Bebbanburg, the man who had killed Ubba Lothbrokson beside the sea and who had spilled Svein of the White Horse from his saddle at Ethandun. I was the man who had given Alfred his kingdom back and I hated him. So I would leave him. My path was the sword-path, and it would take me home. I would go north.

Lundene is the greatest city in all the island of Britain and I have always loved its ruined houses and feverish alleys, but Hild and I stayed there only two days, lodging in a Saxon tavern in the new town west of the decaying Roman walls. The place was a part of Mercia then and was garrisoned by the Danes. The alehouses were full of traders and foreigners and shipmasters, and it was a merchant called Thorkild who offered us passage to Northumbria. I told him my name was Ragnarson and he neither believed me nor questioned me and he gave us passage in return for two silver coins and my muscle on one of his oars. I was a Saxon, but I had been raised by the Danes so I spoke their tongue and Thorkild assumed I was Danish. My fine helmet, mail coat and two swords told him I was a warrior and he must have suspected I was a fugitive from the defeated army, but what did he care? He needed oarsmen. Some traders used only slaves at their oars, but Thorkild reckoned they were trouble and employed free men.

We left on the ebb-tide, our hull filled with bolts of linen, oil from Frankia, beaver-pelts, scores of fine saddles and leather sacks filled with precious cumin and mustard. Once away from the city and in the estuary of the Temes we were in East Anglia, but we saw little of that kingdom for on our first night a pernicious fog rolled in from the sea and it stayed for days. Some mornings we could not travel at all, and even when the weather was half good we never went far from shore. I had thought to sail home because it would be quicker than travelling by road, but instead we crept mile by foggy mile through a tangle of mudbanks, creeks and treacherous currents. We stopped every night, finding some place to anchor or tie up, and spent a whole week in some godforsaken East Anglian marsh because a bowstrake sprang loose and the water could not be bailed fast enough, and so we were forced to haul the ship onto a muddy beach and make repairs. By the time the hull was caulked the weather had changed and the sun sparkled on a fogless sea and we rowed northwards, still stopping every night. We saw a dozen other ships, all longer and narrower than Thorkild’s craft. They were Danish warships and all were travelling northwards. I assumed they were fugitives from Guthrum’s defeated army and they were going home to Denmark or perhaps to Frisia or wherever there was easier plunder to be had than in Alfred’s Wessex.

Thorkild was a tall, lugubrious man who thought he was thirty-five years old. He plaited his greying hair so that it hung in long ropes to his waist, and his arms were bare of the rings that showed a warrior’s prowess. ‘I was never a fighter,’ he confessed to me. ‘I was raised as a trader and I’ve always been a trader and my son will trade when I’m dead.’

‘You live in Eoferwic?’ I asked.

‘Lundene. But I keep a storehouse in Eoferwic. It’s a good place to buy fleeces.’

‘Does Ricsig still rule there?’ I asked.

He shook his head. ‘Ricsig’s been dead two years now. There’s a man called Egbert on the throne now.’

‘There was a King Egbert in Eoferwic when I was a child.’

‘This is his son, or his grandson? Maybe his cousin? He’s a Saxon, anyway.’

‘So who really rules in Northumbria?’

‘We do, of course,’ he said, meaning the Danes. The Danes often put a tamed Saxon on the thrones of the countries they captured, and Egbert, whoever he was, was doubtless just such a leashed monarch. He gave a pretence of legality to the Danish occupiers, but the real ruler was Earl Ivarr, the Dane who owned most of the land about the city. ‘He’s Ivarr Ivarson,’ Thorkild told me with a touch of pride in his voice, ‘and his father was Ivar Lothbrokson.’

‘I knew Ivar Lothbrokson,’ I said.

I doubt Thorkild believed me, but it was true. Ivar Lothbrokson had been a fearsome warlord, thin and skeletal, savage and ghastly, but he had been a friend to Earl Ragnar who raised me. His brother had been Ubba, the man I had killed by the sea. ‘Ivarr is the real power in Northumbria,’ Thorkild told me, ‘but not in the valley of the River Wiire. Kjartan rules there.’ Thorkild touched his hammer amulet when he spoke Kjartan’s name. ‘He’s called Kjartan the Cruel now,’ he said, ‘and his son is worse.’

‘Sven.’ I said the name sourly. I knew Kjartan and Sven. They were my enemies.

‘Sven the One-Eyed,’ Thorkild said with a grimace and again touched his amulet as if to fend off the evil of the names he had just spoken. ‘And north of them,’ he went on, ‘the ruler is Ælfric of Bebbanburg.’

I knew him too. Ælfric of Bebbanburg was my uncle and thief of my land, but I pretended not to know the name. ‘Ælfric?’ I asked, ‘another Saxon?’

‘A Saxon,’ Thorkild confirmed, ‘but his fortress is too powerful for us,’ he added by way of explanation why a Saxon lord was permitted to stay in Northumbria, ‘and he does nothing to offend us.’

‘A friend of the Danes?’

‘He’s no enemy,’ he said. ‘Those are the three great lords, Ivarr, Kjartan and Ælfric, while beyond the hills in Cumbraland? No one knows what happens there.’ He meant the west coast of Northumbria which faced the Irish Sea. ‘There was a great Danish lord in Cumbraland,’ he went on. ‘Hardicnut, he was called, but I hear he was killed in a squabble. And now?’ He shrugged.

So that was Northumbria, a kingdom of rival lords, none of whom had cause to love me and two of whom wanted me dead. Yet it was home, and I had a duty there and that is why I was following the sword-path.

It was the duty of the bloodfeud. The feud had started five years before when Kjartan and his men had come to Earl Ragnar’s hall in the night. They had burned the hall and they had murdered the folk who tried to flee the flames. Ragnar had raised me, I had loved him like a father, and his murder was unavenged. He had a son, also called Ragnar, and he was my friend, but Ragnar the Younger could not take vengeance for he was now a hostage in Wessex. So I would go north and I would find Kjartan and I would kill him. And I would kill his son, Sven the One-Eyed, who had taken Ragnar’s daughter prisoner. Did Thyra still live? I did not know. I only knew I had sworn to revenge Ragnar the Elder’s death. It sometimes seemed to me, as I hauled on Thorkild’s oar, that I was foolish to be going home because Northumbria was full of my enemies, but fate drove me, and there was a lump in my throat when at last we turned into the wide mouth of the Humber.

There was nothing to see other than a low muddy shore half glimpsed through rain, and withies in the shallows marking hidden creeks, and great mats of oarweed and bladderwrack heaving on the grey water, but this was the river that led into Northumbria and I knew, at that moment, that I had made the right decision. This was home. Not Wessex with its richer fields and gentler hills. Wessex was tamed, harnessed by king and church, but up here there were wilder skeins in the colder air.

‘Is this where you live?’ Hild asked as the banks closed on either side.

‘My land is far to the north,’ I told her. ‘That’s Mercia,’ I pointed to the river’s southern shore, ‘and that’s Northumbria,’ I pointed the other way, ‘and Northumbria stretches up into the barbarous lands.’

‘Barbarous?’

‘Scots,’ I said, and spat over the side. Before the Danes came the Scots had been our chief enemies, ever raiding south into our land, but they, like us, had been assaulted by the Northmen and that had lessened their threat, though it had not ended it.

We rowed up the Ouse and our songs accompanied the oar strokes as we glided beneath willow and alder, past meadows and woods, and Thorkild, now that we had entered Northumbria, took the carved dog’s head from his boat’s prow so that the snarling beast would not scare the spirits of the land. And that evening, under a washed sky, we came to Eoferwic, the chief city of Northumbria and the place where my father had been slaughtered and where I had been orphaned and where I had met Ragnar the Elder who had raised me and given me my love of the Danes.

I was not rowing as we approached the city for I had pulled an oar all day and Thorkild had relieved me, and so I was standing in the bow, staring at the smoke sifting up from the city’s roofs, and then I glanced down at the river and saw the first corpse. It was a boy, perhaps ten or eleven years old, and he was naked except for a rag about his waist. His throat had been cut, though the great wound was bloodless now because it had been washed clean by the Ouse. His long fair hair drifted like weed under water.

We saw two more floating bodies, then we were close enough to see men on the city’s ramparts and there were too many men there, men with spears and shields, and there were more men by the river quays, men in mail, men watching us warily, men with drawn swords and Thorkild called an order and our oars lifted and water dripped from the motionless blades. The boat slewed in the current and I heard the screams from inside the city.

I had come home.

One

Thorkild let the boat drift downstream a hundred paces, then rammed her bows into the bank close to a willow. He jumped ashore, tied a sealhide line to tether the boat to the willow’s trunk, and then, with a fearful glance at the armed men watching from higher up the bank, scrambled hurriedly back on board. ‘You,’ he pointed at me, ‘find out what’s happening.’

‘Trouble’s happening,’ I said. ‘You need to know more?’

‘I need to know what’s happened to my storehouse,’ he said, then nodded towards the armed men, ‘and I don’t want to ask them. So you can instead.’

He chose me because I was a warrior and because, if I died, he would not grieve. Most of his oarsmen were capable of fighting, but he avoided combat whenever he could because bloodshed and trading were bad partners. The armed men were advancing down the bank now. There were six of them, but they approached very hesitantly, for Thorkild had twice their number in his ship’s bows and all those seamen were armed with axes and spears.

I pulled my mail over my head, unwrapped the glorious wolf-crested helmet I had captured from a Danish boat off the Welsh coast, buckled on Serpent-Breath and Wasp-Sting and, thus dressed for war, jumped clumsily ashore. I slipped on the steep bank, clutched at nettles for support and then, cursing because of the stings, clambered up to the path. I had been here before, for this was the wide riverside pasture where my father had led the attack on Eoferwic. I pulled on the helmet and shouted at Thorkild to throw me my shield. He did and, just as I was about to start walking towards the six men who were now standing and watching me with swords in their hands, Hild jumped after me. ‘You should have stayed on the boat,’ I told her.

‘Not without you,’ she said. She was carrying our one leather bag in which was little more than a change of clothes, a knife and a whetstone. ‘Who are they?’ she asked, meaning the six men who were still fifty paces away and in no hurry to close the distance.

‘Let’s find out,’ I said, and drew Serpent-Breath.

The shadows were long and the smoke of the city’s cooking fires was purple and gold in the twilight. Rooks flew towards their nests and in the distance I could see cows going to their evening milking. I walked towards the six men. I was in mail, I had a shield and two swords, I wore arm rings and a helmet that was worth the value of three fine mail coats and my appearance checked the six men, who huddled together and waited for me. They all had drawn swords, but I saw that two of them had crucifixes about their necks and that made me suppose they were Saxons. ‘When a man comes home,’ I called to them in English, ‘he does not expect to be met by swords.’

Two of them were older men, perhaps in their thirties, both of them thick-bearded and wearing mail. The other four were in leather coats and were younger, just seventeen or eighteen, and the blades in their hands looked as unfamiliar to them as a plough handle would to me. They must have assumed I was a Dane because I had come from a Danish ship and they must have known that six of them could kill one Dane, but they also knew that one war-Dane, dressed in battle-splendour, was likely to kill at least two of them before he died and so they were relieved when I spoke to them in English. They were also puzzled. ‘Who are you?’ one of the older men called.

I did not answer, but just kept walking towards them. If they had decided to attack me then I would have been forced to flee ignominiously or else die, but I walked confidently, my shield held low and with Serpent-Breath’s tip brushing the long grass. They took my reluctance to answer for arrogance, when in truth it was confusion. I had thought to call myself by any name other than my own, for I did not want Kjartan or my traitorous uncle to know I had returned to Northumbria, but my name was also one to be reckoned with and I was foolishly tempted to use it to awe them, but inspiration came just in time. ‘I am Steapa of Defnascir,’ I announced, and just in case Steapa’s name was unknown in Northumbria, I added a boast. ‘I am the man who put Svein of the White Horse into his long home in the earth.’

The man who had demanded my name stepped a pace backwards. ‘You are Steapa? The one who serves Alfred?’

‘I am.’

‘Lord,’ he said, and lowered his blade. One of the younger men touched his crucifix and dropped to a knee. A third man sheathed his sword and the others, deciding that was prudent, did the same.

‘Who are you?’ I demanded.

‘We serve King Egbert,’ one of the older men said.

‘And the dead?’ I asked, gesturing towards the river where another naked corpse circled slow in the current, ‘who are they?’

‘Danes, lord.’

‘You’re killing Danes?’

‘It’s God’s will, lord,’ he said.

I gestured towards Thorkild’s ship. ‘That man is a Dane and he is also a friend. Will you kill him?’

‘We know Thorkild, lord,’ the man said, ‘and if he comes in peace he will live.’

‘And me?’ I demanded, ‘what would you do with me?’

‘The king would see you, lord. He would honour you for the great slaughter of the Danes.’

‘This slaughter?’ I asked scornfully, pointing Serpent-Breath towards a corpse floating downriver.

‘He would honour the victory over Guthrum, lord. Is it true?’

‘It is true,’ I said, ‘I was there.’ I turned then, sheathed Serpent-Breath, and beckoned to Thorkild who untied his ship and rowed it upstream. I shouted to him across the water, telling him that Egbert’s Saxons had risen against the Danes, but that these men promised they would leave him in peace if he came in friendship.

‘What would you do in my place?’ Thorkild called back. His men gave their oars small tugs to hold the ship against the river’s flow.

‘Go downstream,’ I shouted in Danish, ‘find sword-Danes and wait till you know what is happening.’

‘And you?’ he asked.

‘I stay here,’ I said.

He groped in a pouch and threw something towards me. It glittered in the fading light, then vanished among the buttercups that made the darkening pasture yellow. ‘That’s for your advice,’ he called, ‘and may you live long, whoever you are.’

He turned his ship which was a clumsy manoeuvre for the hull was almost as long as the Ouse was wide, but he managed it skilfully enough and the oars took him downstream and out of my life. I discovered later that his storehouse had been ransacked and the one-armed Dane who guarded it had been slaughtered and his daughter raped, so my advice was worth the silver coin Thorkild had thrown to me.

‘You sent him away?’ one of the bearded men asked me resentfully.

‘I told you, he was a friend.’ I stooped and found the shilling in the long grass. ‘So how do you know of Alfred’s victory?’ I asked.

‘A priest came, lord,’ he said, ‘and he told us.’

‘A priest?’

‘From Wessex, lord. All the way from Wessex. He carried a message from King Alfred.’

I should have known Alfred would want the news of his victory over Guthrum to spread throughout Saxon England, and it turned out that he had sent priests to wherever Saxons lived and those priests carried the message that Wessex was victorious and that God and his saints had given them the triumph. One such priest had been sent to King Egbert in Eoferwic, and that priest had reached the city just one day before me, and that was when the stupidity began.

The priest had travelled on horseback, his clerical frock wrapped in a bundle on the back of his saddle, and he had ridden from Saxon house to Saxon house through Danish-held Mercia. The Mercian Saxons had helped him on his way, providing fresh horses each day and escorting him past the larger Danish garrisons until he had come to Northumbria’s capital to give King Egbert the good news that the West Saxons had defeated the Great Army of the Danes. Yet what appealed even more to the Northumbrian Saxons was the outrageous claim that Saint Cuthbert had appeared to Alfred in a dream and shown him how to gain the victory. The dream was supposed to have come to Alfred during the winter of defeat in Æthelingæg where a handful of fugitive Saxons hid from the conquering Danes, and the story of the dream was aimed at Egbert’s Saxons like a huntsman’s arrow, for there was no saint more revered north of the Humber than Cuthbert. Cuthbert was Northumbria’s idol, the holiest Christian ever to live in the land, and there was not one pious Saxon household that did not pray to him daily. The idea that the north’s own glorious saint had helped Wessex defeat the Danes drove the wits from King Egbert’s skull like partridges fleeing the reapers. He had every right to be pleased at Alfred’s victory, and he doubtless resented ruling on a Danish leash, but what he should have done was thank the priest who brought the news and then, to keep him quiet, shut him up like a dog in a kennel. Instead he had ordered Wulfhere, the city’s archbishop, to hold a service of thanks in the city’s largest church. Wulfhere, who was no fool, had immediately developed an ague and ridden into the country to recover, but a fool called Father Hrothweard took his place and Eoferwic’s big church had resounded to a fiery sermon which claimed Saint Cuthbert had come from heaven to lead the West Saxons to victory, and that idiotic tale had persuaded Eoferwic’s Saxons that God and Saint Cuthbert were about to deliver their own country from the Danes. And so the killing had started.

All this I learned as we went into the city. I learned too that there had been less than a hundred Danish warriors in Eoferwic because the rest had marched north under Earl Ivarr to confront a Scottish army that had crossed the border. There had been no such invasion in living memory, but the southern Scots had a new king who had sworn to make Eoferwic his new capital, and so Ivarr had taken his army north to teach the fellow a lesson.

Ivarr was the true ruler of southern Northumbria. If he had wanted to call himself the king then there was no one to stop him, but it was convenient to have a pliable Saxon on the throne to collect the taxes and to keep his fellow-Saxons quiet. Ivarr, meanwhile, could do what his family did best; make war. He was a Lothbrok and it was their boast that no male Lothbrok had ever died in bed. They died fighting with their swords in their hands. Ivarr’s father and one uncle had died in Ireland, while Ubba, the third Lothbrok brother, had fallen to my sword at Cynuit. Now Ivarr, the latest sword-Dane from a war-besotted family, was marching against the Scots and had sworn to bring their king to Eoferwic in slave manacles.

I thought no Saxon in his right mind would rebel against Ivarr, who was reputed to be as ruthless as his father, but Alfred’s victory and the claim that it was inspired by Saint Cuthbert had ignited the madness in Eoferwic. The flames were fed by Father Hrothweard’s preaching. He bellowed that God, Saint Cuthbert and an army of angels were coming to drive the Danes from Northumbria and my arrival only encouraged the insanity. ‘God has sent you,’ the men who had accosted me kept saying, and they shouted to folk that I was Svein’s killer and by the time we reached the palace there was a small crowd following Hild and me as we pushed through narrow streets still stained with Danish blood.

I had been to Eoferwic’s palace before. It was a Roman building of fine pale stone with vast pillars holding up a tiled roof that was now patched with blackened straw. The floor was also tiled, and those tiles had once formed pictures of the Roman gods, but they were all torn up now and those that were left were mostly covered by rushes that were stained by the previous day’s blood. The big hall stank like a butcher’s yard and was wreathed with smoke from the blazing torches that lit the cavernous space.

The new King Egbert turned out to be the old King Egbert’s nephew and he had his uncle’s shifty face and petulant mouth. He looked scared when he came onto the dais at the hall’s end, and no wonder, for the mad Hrothweard had summoned up a whirlwind and Egbert must have known that Ivarr’s Danes would be coming for revenge. Yet Egbert’s followers were caught up in the excitement, sure that Alfred’s victory foretold the final defeat of the Northmen, and my arrival was taken as another sign from heaven. I was pushed forward and the news of my coming was shouted at the king who looked confused, and was even more confused when another voice, a familiar voice, called out my name. ‘Uhtred! Uhtred!’

I looked for the speaker and saw it was Father Willibald.

‘Uhtred!’ he shouted again and looked delighted to see me. Egbert frowned at me, then looked at Willibald. ‘Uhtred!’ the priest said, ignoring the king, and came forward to embrace me.

Father Willibald was a good friend and a good man. He was a West Saxon who had once been chaplain to Alfred’s fleet, and fate had decreed that he would be the man sent north to carry the good news of Ethandun to the Northumbrian Saxons.

The clamour in the hall subsided. Egbert tried to take command. ‘Your name is,’ he said, then decided he did not know what my name was.

‘Steapa!’ one of the men who had escorted us into the city called out.

‘Uhtred!’ Willibald announced, his eyes bright with excitement.

‘I am Uhtred of Bebbanburg,’ I confessed, unable to prolong my deception.

‘The man who killed Ubba Lothbrokson!’ Willibald announced and tried to hold up my right hand to show I was a champion. ‘And the man,’ he went on, ‘who toppled Svein of the White Horse at Ethandun!’

In two days, I thought, Kjartan the Cruel would know that I was in Northumbria, and in three my uncle Ælfric would have learned of my coming, and if I had possessed an ounce of sense I would have forced my way out of that hall, taken Hild with me, and headed south as fast as Archbishop Wulfhere had vanished from Eoferwic.

‘You were at Ethandun?’ Egbert asked me.

‘I was, lord.’

‘What happened?’

They had already heard the tale of the battle from Willibald, but his was a priest’s version, heavy with prayers and miracles. I gave them what they wanted which was a warrior’s story of dead Danes and sword-slaughter, and all the while a fierce-eyed priest with bristly hair and an unruly beard interrupted me with shouts of hallelujah. I gathered this was Father Hrothweard, the priest who had roused Eoferwic to slaughter. He was young, scarce older than I was, but he had a powerful voice and a natural authority that was given extra force by his passion. Every hallelujah was accompanied by a shower of spittle, and no sooner had I described the defeated Danes spilling down the great slope from Ethandun’s summit than Hrothweard leaped forward and harangued the crowd. ‘This is Uhtred!’ he shouted, poking me in my mail-clad ribs, ‘Uhtred of Northumbria, Uhtred of Bebbanburg, a killer of Danes, a warrior of God, a sword of the Lord! And he has come to us, just as the blessed Saint Cuthbert visited Alfred in his time of tribulation! These are signs from the Almighty!’ The crowd cheered, the king looked scared, and Hrothweard, ever ready to launch into a fiery sermon, began frothing at the mouth as he described the coming slaughter of every Dane in Northumbria.

I managed to sidle away from Hrothweard, making my way to the back of the dais where I took Willibald by the scruff of his skinny neck and forced him into a passage which led to the king’s private chambers. ‘You’re an idiot,’ I growled at him, ‘you’re an earsling. You’re a witless dribbling turd, that’s what you are. I should slit your useless guts here and now and feed them to the pigs.’

Willibald opened his mouth, closed it and looked helpless.

‘The Danes will be back here,’ I promised him, ‘and there’s going to be a massacre.’

His mouth opened and closed again, and still no sound came.

‘So what you’re going to do,’ I said, ‘is cross the Ouse and go south as fast as your legs will carry you.’

‘But it’s all true,’ he pleaded.

‘What’s all true?’

‘That Saint Cuthbert gave us victory!’

‘Of course it isn’t true!’ I snarled. ‘Alfred made it up. You think Cuthbert came to him in Æthelingæg? Then why didn’t he tell us about the dream when it happened? Why does he wait till after the battle to tell us?’ I paused and Willibald made a strangled noise. ‘He waited,’ I answered myself, ‘because it didn’t happen.’

‘But …’

‘He made it up!’ I growled, ‘because he wants Northumbrians to look to Wessex for leadership against the Danes. He wants to be king of Northumbria, don’t you understand that? And not just Northumbria. I’ve no doubt he’s got fools like you telling the Mercians that one of their damned saints appeared to him in a dream.’

‘But he did,’ he interrupted me, and when I looked bemused, he explained further. ‘You’re right! Saint Kenelm spoke to Alfred in Æthelingæg. He came to him in a dream and he told Alfred that he would win.’

‘No he did not,’ I said as patiently as I could.

‘But it’s true!’ he insisted, ‘Alfred told me himself! It’s God’s doing, Uhtred, and wonderful to behold.’

I took him by the shoulders, pressing him against the passage wall. ‘You’ve got a choice, father,’ I said. ‘You can get out of Eoferwic before the Danes come back, or you can tip your head to one side.’

‘I can do what?’ he asked, puzzled.

‘Tip your head,’ I said, ‘and I’ll thump you on one ear so all the nonsense falls out of the other.’

He would not be persuaded. God’s glory, ignited by the bloodshed at Ethandun and fanned by the lie about Saint Cuthbert, was glowing on Northumbria and poor Willibald was convinced he was present at the beginning of great things.

There was a feast that night, a sorry business of salted herrings, cheese, hard bread and stale ale, and Father Hrothweard made another impassioned speech in which he claimed that Alfred of Wessex had sent me, his greatest warrior, to lead the city’s defence, and that the fyrd of heaven would come to Eoferwic’s protection. Willibald kept shouting hallelujah, believing all the rubbish, and it was only the next day when a grey rain and a sullen mist enveloped the city that he began to doubt the imminent arrival of sword-angels.

Folk were leaving the city. There were rumours of Danish war-bands gathering to the north. Hrothweard was still shrieking his nonsense, and he led a procession of priests and monks about the city streets, holding aloft relics and banners, but anyone with sense now understood that Ivarr was likely to return long before Saint Cuthbert turned up with a heavenly host. King Egbert sent a messenger to find me, and the man said the king would talk with me, but I reckoned Egbert was doomed so I ignored the summons. Egbert would have to shift for himself.

Just as I had to shift for myself, and what I wanted was to get far from the city before Ivarr’s wrath descended on it, and in the Crossed Swords tavern, hard by the city’s northern gate, I found my escape. He was a Dane called Bolti and he had survived the massacre because he was married to a Saxon and his wife’s family had sheltered him. He saw me in the tavern and asked if I was Uhtred of Bebbanburg.

‘I am.’

He sat opposite me, bowed his head respectfully to Hild, then snapped his fingers to summon a girl with ale. He was a plump man, bald, with a pocked face, a broken nose and frightened eyes. His two sons, both half Saxon, loitered behind him. I guessed one was about twenty and the other five years younger, and both wore swords though neither looked comfortable with the weapons. ‘I knew Earl Ragnar the Elder,’ Bolti said.

‘I knew him too,’ I said, ‘and I don’t remember you.’

‘The last time he sailed in Wind-Viper,’ he said, ‘I sold him ropes and oar-looms.’

‘Did you cheat him?’ I asked sarcastically.

‘I liked him,’ he said fiercely.

‘And I loved him,’ I said, ‘because he became my father.’

‘I know he did,’ he said, ‘and I remember you.’ He fell silent and glanced at Hild. ‘You were very young,’ he went on, looking back to me, ‘and you were with a small dark girl.’

‘You do remember me then,’ I said, and fell silent as the ale was brought. I noticed that Bolti, despite being a Dane, wore a cross about his neck and he saw me looking at it.

‘In Eoferwic,’ he said, touching the cross, ‘a man must live.’ He pulled aside his coat and I saw Thor’s hammer amulet had been hidden beneath it. ‘They mostly killed pagans,’ he explained.

I pulled my own hammer amulet out from beneath my jerkin. ‘Are many Danes Christians now?’ I asked.

‘A few,’ he said grudingly, ‘you want food to go with that ale?’

‘I want to know why you’re talking with me,’ I said.

He wanted to leave the city. He wanted to take his Saxon wife, two sons and two daughters a long way from the vengeful massacre he suspected was coming, and he wanted swords to escort him, and he stared at me with pathetic, despairing eyes and did not know that what he wanted was just what I wanted. ‘So where will you go?’ I asked.

‘Not west,’ he said with a shudder. ‘There’s killing in Cumbraland.’

‘There’s always killing in Cumbraland,’ I said. Cumbraland was the part of Northumbria that lay across the hills and next to the Irish Sea, and it was raided by Scots from Strath Clota, by Norsemen from Ireland and by Britons from north Wales. Some Danes had settled in Cumbraland, but not enough to keep the wild raids from ravaging the place.

‘I’d go to Denmark,’ Bolti said, ‘but there are no warships.’ The only ships left at Eoferwic’s quays were Saxon traders, and if any dared sail they would be snapped up by Danish ships that were doubtless gathering in the Humber.

‘So?’ I asked.

‘So I want to go north,’ he said, ‘and meet Ivarr. I can pay you.’

‘And you think I can escort you through Kjartan’s land?’

‘I think I will do better with Ragnar’s son beside me than on my own,’ he admitted, ‘and if men know you travel with me then they will join us.’

So I let him pay me, and my price was sixteen shillings, two mares and a black stallion, and the price of the last made Bolti go pale. A man had been leading the stallion about the streets, offering it for sale, and Bolti bought the animal because his fear of being trapped in Eoferwic was worth forty shillings. The black horse was battle trained, which meant he was not startled at loud noises and he moved obediently to the pressure of a knee, which left a man free to hold shield and sword and still manoeuvre. The stallion had been plundered from one of the Danes massacred in the last few days for no one knew his name. I called him Witnere, which means Tormentor, and it was apt for he took a dislike to the two mares and kept snapping at them.

The mares were for Willibald and Hild. I told Father Willibald he should go south, but he was scared now and insisted on staying with me and so, the day after I had met Bolti, we all rode north along the Roman road. A dozen men came with us. Among them were three Danes and two Norsemen who had managed to hide from Hrothweard’s massacre, and the rest were Saxons who wanted to escape Ivarr’s revenge. All had weapons and Bolti gave me money to pay them. They did not get much in wages, just enough to buy food and ale, but their presence deterred any outlaws on the long road.

I was tempted to ride to Synningthwait which was where Ragnar and his followers had their land, but I knew there would be very few men there, for most had gone south with Ragnar. Some of those warriors had died at Ethandun and the rest were still with Guthrum, whose defeated army had stayed in Mercia. Guthrum and Alfred had made peace, and Guthrum had even been baptised, which Willibald said was a miracle. So there would be few warriors at Synningthwait. No place to find refuge against my uncle’s murderous ambitions or Kjartan’s hate. So, with no real plan for my future and content to let fate work its will, I kept faith with Bolti and escorted him north towards Kjartan’s land which lay athwart our path like a dark cloud. To pass through that land meant paying a toll, and that toll would be steep, and only powerful men like Ivarr, whose warriors outnumbered Kjartan’s followers, could cross the River Wiire without payment. ‘You can afford it,’ I teased Bolti. His two sons each led packhorses that I suspected were loaded with coins wrapped in cloth or fleece to stop them clinking.

‘I can’t afford it if he takes my daughters,’ Bolti said. He had twin daughters who were twelve or thirteen, ripe for marriage. They were short, plump, fair-haired, snub-nosed and impossible to tell apart.

‘Is that what Kjartan does?’ I asked.

‘He takes what he wants,’ Bolti said sourly, ‘and he likes young girls, though I suspect he’d prefer to take you.’

‘And why do you suspect that?’ I asked him tonelessly.

‘I know the tales,’ he said. ‘His son lost his eye because of you.’

‘His son lost his eye,’ I said, ‘because he stripped Earl Ragnar’s daughter half naked.’

‘But he blames you.’

‘He does,’ I agreed. We had all been children then, but childhood injuries can fester and I did not doubt that Sven the One-Eyed would love to take both my eyes as revenge for his one.

So as we neared Dunholm we turned west into the hills to avoid Kjartan’s men. It was summer, but a chill wind brought low clouds and a thin rain so that I was glad of my leather-lined mail coat. Hild had smeared the metal rings with lanolin squeezed out of newly-shorn fleeces, and it protected most of the metal from rust. She had put the grease on my helmet and sword-blades too.

We climbed, following the well-worn track, and a couple of miles behind us another group followed, and there were fresh hoofprints in the damp earth betraying that others had passed this way not long before. Such heavy use of the path should have made me think. Kjartan the Cruel and Sven the One-Eyed lived off the dues that travellers paid them, and if a traveller did not pay then they were robbed, taken as slaves or killed. Kjartan and his son had to be aware that folk were trying to avoid them by using the hill paths, and I should have been more wary. Bolti was unafraid, for he simply trusted me. He told me tales of how Kjartan and Sven had become rich from slaves. ‘They take anyone, Dane or Saxon,’ he said, ‘and sell them over the water. If you’re lucky you can sometimes ransom a slave back, but the price will be high.’ He glanced at Father Willibald. ‘He kills all priests.’

‘He does?’

‘He hates all Christian priests. He reckons they’re sorcerers, so he half buries them and lets his dogs eat them.’

‘What did he say?’ Willibald asked me, pulling his mare aside before Witnere could savage her.

‘He said Kjartan will kill you if he captures you, father.’

‘Kill me?’

‘He’ll feed you to his hounds.’

‘Oh, dear God,’ Willibald said. He was unhappy, lost, far from home, and nervous of the strange northern landscape. Hild, on the other hand, seemed happier. She was nineteen years old, and filled with patience for life’s hardships. She had been born into a wealthy West Saxon family, not noble, but possessed of enough land to live well, but she had been the last of eight children and her father had promised her to the church’s service because her mother had nearly died when Hild was born, and he ascribed his wife’s survival to God’s benevolence. So, at eleven years old, Hild, whose proper name was Sister Hildegyth, had been sent to the nuns in Cippanhamm and there she had lived, shut away from the world, praying and spinning yarn, spinning and praying, until the Danes had come and she had been whored.

She still whimpered in her sleep and I knew she was remembering her humiliations, but she was happy to be away from Wessex and away from the folk who constantly told her she should return to God’s service. Willibald had chided her for abandoning her holy life, but I had warned him that one more such comment would earn him a new and larger bellybutton and ever since he had kept quiet. Now Hild drank in every new sight with a child’s sense of wonder. Her pale face had taken on a golden glow to match her hair. She was a clever woman, not the cleverest I have known, but full of a shrewd wisdom. I have lived long now and have learned that some women are trouble, and some are easy companions, and Hild was among the easiest I ever knew. Perhaps that was because we were friends. We were lovers too, but never in love and she was assailed by guilt. She kept that to herself and to her prayers, but in the daylight she had begun to laugh again and to take pleasure from simple things, yet at times the darkness wrapped her and she would whimper and I would see her long fingers fidget with a crucifix and I knew she was feeling God’s claws raking across her soul.

So we rode into the hills and I had been careless, and it was Hild who saw the horsemen first. There were nineteen of them, most in leather coats, but three in mail, and they were circling behind us, and I knew then that we were being shepherded. Our track followed the side of a hill and to our right was a steep drop to a rushing stream, and though we could escape into the dale we would inevitably be slower than the men who now joined the track behind us. They did not try to approach. They could see we were armed and they did not want a fight, they just wanted to make sure we kept plodding north to whatever fate awaited us. ‘Can’t you fight them off?’ Bolti demanded.

‘Thirteen against nineteen?’ I suggested. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘if the thirteen will fight, but they won’t.’ I gestured at the swordsmen Bolti was paying to accompany us. ‘They’re good enough to scare off bandits,’ I went on, ‘but they’re not stupid enough to fight Kjartan’s men. If I ask them to fight they’ll most likely join the enemy and share your daughters.’

‘But …’ he began, then fell silent for we could at last see what did await us. A slave fair was being held where the stream tumbled into a deeper dale and in that larger valley was a sizeable village built where a bridge, nothing more than a giant stone slab, crossed a wider stream that I took to be the Wiire. There was a crowd in the village and I saw those folk were being guarded by more men. The riders who were following us came a little closer, but stopped when I stopped. I gazed down the hill. The village was too far away to tell whether Kjartan or Sven were there, but it seemed safe to assume the men in the valley had come from Dunholm and that one or other of Dunholm’s two lords led them. Bolti was squeaking in alarm, but I ignored him.

Two other tracks led into the village from the south and I guessed that horsemen were guarding all such paths and had been intercepting travellers all day. They had been driving their prey towards the village and those who could not pay the toll were being taken captive. ‘What are you going to do?’ Bolti asked, close to panic.

‘I’m going to save your life,’ I said, and I turned to one of his twin daughters and demanded that she gave me a black linen scarf that she wore as a belt. She unwound it and, with a trembling hand, gave it to me and I wrapped it around my head, covering my mouth, nose and forehead, then asked Hild to pin it into place. ‘What are you doing?’ Bolti squawked again.

I did not bother to reply. Instead I crammed my helmet over the scarf. The cheek-pieces were fitted so that my face was now a mask of polished metal over a black skull. Only my eyes could be seen. I half drew Serpent-Breath to make sure she slid easily in her scabbard, then I urged Witnere a few paces forward. ‘I am now Thorkild the Leper,’ I told Bolti. The scarf made my voice thick and indistinct.

‘You’re who?’ he asked, gaping at me.

‘I am Thorkild the Leper,’ I said, ‘and you and I will now go and deal with them.’

‘Me?’ he said faintly.

I waved everyone forward. The band that had circled to follow us had gone south again, presumably to find the next group trying to evade Kjartan’s war-band.

‘I hired you to protect me,’ Bolti said in desperation.

‘And I am going to protect you,’ I said. His Saxon wife was wailing as though she were at someone’s funeral and I snarled at her to be silent. Then, a couple of hundred paces from the village, I stopped and told everyone except Bolti to wait. ‘Just you and I now,’ I told Bolti.

‘I think you should deal with them alone,’ he said, then squealed.

He squealed because I had slapped the rump of his horse so that it leaped forward. I caught up with him. ‘Remember,’ I said, ‘I’m Thorkild the Leper, and if you betray who I really am then I shall kill you, your wife, your sons and then I’ll sell your daughters into whoredom. Who am I?’

‘Thorkild,’ he stammered.

‘Thorkild the Leper,’ I said. We were in the village now, a miserable place of low stone cottages roofed with turf, and there were at least thirty or forty folk being guarded at the village’s centre, but off to one side, close to the stone-slab bridge, a table and benches had been placed on a patch of grass. Two men sat behind the table with a jug of ale in front of them, and all that I saw, but in truth I really only noticed one thing.

My father’s helmet.

It was on the table. The helmet had a closed face-piece which, like the crown, was inlaid with silver. A snarling mouth was carved into the metal, and I had seen that helmet so many times. I had even played with it as a small child, though if my father discovered me with it he would clout me hard about the skull. My father had worn that helmet on the day he died at Eoferwic, and Ragnar the Elder had bought it from the man who cut my father down, and now it belonged to one of the men who had murdered Ragnar.

It was Sven the One-Eyed. He stood as Bolti and I approached and I felt a savage shock of recognition. I had known Sven since he was a child, and now he was a man, but I instantly knew the flat, wide face with its one feral eye. The other eye was a wrinkled hole. He was tall and broad-shouldered, long-haired and full-bearded, a swaggering young man in a suit of richest mail and with two swords, a long and a short, hanging at his waist. ‘More guests,’ he announced our arrival, and he gestured to the bench on the far side of the table. ‘Sit,’ he ordered, ‘and we shall do business together.’

‘Sit with him,’ I growled softly to Bolti.

Bolti gave me a despairing glance, then dismounted and went to the table. The second man was dark-skinned, black-haired and much older than Sven. He wore a black gown so that he looked like a monk except that he had a silver hammer of Thor hanging at his neck. He also had a wooden tray in front of him and the tray was cunningly divided into separate compartments to hold the different coins that gleamed silver in the sunlight. Sven, sitting again beside the black-robed man, poured a beaker of ale and pushed it towards Bolti who glanced back at me, then sat as he had been commanded.

‘And you are?’ Sven asked him.

‘Bolti Ericson,’ Bolti said. He had to say it twice because the first time he could not raise his voice enough to be heard.

‘Bolti Ericson,’ Sven repeated, ‘and I am Sven Kjartanson and my father is lord of this land. You have heard of Kjartan?’

‘Yes, lord.’

Sven smiled. ‘I think you have been trying to evade our tolls, Bolti! Have you been trying to evade our tolls?’

‘No, lord.’

‘So where have you come from?’

‘Eoferwic.’

‘Ah! Another Eoferwic merchant, eh? You’re the third today! And what do you carry on those packhorses?’

‘Nothing, lord.’

Sven leaned forward slightly, then grinned as he let out a huge fart. ‘Sorry, Bolti, I only heard thunder. Did you say you have nothing? But I see four women, and three are young enough.’ He smiled. ‘Are they your women?’

‘My wife and daughters, lord,’ Bolti said.

‘Wives and daughters, how we do love them,’ Sven said, then he looked up at me and though I knew my face was wrapped in black and that my eyes were deep-shadowed by the helmet, I felt my skin crawl under his gaze. ‘Who,’ Sven asked, ‘is that?’

He must have been curious for I looked like a king. My mail and helmet and weapons were of the very best, while my arm rings denoted a warrior of high status. Bolti threw me a terrified look, but said nothing. ‘I asked,’ Sven said, louder now, ‘who that is.’

‘His name,’ Bolti said, and his voice was a trembling squeak, ‘is Thorkild the Leper.’

Sven made an involuntary grimace and clutched at the hammer amulet about his neck, for which I could not blame him. All men fear the grey, nerveless flesh of lepers, and most lepers are sent into the wilderness to live as they can and die as they must.

‘What are you doing with a leper?’ Sven challenged Bolti.

Bolti had no answer. ‘I am journeying north.’ I spoke for the first time, and my distorted voice seemed to boom inside my closed helmet.

‘Why do you come north?’ Sven asked.

‘Because I am tired of the south,’ I said.

He heard the hostility in my slurred voice and dismissed it as impotent. He must have guessed that Bolti had hired me as an escort, but I was no threat, Sven had five men within a few paces, all of them armed with swords or spears, and he had at least forty other men inside the village.

Sven drank some ale. ‘I hear there was trouble in Eoferwic?’ he asked Bolti.

Bolti nodded. I could see his right hand convulsively opening and closing beneath the table. ‘Some Danes were killed,’ he said.

Sven shook his head as though he found that news distressing. ‘Ivarr won’t be happy.’

‘Where is Ivarr?’ Bolti asked.

‘I last heard he was in the Tuede valley,’ Sven said, ‘and Aed of Scotland was dancing around him.’ He seemed to be enjoying the customary exchange of news, as if his thefts and piracy were given a coating of respectability by sticking to the conventions. ‘So,’ he said, then paused to fart again, ‘so what do you trade in, Bolti?’

‘Leather, fleeces, cloth, pottery,’ Bolti said, then his voice trailed away as he decided he was saying too much.

‘And I trade in slaves,’ Sven said, ‘and this is Gelgill,’ he indicated the man beside him, ‘and he buys the slaves from us, and you have three young women I think might prove very profitable to him and to me. So what will you pay me for them? Pay me enough and you can keep them.’ He smiled as if to suggest he was being entirely reasonable.

Bolti seemed struck dumb, but he managed to bring a purse from beneath his coat and put some silver on the table. Sven watched the coins one by one and when Bolti faltered Sven just smiled and Bolti kept counting the silver until there were thirty-eight shillings on the table. ‘It is all I have, lord,’ he said humbly.

‘All you have? I doubt that, Bolti Ericson,’ Sven said, ‘and if it is then I will let you keep one ear of one of your daughters. Just one ear as a keepsake. What do you think, Gelgill?’

It was a strange name, Gelgill, and I suspected the man had come from across the sea, for the most profitable slave markets were either in Dyflin or far off Frankia. He said something, too low for me to catch, and Sven nodded. ‘Bring the girls here,’ he said to his men, and Bolti shuddered. He looked at me again as if he expected me to stop what Sven planned, but I did nothing as the two guards walked to our waiting group.

Sven chatted of the prospects for the harvest as the guards ordered Hild and Bolti’s daughters off their horses. The men Bolti had hired did nothing to stop them. Bolti’s wife screamed a protest, then subsided into hysterical tears as her daughters and Hild were marched towards the table. Sven welcomed them with exaggerated politeness, then Gelgill stood and inspected the three. He ran his hands over their bodies as if he were buying horses. I saw Hild shiver as he pulled down her dress to probe her breasts, but he was less interested in her than in the two younger girls. ‘One hundred shillings each,’ he said after inspecting them, ‘but that one,’ he looked at Hild, ‘fifty.’ He spoke with a strange accent.

‘But that one’s pretty,’ Sven objected. ‘Those other two look like piglets.’

‘They’re twins,’ Gelgill said. ‘I can get a lot of money for twins. And the tall girl is too old. She must be nineteen or twenty.’

‘Virginity is such a valuable thing,’ Sven said to Bolti, ‘don’t you agree?’

Bolti was shaking. ‘I will pay you a hundred shillings for each of my daughters,’ he said desperately.

‘Oh no,’ Sven said. ‘That’s what Gelgill wants. I have to make some profit too. You can keep all three, Bolti, if you pay me six hundred shillings.’

It was an outrageous price, and it was meant to be, but Bolti did not baulk at it. ‘Only two are mine, lord,’ he whined. ‘The third is his woman.’ He pointed at me.

‘Yours?’ Sven looked at me. ‘You have a woman, leper? So that bit hasn’t dropped off yet?’ He found that funny and the two men who had fetched the women laughed with him. ‘So, leper,’ Sven asked, ‘what will you pay me for your woman?’

‘Nothing,’ I said.

He scratched his arse. His men were grinning. They were used to defiance, and used to defeating it, and they enjoyed watching Sven fleece travellers. Sven poured himself more ale. ‘You have some fine arm rings, leper,’ he said, ‘and I suspect that helmet won’t be much use to you once you’re dead, so in exchange for your woman I’ll take your rings and your helmet and then you can go on your way.’

I did not move, did not speak, but I gently pressed my legs against Witnere’s flanks and I felt the big horse tremble. He was a fighting beast and he wanted me to release him, and perhaps it was Witnere’s tension that Sven sensed. All he could see was my baleful helmet with its dark eye holes and its wolf’s crest and he was becoming worried. He had flippantly raised the wager, but he could not back down if he wanted to keep his dignity. He had to play to win now. ‘Lost your tongue suddenly?’ he sneered at me, then gestured at the two men who had fetched the women. ‘Egil! Atsur! Take the leper’s helmet!’

Sven must have reckoned he was safe. He had at least a ship’s crew of men in the village and I was by myself, and that convinced him that I was defeated even before his two men approached me. One had a spear, the other was drawing his sword, but the sword was not even halfway out of the scabbard before I had Serpent-Breath in my hand and Witnere moving. He had been desperate to attack, and he leaped with the speed of eight-legged Sleipnir, Odin’s famed horse. I took the man on the right first, the man who was still drawing his sword, and Serpent-Breath came from the sky like a bolt of Thor’s lightning and her edge went through his helmet as if it were made of parchment and Witnere, obedient to the pressure of my knee was already turning towards Sven as the spearman came for me. He should have thrust his blade into Witnere’s chest or neck, but instead he tried to ram the spear up at my ribs and Witnere twisted to his right and snapped at the man’s face with his big teeth and the man stumbled backwards, just avoiding the bite, and he lost his footing to sprawl on the grass and I kept Witnere turning left. My right foot was already free of the stirrup and then I threw myself out of the saddle and dropped hard onto Sven. He was half tangled by the bench as he tried to stand, and I drove him down, thumping the wind from his belly, and then I found my feet, stood, and Serpent-Breath was at Sven’s throat. ‘Egil!’ Sven called to the spearman who had been driven back by Witnere, but Egil dared not attack me while my sword was at his master’s gullet.

Bolti was whimpering. He had pissed himself. I could smell it and hear it dripping. Gelgill was standing very still, watching me, his narrow face expressionless. Hild was smiling. A half-dozen of Sven’s other men were facing me, but none dared move because the tip of Serpent-Breath, her blade smeared with blood, was at Sven’s throat. Witnere was beside me, teeth bared, one front hoof pawing at the ground and thumping very close to Sven’s head. Sven was gazing up at me with his one eye that was filled with hate and fear, and I suddenly stepped away from him. ‘On your knees,’ I told him.

‘Egil!’ Sven pleaded again.

Egil, black-bearded and with gaping nostrils where the front of his nose had been chopped off in some fight, levelled his spear.

‘He dies if you attack,’ I said to Egil, touching Sven with Serpent-Breath’s tip. Egil, sensibly stepped backwards, and I flicked Serpent-Breath across Sven’s face, drawing blood. ‘On your knees,’ I said again, and when he was kneeling I leaned down and took his two swords from their scabbards and lay them beside my father’s helmet on the table.

‘You want to kill the slaver?’ I called back to Hild, gesturing at the swords.

‘No,’ she said.

‘Iseult would have killed him,’ I said. Iseult had been my lover and Hild’s friend.

‘Thou shalt not kill,’ Hild said. It was a Christian commandment and about as futile, I thought, as commanding the sun to go backwards.

‘Bolti,’ I spoke in Danish now, ‘kill the slaver.’ I did not want Gelgill behind my back.

Bolti did not move. He was too scared to obey me, but, to my surprise, his two daughters came and fetched Sven’s swords. Gelgill tried to run, but the table was in his way and one of the girls gave a wild swing that slashed across his skull and he fell sideways. Then they savaged him. I did not watch, because I was guarding Sven, but I heard the slaver’s cries and Hild’s gasp of surprise, and I could see the astonishment on the faces of the men in front of me. The twin girls grunted as they hacked. Gelgill took a long time to die and not one of Sven’s men tried to save him, or to rescue their master. They all had weapons drawn and if just one of them had possessed any sense they would have realised that I dared not kill Sven, for his life was my life. If I took his soul they would have swamped me with blades, but they were scared of what Kjartan would do to them if his son died and so they did nothing and I pressed the blade harder against Sven’s throat so that he gave a half-strangled yelp of fear.

Behind me Gelgill was at last hacked to death. I risked a glance and saw that Bolti’s twin daughters were blood-drenched and grinning. ‘They are Hel’s daughters,’ I told the watching men and I was proud of that sudden invention, for Hel is the corpse-goddess, rancid and terrible, who presides over the dead who do not die in battle. ‘And I am Thorkild!’ I went on, ‘and I have filled Odin’s hall with dead men.’ Sven was shaking beneath me. His men seemed to be holding their breath and suddenly my tale took wings and I made my voice as deep as I could. ‘I am Thorkild the Leper,’ I announced loudly, ‘and I died a long time ago, but Odin has sent me from the corpse-hall to take the souls of Kjartan and his son.’

They believed me. I saw men touch amulets. One spearman even dropped to his knees. I wanted to kill Sven there and then, and perhaps I should have done, but it would only have taken one man to break the web of magical nonsense I had spun for them. What I needed at that moment was not Sven’s soul, but our safety, and so I would trade the one for the other. ‘I shall let this worm go,’ I said, ‘to carry news of my coming to his father, but you will go first. All of you! Go back beyond the village and I shall release him. You will leave your captives here.’ They just stared at me and I twitched the blade so that Sven yelped again. ‘Go!’ I shouted.

They went. They went fast, filled with dread. Bolti was gazing at his beloved daughters with awe. I told each girl they had done well, and that they should take a handful of coins from the table, and then they went back to their mother, both clutching silver and bloody blades. ‘They’re good girls,’ I told Bolti and he said nothing, but hurried after them.

‘I couldn’t kill him,’ Hild said. She seemed ashamed of her squeamishness.

‘Doesn’t matter,’ I said. I kept the sword at Sven’s throat until I was sure all his men had retreated a good distance eastwards. The folk who had been their captives, mostly young boys and girls, stayed in the village, but none dared approach me.

I was tempted then to tell Sven the truth, to let him know that he had been humiliated by an old enemy, but the tale of Thorkild the Leper was too good to waste. I was also tempted to ask about Thyra, Ragnar’s sister, but I feared that if she did live and that if I betrayed an interest in her, then she would not live much longer, and so I said nothing of her. Instead I gripped Sven’s hair and pulled his head back so that he was staring up at me. ‘I have come to this middle earth,’ I told him, ‘to kill you and your father. I shall find you again, Sven Kjartanson, and I will kill you next time. I am Thorkild, I walk at night and I cannot be killed because I am already a corpse. So take my greetings to your father and tell him the dead swordsman has been sent for him and we shall all three sail in Skidbladnir back to Niflheim.’ Niflheim was the dreadful pit of the dishonoured dead, and Skidbladnir was the ship of the gods that could be folded and concealed in a pouch. I let go of Sven then and kicked him hard in the back so he sprawled onto his face. He could have crawled away, but he dared not move. He was a whipped dog now, and though I still wanted to kill him I reckoned it would be better to let him carry my eery tale to his father. Kjartan would doubtless learn that Uhtred of Bebbanburg had been seen in Eoferwic, but he would also hear of the corpse warrior come to kill him, and I wanted his dreams to be wreathed with terror.

Sven still did not move as I stooped to his belt and pulled away a heavy purse. Then I stripped him of his seven silver arm rings. Hild had cut off part of Gelgill’s robe and was using it to make a bag to hold the coins in the slave-trader’s tray. I gave her my father’s helmet to carry, then climbed back into Witnere’s saddle. I patted his neck and he tossed his head extravagantly as though he understood he had been a great fighting stallion that day.

I was about to leave when that weird day became stranger still. Some of the captives, as if realising that they were truly freed, had started towards the bridge, while others were so confused or lost or despairing that they had followed the armed men eastwards. Then, suddenly, there was a monkish chanting and out of one of the low, turf-roofed houses where they had been imprisoned, came a file of monks and priests. There were seven of them, and they were the luckiest men that day, for I was to discover that Kjartan the Cruel did indeed have a hatred of Christians and killed every priest or monk he captured. These seven escaped him now, and with them was a young man burdened with slave shackles. He was tall, well-built, very good-looking, dressed in rags and about my age. His long curly hair was so golden that it looked almost white and he had pale eyelashes and very blue eyes and a sun-darkened skin unmarked by disease. His face might have been carved from stone, so pronounced were his cheekbones, nose and jaw, yet the hardness of the face was softened by a cheerful expression that suggested he found life a constant surprise and a continual amusement. When he saw Sven cowering beneath my horse he left the chanting priests and ran towards us, stopping only to pick up the sword of the man I had killed. The young man held the sword awkwardly, for his hands were joined by links of chain, but he carried it to Sven and held it poised over Sven’s neck.

‘No,’ I said.

‘No?’ The young man smiled up at me and I instinctively liked him. His face was open and guileless.

‘I promised him his life,’ I said.

The young man thought about that for a heartbeat. ‘You did,’ he said, ‘but I didn’t.’ He spoke in Danish.

‘But if you take his life,’ I said, ‘then I shall have to take yours.’

He considered that bargain with amusement in his eyes. ‘Why?’ he asked, not in any alarm, but as if he genuinely wished to know.

‘Because that is the law,’ I said.

‘But Sven Kjartanson knows no law,’ he pointed out.

‘It is my law,’ I said, ‘and I want him to take a message to his father.’

‘What message?’

‘That the dead swordsman has come for him.’

The young man cocked his head thoughtfully as he considered the message and he evidently approved of it for he tucked the sword under an armpit and then clumsily untied the rope belt of his breeches. ‘You can take a message from me too,’ he said to Sven, ‘and this is it.’ He pissed on Sven. ‘I baptise you,’ the young man said, ‘in the name of Thor and of Odin and of Loki.’

The seven churchmen, three monks and four priests, solemnly watched the baptism, but none protested the implied blasphemy or tried to stop it. The young man pissed for a long time, aiming his stream so that it thoroughly soaked Sven’s hair, and when at last he finished he retied the belt and offered me another of his dazzling smiles. ‘You’re the dead swordsman?’

‘I am,’ I said.

‘Stop whimpering,’ the young man said to Sven, then smiled up at me again. ‘Then perhaps you will do me the honour of serving me?’

‘Serve you?’ I asked. It was my turn to be amused.

‘I am Guthred,’ he said, as though that explained everything.

‘Guthrum I have heard of,’ I said, ‘and I know a Guthwere and I have met two men named Guthlac, but I know of no Guthred.’

‘I am Guthred, son of Hardicnut,’ he said.

The name still meant nothing to me. ‘And why should I serve Guthred,’ I asked, ‘son of Hardicnut?’

‘Because until you came I was a slave,’ he said, ‘but now, well, because you came, now I’m a king!’ He spoke with such enthusiasm that he had trouble making the words come out as he wanted.

I smiled beneath the linen scarf. ‘You’re a king,’ I said, ‘but of what?’

‘Northumbria, of course,’ he said brightly.

‘He is, lord, he is,’ one of the priests said earnestly.

And so the dead swordsman met the slave king, and Sven the One-Eyed crawled to his father, and the weirdness that infected Northumbria grew weirder still.

Two

At sea, sometimes, if you take a ship too far from land and the wind rises and the tide sucks with a venomous force and the waves splinter white above the shield-pegs, you have no choice but to go where the gods will. The sail must be furled before it rips and the long oars would pull to no effect and so you lash the blades and bail the ship and say your prayers and watch the darkening sky and listen to the wind howl and suffer the rain’s sting, and you hope that the tide and waves and wind will not drive you onto rocks.

That was how I felt in Northumbria. I had escaped Hrothweard’s madness in Eoferwic, only to humiliate Sven who would now want nothing more than to kill me, if indeed he believed I could be killed. That meant I dared not stay in that middling part of Northumbria for my enemies in the region were far too numerous, nor could I go farther north for that would take me into Bebbanburg’s territory, my own land, where it was my uncle’s daily prayer that I should die and so leave him the legitimate holder of what he had stolen, and I did not wish to make it easy for that prayer to come true. So the winds of Kjartan’s hatred and of Sven’s revenge, and the tidal thrust of my uncle’s enmity drove me westwards into the wilds of Cumbraland.

We followed the Roman wall where it runs across the hills. That wall is an extraordinary thing which crosses the whole land from sea to sea. It is made of stone and it rises and falls with the hills and the valleys, never stopping, always remorseless and brutal. We met a shepherd who had not heard of the Romans and he told us that giants had built the wall in the old days and he claimed that when the world ends the wild men of the far north would flow across its rampart like a flood to bring death and horror. I thought of his prophecy that afternoon as I watched a she-wolf run along the wall’s top, tongue lolling, and she gave us a glance, leaped down behind our horses and ran off southwards. These days the wall’s masonry has crumbled, flowers blossom between the stones and turf lies thick along the rampart’s wide top, but it is still an astonishing thing. We build a few churches and monasteries of stone, and I have seen a handful of stone-built halls, but I cannot imagine any man making such a wall today. And it was not just a wall. Beside it was a wide ditch, and behind that a stone road, and every mile or so there was a watchtower, and twice a day we would pass stone-built fortresses where the Roman soldiers had lived. The roofs of their barracks have long gone now and the buildings are homes for foxes and ravens, though in one such fort we discovered a naked man with hair down to his waist. He was ancient, claiming to be over seventy years old, and his grey beard was as long as his matted white hair. He was a filthy creature, nothing but skin, dirt and bones, but Willibald and the seven churchmen I had released from Sven all knelt to him because he was a famous hermit.

‘He was a bishop,’ Willibald told me in awed tones after he had received the scraggy man’s blessing. ‘He had wealth, a wife, servants and honour, and he gave them all up to worship God in solitude. He’s a very holy man.’

‘Perhaps he’s just a mad bastard,’ I suggested, ‘or else his wife was a vicious bitch who drove him out.’

‘He’s a child of God,’ Willibald said reprovingly, ‘and in time he’ll be called a saint.’

Hild had dismounted and she looked at me as though seeking my permission to approach the hermit. She plainly wanted the hermit’s blessing and so she appealed to me, but it was none of my business what she did, so I just shrugged and she knelt to the dirty creature. He leered at her and scratched his crotch and then made the sign of the cross on both her breasts, pushing hard with his fingers to feel her nipples and all the while pretending to bless her, and I was tempted to kick the old bastard into immediate martyrdom. But Hild was crying with emotion as he pawed at her hair and then dribbled some kind of prayer and afterwards she looked grateful. He gave me the evil eye and held out a grubby paw as if expecting me to give him money, but instead I showed him Thor’s hammer and he hissed a curse at me through his two yellow teeth and then we abandoned him to the moor and to the sky and to his prayers.

I had left Bolti. He was safe enough north of the wall, for he had entered Bebbanburg’s territory where Ælfric’s horsemen and the horsemen of the Danes who lived on my land would be patrolling the roads. We followed the wall westwards and I now led Father Willibald, Hild, King Guthred and the seven freed churchmen. I had managed to break the chain of Guthred’s manacles so the slave king, who now rode Willibald’s mare, wore two iron wristbands from which dangled short links of rusted chain. He chattered to me incessantly. ‘What we shall do,’ he told me on the second day of the journey, ‘is raise an army in Cumbraland and then we’ll cross the hills and capture Eoferwic.’

‘What then?’ I asked drily.

‘Go north!’ he said enthusiastically. ‘North! We shall have to take Dunholm, and after that we’ll capture Bebbanburg. You want me to do that, don’t you?’

I had told Guthred my name and that I was the rightful lord of Bebbanburg, and now I told him that Bebbanburg had never been captured.

‘It’s a tough place, eh?’ Guthred responded. ‘Like Dunholm? Well, we shall see about Bebbanburg. But of course we’ll have to finish off Ivarr first.’ He spoke as though destroying the most powerful Dane in Northumbria were a small matter. ‘So we’ll deal with Ivarr,’ he said, then suddenly brightened. ‘Or perhaps Ivarr will accept me as king? He has a son and I’ve a sister who must be of marriageable age by now. They could make an alliance?’

‘Unless your sister’s already married,’ I interrupted.

‘Can’t think who’d want her,’ he said, ‘she’s got a face like a horse.’

‘Horse-faced or not,’ I said, ‘she’s Hardicnut’s daughter. There must be an advantage for someone in marrying her.’

‘There might have been before my father died,’ Guthred said dubiously, ‘but now?’

‘You’re king now,’ I reminded him. I did not really believe he was a king, of course, but he believed it and so I indulged him.

‘That’s true!’ he said. ‘So someone will want Gisela, won’t they? Despite her face!’

‘Does she really look like a horse?’

‘Long face,’ he said, and grimaced, ‘but she’s not completely ugly. And it’s high time she married. She must be fifteen or sixteen! I think perhaps we should marry her to Ivarr’s son. That’ll make an alliance with Ivarr, and he’ll help us deal with Kjartan, and then we’ll have to make sure the Scots don’t give us any trouble. And, of course, we’ll have to keep those rascals in Strath Clota from being a nuisance.’

‘Of course we must,’ I said.

‘They killed my father, see? And made me a slave!’ He grinned.

Hardicnut, Guthred’s father, had been a Danish earl who made his home at Cair Ligualid which was the chief town in Cumbraland. Hardicnut had called himself king of Northumbria, which was pretentious, but strange things happen west of the hills and a man there can claim to be king of the moon if he wants because no one outside of Cumbraland will take the slightest bit of notice. Hardicnut had posed no threat to the greater lords around Eoferwic, indeed he posed small threat to anyone, for Cumbraland was a sad and savage place, forever being raided by the Norsemen from Ireland or by the wild horrors from Strath Clota whose king, Eochaid, called himself king of Scotland, a title disputed by Aed who was now fighting Ivarr.

Of the insolence of the Scots, my father used to say, there is no end. He had cause to say that, for the Scots claimed much of Bebbanburg’s land and until the Danes came our family was forever fighting against the northern tribes. I had been taught as a child that there were many tribes in Scotland, but the two tribes closest to Northumbria were the Scots themselves, of whom Aed was now king, and the savages of Strath Clota who lived on the western shore and never came near Bebbanburg. They raided Cumbraland instead and Hardicnut had decided to punish them and so led a small army north into their hills where Eochaid of Strath Clota ambushed him and then destroyed him. Guthred had marched with his father and had been captured and, for two years now, had been a slave.

‘Why didn’t they kill you?’ I asked.

‘Eochaid should have killed me,’ he admitted cheerfully, ‘but he didn’t know who I was at first, and by the time he found out he wasn’t really in a killing mood. So he kicked me a few times, then said I would be his slave. He liked to watch me empty his shit-pail. I was a household slave, see? It was another insult.’

‘Being a household slave?’

‘Woman’s work,’ Guthred explained, ‘but that meant I spent my time with the girls. I rather liked it.’

‘So how did you escape Eochaid?’

‘I didn’t. Gelgill bought me. He paid a lot for me!’ He said this proudly.

‘And Gelgill was going to sell you to Kjartan?’ I asked.

‘Oh no! He was going to sell me to the priests from Cair Ligualid!’ he nodded towards the seven churchmen who had been rescued with him. ‘They’d agreed the price before, you see, but Gelgill wanted more money and then they all met Sven, and of course Sven wouldn’t let the sale happen. He wanted me back in Dunholm and Gelgill would have done anything for Sven and his father, so we were all doomed until you came along.’

Some of this made sense and, by talking to the seven churchmen and questioning Guthred further, I managed to piece the rest of the story together. Gelgill, known on both sides of the border as a slave-trader, had purchased Guthred from Eochaid and had paid a vast price, not because Guthred was worth it, but because the priests had hired Gelgill to make the trade. ‘Two hundred pieces of silver, eight bullocks, two sacks of malt and a silver-mounted horn. That was my price,’ Guthred told me cheerfully.

‘Gelgill paid that much?’ I was astonished.

‘He didn’t. The priests did. Gelgill just negotiated the sale.’

‘The priests paid for you?’

‘They must have emptied Cumbraland of silver,’ Guthred said proudly.

‘And Eochaid agreed to sell you?’

‘For that price? Of course he did! Why wouldn’t he?’

‘He killed your father. Your duty is to kill him. He knows that.’

‘He rather liked me,’ Guthred said, and I found that believable because Guthred was so very likeable. He faced each day as though it would bring nothing but happiness, and in his company life somehow seemed brighter. ‘He still made me empty his shit-pail,’ Guthred admitted, continuing his story of Eochaid, ‘but he stopped kicking me every time I did it. And he liked to talk to me.’

‘About what?’

‘Oh, about everything! The gods, the weather, fishing, how to make good cheese, women, everything. And he reckoned I wasn’t a warrior, which I’m not really. Now I’m king, of course, so I have to be a warrior, but I don’t much like it. Eochaid made me swear I’d never go to war against him.’

‘And you swore that?’

‘Of course! I like him. I’ll raid his cattle, of course, and kill any men he sends into Cumbraland, but that’s not war, is it?’

So Eochaid had taken the church’s silver and Gelgill had brought Guthred south into Northumbria, but instead of giving him to the priests he had taken him eastwards, reckoning that he could make more money by selling Guthred to Kjartan than by honouring the contract he had made with the churchmen. The priests and monks followed, begging for Guthred’s release, and it was then they had all met Sven who saw his own chance of profit in Guthred. The freed slave was Hardicnut’s son, which meant he was heir to land in Cumbraland, and that suggested he was worth a largish bag of silver in ransom. Sven had planned to take Guthred back to Dunholm where he would doubtless have killed all seven churchmen. Then I had arrived with my face wrapped in black linen and now Gelgill was dead, Sven had stinking wet hair and Guthred was free.

I understood all that, but what did not make sense was why seven Saxon churchmen had come from Cair Ligualid to pay a fortune for Guthred who was both a Dane and a pagan. ‘Because I’m their king, of course,’ Guthred said, as though the answer were obvious, ‘though I never thought I’d become king. Not after Eochaid took me captive, but that’s what the Christian god wants, so who am I to argue?’

‘Their god wants you?’ I asked, looking at the seven churchmen who had travelled so far to free him.

‘Their god wants me,’ Guthred said seriously, ‘because I’m the chosen one. Do you think I should become a Christian?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘I think I should,’ he said, ignoring my answer, ‘just to show gratitude. The gods don’t like ingratitude, do they?’

‘What the gods like,’ I said, ‘is chaos.’

The gods were happy.

Cair Ligualid was a sorry place. Norsemen had pillaged and burned it two years before, just after Guthred’s father had been killed by the Scots, and the town had not even been half rebuilt. What was left of it stood on the south bank of the River Hedene, and that was why the settlement existed, for it was built at the first crossing place of the river, a river which offered some protection against marauding Scots. It had offered no protection against the fleet of Vikings who had sailed up the Hedene, stolen whatever they could, raped what they wanted, killed what they did not want, and taken away the survivors as slaves. Those Vikings had come from their settlements in Ireland and they were the enemies of the Saxons, the Irish, the Scots and even, at times, of their cousins, the Danes, and they had not spared the Danes living in Cair Ligualid. So we rode through a broken gate in a broken wall into a broken town, and it was dusk, and the day’s rain had finally lifted and a shaft of red sunlight came from beneath the western clouds as we entered the ruined town. We rode straight into the light of that swollen sun which reflected from my helm that had the silver wolf on its crest and it shone from my mail coat and from my arm rings and from the hilts of my two swords, and someone shouted that I was the king. I looked like a king. I rode Witnere who tossed his great head and pawed at the ground and I was dressed in my shining war-glory.

Cair Ligualid was crowded. Here and there a house had been rebuilt, but most of the folk were camping in the scorched ruins, along with their livestock, and there were far too many of them to be the survivors of the old Norse raids. They were, instead, the people of Cumbraland who had been brought to Cair Ligualid by their priests or lords because they had been promised that their new king would come. And now, from the east, his mail reflecting the brilliance of the sinking sun, came a gleaming warrior on a great black horse.

‘The king!’ another voice shouted, and more voices took up the cry, and from the wrecked homes and the makeshift shelters folk scrambled to stare at me. Willibald was trying to hush them, but his West Saxon words were lost in the din. I thought Guthred would also protest, but instead he pulled his cloak’s hood over his head so that he looked like one of the churchmen who struggled to keep up as the crowd pressed in on us. Folk knelt as we passed, then scrambled to their feet to follow us. Hild was laughing, and I took her hand so she rode beside me like a queen, and the growing crowd accompanied us up a long, low hill towards a new hall built on the summit. As we grew closer I saw it was not a hall, but a church, and that priests and monks were coming from its door to greet us.

There was a madness in Cair Ligualid. A different madness from that which had shed blood in Eoferwic, but madness just the same. Women were crying, men shouting and children staring. Mothers held babies towards me as if my touch could heal them. ‘You must stop them!’ Willibald had managed to reach my side and was clinging onto my right stirrup.

‘Why?’

‘Because they’re mistaken, of course! Guthred is king!’

I smiled at him. ‘Maybe,’ I said slowly, as though the idea were just coming to me, ‘maybe I should be king instead?’

‘Uhtred!’ Willibald said, shocked.

‘Why not?’ I asked. ‘My ancestors were kings.’

‘Guthred is king!’ Willibald protested. ‘The abbot named him!’

That was how Cair Ligualid’s madness began. The town had been a haunt of foxes and birds when Abbot Eadred of Lindisfarena came across the hills. Lindisfarena, of course, is the monastery hard by Bebbanburg. It lies on Northumbria’s eastern coast, while Cair Ligualid is on the western edge, but the abbot, driven from Lindisfarena by Danish raids, had come to Cair Ligualid and there built the new church to which we climbed. The abbot had also seen Guthred in his dreams. Nowadays, of course, every Northumbrian knows the story of how Saint Cuthbert revealed Guthred to Abbot Eadred, but back then, on the day of Guthred’s arrival in Cair Ligualid, the tale seemed like just another insanity on top of the world’s weltering madness. Folk were shouting at me, calling me king and Willibald turned and bellowed to Guthred. ‘Tell them to stop!’

‘The people want a king,’ Guthred said, ‘and Uhtred looks like one. Let them have him for the moment.’

A number of younger monks, armed with staves, kept the excited people away from the church doors. The crowd had been promised a miracle by Eadred and they had been waiting for days, expecting their king to come, and then I had ridden from the east in the glory of a warrior, which is what I am and always have been. All my life I have followed the path of the sword. Given a choice, and I have been given many choices, I would rather draw a blade than settle an argument with words, for that is what a warrior does, but most men and women are not fighters. They crave peace. They want nothing more than to watch their children grow, to plant their seeds and live to see the harvest, to worship their god, to love their family and to be left in peace. Yet it has been our fate to be born in a time when violence ruled us. The Danes appeared and our land was shattered, and all around our coasts the long ships with their beaked prows came to raid and enslave and steal and kill. In Cumbraland, which is the wildest part of all the Saxon lands, the Danes came and the Norsemen came and the Scots came, and no one could live in peace, and I think that when you break men’s dreams, when you destroy their homes and ruin their harvests and rape their daughters and enslave their sons, you engender a madness. At the world’s ending, when the gods will fight each other, all mankind will be stricken with a great frenzy and the rivers will flow with blood and the sky shall be filled with screaming and the great tree of life will fall with a crash that will be heard beyond the farthest star, but all that is yet to come. Back then, in 878 when I was young, there was just a smaller madness at Cair Ligualid. It was the madness of hope, the belief that a king, born in a churchman’s dream, would end a people’s suffering.

Abbot Eadred was waiting inside the cordon of monks and, as my horse came close, he raised his hands towards the sky. He was a tall man, old and white-haired, gaunt and fierce, with eyes like a falcon and, surprising in a priest, he had a sword strapped to his waist. He could not see my face at first because my cheek-pieces hid it, but even when I took off my helmet he still thought I was the king. He stared up at me, raised thin hands to heaven as if giving thanks for my arrival, then gave me a low bow. ‘Lord King,’ he said in a booming voice. The monks dropped to their knees and stared up at me. ‘Lord King,’ Abbot Eadred boomed again, ‘welcome!’

‘Lord King,’ the monks echoed, ‘welcome.’

Now that was an interesting moment. Eadred, remember, had selected Guthred to be the king because Saint Cuthbert had shown him Hardicnut’s son in a dream. Yet now he thought that I was the king, which meant that either Cuthbert had shown him the wrong face or else that Eadred was a lying bastard. Or perhaps Saint Cuthbert was a lying bastard. But as a miracle, and Eadred’s dream is always remembered as a miracle, it was decidedly suspicious. I told a priest that story once and he refused to believe me. He hissed at me, made the sign of the cross and rushed off to say his prayers. The whole of Guthred’s life was to be dominated by the simple fact that Saint Cuthbert revealed him to Eadred, and the truth is that Eadred did not recognise him, but these days no one believes me. Willibald, of course, was dancing around like a man with two wasps up his breeches, trying to correct Eadred’s mistake, so I kicked him on the side of the skull to make him quiet then gestured towards Guthred who had taken the hood from his head. ‘This,’ I said to Eadred, ‘is your king.’

For a heartbeat Eadred did not believe me, then he did and a look of intense anger crossed his face. It was a sudden contortion of utter fury because he understood, even if no one else did, that he was supposed to have recognised Guthred from his dream. The anger flared, then he mastered it and bowed to Guthred and repeated his greeting and Guthred returned it with his customary cheerfulness. Two monks hurried to take his horse and Guthred dismounted and was led into the church. The rest of us followed as best we could. I ordered some monks to hold Witnere and Hild’s mare. They did not want to, they wanted to be inside the church, but I told them I would break their tonsured heads if the horses were lost, and they obeyed me.

It was dark in the church. There were rushlights burning on the altar, and more on the floor of the nave where a large group of monks bowed and chanted, but the small smoky lights hardly lifted the thick gloom. It was not much of a church. It was big, bigger even than the church Alfred was building in Wintanceaster, but it had been raised in a hurry and the walls were untrimmed logs and when my eyes became accustomed to the darkness I saw that the roof was ragged with rough thatch. There were probably fifty or sixty churchmen inside and half that number of thegns, if the men of Cumbraland aspired to that rank. They were the wealthier men of the region and they stood with their followers and I noted, with curiosity, that some wore the cross and others wore the hammer. There were Danes and Saxons in that church, mingled together, and they were not enemies. Instead they had gathered to support Eadred who had promised them a god-given king.

And there was Gisela.

I noticed her almost immediately. She was a tall girl, dark-haired, with a very long and very grave face. She was dressed in a grey cloak and shift so that at first I thought she was a nun, then I saw the silver bracelets and the heavy brooch holding the cloak at her neck. She had large eyes that shone, but that was because she was crying. They were tears of joy and, when Guthred saw her, he ran to her and they embraced. He held her tight, then he stepped away, holding her hands, and I saw she was half crying and half laughing, and he impulsively led her to me. ‘My sister,’ he introduced her, ‘Gisela.’ He still held her hands. ‘I am free,’ he told her, ‘because of Lord Uhtred.’

‘I thank you,’ she said to me, and I said nothing. I was conscious of Hild beside me, but even more conscious of Gisela. Fifteen? Sixteen? But unmarried, for her black hair was still unbound. What had her brother told me? That she had a face like a horse, but I thought it was a face of dreams, a face to set the sky on fire, a face to haunt a man. I still see that face so many years later. It was long, long nosed, with dark eyes that sometimes seemed far away and other times were mischievous and when she looked at me that first time I was lost. The spinners who make our lives had sent her and I knew nothing would be the same again.

‘You’re not married, are you?’ Guthred asked her anxiously.

She touched her hair that still fell free like a girl’s hair. When she married it would be bound up. ‘Of course not,’ she said, still looking at me, then turned to her brother, ‘are you?’

‘No,’ he said.

Gisela looked at Hild, back to me, and just then Abbot Eadred came to hurry Guthred away and Gisela went back to the woman who was her guardian. She gave me a backwards glance, and I can still see that look. The lowered eyelids and the small trip as she turned to give me a last smile.

‘A pretty girl,’ Hild said.

‘I would rather have a pretty woman,’ I said.

‘You need to marry,’ Hild said.

‘I am married,’ I reminded her, and that was true. I had a wife in Wessex, a wife who hated me, but Mildrith was now in a nunnery so whether she regarded herself as married to me or married to Christ I neither knew nor cared.

‘You liked that girl,’ Hild said.

‘I like all girls,’ I said evasively. I lost sight of Gisela as the crowd pressed forward to watch the ceremony which began when Abbot Eadred unstrapped the sword belt from his own waist and buckled it around Guthred’s ragged clothes. Then he draped the new king in a fine green cloak, trimmed with fur, and put a bronze circlet on his fair hair. The monks chanted while this was being done, and kept chanting as Eadred led Guthred around the church so that everyone could see him. The abbot held the king’s right hand aloft and no doubt many folk thought it odd that the new king was being acclaimed with slave chains hanging from his wrists. Men knelt to him. Guthred knew many of the Danes who had been his father’s followers and he greeted them happily. He played the part of the king well, for he was an intelligent as well as a good-natured man, but I saw a look of amusement on his face. Did he really believe he was king then? I think he saw it all as an adventure, but one that was certainly preferable to emptying Eochaid’s shit-pail.

Eadred gave a sermon that was blessedly short even though he spoke in both English and Danish. His Danish was not good, but it sufficed to tell Guthred’s fellow-countrymen that God and Saint Cuthbert had chosen the new king, and here he was, and glory must inevitably follow. Then he led Guthred towards the rushlights burning in the centre of the church and the monks who had been gathered about those smoky flames scrambled to make way for the new king and I saw they had been clustered around three chests which, in turn, were circled by the small lights.

‘The royal oath will now be taken!’ Eadred announced to the church. The Christians in the church went to their knees again and some of the pagan Danes clumsily followed their example.

It was supposed to be a solemn moment, but Guthred rather spoiled it by turning and looking for me. ‘Uhtred!’ he called, ‘you should be here! Come!’

Eadred bridled, but Guthred wanted me beside him because the three chests worried him. They were gilded, and their lids were held by big metal clasps, and they were surrounded by the flickering rushlights, and all that suggested to him that some Christian sorcery was about to take place and he wanted me to share the risk. Abbot Eadred glared at me. ‘Did he call you Uhtred?’ he asked suspiciously.

‘Lord Uhtred commands my household troops,’ Guthred said grandly. That made me the commander of nothing, but I kept a straight face. ‘And if there are oaths to be taken,’ Guthred continued, ‘then he must make them with me.’

‘Uhtred,’ Abbot Eadred said flatly. He knew the name, of course he did. He came from Lindisfarena where my family ruled and there was a sourness in his tone.

‘I am Uhtred of Bebbanburg,’ I said loudly enough for everyone in the church to hear, and the announcement caused a hiss among the monks. Some crossed themselves and others just looked at me with apparent hatred.

‘He’s your companion?’ Eadred demanded of Guthred.

‘He rescued me,’ Guthred said, ‘and he is my friend.’

Eadred made the sign of the cross. He had disliked me from the moment he mistook me for the dream-born king, but now he was fairly spitting malevolence at me. He hated me because our family was supposedly the guardians of Lindisfarena’s monastery, but the monastery lay in ruins and Eadred, its abbot, had been driven into exile. ‘Did Ælfric send you?’ he demanded.

‘Ælfric,’ I spat the name, ‘is a usurper, a thief, a cuckoo, and one day I shall spill his rotting belly and send him to the tree where Corpse-Ripper will feed on him.’

Eadred placed me then. ‘You’re Lord Uhtred’s son,’ he said, and he looked at my arm rings and my mail and at the workmanship of my swords and at the hammer about my neck. ‘You’re the boy raised by the Danes.’

‘I am the boy,’ I said sarcastically, ‘who killed Ubba Lothbrokson beside a southern sea.’

‘He is my friend,’ Guthred insisted.

Abbot Eadred shuddered, then half bowed his head as if to show that he accepted me as Guthred’s companion. ‘You will take an oath,’ he growled at me, ‘to serve King Guthred faithfully.’

I took a half-step backwards. Oath-taking is a serious matter. If I swore to serve this king who had been a slave then I would no longer be a free man. I would be Guthred’s man, sworn to die for him, to obey him and serve him until death, and the thought galled me. Guthred saw my hesitation and smiled. ‘I shall free you,’ he whispered to me in Danish, and I understood that he, like me, saw this ceremony as a game.

‘You swear it?’ I asked him.

‘On my life,’ he said lightly.

‘The oaths will be taken!’ Eadred announced, wanting to restore some dignity to the church that now murmured with talk. He glowered at the congregation until they went quiet, then he opened one of the two smaller chests. Inside was a book, its cover crusted with precious stones. ‘This is the great gospel book of Lindisfarena,’ Eadred said in awe. He lifted the book out of the chest and held it aloft so that the dim light glinted from its jewels. The monks all crossed themselves, then Eadred handed the heavy book to an attendant priest whose hands shook as he accepted the volume. Eadred stooped to the second of the small chests. He made the sign of the cross then opened the lid and there, facing me with closed eyes, was a severed head. Guthred could not suppress a grunt of distaste and, fearing sorcery, took my right arm. ‘That is the most holy Saint Oswald,’ Eadred said, ‘once king of Northumbria and now a saint most beloved of almighty God.’ His voice quivered with emotion.

Guthred took a half-pace backwards, repelled by the head, but I shook off his grip and stepped forward to gaze down at Oswald. He had been the lord of Bebbanburg in his time, and he had been king of Northumbria too, but that had been two hundred years ago. He had died in battle against the Mercians who had hacked him to pieces, and I wondered how his head had been rescued from the charnel-house of defeat. The head, its cheeks shrunken and its skin dark, looked quite unscarred. His hair was long and tangled, while his neck had been hidden by a scrap of yellowed linen. A gilt-bronze circlet served as his crown. ‘Beloved Saint Oswald,’ Eadred said, making the sign of the cross, ‘protect us and guide us and pray for us.’ The king’s lips had shrivelled so that three of his teeth showed. They were like yellow pegs. The monks kneeling closest to Oswald bobbed up and down in silent and fervent prayer. ‘Saint Oswald,’ Eadred announced, ‘is a warrior of God and with him on our side none can stand against us.’

He stepped past the dead king’s head to the last and biggest of the chests. The church was silent. The Christians, of course, were aware that by revealing the relics, Eadred was summoning the powers of heaven to witness the oaths, while the pagan Danes, even if they did not understand exactly what was happening, were awed by the magic they sensed in the big building. And they sensed that more and greater magic was about to happen, for the monks now prostrated themselves flat on the earthen floor as Eadred silently prayed beside the last box. He prayed for a long time, his hands clasped, his lips moving and with his eyes raised to the rafters where sparrows fluttered and then at last he unlatched the chest’s two heavy bronze locks and lifted the big lid.

A corpse lay inside the big chest. The corpse was wrapped in a linen cloth, but I could see the body’s shape clearly enough. Guthered had again taken my arm as if I could protect him against Eadred’s sorcery. Eadred, meanwhile, gently unwrapped the linen and so revealed a dead bishop robed in white and with his face covered by a small white square of cloth that was hemmed with golden thread. The corpse had an embroidered scapular about its neck and a battered mitre had fallen from its head. A cross of gold, decorated with garnets, lay half-hidden by his hands that were prayerfully clasped on his breast. A ruby ring shone on one shrunken finger. Some of the monks were gasping, as though they could not endure the holy power flowing from the corpse and even Eadred was subdued. He touched his forehead against the edge of the coffin, then straightened to look at me. ‘You know who this is?’ he asked.

‘No.’

‘In the name of the Father,’ he said, ‘and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost,’ and he took the square of golden-hemmed linen away to reveal a yellowed face blotched with darker patches. ‘It is Saint Cuthbert,’ Eadred said with a tearful catch in his voice. ‘It is the most blessed, the most holy, the most beloved Cuthbert. Oh dear sweet God,’ he rocked backward and forward on his knees, ‘this is Saint Cuthbert himself.’

Until the age of ten I had been raised on stories of Cuthbert. I learned how he had trained a choir of seals to sing psalms, and how the eagles had brought food to the small island off Bebbanburg where he lived in solitude for a time. He could calm storms by prayer and had rescued countless sailors from drowning. Angels came to talk with him. He had once rescued a family by commanding the flames that consumed their house to return to hell, and the fire had miraculously vanished. He would walk into the winter sea until the cold water reached his neck and he would stay there all night, praying, and when he came back to the beach in the dawn his monk’s robes would be dry. He drew water from parched ground during a drought and when birds stole newly-sewn barley seed he commanded them to return it, which they did. Or so I was told. He was certainly the greatest saint of Northumbria, the holy man who watched over us and to whom we were supposed to direct our prayers so that he could whisper them into the ear of God, and here he was in a carved and gilded elm box, flat on his back, nostrils gaping, mouth slightly open, cheeks fallen in, and with five yellow-black teeth from which the gums had receded so they looked like fangs. One fang was broken. His eyes were shut. My stepmother had possessed Saint Cuthbert’s comb and she had liked to tell me that she had found some of the saint’s hair on the comb’s teeth and that the hair had been the colour of finest gold, but this corpse had hair black as pitch. It was long, lank and brushed away from a high forehead and from his monkish tonsure. Eadred gently restored the mitre, then leaned forward and kissed the ruby ring. ‘You will note,’ he said in a voice made hoarse by emotion, ‘that the holy flesh is uncorrupted,’ he paused to stroke one of the saint’s bony hands, ‘and that miracle is a sure and certain sign of his sanctity.’ He leaned forward and this time kissed the saint full on the open, shrivelled lips. ‘Oh most holy Cuthbert,’ he prayed aloud, ‘guide us and lead us and bring us to your glory in the name of Him who died for us and upon whose right hand you now sit in splendour everlasting, amen.’

‘Amen,’ the monks chimed. The closest monks had got up from the floor so they could see the uncorrupted saint and most of them cried as they gazed at the yellowing face.

Eadred looked up at me again. ‘In this church, young man,’ he said, ‘is the spiritual soul of Northumbria. Here, in these chests, are our miracles, our treasures, our glory, and the means by which we speak with God to seek his protection. While these precious and holy things are safe, we are safe, and once,’ he stood as he said that last word and his voice grew much harder, ‘once all these things were under the protection of the lords of Bebbanburg, but that protection failed! The pagans came, the monks were slaughtered, and the men of Bebbanburg cowered behind their walls rather than ride to slaughter the pagans. But our forefathers in Christ saved these things, and we have wandered ever since, wandered across the wild lands, and we keep these things still, but one day we shall make a great church and these relics will shine forth across a holy land. That holy land is where I lead these people!’ He waved his hand to indicate the folk waiting outside the church. ‘God has sent me an army,’ he shouted, ‘and that army will triumph, but I am not the man to lead it. God and Saint Cuthbert sent me a dream in which they showed me the king who will take us all to our promised land. He showed me King Guthred!’

He stood and raised Guthred’s arm aloft and the gesture provoked applause from the congregation. Guthred looked surprised rather than regal, and I just looked down at the dead saint.

Cuthbert had been the abbot and bishop of Lindisfarena, the island that lay just north of Bebbanburg, and for almost two hundred years his body had lain in a crypt on the island until the Viking raids became too threatening and, to save the saintly corpse, the monks had taken the dead man inland. They had been wandering Northumbria ever since. Eadred disliked me because my family had failed to protect the holy relics, but the strength of Bebbanburg was its position on the sea-lashed crag, and only a fool would take its garrison beyond the walls to fight. If I had a choice between keeping Bebbanburg and abandoning a relic, then I would have surrendered the whole calendar of dead saints. Holy corpses are cheap, but fortresses like Bebbanburg are rare.

‘Behold!’ Eadred shouted, still holding Guthred’s arm aloft, ‘the king of Haliwerfolkland!’

The king of what? I thought I had misheard, but I had not. Haliwerfolkland, Eadred had said, and it meant the Land of the Holy Man People. That was Eadred’s name for Guthred’s kingdom. Saint Cuthbert, of course, was the holy man, but whoever was king of his land would be a sheep among wolves. Ivarr, Kjartan and my uncle were the wolves. They were the men who led proper forces of trained soldiers, while Eadred was hoping to make a kingdom on the back of a dream, and I had no doubts that his dream-born sheep would end up being savaged by the wolves. Still, for the moment, Cair Ligualid was my best refuge in Northumbria, because my enemies would need to cross the hills to find me and, besides, I had a taste for this kind of madness. In madness lies change, in change is opportunity and in opportunity are riches.

‘Now,’ Eadred let go of Guthred’s hand and turned on me, ‘you will swear fealty to our king and his country.’

Guthred actually winked at me then, and I obediently went on my knees and reached for his right hand, but Eadred knocked my hands away. ‘You swear to the saint,’ he hissed at me.

‘To the saint?’

‘Place your hands on Saint Cuthbert’s most holy hands,’ Eadred ordered me, ‘and say the words.’

I put my hands over Saint Cuthbert’s fingers and I could feel the big ruby ring under my own fingers, and I gave the jewel a twitch just to see whether the stone was loose and would come free, but it seemed well fixed in its setting. ‘I swear to be your man,’ I said to the corpse, ‘and to serve you faithfully.’ I tried to shift the ring again, but the dead fingers were stiff and the ruby would not move.

‘You swear by your life?’ Eadred asked sternly.

I gave the ring another twitch, but it really was immovable. ‘I swear on my life,’ I said respectfully and never, in all that life, have I taken an oath so lightly. How can an oath to a dead man be binding?

‘And you swear to serve King Guthred faithfully?’

‘I do,’ I said.

‘And to be an enemy to all his enemies?’

‘I swear it,’ I said.

‘And you will serve Saint Cuthbert even to the end of your life?’

‘I will.’

‘Then you may kiss the most blessed Cuthbert,’ Eadred said. I leaned over the coffin’s edge to kiss the folded hands. ‘No!’ Eadred protested. ‘On the lips!’ I shuffled on my knees, then bent and kissed the corpse on its dry, scratchy lips.

‘Praise God,’ Eadred said. Then he made Guthred swear to serve Cuthbert and the church watched as the slave king knelt and kissed the corpse. The monks sang as the folk in the church were allowed to see Cuthbert for themselves. Hild shuddered when she came to the coffin and she fell to her knees, tears streaming down her face, and I had to lift her up and lead her away. Willibald was similarly overcome, but his face just glowed with happiness. Gisela, I noticed, did not bow to the corpse. She looked at it with curiosity, but it was plain it meant nothing to her and I deduced she was a pagan still. She stared at the dead man, then looked at me and smiled. Her eyes, I thought, were brighter than the ruby on the dead saint’s finger.

And so Guthred came to Cair Ligualid. I thought then, and still think now, that it was all nonsense, but it was a magical nonsense, and the dead swordsman had made himself liege to a dead man and the slave had become a king. The gods were laughing.

Later, much later, I realised I was doing what Alfred would have wanted me to do. I was helping the Christians. There were two wars in those years. The obvious struggle was between Saxon and Dane, but there was also combat between pagans and Christians. Most Danes were pagan and most Saxons were Christian, so the two wars appeared to be the same fight, but in Northumbria it all became confused, and that was Abbot Eadred’s cleverness.

What Eadred did was to end the war between the Saxons and the Danes in Cumbraland, and he did it by choosing Guthred. Guthred, of course, was a Dane and that meant Cumbraland’s Danes were ready to follow him and, because he had been proclaimed king by a Saxon abbot, the Saxons were equally prepared to support him. Thus the two biggest warring tribes of Cumbraland, the Danes and Saxons, were united, while the Britons, and a good many Britons still lived in Cumbraland, were also Christians and their priests told them to accept Eadred’s choice and so they did.

It is one thing to proclaim a king and another for the king to rule, but Eadred had made a shrewd choice. Guthred was a good man, but he was also the son of Hardicnut who had called himself king of Northumbria, so Guthred had a claim to the crown, and none of Cumbraland’s thegns was strong enough to challenge him. They needed a king because, for too long, they had squabbled among themselves and suffered from the Norse raids out of Ireland and from the savage incursions from Strath Clota. Guthred, by uniting Dane and Saxon, could now marshal stronger forces to face those enemies. There was one man who might have been a rival. Ulf, he was called, and he was a Dane who owned land south of Cair Ligualid and he had greater wealth than any other thegn in Cumbraland, but he was old and lame and without sons and so he offered fealty to Guthred, and Ulf’s example persuaded the other Danes to accept Eadred’s choice. They knelt to him one by one and he greeted them by name, raised them and embraced them.

‘I really should become a Christian,’ he told me on the morning after our arrival.

‘Why?’

‘I told you why. To show gratitude. Aren’t you supposed to call me lord?’

‘Yes, lord.’

‘Does it hurt?’

‘Calling you lord, lord?’

‘No!’ he laughed. ‘Becoming a Christian?’

‘Why should it hurt?’

‘I don’t know. Don’t they nail you to a cross?’

‘Of course they don’t,’ I said scornfully, ‘they just wash you.’

‘I wash myself anyway,’ he said, then frowned. ‘Why do Saxons not wash? Not you, you wash, but most Saxons don’t. Not as much as Danes. Do they like being dirty?’

‘You can catch cold by washing.’

‘I don’t,’ he said. ‘So that’s it? A wash?’

‘Baptism, it’s called.’

‘And you have to give up the other gods?’

‘You’re supposed to.’

‘And only have one wife?’

‘Only one wife. They’re strict about that.’

He thought about it. ‘I still think I should do it,’ he said, ‘because Eadred’s god does have power. Look at that dead man! It’s a miracle that he hasn’t rotted away!’

The Danes were fascinated by Eadred’s relics. Most did not understand why a group of monks would carry a corpse, a dead king’s head and a jewelled book all over Northumbria, but they did understand that those things were sacred and they were impressed by that. Sacred things have power. They are a pathway from our world to the vaster worlds beyond, and even before Guthred arrived in Cair Ligualid some Danes had accepted baptism as a way of harnessing the power of the relics for themselves.

I am no Christian. These days it does no good to confess that, for the bishops and abbots have too much influence and it is easier to pretend to a faith than to fight angry ideas. I was raised a Christian, but at ten years old, when I was taken into Ragnar’s family, I discovered the old Saxon gods who were also the gods of the Danes and of the Norsemen, and their worship has always made more sense to me than bowing down to a god who belongs to a country so far away that I have met no one who has ever been there. Thor and Odin walked our hills, slept in our valleys, loved our women and drank from our streams, and that makes them seem like neighbours. The other thing I like about our gods is that they are not obsessed with us. They have their own squabbles and love affairs and seem to ignore us much of the time, but the Christian god has nothing better to do than to make rules for us. He makes rules, more rules, prohibitions and commandments, and he needs hundreds of black-robed priests and monks to make sure we obey those laws. He strikes me as a very grumpy god, that one, even though his priests are forever claiming that he loves us. I have never been so stupid as to think that Thor or Odin or Hoder loved me, though I hope at times they have thought me worthy of them.

But Guthred wanted the power of the Christian holy relics to work for him and so, to Eadred’s delight, he asked to be baptised. The ceremony was done in the open air, just outside the big church, where Guthred was immersed in a great barrel of river-water and all the monks waved their hands to heaven and said God’s work was marvellous to behold. Guthred was then draped in a robe and Eadred crowned him a second time by placing the dead King Oswald’s circlet of gilt bronze on his wet hair. Guthred’s forehead was then smeared with cod oil, he was given a sword and shield, and asked to kiss both the Lindisfarena gospel book and the lips of Cuthbert’s corpse that had been brought into the sunlight so that the whole crowd could see the saint. Guthred looked as though he enjoyed the whole ceremony, and Abbot Eadred was so moved that he took Saint Cuthbert’s garnet-studded cross from the dead man’s hands and hung it about the new king’s neck. He did not leave it there for long, but returned it to the corpse after Guthred had been presented to his ragged people in Cair Ligualid’s ruins.

That night there was a feast. There was little to eat, just smoked fish, stewed mutton and hard bread, but there was plenty of ale, and next morning, with a throbbing head, I went to Guthred’s first witanegemot. Being a Dane, of course, he was not accustomed to such council meetings where every thegn and senior churchman was invited to offer advice, but Eadred insisted the Witan met, and Guthred presided.

The meeting took place in the big church. It had started to rain overnight and water dripped through the crude thatch so that men were forever trying to shift out of the way of the drops. There were not enough chairs or stools, so we sat on the rush-strewn floor in a big circle around Eadred and Guthred who were enthroned beside Saint Cuthbert’s open coffin. There were forty-six men there, half of them clergy and the other half the biggest landowners of Cumbraland, both Danes and Saxons, but compared to a West Saxon witanegemot it was a paltry affair. There was no great wealth on display. Some of the Danes wore arm rings and a few of the Saxons had elaborate brooches, but in truth it looked more like a meeting of farmers than a council of state.

Eadred, though, had visions of greatness. He began by telling us news from the rest of Northumbria. He knew what happened because he received reports from churchmen all across the land, and those reports said that Ivarr was still in the valley of the River Tuede, where he was fighting a bitter war of small skirmishes against King Aed of Scotland. ‘Kjartan the Cruel lurks in his stronghold,’ Eadred said, ‘and won’t emerge to fight. Which leaves Egbert of Eoferwic, and he is weak.’

‘What about Ælfric?’ I intervened.

‘Ælfric of Bebbanburg is sworn to protect Saint Cuthbert,’ Eadred said, ‘and he will do nothing to offend the saint.’

Maybe that was true, but my uncle would doubtless demand my skull as a reward for keeping the corpse undefiled. I said nothing more, but just listened as Eadred proposed that we formed an army and marched it across the hills to capture Eoferwic. That caused some astonishment. Men glanced at each other, but such was Eadred’s forceful confidence that at first no one dared question him. They had expected to be told that they should have their men ready to fight against the Norse Vikings from Ireland or to fend off another assault by Eochaid of Strath Clota, but instead they were being asked to go far afield to depose King Egbert.

Ulf, the wealthiest Dane of Cumbraland, finally intervened. He was elderly, perhaps forty years old, and he had been lamed and scarred in Cumbraland’s frequent quarrels, but he could still bring forty or fifty trained warriors to Guthred. That was not many by the standards of most parts of Britain, but it was a substantial force in Cumbraland. Now he demanded to know why he should lead those men across the hills. ‘We have no enemies in Eoferwic,’ he declared, ‘but there are many foes who will attack our lands when we’re gone.’ Most of the other Danes murmured their agreement.

But Eadred knew his audience. ‘There is great wealth in Eoferwic,’ he said.

Ulf liked that idea, but was still cautious. ‘Wealth?’ he asked.

‘Silver,’ Eadred said, ‘and gold, and jewels.’

‘Women?’ a man asked.

‘Eoferwic is a sink of corruption,’ Eadred announced, ‘it is a haunt of devils and a place of lascivious women. It is a city of evil that needs to be scoured by a holy army.’ Most of the Danes cheered up at the prospect of lascivious women, and none made any more protest at the thought of attacking Eoferwic.

Once the city was captured, a feat Eadred took for granted, we were to march north and the men of Eoferwic, he claimed, would swell our ranks. ‘Kjartan the Cruel will not face us,’ Eadred declared, ‘because he is a coward. He will go to his fastness like a spider scuttling to his web and he will stay there and we shall let him rot until the time comes to strike him down. Ælfric of Bebbanburg will not fight us, for he is a Christian.’

‘He’s an untrustworthy bastard,’ I growled, and was ignored.

‘And we shall defeat Ivarr,’ Eadred said, and I wondered how our rabble was supposed to beat Ivarr’s shield wall, but Eadred had no doubts. ‘God and Saint Cuthbert will fight for us,’ he said, ‘and then we shall be masters of Northumbria and almighty God will have established Haliwerfolkland and we shall build a shrine to Saint Cuthbert that will astonish all the world.’

That was what Eadred really wanted, a shrine. That was what the whole madness was about, a shrine to a dead saint, and to that end Eadred had made Guthred king and would now go to war with all Northumbria. And next day the eight dark horsemen came.

We had three hundred and fifty-four men of fighting age, and of those fewer than twenty possessed mail, and only about a hundred had decent leather armour. The men with leather or mail mostly possessed helmets and had proper weapons, swords or spears, while the rest were armed with axes, adzes, sickles or sharpened hoes. Eadred grandly called it the Army of the Holy Man, but if I had been the holy man I would have bolted back to heaven and waited for something better to come along.

A third of our army was Danish, the rest was mostly Saxon though there were a few Britons armed with long hunting bows, and those can be fearful weapons, so I called the Britons the Guard of the Holy Man and said they were to stay with the corpse of Saint Cuthbert who would evidently accompany us on our march of conquest. Not that we could start our conquering just yet because we had to amass food for the men and fodder for the horses, of which we had only eighty-seven.

Which made the arrival of the dark horsemen welcome. There were eight of them, all on black or brown horses and leading four spare mounts, and four of them wore mail and the rest had good leather armour and all had black cloaks and black painted shields, and they rode into Cair Ligualid from the east, following the Roman wall that led to the far bank of the river and there they crossed by the ford because the old bridge had been pulled down by the Norsemen.

The eight horsemen were not the only newcomers. Men trickled in every hour. Many of them were monks, but some were fighters coming from the hills and they usually came with an axe or a quarterstaff. Few came with armour or a horse, but the eight dark riders arrived with full war-gear. They were Danes and told Guthred they were from the steading of Hergist who had land at a place called Heagostealdes. Hergist was old, they told Guthred, and could not come himself, but he had sent the best men he had. Their leader was named Tekil and he looked to be a useful warrior for he boasted four arm rings, had a long sword and a hard, confident face. He appeared to be around thirty years old, as were most of his men, though one was much younger, just a boy, and he was the only one without arm rings. ‘Why,’ Guthred demanded of Tekil, ‘would Hergist send men from Heagostealdes?’

‘We’re too close to Dunholm, lord,’ Tekil answered, ‘and Hergist wishes you to destroy that nest of wasps.’

‘Then you are welcome,’ Guthred said, and he allowed the eight men to kneel to him and swear him fealty. ‘You should bring Tekil’s men into my household troops,’ he said to me later. We were in a field to the south of Cair Ligualid where I was practising those household troops. I had picked thirty young men, more or less at random, and made sure that half were Danes and half were Saxons, and I insisted they made a shield wall in which every Dane had a Saxon neighbour, and now I was teaching them how to fight and praying to my gods that they never had to, for they knew next to nothing. The Danes were better, because the Danes are raised to sword and shield, but none had yet been taught the discipline of the shield wall.

‘Your shields have to touch!’ I shouted at them, ‘otherwise you’re dead. You want to be dead? You want your guts spooling around your feet? Touch the shields. Not that way, you earsling! The right side of your shield goes in front of the left side of his shield. Understand?’ I said it again in Danish then glanced at Guthred. ‘I don’t want Tekil’s men in the bodyguard.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because I don’t know them.’

‘You don’t know these men,’ Guthred said, gesturing at his household troops.

‘I know they’re idiots,’ I said, ‘and I know their mothers should have kept their knees together. What are you doing, Clapa?’ I shouted at a hulking young Dane. I had forgotten his real name, but everyone called him Clapa, which meant clumsy. He was a huge farm boy, as strong as two other men, but not the cleverest of mortals. He stared at me with dumb eyes as I stalked towards the line. ‘What are you supposed to do, Clapa?’

‘Stay close to the king, lord,’ he said with a puzzled look.

‘Good!’ I said, because that was the first and most important lesson that had to be thumped into the thirty young men. They were the king’s household troops so they must always stay with the king, but that was not the answer I wanted from Clapa. ‘In the shield wall, idiot,’ I said, thumping his muscled chest, ‘what are you supposed to do in the shield wall?’

He thought for a while, then brightened. ‘Keep the shield up, lord.’

‘That’s right,’ I said, dragging his shield up from his ankles. ‘You don’t dangle it around your toes! What are you grinning at, Rypere?’ Rypere was a Saxon, skinny where Clapa was solid, and clever as a weasel. Rypere was a nickname which meant thief, for that was what Rypere was and if there had been any justice he would have been branded and whipped, but I liked the cunning in his young eyes and reckoned he would prove a killer. ‘You know what you are, Rypere?’ I said, thumping his shield back into his chest, ‘you’re an earsling. What’s an earsling, Clapa?’

‘A turd, lord.’

‘Right, turds! Shields up! Up!’ I screamed the last word. ‘You want folk to laugh at you?’ I pointed at other groups of men fighting mock battles in the big meadow. Tekil’s warriors were also present, but they were sitting in the shade, just watching, implying that they did not need to practise. I went back to Guthred. ‘You can’t have all the best men in your household troops,’ I told him.

‘Why not?’

‘Because you’ll end up surrounded when everyone else has run away. Then you die. It isn’t pretty.’

‘That’s what happened when my father fought Eochaid,’ he admitted.

‘So that’s why you don’t have all your best men in the household guard,’ I said. ‘We’ll put Tekil on one flank and Ulf and his men on the other.’ Ulf, inspired by a dream of unlimited silver and lasciviously evil women, was now eager to march on Eoferwic. He was not at Cair Ligualid when the dark horsemen arrived, but had taken his men to collect forage and food.

I divided the household troops into two groups and made them fight, though first I ordered them to wrap their swords in cloth so they wouldn’t end up slaughtering each other. They were eager but hopeless. I broke through both shield walls in the time it took to blink, but they would learn how to fight eventually unless they met Ivarr’s troops first, in which case they would die. After a while, when they were weary and the sweat was streaming down their faces, I told them to rest. I noticed that the Danes sat with the other Danes, and the Saxons with the Saxons, but that was only to be expected and in time, I thought, they would learn trust. They could more or less speak to each other because I had noticed that in Northumbria the Danish and Saxon tongues were becoming muddled. The two languages were similar anyway, and most Danes could be understood by Saxons if they shouted loud enough, but now the two tongues grew ever more alike. Instead of talking about their swordcraft the Saxon earslings in Guthred’s household troops boasted of their ‘skill’ with a sword, though they had none, and they ate eggs instead of eating eyren. The Danes, meanwhile, called a horse a horse instead of a hros and sometimes it was hard to know whether a man was a Dane or a Saxon. Often they were both, the son of a Danish father and Saxon mother, though never the other way around. ‘I should marry a Saxon,’ Guthred told me. We had wandered to the edge of the field where a group of women were chopping straw and mixing the scraps with oats. We would carry the mixture to feed our horses as we crossed the hills.

‘Why marry a Saxon?’ I asked.

‘To show that Haliwerfolkland is for both tribes,’ he said.

‘Northumbria,’ I said bad-temperedly.

‘Northumbria?’

‘It’s called Northumbria,’ I said, ‘not Haliwerfolkland.’

He shrugged as if the name did not matter. ‘I should still marry a Saxon,’ he said, ‘and I’d like it to be a pretty one. Pretty as Hild, maybe? Except she’s too old.’

‘Too old?’

‘I need one about thirteen, fourteen maybe? Ready to pup some babies.’ He clambered across a low fence and edged down a steep bank towards a small stream that flowed north towards the Hedene. ‘There must be some pretty Saxons in Eoferwic?’

‘But you want a virgin, don’t you?’

‘Probably,’ he said, then nodded, ‘yes.’

‘Might be one or two left in Eoferwic,’ I said.

‘Pity about Hild,’ he said vaguely.

‘What do you mean?’

‘If you weren’t with her,’ he said vigorously, ‘you might make a husband for Gisela.’

‘Hild and I are friends,’ I said, ‘just friends,’ which was true. We had been lovers, but ever since Hild had seen the body of Saint Cuthbert she had withdrawn into a contemplative mood. She was feeling the tug of her god, I knew, and I had asked her if she wanted to put on the robes of a nun again, but she had shaken her head and said she was not ready.

‘But I should probably marry Gisela to a king,’ Guthred said, ignoring my words. ‘Maybe Aed of Scotland? Keep him quiet with a bride? Or maybe it’s better if she marries Ivarr’s son. Do you think she’s pretty enough?’

‘Of course she is!’

‘Horseface!’ he said, then laughed at the old nickname. ‘The two of us used to catch sticklebacks here,’ he went on, then tugged off his boots, left them on the bank, and began wading upstream. I followed him, staying on the bank where I pushed under alders and through the rank grass. Flies buzzed around me. It was a warm day.

‘You want sticklebacks?’ I asked, still thinking of Gisela.

‘I’m looking for an island,’ he said.

‘Can’t be a very big island,’ I said. The stream could be crossed in two paces and it never rose above Guthred’s calves.

‘It was big enough when I was thirteen,’ he said.

‘Big enough for what?’ I asked, then slapped at a horsefly, crushing it against my mail. It was hot enough to make me wish I had not worn the mail, but I had long learned that a man must be accustomed to the heavy armour or else, in battle, it becomes cumbersome and so I wore it most days just so that it became like a second skin. When I took the mail off it was as though the gods had given me winged feet.

‘It was big enough for me and a Saxon called Edith,’ he said, grinning at me, ‘and she was my first. She was a sweet thing.’

‘Probably still is.’

He shook his head. ‘She was gored by a bull and died.’ He waded on, passing some rocks where ferns grew and, fifty or so paces beyond he gave a happy cry as he discovered his island and I felt sorry for Edith for it was nothing more than a bank of stones that must have been sharp as razors on her scrawny backside.

Guthred sat and began flicking pebbles into the water. ‘Can we win?’ he asked me.

‘We can probably take Eoferwic,’ I said, ‘so long as Ivarr hasn’t returned.’

‘And if he has?’

‘Then you’re dead, lord.’

He frowned at that. ‘We can negotiate with Ivarr,’ he suggested.

‘That’s what Alfred would do,’ I said.

‘Good!’ Guthred cheered up. ‘And I can offer him Gisela for his son!’

I ignored that. ‘But Ivarr won’t negotiate with you,’ I said instead. ‘He’ll fight. He’s a Lothbrok. He doesn’t negotiate except to gain time. He believes in the sword, the spear, the shield, the war axe and the death of his enemies. You won’t negotiate with Ivarr, you’ll have to fight him and we don’t have the army to do that.’

‘But if we take Eoferwic,’ he said energetically, ‘folk there will join us. The army will grow.’

‘You call this an army?’ I asked, then shook my head. ‘Ivarr leads war-hardened Danes. When we meet them, lord, most of our Danes will join him.’

He looked up at me, puzzlement on his honest face. ‘But they took oaths to me!’

‘They’ll still join him,’ I said grimly.

‘So what do we do?’

‘We take Eoferwic,’ I said, ‘we plunder it and we come back here. Ivarr won’t follow you. He doesn’t care about Cumbraland. So rule here and eventually Ivarr will forget about you.’

‘Eadred wouldn’t like that.’

‘What does he want?’

‘His shrine.’

‘He can build it here.’

Guthred shook his head. ‘He wants it on the east coast because that’s where most folk live.’

What Eadred wanted, I suppose, was a shrine that would attract thousands of pilgrims who would shower his church with coins. He could build his shrine here in Cair Ligualid, but it was a remote place and the pilgrims would not come in their thousands. ‘But you’re the king,’ I said, ‘so you give the orders. Not Eadred.’

‘True,’ he said wryly and tossed another pebble. Then he frowned at me. ‘What makes Alfred a good king?’

‘Who says he’s good?’

‘Everyone. Father Willibald says he’s the greatest king since Charlemagne.’

‘That’s because Willibald is an addled earsling.’

‘You don’t like Alfred?’

‘I hate the bastard.’

‘But he’s a warrior, a lawgiver …’

‘He’s no warrior!’ I interrupted scornfully, ‘he hates fighting! He has to do it, but he doesn’t like it, and he’s far too sick to stand in a shield wall. But he is a lawgiver. He loves laws. He thinks if he invents enough laws he’ll make heaven on earth.’

‘But why do men say he’s good?’ Guthred asked, puzzled.

I stared up at an eagle sliding across the sky’s blue vault. ‘What Alfred is,’ I said, trying to be honest, ‘is fair. He deals properly with folk, or most of them. You can trust his word.’

‘That’s good,’ Guthred said.

‘But he’s a pious, disapproving, worried bastard,’ I said, ‘that’s what he really is.’

‘I shall be fair,’ Guthred said. ‘I shall make men like me.’

‘They already like you,’ I said, ‘but they also have to fear you.’

‘Fear me?’ He did not like that idea.

‘You’re a king.’

‘I shall be a good king,’ he said vehemently, and just then Tekil and his men attacked us.

I should have guessed. Eight well-armed men do not cross a wilderness to join a rabble. They had been sent, and not by some Dane called Hergild in Heagostealdes. They had come from Kjartan the Cruel who, infuriated by his son’s humiliation, had sent men to track the dead swordsman, and it had not taken them long to discover that we had followed the Roman wall, and now Guthred and I had wandered away on a warm day and were at the bottom of a small valley as the eight men swarmed down the banks with drawn swords.

I managed to draw Serpent-Breath, but she was knocked aside by Tekil’s blade and then two men hit me, driving me back into the stream. I fought them, but my sword arm was pinned, a man was kneeling on my chest and another was holding my head under the stream and I felt the gagging horror as the water choked in my throat. The world went dark. I wanted to shout, but no sound came, and then Serpent-Breath was taken from my hand and I lost consciousness.

I recovered on the shingle island where the eight men stood around Guthred and me, their swords at our bellies and throats. Tekil, grinning, kicked away the blade that was prodding my gullet and knelt beside me. ‘Uhtred Ragnarson,’ he greeted me, ‘and I do believe you met Sven the One-Eyed not long ago. He sends you greetings.’ I said nothing. Tekil smiled. ‘You have Skidbladnir in your pouch, perhaps? You’ll sail away from us? Back to Niflheim?’

I still said nothing. The breath was rasping in my throat and I kept coughing up water. I wanted to fight, but a sword point was hard against my belly. Tekil sent two of his men to fetch the horses, but that still left six warriors guarding us. ‘It’s a pity,’ Tekil said, ‘that we didn’t catch your whore. Kjartan wanted her.’ I tried to summon all my strength to heave up, but the man holding his blade at my belly prodded and Tekil just laughed at me, then unbuckled my sword belt and dragged it out from beneath me. He felt the pouch and grinned when he heard the coins chink. ‘We have a long journey, Uhtred Ragnarson, and we don’t want you to escape us. Sihtric!’

The boy, the only one without arm rings, came close. He looked nervous. ‘Lord?’ he said to Tekil.

‘Shackles,’ Tekil said, and Sihtric fumbled with a leather bag and brought out two sets of slave manacles.

‘You can leave him here,’ I said, jerking my head at Guthred.

‘Kjartan wants to meet him too,’ Tekil said, ‘but not as much as he wants to renew your acquaintance.’ He smiled then, as if at a private jest, and drew a knife from his belt. It was a thin-bladed knife and so sharp that its edges looked serrated. ‘He told me to hamstring you, Uhtred Ragnarson, for a man without legs can’t escape, can he? So we’ll cut your strings and then we’ll take an eye. Sven said I should leave you one eye for him to play with, but that if I wanted I could take the other if it would make you more biddable, and I do want you to be biddable. So which eye would you like me to take, Uhtred Ragnarson? The left eye or the right eye?’

I said nothing again and I do not mind confessing that I was scared. I again tried to heave myself away from him, but he had one knee on my right arm and another man was holding my left, and then the knife blade touched the skin just beneath my left eye and Tekil smiled. ‘Say goodbye to your eye, Uhtred Ragnarson,’ he said.

The sun was shining, reflecting off the blade so that my left eye was filled with its brilliance, and I can still see that dazzling brightness now, years later.

And I can still hear the scream.

Three

It was Clapa who screamed. It was a high-pitched shriek like a young boar being gelded. It sounded more like a scream of terror than a challenge, and that was not surprising for Clapa had never fought before. He had no idea that he was screaming as he came down the slope. The rest of Guthred’s household troops followed him, but it was Clapa who led, all clumsiness and savagery. He had forgotten to untie the scrap of torn blanket that protected the edge of his sword, but he was so big and strong that the cloth-wrapped sword acted like a club. There were only five men with Tekil, and the thirty young men came down the steep bank in a rush and I felt Tekil’s knife slice across my cheekbone as he rolled away. I tried to seize his knife hand, but he was too quick, then Clapa hit him across the skull and he stumbled, then I saw Rypere about to plunge his sword into Tekil’s throat and I shouted that I wanted them alive. ‘Alive! Keep them alive!’

Two of Tekil’s men died despite my shout. One had been stabbed and torn by at least a dozen blades and he twisted and jerked in the stream that ran red with his blood. Clapa had abandoned his sword and wrestled Tekil onto the shingle bank where he held him down by brute strength. ‘Well done, Clapa,’ I said, thumping him on the shoulder, and he grinned at me as I took away Tekil’s knife and sword. Rypere finished off the man thrashing in the water. One of my boys had received a sword thrust in his thigh, but the rest were uninjured and now they stood grinning in the stream, wanting praise like puppies that had run down their first fox. ‘You did well,’ I told them, and so they had, for we now held Tekil and three of his men prisoner. Sihtric, the youngster, was one of the captives and he was still holding the slave shackles and, in my anger, I snatched them from him and whipped them across his skull. ‘I want the other two men,’ I told Rypere.

‘What other men, lord?’

‘He sent two men to fetch their horses,’ I said, ‘find them.’ I gave Sihtric another hard blow, wanting to hear him cry out, but he kept silent even though blood was trickling from his temple.

Guthred was still sitting on the shingle, a look of astonishment on his handsome face. ‘I’ve lost my boots,’ he said. It seemed to worry him far more than his narrow escape.

‘You left them upstream,’ I told him.

‘My boots?’

‘They’re upstream,’ I said and kicked Tekil, hurting my foot more than I hurt his mail-clad ribs, but I was angry. I had been a fool, and felt humiliated. I strapped on my swords, then knelt and took Tekil’s four arm rings. He looked up at me and must have known his fate, but his face showed nothing.

The prisoners were taken back to the town and meanwhile we discovered that the two men who had been sent to fetch Tekil’s horses must have heard the commotion for they had ridden away eastwards. It took us far too much time to saddle our own horses and set off in pursuit and I was cursing because I did not want the two men to take news of me back to Kjartan. If the fugitives had been sensible they would have crossed the river and ridden hard along the wall, but they must have reckoned it was risky to ride through Cair Ligualid and safer to go south and east. They also should have abandoned the riderless horses, but they were greedy and took them all and that meant their tracks were easy to follow even though the ground was dry. The two men were in unfamiliar country, and they veered too far to the south and so gave us a chance to block the eastward tracks. By evening we had more than sixty men hunting them and in the dusk we found them gone to ground in a stand of hornbeam.

The older man came out fighting. He knew he had small time left to live and he was determined to go to Odin’s corpse-hall rather than to the horrors of Niflheim and he charged from the trees on his tired horse, shouting a challenge, and I touched my heels to Witnere’s flanks, but Guthred headed me off. ‘Mine,’ Guthred said and he drew his sword and his horse leaped away, mainly because Witnere, offended at being blocked, had bitten the smaller stallion in the rump.

Guthred was behaving like a king. He never enjoyed fighting, and he was far less experienced in battle than I, but he knew he had to make this killing himself or else men would say he sheltered behind my sword. He managed it well enough. His horse stumbled just before he met Kjartan’s man, but that was an advantage for the stumble veered him away from the enemy whose wild blow swept harmlessly past Guthred’s waist while Guthred’s own desperate hack struck the man’s wrist, breaking it, and after that it was a simple matter to ride the enemy down and chop him to death. Guthred did not enjoy it, but knew he had to do it, and in time the killing became part of his legend. Songs were sung how Guthred of Northumbria slew six evildoers in combat, but it had been only one man and Guthred was lucky that his horse had tripped. But that is good in a king. Kings need to be lucky. Later, when we got back to Cair Ligualid, I gave him my father’s old helmet as a reward for his bravery and he was pleased.

I ordered Rypere to kill the second man which he did with an encouraging relish. It was not hard for Rypere because the second man was a coward and only wanted to surrender. He threw away his sword and knelt, shivering, calling out that he yielded, but I had other plans for him. ‘Kill him!’ I told Rypere who gave a wolfish grin and chopped down hard.

We took the twelve horses, stripped the two men of their armour and weapons and left their corpses for the beasts, but first I told Clapa to use his sword to cut off their heads. Clapa stared at me with ox-eyes. ‘Their heads, lord?’ he asked.

‘Chop them off, Clapa,’ I said, ‘and these are for you.’ I gave him two of Tekil’s arm rings.

He gazed at the silver rings as though he had never seen such wonders before. ‘For me, lord?’

‘You saved our lives, Clapa.’

‘It was Rypere who brought us,’ he admitted. ‘He said we shouldn’t leave the king’s side and you’d gone away so we had to follow.’

So I gave Rypere the other two rings, and then Clapa chopped at the dead men and learned how hard it is to cut through a neck, but once the deed was done we carried the bloody heads back to Cair Ligualid and when we reached the ruined town I had the first two corpses pulled from the stream and decapitated.

Abbot Eadred wanted to hang the four remaining prisoners, but I persuaded him to give me Tekil, at least for a night, and I had him brought to me in the ruins of an old building which I think must have been made by the Romans. The tall walls were made of dressed stone and were broken by three high windows. There was no roof. The floor was made of tiny black and white tiles that had once made a pattern, but the pattern had long been broken. I made a fire on the biggest remaining patch of tile and the flames threw a lurid flicker on the old walls. A wan light came through the windows when clouds slid away from the moon. Rypere and Clapa brought Tekil to me, and they wanted to stay and watch whatever I did to him, but I sent them away.

Tekil had lost his armour and was now dressed in a grubby jerkin. His face was bruised and his wrists and ankles were joined by the slave manacles he had intended for me. He sat at the far end of the old room and I sat across the fire from him and he just stared at me. He had a good face, a strong face, and I thought that I might have liked Tekil if we had been comrades instead of enemies. He seemed amused by my inspection of him. ‘You were the dead swordsman,’ he said after a while.

‘Was I?’

‘I know the dead swordsman wore a helmet with a silver wolf on the crown, and I saw the same helmet on you,’ he shrugged, ‘or perhaps he lends you his helmet?’

‘Perhaps he does,’ I said.

He half smiled. ‘The dead swordsman scared Kjartan and his son halfway to death, but that’s what you intended, isn’t it?’

‘That’s what the swordsman intended,’ I said.

‘Now,’ he said, ‘you’ve cut off the heads of four of my men and you’re going to give those heads back to Kjartan, aren’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Because you want to frighten him even more?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘But there have to be eight heads,’ he said. ‘Isn’t that so?’

‘Yes,’ I said again.

He grimaced at that, then leaned against the wall and gazed up at the clouds drifting beside the crescent moon. Dogs howled in the ruins and Tekil turned his head to listen to the noise. ‘Kjartan like dogs,’ he said. ‘He keeps a pack of them. Vicious things. They have to fight each other and he only keeps the strongest. He kennels them in a hall at Dunholm and he uses them for two things.’ He stopped then and looked at me quizzically. ‘That’s what you want, isn’t it? For me to tell you all about Dunholm? Its strengths, its weaknesses, how many men are there and how you can break the place?’

‘All that,’ I said, ‘and more.’

‘Because this is your bloodfeud, isn’t it? Kjartan’s life in revenge for Earl Ragnar’s death?’

‘Earl Ragnar raised me,’ I said, ‘and I loved him like a father.’

‘What about his son?’

‘Alfred kept him as a hostage.’

‘So you’ll do a son’s duty?’ he asked, then shrugged as if my answer would be obvious. ‘You’ll find it hard,’ he said, ‘and harder still if you have to fight Kjartan’s dogs. He keeps them in their own hall. They live like lords, and under the hall’s floor is Kjartan’s treasure. So much gold and silver. A hoard that he never looks at. But it’s all there, buried in the earth beneath the dogs.’

‘Who guards it?’ I asked.

‘That’s one of their jobs,’ Tekil said, ‘but the second is to kill people. It’s how he’ll kill you. He’ll take your eyes first, then you’ll be torn to pieces by his hounds. Or perhaps he’ll take the skin off you inch by inch. I’ve seen him do that.’

‘Kjartan the Cruel,’ I said.

‘He’s not called that for nothing,’ Tekil said.

‘So why do you serve him?’

‘He’s generous,’ Tekil said. ‘There are four things Kjartan loves. Dogs, treasure, women and his son. I like two of those, and Kjartan is generous with both.’

‘And the two you don’t like?’ I asked.

‘I hate his dogs,’ he admitted, ‘and his son is a coward.’

‘Sven?’ I was surprised. ‘He wasn’t a coward as a child.’

Tekil stretched out a leg, then grimaced when the slave shackles checked his foot. ‘When Odin lost an eye,’ he said, ‘he gained wisdom, but when Sven lost an eye he learned fear. He’s courageous enough when he’s fighting the weak, but he doesn’t like facing the strong. But his father, now, he’s no coward.’

‘I remember Kjartan was brave,’ I said.

‘Brave, cruel and brutal,’ Tekil said, ‘and now you’ve also learned that he has a lordly hall filled with hounds that will tear you to bloody scraps. And that, Uhtred Ragnarson, is all that I will tell you.’

I shook my head. ‘You will tell me more,’ I said.

He watched as I put a log on the fire. ‘Why will I tell you more?’ he asked.

‘Because I have something you want,’ I told him.

‘My life?’

‘The manner of your death,’ I said.

He understood that and gave a half-smile. ‘I hear the monks want to hang me?’

‘They do,’ I said, ‘because they have no imagination. But I won’t let them hang you.’

‘So what will you do instead? Give me to those boys you call soldiers? Let them practise on me?’

‘If you don’t talk,’ I said, ‘that’s just what I’ll do because they need the practice. But I’ll make it easy for them. You won’t have a sword.’

Without a sword he would not go to the corpse-hall and that was threat enough to make Tekil talk. Kjartan, he told me, had three crews of men at Dunholm, which amounted to about a hundred and fifty warriors, but there were others in steadings close to the stronghold who would fight for him if they were summoned so that if Kjartan wished he could lead four hundred well-trained warriors. ‘And they’re loyal to him,’ Tekil warned me.

‘Because he’s generous to them?’

‘We never lack for silver or women. What more can a warrior want?’

‘To go to the corpse-hall,’ I said and Tekil nodded at that truth. ‘So where do the slaves come from?’ I asked.

‘From traders like the one you killed. Or we find them for ourselves.’

‘You keep them at Dunholm?’

Tekil shook his head. ‘Only the young girls go there, the rest go to Gyruum. We’ve got two crews at Gyruum.’ That made sense. I had been to Gyruum, a place where there had once been a famous monastery before Ragnar the Elder destroyed it. It was a small town on the south bank of the River Tine, very close to the sea, which made it a convenient place to ship slaves across the water. There was an old Roman fort on Gyruum’s headland, but the fort was not nearly so defensible as Dunholm, which scarcely mattered because if trouble loomed the Gyruum garrison would have time to march south to the larger fortress and find refuge there, taking their slaves with them. ‘And Dunholm,’ Tekil told me, ‘cannot be taken.’

‘Cannot?’ I asked sceptically.

‘I’m thirsty,’ Tekil said.

‘Rypere!’ I shouted. ‘I know you’re out there! Bring some ale!’

I gave Tekil a pot of ale, some bread and cold goat-meat, and while he ate he talked of Dunholm and assured me it was truly impregnable.

‘A large enough army could take it,’ I suggested.

He scoffed at that idea. ‘You can only approach from the north,’ he said, ‘and that approach is steep and narrow, so if you have the greatest army in the world you can still only lead a few men against the defences.’

‘Has anyone tried?’

‘Ivarr came to look at us, stayed four days and marched away. Before that Earl Ragnar’s son came and he didn’t even stay that long. You could starve the place, I suppose, but that will take you a year, and how many men can afford to keep a besieging force in food for a year?’ He shook his head. ‘Dunholm is like Bebbanburg, it’s impregnable.’

Yet my fate was leading me to both places. I sat in silence, thinking, until Tekil heaved at his slave shackles as if to see whether he could snap them. He could not. ‘So tell me the manner of my death,’ he said.

‘I have one more question.’

He shrugged. ‘Ask it.’

‘Thyra Ragnarsdottir.’

That surprised him and he was silent for a while, then he realised that of course I had known Thyra as a child. ‘The lovely Thyra,’ he said sarcastically.

‘She lives?’

‘She was supposed to be Sven’s wife,’ Tekil said.

‘And is she?’

He laughed at that. ‘She was forced to his bed, what do you think? But he doesn’t touch her now. He fears her. So she’s locked away and Kjartan listens to her dreams.’

‘Her dreams?’

‘The gods talk through her. That’s what Kjartan thinks.’

‘And you think?’

‘I think the bitch is mad.’

I stared at him through the flames. ‘But she lives?’

‘If you can call it living,’ he said drily.

‘Mad?’

‘She cuts herself,’ Tekil said, drawing the edge of a hand across his arm. ‘She wails, cuts her flesh and makes curses. Kjartan is frightened of her.’

‘And Sven?’

Tekil grimaced. ‘He’s terrified of her. He wants her dead.’

‘So why isn’t she dead?’

‘Because the dogs won’t touch her,’ Tekil said, ‘and because Kjartan believes she has the gift of prophecy. She told him the dead swordsman would kill him, and he half believes her.’

‘The dead swordsman will kill Kjartan,’ I said, ‘and tomorrow he will kill you.’

He accepted that fate. ‘The hazel rods?’

‘Yes.’

‘And a sword in my hand?’

‘In both hands, if you want,’ I said, ‘because the dead swordsman will kill you all the same.’

He nodded, then closed his eyes and leaned against the wall again. ‘Sihtric,’ he told me, ‘is Kjartan’s son.’

Sihtric was the boy who had been captured with Tekil. ‘He’s Sven’s brother?’ I asked.

‘His half-brother. Sihtric’s mother was a Saxon slave girl. Kjartan gave her to the dogs when he believed she tried to poison him. Maybe she did or maybe he just had a pain in his belly. But whatever it was he fed her to his dogs and she died. He let Sihtric live because he’s my servant and I pleaded for him. He’s a good boy. You’d do well to let him live.’

‘But I need eight heads,’ I reminded him.

‘Yes,’ he said tiredly, ‘you do.’ Fate is inexorable.

Abbot Eadred wanted the four men hanged. Or drowned. Or strangled. He wanted them dead, dishonoured and forgotten. ‘They assaulted our king!’ he declared vehemently. ‘And they must suffer a vile death, a vile death!’ He kept repeating those words with a rare relish, and I just shrugged and said I had promised Tekil an honourable death, one that would send him to Valhalla instead of to Niflheim, and Eadred stared at my hammer amulet and screeched that in Haliwerfolkland there could be no mercy for men who attacked Cuthbert’s chosen one.

We were arguing on the slope just beneath the new church and the four prisoners, all in shackles or ropes, were sitting on the ground, guarded by Guthred’s household troops, and many of the folk from the town were there, waiting for Guthred’s decision. Eadred was haranguing the king, saying that a show of weakness would undermine Guthred’s authority. The churchmen agreed with the abbot, which was no surprise, and chief amongst his supporters were two newly-arrived monks who had walked across the hills from eastern Northumbria. They were named Jænberht and Ida, both were in their twenties and both owed obedience to Eadred. They had evidently been across the hills on some mission for the abbot, but now they were back in Cair Ligualid and they were vehement that the prisoners should die ignominiously and painfully. ‘Burn them!’ Jænberht urged, ‘as the pagans burned so many of the holy saints! Roast them over the flames of hell!’

‘Hang them!’ Abbot Eadred insisted.

I could sense, even if Eadred could not, that the Cumbraland Danes who had joined Guthred were taking offence at the priests’ vehemence, so I took the king aside. ‘You think you can stay king without the Danes?’ I asked him.

‘Of course not.’

‘But if you torture fellow Danes to death they’ll not like it. They’ll think you favour the Saxons over them.’

Guthred looked troubled. He owed his throne to Eadred and would not keep it if the abbot deserted him, but nor would he keep it if he lost the support of Cumbraland’s Danes. ‘What would Alfred do?’ he asked me.

‘He’d pray,’ I said, ‘and he’d have all his monks and priests praying, but in the end he would do whatever is necessary to keep his kingdom intact.’ Guthred just stared at me. ‘Whatever is necessary,’ I repeated slowly.

Guthred nodded, then, frowning, he walked back to Eadred. ‘In a day or two,’ Guthred said loudly enough for most of the crowd to hear him, ‘we shall march eastwards. We shall cross the hills and carry our blessed saint to a new home in a holy land. We shall overcome our enemies, whoever they are, and we shall establish a new kingdom.’ He was speaking in Danish, but his words were being translated into English by three or four folk. ‘This will happen,’ he said, speaking more strongly now, ‘because my friend Abbot Eadred was given a dream sent by God and by the holy Saint Cuthbert, and when we leave here to cross the hills we shall go with God’s blessing and with Saint Cuthbert’s aid, and we shall make a better kingdom, a hallowed kingdom which will be guarded by the magic of Christianity.’ Eadred frowned at the word magic, but did not protest. Guthred’s grasp of his new religion was still sketchy, but he was mostly saying what Eadred wanted to hear. ‘And we shall have a kingdom of justice!’ Guthred said very loudly. ‘A kingdom in which all men will have faith in God and the king, but in which not every man worships the same god.’ They were all listening now, listening closely, and Jænberht and Ida half reared as if to protest Guthred’s last proposal, but Guthred kept speaking, ‘and I will not be king of a land in which I force on men the customs of other men, and it is the custom of these men,’ he gestured at Tekil and his companions, ‘to die with a sword in their hands, and so they shall. And God will have mercy on their souls.’

There was silence. Guthred turned to Eadred and spoke much lower. ‘There are some folk,’ he said in English, ‘who do not think we can beat the Danes in a fight. So let them see it done now.’

Eadred stiffened, then forced himself to nod. ‘As you command, lord King,’ he said.

And so the hazel branches were fetched.

The Danes understand the rules of a fight inside an area marked by stripped branches of hazel. It is a fight from which only one man can emerge alive, and if either man flees the hazel-marked space then he can be killed by anyone. He has become a nothing. Guthred wanted to fight Tekil himself, but I sensed he was only making the suggestion because it was expected of him and he did not really want to face a seasoned warrior. Besides, I was in no mood to be denied. ‘I’ll do them all,’ I said, and he did not argue.

I am old now. So old. I lose count of how old sometimes, but it must be eighty years since my mother died giving birth to me, and few men live that long, and very few who stand in the shield wall live half that many years. I see folk watching me, expecting me to die, and doubtless I will oblige them soon. They drop their voices when they are near me in case they disturb me, and that is an annoyance for I do not hear as well as I did, and I do not see as well as I did, and I piss all night and my bones are stiff and my old wounds ache and each dusk, when I lie down, I make certain that Serpent-Breath or another of my swords is beside the bed so that I can grip the hilt if death comes for me. And in the darkness, as I listen to the sea beat on the sand and the wind fret at the thatch, I remember what it was like to be young and tall and strong and fast. And arrogant.

I was all those things. I was Uhtred, killer of Ubba, and in 878, the year that Alfred defeated Guthrum and the year in which Guthred came to the throne of Northumbria, I was just twenty-one and my name was known wherever men sharpened swords. I was a warrior. A sword warrior, and I was proud of it. Tekil knew it. He was good, he had fought a score of battles, but when he stepped across the hazel branch he knew he was dead.

I will not say I was not nervous. Men have looked at me on battlefields across the island of Britain and they wondered that I had no fear, but of course I had fear. We all have fear. It crawls inside you like a beast, it claws at your guts, it weakens your muscles, it tries to loosen your bowels and it wants you to cringe and weep, but fear must be thrust away and craft must be loosed, and savagery will see you through, and though many men have tried to kill me and so earn the boast that they killed Uhtred, so far that savagery has let me survive and now, I think, I am too old to die in battle and so will dribble away to nothingness instead. Wyrd bið ful aræd, we say, and it is true. Fate is inexorable.

Tekil’s fate was to die. He fought with sword and shield, and I had given him back his mail and, so that no man would say I had an advantage over him, I fought without any armour at all. No shield either. I was arrogant, and I was conscious that Gisela was watching, and in my head I dedicated Tekil’s death to her. It took scarcely a moment, despite my limp. I have had that slight limp ever since the spear thrust into my right thigh at Ethandun, but the limp did not slow me. Tekil came at me in a rush, hoping to beat me down with his shield and then hack me with his sword, but I turned him neatly and then I kept moving. That is the secret of winning a sword fight. Keep moving. Dance. In the shield wall a man cannot move, only lunge and beat and hack and keep the shield high, but inside the hazel boughs litheness means life. Make the other man respond and keep him off balance, and Tekil was slow because he was in mail and I was unarmoured, but even in armour I was fast and he had no chance of matching my speed. He came at me again, and I let him pass me by, then made his death swift. He was turning to face me, but I moved faster and Serpent-Breath took the back of his neck, just above the edge of his mail and, because he had no helmet, the blade broke through his spine and he collapsed in the dust. I killed him quickly and he went to the corpse-hall where one day he will greet me.

The crowd applauded. I think the Saxons among them might have preferred to see the prisoners burned or drowned or trampled by horses, but enough of them appreciated sword work and they clapped me. Gisela was grinning at me. Hild was not watching. She was at the edge of the crowd with Father Willibald. The two spent long hours talking and I knew it was Christian matters they discussed, but that was not my business.

The next two prisoners were terrified. Tekil had been their leader, and a man leads other men because he is the best fighter, and in Tekil’s sudden death they saw their own, and neither put up any real fight. Instead of attacking me they tried to defend themselves, and the second had enough skill to parry me again and again, until I lunged high, his shield went up and I kicked his ankle out from beneath him and the crowd cheered as he died.

That left Sihtric, the boy. The monks, who had wanted to hang these Danes, but who now took an unholy glee in their honourable deaths, pushed him into the hazel ring and I could see that Sihtric did not know how to hold the sword and that his shield was nothing but a burden. His death was a heartbeat away, no more trouble to me than swatting a fly. He knew that too and was weeping.

I needed eight heads. I had seven. I stared at the boy and he could not meet my gaze, but looked away instead and he saw the bloody scrapes in the earth where the first three bodies had been dragged away and he fell to his knees. The crowd jeered. The monks were shouting at me to kill him. Instead I waited to see what Sihtric would do and I saw him conquer his fear. I saw the effort he made to stop blubbing, to control his breath, to force his shaking legs to obey him so that he managed to stand. He hefted the shield, sniffed, then looked me in the eye. I gestured at his sword and he obediently raised it so that he would die like a man. There were bloody scabs on his forehead where I had hit him with the slave shackles.

‘What was your mother’s name?’ I asked him. He stared at me and seemed incapable of speaking. The monks were shouting for his death. ‘What was your mother’s name?’ I asked him again.

‘Elflæd,’ he stammered, but so softly I could not hear him. I frowned at him, waited, and he repeated the name. ‘Elflæd.’

‘Elflæd, lord,’ I corrected him.

‘She was called Elflæd, lord,’ he said.

‘She was Saxon?’

‘Yes, lord.’

‘And did she try to poison your father?’

He paused, then realised that no harm could come from telling the truth now. ‘Yes, lord.’

‘How?’ I had to raise my voice over the noise of the crowd.

‘The black berries, lord.’

‘Nightshade?’

‘Yes, lord.’

‘How old are you?’

‘I don’t know, lord.’

Fourteen, I guessed. ‘Does your father love you?’ I asked.

That question puzzled him. ‘Love me?’

‘Kjartan. He’s your father, isn’t he?’

‘I hardly know him, lord,’ Sihtric said, and that was probably true. Kjartan must have whelped a hundred pups in Dunholm.

‘And your mother?’ I asked.

‘I loved her, lord,’ Sihtric said, and he was close to tears again.

I went a pace closer to him and his sword arm faltered, but he tried to brace himself. ‘On your knees, boy,’ I said.

He looked defiant then. ‘I would die properly,’ he said in a voice made squeaky by fear.

‘On your knees!’ I snarled, and the tone of my voice terrified him and he dropped to his knees and he seemed unable to move as I came towards him. He flinched when I reversed Serpent-Breath, expecting me to hit him with the heavy pommel, but then disbelief showed in his eyes as I held the sword’s hilt to him. ‘Clasp it,’ I said, ‘and say the words.’ He still stared up at me, then managed to drop his shield and sword and put his hands on Serpent-Breath’s hilt. I put my hands over his. ‘Say the words,’ I told him again.

‘I will be your man, lord,’ he said, looking up at me, ‘and I will serve you till death.’

‘And beyond,’ I said.

‘And beyond, lord. I swear it.’

Jænberht and Ida led the protest. The two monks stepped across the hazel branches and shouted that the boy had to die, that it was God’s will that he died, and Sihtric flinched as I tore Serpent-Breath from his hands and whipped her around. The blade, all newly-bloodied and nicked, swept towards the monks and then I held her motionless with her tip at Jænberht’s neck. The fury came then, the battle-fury, the bloodlust, the joy of slaughter, and it was all I could do not to let Serpent-Breath take another life. She wanted it, I could feel her trembling in my hand. ‘Sihtric is my man,’ I said to the monk, ‘and if anyone harms him then they will be my enemy, and I would kill you, monk, if you harm him, I would kill you without a thought.’ I was shouting now, forcing him back. I was nothing but anger and red-haze, wanting his soul. ‘Does anyone here,’ I shouted, at last managing to take Serpent-Breath’s tip away from Jænberht’s throat and whirling the sword around to embrace the crowd, ‘deny that Sihtric is my man? Anyone?’

No one spoke. The wind gusted across Cair Ligualid and they could all smell death in that breeze and no one spoke, but their silence did not satisfy my anger. ‘Anyone?’ I shouted, desperately eager for someone to meet my challenge. ‘Because you can kill him now. You can kill him there, on his knees, but first you must kill me.’

Jænberht watched me. He had a narrow, dark face and clever eyes. His mouth was twisted, perhaps from some boyhood accident, and it gave him a sneering look. I wanted to tear his rotten soul out of his thin body. He wanted my soul, but he dared not move. No one moved until Guthred stepped across the hazel branches and held his hand to Sihtric. ‘Welcome,’ he said to the boy.

Father Willibald, who had come running when he first heard my furious challenge, also stepped over the hazel branches. ‘You can sheathe your sword, lord,’ he said gently. He was too frightened to come close, but brave enough to stand in front of me and gently push Serpent-Breath aside. ‘You can sheathe the sword,’ he repeated.

‘The boy lives!’ I snarled at him.

‘Yes, lord,’ Willibald said softly, ‘the boy lives.’

Gisela was watching me, eyes as bright as when she had welcomed her brother back from slavery. Hild was watching Gisela.

And I was still lacking one severed head.

We left at dawn, an army going to war.

Ulf’s men were the vanguard, then came the horde of churchmen carrying Abbot Eadred’s three precious boxes, and behind them Guthred rode a white mare. Gisela walked beside her brother and I walked close behind while Hild led Witnere, though when she was tired I insisted she climb into the stallion’s saddle.

Hild looked like a nun. She had plaited her long golden hair and then twisted the plaits about her skull, and over it she wore a pale grey hood. Her cloak was of the same pale grey and around her neck hung a plain wooden cross that she fingered as she rode. ‘They’ve been pestering you, haven’t they?’ I said.

‘Who?’

‘The priests,’ I said. ‘Father Willibald. They’ve been telling you to go back to the nunnery.’

‘God has been pestering me,’ she said. I looked up at her and she smiled as if to reassure me that she would not burden me with her dilemma. ‘I prayed to Saint Cuthbert,’ she said.

‘Did he answer?’

She fingered her cross. ‘I just prayed,’ she said calmly, ‘and that’s a beginning.’

‘Don’t you like being free?’ I asked her harshly.

Hild laughed at that. ‘I’m a woman,’ she said, ‘how can I be free?’ I said nothing and she smiled at me. ‘I’m like mistletoe,’ she said, ‘I need a branch to grow on. Without the branch, I’m nothing.’ She spoke without bitterness, as if she merely stated an obvious truth. And it was true. She was a woman of good family and if she had not been given to the church then, like little Æthelflaed, she would have been given to a man. That is woman’s fate. In time I knew a woman who defied it, but Hild was like the ox that missed its yoke on a feast day.

‘You’re free now,’ I said.

‘No,’ she said, ‘I’m dependant on you.’ She looked at Gisela who was laughing at something her brother had just said. ‘And you are taking good care, Uhtred, not to shame me.’ She meant I was not humiliating her by abandoning her to pursue Gisela, and that was true, but only just true. She saw my expression and laughed. ‘In many ways,’ she said, ‘you’re a good Christian.’

‘I am?’

‘You try to do the right thing, don’t you?’ She laughed at my shocked expression. ‘I want you to make me a promise,’ she said.

‘If I can,’ I said cautiously.

‘Promise me you won’t steal Saint Oswald’s head to make up the eight.’

I laughed, relieved that the promise did not involve Gisela. ‘I was thinking about it,’ I admitted.

‘I know you were,’ she said, ‘but it won’t work. It’s too old. And you’ll make Eadred unhappy.’

‘What’s wrong with that?’

She ignored that question. ‘Seven heads are enough,’ she insisted.

‘Eight would be better.’

‘Greedy Uhtred,’ she said.

The seven heads were now sewn into a sack which Sihtric had put on a donkey that he led by a rope. Flies buzzed around the sack, which stank so that Sihtric walked alone.

We were a strange army. Not counting churchmen, we numbered three hundred and eighteen men, and with us marched at least that many women and children and the usual scores of dogs. There were sixty or seventy priests and monks and I would have exchanged every one of them for more horses or more warriors. Of the three hundred and eighteen men I doubted that even a hundred were worth putting in a shield wall. In truth we were not an army, but a rabble.

The monks chanted as they walked. I suppose they chanted in Latin, for I did not understand the words. They had draped Saint Cuthbert’s coffin with a fine green cloth embroidered with crosses and that morning a raven had spattered the cloth with shit. At first I took this to be a bad omen, then decided that as the raven was Odin’s bird he was merely showing his displeasure with the dead Christian and so I applauded the god’s joke, thus getting a malignant look from Brothers Ida and Jænberht.

‘What do we do,’ Hild asked me, ‘if we get to Eoferwic and find that Ivarr has returned?’

‘We run away, of course.’

She laughed. ‘You’re happy, aren’t you?’ she said.

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I’m away from Alfred,’ I said, and I realised that was true.

‘Alfred is a good man,’ Hild chided me.

‘He is,’ I answered, ‘but do you ever look forward to his company? Do you brew special ale for him? Do you remember a joke to tell him? Does anyone ever sit by a fire and try him with riddles? Do we sing with him? All he ever does is worry about what his god wants, and he makes rules to please his god, and if you do something for him it’s never enough because his wretched god just wants more.’

Hild gave me her customary patient smile when I insulted her god. ‘Alfred wants you back,’ she said.

‘He wants my sword,’ I said, ‘not me.’

‘Will you go back?’

‘No,’ I said firmly, and I tried to see into the future to test that answer, but I did not know what the spinners who make our fate planned for me. Somehow, with this rabble of men, I hoped to destroy Kjartan and capture Bebbanburg, and hard sense told me it could not be done, but hard sense would never have imagined that a freed slave would be accepted as king by Saxon and Dane alike.

‘You’ll never go back?’ Hild asked, sceptical of my first answer.

‘Never,’ I said, and I could hear the spinners laughing at me and I feared that fate had tied me to Alfred and I resented that because it suggested I was not my own master. Perhaps I was mistletoe too, except I had a duty. I had a bloodfeud to finish.

We followed the Roman roads across the hills. It took us five days, slow going, but we could go no faster than the monks carrying the saint’s corpse on their shoulders. Every night they said prayers, and every day new folk joined us so that as we marched on the last day across the flat plain towards Eoferwic we numbered close to five hundred men. Ulf, who now called himself Earl Ulf, led the march under his banner of an eagle’s head. He had come to like Guthred, and Ulf and I were the king’s closest advisors. Eadred was also close, of course, but Eadred had little to say about matters of war. Like most churchmen he assumed his god would bring us victory, and that was all he had to contribute. Ulf and I, on the other hand, had plenty to say and the gist of it was that five hundred half-trained men were not nearly enough to capture Eoferwic if Egbert had a mind to defend it.

But Egbert was in despair. There is a tale in a Christian holy book about a king who saw some writing on the wall. I have heard the story a few times, but cannot remember the details, except that it was a king and there were words on his wall and they frightened him. I think the Christian god wrote the words, but I am not even sure about that. I could send for my wife’s priest, for I allow her to employ such a creature these days, and I could ask him for the details, but he would only grovel at my feet and beg that I increase his family’s allowance of fish, ale and firewood, which I do not wish to do, so the details do not matter now. There was a king, his wall had words on it and they frightened him.

It was Willibald who put that story into my head. He was crying as we entered the city, crying tears of joy, and when he learned that Egbert would not resist us, he began shouting that the king had seen the writing on the wall. Over and over he shouted it, and it made no sense to me at the time, but now I know what he meant. He meant that Egbert knew he had lost before he had even begun to fight.

Eoferwic had been expecting Ivarr’s return and many of its citizens, fearing the Dane’s revenge, had left. Egbert had a bodyguard, of course, but most had deserted him so that now his household troops only numbered twenty-eight men and not one of them wanted to die for a king with writing on his wall, and the remaining citizens were in no mood to barricade the gates or man the wall, and so Guthred’s army marched in without meeting any resistance. We were welcomed. I think the folk of Eoferwic thought we had come to defend them against Ivarr rather than take the crown from Egbert, but even when they learned that they had a new king they seemed happy enough. What cheered them most, of course, was the presence of Saint Cuthbert, and Eadred propped the saint’s coffin in the archbishop’s church, opened the lid, and the folk crowded in to see the dead man and say prayers to him.

Wulfhere, the archbishop, was not in the city, but Father Hrothweard was still there and still preaching madness, and he sided instantly with Eadred. I suppose he had seen the writing on the wall too, but the only writing I saw were crosses scratched on doorways. These were supposed to indicate that Christians lived inside, but most of the surviving Danes also displayed the cross as a protection against plunderers, and Guthred’s men wanted plunder. Eadred had promised them lascivious women and heaps of silver, but now the abbot strove mightily to protect the city’s Christians from Guthred’s Danes. There was some trouble, but not much. Folk had the good sense to offer coins, food and ale rather than be robbed, and Guthred discovered chests of silver inside the palace and he distributed the money to his army and there was plenty of ale in the taverns, so for the moment the men of Cumbraland were happy enough.

‘What would Alfred do?’ Guthred asked me on that first evening in Eoferwic. It was a question I was getting used to, for somehow Guthred had convinced himself that Alfred was a king worth emulating. This time he asked me the question about Egbert who had been discovered in his bedchamber. Egbert had been dragged to the big hall where he went on his knees to Guthred and swore fealty. It was a strange sight, one king kneeling to another, and the old Roman hall lit by braziers that filled the upper part with smoke, and behind Egbert were his courtiers and servants who also knelt and shuffled forward to promise loyalty to Guthred. Egbert looked old, ill and unhappy while Guthred was a shining young monarch. I had found Egbert’s mail and given it to Guthred who wore the armour because it made him look regal. He was cheerful with the deposed king, raising him from his knees and kissing him on both cheeks, then courteously inviting him to sit beside him.

‘Kill the old bastard,’ Ulf said.

‘I am minded to be merciful,’ Guthred said regally.

‘You’re minded to be an idiot,’ Ulf retorted. He was in a gloomy mood for Eoferwic had not yielded a quarter of the plunder he had expected, but he had found twin girls who pleased him and they kept him from making too many complaints.

When the ceremonies were over, and after Eadred had bellowed an interminable prayer, Guthred walked with me through the city. I think he wanted to show off his new armour, or perhaps he just wanted to clear his head from the smoke fumes in the palace. He drank ale in every tavern, joking with his men in English and Danish, and he kissed at least fifty girls, but then he led me on to the ramparts and we walked for a time in silence until we came to the city’s eastern side where I stopped and looked across the field to where the river lay like a sheet of beaten silver under a half-moon. ‘This is where my father died,’ I said.

‘Sword in hand?’

‘Yes.’

‘That’s good,’ he said, forgetting for a moment that he was a Christian. ‘But a sad day for you.’

‘It was a good day,’ I said, ‘I met Earl Ragnar. And I never much liked my father.’

‘You didn’t?’ he sounded surprised. ‘Why not?’

‘He was a grim beast,’ I said. ‘Men wanted his approval, and it was grudging.’

‘Like you, then,’ he said, and it was my turn to be surprised.

‘Me?’

‘My grim Uhtred,’ he said, ‘all anger and threat. So tell me what I do about Egbert?’

‘What Ulf suggests,’ I said, ‘of course.’

‘Ulf would kill everyone,’ Guthred said, ‘because then he’d have no problems. What would Alfred do?’

‘It doesn’t matter what Alfred would do.’

‘Yes it does,’ he insisted patiently, ‘so tell me.’

There was something about Guthred that always made me tell the truth to him, or mostly tell the truth, and I was tempted to answer that Alfred would drag the old king out to the market place and lop off his head, but I knew that was not true. Alfred had spared his traitorous cousin’s life after Ethandun and he had permitted his nephew, Æthelwold, to live when that nephew had a better claim to the throne than Alfred himself. So I sighed. ‘He’d let him live,’ I said, ‘but Alfred’s a pious fool.’

‘No he’s not,’ Guthred said.

‘He’s terrified of God’s disapproval,’ I said.

‘That’s a sensible thing to be frightened of,’ Guthred said.

‘Kill Egbert, lord,’ I said vehemently. ‘If you don’t kill him then he’ll try to get the kingdom back. He’s got estates south of here. He can raise men. You let him live and he’ll take those men to Ivarr, and Ivarr will want him back on the throne. Egbert’s an enemy!’

‘He’s an old man, and he’s not well and he’s frightened,’ Guthred said patiently.

‘So put the bastard out of his misery,’ I urged him. ‘I’ll do it for you. I’ve never killed a king.’

‘And you’d like to?’

‘I’ll kill this one for you,’ I said. ‘He let his Saxons massacre Danes! He’s not as pathetic as you think.’

Guthred gave me a reproachful look. ‘I know you, Uhtred,’ he said fondly. ‘You want to boast that you’re the man who killed Ubba beside the sea and unhorsed Svein of the White Horse and sent King Egbert of Eoferwic to his cold grave.’

‘And killed Kjartan the Cruel,’ I said, ‘and slaughtered Ælfric, usurper of Bebbanburg.’

‘I’m glad I’m not your enemy,’ he said lightly, then grimaced. ‘The ale is sour here.’

‘They make it differently,’ I explained. ‘What does Abbot Eadred tell you to do?’

‘The same as you and Ulf, of course. Kill Egbert.’

‘For once Eadred’s right.’

‘But Alfred would not kill him,’ he said firmly.

‘Alfred is king of Wessex,’ I said, ‘and he’s not facing Ivarr, and he doesn’t have a rival like Egbert.’

‘But Alfred’s a good king,’ Guthred insisted.

I kicked the palisade in my frustration. ‘Why would you let Egbert live?’ I demanded, ‘so that folk will like you?’

‘I want men to like me,’ he said.

‘They should fear you,’ I said vehemently. ‘You’re a king! You have to be ruthless. You have to be feared.’

‘Is Alfred feared?’

‘Yes,’ I said, and was surprised to realise I had spoken the truth.

‘Because he’s ruthless?’

I shook my head. ‘Men fear his displeasure.’ I had never realised that before, but it was suddenly clear to me. Alfred was not ruthless. He was given to mercy, but he was still feared. I think men recognised that Alfred was under discipline, just as they were under his rule. Alfred’s discipline was fear of his god’s displeasure. He could never escape that. He could never be as good as he wanted, but he never stopped trying. Me, I had long accepted that I was fallible, but Alfred would never accept that of himself.

‘I would like men to fear my displeasure,’ Guthred said mildly.

‘Then let me kill Egbert,’ I said, and could have saved my breath. Guthred, inspired by his reverence for Alfred, spared Egbert’s life, and in the end he was proved right. He made the old king go to live in a monastery south of the river and he charged the monks to keep Egbert confined to the monastery’s walls, which they did, and within a year Egbert died of some disease that wasted him away to a pain-racked scrap of bone and sinew. He was buried in the big church at Eoferwic, though I saw none of that.

It was high summer by now and every day I feared to see Ivarr’s men coming south, but instead there came a rumour of a great battle between Ivarr and the Scots. There were always such rumours, and most are untrue, so I gave it no credence, but Guthred decided to believe the story and he gave his permission for most of his army to go back to Cumbraland to gather their harvest. That left us very few troops to garrison Eoferwic. Guthred’s household troops stayed and every morning I made them practise with swords, shields and spears, and every afternoon made them work to repair Eoferwic’s wall that was falling down in too many places. I thought Guthred a fool to let most of his men go, but he said that without a harvest his people would starve, and he was quite certain they would return. And again he was right. They did return. Ulf led them back from Cumbraland and demanded to know how the gathering army would be employed.

‘We march north to settle Kjartan,’ Guthred said.

‘And Ælfric,’ I insisted.

‘Of course,’ Guthred said.

‘How much plunder does Kjartan have?’ Ulf wanted to know.

‘Vast plunder,’ I said, remembering Tekil’s tales. I said nothing of the feral dogs that guarded the silver and gold. ‘Kjartan is rich beyond dreams.’

‘Time to sharpen our swords,’ Ulf said.

‘And Ælfric has an even bigger hoard,’ I added, though I had no idea whether I spoke the truth.

But I truly believed we could capture Bebbanburg. It had never been taken by an enemy, but that did not mean it could not be taken. It all depended on Ivarr. If he could be defeated then Guthred would be the most powerful man in Northumbria and Guthred was my friend and he, I believed, would not only help me kill Kjartan and so revenge Ragnar the Elder, but then return me to my lands and to my fortress beside the sea. Those were my dreams that summer. I thought the future was golden if only I could secure the kingdom for Guthred, but I had forgotten the malevolence of the three spinners at the world’s root.

Father Willibald wanted to return to Wessex, for which I did not blame him. He was a West Saxon and he disliked Northumbria. I remember one night when we ate a dish of elder, which is cow’s udder pressed and cooked, and I was devouring it and saying that I had not eaten so well since I was a child, and poor Willibald could not finish a mouthful. He looked as though he wanted to be sick, and I mocked him for being a weak-spined southerner. Sihtric, who was my servant now, brought him bread and cheese instead and Hild and I divided his elder between us. She was a southerner too, but not so choosy as Willibald. It was that night, as he grimaced at the food, that he told us he wanted to go back to Alfred.

We had heard little news of Wessex, except that it was at peace. Guthrum, of course, had been defeated and had accepted baptism as part of the peace treaty he made with Alfred. He had taken the baptismal name of Æthelstan, which meant ‘noble stone’, and Alfred was his godfather, and reports from the south said that Guthrum or whatever he was now called was keeping the peace. Alfred lived, and that was about all we knew.

Guthred decided he would send an embassy to Alfred. He chose four Danes and four Saxons to ride south, reckoning that such a group could ride safely through Danish or Saxon territory, and he chose Willibald to carry his message. Willibald wrote it down, his quill scratching on a piece of newly scraped parchment. ‘By God’s help,’ Guthred dictated, ‘I have taken the kingdom of Northumbria …’

‘Which is called Haliwerfolkland,’ Eadred interrupted.

Guthred waved courteously, as if to suggest that Willibald could decide for himself whether to add that phrase. ‘And I am determined,’ Guthred went on, ‘by God’s grace to rule this land in peace and justice …’

‘Not so fast, lord,’ Willibald said.

‘And to teach them how to brew proper ale,’ Guthred continued.

‘And to teach them …’ Willibald said under his breath.

Guthred laughed. ‘No, no, father! You don’t write that!’

Poor Willibald. That letter was so long that another lambskin had to be stretched, scraped and trimmed. The message went on and on about the holy Saint Cuthbert and how he had brought the army of the holy folk to Eoferwic, and how Guthred would make a shrine to the saint. The letter did mention that there were still enemies who might spoil that ambition, but it made light of them, as though Ivarr and Kjartan and Ælfric were minor obstacles. It asked for King Alfred’s prayers and assured the king of Wessex that prayers were being said for him each day by the Christians of Haliwerfolkland. ‘I should send Alfred a present,’ Guthred said, ‘what would he like?’

‘A relic,’ I suggested sourly.

That was a good suggestion for there was nothing Alfred loved so dearly as a holy relic, but there was nothing much to be had in Eoferwic. The archbishop’s church possessed many treasures, including the sponge on which Jesus had been given wine to drink as he died and it also had the halter from Balaam’s ass, though who Balaam was I did not know, and why his ass was holy was even more of a mystery. The church possessed a dozen such things, but the archbishop had carried them away with him and no one was certain where Wulfhere was. I assumed he had joined Ivarr. Hrothweard said he had a seed from a sycamore tree mentioned in the gospel book, but when we opened the silver box in which the seed was kept there was nothing but dust. In the end I suggested that we drew two of Saint Oswald’s three teeth. Eadred bridled at that, then decided that the idea was not so bad after all, so pliers were fetched and the small chest opened and one of the monks tugged out two of the dead king’s yellow peg-like teeth and they were placed in a beautiful silver pot that Egbert had used to store smoked oysters.

The embassy left on a late August morning. Guthred took Willibald aside and gave him a last message for Alfred, assuring Alfred that though he, Guthred, was a Dane he was also a Christian, and begging that should Northumbria be threatened by enemies that Alfred should send warriors to fight for God’s land. That was pissing into the wind, I thought, for Wessex had enemies enough without worrying about Northumbria’s fate.

I also took Willibald aside. I was sorry he was going, for I liked him, and he was a good man, but I could see he was impatient to see Wessex again. ‘You will do something for me, father,’ I said.

‘If it is possible,’ he said cautiously.

‘Give the king my greetings,’ I said.

Willibald looked relieved as if he had expected my favour to be a great deal more burdensome, which it was, as he would find out. ‘The king will want to know when you will return, lord,’ he said.

‘In good time,’ I answered, though the only reason I now had for visiting Wessex was to retrieve the hoard I had hidden at Fifhaden. I regretted burying that treasure now, for in truth I never wanted to see Wessex again. ‘I want you to find Earl Ragnar,’ I told Willibald.

His eyes widened. ‘The hostage?’ he asked.

‘Find him,’ I said, ‘and give him a message from me.’

‘If I can,’ he said, still cautious.

I gripped his shoulders to make him pay attention and he grimaced from the strength of my hands. ‘You will find him,’ I said threateningly, ‘and you will give him a message. Tell him I am going north to kill Kjartan. And tell him his sister lives. Tell him I will do all I can to find her and keep her safe. Tell him I swear that on my life. And tell him to come here as soon as he is freed.’ I made him repeat it, and I made him swear on his crucifix that he would deliver the message and he was reluctant to make such an oath, but he was frightened of my anger and so he gripped the little cross and made the solemn promise.

And then he went.

And we had an army again, for the harvest was gathered, and it was time to strike north.

Guthred went north for three reasons. The first was Ivarr who had to be defeated, and the second was Kjartan whose presence in Northumbria was like a foul wound and the third was Ælfric who had to submit to Guthred’s authority. Ivarr was the most dangerous and he would surely defeat us if he brought his army south. Kjartan was less dangerous, but he had to be destroyed for there could be no peace in Northumbria while he lived. Ælfric was the least dangerous. ‘Your uncle is king in Bebbanburg,’ Guthred told me as we marched north.

‘Does he call himself that?’ I asked, angry.

‘No, no! He’s got too much sense. But in effect that’s what he is. Kjartan’s land is a barrier, isn’t it? So Eoferwic’s rule doesn’t stretch past Dunholm.’

‘We used to be kings in Bebbanburg,’ I said.

‘You did?’ Guthred was surprised. ‘Kings of Northumbria?’

‘Of Bernicia,’ I said. Guthred had never heard the name. ‘It was all of northern Northumbria,’ I said, ‘and everything around Eoferwic was the kingdom of Deira.’

‘They joined together?’ Guthred asked.

‘We killed their last king,’ I said, ‘but that was years ago. Back before Christianity came.’

‘So you have a claim to the kingship here?’ he asked and, to my astonishment, there was suspicion in his voice. I stared at him and he blushed. ‘But you do?’ he said, trying to sound as if he did not care what I answered.

I laughed at him. ‘Lord King,’ I said, ‘if you restore me to Bebbanburg I shall kneel to you and swear you and your heirs lifelong fealty.’

‘Heirs!’ he said brightly. ‘Have you seen Osburh?’

‘I’ve seen Osburh,’ I said. She was Egbert’s niece, a Saxon girl, and she had been living in the palace when we took Eoferwic. She was fourteen, dark-haired and had a plump, pretty face.

‘If I marry her,’ Guthred asked me, ‘will Hild be her companion?’

‘Ask her,’ I said, jerking my head to where Hild followed us. I had thought Hild might return to Wessex with Father Willibald, but she had said she was not ready to face Alfred yet and I could not blame her for that and so I had not pressed her. ‘I think she’d be honoured to be your wife’s companion,’ I told Guthred.

We camped that first night at Onhripum where a small monastery gave Guthred, Eadred and the host of clergymen shelter. Our army was close to six hundred men now, and almost half of them were mounted, and our campfires lit the fields all about the monastery. As commander of the household troops I camped closest to the buildings and my young men, who now numbered forty, and most of whom possessed mail coats plundered from Eoferwic, slept close to the monastery’s gate.

I stood guard with Clapa and two Saxons for the first part of the night. Sihtric was with me. I called him my servant, but he was learning to use a sword and shield and I reckoned he would make a useful soldier in a year or two. ‘You have the heads safe?’ I asked him.

‘You can smell them!’ Clapa protested.

‘No worse than you smell, Clapa,’ I retorted.

‘They’re safe, lord,’ Sihtric said.

‘I should have eight heads,’ I said, and put my fingers around Sihtric’s throat. ‘Pretty skinny neck, Sihtric.’

‘But it’s a tough neck, lord,’ he said.

Just then the monastery door opened and Gisela, cloaked in black, slipped through. ‘You should be asleep, lady,’ I chided her.

‘I can’t sleep. I want to walk.’ She stared defiantly at me. Her lips were slightly apart and the firelight glinted off her teeth and reflected from her wide eyes.

‘Where do you want to walk?’ I asked.

She shrugged, still looking at me, and I thought of Hild sleeping in the monastery.

‘I’ll leave you in charge, Clapa,’ I said, ‘and if Ivarr comes, kill the bastard.’

‘Yes, lord.’

I heard the guards sniggering as we walked away. I quietened them with a growl, then led Gisela towards the trees east of the monastery for it was dark there. She reached out and took my hand. She said nothing, content to walk close beside me. ‘Aren’t you frightened of the night?’ I asked her.

‘Not with you.’

‘When I was a child,’ I said, ‘I made myself into a sceadugengan.’

‘What’s a sceadugengan?’ The word was Saxon and unfamiliar to her.

‘A shadow-walker,’ I told her. ‘A creature that stalks the dark.’ An owl hooted quite close by and her fingers instinctively tightened on mine.

We stopped under some wind-rustled beech trees. Some small light came through the leaves, cast by the campfires, and I tilted her face up and looked down at her. She was tall, but still a head shorter than me. She let herself be examined, then closed her eyes as I drew a gentle finger down her long nose. ‘I …’ I said, then stopped.

‘Yes,’ she said, as if she knew what I had been about to say.

I made myself turn away from her. ‘I cannot make Hild unhappy.’

‘She told me,’ Gisela said, ‘that she would have gone back to Wessex with Father Willibald, but she wants to see if you capture Dunholm. She says she’s prayed for that and it will be a sign from her god if you succeed.’

‘She said that?’

‘She said it would be a sign that she must go back to her convent. She told me that tonight.’

I suspected that was true. I stroked Gisela’s face. ‘Then we should wait till after Dunholm is taken,’ I said, and it was not what I wanted to say.

‘My brother says I have to be a peace cow,’ she said bitterly. A peace cow was a woman married to a rival family in an attempt to bring friendship, and doubtless Guthred had in mind Ivarr’s son or else a Scottish husband. ‘But I won’t be a peace cow,’ she said harshly. ‘I cast the runesticks and learned my fate.’

‘What did you learn?’

‘I am to have two sons and a daughter.’

‘Good,’ I said.

‘They will be your sons,’ she said defiantly, ‘and your daughter.’

For a moment I did not speak. The night suddenly seemed fragile. ‘The runesticks told you that?’ I managed to say after a few heartbeats.

‘They have never lied,’ she said calmly. ‘When Guthred was taken captive the runesticks told me he would come back, and they told me my husband would arrive with him. And you came.’

‘But he wants you to be a peace cow,’ I said.

‘Then you must carry me off,’ she said, ‘in the old way.’ The old Danish way of taking a bride was to kidnap her, to raid her household and snatch her from her family and carry her off to marriage. It is still done occasionally, but in these softer days the raid usually follows formal negotiations and the bride has time to pack her belongings before the horsemen come.

‘I will carry you off,’ I promised her, and I knew I was making trouble, and that Hild had done nothing to deserve the trouble, and that Guthred would feel betrayed, but even so I tipped Gisela’s face up and kissed her.

She clung to me and then the shouting started. I held Gisela tight and listened. The shouts were from the camp and I could see, through the trees, folk running past fires towards the road. ‘Trouble,’ I said, and I seized her hand and ran with her to the monastery where Clapa and the guards had drawn swords. I pushed Gisela towards the door and drew Serpent-Breath.

But there was no trouble. Not for us. The newcomers, attracted by the light of our campfires, were three men, one of them badly wounded, and they brought news. Within an hour the monastery’s small church blazed with fire and the priests and monks were singing God’s praises, and the message the three men had brought from the north went all through our camp so that newly-woken folk came to the monastery to hear the news again and to be assured that it was true.

‘God works miracles!’ Hrothweard shouted at the crowd. He had used a ladder to climb onto the monastery roof. It was dark, but some people had brought flaming torches and in their light Hrothweard looked huge. He raised his arms so that the crowd fell silent. He let them wait as he stared down at their upturned faces, and from behind him came the solemn chanting of the monks, and somewhere in the night an owl called, and Hrothweard clenched his fists and reached higher still as though he could touch heaven in the moonlight. ‘Ivarr is defeated!’ he finally shouted. ‘Praise God and the saints, the tyrant Ivarr Ivarson is defeated! He has lost his army!’

And the people of Haliwerfolkland, who had feared to fight the mighty Ivarr, cheered themselves hoarse because the biggest obstacle to Guthred’s rule in Northumbria had been swept away. He could truly call himself king at last and so he was. King Guthred.

Four

There had been a battle, we heard, a slaughter battle, a fight of horror in which a dale had reeked of blood, and Ivarr Ivarson, the most powerful Dane of Northumbria, had been defeated by Aed of Scotland.

The killing on both sides had been awesome. We heard more about the fight next morning when nearly sixty new survivors arrived. They had travelled in a band large enough to be spared Kjartan’s attention, and they were still reeling from the butcher’s work they had endured. Ivarr, we learned, had been lured across a river and into a valley where he believed Aed had taken refuge, but it was a trap. The hills on either side of the valley were thick with tribesmen who came howling through the mist and heather to hack into the Danish shield walls. ‘There were thousands of them,’ one man said and he was still shaking as he spoke.

Ivarr’s shield wall held, but I could imagine the ferocity of that battle. My father had fought the Scots many times and he had always described them as devils. Mad devils, he said, sword devils, howling devils, and Ivarr’s Danes told us how they had rallied from that first assault, and used sword and spear to cut the devils down, and still the shrieking hordes came, climbing over their own dead, their wild hair red with blood, their swords hissing, and Ivarr tried to climb north out of the dale to reach the high ground. That meant cutting and slashing a path through flesh, and he failed. Aed had then led his household troops against Ivarr’s best men and the shields clashed and the blades rang and one by one the warriors died. Ivarr, the survivors said, fought like a fiend, but he took a sword thrust to the chest and a spear cut in his leg and his household troops dragged him back from the shield wall. He raved at them, demanding to die in the face of his enemies, but his men held him back and fought off the devils and by then night was falling.

The rearmost part of the Danish column still held, and the survivors, almost all of them bleeding, dragged their leader south towards the river. Ivarr’s son, Ivar, just sixteen years old, assembled the least wounded warriors and they made a charge and broke through the encircling Scots, but scores more died as they tried to cross the river in the dark. Some, weighed down by their mail, drowned. Others were butchered in the shallows, but perhaps a sixth of Ivarr’s army made it through the water and they huddled on the southern bank where they listened to the cries of the dying and the howling of the Scots. In the dawn they made a shield wall, expecting the Scots to cross the river and complete the slaughter, but Aed’s men were almost as bloodied and wearied as the defeated Danes. ‘We killed hundreds,’ a man said bleakly, and later we heard that was true and that Aed had limped back north to lick his wounds.

Earl Ivarr lived. He was wounded, but he lived. He was said to be hiding in the hills, fearful of being captured by Kjartan, and Guthred sent a hundred horsemen north to find him and they discovered that Kjartan’s troops were also scouring the hills. Ivarr must have known he would be found, and he preferred being Guthred’s captive to being Kjartan’s prisoner, and so he surrendered to a troop of Ulf’s men who brought the injured earl back to our camp just after midday. Ivarr could not ride a horse so he was being carried on a shield. He was accompanied by his son, Ivar, and by thirty other survivors, some of them as badly wounded as their leader, but when Ivarr realised he must confront the man who had usurped Northumbria’s throne he insisted that he did so on his own two feet. He walked. I do not know how he did it for he must have been in agony, but he forced himself to limp and every few steps he paused to lean on the spear he used as a crutch. I could see the pain, but I could also see the pride that would not let him be carried into Guthred’s presence.

So he walked to us. He flinched with every step, but he was defiant and angry. I had never met him before because he had been raised in Ireland, but he looked just like his father. He had Ivar the Boneless’s skeletal appearance. He had the same skull-like face with its sunken eyes, the same yellow hair drawn back to the nape of his neck and the same sullen malevolence. He had the same power.

Guthred waited at the monastery entrance and his household troops made two lines through which Ivarr had to walk. Guthred was flanked by his chief men and attended by Abbot Eadred, Father Hrothweard and all the other churchmen. When Ivarr was a dozen paces away he stopped, leaned on the spear and gave us all a scathing look. He mistook me for the king, perhaps because my mail and helmet were so much finer than Guthred’s. ‘Are you the boy who calls himself king?’ he demanded.

‘I’m the boy who killed Ubba Lothbrokson,’ I answered. Ubba had been Ivarr’s uncle, and the taunt made Ivarr jerk up his face and I saw a strange green glint in his eyes. They were serpent’s eyes in a skull face. He might have been wounded and he might have had his power broken, but all he wanted at that moment was to kill me.

‘And you are?’ he demanded of me.

‘You know who I am,’ I said scornfully. Arrogance is all in a young warrior.

Guthred gripped my arm as if to tell me to be quiet, then stepped forward. ‘Lord Ivarr,’ he said, ‘I am sorry to see you wounded.’

Ivarr sneered at that. ‘You should be glad,’ he said, ‘and only sorry I am not dead. You’re Guthred?’

‘I grieve you are wounded, lord,’ Guthred said, ‘and I grieve for the men you have lost and I rejoice in the enemies you have killed. We owe you thanks.’ He stepped back and looked past Ivarr to where our army had gathered about the road. ‘We owe Ivarr Ivarson thanks!’ Guthred shouted. ‘He has removed a threat to our north! King Aed has limped home to weep over his losses and to console the widows of Scotland!’

The truth, of course, was that Ivarr was limping and Aed was victorious, but Guthred’s words prompted cheers, and those cheers astonished Ivarr. He must have expected that Guthred would kill him, which is exactly what Guthred should have done, but instead Ivarr was being treated with honour.

‘Kill the bastard,’ I muttered to Guthred.

He gave me a look of utter astonishment, as if such a thing had never occurred to him. ‘Why?’ he asked quietly.

‘Just kill him now,’ I said urgently, ‘and that rat of a son.’

‘You’re obsessed with killing,’ Guthred said, amused, and I saw Ivarr watching and he must have known what I had been saying. ‘You are truly welcome, Lord Ivarr,’ Guthred turned away from me and smiled at Ivarr. ‘Northumbria has need of great warriors,’ he went on, ‘and you, lord, are in need of rest.’

I was watching those serpent eyes and I saw Ivarr’s amazement, but I also saw that he thought Guthred a fool, but it was at that moment I understood Guthred’s fate was golden. Wyrd bið ful aræd. When I had rescued Guthred from Sven and he had claimed to be a king I had thought him a joke, and when he was made a king in Cair Ligualid I still thought the jest was rich, and even in Eoferwic I could not see the laughter lasting more than a few weeks for Ivarr was the great brutal overlord of Northumbria, but now Aed had done our work for us. Ivarr had lost most of his men, he had been wounded, and there were now just three great lords in Northumbria. There was Ælfric, clinging to his stolen land at Bebbanburg, Kjartan, who was the dark spider lord in his fastness by the river, and there was King Guthred, lord of the north, and the only Dane in Britain who led willing Saxons as well as Danes.

We stayed at Onhripum. We had not planned to do that, but Guthred insisted that we wait while Ivarr was treated for his wounds. The monks tended him and Guthred waited on the wounded earl, taking him food and ale. Most of Ivarr’s survivors were wounded, and Hild washed wounds and found clean cloths for bandages. ‘They need food,’ she told me, but we had little enough food already and every day I had to lead forage parties further away to find grain or livestock. I urged Guthred to march again, to take us into country where supplies might be more plentiful, but he was entranced by Ivarr. ‘I like him!’ he told me, ‘and we can’t leave him here.’

‘We can bury him here,’ I suggested.

‘He’s our ally!’ Guthred insisted, and he believed it. Ivarr was heaping praises on him and Guthred trusted every treacherous word.

The monks did their work well, for Ivarr recovered swiftly. I had hoped he would die of his wounds, but within three days he was riding a horse. He still hurt. That was obvious. The pain must have been terrible, but he forced himself to walk and to mount a horse, just as he forced himself to offer fealty to Guthred.

He had little choice in that. Ivarr now led fewer than a hundred men, many of whom were injured, and he was no longer the great warlord he had been, so he and his son knelt to Guthred and clasped his hands and swore their loyalty. The son, sixteen-year-old Ivar, looked like his father and grandfather, lean and dangerous. I distrusted them both, but Guthred would not listen to me. It was right, he said, that a king should be generous, and in showing mercy to Ivarr he believed he was binding the man to him for ever. ‘It’s what Alfred would have done,’ he told me.

‘Alfred would have taken the son hostage and sent the father away,’ I said.

‘He has taken an oath,’ Guthred insisted.

‘He’ll raise new men,’ I warned him.

‘Good!’ He offered me his infectious grin. ‘We need men who can fight.’

‘He’ll want his son to be king.’

‘He didn’t want to be king himself, so why should he want it for his son? You see enemies everywhere, Uhtred. Young Ivar’s a good-looking fellow, don’t you think?’

‘He looks like a half-starved rat.’

‘He’s the right age for Gisela! Horseface and the rat, eh?’ he said, grinning at me and I wanted to strike the grin off his face with my fist. ‘It’s an idea, isn’t it?’ he went on. ‘It’s time she married and it would bind Ivarr to me.’

‘Why not bind me to you?’ I asked.

‘You and I are friends already,’ he said, still grinning, ‘and I thank God for that.’

We marched northwards when Ivarr was sufficiently recovered. Ivarr was certain others of his men had survived the Scottish slaughter and so Brothers Jænberht and Ida rode ahead with an escort of fifty men. The two monks, Guthred assured me, knew the country about the River Tuede and could guide the searchers who looked for Ivarr’s missing men.

Guthred rode with Ivarr for much of the journey. He had been flattered by Ivarr’s oath which he ascribed to Christian magic and when Ivarr dropped behind to ride with his own men Guthred summoned Father Hrothweard and questioned the wild-bearded priest about Cuthbert, Oswald and the Trinity. Guthred wanted to know how to work the magic for himself and was frustrated by Hrothweard’s explanations. ‘The son is not the father,’ Hrothweard tried again, ‘and the father is not the spirit, and the spirit is not the son, but father, son and spirit are one, indivisible and eternal.’

‘So they’re three gods?’ Guthred asked.

‘One god!’ Hrothweard said angrily.

‘Do you understand it, Uhtred?’ Guthred called back to me.

‘I never have, lord,’ I said. ‘To me it’s all nonsense.’

‘It is not nonsense!’ Hrothweard hissed at me. ‘Think of it as the clover leaf, lord,’ he said to Guthred, ‘three leaves, separate, but one plant.’

‘It is a mystery, lord,’ Hild put in.

‘Mystery?’

‘God is mysterious, lord,’ she said, ignoring Hrothweard’s malevolent glance, ‘and in his mystery we can discover wonder. You don’t need to understand it, just be astonished by it.’

Guthred twisted in his saddle to look at Hild. ‘So will you be my wife’s companion?’ he asked her cheerfully.

‘Marry her first, lord,’ Hild said, ‘and then I’ll decide.’

He grinned and turned away.

‘I thought you’d decided to go back to a nunnery,’ I said quietly.

‘Gisela told you that?’

‘She did.’

‘I’m looking for a sign from God,’ Hild said.

‘The fall of Dunholm?’

She frowned. ‘Maybe. It’s an evil place. If Guthred takes it under the banner of Saint Cuthbert then it will show God’s power. Perhaps that’s the sign I want.’

‘It sounds to me,’ I said, ‘as though you have your sign already.’

She moved her mare away from Witnere who was giving it the evil eye. ‘Father Willibald wanted me to go back to Wessex with him,’ she said, ‘but I said no. I told him that if I retire from the world again then first I want to know what the world is.’ She rode in silence for a few paces, then spoke very softly. ‘I would have liked children.’

‘You can have children,’ I said.

She shook her head dismissively. ‘No,’ she said, ‘it is not my fate.’ She glanced at me. ‘You know Guthred wants to marry Gisela to Ivarr’s son?’ she asked.

I was startled by her sudden question. ‘I know he’s thinking about it,’ I said cautiously.

‘Ivarr said yes. Last night.’

My heart sank, but I tried to show nothing. ‘How do you know?’ I asked.

‘Gisela told me. But there is a bride-price.’

‘There’s always a bride-price,’ I said harshly.

‘Ivarr wants Dunholm,’ she said.

It took me a moment to understand, then I saw the whole monstrous bargain. Ivarr had lost most of his power when his army was massacred by Aed, but if he were to be given Dunholm and Dunholm’s lands, then he would be strong again. The men who now followed Kjartan would become his men and in a stroke Ivarr would regain his strength. ‘And has Guthred accepted?’ I asked.

‘Not yet.’

‘He can’t be that stupid,’ I said angrily.

‘Of the stupidity of men,’ Hild said tartly, ‘there seems no end. But do you remember, before we left Wessex, how you told me Northumbria was full of enemies?’

‘I remember.’

‘More full, I think, than you realise,’ she said, ‘so I will stay till I know that you will survive.’ She reached out and touched my arm. ‘I think, sometimes, I am the only friend you have here. So let me stay till I know you’re safe.’

I smiled at her and touched Serpent-Breath’s hilt. ‘I’m safe,’ I said.

‘Your arrogance,’ she said, ‘blinds folk to your kindness.’ She said it reprovingly, then looked at the road ahead. ‘So what will you do?’ she asked.

‘Finish my bloodfeud,’ I said. ‘That’s why I’m here.’ And that was true. That was why I rode north, to kill Kjartan and to free Thyra, but if I achieved those things then Dunholm would belong to Ivarr, and Gisela would belong to Ivarr’s son. I felt betrayed, though in truth there was no betrayal, for Gisela had never been promised to me. Guthred was free to marry her to whoever he wished. ‘Or maybe we should just ride away,’ I said bitterly.

‘Ride where?’

‘Anywhere.’

Hild smiled. ‘Back to Wessex?’

‘No!’

‘Then where?’

Nowhere. I had ridden away from Wessex and would not ride back except to fetch my hoard when I had a safe place to bring it. Fate had me in its grip and fate had given me enemies. Everywhere.

We forded the River Wiire well west of Dunholm and then marched the army to a place the locals called Cuncacester which lay athwart the Roman road five miles north of Dunholm. The Romans had built a fort at Cuncacester, and the walls were still there, though by now they were little more than worn-down banks in green fields. Guthred announced the army would stay close to the decrepit fort, and I said the army should keep marching south until it reached Dunholm, and we had our first argument, because he would not change his mind. ‘What is the purpose, lord,’ I asked, ‘of keeping an army two hours’ march from its enemy?’

‘Eadred says we must stop here.’

‘Abbot Eadred? He knows how to take fortresses?’

‘He had a dream,’ Guthred said.

‘A dream?’

‘Saint Cuthbert wants his shrine here,’ Guthred said. ‘Right there,’ he pointed to a small hill where the coffined saint was surrounded by praying monks.

It made no sense to me. The place was undistinguished, except for the remnants of the fort. There were hills, fields, a couple of farms and a small river, altogether a pleasant enough spot, though why it was the right place for the saint’s shrine was quite beyond my understanding. ‘Our job, lord,’ I said, ‘is to capture Dunholm. We don’t do that by building a church here.’

‘But Eadred’s dreams have always been right,’ Guthred said earnestly, ‘and Saint Cuthbert has never failed me.’

I argued and I lost. Even Ivarr supported me, telling Guthred that we had to take the army closer to Dunholm, but Abbot Eadred’s dream meant that we camped at Cuncacester and the monks immediately began working on their church. The hilltop was levelled, trees were felled, and Abbot Eadred planted stakes to show where the walls should go. He wanted stone for its foundations, and that meant searching for a quarry, or better still an old Roman building that could be pulled down, but it would have to be a large building because the church he planned was bigger than the halls of most kings.

And next day, a late summer’s day, under high scattered clouds, we rode south to Dunholm. We rode to confront Kjartan and to explore the fortress’s strength.

One hundred and fifty men made the short journey. Ivarr and his son flanked Guthred, Ulf and I followed, and only the churchmen stayed at Cuncacester. We were Danes and Saxons, sword-warriors and spearmen, and we rode under Guthred’s new banner that showed Saint Cuthbert with one hand raised in blessing and the other hand holding the jewelled gospel book of Lindisfarena. It was not an inspiring banner, at least not to me, and I wished I had thought to ask Hild to make me a banner, one showing the wolf’s head of Bebbanburg. Earl Ulf had his banner of the eagle’s head, Guthred had his flag, and Ivarr rode under a ragged banner showing two ravens that he had somehow rescued from his defeat in Scotland, but I rode without any standard.

Earl Ulf cursed when we came in sight of Dunholm for it was the first time he had ever seen the strength of that high rock girdled by a loop of the River Wiire. The rock was not sheer, for hornbeams and sycamore grew thick on its steep slopes, but the summit had been cleared and we could see a stout wooden palisade protecting the height where three or four halls had been built. The entrance to the fort was a high gatehouse, surmounted by a rampart where a triangular banner flew. The flag showed a serpent-headed ship, a reminder that Kjartan had once been a shipmaster, and beneath the banner were men with spears, and hanging on the palisade were rows of shields.

Ulf stared at the fortress. Guthred and Ivarr joined him and none of us spoke, for there was nothing to say. It looked impregnable. It looked terrible. There was a path up to the fortress, but it was steep and it was narrow, and very few men would be needed to hold that track as it twisted up through tree stumps and past boulders to the high gate. We could throw all our army up that path, but in places the way was so constricted that twenty men could hold off that army, and all the while spears and rocks would rain down on our heads. Guthred, who plainly believed Dunholm could not be taken, threw me a mute look of pleading.

‘Sihtric!’ I called, and the boy hurried to my side. ‘That wall,’ I said, ‘does it go all the way around the summit?’

‘Yes, lord,’ he said, then hesitated, ‘except …’

‘Except where?’

‘There’s a small place on the southern side, lord, where there’s a crag. No wall there. It’s where they throw the shit.’

‘A crag?’ I asked, and he made a gesture with his right hand to show that it was a sheer slab of rock. ‘Can the crag be climbed?’ I asked him.

‘No, lord.’

‘What about water?’ I asked him. ‘Is there a well?’

‘Two wells, lord, both outside the palisade. There’s one to the west which they don’t often use, and the other’s on the eastern side. But that one’s high up the slope where the trees grow.’

‘It’s outside the wall?’

‘It’s outside, lord, but it has its own wall.’

I tossed him a coin as reward, though his answers had not cheered me. I had thought that if Kjartan’s men took their water from the river then we might post archers to stop them, but no archer could pierce trees and a wall to stop them reaching the well.

‘So what do we do?’ Guthred asked me, and a flicker of annoyance tempted me to ask him why he didn’t consult his priests who had insisted on making the army’s camp so inconveniently far away. I managed to stifle that response. ‘You can offer him terms, lord,’ I said, ‘and when he refuses you’ll have to starve him out.’

‘The harvest is in,’ Guthred pointed out.

‘So it will take a year,’ I retorted. ‘Build a wall across the neck of land. Trap him. Let him see we won’t go away. Let him see starvation coming for him. If you build the wall,’ I said, warming to the idea, ‘you won’t have to leave an army here. Even sixty men should be enough.’

‘Sixty?’ Guthred asked.

‘Sixty men could defend a wall here,’ I said. The great mass of rock on which Dunholm stood was shaped like a pear, its lower narrow end forming the neck of land from where we stared at the high walls. The river ran to our right, swept about the great bulge of stone, then reappeared to our left, and just here the distance between the river banks was a little less than three hundred paces. It would take us a week to clear those three hundred paces of trees, and another week to dig a ditch and throw up a palisade, and a third week to strengthen that palisade so that sixty men would be sufficient to defend it. The neck was not a flat strip of land, but an uneven hump of rock, so the palisade would have to climb across the hump. Sixty men could never defend three hundred paces of wall, but much of the neck was impassable because of stone bluffs where no attack could ever come, so in truth the sixty would only have to defend the palisade in three or four places.

‘Sixty,’ Ivarr had been silent, but now spat that word like a curse. ‘You’ll need more than sixty. The men will have to be relieved at night. Other men have to fetch water, herd cattle and patrol the river’s bank. Sixty men might hold the wall, but you’ll need two hundred more to hold those sixty men in place.’ He gave me a scathing look. He was right, of course. And if two to three hundred men were occupied at Dunholm, then that was two to three hundred men who could not guard Eoferwic or patrol the frontiers or grow crops.

‘But a wall here,’ Guthred said, ‘would defeat Dunholm.’

‘It would,’ Ivarr agreed, though he sounded dubious.

‘So I just need men,’ Guthred said. ‘I need more men.’

I walked Witnere to the east as if I were exploring where the wall might be made. I could see men on Dunholm’s high gate watching us. ‘Maybe it won’t take a year,’ I called back to Guthred. ‘Come and look at this.’

He urged his horse towards me and I thought I had never seen him so out of spirits. Till now everything had come easily to Guthred, the throne, Eoferwic and Ivarr’s homage, but Dunholm was a great raw block of brute power that defied his optimism. ‘What are you showing me?’ he asked, puzzled that I had brought him away from the path.

I glanced back, making sure that Ivarr and his son were out of earshot, then I pointed to the river as if I were discussing the lie of the land. ‘We can capture Dunholm,’ I told Guthred quietly, ‘but I won’t help you if you give it as a reward to Ivarr.’ He bridled at that, then I saw a flicker of guile on his face and knew he was tempted to deny he had ever considered giving Dunholm to Ivarr. ‘Ivarr is weak,’ I told him, ‘and so long as Ivarr is weak he will be your friend. Strengthen him and you make an enemy.’

‘What use is a weak friend?’ he asked.

‘More use than a strong enemy, lord.’

‘Ivarr doesn’t want to be king,’ he said, ‘so why should he be my enemy?’

‘What Ivarr wants,’ I said, ‘is to control the king like a puppy on his leash. Is that what you want? To be Ivarr’s puppy?’

He stared up at the high gate. ‘Someone has to hold Dunholm,’ he said weakly.

‘Then give it to me,’ I said, ‘because I’m your friend. Do you doubt that?’

‘No, Uhtred,’ he said, ‘I do not doubt it.’ He reached over and touched my elbow. Ivarr was watching us with his snake-like eyes. ‘I have made no promises,’ Guthred went on, but he looked troubled as he said it. Then he forced a smile. ‘Can you capture the place?’

‘I think we can get Kjartan out of there, lord.’

‘How?’ he asked.

‘I work sorcery tonight, lord,’ I told him, ‘and tomorrow you talk with him. Tell him that if he stays here then you will destroy him. Tell him you’ll start by firing his steadings and burning his slave pens at Gyruum. Promise that you’ll impoverish him. Let Kjartan understand that nothing but death, fire and misery wait for him so long as he stays here. Then you offer him a way out. Let him go across the seas.’ That was not what I wanted, I wanted Kjartan the Cruel writing under Serpent-Breath, but my revenge was not so important as getting Kjartan out of Dunholm.

‘So work your sorcery,’ Guthred told me.

‘And if it works, lord, you promise you won’t give the place to Ivarr?’

He hesitated, then held his hand to me. ‘If it works, my friend,’ he said, ‘then I promise I will give it to you.’

‘Thank you, lord,’ I said, and Guthred rewarded me with his infectious smile.

Kjartan’s watching men must have been puzzled when we rode away late in the afternoon. We did not go far, but made a camp on a hillside north of the fortress and we lit fires to let Kjartan know that we were still close. Then, in the darkness, I rode back to Dunholm with Sihtric. I went to work my sorcery, to scare Kjartan, and to do that I needed to be a sceadugengan, a shadow-walker. The sceadugengan walk at night, when honest men fear to leave their houses. The night is when strange things stalk the earth, when shape-shifters, ghosts, wild men, elves and beasts roam the land.

But I had ever been comfortable with the night. From a child I had practised shadow-walking until I had become one of the creatures men fear, and that night I took Sihtric up the path towards Dunholm’s high gate. Sihtric led our horses and they, like him, were scared. I had trouble keeping to the path for the moon was hidden by newly arrived clouds, so I felt my way, using Serpent-Breath as a stick to find bushes and rocks. We went slowly with Sihtric holding onto my cloak so that he did not lose me. It became easier as we went higher, for there were fires inside the fortress and the glow of their flames above the palisade acted as a beacon. I could see the shadowed outlines of sentries on the high gate, but they could not see us as we reached a shelf of land where the path dropped a few feet before climbing the last long stretch to the gate. The whole slope between the brief shelf and the palisade had been cleared of trees so that no enemy could creep unseen to the defences and attempt a sudden assault.

‘Stay here,’ I told Sihtric. I needed him to guard the horses and to carry my shield, helmet and the bag of severed heads which I now took from him. I told him to hide behind the trees and wait there.

I placed the heads on the path, the closest less than fifty paces from the gate, the last very near to the trees which grew at the lip of the shelf. I could feel maggots squirming under my hands as I lifted the heads from the sack. I made the dead eyes look towards the fortress, positioning the rotting skulls by feel so that my hands were slimy when at last I was finished. No one heard me, no one saw me. The dark wrapped about me and the wind sighed across the hill and the river ran noisily over the rocks below. I found Sihtric, who was shivering, and he gave me the black scarf that I wrapped about my face, knotting it at the nape of my neck, and then I forced my helmet over the linen and took my shield. Then I waited.

The light comes slowly in a clouded dawn. First there is just a shiver of greyness that touches the sky’s eastern rim, and for a time there is neither light nor dark, nor any shadows, just the cold grey filling the world as the bats, the shadow-fliers, skitter home. The trees turn black as the sky pales the horizon, and then the first sunlight skims the world with colour. Birds sang. Not as many as sing in spring and early summer, but I could hear wrens, chiff-chaffs and robins greeting the day’s coming, and below me in the trees a woodpecker rattled at a trunk. The black trees were dark green now and I could see the bright red berries of a rowan bush not far away. And it was then that the guards saw the heads. I heard them shout, saw more men come to the rampart, and I waited. The banner was raised over the high gate, and still more men came to the wall and then the gate opened and two men crept out. The gate closed behind them and I heard a dull thud as its great locking bar was dropped into place. The two men looked hesitant. I was hidden in the trees, Serpent-Breath drawn, my cheek-pieces open so that the black linen filled the space between the helmet’s edges. I wore a black cloak over my mail that Hild had brightened by scrubbing it with river-sand. I wore high black boots. I was the dead swordsman again and I watched as the two men came cautiously down the path towards the line of heads. They reached the first blood-matted head and one of them shouted up to the fortress that it was one of Tekil’s men. Then he asked what he should do.

Kjartan answered. I was sure it was him, though I could not see his face, but his voice was a roar. ‘Kick them away!’ he shouted, and the two men obeyed, kicking the heads off the path so that they rolled down into the long grass where the trees had been felled.

They came closer until there was only one of the seven heads left and, just as they reached it, I stepped from the trees.

They saw a shadow-faced warrior, gleaming and tall, with sword and shield in hand. They saw the dead swordsman, and I just stood there, ten paces from them, and I did not move and I did not speak, and they gazed at me and one made a sound like a kitten mewing and then, without another word, they fled.

I stood there as the sun rose. Kjartan and his men stared at me and in that early light I was dark-faced death in shining armour, death in a bright helmet, and then, before they decided to send the dogs to discover I was not a spectre, but flesh and blood, I turned back into the shadows and rejoined Sihtric.

I had done my best to terrify Kjartan. Now Guthred had to talk him into surrender, and then, I dared hope, the great fort on its rock would become mine, and Gisela with it, and I dared hope those things because Guthred was my friend. I saw my future as golden as Guthred’s. I saw the bloodfeud won, I saw my men raiding Bebbanburg’s land to weaken my uncle and I saw Ragnar returning to Northumbria to fight at my side. In short I forgot the gods and spun my own bright fate, while at the root of life the three spinners laughed.

Thirty horsemen rode back to Dunholm in mid morning. Clapa went ahead of us with a leafy branch to show we came in peace. We were all in mail, though I had left my good helmet with Sihtric. I had thought of dressing as the dead swordsman, but he had done his sorcery and now we would discover if it had worked.

We came to the place where I had stood and watched the two men kick the seven heads off the path and there we waited. Clapa waved the branch energetically and Guthred fidgeted as he watched the gate. ‘How long will it take us to reach Gyruum tomorrow?’ he asked.

‘Gyruum?’ I asked.

‘I thought we’d ride there tomorrow,’ he said, ‘and burn the slave pens. We can take hawks. Go hunting.’

‘If we leave at dawn,’ Ivarr answered, ‘we’ll be there by noon.’

I looked to the west where there were ominous dark clouds. ‘There’s bad weather coming,’ I said.

Ivarr slapped at a horsefly on his stallion’s neck, then frowned at the high gate. ‘Bastard doesn’t want to speak to us.’

‘I’d like to go tomorrow,’ Guthred said mildly.

‘There’s nothing there,’ I said.

‘Kjartan’s slave pens are there,’ Guthred said, ‘and you told me we have to destroy them. Besides, I have a mind to see the old monastery. I hear it was a great building.’

‘Then go when the bad weather’s passed,’ I suggested.

Guthred said nothing because, in response to Clapa’s waving branch, a horn had suddenly sounded from the high gate. We fell silent as the gates were pushed open and a score of men rode towards us.

Kjartan led them, mounted on a tall, brindled horse. He was a big man, wide-faced, with a huge beard and small suspicious eyes, and he carried a great war axe as though it weighed nothing. He wore a helmet on which a pair of raven wings had been fixed and had a dirty white cloak hanging from his broad shoulders. He stopped a few paces away and for a time he said nothing, but just stared at us, and I tried to find some fear in his eyes, but he just looked belligerent, though when he broke the silence his voice was subdued. ‘Lord Ivarr,’ he said, ‘I am sorry you did not kill Aed.’

‘I lived,’ Ivarr said drily.

‘I am glad of it,’ Kjartan said, then he gave me a long look. I was standing apart from the others, off to one side of the path and slightly above them where the track rose to the tree-covered knob before dropping to the neck. Kjartan must have recognised me, known I was Ragnar’s adopted son who had cost his own son an eye, but he decided to ignore me, looking back to Ivarr. ‘What you needed to defeat Aed,’ he said, ‘was a sorcerer.’

‘A sorcerer?’ Ivarr sounded amused.

‘Aed fears the old magic,’ Kjartan said. ‘He would never fight against a man who could take heads by sorcery.’

Ivarr said nothing. Instead he just turned and stared at me, and thus he betrayed the dead swordsman and reassured Kjartan that he did not face sorcery, but an old enemy, and I saw the relief on Kjartan’s face. He laughed suddenly, a brief bark of scorn, but he still ignored me. He turned on Guthred instead. ‘Who are you?’ he demanded.

‘I am your king,’ Guthred said.

Kjartan laughed again. He was relaxed now, certain that he faced no dark magic. ‘This is Dunholm, pup,’ he said, ‘and we have no king.’

‘Yet here I am,’ Guthred said, unmoved by the insult, ‘and here I stay until your bones have bleached in Dunholm’s sun.’

Kjartan was amused at that. ‘You think you can starve me out? You and your priests? You think I’ll die of hunger because you’re here? Listen, pup. There are fish in the river and birds in the sky and Dunholm will not starve. You can wait here till chaos shrouds the world and I’ll be better fed than you. Why didn’t you tell him that, Lord Ivarr?’ Ivarr just shrugged as though Guthred’s ambitions were no concern of his. ‘So,’ Kjartan rested the axe on his shoulder as if to suggest it would not be needed, ‘what are you here to offer me, pup?’

‘You can take your men to Gyruum,’ Guthred said, ‘and we shall provide ships and you can sail away. Your folk can go with you, except those who wish to stay in Northumbria.’

‘You play at being a king, boy,’ Kjartan said, then looked at Ivarr again. ‘And you’re allied to him?’

‘I am allied to him,’ Ivarr said tonelessly.

Kjartan looked back to Guthred. ‘I like it here, pup. I like Dunholm. I ask for nothing more than to be left in peace. I don’t want your throne, I don’t want your land, though I might want your woman if you have one and if she’s pretty enough. So I shall make you an offer. You leave me in peace and I shall forget that you exist.’

‘You disturb my peace,’ Guthred said.

‘I’ll shit all over your peace, pup, if you don’t leave here,’ Kjartan snarled, and there was a force in his voice that startled Guthred.

‘So you refuse my offer?’ Guthred asked. He had lost this confrontation and knew it.

Kjartan shook his head as if he found the world a sadder place than he had expected. ‘You call that a king?’ he demanded of Ivarr. ‘If you need a king, find a man.’

‘I hear this king was man enough to piss all over your son,’ I spoke for the first time, ‘and I hear Sven crawled away weeping. You bred a coward, Kjartan.’

Kjartan pointed the axe at me. ‘I have business with you,’ he said, ‘but this is not the day to make you scream like a woman. But that day will come.’ He spat at me, then wrenched his horse’s head about and spurred back towards the high gate without another word. His men followed.

Guthred watched him go. I stared at Ivarr, who had deliberately betrayed the sorcery, and I guessed that he had been told I was to hold Dunholm if it fell and so he had made certain it did not fall. He glanced at me, said something to his son and they both laughed.

‘In two days,’ Guthred spoke to me, ‘you start work on the wall. I’ll give you two hundred men to make it.’

‘Why not start tomorrow?’ I asked.

‘Because we’re going to Gyruum, that’s why. We’re going to hunt!’

I shrugged. Kings have whims and this king wanted to hunt.

We rode back to Cuncacester where we discovered that Jænberht and Ida, the two monks, had returned from their search for more of Ivarr’s survivors. ‘Did you find anyone?’ I asked them as we dismounted.

Jænberht just stared at me, as if the question puzzled him, then Ida shook his head hurriedly. ‘We found no one,’ he said.

‘So you wasted your time,’ I said.

Jænberht smirked at that, or perhaps it was just his twisted mouth that made me think he smirked, then both men were summoned to tell Guthred of their journey and I went to Hild and asked her if Christians pronounced curses, and if they did then she was to make a score of curses against Ivarr. ‘Put your devil onto him,’ I said.

That night Guthred tried to restore our spirits by giving a feast. He had taken a farm in the valley below the hill where Abbot Eadred was laying out his church, and he invited all the men who had confronted Kjartan that morning and served us seethed mutton and fresh trout, ale and good bread. A harpist played after the meal and then I told the tale of Alfred going into Cippanhamm disguised as a harpist. I made them laugh when I described how a Dane had thumped him because he was such a bad musician.

Abbot Eadred was another of the guests and, when Ivarr left, the abbot offered to say evening prayers. The Christians gathered at one side of the fire, and that left Gisela with me beside the farm’s door. She had a lambskin pouch at her belt and, as Eadred chanted his words, she opened the pouch and took out a bundle of runesticks bound with a woollen thread. The sticks were slender and white. She looked at me as if to ask whether she should cast them and I nodded. She held them above the ground, closed her eyes, then let them go.

The sticks fell in their usual disarray. Gisela knelt beside them, her face sharply shadowed by the fire’s dying flames. She stared at the tangled sticks a long time, once or twice looking up at me, and then, quite suddenly, she began to cry. I touched her shoulder. ‘What is it?’ I asked.

Then she screamed. She raised her head to the smoky rafters and wailed. ‘No!’ she called, startling Eadred into silence, ‘no!’ Hild came hurrying around the hearth and put an arm about the weeping girl, but Gisela tore herself free and stooped over the runesticks again. ‘No!’ she shouted a third time.

‘Gisela!’ Her brother crouched beside her. ‘Gisela!’

She turned on him and slapped him once, slapped him hard about the face, and then she began gasping as if she could not find breath enough to live, and Guthred, his cheek red, scooped up the sticks.

‘They are a pagan sorcery, lord,’ Eadred said, ‘they are an abomination.’

‘Take her away,’ Guthred said to Hild, ‘take her to her hut,’ and Hild pulled Gisela away, helped by two serving women who had been attracted by her wailing.

‘The devil is punishing her for sorcery,’ Eadred insisted.

‘What did she see?’ Guthred asked me.

‘She didn’t say.’

He kept looking at me and I thought for a heartbeat that there were tears in his eyes, then he abruptly turned away and dropped the runesticks onto the fire. They crackled fiercely and a searing flame leaped towards the roof-tree, then they dulled into blackened squiggles. ‘What do you prefer,’ Guthred asked me, ‘falcon or hawk?’ I stared at him, puzzled. ‘When we hunt tomorrow,’ he explained, ‘what do you prefer?’

‘Falcon,’ I said.

‘Then tomorrow you can hunt with Swiftness,’ he said, naming one of his birds.

‘Gisela’s ill,’ Hild told me later that night, ‘she has a fever. She shouldn’t have eaten meat.’

Next morning I bought a set of runesticks from one of Ulf’s men. They were black sticks, longer than the burned white ones, and I paid well for them. I took them to Gisela’s hut, but one of her women said Gisela was sick with a woman’s sickness and could not see me. I left the sticks for her. They told the future and I would have done better, much better, to have cast them myself. Instead I went hunting.

It was a hot day. There were still dark clouds heaped in the west, but they seemed to be no nearer, and the sun burned fiercely so that only the score of troops who rode to guard us wore mail. We did not expect to meet enemies. Guthred led us, and Ivarr and his son rode, and Ulf was there, and so were the two monks, Jænberht and Ida, who came to say prayers for the monks who had once been massacred at Gyruum. I did not tell them that I had been present at the massacre that had been the work of Ragnar the Elder. He had cause. The monks had murdered Danes and Ragnar had punished them, though these days the story is always told that the monks were innocently at prayer and died as spotless martyrs. In truth they were malevolent killers of women and children, but what chance does truth have when priests tell tales?

Guthred was feverishly happy that day. He talked incessantly, laughed at his own jests, and even tried to stir a smile on Ivarr’s skull face. Ivarr said little except to give his son advice on hawking. Guthred had given me his falcon to fly, but at first we rode through wooded country where a falcon could not hunt, so his goshawk had an advantage and brought down two rooks among the branches. He whooped with each kill. It was not till we reached the open ground by the river that my falcon could fly high and stoop fast to strike at a duck, but the falcon missed and the duck flew into the safety of a grove of alders. ‘Not your lucky day,’ Guthred told me.

‘We might all be unlucky soon,’ I said, and pointed westwards to where the clouds were gathering. ‘There’s going to be a storm.’

‘Maybe tonight,’ he said dismissively, ‘but not till after dark.’ He had given his goshawk to a servant and I handed the falcon to another. The river was on our left now and the scorched stone buildings of Gyruum’s monastery were ahead, built on the river bank where the ground rose above the long salt-marshes. It was low tide and wicker fish traps stretched into the river that met the sea a short distance eastwards.

‘Gisela has a fever,’ Guthred told me.

‘I heard.’

‘Eadred says he’ll touch her with the cloth that covers Cuthbert’s face. He says it will cure her.’

‘I hope it does,’ I said dutifully. Ahead of us Ivarr and his son rode with a dozen of their followers in mail. If they turned now, I thought, they could slaughter Guthred and me, so I leaned over and checked his horse so that Ulf and his men could catch up with us.

Guthred let me do that, but was amused. ‘He’s no enemy, Uhtred.’

‘One day,’ I said, ‘you will have to kill him. On that day, lord, you’ll be safe.’

‘I’m not safe now?’

‘You have a small army, an untrained army,’ I said, ‘and Ivarr will raise men again. He’ll hire sword-Danes, shield-Danes and spear-Danes until he is lord of Northumbria again. He’s weak now, but he won’t always be weak. That’s why he wants Dunholm, because it will make him strong again.’

‘I know,’ Guthred said patiently. ‘I know all that.’

‘And if you marry Gisela to Ivarr’s son,’ I said, ‘how many men will that bring you?’

He looked at me sharply. ‘How many men can you bring me?’ he asked, but did not wait for my answer. Instead he put spurs to his horse and hurried up the slope to the ruined monastery that Kjartan’s men had used as their hall. They had made a thatched roof between the stone walls, and beneath it was a hearth and a dozen sleeping platforms. The men who had lived here must have gone back to Dunholm before we ever crossed the river on our way north for the hall had long been deserted. The hearth was cold. Beyond the hill, in the wide valley between the monastery and the old Roman fort on its headland, were slave pens that were just wattle hurdles staked into enclosures. All were deserted. Some folk lived up at the old fort and they tended a high beacon which they were supposed to light if raiders came to the river. I doubted if the beacon was ever used for no Dane would raid Kjartan’s land, but there was a single ship beneath the beacon’s hill, anchored where the River Tine made its turn towards the sea. ‘We’ll see what business he has,’ Guthred said grimly, as if he resented the ship’s presence, then he ordered his household troops to pull down the wattle fences and burn them with the thatch roof. ‘Burn it all!’ he ordered. He watched as the work began, then grinned at me. ‘Shall we see what ship that is?’

‘It’s a trader,’ I said. It was a Danish ship, for no other kind sailed this coast, but she was plainly no warship for her hull was shorter and her beam wider than any warrior’s boat.

‘Then let’s tell him there’s no trade here any more,’ Guthred said, ‘at least none in slaves.’

He and I rode eastwards. A dozen men came with us. Ulf was one, Ivarr and his son came too, and tagging behind them was Jænberht who kept urging Guthred to start rebuilding the monastery.

‘We must finish Saint Cuthbert’s church first,’ Guthred told Jænberht.

‘But the house here must be remade,’ Jænberht insisted, ‘it’s a sacred place. The most holy and blessed Bede lived here.’

‘It will be rebuilt,’ Guthred promised, then he curbed his horse beside a stone cross that had been toppled from its pedestal and now lay half buried in the soil and overgrown with grass and weeds. It was a fine piece of carving, writhing with beasts, plants and saints. ‘And this cross shall stand again,’ he said and then looked around the wide river bend. ‘A good place,’ he said.

‘It is,’ I agreed.

‘If the monks come back,’ he said, ‘then we can make it prosperous again. Fish, salt, crops, cattle. How does Alfred raise money?’

‘Taxes,’ I said.

‘He taxes the church too?’

‘He doesn’t like taxing the church,’ I said, ‘but he does when things are hard. They have to pay to be protected, after all.’

‘He mints his own money?’

‘Yes, lord.’

He laughed. ‘It’s complicated, being a king. Maybe I should visit Alfred. Ask his advice.’

‘He’d like that,’ I said.

‘He’d welcome me?’ He sounded wary.

‘He would.’

‘Though I’m a Dane?’

‘Because you’re a Christian,’ I said.

He thought about that, then rode on to where the path twisted through a marsh and crossed a small shallow stream where two ceorls were setting eel traps. They knelt as we passed and Guthred acknowledged them with a smile which neither of them saw because their heads were bowed so low. Four men were wading ashore from the moored ship and none of them had weapons and I supposed they were merely coming to greet us and assure us that they meant no harm. ‘Tell me,’ Guthred said suddenly, ‘is Alfred different because he’s a Christian?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘In what way?’

‘He’s determined to be good, lord,’ I said.

‘Our religion,’ he said, momentarily forgetting that he had been baptised, ‘doesn’t do that, does it?’

‘It doesn’t?’

‘Odin and Thor want us to be brave,’ he said, ‘and they want us to respect them, but they don’t make us good.’

‘No,’ I agreed.

‘So Christianity is different,’ he insisted, then curbed his horse where the path ended in a low ridge of sand and shingle. The four men waited a hundred paces away at the shingle’s far end. ‘Give me your sword,’ Guthred said suddenly.

‘My sword?’

He smiled patiently. ‘Those sailors are not armed, Uhtred, and I want you to go and talk to them, so give me your sword.’

I was only armed with Serpent-Breath. ‘I hate being unarmed, lord,’ I said in mild protest.

‘It is a courtesy, Uhtred,’ Guthred insisted, and held out his hand.

I did not move. No courtesy I had ever heard of suggested that a lord should take off his sword before talking to common seamen. I stared at Guthred and behind me I heard blades hissing from scabbards.

‘Give me the sword,’ Guthred said, ‘then walk to the men. I’ll hold your horse.’

I remember looking around me and seeing the marsh behind and the shingle ridge in front and I was thinking that I only had to dig my spurs in and I could gallop away, but Guthred reached over and gripped my reins. ‘Greet them for me,’ he said in a forced voice.

I could still have galloped away, tearing the reins from his hand, but then Ivarr and his son crowded me. Both men had drawn swords and Ivarr’s stallion blocked Witnere who snapped in irritation. I calmed the horse. ‘What have you done, lord?’ I asked Guthred.

For a heartbeat he did not speak. Indeed he seemed incapable of looking at me, but then he made himself answer. ‘You told me,’ he said, ‘that Alfred would do whatever is necessary to preserve his kingdom. That is what I’m doing.’

‘And what is that?’

He had the grace to look embarrassed. ‘Ælfric of Bebbanburg is bringing troops to help capture Dunholm,’ he said. I just stared at him. ‘He is coming,’ Guthred went on, ‘to give me an oath of loyalty.’

‘I gave you that oath,’ I said bitterly.

‘And I promised I would free you from it,’ he said, ‘which now I do.’

‘So you’re giving me to my uncle?’ I asked.

He shook his head. ‘Your uncle’s price was your life, but I refused it. You are to go away, Uhtred. That is all. You are to go far away. And in exchange for your exile I gain an ally with many warriors. You were right. I need warriors. Ælfric of Bebbanburg can provide them.’

‘And why must an exile go unarmed?’ I asked, touching Serpent-Breath’s hilt.

‘Give me the sword,’ Guthred said. Two of Ivarr’s men were behind me, also with drawn swords.

‘Why must I go unarmed?’ I asked again.

Guthred glanced at the ship, then back to me. He forced himself to say what needed to be said. ‘You will go unarmed,’ he told me, ‘because what I was, you must be. That is the price of Dunholm.’

For a heartbeat I could neither breathe nor speak and it took me a moment to convince myself that he meant what I knew he meant. ‘You’re selling me into slavery?’ I asked.

‘On the contrary,’ he said, ‘I paid to have you enslaved. So go with God, Uhtred.’

I hated Guthred then, though a small part of me recognised that he was being ruthless and that is part of kingship. I could provide him with two swords, nothing more, but my uncle Ælfric could bring him three hundred swords and spears, and Guthred had made his choice. It was, I suppose, the right choice and I was stupid not to have seen it coming.

‘Go,’ Guthred said more harshly and I vowed revenge and rammed my heels back and Witnere lunged forward, but was immediately knocked off balance by Ivarr’s horse so that he stumbled onto his foreknees and I was pitched onto his neck. ‘Don’t kill him!’ Guthred shouted, and Ivarr’s son slapped the flat of his sword-blade against my head so that I fell off and, by the time I had regained my feet, Witnere was safe in Ivarr’s grasp and Ivarr’s men were above me with their sword-blades at my neck.

Guthred had not moved. He just watched me, but behind him with a smile on his crooked face, was Jænberht and I understood then. ‘Did that bastard arrange this?’ I asked Guthred.

‘Brother Jænberht and Brother Ida are from your uncle’s household,’ Guthred admitted.

I knew then what a fool I had been. The two monks had come to Cair Ligualid and ever since they had been negotiating my fate and I had been oblivious of it.

I dusted off my leather jerkin. ‘Grant me a favour, lord?’ I said.

‘If I can.’

‘Give my sword and my horse to Hild. Give her everything of mine and tell her to keep them for me.’

He paused. ‘You will not be coming back, Uhtred,’ he said gently.

‘Grant me that favour, lord,’ I insisted.

‘I shall do all that,’ Guthred promised, ‘but give me the sword first.’

I unbuckled Serpent-Breath. I thought of drawing her and laying about me with her good blade, but I would have died in an eyeblink and so I kissed her hilt and then handed her up to Guthred. Then I slid off my arm rings, those marks of a warrior, and I held those to him. ‘Give these to Hild,’ I asked him.

‘I will,’ he said, taking the rings, then he looked at the four men who waited for me. ‘Earl Ulf found these men,’ Guthred said, nodding at the waiting slavers, ‘and they do not know who you are, only that they are to take you away.’ That anonymity was a gift, of sorts. If the slavers had known how badly Ælfric wanted me, or how much Kjartan the Cruel would pay for my eyes, then I would not have lived a week. ‘Now go,’ Guthred commanded me.

‘You could have just sent me away,’ I told him bitterly.

‘Your uncle has a price,’ Guthred said, ‘and this is it. He wanted your death, but accepted this instead.’

I looked beyond him to where the black clouds heaped in the west like mountains. They were much closer and darker, and a freshening wind was chilling the air. ‘You must go too, lord,’ I said, ‘for a storm is coming.’

He said nothing and I walked away. Fate is inexorable. At the root of life’s tree the three spinners had decided that the thread of gold that made my life fortunate had come to its end. I remember my boots crunching on the shingle and remember the white gulls flying free.

I had been wrong about the four men. They were armed, not with swords or spears, but with short cudgels. They watched me approach as Guthred and Ivarr watched me walk away, and I knew what was to happen and I did not try to resist. I walked to the four men and one of them stepped forward and struck me in the belly to drive all the breath from my body, and another hit me on the side of the head so that I fell onto the shingle and then I was hit again and knew nothing more. I was a lord of Northumbria, a sword-warrior, the man who had killed Ubba Lothbrokson beside the sea and who had brought down Svein of the White Horse, and now I was a slave.

PART TWO

The Red Ship

Five

The shipmaster, my master, was called Sverri Ravnson and had been one of the four men who greeted me with blows. He was a head shorter than me, ten years older, and twice as wide. He had a face flat as an oar-blade, a nose that had been broken to a pulp, a black beard shot through with wiry grey strands, three teeth and no neck. He was one of the strongest man I ever knew. He did not speak much.

He was a trader and his ship was called Trader. She was a tough craft, well built and strongly rigged, with benches for sixteen oarsmen, though when I joined Sverri’s crew he only had eleven rowers so he was glad to have me to balance the numbers. The rowers were all slaves. The five free crew members never touched an oar, but were there to relieve Sverri on the steering oar, to make certain we worked, to ensure we did not escape and to throw our bodies overboard if we died. Two, like Sverri, were Norsemen, two were Danes and the fifth was a Frisian called Hakka and it was Hakka who riveted the slave manacles onto my ankles. They first stripped me of my fine clothes, leaving only my shirt. They tossed me a pair of louse-ridden breeches. Hakka, having chained my ankles, tore the shirt open at the left shoulder and carved a big S in the flesh of my upper arm with a short knife. The blood poured down to my elbow where it was diluted by the first few specks of rain gusting from the west. ‘I should burn your skin,’ Hakka said, ‘but a ship’s no place for a fire.’ He scooped filth from the bilge and rubbed it into the newly opened cut. It turned foul, that wound, and wept pus and gave me a fever, but when it healed I was left with Sverri’s mark on my arm. I have it to this day.

The slave mark almost had no time to heal, for we all came near death that first night. The wind suddenly blew hard, turning the river into a welter of small, hurrying whitecaps, and Trader jerked at her anchor line, and the wind rose and the rain was being driven horizontally. The ship was bucking and shuddering, the tide was ebbing so that wind and current were trying to drive us ashore, and the anchor, that was probably nothing more than a big stone ring that held the ship by weight alone, began to drag. ‘Oars!’ Sverri shouted and I thought he wanted us to row against the pressure of wind and tide, but instead he slashed through the quivering hide rope that tied us to the anchor and Trader leaped away. ‘Row, you bastards!’ Sverri shouted, ‘row!’

‘Row!’ Hakka echoed and slashed at us with his whip. ‘Row!’

‘You want to live?’ Sverri bellowed over the wind, ‘row!’

He took us to sea. If we had stayed in the river we would have been driven ashore, but we would have been safe because the tide was dropping and the next high tide would have floated us off, but Sverri had a hold full of cargo and he feared that if he were stranded he would be pillaged by the sullen folk who lived in Gyruum’s hovels. He reckoned it was better to risk death at sea than to be murdered ashore, and so he took us into a grey chaos of wind, darkness and water. He wanted to turn north at the river mouth and take shelter by the coast and that was not such a bad idea, for we might have lain in the lee of the land and ridden out the storm, but he had not reckoned with the force of the tide and, row as we might, and despite the lashes put onto our shoulders, we could not haul the boat back. Instead we were swept to sea and within moments we had to stop rowing, plug the oar-holes and start bailing the boat. All night we scooped water from the bilge and chucked it overboard and I remember the weariness of it, the bone-aching tiredness, and the fear of those vast unseen seas as they lifted us and roared beneath us. Sometimes we turned broadside onto the waves and I thought we must capsize and I remember clinging to a bench as the oars clattered across the hull and water churned about my thighs, but somehow Trader staggered upwards and we hurled water over the side, and why she did not sink I will never know.

Dawn found us half waterlogged in an angry, but no longer vicious sea. No land was in sight. My ankles were bloody for the manacles had bitten into the skin during the night, but I was still bailing. No one else moved. The other slaves, I had not even learned their names yet, were slumped on the benches and the crew was huddled under the steering platform where Sverri was clinging to the steering oar and I felt his dark eyes watching me as I scooped up buckets of water and poured them back to the ocean. I wanted to stop. I was bleeding, bruised and exhausted, but I would not show weakness. I hurled bucket after bucket, and my arms were aching and my belly was sour and my eyes stung from the salt and I was miserable, but I would not stop. There was vomit slopping in the bilge, but it was not mine.

Sverri stopped me in the end. He came down the boat and struck me across the shoulders with a short whip and I collapsed onto a bench, and a moment later two of his men brought us stale bread soaked in seawater and a skin of sour ale. No one spoke. The wind slapped the leather halliards against the short mast and the waves hissed down the hull and the wind was bitter and rain pitted the sea. I clutched the hammer amulet. They had left me that, for it was a poor thing of carved oxbone and had no value. I prayed to all the gods. I prayed to Njord to let me live in his angry sea, and I prayed to the other gods for revenge. I thought Sverri and his men must sleep and when they slept I would kill them, but I fell asleep before they did and we all slept as the wind lost its fury, and some time later we slaves were kicked awake and we hauled the sail up the mast and ran before the rain towards the grey-edged east.

Four of the rowers were Saxons, three were Norsemen, three were Danes and the last man was Irish. He was on the bench across from me and I did not know he was Irish at first for he rarely spoke. He was wiry, dark-skinned, black-haired and, though only a year or so older than me, he bore the battle scars of an old warrior. I noted how Sverri’s men watched him, fearing he was trouble and when, later that day, the wind went southerly and we were ordered to row, the Irishman pulled his oar with an angry expression. That was when I asked him his name and Hakka came storming down the boat and struck me across the face with a leather knout. Blood ran from my nostrils. Hakka laughed, then became angry because I showed no sign of pain and so hit me again. ‘You do not speak,’ he told me, ‘you are nothing. What are you?’ I did not answer, so he hit me again, harder. ‘What are you?’ he demanded.

‘Nothing,’ I grunted.

‘You spoke!’ he snarled, and hit me again. ‘You mustn’t speak!’ he screamed into my face and slashed me around the scalp with his knout. He laughed, having tricked me into breaking the rules, and went back to the prow. So we rowed in silence, and we slept through the dark, though before we slept they chained our manacles together. They always did that and one man always had an arrow on a bow in case any of us tried to fight as the man threading the chain bent in front of us.

Sverri knew how to run a slave ship. In those first days I looked for a chance to fight and had none. The manacles never came off. When we made port we were ordered into the space beneath the steering platform and it would be closed up by planks that were nailed into place. We could talk there and that is how I learned something of the other slaves. The four Saxons had all been sold into slavery by Kjartan. They had been farmers and they cursed the Christian god for their predicament. The Norsemen and Danes were thieves, condemned to slavery by their own people, and all of them were sullen brutes. I learned little of Finan, the Irishman, for he was tight-lipped, silent and watchful. He was the smallest of us, but strong, with a sharp face behind his black beard. Like the Saxons he was a Christian, or at least he had the splintered remnants of a wooden cross hanging on a leather thong, and sometimes he would kiss the wood and hold it to his lips as he silently prayed. He might not have spoken much, but he listened intently as the other slaves spoke of women, food and the lives they had left behind, and I daresay they lied about all three. I kept quiet, just as Finan kept quiet, though sometimes, if the others were sleeping, he would sing a sad song in his own language.

We would be let out of the dark prison to load cargo that went into the deep hold in the centre of the ship just aft of the mast. The crew sometimes got drunk in port, but two of them were always sober and those two guarded us. Sometimes, if we anchored offshore, Sverri would let us stay on deck, but he chained our manacles together so none of us could attempt an escape.

My first voyage on Trader was from the storm-racked coast of Northumbria to Frisia where we threaded a strange seascape of low islands, sandbanks, running tides and glistening mudflats. We called at some miserable harbour where four other ships were loading cargoes and all four ships were crewed by slaves. We filled Trader’s hold with eelskins, smoked fish and otter-pelts.

From Frisia we ran south to a port in Frankia. I learned it was Frankia because Sverri went ashore and came back in a black mood. ‘If a Frank is your friend,’ he snarled to his crew, ‘you can be sure he’s not your neighbour.’ He saw me looking at him and lashed out with his hand, cutting my forehead with a silver and amber ring he wore. ‘Bastard Franks,’ he said, ‘bastard Franks! Tight-moneyed misbegotten bastard Franks.’ That evening he cast the runesticks on the steering platform. Like all sailors, Sverri was a superstitious man and he kept a sheaf of black runesticks in a leather bag and, locked away beneath the platform, I heard the thin sticks clatter on the deck above. He must have peered at the pattern the fallen sticks made and found some hope in their array, for he decided we would stay with the tight-moneyed misbegotten bastard Franks, and at the end of three days he had bargained successfully for we loaded a cargo of sword-blades, spear-heads, scythes, mail coats, yew logs and fleeces. We took that north, far north, into the lands of the Danes and the Svear where he sold the cargo. Frankish blades were much prized, while the yew logs would be cut into plough-blades, and with the money he earned Sverri filled the boat with iron-ore that we carried back south again.

Sverri was good at managing slaves and very good at making money. The coins fairly flowed into the ship, all of them stored in a vast wooden box kept in the cargo hold. ‘You’d like to get your hands on that, wouldn’t you?’ he sneered at us one day as we sailed up some nameless coast. ‘You sea-turds!’ The thought of us robbing him had made him voluble. ‘You think you can cheat me? I’ll kill you first. I’ll drown you. I’ll push seal shit down your throats till you choke.’ We said nothing as he raved.

Winter was coming by then. I did not know where we were, except we were in the north and somewhere in the sea that lies about Denmark. After delivering our last cargo we rowed the unladen ship beside a desolate sandy shore until Sverri finally steered us up a tidal creek edged with reeds and there he ran Trader ashore on a muddy bank. It was high tide and the ship was stranded at the beginning of the ebb. There was no village at the creek, just a long low house thatched with moss-covered reeds. Smoke drifted from the roof hole. Gulls called. A woman emerged from the house and, as soon as Sverri jumped down from the ship, she ran to him with cries of joy and he took her in his arms and swept her about in a circle. Then three children came running and he gave each a handful of silver and tickled them and threw them in the air and hugged them.

This was evidently where Sverri planned to winter Trader and he made us empty her of her stone ballast, strip her sail, mast and rigging, and then haul her on log rollers so she stood clear of the highest tides. She was a heavy boat and Sverri called on a neighbour from across the marsh to help haul her with a pair of oxen. His eldest child, a son aged about ten, delighted in pricking us with the ox goad. There was a slave hut behind the house. It was made of heavy logs, even the roof was of logs, and we slept there in our manacles. By day we worked, cleaning Trader’s hull, scraping away the filth and weeds and barnacles. We cleaned the muck from her bilge, spread the sail to be washed by rain, and watched hungrily as Sverri’s woman repaired the cloth with a bone needle and catgut. She was a stocky woman with short legs, heavy thighs and a round face pockmarked by some disease. Her hands and arms were red and raw. She was anything but beautiful, but we were starved of women and gazed at her. That amused Sverri. He hauled down her dress once to show us a plump white breast and then laughed at our wide-eyed stares. I dreamed of Gisela. I tried to summon her face to my dreams, but it would not come, and dreaming of her was no consolation.

Sverri’s men fed us gruel and eel soup and rough bread and fish stew, and when the snow came they threw us mud-clotted fleeces and we huddled in the slave hut and listened to the wind and watched the snow through the chinks between the logs. It was cold, so cold, and one of the Saxons died. He had been feverish and after five days he just died and two of Sverri’s men carried his body to the creek and threw him beyond the ice so that his body floated away on the next tide. There were woods not far away and every few days we would be taken to the trees, given axes and told to make firewood. The manacles were deliberately made too short so that a man could not take a full stride, and when we had axes they guarded us with bows and with spears, and I knew I would die before I could reach one of the guards with the axe, but I was tempted to try. One of the Danes tried before I did, turning and screaming, running clumsily, and an arrow took him in the belly and he doubled over and Sverri’s men killed him slowly. He screamed for every long moment. His blood stained the snow for yards around and he died so very slowly as a lesson to the rest of us, and so I just chopped at trees, trimmed the trunks, split the trunks with a maul and wedges, chopped again and went back to the slave hut.

‘If the little bastard children would just come close,’ Finan said next day, ‘I’d strangle the filthy wee creatures, so I would.’

I was astonished for it was the longest statement I had ever heard him make. ‘Better to take them hostage,’ I suggested.

‘But they know better than to come close,’ he said, ignoring my suggestion. He spoke Danish in a strange accent. ‘You were a warrior,’ he said.

‘I am a warrior,’ I said. The two of us were sitting outside the hut on a patch of grass where the snow had melted and we were gutting herrings with blunt knives. The gulls screamed about us. One of Sverri’s men watched us from outside the long-house. He had a bow across his knees and a sword at his side. I wondered how Finan had guessed I was a warrior, for I had never talked of my life. Nor had I revealed my true name, preferring them to think that I was called Osbert. Osbert had once been my real name, the name I was given at birth, but I had been renamed Uhtred when my elder brother died because my father insisted his eldest son must be called Uhtred. But I did not use the name Uhtred on board Trader. Uhtred was a proud name, a warrior’s name, and I would keep it a secret until I had escaped slavery. ‘How did you know I’m a warrior?’ I asked Finan.

‘Because you never stop watching the bastards,’ he said. ‘You never stop thinking about how to kill them.’

‘You’re the same,’ I said.

‘Finan the Agile, they called me,’ he said, ‘because I would dance around enemies. I would dance and kill. Dance and kill.’ He slit another fish’s belly and flicked the offal into the snow where two gulls fought for it. ‘There was a time,’ he went on angrily, ‘when I owned five spears, six horses, two swords, a coat of bright mail, a shield and a helmet that shone like fire. I had a woman with hair that fell to her waist and with a smile that could dim the noonday sun. Now I gut herrings.’ He slashed with the knife. ‘And one day I shall come back here and I shall kill Sverri, hump his woman, strangle his bastard children and steal his money.’ He gave a harsh chuckle. ‘He keeps it all here. All that money. Buried it is.’

‘You know that for sure?’

‘What else does he do with it? He can’t eat it because he doesn’t shit silver, does he? No, it’s here.’

‘Wherever here is,’ I said.

‘Jutland,’ he said. ‘The woman’s a Dane. We come here every winter.’

‘How many winters?’

‘This is my third,’ Finan said.

‘How did he capture you?’

He flipped another cleaned fish into the rush basket. ‘There was a fight. Us against the Norsemen and the bastards beat us. I was taken prisoner and the bastards sold me to Sverri. And you?’

‘Betrayed by my lord.’

‘So that’s another bastard to kill, eh? My lord betrayed me too.’

‘How?’

‘He wouldn’t ransom me. He wanted my woman, see? So he let me go, in return for which favour I pray he may die and that his wives get lockjaw and that his cattle get the staggers and that his children rot in their own shit and that his crops wither and his hounds choke.’ He shuddered as if his anger was too much to contain.

Sleet came instead of snow and the ice slowly melted in the creek. We made new oars from seasoned spruce cut the previous winter, and by the time the oars had been shaped the ice was gone. Grey fogs cloaked the land and the first flowers showed at the edges of the reeds. Herons stalked the shallows as the sun melted the morning frosts. Spring was coming and so we caulked Trader with cattle hair, tar and moss. We cleaned her and launched her, returned the ballast to her bilge, rigged the mast and bent the cleaned and mended sail onto her yard. Sverri embraced his woman, kissed his children and waded out to us. Two of his crew hauled him aboard and we gripped the oars.

‘Row, you bastards!’ he shouted, ‘row!’

We rowed.

Anger can keep you alive, but only just. There were times when I was sick, when I felt too weak to pull the oar, but pull it I did for if I faltered then I would be tossed overboard. I pulled as I vomited, pulled as I sweated, pulled as I shivered, and pulled as I hurt in every muscle. I pulled through rain and sun and wind and sleet. I remember having a fever and thinking I was going to die. I even wanted to die, but Finan cursed me under his breath. ‘You’re a feeble Saxon,’ he goaded me, ‘you’re weak. You’re pathetic, you Saxon scum.’ I grunted some response, and he snarled at me again, louder this time so that Hakka heard from the bows. ‘They want you to die, you bastard,’ Finan said, ‘so prove them wrong. Pull, you feeble Saxon bastard, pull.’ Hakka hit him for speaking. Another time I did the same for Finan. I remember cradling him in my arms and putting gruel into his mouth with my fingers. ‘Live, you bastard,’ I told him, ‘don’t let these earslings beat us. Live!’ He lived.

We went north that next summer, pulling into a river that twisted through a landscape of moss and birch, a place so far north that rills of snow still showed in shadowed places. We bought reindeer hides from a village among the birches and carried them back to the sea, and exchanged them for walrus tusks and whalebone, which in turn we traded for amber and eider feathers. We carried malt and sealskin, furs and salt meat, iron-ore and fleeces. In one rock-circled cove we spent two days loading slates that would be turned into whetstones, and Sverri traded the slates for combs made from deer antlers and for big coils of sealskin rope and a dozen heavy ingots of bronze, and we took all those back to Jutland, going into Haithabu which was a big trading port, so big that there was a slave compound and we were taken there and released inside where we were guarded by spearmen and high walls.

Finan found some fellow Irishmen in the compound and I discovered a Saxon who had been captured by a Dane from the coast of East Anglia. King Guthrum, the Saxon said, had returned to East Anglia where he called himself Æthelstan and was building churches. Alfred, so far as he knew, was still alive. The East Anglian Danes had not tried to attack Wessex, but even so he had heard that Alfred was making forts about his frontier. He knew nothing about Alfred’s Danish hostages, so could not tell me whether Ragnar had been released, nor had the man heard any news of Guthred or Northumbria, so I stood in the compound’s centre and shouted a question. ‘Is anyone here from Northumbria?’ Men stared at me dully. ‘Northumbria?’ I shouted again, and this time a woman called from the far side of the palisade which divided the mens’ compound from the womens’. Men were crowded at the palisade, peering through its chinks at the women, but I pushed two aside. ‘You’re from Northumbria?’ I asked the woman who had called to me.

‘From Onhripum,’ she told me. She was a Saxon, fifteen years old and a tanner’s daughter from Onhripum. Her father had owed money to Earl Ivarr and, to settle the debt, Ivarr had taken the girl and sold her to Kjartan.

At first I thought I must have misheard. ‘To Kjartan?’ I asked her.

‘To Kjartan,’ she said dully, ‘who raped me, then sold me to these bastards.’

‘Kjartan’s alive?’ I asked, astonished.

‘He lives,’ she said.

‘But he was being besieged,’ I protested.

‘Not while I was there,’ she said.

‘And Sven? His son?’

‘He raped me too,’ she said.

Later, much later, I pieced the whole tale together. Guthred and Ivarr, joined by my uncle Ælfric, had tried to starve Kjartan into submission, but the winter was hard, their armies had been struck by disease, and Kjartan had offered to pay tribute to all three and they had accepted his silver. Guthred had also extracted a promise that Kjartan would stop attacking churchmen, and for a time that promise was kept, but the church was too wealthy and Kjartan too greedy, and within a year the promise had been broken and some monks were killed or enslaved. The annual tribute of silver that Kjartan was supposed to give to Guthred, Ælfric and Ivarr had been paid once, and never paid again. So nothing had changed. Kjartan had been humbled for a few months, then he had judged the strength of his enemies and found it feeble. The tanner’s daughter from Onhripum knew nothing of Gisela, had never even heard of her, and I thought perhaps she had died and that night I knew despair. I wept. I remembered Hild and I wondered what had happened to her, and I feared for her, and I remembered that one night with Gisela when I had kissed her beneath the beech trees and I thought of all my dreams that were now hopeless and so I wept.

I had married a wife in Wessex and I knew nothing of her and, if the truth were known, I cared nothing. I had lost my baby son to death. I had lost Iseult to death. I had lost Hild, I had lost all chance of Gisela, and that night I felt a swamping pity for myself and I sat in the hut and tears rolled down my cheeks and Finan saw me and he began weeping too and I knew he had been reminded of home. I tried to rekindle my anger because it is only anger that will keep you alive, but the anger would not come. I just wept instead. I could not stop. It was the darkness of despair, of the knowledge that my fate was to pull an oar until I was broken and then I would go overboard. I wept.

‘You and me,’ Finan said, and paused. It was dark. It was a cold night, though it was summer.

‘You and me?’ I asked, my eyes closed in an attempt to stop the tears.

‘Swords in hand, my friend,’ he said, ‘you and me. It will happen.’ He meant we would be free and we would have our revenge.

‘Dreams,’ I said.

‘No!’ Finan said angrily. He crawled to my side and took my hand in both his. ‘Don’t give up,’ he snarled at me. ‘We’re warriors, you and I, we’re warriors!’ I had been a warrior, I thought. There had been a time when I shone in mail and helmet, but now I was lice-ridden, filthy, weak and tearful. ‘Here,’ Finan said, and he pushed something into my hand. It was one of the antler-combs we had carried as cargo and somehow he had managed to steal it and secrete it in his rags. ‘Never give up,’ he told me, and I used the comb to disentangle my hair that now grew almost to my waist. I combed it out, tearing knots free, pulling lice from the teeth, and next morning Finan plaited my straight hair and I did the same for him. ‘It’s how warriors dress their hair in my tribe,’ he explained, ‘and you and I are warriors. We’re not slaves, we’re warriors!’ We were thin, dirty, and ragged, but the despair had passed like a squall at sea and I let the anger give me resolve.

Next day we loaded Trader with ingots of copper, bronze and iron. We rolled barrels of ale into her stern and filled the remaining cargo space with salt meat, rings of hard bread and tubs of salted cod. Sverri laughed at our plaited hair. ‘You two think you’ll find women, do you?’ he mocked us. ‘Or are you pretending to be women?’ Neither of us answered and Sverri just grinned. He was in a good mood, one of unusual excitement. He liked seafaring and from the amount of provisions we stowed I guessed he planned a long voyage and so it proved. He cast his runesticks time after time and they must have told him he would prosper for he bought three new slaves, all of them Frisians. He wanted to be well-manned for the voyage ahead, a voyage that began badly, for, as we left Haithabu, we were pursued by another ship. A pirate, Hakka announced sourly, and we ran north under sail and oars and the other ship slowly overhauled us for she was longer, leaner and faster, and it was only the coming of night that let us escape, but it was a nervous night. We stowed the oars and lowered the sail so that Trader would make no noise, and in the dark I heard the oar-splashes of our pursuer and Sverri and his men were crouching near us, swords in hand, ready to kill us if we made a noise. I was tempted, and Finan wanted to thump on the ship’s side to bring the pursuers to us, but Sverri would have slaughtered us instantly and so we kept silent and the strange ship passed us in the darkness and when dawn came she had vanished.

Such threats were rare. Wolf does not eat wolf, and the falcon does not stoop on another falcon, and so the Northmen rarely preyed on each other, though some men, desperate, would risk attacking a fellow Dane or Norseman. Such pirates were reviled as outcasts, as nothings, but they were feared. Usually they were hunted down and the crews were killed or enslaved, but still some men risked being outcasts, knowing that if they could just capture one rich ship like Trader they could make a fortune that would give them status, power and acceptance. But we escaped that night, and next day we sailed further north and still further north, and we did not put into land that night, nor for many nights. Then one morning I saw a black coast of terrible cliffs and the sea was shattering white against those grim rocks, and I thought we had come to our journey’s end, but we did not seek land. Instead we sailed on, going west now, and then briefly south to put into the bay of an island where we anchored.

At first Finan thought it was Ireland, but the folk who came to Trader in a small skin boat did not speak his language. There are islands all about the northern coast of Britain and this, I think was one of them. Savages live on those islands and Sverri did not go ashore, but traded a few paltry coins with the savages and received in return some gulls’ eggs, dried fish and goat-meat. And next morning we rowed into a brisk wind and we rowed all day and I knew we were heading into the western wastes of the wilderness sea. Ragnar the Elder had warned me of those seas, saying that there were lands beyond them, but that most men who sought the far lands never came back. Those western lands, he told me, were inhabited by the souls of dead sailors. They were grey places, fog-shrouded and storm-battered, but that was where we were going and Sverri stood at the steering oar with a look of happiness on his flat face and I remembered that same happiness. I remembered the joy of a good ship and the pulse of its life in the loom of the steering oar.

For two weeks we voyaged. This was the whale path, and the monsters of the sea rolled to look at us or spouted water, and the air became colder and the sky was forever clouded, and I knew Sverri’s crewmen were nervous. They thought we were lost, and I thought the same, and I believed my life would end at the sea’s edge where great whirlpools drag ships down to their deaths. Seabirds circled us, their cries forlorn in the white cold, and the great whales plunged beneath us, and we rowed until our backs were sore. The seas were grey and mountainous, unending and cold, scummed with white foam, and we had only one day of friendly wind when we could travel under sail with the big grey seas hissing along our hull.

And so we came to Horn in the land of fire that some men call Thule. Mountains smoked and we heard tales of magical pools of hot water, though I saw none. And it was not just a land of fire, but a haunt of ice. There were mountains of ice, rivers of ice and shelves of ice in the sky. There were codfish longer than a man is tall and we ate well there and Sverri was happy. Men feared to make the voyage we had just made, and he had achieved it, and in Thule his cargo was worth three times what he would have received in Denmark or Frankia, though of course he had to yield some of the precious cargo as tribute to the local lord. But he sold the rest of the ingots and took on board whale bones and walrus tusks and walrus hides and sealskin, and he knew he would make much money if he could take those things home. He was in such a good mood that he even allowed us ashore and we drank sour birch wine in a long-house that stank of whale flesh. We were all shackled, not just with our ordinary manacles, but with neck chains too, and Sverri had hired local men to guard us. Three of those sentinels were armed with the long heavy spears that the men of Thule use to kill whales while the other four had flensing knives. Sverri was safe with them watching us, and he knew it, and for the only time in all the months I was with him he deigned to speak with us. He boasted of the voyage we had made and even praised our skill at the oars. ‘But you two hate me,’ he said, looking at Finan and then at me.

I said nothing.

‘The birch wine is good,’ Finan said, ‘thank you for it.’

‘The birch wine is walrus piss,’ Sverri said, then belched. He was drunk. ‘You hate me,’ he said, amused by our hatred. ‘I watch you two and you hate me. The others now, they’re whipped, but you two would kill me before I could sneeze. I should kill you both, shouldn’t I? I should sacrifice you to the sea.’ Neither of us spoke. A birch log cracked in the fire and spewed sparks. ‘But you row well,’ Sverri said. ‘I did free a slave once,’ he went on, ‘I released him because I liked him. I trusted him. I even let him steer Trader, but he tried to kill me. You know what I did with him? I nailed his filthy corpse to the prow and let him rot there. And I learned my lesson. You’re there to row. Nothing else. You row and you work and you die.’ He fell asleep shortly after, and so did we, and next morning we were back on board Trader and, under a spitting rain, left that strange land of ice and flame.

It took much less time to go back east because we ran before a friendly wind and so wintered in Jutland again. We shivered in the slave hut and listened to Sverri grunting in his woman’s bed at night. The snow came, ice locked the creek, and it became the year 880 and I had lived twenty-three years and I knew my future was to die in shackles because Sverri was watchful, clever and ruthless.

And then the red ship came.

She was not truly red. Most ships are built of oak that darkens as the ship lives, but this ship had been made from pine and when the morning or evening light lanced low across the sea’s edge she seemed to be the colour of darkening blood.

She looked a livid red when we first saw her. That was on the evening of the day we had launched and the red ship was long and low and lean. She coursed from the eastern horizon, coming towards us at an angle, and her sail was a dirty grey, criss-crossed by the ropes that strengthen the cloth, and Sverri saw the beast-head at her prow and decided she was a pirate and so we struck inshore to waters he knew well. They were shallow waters and the red ship hesitated to follow. We rowed through narrow creeks, scattering wildfowl, and the red ship stayed within sight, but out beyond the dunes, and then the night fell and we reversed our course and let the ebb-tide take us out to sea and Sverri’s men whipped us to make us row hard to escape the coast. The dawn came cold and misty, but as the mist lifted we saw that the red ship was gone.

We were going to Haithabu to find the first cargo of the season, but as we approached the port Sverri saw the red ship again and she turned towards us and Sverri cursed her. We were upwind of her, which made escaping easy, but even so she tried to catch us. She used her oars and, because she had at least twenty benches, she was much faster than Trader, but she could not close the wind’s gap and by the following morning we were again alone on an empty sea. Sverri cursed her all the same. He cast his runesticks and they persuaded him to abandon the idea of Haithabu and so we crossed to the land of the Svear where we loaded beaver hides and dung-encrusted fleeces.

We exchanged that cargo for fine candles of rolled wax. We shipped iron-ore again and so the spring passed and the summer came and we did not see the red ship. We had forgotten her. Sverri reckoned it was safe to visit Haithabu so we took a cargo of reindeer skins to the port, and there he learned that the red ship had not forgotten him. He came back aboard in a hurry, not bothering to load a cargo, and I heard him talking to his crewmen. The red ship, he said, was prowling the coasts in search of Trader. She was a Dane, he thought, and she was crewed by warriors.

‘Who?’ Hakka asked.

‘No one knows.’

‘Why?’

‘How would I know?’ Sverri growled, but he was worried enough to throw his runesticks on the deck and they instructed him to leave Haithabu at once. Sverri had made an enemy and he did not know who, and so he took Trader to a place near his winter home and there he carried gifts ashore. Sverri had a lord. Almost all men have a lord who offers protection, and this lord was called Hyring and he owned much land, and Sverri would pay him silver each winter and in return Hyring would offer protection to Sverri and his family. But there was little Hyring could do to protect Sverri on the sea, though he must have promised to discover who sailed the red ship and to learn why that man wanted Sverri. In the meantime Sverri decided to go far away and so we went into the North Sea and down the coast and made some money with salted herrings. We crossed to Britain for the first time since I had been a slave. We landed in an East Anglian river, and I never did learn what river it was, and we loaded thick fleeces that we took back to Frankia and there bought a cargo of iron ingots. That was a rich cargo because Frankish iron is the best in the world, and we also purchased a hundred of their prized sword-blades. Sverri, as ever, cursed the Franks for their hard-headedness, but in truth Sverri’s head was as hard as any Frank’s and, though he paid well for the iron and sword-blades, he knew that they would bring him a great profit in the northern lands.

So we headed north and the summer was ending and the geese were flying south above us in great skeins and, two days after we had loaded the cargo, we saw the red ship waiting for us off the Frisian coast. It had been weeks since we had seen her and Sverri must have hoped that Hyring had ended her threat, but she was lying just offshore and this time the red ship had the wind’s advantage and so we turned inshore and Sverri’s men whipped us desperately. I grunted with every stroke, making it look as though I hauled the oar-loom with all my strength, but in truth I was trying to lessen the force of the blade in the water so that the red ship could catch us. I could see her clearly. I could see her oar-wings rising and falling and see the white bone of water snapping at her bows. She was much longer than Trader, and much faster, but she also drew more water which is why Sverri had taken us inshore to the coast of Frisia which all shipmasters fear.

It is not rockbound like so many northern coasts. There are no cliffs against which a good ship can be broken in pieces. Instead it is a tangle of reeds, islands, creeks and mudflats. For mile after mile there is nothing but dangerous shallows. Passages are marked through those shallows with withies rammed into the mud, and those frail signals offer a safe way through the tangle, but the Frisians are pirates too. They like to mark false channels that lead only to a mudbank where a falling tide can strand a ship, and then the folk, who live in mud huts on their mud islands, will swarm like water-rats to kill and pillage.

But Sverri had traded here and, like all good shipmasters, he carried memories of good and bad water. The red ship was catching us, but Sverri did not panic. I would watch him as I rowed, and I could see his eyes darting left and right to decide which passage to take, then he would make a swift push on the steering oar and we would turn into his chosen channel. He sought the shallowest places, the most twisted creeks, and the gods were with him for, though our oars sometimes struck a mudbank, Trader never grounded. The red ship, being larger, and presumably because her master did not know the coast as Sverri did, was travelling much more cautiously and we were leaving her behind.

She began to overhaul us again when we had to cross a wide stretch of open water, but Sverri found another channel at the far side, and here, for the first time, he slowed our oar-beats. He put Hakka in the bows and Hakka kept throwing a lead-weighted line into the water and calling the depth. We were crawling into a maze of mud and water, working our slow way north and east, and I looked across to the east and saw that Sverri had at last made a mistake. A line of withies marked the channel we threaded, but beyond them and beyond a low muddy island thick with birds, larger withies marked a deep water channel that cut inshore of our course and would allow the red ship to head us off, and the red ship saw the opportunity and took that larger channel. Her oar-blades beat at the water, she ran at full speed, she was overtaking us fast, and then she ran aground in a tangle of clashing oars.

Sverri laughed. He had known the larger withies marked a false channel and the red ship had fallen into the trap. I could see her clearly now, a ship laden with armed men, men in mail, sword-Danes and spear-warriors, but she was stranded.

‘Your mothers are goats!’ Sverri shouted across the mud, though I doubt his voice carried to the grounded ship, ‘you are turds! Learn to master a ship, you useless bastards!’

We took another channel, leaving the red ship behind, and Hakka was still in Trader’s bows where he constantly threw the line weighted with its lump of lead. He would shout back how deep the water was. This channel was unmarked, and we had to go perilously slowly for Sverri dared not run aground. Behind us, far behind now, I could see the crew of the red ship labouring to free her. The warriors had discarded their mail and were in the water, heaving at the long hull, and as night fell I saw her slip free and resume her pursuit, but we were far ahead now and the darkness cloaked us.

We spent that night in a reed-fringed bay. Sverri would not go ashore. There were folk on the nearby island, and their fires sparked in the night. We could see no other lights, which surely meant that the island was the only settlement for miles, and I knew Sverri was worried because the fires would attract the red ship and so he kicked us awake in the very first glimmerings of the dawn and we pulled the anchor and Sverri took us north into a passage marked by withies. The passage seemed to wriggle about the island’s coast to the open sea where the waves broke white, and it offered a way out of the tangled shore. Hakka again called the depths as we eased our way past reeds and mudbanks. The creek was shallow, so shallow that our oar-blades constantly struck bottom to kick up swirls of mud, yet pace by pace we followed the frail channel marks, and then Hakka shouted that the red ship was behind us.

She was a long way behind us. As Sverri had feared she had been attracted by the settlement’s fires, but she had ended up south of the island, and between us and her was the mystery of mudbanks and creeks. She could not go west into the open sea, for the waves broke continuously on a long half-sunken beach there, so she could either pursue us or else try to loop far around us to the east and discover another way to the ocean.

She decided to follow us and we watched as she groped her way along the island’s southern coast, looking for a channel into the harbour where we had anchored. We kept creeping north, but then, suddenly, there was a soft grating sound beneath our keel and Trader gave a gentle shudder and went ominously still. ‘Back oars!’ Sverri bellowed.

We backed oars, but she had grounded. The red ship was lost in the half-light and in the tenuous mist that drifted across the islands. The tide was low. It was the slack water between ebb and flood and Sverri stared hard at the creek, praying that he could see the tide flowing inwards to float us off, but the water lay still and cold.

‘Overboard!’ he shouted. ‘Push her!’

We tried. Or the others tried, while Finan and I merely pretended to push, but Trader was stuck hard. She had gone aground so softly, so quietly, yet she would not move and Sverri, still standing on the steering platform, could see the islanders coming towards us across the reed-beds and, more worrying, he could see the red ship crossing the wide bay where we had anchored. He could see death coming.

‘Empty her,’ he shouted.

That was a hard decision for Sverri to take, but it was better than death, and so we threw all the ingots overboard. Finan and I could no longer shirk, for Sverri could see how much work we were doing, and he lashed at us with a stick and so we destroyed the profits of a year’s trading. Even the sword-blades went, and all the time the red ship crept closer, coming up the channel, and she was only a quarter-mile behind us when the last ingots splashed over the side and Trader gave a slight lurch. The tide was flooding now, swirling past and around the jettisoned ingots.

‘Row!’ Sverri shouted. The islanders were watching us. They had not dared approach for fear of the armed men on the red ship, and now they watched as we slid away northwards, and we fought the incoming tide and our oars pulled on mud as often as they bit water, but Sverri screamed at us to row harder. He would risk a further grounding to get clear, and the gods were with him, for we shot out of the passage’s mouth and Trader reared to the incoming waves and suddenly we were at sea again with the water breaking white on our bows and Sverri hoisted the sail and we ran northwards and the red ship seemed to have grounded where we had been stranded. She had run onto the pile of ingots and, because her hull was deeper than Trader’s, it took her a long time to escape and by the time she was free of the channel we were already hidden by rain squalls that crashed from the west and pounded the ship as they passed.

Sverri kissed his hammer amulet. He had lost a fortune, but he was a wealthy man and could afford it. Yet he had to stay wealthy and he knew that the red ship was pursuing him and that it would stay on the coast until it found us and so, as dark fell, he dropped the sail and ordered us to the oars.

We went northwards. The red ship was still behind us, but far behind, and the rain squalls hid us from time to time and when a bigger squall came Sverri dropped the sail, turned the ship westwards into the wind and his men whipped us to work. Two of his men even took oars themselves so that we could escape across the darkening horizon before the red ship saw that we had changed course. It was brutally hard work. We were thumping into the wind and seas, and every stroke burned the muscles until I thought I would drop from exhaustion. Deep night ended the work. Sverri could no longer see the big waves hissing from the west and so he let us ship the oars and plug the oar-holes and we lay like dead men as the ship heaved and wallowed in the dark and churning sea.

Dawn found us alone. Wind and rain whipped from the south, and that meant we did not have to row, but instead could hoist the sail and let the wind carry us across the grey waters. I looked aft, searching for the red ship and she was not to be seen. There were only the waves and the clouds and the squalls hurtling across our wake and the wild birds flying like white scraps in the bitter wind, and Trader bent to that wind so that the water rushed past us and Sverri leaned on the steering oar and sang to celebrate his escape from the mysterious enemy. I could have wept again. I did not know what the red ship was, or who sailed her, but I knew she was Sverri’s enemy and that any enemy of Sverri was my friend. But she was gone. We had escaped her.

And so we came back to Britain. Sverri had not intended to go there, and he had no cargo to sell though he did have coins hidden aboard to buy goods, but the coins would also have to be expended in survival. He had evaded the red ship, but he knew that if he went home he would find her lurking off Jutland and I do not doubt he was thinking of some other place he might spend the winter in safety. That meant discovering a lord who would shelter him while Trader was hauled ashore, cleaned, repaired and re-caulked, and that lord would require silver. We oarsmen heard snatches of conversation and gathered that Sverri reckoned he should pick up one last cargo, take it to Denmark, sell it, then find some port where he could shelter and from where he could travel overland to his home to collect more silver to fund the next year’s trading.

We were off the British coast. I did not recognise where we were. I knew it was not East Anglia for there were bluffs and hills. ‘Nothing to buy here,’ Sverri complained.

‘Fleeces?’ Hakka suggested.

‘What price will they fetch at this time of year?’ Sverri demanded angrily. ‘All we’ll get is whatever they couldn’t sell in the spring. Nothing but rubbish matted with sheep shit. I’d rather carry charcoal.’

We sheltered one night in a river mouth and armed horsemen rode to the shore to stare at us, but they did not use any of the small fishing craft which were hauled on the beach to come out to us, suggesting that if we left them alone then they would leave us alone. Just as dark fell another trading boat came into the river and anchored near us, and its Danish shipmaster used a small craft to row across to us and he and Sverri squatted in the space beneath the steering platform and exchanged news. We heard none of it. We just saw the two men drinking ale and talking. The stranger left before darkness hid his ship and Sverri seemed pleased with the conversation, for in the morning he shouted his thanks to the other boat and ordered us to haul the anchor and take the oars. It was a windless day, the sea was calm, and we rowed northwards beside the shore. I stared inland and saw smoke rising from settlements and thought that freedom lay there.

I dreamed of freedom, but now I did not think it would ever come. I thought I would die at that oar as so many others had died under Sverri’s lash. Of the eleven oarsmen who had been aboard when I was given to Sverri only four still lived, of whom Finan was one. We now had fourteen oarsmen, for Sverri had replaced the dead and, ever since the red ship had come to haunt his existence, he had paid for more slaves to man his oars. Some shipmasters used free men to row their boats, reckoning they worked more willingly, but such men expected a share in the silver and Sverri was a miserly man.

Late that morning we came to a river’s mouth and I gazed up at the headland on the southern bank and saw a high beacon waiting to be lit to warn the inland folk that raiders came, and I had seen that beacon before. It was like a hundred others, yet I recognised it, and I knew it stood in the ruins of the Roman fort at the place where my slavery had begun. We had come back to the River Tine.

‘Slaves!’ Sverri announced to us. ‘That’s what we’re buying. Slaves, just like you bastards. Except they’re not like you, because they’re women and children. Scots. Anyone here speak their bastard language?’ None of us answered. Not that we needed to speak the Scottish language, for Sverri had whips that spoke loudly enough.

He disliked carrying slaves as cargo for they needed constant watching and feeding, but the other trader had told him of women and children newly captured in one of the endless border raids between Northumbria and Scotland, and those slaves offered the best prospect of any profit. If any of the women and children were pretty then they would sell high in Jutland’s slave markets, and Sverri needed to make a good trade, and so we rowed into the Tine on a rising tide. We were going to Gyruum, and Sverri waited until the water had almost reached the high-tide mark of sea-wrack and flotsam, and then he beached Trader. He did not often beach her, but he wanted us to scrape her hull before going back to Denmark, and a beached ship made it easier to load human cargo, and so we ran her ashore and I saw that the slave pens had been rebuilt and that the ruined monastery had a thatched roof again. All was as it was.

Sverri made us wear slave collars that were chained together so we could not escape and then, while he crossed the salt-marsh and climbed to the monastery, we scraped the exposed hull with stones. Finan sang in his native Irish as he worked, but sometimes he would throw me a crooked grin. ‘Tear the caulking out, Osbert,’ he suggested.

‘So we sink?’

‘Aye, but Sverri sinks with us.’

‘Let him live so we can kill him,’ I said.

‘And we will kill him,’ Finan said.

‘Never give up hope, eh?’

‘I dreamed it,’ Finan said. ‘I’ve dreamed it three times since the red ship came.’

‘But the red ship’s gone,’ I said.

‘We’ll kill him. I promise you. I’ll dance in his guts, I will.’

The tide had been at its height at midday so all afternoon it fell until Trader was stranded high above the fretting waves, and she could not be refloated until long after dark. Sverri was always uneasy when his ship was ashore and I knew he would want to load his cargo that same day and then refloat the ship on the night’s tide. He had an anchor ready so that, in the dark, we could push off from the beach and moor in the river’s centre and be ready to leave the river at first light.

He purchased thirty-three slaves. The youngest were five or six years old, the oldest were perhaps seventeen or eighteen, and they were all women and children, not a man among them. We had finished cleaning the hull and were squatting on the beach when they arrived, and we stared at the women with the hungry eyes of men denied partners. The slaves were weeping, so it was hard to tell if any were pretty. They were weeping because they were slaves, and because they had been stolen from their own land, and because they feared the sea, and because they feared us. A dozen armed men rode behind them. I recognised none of them. Sverri walked down the manacled line, examining the children’s teeth and pulling down the women’s dresses to examine their breasts. ‘The red-haired one will fetch a good price,’ one of the armed men called to Sverri.

‘So will they all.’

‘I humped her last night,’ the man said, ‘so perhaps she’s carrying my baby, eh? You’ll get two slaves for the price of one, you lucky bastard.’

The slaves were already shackled and Sverri had been forced to pay for those manacles and chains, just as he had to buy food and ale to keep the thirty-three Scots alive on their voyage to Jutland. We had to fetch those provisions from the monastery and so Sverri led us back across the salt-marsh, over the stream and up to the fallen stone cross where a wagon and six mounted men waited. The wagon had barrels of ale, tubs of salt herring and smoked eels, and a sack of apples. Sverri bit into an apple, made a wry face and spat out the mouthful. ‘Worm-ridden,’ he complained and tossed the remnants to us, and I managed to snatch it out of the air despite everyone else reaching for it. I broke it in half and gave one portion to Finan. ‘They’ll fight over a wormy apple,’ Sverri jeered, then spilled a bag of coins onto the wagon bed. ‘Kneel, you bastards,’ he snarled at us as a seventh horseman rode towards the wagon.

We knelt in obeisance to the newcomer. ‘We must test the coins,’ the newcomer said and I recognised the voice and looked up and saw Sven the One-Eyed.

And he looked at me.

I dropped my gaze and bit into the apple.

‘Frankish deniers,’ Sverri said proudly, offering some of the silver coins to Sven.

Sven did not take them. He was staring at me. ‘Who is that?’ he demanded.

Sverri looked at me. ‘Osbert,’ he said. He selected some more coins. ‘These are Alfred’s pennies,’ he said, holding them out to Sven.

‘Osbert?’ Sven said. He still gazed at me. I did not look like Uhtred of Bebbanburg. My face had new scars, my nose was broken, my uncombed hair was a great tangled thatch, my beard was ragged and my skin was as dark as pickled wood, but still he stared at me. ‘Come here, Osbert,’ he said.

I could not go far, because the neck chain held me close to the other oarsmen, but I stood and shuffled towards him and knelt again because I was a slave and he was a lord.

‘Look at me,’ he snarled.

I obeyed, staring into his one eye, and I saw he was dressed in fine mail and had a fine cloak and was mounted on a fine horse. I made my right cheek quiver and I dribbled as if I were halfway mad and I grinned as though I were pleased to see him and I bobbed my head compulsively and he must have decided I was just another ruined half-mad slave and he waved me away and took the coins from Sverri. They haggled, but at last enough coins were accepted as good silver, and we oarsmen were ordered to carry the barrels and tubs down to the ship.

Sverri clouted me over the shoulders as we walked. ‘What were you doing?’

‘Doing, master?’

‘Shaking like an idiot. Dribbling.’

‘I think I’m falling ill, master.’

‘Did you know that man?’

‘No, lord.’

Sverri was suspicious of me, but he could learn nothing, and he left me alone as we heaved the barrels onto Trader that was still half stranded on the beach. But I did not shake or dribble as we stowed the provisions, and Sverri knew something was amiss and he thought about it further and then hit me again as the answer came to him. ‘You came from here, didn’t you?’

‘Did I, lord?’

He hit me again, harder, and the other slaves watched. They knew a wounded animal when they saw one and only Finan had any sympathy for me, but he was helpless. ‘You came from here,’ Sverri said. ‘How could I have forgotten that? This is where you were given to me.’ He pointed towards Sven who was across the marsh on the ruin-crowned hill. ‘What’s Sven the One-Eyed to you?’

‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘I’ve never seen him before.’

‘You lying turd,’ he said. He had a merchant’s instinct for profit and so he ordered me released from the other oarsmen though he made sure my ankles were still shackled and that I still wore the neck chain. Sverri took its end, meaning to lead me back to the monastery, but we got no further than the shingle bank because Sven had also been having second thoughts. My face haunted his bad dreams and, in the twitching idiot visage of Osbert, he had seen his nightmares and now he was galloping towards us, followed by six horsemen.

‘Kneel,’ Sverri ordered me.

I knelt.

Sven’s horse skidded to a halt on the shingle bank. ‘Look at me,’ he ordered a second time, and I looked up and spittle hung from my mouth into my beard. I twitched, and Sverri struck me hard. ‘Who is he?’ Sven demanded.

‘He told me his name was Osbert, lord,’ Sverri said.

‘He told you?’

‘I was given him here, lord, in this place,’ Sverri said, ‘and he told me he was called Osbert.’

Sven smiled then. He dismounted and walked to me, tipping my chin up so he could stare into my face. ‘You got him here?’ he asked Sverri.

‘King Guthred gave him to me, lord.’

Sven knew me then and his one-eyed face was contorted with a strange mix of triumph and hatred. He hit me across the skull, hit me so hard that my mind went dark for an instant and I fell to one side. ‘Uhtred!’ he proclaimed triumphantly, ‘you’re Uhtred!’

‘Lord!’ Sverri was standing over me, protecting me. Not because he liked me, but because I represented a windfall profit.

‘He’s mine,’ Sven said, and his long sword whispered out of its fleece-lined scabbard.

‘He’s mine to sell, lord, and yours to buy,’ Sverri said humbly, but firmly.

‘To take him,’ Sven said, ‘I will kill you, Sverri, and all your men. So the price for this man is your life.’

Sverri knew he was beaten then. He bowed, released my neck chain and stepped back, and I seized the neck chain and whipped its loose end at Sven and it whistled close to him, driving him back, and then I ran. The leg shackles hobbled me and I had no choice but to run into the river. I stumbled through the small waves and turned, ready to use the chain as a weapon and I knew I was dead because Sven’s horsemen were coming for me and I backed deeper into the water. It was better to drown, I thought, than to suffer Sven’s tortures.

Then the horsemen stopped. Sven pushed past them and then he too checked and I was up to my chest in the river and the chain was awkward in my hand and I was readying to throw myself backwards to black death in the river when Sven himself stepped away. Then he went back another pace, turned and ran for his horse. There had been fear on his face and I risked turning to see what had frightened him.

And there, coming from the sea, driven by twin oar-banks and by the swiftly flooding tide, was the red ship.

Six

The red ship was close and was coming fast. Her bows were crowned with a black-toothed dragon’s head and filled with armed men in mail and helmets. She came in a gale of noise; the splash of oar-blades, the shouts of her warriors and the seethe of white water around the great red breast of her high prow. I had to stagger to one side to avoid her, for she did not slow as she neared the beach, but kept coming, and the oars gave one last heave and the bows grated on the shore and the dragon’s head reared up and the great ship’s keel crashed up the beach in a thunder of scattering shingle. The dark hull loomed above me, then an oar-shaft struck me in the back, throwing me under the waves and when I managed to stagger upright I saw the ship had shuddered to a halt and a dozen mail-clad men had jumped from the prow with spears, swords, axes and shields. The first men onto the beach bellowed defiance as the rowers dropped their oars, plucked up weapons, and followed. This was no trading ship, but a Viking come to her kill.

Sven fled. He scrambled into his saddle and spurred across the marsh while his six men, much braver, rode their horses at the invading Vikings, but the beasts were axed down screaming and the unsaddled riders were butchered on the strand, their blood trickling to the small waves where I stood, mouth open, hardly believing what I saw. Sverri was on his knees with his hands spread wide to show he had no weapons.

The red ship’s master, glorious in a helmet crested with eagle wings, took his men to the marsh path and led them towards the monastery buildings. He left a half-dozen warriors on the beach and one of those was a huge man, tall as a tree and broad as a barrel, who carried a great war axe that was stained with blood. He dragged off his helmet and grinned at me. He said something, but I did not hear him. I was just staring in disbelief and he grinned wider.

It was Steapa.

Steapa Snotor. Steapa the Clever, that meant, which was a joke because he was not the brightest of men, but he was a great warrior who had once been my sworn enemy and had since become my friend. Now he grinned at me from the water’s edge and I did not understand why a West Saxon warrior was travelling in a Viking ship, and then I began to cry. I cried because I was free and because Steapa’s broad, scarred, baleful face was the most beautiful thing I had seen since I had last been on this beach.

I waded out of the water and I embraced him, and he patted my back awkwardly and he could not stop grinning because he was happy. ‘They did that to you?’ he said, pointing at my leg shackles.

‘I’ve worn them for more than two years,’ I said.

‘Put your legs apart, lord,’ he said.

‘Lord?’ Sverri had heard Steapa and he understood that one Saxon word. He got up from his knees and took a faltering step towards us. ‘Is that what he called you?’ he asked me, ‘lord?’

I just stared at Sverri and he went on his knees again. ‘Who are you?’ he asked, frightened.

‘You want me to kill him?’ Steapa growled.

‘Not yet,’ I said.

‘I kept you alive,’ Sverri said, ‘I fed you.’

I pointed at him. ‘Be silent,’ I said and he was.

‘Put your legs apart, lord,’ Steapa said again. ‘Stretch that chain for me.’

I did as he ordered. ‘Be careful,’ I said.

‘Be careful!’ he mocked, then he swung the axe and the big blade whistled past my groin and crashed into the chain and my ankles were twitched inwards by the massive blow so that I staggered. ‘Be still,’ Steapa ordered me, and he swung again and this time the chain snapped. ‘You can walk now, lord,’ Steapa said, and I could, though the links of broken chain dragged behind my ankles.

I walked to the dead men and selected two swords. ‘Free that man,’ I told Steapa, pointing at Finan, and Steapa chopped through more chains and Finan ran to me, grinning, and we stared at each other, eyes bright with tears of joy, and then I held a sword to him. He looked at the blade for a moment as though he did not believe what he was seeing, then he gripped the hilt and bayed like a wolf at the darkening sky. Then he threw his arms around my neck. He was weeping. ‘You’re free,’ I told him.

‘And I am a warrior again,’ he said. ‘I am Finan the Agile!’

‘And I am Uhtred,’ I said, using that name for the first time since I had last been on this beach. ‘My name is Uhtred,’ I said again, but louder this time, ‘and I am the lord of Bebbanburg.’ I turned on Sverri, my anger welling up. ‘I am Lord Uhtred,’ I told him, ‘the man who killed Ubba Lothbrokson beside the sea and sent Svein of the White Horse to the corpse-hall. I am Uhtred.’ I was in a red rage now. I stalked to Sverri and tipped his face up with the sword-blade. ‘I am Uhtred,’ I said, ‘and you call me lord.’

‘Yes, lord,’ he said.

‘And he is Finan of Ireland,’ I said, ‘and you call him lord.’

Sverri looked at Finan, could not meet his gaze and lowered his eyes. ‘Lord,’ he said to Finan.

I wanted to kill him, but I had a notion that Sverri’s usefulness on this earth was not quite finished and so I contented myself with taking Steapa’s knife and slitting open Sverri’s tunic to bare his arm. He was shaking, expecting his throat to be cut, but instead I carved the letter S into his flesh, then rubbed sand into the wound. ‘So tell me, slave,’ I said, ‘how you undo these rivets?’ I tapped my ankle chains with the knife.

‘I need a blacksmith’s tools, lord,’ Sverri said.

‘If you want to live, Sverri, pray that we find them.’

There had to be tools up at the ruined monastery, for that was where Kjartan’s men manacled their slaves, and so Steapa sent two men to search for the means to strike off our chains and Finan amused himself by butchering Hakka because I would not let him slaughter Sverri. The Scottish slaves watched in awe as the blood swilled into the sea beside the stranded Trader. Finan danced with joy afterwards and chanted one of his wild songs, then he killed the rest of Sverri’s crew.

‘Why are you here?’ I asked Steapa.

‘I was sent, lord,’ he said proudly.

‘Sent? Who sent you?’

‘The king, of course,’ he said.

‘Guthred sent you?’

‘Guthred?’ Steapa asked, puzzled by the name, then shook his head. ‘No, lord. It was King Alfred, of course.’

‘Alfred sent you?’ I asked, then gaped at him. ‘Alfred?’

‘Alfred sent us,’ he confirmed.

‘But these are Danes,’ I gestured at the crewmen who had been left on the beach with Steapa.

‘Some are Danes,’ Steapa said, ‘but we’re mostly West Saxons. Alfred sent us.’

‘Alfred sent you?’ I asked again, knowing I sounded like an incoherent fool, but I could scarcely believe what I was hearing. ‘Alfred sent Danes?’

‘A dozen of them, lord,’ Steapa said, ‘and they’re only here because they follow him.’ He pointed to the shipmaster in his winged helmet who was striding back to the beach. ‘He’s the hostage,’ Steapa said as though that explained everything, ‘and Alfred sent me to keep him honest. I guard him.’

The hostage? Then I remembered whose badge was the eagle wing and I stumbled towards the red ship’s master, inhibited by the ragged chains dragging from my ankles, and the approaching warrior took off his winged helmet and I could scarcely see his face because of my tears. But I still shouted his name. ‘Ragnar!’ I shouted. ‘Ragnar!’

He was laughing when we met. He embraced me, whirled me about, embraced me a second time and then pushed me away. ‘You stink,’ he said, ‘you’re the ugliest, hairiest, smelliest bastard I’ve ever laid eyes on. I should throw you to the crabs, except why would a good crab want anything as revolting as you?’

I was laughing and I was crying. ‘Alfred sent you?’

‘He did, but I wouldn’t have come if I’d known what a filthy turd you’ve become,’ he said. He smiled broadly and that smile reminded me of his father, all good humour and strength. He embraced me again. ‘It is good to see you, Uhtred Ragnarson,’ he said.

Ragnar’s men had driven Sven’s remaining troops away. Sven himself had escaped on horseback, fleeing towards Dunholm. We burned the slave pens, freed the slaves, and that night, by the light of the burning wattle hurdles, my shackles were struck off and for the next few days I raised my feet ludicrously high when I walked for I had grown so accustomed to the weight of the iron bonds.

I washed. The red-haired Scottish slave cut my hair, watched by Finan. ‘Her name’s Ethne,’ he told me. He spoke her language, or at least they could understand one another, though I guessed, from the way they looked at each other, that different languages would not have been a barrier. Ethne had found two of the men who had raped her among Sven’s dead and she had borrowed Finan’s sword to mutilate their corpses and Finan had watched her proudly. Now she used shears to cut my hair and trim my beard, and afterwards I dressed in a leather jerkin and in clean hose and proper shoes. And then we ate in the ruined monastery church and I sat with Ragnar, my friend, and heard the tale of my rescue.

‘We’ve been following you all summer,’ he said.

‘We saw you.’

‘Couldn’t miss us, could you, not with that hull? Isn’t she a horror? I hate pine-built hulls. She’s called Dragon-Fire, but I call her Worm-Breath. It took me a month to get her ready for sea. She belonged to a man who was killed at Ethandun and she was just rotting away on the Temes when Alfred gave her to us.’

‘Why would Alfred do that?’

‘Because he said you won him his throne at Ethandun,’ Ragnar said and grinned. ‘Alfred was exaggerating,’ he went on, ‘I’m sure he was. I imagine you just stumbled about the battlefield and made a bit of noise, but you did enough to fool Alfred.’

‘I did enough,’ I said softly, remembering the long green hill. ‘But I thought Alfred didn’t notice.’

‘He noticed,’ Ragnar said, ‘but he didn’t do this just for you. He gained a nunnery as well.’

‘He did what?’

‘Got himself a nunnery. God knows why he’d want one. Me, I might have exchanged you for a whorehouse, but Alfred got a nunnery and he seemed well enough pleased with that bargain.’

And that was when the story emerged. I did not hear the whole tale that night, but later I pieced it all together and I shall tell it here. It had all started with Hild.

Guthred kept his last promise to me and treated her honourably. He gave her my sword and my helmet, he let her keep my mail and my arm rings, and he asked her to be the companion of his new wife, Queen Osburh, the Saxon niece of the dethroned king in Eoferwic. But Hild blamed herself for my betrayal. She decided that she had offended her god by resisting her calling as a nun and so she begged Guthred to give her leave to go back to Wessex and rejoin her order. He had wanted her to stay in Northumbria, but she pleaded with him to let her go and she told him that God and Saint Cuthbert demanded it of her, and Guthred was ever open to Cuthbert’s persuasion. And so he allowed her to accompany messengers he was sending to Alfred and thus Hild returned to Wessex and once there she found Steapa, who had always been fond of her.

‘She took me to Fifhaden,’ Steapa told me that night when the hurdles burned beneath the ruined walls of Gyruum’s monastery.

‘To Fifhaden?’

‘And we dug up your hoard,’ Steapa said. ‘Hild showed me where it was and I dug it up. Then we carried it to Alfred. All of it. We poured it on the floor and he just stared at it.’

That hoard was Hild’s weapon. She told Alfred the story of Guthred and how he had betrayed me, and she promised Alfred that if he sent men to find me then she would use all that gold and silver on his hall’s floor to build a house of God and that she would repent of her sins and live the rest of her life as a bride of Christ. She would wear the church’s manacles so that my iron chains could be struck off.

‘She became a nun again?’ I asked.

‘She said she wanted that,’ Steapa said. ‘She said God wanted it. And Alfred did. He said yes to her.’

‘So Alfred released you?’ I asked Ragnar.

‘I hope he will,’ Ragnar said, ‘when I take you back home. I’m still a hostage, but Alfred said I could search for you if I promised to return to him. And we’ll all be released soon enough. Guthrum’s making no trouble. King Æthelstan, he’s called now.’

‘He’s in East Anglia?’

‘He’s in East Anglia,’ Ragnar confirmed, ‘and he’s building churches and monasteries.’

‘So he really did become a Christian?’

‘The poor bastard’s as pious as Alfred,’ Ragnar said gloomily. ‘Guthrum always was a credulous fool. But Alfred sent for me. Told me I could search for you. He let me take the men who served me in exile and the rest are crewmen that Steapa found. They’re Saxons, of course, but the bastards can row well enough.’

‘Steapa said he was here to guard you,’ I said.

‘Steapa!’ Ragnar looked across the fire we had lit in the nave of the monastery’s ruined church, ‘you foul scrap of stinking stoat-shit. Did you say you were here to guard me?’

‘But I am, lord,’ Steapa said.

‘You’re a piece of shit. But you fight well.’ Ragnar grinned and looked back to me. ‘And I’m to take you back to Alfred.’

I stared into the fire where strips of burning wattle glowed a brilliant red. ‘Thyra is at Dunholm,’ I said, ‘and Kjartan still lives.’

‘And I go to Dunholm when Alfred releases me,’ Ragnar said, ‘but first I have to take you to Wessex. I swore an oath on it. I swore I would not break Northumbria’s peace, but only fetch you. And Alfred kept Brida, of course.’ Brida was his woman.

‘He kept her?’

‘As a hostage for me, I suppose. But he’ll release her and I shall raise money and I shall assemble men and then I shall scrape Dunholm off the face of the earth.’

‘You have no money?’

‘Not enough.’

So I told him about Sverri’s home in Jutland and how there was money there, or at least we believed there was money there, and Ragnar thought about that and I thought about Alfred.

Alfred did not like me. He had never liked me. At times he hated me, but I had done him service. I had done him great service, and he had been less than generous in rewarding that service. Five hides, he had given me, while I had given him a kingdom. Yet now I owed my freedom to him, and I did not understand why he had done it. Except, of course, that Hild had given him a house of prayer, and he would have wanted that, and he would have welcomed her repentance, and both those things made a twisted kind of sense. Yet he had still rescued me. He had reached out and plucked me from slavery and I decided he was generous after all. But I also knew there would be a price to pay. Alfred would want more than Hild’s soul and a new convent. He would want me. ‘I hoped I’d never see Wessex again,’ I said.

‘Well you’re going to see it,’ Ragnar said, ‘because I swore to take you back. Besides, we can’t stay here.’

‘No,’ I agreed.

‘Kjartan will have a hundred men here in the morning,’ Ragnar said.

‘Two hundred,’ I said.

‘So we must go,’ he said, then looked wistful. ‘There’s a hoard in Jutland?’

‘A great hoard,’ Finan said.

‘We think it’s buried in a reed hut,’ I added, ‘and guarded by a woman and three children.’

Ragnar stared through the door to where a few sparks of fire showed among the hovels built by the old Roman fort. ‘I can’t go to Jutland,’ he said softly. ‘I swore an oath that I would take you back as soon as I found you.’

‘So someone else can go,’ I suggested. ‘You have two ships now. And Sverri will reveal where his hoard is if he’s frightened enough.’

So next morning Ragnar ordered his twelve Danes to take Trader across the sea. The command of the ship was given to Rollo, Ragnar’s best steersman, and Finan begged to go with Rollo’s crew, and the Scottish girl Ethne went with Finan who now wore mail and a helmet and had a long sword buckled at his waist. Sverri was chained to one of Trader’s oar-benches and, as she left the shore, I saw Finan whipping him with the lash that had scarred our backs for so many months.

Trader left and we then carried the Scottish slaves across the river in the red ship and released them on the northern bank. They were frightened and did not know what to do, so we gave them a handful of the coins we had taken from Sverri’s strongbox and told them to keep walking with the sea always on their right hand and, with a little luck, they might reach home. They would more likely be captured by Bebbanburg’s garrison and sold back into slavery, but we could not help that. We left them, pushed the red ship away from the shore and turned for the sea.

Behind us, where Gyruum’s hilltop smoked from the remnants of our fires, horsemen in mail and helmets appeared. They lined the crest, and a column of them galloped across the salt-marsh to clatter onto the shingle bank, but they were much too late. We were riding the ebb-tide towards the open sea and I looked behind and saw Kjartan’s men and I knew I would see them again and then the Dragon-Fire rounded the river’s bend and the oars bit the water and the sun glittered like sharpened spear-points on the small waves and an osprey flew overhead and I raised my eyes to the wind and wept.

Pure tears of joy.

It took us three weeks to voyage to Lundene where we paid silver to the Danes who exacted a toll from every ship that rowed upriver, and then it was another two days to Readingum where we beached Dragon-Fire and purchased horses with Sverri’s money. It was autumn in Wessex, a time of mists and fallow fields. The peregrine falcons had returned from wherever they voyage in the high sky during the summer months and the oak leaves were turning a wind-shivered bronze.

We rode to Wintanceaster for we were told that was where Alfred was holding court, but the day we arrived he had ridden to one of his estates and was not expected to return that night and so, as the sun lowered over the scaffolding of the big church Alfred was building, I left Ragnar in the Two Cranes tavern and walked to the northern edge of the town. I had to ask directions and was pointed down a long alley that was choked with muddy ruts. Two pigs rooted in the alley that was bordered on one side by the town’s high palisade and on the other by a wooden wall in which there was a low door marked by a cross. A score of beggars were crouched in the mud and dung outside the door. They were in rags. Some had lost arms or legs, most were covered in sores, while a blind woman held a scarred child. They all shuffled nervously aside as I approached.

I knocked and waited. I was about to knock again when a small hatch was slid aside in the door and I explained my business, then the hatch snapped shut and I waited again. The scarred child cried and the blind woman held a begging bowl towards me. A cat walked along the wall’s top and a cloud of starlings flew westwards. Two women with huge loads of firewood strapped on their backs passed me and behind them a man drove a cow. He bobbed his head in deference to me for I looked like a lord again. I was dressed in leather and had a sword at my side, though the sword was not Serpent-Breath. My black cloak was held at my throat with a heavy brooch of silver and amber that I had taken from one of Sverri’s dead crewmen, and that brooch was my only jewel for I had no arm rings.

Then the low door was unbolted and pulled inwards on its leather hinges and a small woman beckoned me inside. I ducked through, she closed the door and led me across a patch of grass, pausing there to let me scrape the street dung off my boots before taking me to a church. She ushered me inside, then paused again to genuflect towards the altar. She muttered a prayer, then gestured that I should go through another door into a bare room with walls made of mud and wattle. Two stools were the only furniture and she told me I might sit on one of them, and then she opened a shutter so that the late sun could illuminate the room. A mouse scuttled in the floor rushes and the small woman tutted and then left me alone.

I waited again. A rook cawed on the roof. From some place nearby I could hear the rhythmic squirt of milk going into a pail. Another cow, its udder full, waited patiently just beyond the open shutter. The rook cawed again and then the door opened and three nuns came into the room. Two of them stood against the far wall, while the third just gazed at me and began to weep silently. ‘Hild,’ I said, and I stood to embrace her, but she held a hand out to keep me from touching her. She went on weeping, but she was smiling too, and then she put both her hands over her face and stayed that way for a long while.

‘God has forgiven me,’ she finally spoke through her fingers.

‘I am glad of it,’ I said.

She sniffed, took her hands from her face and indicated that I should sit again, and she sat opposite me and for a time we just looked at each other and I thought how I had missed her, not as a lover, but as a friend. I wanted to embrace her, and perhaps she sensed that for she sat straighter and spoke very formally. ‘I am now the Abbess Hildegyth,’ she said.

‘I had forgotten your proper name is Hildegyth,’ I said.

‘And it does my heart good to see you,’ she said primly. She was dressed in a coarse grey robe that matched the gowns of her two companions, both of whom were older women. The robes were belted with hemp-rope and had heavy hoods hiding their hair. A plain wooden cross hung at Hild’s neck and she fingered it compulsively. ‘I have prayed for you,’ she went on.

‘It seems your prayers worked,’ I said awkwardly.

‘And I stole all your money,’ she said with a touch of her old mischief.

‘I give it to you,’ I said, ‘willingly.’

She told me about the nunnery. She had built it with the money from Fifhaden’s hoard and now it housed sixteen sisters and eight laywomen. ‘Our lives,’ she said, ‘are dedicated to Christ and to Saint Hedda. You know who Hedda was?’

‘I’ve never heard of her,’ I said.

The two older nuns, who had been looking at me with stern disapproval, suddenly broke into giggles. Hild smiled. ‘Hedda was a man,’ she told me gently, ‘and he was born in Northumbria and he was the first bishop of Wintanceaster. He is remembered as a most holy and good man, and I chose him because you are from Northumbria and it was your unwitting generosity that let us build this house in the town where Saint Hedda preached. We vowed to pray to him every day until you returned, and now we shall pray to him every day to thank him for answering our prayers.’

I said nothing for I did not know what to say. I remember thinking that Hild’s voice was forced as if she were persuading herself as well as me that she was happy, and I was wrong about that. It was forced because my presence brought her unpleasant memories, and in time I learned she truly was happy. She was useful. She had made her peace with her god and after she died she was remembered as a saint. Not so very long ago a bishop told me all about the most holy and blessed Saint Hildegyth and how she had been a shining example of Christian chastity and charity, and I was sorely tempted to tell him that I had once spread-eagled the saint among the buttercups, but managed to restrain myself. He was certainly right about her charity. Hild told me that the purpose of Saint Hedda’s nunnery was not just to pray for me, its benefactor, but to heal the sick. ‘We are busy all day,’ she said, ‘and all night. We take the poor and we tend them. I’ve no doubt there are some waiting outside our gate right now.’

‘There are,’ I said.

‘Then those poor folk are our purpose,’ she said, ‘and we are their servants.’ She gave me a brisk smile. ‘Now tell me what I have prayed to hear. Tell me your tales.’

So I told her and I did not tell her all of what had happened, but made light of slavery, saying only that I had been chained so I could not escape. I told her of the voyages, of the strange places and of the people I had seen. I spoke of the land of ice and fire, of watching the great whales breach in the endless sea, and I told her of the long river that twisted into a land of birch trees and lingering snow, and I finished by saying that I was glad to be a free man again and grateful to her for making me so.

Hild was silent when I finished. The milk still spurted into the pail outside. A sparrow perched on the window ledge, preened itself and flew away. Hild had been staring at me, as if testing the veracity of my words. ‘Was it bad?’ she asked after a while.

I hesitated, tempted to lie, then shrugged. ‘Yes,’ I said shortly.

‘But now you are the Lord Uhtred again,’ she said, ‘and I have your possessions.’ She signalled to one of the nuns, who left the room. ‘We kept everything for you,’ Hild said brightly.

‘Everything?’ I asked.

‘Except your horse,’ she said ruefully. ‘I couldn’t bring the horse. What was he called? Witnere?’

‘Witnere,’ I said.

‘I fear he was stolen.’

‘Stolen?’

‘The Lord Ivarr took him.’

I said nothing because the nun had come back into the room with a cumbersome armful of weapons and mail. She had my helmet, my heavy coat of leather and mail, she had my arm rings and she had Wasp-Sting and Serpent-Breath, and she dropped them all at my feet and there were tears in my eyes as I leaned forward and touched Serpent-Breath’s hilt. ‘The mail coat was damaged,’ Hild said, ‘so we had one of the king’s armourers repair it.’

‘Thank you,’ I said.

‘I have prayed,’ Hild said, ‘that you will not take revenge on King Guthred.’

‘He enslaved me,’ I said harshly. I could not take my hand from the sword. There had been so many moments of despair in the last two years, moments when I thought I would never touch a sword again, let alone Serpent-Breath, yet here she was, and my hand slowly closed about the hilt.

‘Guthred did what he felt was best for his kingdom,’ Hild said sternly, ‘and he is a Christian.’

‘He enslaved me,’ I said again.

‘And you must forgive him,’ Hild said forcefully, ‘as I have forgiven the men who wronged me and as God has forgiven me. I was a sinner,’ she went on, ‘a great sinner, but God has touched me and poured his grace into me and so forgiven me. So swear to me that you will spare Guthred.’

‘I will make no oaths,’ I said harshly, still holding Serpent-Breath.

‘You are not an unkind man,’ Hild said. ‘I know that. You were kinder to me than I ever deserved. So be kind to Guthred. He’s a good man.’

‘I will remember that when I meet him,’ I said evasively.

‘And remember that he regretted what he did,’ Hild said, ‘and that he did it because he believed it would preserve his kingdom. And remember too that he has given this house money as a penance. We have much need of silver. There is no shortage of poor, sick folk, but there is ever a shortage of alms.’

I smiled at her. Then I stood and I unbuckled the sword I had taken from one of Sven’s men at Gyruum and I unpinned the brooch at my neck, and I dropped cloak, brooch and sword onto the rushes. ‘Those you can sell,’ I said. Then, grunting with the effort, I pulled on my old mail coat and I buckled on my old swords and I picked up my wolf-crested helmet. The coat felt monstrously heavy because it had been so long since I had worn mail. It was also too big for me for I had become thinner in those years of pulling Sverri’s oar. I slipped the arm rings over my hands, then looked at Hild. ‘I will give you one oath, Abbess Hildegyth,’ I said. She looked up at me and she was seeing the old Uhtred, the shining lord and sword-warrior. ‘I will support your house,’ I promised, ‘and you will have money from me and you will thrive and you will always have my protection.’

She smiled at that, then reached into a purse that hung at her belt and held out a small silver cross. ‘And that is my gift to you,’ she said, ‘and I pray that you will revere it as I do and learn its lesson. Our Lord died on that cross for the evil we all do, and I have no doubt, Lord Uhtred, that some of the pain he felt at his death was for your sins.’

She gave me the cross and our fingers touched and I looked into her eyes and she snatched her hand away. She blushed, though, and she looked up at me through half-lowered lids. For a heartbeat I saw the old Hild, the fragile, beautiful Hild, but then she composed her face and tried to look stern. ‘Now you can go to Gisela,’ she said.

I had not mentioned Gisela and now I pretended the name meant little. ‘She will be married by now,’ I said carelessly, ‘if she even lives.’

‘She lived when I left Northumbria,’ Hild said, ‘though that was eighteen months ago. She would not speak to her brother then, not after what he did to you. I spent hours comforting her. She was full of tears and anger. A strong girl, that one.’

‘And marriageable,’ I said harshly.

Hild smiled gently. ‘She swore to wait for you.’

I touched Serpent-Breath’s hilt. I was so full of hope and so racked by dread. Gisela. In my head I knew she could not match a slave’s feverish dreams, but I could not rid my head of her.

‘And perhaps she does wait for you,’ Hild said, then she stepped back, brusque suddenly. ‘Now we have prayers to say, folk to feed and bodies to heal.’

And so I was dismissed and I ducked out of the door in the convent wall to stand in the muddy alleyway. The beggars were allowed inside, leaving me leaning against the wooden wall with tears in my eyes. Folk edged by on the alley’s far side, fearful of me for I was dressed for war with my two swords.

Gisela, I thought, Gisela. Maybe she did wait, but I doubted it for she was too valuable as a peace cow, but I knew I would go back north as soon as I could. I would go for Gisela. I gripped the silver cross until I could feel its edges hurting through the great callouses that Sverri’s oar had made on my hand. Then I drew Serpent-Breath and I saw that Hild had looked after the blade well. It shone with a light coating of lard or lanolin that had prevented the patterned steel from rusting. I raised the sword to my lips and kissed her long blade. ‘You have men to kill,’ I told her, ‘and revenge to take.’

And so she had.

I found a swordsmith the next day and he told me he was too busy and could not do my work for many days and I told him that he would do my work that day or else he would do no work ever again, and in the end we came to an agreement. He agreed to do my work that day.

Serpent-Breath is a lovely weapon. She was made by Ealdwulf the Smith in Northumbria and her blade is a magical thing, flexible and strong, and when she had been made I had wanted her plain iron hilt decorated with silver or gilt-bronze, but Ealdwulf had refused. ‘It’s a tool,’ he had told me, ‘just a tool. Something to make your work easier.’

She had handles of ash wood, one either side of the sword’s tang, and over the years the twin handles had become polished and smooth. Such worn handles are dangerous. In battle they can slip in the hand, especially when blood is splashed on them, and so I told the swordsmith that I wanted new handles riveted onto the hilt, and that the handles must give a good grip, and that the small silver cross that Hild had given me must be embedded in the hilt’s pommel.

‘I shall do it, lord,’ he said.

‘Today.’

‘I shall try, lord,’ he said weakly.

‘You will succeed,’ I said, ‘and the work will be well done.’ I drew Serpent-Breath and her blade was bright in the shadowed room as I held her towards the smith’s furnace and in the red firelight I saw the patterns on her steel. She had been forged by beating three smooth and four twisted rods into one metal blade. She had been heated and hammered, heated and hammered, and when she was done, and when the seven rods had become one single savage streak of shining steel, the twists in the four rods were left in the blade as ghostly patterns. That was how she got her name, for the patterns looked like the swirling breath of a dragon.

‘She is a fine blade, lord,’ the swordsmith said.

‘She is the blade that killed Ubba by the sea,’ I said, stroking the steel.

‘Yes, lord,’ he said. He was terrified of me now.

‘And you will do the work today,’ I stressed, and I put sword and scabbard on his fire-scarred bench. I laid Hild’s cross on the hilt, then added a silver coin. I was no longer wealthy, but nor was I poor, and with the help of Serpent-Breath and Wasp-Sting I knew I would be rich again.

It was a lovely autumn day. The sun shone, making the new wood of Alfred’s church glow like gold. Ragnar and I were waiting for the king and we sat on the newly-scythed grass in a courtyard and Ragnar watched a monk carrying a pile of parchments to the royal scriptorium. ‘Everything’s written down here,’ he said, ‘everything! Can you read?’

‘I can read and write.’

He was impressed by that. ‘Is it useful?’

‘It’s never been useful for me,’ I admitted.

‘So why do they do it?’ he wondered.

‘Their religion is written down,’ I said, ‘ours isn’t.’

‘A written religion?’ He was puzzled by that.

‘They’ve got a book,’ I said, ‘and it’s all in there.’

‘Why do they need it written down?’

‘I don’t know. They just do. And, of course, they write down the laws. Alfred loves making new laws, and they all have to be written in books.’

‘If a man can’t remember the laws,’ Ragnar said, ‘then he’s got too many of them.’

The shouts of children interrupted us, or rather the offended screech of one small boy and the mocking laughter of a girl, and a heartbeat later the girl ran around the corner. She looked nine or ten years old, had golden hair as bright as the sun and was carrying a carved wooden horse that was plainly the property of the small boy who followed her. The girl, brandishing the carved horse like a trophy, ran across the grass. She was coltish, thin and happy, while the boy, three or four years younger, was built more solidly and looked thoroughly miserable. He had no chance of catching the girl for she was much too quick, but she saw me and her eyes widened and she stopped in front of us. The boy caught up with her, but was too overawed by Ragnar and me to try to retrieve his wooden horse. A nurse, red-faced and panting appeared around the corner and shouted the children’s names. ‘Edward! Æthelflaed!’

‘It’s you!’ Æthelflaed said, staring at me with a look of delight.

‘It’s me,’ I said, and I stood because Æthelflaed was the daughter of a king and Edward was the ætheling, the prince who might well rule Wessex when Alfred, his father, died.

‘Where have you been?’ Æthelflaed demanded, as if she had only missed me for a week or two.

‘I have been in the land of giants,’ I said, ‘and places where fire runs like water and where the mountains are made of ice and where sisters are never, ever unkind to their little brothers.’

‘Never?’ she asked, grinning.

‘I want my horse!’ Edward insisted and tried to snatch it from her, but Æthelflaed held it out of reach.

‘Never use force to get from a girl,’ Ragnar said to Edward, ‘what you can take by guile.’

‘Guile?’ Edward frowned, evidently unfamiliar with the word.

Ragnar frowned at Æthelflaed. ‘Is the horse hungry?’

‘No.’ She knew he was playing a game and she wanted to see if she could win.

‘But suppose I use magic,’ Ragnar suggested, ‘and make it eat grass?’

‘You can’t.’

‘How do you know?’ he asked. ‘I have been to places where the wooden horses go to pasture every morning, and every night the grass grows to touch the sky and every day the wooden horses eat it back to nothing again.’

‘No they don’t,’ she said, grinning.

‘And if I say the magic words,’ Ragnar said, ‘your horse will eat the grass.’

‘It’s my horse,’ Edward insisted.

‘Magic words?’ Æthelflaed was interested now.

‘You have to put the horse on the grass,’ Ragnar said.

She looked at me, wanting reassurance, but I just shrugged, and so she looked back at Ragnar who was being very serious, and she decided she wanted to see some magic and so she carefully placed the wooden horse beside a swathe of cut grass. ‘Now?’ she asked expectantly.

‘You have to shut your eyes,’ Ragnar said, ‘turn around three times very fast, then shout Havacar very loudly.’

‘Havacar?’

‘Careful!’ he warned her, looking alarmed. ‘You can’t say magic words carelessly.’

So she shut her eyes, turned around three times, and while she did Ragnar pointed at the horse and nodded to Edward who snatched it up and ran off to the nurse, and by the time Æthelflaed, staggering slightly from dizziness, had shouted her magic word the horse was gone.

‘You cheated!’ she accused Ragnar.

‘But you learned a lesson,’ I said, squatting beside her as if I were going to tell her a secret. I learned forward and whispered in her ear. ‘Never trust a Dane.’

She smiled at that. She had known me well during the long wet winter when her family had been fugitives in the marshes of Sumorsæte and in those dismal months she had learned to like me and I had come to like her. She reached out now and touched my nose. ‘How did that happen?’

‘A man broke my nose,’ I said. It had been Hakka, striking me in Trader because he thought I was shirking at the oar.

‘It’s crooked,’ she said.

‘It lets me smell crooked smells.’

‘What happened to the man who broke it?’

‘He’s dead,’ I said.

‘Good,’ she said. ‘I’m going to be married.’

‘You are?’ I asked.

‘To Æthelred of Mercia,’ she said proudly, then frowned because a flicker of distaste had crossed my face.

‘To my cousin?’ I asked, trying to look pleased.

‘Is Æthelred your cousin?’ she asked.

‘Yes.’

‘I’m to be his wife,’ she said, ‘and live in Mercia. Have you been to Mercia?’

‘Yes.’

‘Is it nice?’

‘You will like it,’ I said, though I doubted she would, not married to my snotty-nosed, pompous cousin, but I could hardly say that.

She frowned. ‘Does Æthelred pick his nose?’

‘I don’t think so,’ I said.

‘Edward does,’ she said, ‘and then he eats it. Ugh.’ She leaned forward, gave me an impulsive kiss on my broken nose, then ran off to the nurse.

‘A pretty girl,’ Ragnar said.

‘Who is to be wasted on my cousin,’ I said.

‘Wasted?’

‘He’s a bumptious little shit called Æthelred,’ I said. He had brought men to Ethandun, only a few, but enough to loft him into Alfred’s good graces. ‘The idea is,’ I went on, ‘that he’ll be Ealdorman of Mercia when his father dies and Alfred’s daughter will be his wife, and that will bind Mercia to Wessex.’

Ragnar shook his head. ‘There are too many Danes in Mercia. The Saxons won’t ever rule there again.’

‘Alfred wouldn’t waste his daughter on Mercia,’ I said, ‘unless he thought there was something to gain.’

‘To gain things,’ Ragnar said, ‘you have to be bold. You can’t write things down and win, you have to take risks. Alfred’s too cautious.’

I half smiled. ‘You really think he’s cautious?’

‘Of course he is,’ Ragnar said scornfully.

‘Not always,’ I said, then paused, wondering if I should say what I was thinking.

My hesitation provoked Ragnar. He knew I was hiding something. ‘What?’ he demanded.

I still hesitated, then decided no harm could come from an old tale. ‘Do you remember that winter night in Cippanhamm?’ I asked him. ‘When Guthrum was there and you all believed Wessex had fallen, and you and I drank in the church?’

‘Of course I remember it, yes.’

It had been the winter when Guthrum had invaded Wessex and it had seemed that Guthrum must have won the war, for the West Saxon army was scattered. Some thegns fled abroad, many made their own peace with Guthrum, while Alfred had been driven into hiding on the marshes of Sumorsæte. Yet Alfred, though he was defeated, was not broken, and he had insisted on disguising himself as a harpist and going secretly to Cippanhamm to spy on the Danes. That had almost ended in disaster, for Alfred did not possess the cunning to be a spy. I had rescued him that night, the same night that I had found Ragnar in the royal church. ‘And do you remember,’ I went on, ‘that I had a servant with me and he sat at the back of the church with a hood over his head and I ordered him to be silent?’

Ragnar frowned, trying to recall that winter night, then he nodded. ‘You did, that’s right.’

‘He was no servant,’ I said, ‘that was Alfred.’

Ragnar stared at me. In his head he was working things out, realising that I had lied to him on that distant night, and he was understanding that if he had only known that the hooded servant had been Alfred then he could have won all Wessex for the Danes that same night. For a moment I regretted telling him, because I thought he would be angry with me, but then he laughed. ‘That was Alfred? Truly?’

‘He went to spy on you,’ I said, ‘and I went to rescue him.’

‘It was Alfred? In Guthrum’s camp?’

‘He takes risks,’ I said, reverting to our talk of Mercia.

But Ragnar was still thinking of that far-off cold night. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ he demanded.

‘Because I’d given him my oath.’

‘We would have made you richer than the richest king,’ Ragnar said. ‘We would have given you ships, men, horses, silver, women, anything! All you had to do was speak.’

‘I had given him my oath,’ I said again, and I remembered how close I had come to betraying Alfred. I had been so tempted to blurt out the truth. That night, with a handful of words, I could have ensured that no Saxon ever ruled in England again. I could have made Wessex into a Danish kingdom. I could have done all that by betraying a man I did not much like to a man I loved as a brother, and yet I had kept silent. I had given an oath and honour binds us to paths we might not choose. ‘Wyrd bið ful aræd,’ I said.

Fate is inexorable. It grips us like a harness. I thought I had escaped Wessex and escaped Alfred, yet here I was, back in his palace, and he returned that afternoon in a clatter of hooves and a noisy rush of servants, monks and priests. Two men carried the king’s bedding back to his chamber while a monk wheeled a barrow piled with documents which Alfred had evidently needed during his single day’s absence. A priest hurried by with an altar cloth and a crucifix, while two more brought home the relics that accompanied Alfred on all his travels. Then came a group of the king’s bodyguards, the only men allowed to carry weapons in the royal precincts, and then more priests, all talking, among whom was Alfred himself. He had not changed. He still had a clerk’s look about him, lean and pale and scholarly. A priest was talking urgently to him and he nodded his head as he listened. He was dressed simply, his black cloak making him look like a cleric. He wore no royal circlet, just a woollen cap. He was holding Æthelflaed’s hand and Æthelflaed, I noticed, was once again holding her brother’s horse. She was hopping on one leg rather than walking which meant that she kept tugging her father away from the priest, but Alfred indulged her for he was ever fond of his children. Then she tugged him purposely, trying to draw him onto the grass where Ragnar and I had stood to welcome him and he yielded to her, letting her bring him to us.

Ragnar and I knelt. I kept my head bowed.

‘Uhtred has a broken nose,’ Æthelflaed told her father, ‘and the man who did it is dead now.’

A royal hand tipped my head up and I stared into that pale, narrow face with its clever eyes. He looked drawn. I supposed that he was suffering another bout of the bowel cramps that made his life perpetual agony. He was looking at me with his customary sternness, but then he managed a half-smile. ‘I thought never to see you again, Lord Uhtred.’

‘I owe you thanks, lord,’ I said humbly, ‘so I thank you.’

‘Stand,’ he said, and we both stood and Alfred looked at Ragnar. ‘I shall free you soon, Lord Ragnar.’

‘Thank you, lord.’

‘But in a week’s time we shall be holding a celebration here. We shall rejoice that our new church is finished, and we shall formally betroth this young lady to Lord Æthelred. I have summoned the Witan, and I would ask you both to stay until our deliberations are over.’

‘Yes, lord,’ I said. In truth all I wanted was to go to Northumbria, but I was beholden to Alfred and could wait a week or two.

‘And at that time,’ he went on, ‘I may have matters,’ he paused, as if fearing that he spoke too much, ‘matters,’ he said vaguely, ‘in which you might be of service to me.’

‘Yes, lord,’ I repeated, then he nodded and walked away.

And so we waited. The town, anticipating the celebrations, filled with folk. It was a time of reunions. All the men who had led Alfred’s army at Ethandun were there, and they greeted me with pleasure. Wiglaf of Sumorsæte and Harald of Defnascir and Osric of Wiltunscir and Arnulf of Suth Seaxa all came to Wintanceaster. They were the powerful men of the kingdom now, the great lords, the men who had stood by their king when he had seemed doomed. But Alfred did not punish those who had fled Wessex. Wilfrith was still Ealdorman of Hamptonscir, even though he had run to Frankia to escape Guthrum’s attack, and Alfred treated Wilfrith with exaggerated courtesy, but there was still an unspoken divide between those who had stayed to fight and those who had run away.

The town also filled with entertainers. There were the usual jugglers and stilt-walkers, story-tellers and musicians, but the most successful was a dour Mercian called Offa who travelled with a pack of performing dogs. They were only terriers, the kind most men use to hunt rats, but Offa could make them dance, walk on their hind legs and jump through hoops. One of the dogs even rode a pony, holding the reins in its teeth, and the other dogs followed with small leather pails to collect the crowd’s pennies. To my surprise Offa was invited to the palace. I was surprised because Alfred was not fond of frivolity. His idea of a good time was to discuss theology, but he commanded the dogs be brought to the palace and I assumed it was because he thought they would amuse his children. Ragnar and I both went to the performance, and Father Beocca found me there.

Poor Beocca. He was in tears because I lived. His hair, that had always been red, was heavily touched by grey now. He was over forty, an old man, and his wandering eye had gone milky. He limped and had a palsied left hand, for which afflictions men mocked him, though none did in my presence. Beocca had known me since I was a child, for he had been my father’s mass-priest and my early tutor, and he veered between loving me and detesting me, though he was ever my friend. He was also a good priest, a clever man and one of Alfred’s chaplains, and he was happy in the king’s service. He was delirious now, beaming at me with tears in his eyes. ‘You live,’ he said, giving me a clumsy embrace.

‘I’m a hard man to kill, father.’

‘So you are, so you are,’ he said, ‘but you were a weakly child.’

‘Me?’

‘The runt of the litter, your father always said. Then you began to grow.’

‘Haven’t stopped, have I?’

‘Isn’t that clever!’ Beocca said, watching two dogs walk on their hind legs. ‘I do like dogs,’ he went on, ‘and you should talk to Offa.’

‘To Offa?’ I asked, glancing at the Mercian who controlled his dogs by clicking his fingers or whistling.

‘He was in Bebbanburg this summer,’ Beocca said. ‘He tells me your uncle has rebuilt the hall. It’s bigger than it was. And Gytha is dead. Poor Gytha,’ he made the sign of the cross, ‘she was a good woman.’

Gytha was my stepmother and, after my father was killed at Eoferwic, she married my uncle and so was complicit in his usurpation of Bebbanburg. I said nothing of her death, but after the performance, when Offa and his two women assistants were packing up the hoops and leashing the dogs, I sought the Mercian out and said I would talk with him.

He was a strange man. He was tall like me, lugubrious, knowing, and, oddest of all, a Christian priest. He was really Father Offa. ‘But I was bored with the church,’ he told me in the Two Cranes where I had bought him a pot of ale, ‘and bored with my wife. I became very bored with her.’

‘So you walked away?’

‘I danced away,’ he said, ‘I skipped away. I would have flown away if God had given me wings.’

He had been travelling for a dozen years now, ranging throughout the Saxon and Danish lands in Britain and welcome everywhere because he provided laughter, though in conversation he was a gloomy man. But Beocca had been right. Offa had been in Northumbria and it was clear that he had kept a very sharp eye on all that he saw. So sharp that I understood why Alfred had invited his dogs to the palace. Offa was plainly one of the spies who brought news of Britain to the West Saxon court. ‘So tell me what happens in Northumbria,’ I invited him.

He grimaced and stared up at the ceiling beams. It was the pleasure of the Two Cranes for a man to cut a notch in the beam every time he hired one of the tavern’s whores and Offa seemed to be counting the cuts, a job that might take a lifetime, then he glanced at me sourly. ‘News, lord,’ he said, ‘is a commodity like ale or hides or the service of whores. It is bought and sold.’ He waited until I laid a coin on the table between us, then all he did was look at the coin and yawn, so I laid another shilling beside the first. ‘Where do you wish me to begin?’ he asked.

‘The north.’

Scotland was quiet, he said. King Aed had a fistula and that distracted him, though of course there were frequent cattle raids into Northumbria where my uncle, Ælfric the Usurper, now called himself the Lord of Bernicia.

‘He wants to be king of Bernicia?’ I asked.

‘He wants to be left in peace,’ Offa said. ‘He offends no one, he amasses money, he acknowledges Guthred as king and he keeps his swords sharp. He is no fool. He welcomes Danish settlers because they offer protection against the Scots, but he allows no Danes to enter Bebbanburg unless he trusts them. He keeps that fortress safe.’

‘But he wants to be king?’ I insisted.

‘I know what he does,’ Offa said tartly, ‘but what he wants is between Ælfric and his god.’

‘His son lives?’

‘He has two sons now, both young, but his wife died.’

‘I heard.’

‘His eldest son liked my dogs and wanted his father to buy them. I said no.’

He had little other news of Bebbanburg, other than that the hall had been enlarged and, more ominously, the outer wall and the low gate rebuilt higher and stronger. I asked if he and his dogs were welcome at Dunholm and he gave me a very sharp look and made the sign of the cross. ‘No man goes to Dunholm willingly,’ Offa said. ‘Your uncle gave me an escort through Kjartan’s land and I was glad of it.’

‘So Kjartan thrives?’ I asked bitterly.

‘He spreads like a green bay tree,’ Offa said and, when he saw my puzzlement, enlarged the answer. ‘He thrives and steals and rapes and kills and he lurks in Dunholm. But his influence is wider, much wider. He has money and he uses it to buy friends. If a Dane complains about Guthred then you can be sure he has taken Kjartan’s money.’

‘I thought Kjartan agreed to pay a tribute to Guthred?’

‘It was paid for one year. Since then Good King Guthred has learned to do without.’

‘Good King Guthred?’ I asked.

‘That is how he is known in Eoferwic,’ Offa said, ‘but only to the Christians. The Danes consider him a gullible fool.’

‘Because he’s a Christian?’

‘Is he a Christian?’ Offa asked himself. ‘He claims to be, and he goes to church, but I suspect he still half believes in the old gods. No, the Danes dislike him because he favours the Christians. He tried to levy a church tax on the Danes. It was not a clever idea.’

‘So how long does Good King Guthred have?’ I asked.

‘I charge more for prophecy,’ Offa said, ‘on the grounds that what is worthless must be made expensive.’

I kept my money in its purse. ‘What of Ivarr?’ I asked.

‘What of him?’

‘Does he still acknowledge Guthred as king?’

‘For the moment,’ Offa said carefully, ‘but the Earl Ivarr is once again the strongest man in Northumbria. He took money from Kjartan, I hear, and used it to raise men.’

‘Why raise men?’

‘Why do you think?’ Offa asked sarcastically.

‘To put his own man on the throne?’

‘It would seem likely,’ Offa said, ‘but Guthred has an army too.’

‘A Saxon army?’

‘A Christian army. Mostly Saxon.’

‘So civil war is brewing?’

‘In Northumbria,’ Offa said, ‘civil war is always brewing.’

‘And Ivarr will win,’ I said, ‘because he’s ruthless.’

‘He’s more cautious than he was,’ Offa said. ‘Aed taught him that three years ago. But in time, yes, he will attack. When he’s sure he can win.’

‘So Guthred,’ I said, ‘must kill Ivarr and Kjartan.’

‘What kings must do, lord, is beyond my humble competence. I teach dogs to dance, not men to rule. You wish to know about Mercia?’

‘I wish to know about Guthred’s sister.’

Offa half smiled. ‘That one! She’s a nun.’

‘Gisela!’ I was shocked. ‘A nun? She’s become a Christian?’

‘I doubt she’s a Christian,’ Offa said, ‘but going into a nunnery protected her.’

‘From whom?’

‘Kjartan. He wanted the girl as a bride for his son.’

That did surprise me. ‘But Kjartan hates Guthred,’ I said.

‘But even so Kjartan decided Guthred’s sister would be a suitable bride for his one-eyed son,’ Offa said. ‘I suspect he wants the son to be king in Eoferwic one day, and marrying Guthred’s sister would help that ambition. Whatever, he sent men to Eoferwic and offered Guthred money, peace and a promise to stop molesting Christians and I think Guthred was half tempted.’

‘How could he be?’

‘Because a desperate man needs allies. Perhaps, for a day or two, Guthred dreamed of separating Ivarr and Kjartan. He certainly needs money, and Guthred has the fatal mind of a man who always believes the best in other people. His sister isn’t so burdened with charitable ideas, and she would have none of it. She fled to a nunnery.’

‘When was this?’

‘Last year. Kjartan took her rejection as another insult and has threatened to let his men rape her one by one.’

‘She’s still in the nunnery?’

‘She was when I left Eoferwic. She’s safe from marriage there, isn’t she? Perhaps she doesn’t like men. Lots of nuns don’t. But I doubt her brother will leave her there for very much longer. She’s too useful as a peace cow.’

‘To marry Kjartan’s son?’ I asked scornfully.

‘That won’t happen,’ Offa said. He poured himself more ale. ‘Father Hrothweard, you know who he is?’

‘A nasty man,’ I said, remembering how Hrothweard had raised the mob in Eoferwic to murder the Danes.

‘Hrothweard is an exceedingly unpleasant creature,’ Offa agreed with rare enthusiasm. ‘He was the one who suggested the church tax on the Danes. He’s also suggested that Guthred’s sister becomes your uncle’s new wife, and that notion probably does have some appeal to Guthred. Ælfric needs a wife, and if he were willing to send his spearmen south then it would hugely increase Guthred’s strength.’

‘It would leave Bebbanburg unprotected,’ I said.

‘Sixty men can hold Bebbanburg till Judgment Day,’ Offa said dismissively. ‘Guthred needs a larger army, and two hundred men from Bebbanburg would be a Godsend, and certainly worth a sister. Mind you, Ivarr would do anything to stop that marriage. He doesn’t want the Saxons of northern Northumbria uniting with the Christians of Eoferwic. So, lord,’ he pushed his bench back as if to suggest that his survey was finished, ‘Britain is at peace, except for Northumbria, where Guthred is in trouble.’

‘No trouble in Mercia?’ I asked.

He shook his head. ‘Nothing unusual.’

‘East Anglia?’

He paused. ‘No trouble there,’ he said after the hesitation, but I knew the pause had been deliberate, a bait on a hook, and so I waited. Offa just looked innocently at me and so I sighed, took another coin from my purse and placed it on the table. He rang it to make sure the silver was good. ‘King Æthelstan,’ he said, ‘Guthrum as was, negotiates with Alfred. Alfred doesn’t think I know, but I do. Together they will divide England.’

‘They?’ I asked. ‘Divide England? It’s not theirs to divide!’

‘The Danes will be given Northumbria, East Anglia and the north-eastern parts of Mercia. Wessex will gain the south-western part of Mercia.’

I stared at him. ‘Alfred won’t agree to that,’ I said.

‘He will.’

‘He wants all England,’ I protested.

‘He wants Wessex to be safe,’ Offa said, spinning the coin on the table.

‘So he’ll agree to give up half England?’ I asked in disbelief.

Offa smiled. ‘Think of it this way, lord,’ he said. ‘In Wessex there are no Danes, but where the Danes rule there are many Saxons. If the Danes agree not to attack Alfred then he can feel safe. But how can the Danes ever feel safe? Even if Alfred agrees not to attack them, they still have thousands of Saxons on their land and those Saxons could rise against them at any time, especially if they receive encouragement from Wessex. King Æthelstan will make his treaty with Alfred, but it won’t be worth the parchment it’s scribbled on.’

‘You mean Alfred will break the treaty?’

‘Not openly, no. But he will encourage Saxon revolt, he will support Christians, he will foment trouble, and all the time he will say his prayers and swear eternal friendship with the enemy. You all think of Alfred as a pious scholar, but his ambition embraces all the land between here and Scotland. You see him praying, I see him dreaming. He will send missionaries to the Danes and you will think that’s all he does, but whenever a Saxon kills a Dane then Alfred will have supplied the blade.’

‘No,’ I said, ‘not Alfred. His god won’t let him be treacherous.’

‘What do you know of Alfred’s god?’ Offa asked scornfully, then closed his eyes. ‘“Then the Lord our God delivered the enemy to us,”’ he intoned, ‘“and we struck him, and his sons, and all his tribe. We took all his cities and utterly destroyed the men, and the women, and the little children.”’ He opened his eyes. ‘Those are the actions of Alfred’s god, Lord Uhtred. You want more from the holy scriptures? “The Lord thy God shall deliver all thy enemies to thee and thou shalt smite them and utterly destroy them.”’ Offa grimaced. ‘Alfred believes in God’s promises, and he dreams of a land free of pagans, a land where the enemy is utterly destroyed and where only godly Christians live. If there is one man in the island of Britain to fear, Lord Uhtred, that man is King Alfred.’ He stood. ‘I must make sure those stupid women have fed my dogs.’

I watched him go and I thought he was a clever man who had misunderstood Alfred.

Which was, of course, what Alfred wanted me to think.

Seven

The Witan was the royal council, formed by the leading men of the kingdom, and it assembled for the dedication of Alfred’s new church and to celebrate Æthelflaed’s betrothal to my cousin. Ragnar and I had no business in their discussions so we drank in the town’s taverns while they talked. Brida had been allowed to join us and Ragnar was the happier for it. She was an East Anglian Saxon and had once been my lover, but that had been years before when we were both children. Now she was a woman and more Danish than the Danes. She and Ragnar had never formally married, but she was his friend, lover, adviser and sorceress. He was fair and she was dark, he ate like a boar while she picked at her food, he was raucous and she was quietly wise, but together they were happiness. I spent hours telling her about Gisela, and Brida listened patiently. ‘You really think she’s waited for you?’ she asked me.

‘I hope so,’ I said and touched Thor’s hammer.

‘Poor girl,’ Brida said, smiling. ‘So you’re in love?’

‘Yes.’

‘Again,’ she said.

The three of us were in the Two Cranes on the day before Æthelflaed’s formal betrothal and Father Beocca found us there. His hands were filthy with ink. ‘You’ve been writing again,’ I accused him.

‘We are making lists of the shire fyrds,’ he explained. ‘Every man between twelve and sixty has to take an oath to serve the king now. I’m compiling the lists, but we’ve run out of ink.’

‘No wonder,’ I said, ‘it’s all on you.’

‘They’re mixing a new pot,’ he said, ignoring me, ‘and that will take time, so I thought you’d like to see the new church.’

‘I’ve been dreaming of little else,’ I said.

He insisted on taking us and the church was, indeed, a thing of utter splendour. It was bigger than any hall I had ever seen. It soared to a great height, its roof held up by massive oak beams that had been carved with saints and kings. The carvings had been painted, while the crowns of the kings and the haloes and wings of the saints glinted with gold leaf that Beocca said had been applied by craftsmen brought from Frankia. The floor was stone-flagged, all of it, so that no rushes were needed and dogs were confused where to piss. Alfred had made a rule that no dogs were allowed in the church, but they got in anyway, so he had appointed a warden who was given a whip and charged with driving the animals out of the big nave, but the warden had lost a leg to a Danish war axe at Ethandun and he could only move slowly, so the dogs had no trouble avoiding him. The lower part of the church’s walls were built of dressed stone, but the upper parts and the roof were of timber, and just below the roof were high windows that were filled with scraped horn so the rain could not come in. Every scrap of the walls was covered with stretched leather panels painted with pictures of heaven and hell. Heaven was populated with Saxons while hell seemed to be the abode of Danes, though I noticed, with surprise, that a couple of priests seemed to have tumbled down to the devil’s flames. ‘There are bad priests,’ Beocca assured me earnestly. ‘Not many, of course.’

‘And there are good priests,’ I said, pleasing Beocca, ‘talking of which, do you hear anything of Father Pyrlig?’ Pyrlig was a Briton who had fought beside me at Ethandun and I was fond of him. He spoke Danish and had been sent to be one of Guthrum’s priests in East Anglia.

‘He does the Lord’s work,’ Beocca said enthusiastically. ‘He says the Danes are being baptised in great numbers! I truly believe we are seeing the conversion of the pagans.’

‘Not this pagan,’ Ragnar said.

Beocca shook his head. ‘Christ will come to you one day, Lord Ragnar, and you will be astonished by his grace.’

Ragnar said nothing. I could see, though, that he was as impressed as I was by Alfred’s new church. The tomb of Saint Swithun was railed in silver and lay in front of the high altar that was covered with a red cloth as big as a dragon-boat’s sail. On the altar were a dozen fine wax candles in silver holders that flanked a big silver cross inlaid with gold that Ragnar muttered would be worth a month’s voyaging to capture. Either side of the cross were reliquaries; boxes and flasks of silver and gold, all studded with jewels, and some had small crystal windows through which the relics could be glimpsed. Mary Magdalene’s toe ring was there, and what remained of the feather from the dove that Noah had released from the ark. There was Saint Kenelm’s horn spoon, a flask of dust from Saint Hedda’s tomb, and a hoof from the donkey that Jesus rode into Jerusalem. The cloth with which Mary Magdalene had washed Jesus’s feet was encased in a great golden chest and next to it, and quite dwarfed by the gold’s splendour, were Saint Oswald’s teeth, the gift from Guthred. The two teeth were still encased in their silver oyster pot which looked very shabby compared to the other vessels. Beocca showed us all the holy treasures, but was most proud of a scrap of bone displayed behind a shard of milky crystal. ‘I found this one,’ he said, ‘and it’s most exciting!’ He lifted the lid of the box and took out the bone, which looked like something left over from a bad stew. ‘It’s Saint Cedd’s aestel!’ Beocca said with awe in his voice. He made the sign of the cross and peered at the yellowed bone sliver with his one good eye as if the arrow-head shaped relic had just dropped from heaven.

‘Saint Cedd’s what?’ I asked.

‘His aestel.’

‘What’s an aestel?’ Ragnar asked. His English, after years of being a hostage, was good, but some words still confused him.

‘An aestel is a device to help reading,’ Beocca said. ‘You use it to follow the lines. It’s a pointer.’

‘What’s wrong with a finger?’ Ragnar wanted to know.

‘It can smear the ink. An aestel is clean.’

‘And that one really belonged to Saint Cedd?’ I asked, pretending to be amazed.

‘It did, it did,’ Beocca said, almost delirious with wonder, ‘the holy Cedd’s very own aestel. I discovered it! It was in a little church in Dornwaraceaster and the priest there was an ignorant fellow and had no idea what it was. It was in a horn box and Saint Cedd’s name was scratched on the box and the priest couldn’t even read the writing! A priest! Illiterate! So I confiscated it.’

‘You mean you stole it?’

‘I took it into safekeeping!’ he said, offended.

‘And when you’re a saint,’ I said, ‘someone will put one of those smelly shoes of yours into a golden box and worship it.’

Beocca blushed. ‘You tease me, Uhtred, you tease me.’ He laughed, but I saw from his blush that I had touched on his secret ambition. He wanted to be declared a saint, and why not? He was a good man, far better than many I have known who are now revered as saints.

Brida and I visited Hild that afternoon and I gave her nunnery thirty shillings, almost all the money I had, but Ragnar was blithely confident that Sverri’s fortune would come from Jutland and that Ragnar would share with me, and in that belief I pressed the money on Hild who was delighted by the silver cross in Serpent-Breath’s hilt. ‘You must use the sword wisely from now on,’ she told me sternly.

‘I always use it wisely.’

‘You have harnessed the power of God to the blade,’ she said, ‘and it must do nothing evil.’

I doubted I would obey that command, but it was good to see Hild. Alfred had given her a gift of some of the dust from Saint Hedda’s tomb and she told me that mixed with curds it made a miraculous medicine that had prompted at least a dozen cures among the nunnery’s sick. ‘If you are ever ill,’ she said, ‘you must come here and we shall mix the dust with fresh curds and anoint you.’

I saw Hild again the next day when we were all summoned to the church for its consecration and to witness Æthelflaed’s betrothal. Hild, with all the other nuns of Wintanceaster, was in the side aisle, while Ragnar, Brida and I, because we arrived late, had to stand at the very back of the church. I was taller than most men, but I could still see very little of the ceremony which seemed to last for ever. Two bishops said prayers, priests scattered holy water and a choir of monks chanted. Then the Archbishop of Contwaraburg preached a long sermon which, bizarrely, said nothing about the new church, nor about the betrothal, but instead berated the clergy of Wessex for wearing short tunics instead of long robes. This bestial practice, the archbishop thundered, had offended the holy father in Rome and must stop forthwith on pain of excommunication. A priest standing near us was wearing a short tunic and tried to crouch so that he looked like a dwarf in a long robe. The monks sang again and then my cousin, red-haired and cocksure, strutted to the altar and little Æthelflaed was led to his side by her father. The archbishop mumbled over them, they were sprinkled with holy water, then the newly betrothed couple were presented to the congregation and we all dutifully cheered.

Æthelflaed was hurried away as the men in the church congratulated Æthelred. He was twenty years old, eleven years older than Æthelflaed, and he was a short, red-haired, bumptious young man who was convinced of his own importance. That importance was that he was his father’s son, and his father was the chief ealdorman in southern Mercia which was the region of that country least infested by Danes, and so one day Æthelred would become the leader of the free Mercian Saxons. Æthelred, in short, could deliver a large part of Mercia to Wessex’s rule, which was why he had been promised Alfred’s daughter in marriage. He made his way down the nave, greeting the lords of Wessex, then saw me and looked surprised. ‘I heard you were captured in the north,’ he said.

‘I was.’

‘And here you are. And you’re just the man I want.’ He smiled, certain that I liked him, in which certainty he could not have been more mistaken, but Æthelred assumed that everyone else in the whole world was envious of him and wanted nothing more than to be his friend. ‘The king,’ he said, ‘has honoured me with the command of his household guard.’

‘Alfred has?’ I asked, surprised.

‘At least until I assume my father’s duties.’

‘Your father’s well, I trust?’ I asked drily.

‘He’s sick,’ Æthelred said, sounding pleased, ‘so who knows how long I shall command Alfred’s guard. But you’d be of great use to me if you would serve in the household troops.’

‘I’d rather shovel shit,’ I said, then held a hand towards Brida. ‘Do you remember Brida?’ I asked. ‘You tried to rape her ten years ago.’

He went bright red, said nothing, but just hurried away. Brida laughed as he retreated, then gave a very small bow because Ælswith, Alfred’s wife, was walking past us. Ælswith ignored us, for she had never liked Brida or me, but Eanflæd smiled. She was Ælswith’s closest companion and I kissed my hand towards her. ‘She was a tavern whore,’ I told Brida, ‘and now she rules the king’s household.’

‘Good for her,’ Brida said.

‘Does Alfred know she was a whore?’ Ragnar asked.

‘He pretends not to know,’ I said.

Alfred came last. He looked sick, but that was nothing unusual. He half inclined his head to me, but said nothing, though Beocca scuttled over to me as we waited for the crowd at the door to thin. ‘You’re to see the king after midday prayers,’ he told me, ‘and you too, Lord Ragnar. I shall summon you.’

‘We’ll be in the Two Cranes,’ I told him.

‘I don’t know why you like that tavern.’

‘Because it’s a brothel too, of course,’ I said. ‘And if you go there, father, make sure you carve a notch in one of the beams to show you humped one of the ladies. I’d recommend Ethel. She’s only got one hand, but it’s a miracle what she can do with it.’

‘Oh, dear God, Uhtred, dear God. What an ugly cesspit you have for a mind. If I ever marry, and I pray God for that dear happiness, I shall go unstained to my bride.’

‘I pray you do too, father,’ I said, and I meant it. Poor Beocca. He was so ugly and he dreamed of a wife, but he had never found one and I doubted he ever would. There were plenty of women willing to marry him, squint and all, for he was, after all, a privileged priest high in Alfred’s estimation, but Beocca was waiting for love to strike him like a lightning bolt. He would stare at beautiful women, dream his hopeless dreams and say his prayers. Perhaps, I thought, his heaven would reward him with a glorious bride, but nothing I had ever heard about the Christian heaven suggested that such joys were available.

Beocca fetched us from the Two Cranes that afternoon. I noted that he glanced at the beams and looked shocked at the number of notches, but he said nothing of them, leading us instead to the palace where we surrendered our swords at the gatehouse. Ragnar was commanded to wait in the courtyard while Beocca took me to Alfred who was in his study, a small room that had been part of the Roman building that was the heart of Wintanceaster’s palace. I had been in the room before, so I was not surprised by the scant furniture, nor by the piles of parchments that spilled from the wide window ledge. The walls were of stone, and whitewashed, so it was a well-lit room, though for some reason Alfred had a score of candles burning in one corner. Each candle had been scored with deep lines about a thumb’s width apart. The candles were certainly not there for illumination because an autumnal sun streamed through the big window, and I did not want to ask what purpose the candles served in case he told me. I merely assumed there was a candle for every saint he had prayed to over the last few days and each of the scored lines was a sin that had to be burned away. Alfred had a very acute conscience for sins, especially mine.

Alfred was dressed in a brown robe so that he looked like a monk. His hands, like Beocca’s, were ink-stained. He appeared pale and sick. I had heard his stomach troubles were bad again and every now and then he flinched as a pain stabbed at his belly. But he greeted me warmly enough. ‘Lord Uhtred. I trust you are in health?’

‘I am, lord,’ I said, still kneeling, ‘and hope the same for you.’

‘God afflicts me. There is purpose in that, so I must be glad of it. Stand, please. Is Earl Ragnar with you?’

‘He is outside, lord.’

‘Good,’ he said. I stood in the only space left in the small room. The mysterious candles took up a large area, and Beocca was standing against the wall next to Steapa who took up even more. I was surprised to see Steapa. Alfred favoured clever men and Steapa was hardly clever. He had been born a slave, now he was a warrior, and in truth he was not much good for anything beyond consuming ale and slaughtering the king’s enemies, two tasks he did with a brutal efficiency. Now he stood just beyond the king’s high writing desk with an awkward expression as though he were unsure why he had been summoned.

I thought Alfred would ask about my ordeal, for he liked to hear stories of distant places and strange people, but he ignored it utterly, instead asking for my opinion of Guthred and I said I liked Guthred, which seemed to surprise the king. ‘You like him,’ Alfred asked, ‘despite what he did to you?’

‘He had little choice, lord,’ I said. ‘I told him that a king must be ruthless in defence of his realm.’

‘Even so,’ Alfred watched me with a dubious face.

‘If we mere men, lord, wanted gratitude from kings,’ I said with my most earnest expression, ‘then we should be forever disappointed.’

He looked at me sternly then gave a rare burst of laughter. ‘I’ve missed you, Uhtred,’ he said. ‘You are the only man who is impertinent with me.’

‘He did not mean it, lord,’ Beocca said anxiously.

‘Of course he meant it,’ Alfred said. He pushed some parchments aside on the window ledge and sat down. ‘What do you think of my candles?’ he asked me.

‘I find, lord,’ I said thoughtfully, ‘that they’re more effective at night.’

‘I am trying to develop a clock,’ he said.

‘A clock?’

‘To mark the passing hours.’

‘You look at the sun, lord,’ I said, ‘and at night, the stars.’

‘Not all of us can see through clouds,’ he remarked tartly. ‘Each mark is supposed to represent one hour. I am endeavoring to find which markings are most accurate. If I can find a candle that burns twenty-four divisions between midday and midday then I shall always know the hour, won’t I?’

‘Yes, lord,’ I said.

‘Our time must be properly spent,’ he said, ‘and to do that we must first know how much time we have.’

‘Yes, lord,’ I said again, my boredom obvious.

Alfred sighed, then looked through the parchments and found one embossed with a huge seal of sickly-green wax. ‘This is a message from King Guthred,’ he said. ‘He has asked for my advice and I am minded to offer it. To which end I am sending an embassy to Eoferwic. Father Beocca has agreed to speak for me.’

‘You do me a privilege, lord,’ Beocca said happily, ‘a great privilege.’

‘And Father Beocca will be carrying precious gifts for King Guthred,’ Alfred went on, ‘and those gifts must be protected, which means an escort of warriors. I thought, perhaps, you would provide that protection, Lord Uhtred? You and Steapa?’

‘Yes, lord,’ I said, enthusiastically this time, for all I dreamed of was Gisela and she was in Eoferwic.

‘But you are to understand,’ Alfred said, ‘that Father Beocca is in charge. He is my ambassador and you will take his orders. Is that understood?’

‘Indeed, lord,’ I said, though in truth I had no need to accept Alfred’s instructions. I was no longer sworn to him, I was not a West Saxon, but he was asking me to go where I wanted to go and so I did not remind him that he lacked my oath.

He did not need reminding. ‘You will all three return before Christmas to report on your embassy,’ he said, ‘and if you do not swear to that,’ he was looking at me now, ‘and swear to be my man, then I shall not let you go.’

‘You want my oath?’ I asked him.

‘I insist on it, Lord Uhtred,’ he said.

I hesitated. I did not want to be Alfred’s man again, but I sensed there was far more behind this so-called embassy than the provision of advice. If Alfred wanted to advise Guthred why not do it in a letter? Or send a half-dozen priests to weary Guthred’s ears? But Alfred was sending Steapa and myself and, in truth, the two of us were only fit for one thing, fighting. And Beocca, though undoubtedly a good man, was hardly an impressive ambassador. Alfred, I thought, wanted Steapa and me in the north, which meant he wanted violence done, and that was encouraging, but still I hesitated and that annoyed the king.

‘Must I remind you,’ Alfred asked with some asperity, ‘that I went to a deal of trouble to free you from your slavery?’

‘Why did you do that, lord?’ I asked.

Beocca hissed, angry that I had not yielded immediately to the king’s wishes, and Alfred looked affronted, but then he seemed to accept that my question deserved an answer. He motioned Beocca to silence, then fidgeted with the seal on Guthred’s letter, shredding scraps of green wax. ‘The Abbess Hildegyth convinced me,’ he said at last. I waited. Alfred glanced at me and saw I thought there was more to the answer than Hild’s entreaties. He shrugged. ‘And it seemed to me,’ he said awkwardly, ‘that I owed you more than I repaid you for your services at Æthelingæg.’

It was hardly an apology, but it was an acknowledgment that five hides were no reward for a kingdom. I bowed my head. ‘Thank you, lord,’ I said, ‘and you shall have my oath.’ I did not want to give it to him, but what choice did I have? Thus are our lives decided. For years I had swayed between love of the Danes and loyalty to the Saxons and there, beside the guttering candle-clocks, I gave my services to a king I disliked. ‘But might I ask, lord,’ I went on, ‘why Guthred needs advice?’

‘Because Ivarr Ivarson tires of him,’ Alfred said, ‘and Ivarr would have another, more compliant, man on Northumbria’s throne.’

‘Or take the throne for himself?’ I suggested.

‘Ivarr, I think, does not want a king’s heavy responsibilities,’ Alfred said. ‘He wants power, he wants money, he wants warriors, and he wants another man to do the hard work of enforcing the laws on the Saxons and raising taxes from the Saxons. And he will choose a Saxon to do that.’ That made sense. It was how the Danes usually governed their conquered Saxons. ‘And Ivarr,’ Alfred went on, ‘no longer wants Guthred.’

‘Why not, lord?’

‘Because King Guthred,’ Alfred said, ‘attempts to impose his law equally on Danes and Saxons alike.’

I remembered Guthred’s hope that he would be a just king. ‘Is that bad?’ I asked.

‘It is foolishness,’ Alfred said, ‘when he decrees that every man, whether pagan or Christian, must donate his tithe to the church.’

Offa had mentioned that church tax and it was, indeed, a foolish imposition. The tithe was a tenth of everything a man grew, reared or made, and the pagan Danes would never accept such a law. ‘I thought you would approve, lord,’ I said mischievously.

‘I approve of tithing, of course,’ Alfred said wearily, ‘but a tithe should be given with a willing heart.’

‘Hilarem datorem diligit Deus,’ Beocca put in unhelpfully. ‘It says so in the gospel book.’

‘“God approves a cheerful giver”,’ Alfred provided the translation, ‘but when a land is half pagan and half Christian you do not encourage unity by offending the more powerful half. Guthred must be a Dane to the Danes and a Christian to the Christians. That is my advice to him.’

‘If the Danes rebel,’ I asked, ‘does Guthred have the power to defeat them?’

‘He has the Saxon fyrd, what’s left of it, and some Danish Christians, but too few of those, alas. My estimate is that he can raise six hundred spears, but fewer than half of those will be reliable in battle.’

‘And Ivarr?’ I asked.

‘Nearer a thousand. And if Kjartan joins him then he will have far more. And Kjartan is encouraging Ivarr.’

‘Kjartan,’ I said ‘doesn’t leave Dunholm.’

‘He doesn’t need to leave Dunholm,’ Alfred said, ‘he needs only to send two hundred men to assist Ivarr. And Kjartan, I am told, has a particular hatred of Guthred.’

‘That’s because Guthred pissed all over his son,’ I said.

‘He did what?’ The king stared at me.

‘Washed his hair with piss,’ I said. ‘I was there.’

‘Dear God,’ Alfred said, plainly thinking that every man north of the Humber was a barbarian.

‘So what Guthred must do now,’ I said, ‘is destroy Ivarr and Kjartan?’

‘That is Guthred’s business,’ Alfred said distantly.

‘He must make peace with them,’ Beocca said, frowning at me.

‘Peace is always desirable,’ Alfred said, though without much enthusiasm.

‘If we are to send missionaries to the Northumbrian Danes, lord,’ Beocca urged, ‘then we must have peace.’

‘As I said,’ Alfred retorted, ‘peace is desirable.’ Again he spoke without fervour and that, I thought, was his real message. He knew there could not be peace.

I remembered what Offa, the dog-dancing man, had told me about marrying Gisela to my uncle. ‘Guthred could persuade my uncle to support him,’ I suggested.

Alfred gave me a speculative look. ‘Would you approve of that, Lord Uhtred?’

‘Ælfric is a usurper,’ I said. ‘He swore to recognise me as heir to Bebbanburg and broke that oath. No, lord, I would not approve.’

Alfred peered at his candles that guttered away, smearing the whitewashed wall with their smoke. ‘This one,’ he said, ‘burns too fast.’ He licked his fingers, pinched out the flame, and put the dead candle in a basket with a dozen other rejects. ‘It is greatly to be wished,’ he said, still examining his candles, ‘that a Christian king reigns in Northumbria. It is even desirable that it should be Guthred. He is a Dane, and if we are to win the Danes to a knowledge and love of Christ then we need Danish kings who are Christians. What we do not need is Kjartan and Ivarr making war on the Christians. They would destroy the church if they could.’

‘Kjartan certainly would,’ I said.

‘And I doubt your uncle is strong enough to defeat Kjartan and Ivarr,’ Alfred said, ‘even if he were willing to ally himself with Guthred. No,’ he paused, thinking, ‘the only solution is for Guthred to make his peace with the pagans. That is my advice to him.’ He spoke the last few words directly to Beocca.

Beocca looked pleased. ‘Wise advice, lord,’ he said, ‘praise be to God.’

‘And speaking of pagans,’ Alfred glanced at me, ‘what will the Earl Ragnar do if I release him?’

‘He won’t fight for Ivarr,’ I said firmly.

‘You can be sure of that?’

‘Ragnar hates Kjartan,’ I said, ‘and if Kjartan is allied to Ivarr then Ragnar will hate both men. Yes, lord, I can be sure of that.’

‘So if I release Ragnar,’ Alfred asked, ‘and allow him to go north with you, he will not turn against Guthred?’

‘He’ll fight Kjartan,’ I said, ‘but what he will think of Guthred I don’t know.’

Alfred considered that answer, then nodded. ‘If he is opposed to Kjartan,’ he said, ‘that should be sufficient.’ He turned and smiled at Beocca. ‘Your embassy, father, is to preach peace to Guthred. You will advise him to be a Dane among the Danes and a Christian among the Saxons.’

‘Yes, of course, lord,’ Beocca said, but it was plain he was thoroughly confused. Alfred talked peace, but was sending warriors, for he knew there could not be peace while Ivarr and Kjartan lived. He dared not make such a pronouncement publicly, or else the northern Danes would accuse Wessex of interfering in Northumbrian affairs. They would resent that, and their resentment would add strength to Ivarr’s cause. And Alfred wanted Guthred on Northumbria’s throne because Guthred was a Christian, and a Christian Northumbria was more likely to welcome a Saxon army when it came, if it came. Ivarr and Kjartan would make Northumbria into a pagan stronghold if they could, and Alfred wanted to prevent that. Beocca, therefore, was to preach peace and conciliation, but Steapa, Ragnar and I would carry swords. We were his dogs of war and Alfred knew full well that Beocca could not control us.

He dreamed, Alfred did, and his dreams encompassed all the isle of Britain.

And I was once again to be his sworn man, and that was not what I had wanted, but he was sending me north, to Gisela, and that I did want and so I knelt to him, placed my hands between his, swore the oath and thus lost my freedom. Then Ragnar was summoned and he also knelt and was granted his freedom.

And next day we all rode north.

Gisela was already married.

I heard that from Wulfhere, Archbishop of Eoferwic, and he should have known because he had performed the ceremony in his big church. It seemed I had arrived five days too late and when I heard the news I felt a despair like that which had caused my tears in Haithabu. Gisela was married.

It was autumn when we reached Northumbria. Peregrine falcons patrolled the sky, stooping on the newly arrived woodcock or on the gulls that flocked in the rain-drowned furrows. It had been a fine autumn so far, but the rains arrived from the west as we travelled north through Mercia. There were ten of us; Ragnar and Brida, Steapa and myself and Father Beocca who had charge of three servants who led the packhorses carrying our shields, armour, changes of clothing and the gifts Alfred was sending to Guthred. Ragnar led two men who had shared his exile. All of us were mounted on fine horses that Alfred had given us and we should have made good time, but Beocca slowed us. He hated being on horseback and even though we padded his mare’s saddle with two thick fleeces he was still crippled by soreness. He had spent the journey rehearsing the speech with which he would greet Guthred, practising and practising the words until we were all bored by them. We had encountered no trouble in Mercia, for Ragnar’s presence ensured that we were welcome in Danish halls. There was still a Saxon king in northern Mercia, Ceolwulf was his name, but we did not meet him and it was plain that the real power lay with the great Danish lords. We crossed the border into Northumbria under a pelting rainstorm and it was still raining as we rode into Eoferwic.

And there I learned that Gisela was married. Not only married, but gone from Eoferwic with her brother. ‘I solemnised the marriage,’ Wulfhere, the archbishop, told us. He was spooning barley soup into his mouth and long dribbles hung in glutinous loops in his white beard. ‘The silly girl wept all through the ceremony, and she wouldn’t take the mass, but it makes no difference. She’s still married.’

I was horrified. Five days, that was all. Fate is inexorable. ‘I thought she’d gone to a nunnery,’ I said, as if that made any difference.

‘She lived in a nunnery,’ Wulfhere said, ‘but putting a cat into a stable doesn’t make it a horse, does it? She was hiding herself away! It was a waste of a perfectly good womb! She’s been spoiled, that’s her trouble. Allowed to live in a nunnery where she never said a prayer. She needed the strap, that one. A good thrashing, that’s what I’d have given her. Still, she’s not in the nunnery now. Guthred pulled her out and married her off.’

‘To whom?’ Beocca asked.

‘Lord Ælfric, of course.’

‘Ælfric came to Eoferwic?’ I asked, astonished, for my uncle was as reluctant to leave Bebbanburg as Kjartan was to quit the safety of Dunholm.

‘He didn’t come,’ Wulfhere said. ‘He sent a score of men and one of those stood in for Lord Ælfric. It was a proxy wedding. Quite legal.’

‘It is,’ Beocca said.

‘So where is she?’ I asked.

‘Gone north,’ Wulfhere waved his horn spoon. ‘They’ve all gone. Her brother’s taken her to Bebbanburg. Abbot Eadred’s with them, and he’s taken Saint Cuthbert’s corpse, of course. And that awful man Hrothweard went as well. Can’t stand Hrothweard. He was the idiot who persuaded Guthred to impose the tithe on the Danes. I told Guthred it was foolishness, but Hrothweard claimed to have got his orders directly from Saint Cuthbert, so nothing I could say had the slightest effect. Now the Danes are probably gathering their forces, so it’s going to be war.’

‘War?’ I asked. ‘Has Guthred declared war on the Danes?’ It sounded unlikely.

‘Of course not! But they’ve got to stop him.’ Wulfhere used the sleeve of his robe to mop up his beard.

‘Stop him from doing what?’ Ragnar asked.

‘Reaching Bebbanburg, of course, what else? The day Guthred delivers his sister and Saint Cuthbert to Bebbanburg is the day Ælfric gives him two hundred spearmen. But the Danes aren’t going to stand for that! They more or less put up with Guthred, but only because he’s too weak to order them about, but if he gets a couple of hundred prime spearmen from Ælfric, the Danes will squash him like a louse. I should think Ivarr is already gathering troops to stop the nonsense.’

‘They’ve taken the blessed Saint Cuthbert with them?’ Beocca asked.

The archbishop frowned at Beocca. ‘You’re an odd ambassador,’ he said.

‘Odd, lord?’

‘Can’t look straight, can you? Alfred must be hard up for men if he sends an ugly thing like you. There used to be a priest in Bebbanburg with a squint. That was years ago, back in old Lord Uhtred’s day.’

‘That was me,’ Beocca said eagerly.

‘Don’t be a fool, of course it wasn’t. The fellow I’m talking about was young and red-haired. Take all the chairs, you brainless idiot!’ he turned on a servant, ‘all six of them. And bring me more bread.’ Wulfhere was planning to escape before war broke out between Guthred and the Danes and his courtyard was busy with wagons, oxen and packhorses because the treasures of his big church were being packed up so they could be taken to some place that offered safety. ‘King Guthred took Saint Cuthbert,’ the archbishop said, ‘because that’s Ælfric’s price. He wants the corpse as well as the womb. I just hope he remembers which one to poke.’

My uncle, I realised, was making his bid for power. Guthred was weak, but he did possess the great treasure of Cuthbert’s corpse and if Ælfric could gain possession of the saint then he would become the guardian of all Northumbria’s Christians. He would also make a small fortune from the pennies of pilgrims. ‘What he’s doing,’ I said, ‘is remaking Bernicia. He’ll call himself king before too long.’

Wulfhere looked at me as though I was not a complete fool. ‘You’re right,’ he said, ‘and his two hundred spearmen will stay with Guthred for a month, that’s all. Then they’ll go home and the Danes will roast Guthred over a fire. I warned him! I told him a dead saint was worth more than two hundred spearmen, but he’s desperate. And if you want to see him, you’d best go north.’ Wulfhere had received us because we were Alfred’s ambassadors, but he had offered us neither food nor shelter and he plainly wanted to see the back of us as soon as decently possible. ‘Go north,’ he reiterated, ‘and you might find the silly man alive.’

We went back to the tavern where Steapa and Brida waited and I cursed the three spinners who had let me come so close, and then denied me. Gisela had been gone four days, which was more than enough time to reach Bebbanburg, and her brother’s desperate bid for Ælfric’s support had probably stirred the Danes to revolt. Not that I cared about the anger of the Danes. I was only thinking of Gisela.

‘We have to go north,’ Beocca said, ‘and find the king.’

‘You step inside Bebbanburg,’ I told him, ‘and Ælfric will kill you.’ Beocca, when he fled Bebbanburg, had taken all the parchments that proved I was the rightful lord, and Ælfric knew and resented that.

‘Ælfric won’t kill a priest,’ Beocca said, ‘not if he cares for his soul. And I’m an ambassador! He can’t kill an ambassador.’

‘So long as he’s safe inside Bebbanburg,’ Ragnar put in, ‘he can do whatever he likes.’

‘Maybe Guthred didn’t reach Bebbanburg,’ Steapa said, and I was so surprised that he had spoken at all that I did not really pay attention. Nor, it seemed, did anyone else, for none of us responded. ‘If they don’t want the girl married,’ Steapa went on, ‘they’ll stop him.’

‘They?’ Ragnar asked.

‘The Danes, lord,’ Steapa said.

‘And Guthred will be travelling slowly,’ Brida added.

‘He will?’ I asked.

‘You said he’s taken Cuthbert’s corpse with him.’

Hope stirred in me. Steapa and Brida were right. Guthred might be intent on reaching Bebbanburg, but he could travel no faster than the corpse could be carried, and the Danes would want to stop him. ‘He could be dead by now,’ I said.

‘Only one way to find out,’ Ragnar said.

We rode next dawn, taking the Roman road north, and we rode as fast we could. So far we had coddled Alfred’s horses, but now we drove them hard, though we were still slowed by Beocca. Then, as the morning wore on, the rains came again. Gentle at first, but soon hard enough to make the ground treacherous. The wind rose, and it was in our faces. Thunder sounded far off and the rain fell with a new intensity and we were all spattered by mud, we were all cold and all soaked. The trees thrashed, shedding their last leaves into the bitter wind. It was a day to be inside a hall, beside a vast fire.

We found the first bodies beside the road. They were two men who lay naked with their wounds washed bloodless by the rain. One of the dead men had a broken sickle beside him. Another three corpses were a half-mile to the north, and two of them had wooden crosses about their necks which meant they were Saxons. Beocca made the sign of the cross over their bodies. Lightning whipped the hills to the west, then Ragnar pointed ahead and I saw, through the hammering rain, a settlement beside the road. There were a few low houses, what might have been a church, and a high-ridged hall within a wooden palisade.

There was a score of horses tied to the hall’s palisade and, as we appeared from the storm, a dozen men ran from the gate with swords and spears. They mounted and galloped down the road towards us, but slowed when they saw the arm rings Ragnar and I wore. ‘Are you Danes?’ Ragnar shouted.

‘We’re Danes!’ They lowered their swords and turned their horses to escort us. ‘Have you seen any Saxons?’ one of them asked Ragnar.

‘Only dead ones.’

We stabled the horses in one of the houses, pulling down part of the roof to enlarge the door so the horses could be taken inside. There was a Saxon family there and they shrank from us. The woman whimpered and held her hands towards us in mute prayer. ‘My daughter’s ill,’ she said.

The girl lay in a dark corner, shivering. She did not look ill so much as terrified. ‘How old is she?’ I asked.

‘Eleven years, lord, I think,’ the girl’s mother answered.

‘She was raped?’ I asked.

‘By four men, lord,’ she said.

‘She’s safe now,’ I said, and I gave them coins to pay for the damage to the roof and we left Alfred’s servants and Ragnar’s two men to guard the horses, then joined the Danes in the big hall where a fire burned fierce in the central hearth. The men about the flames made room for us, though they were confused that we travelled with a Christian priest. They looked at the bedraggled Beocca suspiciously, but Ragnar was so obviously a Dane that they said nothing, and his arm rings, like mine, indicated that he was a Dane of the highest rank. The men’s leader must have been impressed by Ragnar for he half bowed. ‘I am Hakon,’ he said, ‘of Onhripum.’

‘Ragnar Ragnarson,’ Ragnar introduced himself. He introduced neither Steapa nor myself, though he did nod towards Brida. ‘And this is my woman.’

Hakon knew of Ragnar, which was not surprising for Ragnar’s name was famous in the hills to the west of Onhripum. ‘You were a hostage in Wessex, lord?’ he asked.

‘No longer,’ Ragnar said shortly.

‘Welcome home, lord,’ Hakon said.

Ale was brought to us, and bread and cheese and apples. ‘The dead we saw on the road,’ Ragnar asked, ‘that was your work?’

‘Saxons, lord. We’re to stop them gathering.’

‘You certainly stopped those men gathering,’ Ragnar said, provoking a smile from Hakon. ‘Whose orders?’ Ragnar asked.

‘The Earl Ivarr, lord. He’s summoned us. And if we find Saxons with weapons we’re to kill them.’

Ragnar mischievously jerked his head at Steapa. ‘He’s a Saxon, he’s armed.’

Hakon and his men looked at the huge, baleful Steapa. ‘He’s with you, lord.’

‘So why has Ivarr summoned you?’ Ragnar demanded.

And so the story emerged, or as much as Hakon knew. Guthred had travelled this same road north, but Kjartan had sent men to block his path. ‘Guthred has no more than a hundred and fifty spearmen,’ Hakon told us, ‘and Kjartan opposed him with two hundred or more. Guthred did not try to fight.’

‘So where is Guthred?’

‘He ran away, lord.’

‘Where?’ Ragnar asked sharply.

‘We think west, lord, towards Cumbraland.’

‘Kjartan didn’t follow?’

‘Kjartan, lord, doesn’t go far from Dunholm. He fears Ælfric of Bebbanburg will attack Dunholm if he goes far away, so he stays close.’

‘And you’re summoned where?’ Ragnar demanded.

‘We’re to meet the Lord Ivarr at Thresk,’ Hakon said.

‘Thresk?’ Ragnar was puzzled. Thresk was a settlement beside a lake some miles to the east. Guthred, it appeared, had gone west, but Ivarr was raising his banner to the east. Then Ragnar understood. ‘Ivarr will attack Eoferwic?’

Hakon nodded. ‘Take Guthred’s home, lord,’ he said, ‘and where can he go?’

‘Bebbanburg?’ I suggested.

‘There are horsemen shadowing Guthred,’ Hakon said, ‘and if he tries to go north Kjartan will march again.’ He touched his sword’s hilt. ‘We shall finish the Saxons for ever, lord. The Lord Ivarr will be glad of your return.’

‘My family,’ Ragnar said harshly, ‘does not fight alongside Kjartan.’

‘Not even for plunder?’ Hakon asked. ‘I hear Eoferwic is full of plunder.’

‘It’s been plundered before,’ I said, ‘how much can be left?’

‘Enough,’ Hakon said flatly.

Ivarr, I thought, had devised a clever strategy. Guthred, accompanied by too few spearmen and cumbered with priests, monks and a dead saint, was wandering in the wild Northumbrian weather, and meanwhile his enemies would capture his palace and his city, and with them the city’s garrison that formed the heart of Guthred’s forces. Kjartan, meanwhile, was keeping Guthred from reaching the safety of Bebbanburg.

‘Whose hall is this?’ Ragnar asked.

‘It belonged to a Saxon, lord,’ Hakon said.

‘Belonged?’

‘He drew his sword,’ Hakon explained, ‘so he and all his folk are dead. Except two daughters.’ He jerked his head towards the back of the hall. ‘They’re in a cattle byre if you want them.’

More Danes arrived as evening fell. They were all going to Thresk and the hall was a good place to shelter from the weather that was now blowing a full storm. There was ale in the hall and inevitably men got drunk, but they were happily drunk because Guthred had made a terrible mistake. He had marched north with too few men in the belief that the Danes would not interfere with him, and now these Danes had the promise of an easy war and much plunder.

We took one of the sleeping platforms at the side of the hall for our own use. ‘What we have to do,’ Ragnar said, ‘is go to Synningthwait.’

‘At dawn,’ I agreed.

‘Why Synningthwait?’ Beocca wanted to know.

‘Because that’s where my men are,’ Ragnar said, ‘and that’s what we need now. Men.’

‘We need to find Guthred!’ Beocca insisted.

‘We need men to find him,’ I said, ‘and we need swords.’ Northumbria was falling into chaos and the best way to endure chaos was to be surrounded by swords and spears.

Three drunken Danes had watched us talking and they were intrigued, perhaps offended, that we included a Christian priest in our conversation. They crossed to the platform and demanded to know who Beocca was and why we were keeping him company.

‘We’re keeping him,’ I said, ‘in case we get hungry.’ That satisfied them, and the joke was passed about the hall to more laughter.

The storm passed in the night. Thunder growled ever more faintly, and the intensity of the rain on the wind-tossed thatch slowly diminished so that by dawn there was only a light drizzle and water dripping from the moss-covered roof. We dressed in mail and helmets and, as Hakon and the other Danes went east towards Thresk, we rode west into the hills.

I was thinking of Gisela, lost somewhere in the hills and a victim of her brother’s desperation. Guthred must have thought that it was too late in the year for armies to assemble, and that he could slip past Dunholm to Bebbanburg without the Danes trying to oppose him. Now he was on the edge of losing everything. ‘If we find him,’ Beocca asked me as we rode, ‘can we take him south to Alfred?’

‘Take him south to Alfred?’ I asked. ‘Why would we do that?’

‘To keep him alive. If he’s a Christian then he’ll be welcome in Wessex.’

‘Alfred wants him to be king here,’ I said.

‘It’s too late,’ Beocca said gloomily.

‘No,’ I said, ‘it’s not too late.’ Beocca stared at me as though I were mad, and perhaps I was, but in the chaos that darkened Northumbria there was one thing Ivarr had not thought of. He must have believed he had already won. His forces were assembling and Kjartan was driving Guthred into the wild centre of the country where no army could survive for long in cold and wind and rain. But Ivarr had forgotten Ragnar. Ragnar had been away so long, yet he held a stretch of land in the hills and that land supported men, and those men were sworn to Ragnar’s service.

And so we rode to Synningthwait and I had a lump in my throat as we cantered into the valley for it had been near Synningthwait that I had lived as a child, where I had been raised by Ragnar’s father, where I had learned to fight, where I had been loved, where I had been happy, and where I had watched Kjartan burn Ragnar’s hall and murder its inhabitants. This was the first time I had returned since that foul night.

Ragnar’s men lived in the settlement or in the nearby hills, though the first person I saw was Ethne, the Scottish slave we had freed at Gyruum. She was carrying two pails of water and she did not recognise me till I called her name. Then she dropped the pails and ran towards the houses, shouting, and Finan emerged from a low doorway. He shouted with delight, and more folk appeared, and suddenly there was a crowd cheering because Ragnar had come back to his people.

Finan could not wait for me to dismount. He walked beside my horse, grinning. ‘You want to know how Sverri died?’ he asked me.

‘Slowly?’ I guessed.

‘And loudly.’ He grinned. ‘And we took his money.’

‘Much money?’

‘More than you can dream of!’ he said exultantly. ‘And we burned his house. Left his woman and children weeping.’

‘You let them live?’

He looked embarrassed. ‘Ethne felt sorry for them. But killing him was pleasure enough.’ He grinned up at me again. ‘So are we going to war?’

‘We’re going to war.’

‘We’re to fight that bastard Guthred, eh?’ Finan said.

‘You want to do that?’

‘He sent a priest to say we had to pay the church money! We chased him away.’

‘I thought you were a Christian,’ I said.

‘I am,’ Finan said defensively, ‘but I’ll be damned before I give a priest a tenth of my money.’

The men of Synningthwait expected to fight for Ivarr. They were Danes, and they saw the imminent war as one between Danes and upstart Saxons, though none had much enthusiasm for the fight because Ivarr was not liked. Ivarr’s summons had reached Synningthwait five days before and Rollo, who commanded in Ragnar’s absence, had deliberately dallied. Now the decision belonged to Ragnar and that night, in front of his hall where a great fire burned beneath the clouds, he invited his men to speak their minds. Ragnar could have ordered them to do whatever he wanted, but he had not seen most of them in three years and he wanted to know their temper. ‘I’ll let them speak,’ he told me, ‘then I’ll tell them what we’ll do.’

‘What will we do?’ I asked.

Ragnar grinned. ‘I don’t know yet.’

Rollo spoke first. He did not dislike Guthred, he said, but he wondered if Guthred was the best king for Northumbria. ‘A land needs a king,’ he said, ‘and that king should be fair and just and generous and strong. Guthred is neither just nor strong. He favours the Christians.’ Men murmured support.

Beocca was sitting beside me and understood enough of what was being said to become upset. ‘Alfred supports Guthred!’ he hissed to me.

‘Be quiet,’ I warned him.

‘Guthred,’ Rollo went on, ‘demanded that we pay a tax to the Christian priests.’

‘Did you?’ Ragnar asked.

‘No.’

‘If Guthred is not king,’ Ragnar demanded, ‘who should be?’ No one spoke. ‘Ivarr?’ Ragnar suggested, and a shudder went through the crowd. No one liked Ivarr, and no one spoke except Beocca and he only managed one word before I choked off his protest with a sharp dig into his bony ribs. ‘What about Earl Ulf?’ Ragnar asked.

‘Too old now,’ Rollo said. ‘Besides he’s gone back to Cair Ligualid and wants to stay there.’

‘Is there a Saxon who would leave us Danes alone?’ Ragnar asked, and again no one answered. ‘Another Dane, then?’ Ragnar suggested.

‘It must be Guthred!’ Beocca snapped like a dog.

Rollo took a pace forward as if what he was about to say was important. ‘We would follow you, lord,’ he said to Ragnar, ‘for you are fair and just and generous and strong.’ That provoked wild applause from the crowd gathered about the fire.

‘This is treason!’ Beocca hissed.

‘Be quiet,’ I told him.

‘But Alfred told us …’

‘Alfred is not here,’ I said, ‘and we are, so be quiet.’

Ragnar gazed into the fire. He was such a good-looking man, so strong-faced, so open-faced and cheerful, yet at that moment he was troubled. He looked at me. ‘You could be king,’ he said.

‘I could,’ I agreed.

‘We are here to support Guthred!’ Beocca yapped.

‘Finan,’ I said, ‘beside me is a squint-eyed, club-footed, palsied priest who is irritating me. If he speaks again, cut his throat.’

‘Uhtred!’ Beocca squeaked.

‘I shall allow him that one utterance,’ I told Finan, ‘but the next time he speaks you will send him to his forefathers.’

Finan grinned and drew his sword. Beocca went silent.

‘You could be king,’ Ragnar said to me again, and I was aware of Brida’s dark eyes resting on me.

‘My ancestors were kings,’ I said, ‘and their blood is in me. It is the blood of Odin.’ My father, though a Christian, had always been proud that our family was descended from the god Odin.

‘And you would be a good king,’ Ragnar said. ‘It is better that a Saxon rules, and you are a Saxon who loves the Danes. You could be King Uhtred of Northumbria, and why not?’ Brida still watched me. I knew she was remembering the night when Ragnar’s father had died, and when Kjartan and his yelling crew had cut down the men and women stumbling from the burning hall. ‘Well?’ Ragnar prompted me.

I was tempted. I confess I was very tempted. In their day my family had been kings of Bernicia and now the throne of Northumbria was there for the taking. With Ragnar beside me I could be sure of Danish support, and the Saxons would do what they were told. Ivarr would resist, of course, as would Kjartan and my uncle, but that was nothing new and I was certain I was a better soldier than Guthred.

And yet I knew it was not my fate to be king. I have known many kings and their lives are not all silver, feasting and women. Alfred looked worn out by his duties, though part of that was his constant sickness and another part an inability to take his duties lightly. Yet Alfred was right in that dedication to duty. A king has to rule, he has to keep a balance between the great thegns of his kingdom, he has to fend off rivals, he has to keep the treasury full, he has to maintain roads and fortresses and armies. I thought of all that while Ragnar and Brida stared at me and while Beocca held his breath beside me, and I knew I did not want the responsibility. I wanted the silver, the feasting and the women, but those I could have without a throne. ‘It is not my fate,’ I said.

‘Maybe you don’t know your fate,’ Ragnar suggested.

The smoke whirled into the cold sky that was bright with sparks. ‘My fate,’ I said, ‘is to be the ruler of Bebbanburg. I know that. And I know Northumbria cannot be ruled from Bebbanburg. But perhaps it is your fate,’ I said to Ragnar.

He shook his head. ‘My father,’ he said, ‘and his father, and his father before him, were all Vikings. We sailed to where we could take wealth. We grew rich. We had laughter, ale, silver and battle. If I were to be king then I would have to protect what I have from the men who would take it from me. Instead of being a Viking I would be a shepherd. I want to be free. I have been a hostage too long, and I want my freedom. I want my sails in the wind and my swords in the sun. I do not wish to be heaped with duties.’ He had been thinking what I had been thinking, though he had said it far more eloquently. He grinned suddenly, as if released from a burden. ‘I wish to be richer than any king,’ he declared to his men, ‘and I will make you all rich with me.’

‘So who is to be king?’ Rollo asked.

‘Guthred,’ Ragnar said.

‘Praise God,’ Beocca said.

‘Quiet,’ I hissed.

Ragnar’s men were not happy with his choice. Rollo, gaunt and bearded and loyal, spoke for them. ‘Guthred favours the Christians,’ he said. ‘He is more Saxon than Dane. He would make us all worship their nailed god.’

‘He will do what he’s told to do,’ I said firmly, ‘and the first thing we tell him is that no Dane will pay a tithe to their church. He will be a king like Egbert was king, obedient to Danish wishes.’ Beocca was spluttering, but I ignored him. ‘What matters,’ I went on, ‘is which Dane gives him his orders. Is it to be Ivarr? Kjartan? Or Ragnar?’

‘Ragnar!’ men shouted.

‘And my wish,’ Ragnar had moved closer to the fire so that the flames illuminated him and made him look bigger and stronger, ‘my wish,’ he said again, ‘is to see Kjartan defeated. If Ivarr beats Guthred then Kjartan will grow stronger, and Kjartan is my enemy. He is our enemy. There is a bloodfeud between his family and mine, and I would end that feud now. We march to help Guthred, but if Guthred does not assist us in taking Dunholm then I swear to you that I shall kill Guthred and all his folk and take the throne. But I would rather stand in Kjartan’s blood than be king of all the Danes. I would rather be the slayer of Kjartan than be king of all the earth. My quarrel is not with Guthred. It is not with the Saxons. It is not with the Christians. My quarrel is with Kjartan the Cruel.’

‘And in Dunholm,’ I said, ‘there is a hoard of silver worthy of the gods.’

‘So we will find Guthred,’ Ragnar announced, ‘and we shall fight for him!’

A moment before, the crowd had wanted Ragnar to lead them against Guthred, but now they cheered the news that they were to fight for the king. There were seventy warriors there, not many, but they were among the best in Northumbria and they thumped swords against shields and shouted Ragnar’s name.

‘You can speak now,’ I told Beocca.

But he had nothing to say.

And next dawn, under a clear sky, we rode to find Guthred.

And Gisela.

PART THREE

Shadow-Walker

Eight

We were seventy-six warriors, including Steapa and myself. All of us were on horseback and all had weapons, mail or good leather, and helmets. Two score of servants on smaller horses carried the shields and led our spare stallions, but those servants were not fighting men and were not counted among the seventy-six. There had been a time when Ragnar could raise over two hundred warriors, but many had died at Ethandun and others had found new lords in the long months while Ragnar was a hostage, but seventy-six was still a good number. ‘And they’re formidable men,’ he told me proudly.

He rode under his banner of an eagle’s wing. It was a real eagle’s wing nailed to the top of a high pole, and his helmet was decorated with two more such wings. ‘I dreamed of this,’ he told me as we rode eastwards, ‘I dreamed of riding to war. All that time I was a hostage I wanted to be riding to war. There’s nothing in life like it, Uhtred, nothing!’

‘Women?’ I asked.

‘Women and war!’ he said, ‘women and war!’ He whooped for joy and his stallion pricked back its ears and took a few short, high steps as if it shared its master’s happiness. We rode at the front of the column, though Ragnar had a dozen men mounted on light ponies ranging far ahead of us. The dozen men signalled to each other and back to Ragnar, and they spoke to shepherds and listened to rumour and smelt the wind. They were like hounds seeking scent, and they looked for Guthred’s trail, which we expected to find leading west towards Cumbraland, but as the morning wore on the scouts kept tending eastwards. Our progress was slow, which frustrated Father Beocca, but before we could ride fast we had to know where we were going. Then, at last, the scouts seemed confident that the trail led east and spurred their ponies across the hills and we followed. ‘Guthred’s trying to go back to Eoferwic,’ Ragnar guessed.

‘He’s too late for that,’ I said.

‘Or else he’s panicking,’ Ragnar suggested cheerfully, ‘and doesn’t know what he’s doing.’

‘That sounds more likely,’ I said.

Brida and some twenty other women rode with us. Brida was in leather armour and had a black cloak held at her neck with a fine brooch of silver and jet. Her hair was twisted high and held in place with a black ribbon, and at her side was a long sword. She had grown into an elegant woman who possessed an air of authority and that, I think, offended Father Beocca who had known her since she was a child. She had been raised a Christian, but had escaped the faith and Beocca was upset by that, though I think he found her beauty more disturbing. ‘She’s a sorceress,’ Beocca hissed at me.

‘If she’s a sorceress,’ I said, ‘then she’s a good person to have on your side.’

‘God will punish us,’ he warned.

‘This isn’t your god’s country,’ I told him. ‘This is Thor’s land.’

He made the sign of the cross to protect himself from the evil of my words. ‘And what were you doing last night?’ he asked indignantly. ‘How could you even think of being king here?’

‘Easily,’ I said. ‘I am descended from kings. Unlike you, father. You’re descended from swineherds, aren’t you?’

He ignored that. ‘The king is the Lord’s anointed,’ he insisted. ‘The king is chosen by God and by all the throng of holy saints. Saint Cuthbert led Northumbria to Guthred, so how could you even think of replacing him? How could you?’

‘We can turn around and go home then,’ I said.

‘Turn around and go home?’ Beocca was appalled. ‘Why?’

‘Because if Cuthbert chose him,’ I said, ‘then Cuthbert can defend him. Guthred doesn’t need us. He can go into battle with his dead saint. Or maybe he already has,’ I said, ‘have you thought of that?’

‘Thought of what?’

‘That Guthred might already be defeated. He could be dead. Or he could be wearing Kjartan’s chains.’

‘God preserve us,’ Beocca said, making the sign of the cross again.

‘It hasn’t happened,’ I assured him.

‘How do you know?’

‘Because we’d have met his fugitives by now,’ I said, though I could not be certain of that. Perhaps Guthred was fighting even as we spoke, but I had a feeling he was alive and not too far away. It is hard to describe that feeling. It is an instinct, as hard to read as a god’s message in the fall of a wren’s feather, but I had learned to trust the feeling.

And my instinct was right, for late in the morning one of the scouts came racing back across the moorland with his pony’s mane tossing in the wind. He slewed around in a burst of turf and bracken to tell Ragnar that there was a large band of men and horses in the valley of the River Swale. ‘They’re at Cetreht, lord,’ he said.

‘On our side of the river?’ Ragnar asked.

‘On our side, lord,’ the scout said, ‘in the old fort. Trapped there.’

‘Trapped?’

‘There’s another war-band outside the fort, lord,’ the scout said. He had not ridden close enough to see any banners, but two other scouts had ridden down into the valley while this first galloped back to bring us the news that Guthred was probably very near.

We quickened our pace. Clouds raced in the wind and at midday a sharp rain fell briefly, and just after it ended we met the two scouts who had ridden down to the fields outside the fort and spoken to the war-band. ‘Guthred’s in the fort,’ one of them reported.

‘So who’s outside?’

‘Kjartan’s men, lord,’ the man said. He grinned, knowing that if any of Kjartan’s men were close then there would be a fight. ‘There are sixty of them, lord. Only sixty.’

‘Is Kjartan there? Or Sven?’

‘No, lord. They’re led by a man called Rolf.’

‘You spoke to him?’

‘Spoke to him and drank his ale, lord. They’re watching Guthred. Making sure he doesn’t run away. They’re keeping him there until Ivarr comes north.’

‘Till Ivarr comes?’ Ragnar asked. ‘Not Kjartan?’

‘Kjartan stays at Dunholm, lord,’ the man said, ‘that’s what they said, and that Ivarr will come north once he’s garrisoned Eoferwic.’

‘There are sixty of Kjartan’s men in the valley,’ Ragnar shouted back to his warriors, and his hand instinctively went to the hilt of Heart-Breaker. That was his sword, given the same name as his father’s blade as a reminder of his duty to revenge Ragnar the Elder’s death. ‘There are sixty men to kill!’ he added, then called for a servant to bring his shield. He looked back to the scouts. ‘Who did they think you were?’

‘We claimed to serve Hakon, lord. We said we were looking for him.’

Ragnar gave the men silver coins. ‘You did well,’ he said. ‘So how many men does Guthred have in the fort?’

‘Rolf says he’s got at least a hundred, lord.’

‘A hundred? And he hasn’t tried to drive off sixty men?’

‘No, lord.’

‘Some king,’ Ragnar said scornfully.

‘If he fights them,’ I said, ‘then at the end of the day he’ll have fewer than fifty men.’

‘So what’s he doing instead?’ Ragnar wanted to know.

‘Praying, probably.’

Guthred, as we later learned, had panicked. Thwarted in his efforts to reach Bebbanburg he had turned west towards Cumbraland, thinking that in that familiar country he would find friends, but the weather had slowed him, and there were enemy horsemen always in sight and he feared ambush in the steep hills ahead. So he had changed his mind and decided to return to Eoferwic, but had got no father than the Roman fort that had once guarded the crossings of the Swale at Cetreht. He was desperate by then. Some of his spearmen had deserted, reckoning that only death waited for them if they stayed with the king, so Guthred had sent messengers to summon help from Northumbria’s Christian thegns, but we had already seen the corpses and knew no help would come. Now he was trapped. The sixty men would hold him in Cetreht until Ivarr came to kill him.

‘If Guthred is praying,’ Beocca said sternly, ‘then those prayers are being answered.’

‘You mean the Christian god sent us?’ I asked.

‘Who else?’ he responded indignantly as he brushed down his black robe. ‘When we meet Guthred,’ he told me, ‘you will let me speak first.’

‘You think this is a time for ceremony?’

‘I’m an ambassador!’ he protested, ‘you forget that.’ His indignation suddenly burst like a rain-sodden stream overflowing its banks. ‘You have no conception of dignity! I am an ambassador! Last night, Uhtred, when you told that Irish savage to cut my throat, what were you thinking of?’

‘I was thinking of keeping you quiet, father.’

‘I shall tell Alfred of your insolence. You can be sure of that. I shall tell him!’

He went on complaining, but I was not listening for we had ridden across the skyline and there was Cetreht and the curving River Swale beneath us. The Roman fort was a short distance from the Swale’s southern bank and the old earth walls made a wide square which enclosed a village which had a church at its centre. Beyond the fort was the stone bridge the Romans had made to carry their great road which led from Eoferwic to the wild north, and half of the old arch still stood.

As we rode closer I could see that the fort was full of horses and people. A standard flew from the church’s gable and I assumed that must be Guthred’s flag showing Saint Cuthbert. A few horsemen were north of the river, blocking Guthred’s escape across the ford, while Rolf’s sixty riders were in the fields south of the fort. They were like hounds stopping up a fox’s earth.

Ragnar had checked his horse. His men were readying for a fight. They were pushing their arms into shield loops, loosening swords in scabbards and waiting for Ragnar’s orders. I gazed into the valley. The fort was a hopeless refuge. Its walls had long eroded into the ditch and there was no palisade, so that a man could stroll over the ramparts without even breaking stride. The sixty horsemen, if they had wished, could have ridden into the village, but they preferred to ride close to the old wall and shout insults. Guthred’s men watched from the fort’s edge. More men were clustered about the church. They had seen us on the hill and must have thought we were new enemies, for they were hurrying towards the remnants of the southern rampart. I stared at the village. Was Gisela there? I remembered the flick of her head and how her eyes had been shadowed by her black hair, and I unconsciously spurred my horse a few paces forward. I had spent over two years of hell at Sverri’s oar, but this was the moment I had dreamed of through all that time, and so I did not wait for Ragnar. I touched spurs to my horse again and rode alone into the valley of the Swale.

Beocca, of course, followed me, squawking that as Alfred’s ambassador he must lead the way into Guthred’s presence, but I ignored him and, halfway down the hill he tumbled from his horse. He gave a despairing cry and I left him limping in the grass as he tried to retrieve his mare.

The late autumn sun was bright on the land that was still wet from rain. I carried a shield with a polished boss, I was in mail and helmet, my arm rings shone, I glittered like a lord of war. I twisted in my saddle to see that Ragnar had started down the hill, but he was slanting eastwards, plainly intent on cutting off the retreat of Kjartan’s men, whose best escape would lie in the eastern river meadows.

I reached the hill’s foot and spurred across the flat river plain to join the Roman road. I passed a Christian cemetery, the ground lumpy and scattered with small wooden crosses looking towards the one larger cross which would show the resurrected dead the direction of Jerusalem on the day the Christians believed their corpses would rise from the earth. The road led straight past the graves to the fort’s southern entrance, where a crowd of Guthred’s men watched me. Kjartan’s men spurred to intercept me, barring the road, but they showed no apprehension. Why should they? I appeared to be a Dane, I was one man and they were many, and my sword was still in its scabbard. ‘Which of you is Rolf?’ I shouted as I drew near them.

‘I am,’ a black-bearded man urged his horse towards me. ‘Who are you?’

‘Your death, Rolf,’ I said, and I drew Serpent-Breath and touched my heels to the stallion’s flanks and he went into the full gallop and Rolf was still drawing his sword when I pounded past him and swung Serpent-Breath and the blade sliced through his neck so that his head and helmet flew back, bounced on the road and rolled under my horse’s hooves. I was laughing because the battle-joy had come. Three men were ahead of me and none had yet drawn a sword. They just stared at me, aghast, and at Rolf’s headless trunk that swayed in the saddle. I charged the centre man, letting my horse barge into his and striking him hard with Serpent-Breath, and then I was through Kjartan’s horsemen and the fort was in front of me.

Fifty or sixty men were standing at the fort’s entrance. Only a handful were mounted, but nearly all had swords or spears. And I could see Guthred there, his fair curly hair bright in the sun, and next to him was Gisela. I had tried so often to summon her face in those long months at Sverri’s oar, and I had always failed, yet suddenly the wide mouth and the defiant eyes seemed so familiar. She was dressed in a white linen robe, belted at her waist with a silver chain, and she had a linen bonnet on her hair which, because she was married, was bound into a knot. She was holding her brother’s arm, and Guthred was just staring at the strange events unfolding outside his refuge.

Two of Kjartan’s men had followed me while the rest were milling around, torn between the shock of Rolf’s death and the sudden appearance of Ragnar’s war-band. I turned on the two men following me, wrenching the stallion about so sharply that his hooves scrabbled in the wet mud, but my sudden turn drove my pursuers back. I spurred after them. One was too fast, the second was on a lumbering horse and he heard my hoofbeats and swung his sword back in a desperate attempt to drive me off. I took the blade on my shield, then lunged Serpent-Breath into the man’s spine so that his back arched and he screamed. I tugged Serpent-Breath free and back-swung her into the man’s face. He fell from the saddle and I rode around him, sword red, and took off my helmet as I spurred again towards the fort.

I was showing off. Of course I was showing off. One man against sixty? But Gisela was watching. In truth I was in no real danger. The sixty men had not been ready for a fight, and if they pursued me now I could take refuge with Guthred’s men. But Kjartan’s men were not pursuing. They were too nervous of Ragnar’s approach and so I ignored them, riding close to Guthred and his men instead.

‘Have you forgotten how to fight?’ I shouted at them. I ignored Guthred. I even ignored Gisela, though I had taken off my helmet so she would recognise me. I knew she was watching me. I could sense those dark eyes and sense her astonishment and I hoped it was a joyful astonishment. ‘They’ve all got to die!’ I shouted, pointing my sword at Kjartan’s men. ‘Every last one of the bastards has to die, so go out and kill them!’

Ragnar struck then and there was the hammer of shield on shield, the clangour of swords and the scream of men and horses. Kjartan’s men were scattering and some, despairing of making an escape eastwards, were galloping to the west. I looked at the men in the gateway, ‘Rypere! Clapa! I want those men stopped!’

Clapa and Rypere were staring at me as though I were a ghost, which I suppose I was in a way. I was glad Clapa was still with Guthred, for Clapa was a Dane and that suggested Guthred could still command some Danish allegiance. ‘Clapa! You earsling!’ I yelled. ‘Stop dawdling like a boiled egg. Get on a horse and fight!’

‘Yes, lord!’

I rode closer still until I was staring down at Guthred. There was a fight going on behind me and Guthred’s men, stirred from their torpor, were hurrying to join the slaughter, but Guthred had no eyes for the battle. He just stared up at me. There were priests behind him and Gisela was beside him, but I looked only into Guthred’s eyes and saw the fear there. ‘Remember me?’ I asked coldly.

He had no words.

‘You would do well,’ I said, ‘to set a kingly example and kill a few men right now. You have a horse?’

He nodded and still could not speak.

‘Then get on your horse,’ I said curtly, ‘and fight.’

Guthred nodded and took one backwards pace, but though his servant led a horse forward Guthred did not mount. I looked at Gisela then and she looked back and I thought her eyes could light a fire. I wanted to speak, but it was my turn to have no words. A priest plucked at her shoulder as if summoning her away from the fighting, but I twitched Serpent-Breath’s bloody blade towards the man and he went very still. I looked back at Gisela and it seemed as if I had no breath, as if the world stood still. A gust of wind lifted a wisp of black hair showing beneath her bonnet. She brushed it away, then smiled. ‘Uhtred,’ she said, as though saying the name for the very first time.

‘Gisela,’ I managed to speak.

‘I knew you’d come back,’ she said.

‘I thought you were going to fight,’ I snarled at Guthred and he ran off like a whipped dog.

‘Do you have a horse?’ I asked Gisela.

‘No.’

‘You!’ I shouted at a boy gawping at me. ‘Fetch me that horse!’ I pointed to the stallion of the man I had injured in the face. That man was now dead, killed by Guthred’s men as they joined the fight.

The boy brought me the stallion and Gisela scrambled into its saddle, hoisting her skirts inelegantly around her thighs. She pushed her muddy shoes into the stirrups then held out a hand to touch my cheek. ‘You’re thinner,’ she said.

‘So are you.’

‘I have not been happy,’ she said, ‘since the moment you left.’ She kept her hand on my cheek for a heartbeat, then impulsively took it away and tore off the linen bonnet and unpinned her black hair so that it fell around her shoulders like the hair of an unwed girl. ‘I’m not married,’ she said, ‘not properly married.’

‘Not yet,’ I said, and my heart was so full of joy. I could not take my eyes from her. I was with her again and the months of slavery dropped away as though they had never happened.

‘Have you killed enough men yet?’ she asked mischievously.

‘No.’

So we rode towards the slaughter.

You cannot kill everyone in an enemy army. Or rarely. Whenever the poets sing a tale of battle they always insist that no enemy escapes unless the poet himself happens to be part of the fight when he alone escapes. It is strange that. Poets always live while everyone else dies, but what do poets know? I have never seen a poet in a shield wall. Yet, outside Cetreht, we must have killed over fifty of Kjartan’s men, and then everything became chaotic because Guthred’s men could not tell the difference between Kjartan’s followers and Ragnar’s Danes, and so some of the enemy escaped as we pulled warriors apart. Finan, attacked by two of Guthred’s household troops, had killed both of them and, when I found him, he was about to attack a third. ‘He’s on our side,’ I shouted to Finan.

‘He looks like a rat,’ Finan snarled.

‘His name,’ I said, ‘is Sihtric, and he once swore me an oath of loyalty.’

‘Still looks like a rat, he does.’

‘Are you on our side?’ I called to Sihtric, ‘or did you rejoin your father’s troops?’

‘Lord, lord!’ Sihtric came running to me and fell to his knees in the trampled mud beside my horse. ‘I’m still your man, lord.’

‘You didn’t take an oath to Guthred?’

‘He never asked me, lord.’

‘But you served him? You didn’t run back to Dunholm?’

‘No, lord! I stayed with the king.’

‘He did,’ Gisela confirmed.

I gave Serpent-Breath to Gisela, then reached down and took Sihtric’s hand. ‘So you’re still my man?’

‘Of course, lord.’ He was clutching my hand, gazing at me with disbelief.

‘You’re not much use, are you,’ I said, ‘if you can’t beat a skinny Irishman like him?’

‘He’s quick, lord,’ Sihtric said.

‘So teach him your tricks,’ I told Finan, then I patted Sihtric’s cheek. ‘It’s good to see you, Sihtric.’

Ragnar had two prisoners and Sihtric recognised the taller of the two. ‘His name is Hogga,’ he told me.

‘He’s a dead Hogga now,’ I said. I knew Ragnar would not let any of Kjartan’s men survive while Kjartan himself lived. This was the bloodfeud. This was hatred. This was the start of Ragnar’s revenge for his father’s death, but for the moment Hogga and his shorter companion evidently believed they would live. They were talking avidly, describing how Kjartan had close to two hundred men in Dunholm. They said Kjartan had sent a large war-band to support Ivarr, while the rest of his men had followed Rolf to this bloody field by Cetreht.

‘Why didn’t Kjartan bring all his men here?’ Ragnar wanted to know.

‘He won’t leave Dunholm, lord, in case Ælfric of Bebbanburg attacks when he’s gone.’

‘Has Ælfric threatened to do that?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know, lord,’ Hogga said.

It would be unlike my uncle to risk an attack on Dunholm, though perhaps he would lead men to rescue Guthred if he knew where Guthred was. My uncle wanted the saint’s corpse and he wanted Gisela, but my guess was that he would risk little to get those two things. He would certainly not risk Bebbanburg itself, any more than Kjartan would risk Dunholm.

‘And Thyra Ragnarsdottir?’ Ragnar resumed his questioning. ‘Does she live?’

‘Yes, lord.’

‘Does she live happily?’ Ragnar asked harshly.

They hesitated, then Hogga grimaced. ‘She is mad, lord.’ He spoke in a low voice. ‘She is quite mad.’

Ragnar stared at the two men. They became uncomfortable under his gaze, but then Ragnar looked up at the sky where a buzzard floated down from the western hills. ‘Tell me,’ he said, and his voice was suddenly low, almost easy, ‘how long have you served Kjartan?’

‘Eight years, lord,’ Hogga said.

‘Seven years, lord,’ the other man said.

‘So you both served him,’ Ragnar said, still speaking softly, ‘before he fortified Dunholm?’

‘Yes, lord.’

‘And you both served him,’ Ragnar went on, his voice harsh now, ‘when he took men to Synningthwait and burned my father’s hall. When he took my sister as his son’s whore. When he killed my mother and my father.’

Neither man answered. The shorter of the two was shaking. Hogga looked around as if to find a way to escape, but he was surrounded by mounted sword-Danes, then he flinched as Ragnar drew Heart-Breaker.

‘No, lord,’ Hogga said.

‘Yes,’ Ragnar said and his face twisted with anger as he chopped down. He had to dismount to finish the job. He killed both men, and he hacked at their fallen bodies in fury. I watched, then turned to see Gisela’s face. It showed nothing, then she became conscious of my gaze and turned towards me with a small look of triumph as if she knew I had half expected her to be horrified by the sight of men being disembowelled. ‘They deserved it?’ she asked.

‘They deserved it,’ I said.

‘Good.’

Her brother, I noted, had not watched. He was nervous of me, for which I did not blame him, and doubtless terrified of Ragnar who was bloodied like a butcher, and so Guthred had gone back to the village, leaving us with the dead. Father Beocca had managed to find some of Guthred’s priests and, after talking with them, he limped to us. ‘It is agreed,’ he said, ‘that we shall present ourselves to the king in the church.’ He suddenly became aware of the two severed heads and the sword-slashed bodies. ‘Dear God, who did that?’

‘Ragnar.’

Beocca made the sign of the cross. ‘The church,’ he said, ‘we’re to meet in the church. Do try to wipe that blood off your mail, Uhtred. We’re an embassy!’

I turned to see a handful of fugitives crossing the hilltops to the west. They would doubtless cross the river higher up and join the horsemen on the far bank, and those horsemen would be wary now. They would send word to Dunholm that enemies had come, and Kjartan would hear of the eagle-wing banner and know that Ragnar was returned from Wessex.

And perhaps, on his high crag, behind his high walls, he would be frightened.

I rode to the church, taking Gisela with me. Beocca hurried after on foot, but he was slow. ‘Wait for me!’ he shouted, ‘wait for me!’

I did not wait. Instead I spurred the stallion faster and left Beocca far behind.

It was dark in the church. The only illumination came from a small window above the door and from some feeble rushlights burning on the altar that was a trestle table covered by a black cloth. Saint Cuthbert’s coffin, together with the other two chests of relics, stood in front of the altar where Guthred sat on a milking stool flanked by two men and a woman. The Abbot Eadred was one of the men and Father Hrothweard was the other. The woman was young, had a plumply pretty face, and a pregnant belly. I learned later she was Osburh, Guthred’s Saxon queen. She glanced from me to her husband, evidently expecting Guthred to speak, but he was silent. A score of warriors stood on the left side of the church and a larger number of priests and monks on the right. They had been arguing, but all went quiet when I entered.

Gisela held my left arm. Together we walked down the church until we faced Guthred, who seemed incapable of looking at me or speaking to me. He opened his mouth once, but no words came, and he looked past me as if hoping that someone less baleful would come through the church door. ‘I’m going to marry your sister,’ I told him.

He opened his mouth and closed it again.

A monk moved as if to protest my words and was pulled back by a companion and I saw that the gods had been especially good to me that day, for the pair were Jænberht and Ida, the monks who had negotiated my slavery. Then, from the other side of the church, a man did protest. ‘The Lady Gisela,’ he said, ‘is already married.’

I saw that the speaker was an older man, grey-haired and stout. He was dressed in a short brown tunic with a silver chain about his neck and he jerked his head up belligerently as I walked towards him. ‘You’re Aidan,’ I said. It had been fourteen years since I had been in Bebbanburg, but I recognised Aidan. He had been one of my father’s doorkeepers, charged with keeping unwanted folk out of the great hall, but the silver chain made it clear that he had risen in rank since then. I flicked the chain with my hand. ‘What are you now, Aidan?’ I demanded.

‘Steward to the Lord of Bebbanburg,’ he said gruffly. He did not recognise me. How could he? I had been nine years old when he last saw me.

‘So that makes you my steward,’ I said.

‘Your steward?’ he asked, then he realised who I was and he stepped back to join two young warriors. That step was involuntary, though Aidan was no coward. He had been a good soldier in his day, but meeting me had shocked him. He recovered though, and faced me defiantly. ‘The Lady Gisela,’ he said, ‘is married.’

‘Are you married?’ I asked Gisela.

‘No,’ she said.

‘She’s not married,’ I told Aidan.

Guthred cleared his throat as if to speak, but then fell silent as Ragnar and his men filed into the church.

‘The lady is married,’ a voice called from among the priests and monks. I turned to see that it was Brother Jænberht who had spoken. ‘She is married to the Lord Ælfric,’ Jænberht insisted.

‘She’s married to Ælfric?’ I asked as if I had not heard that news, ‘she’s married to that whore-born piece of lice-shit?’

Aidan gave one of the warriors beside him a hard nudge, and the man drew his sword. The other did the same, and I smiled at them, then very slowly drew Serpent-Breath.

‘This is a house of God!’ Abbot Eadred protested. ‘Put your swords away!’

The two young men hesitated, but when I kept Serpent-Breath drawn they kept their own blades ready, though neither moved to attack me. They knew my reputation and, besides, Serpent-Breath was still sticky with the blood of Kjartan’s men.

‘Uhtred!’ This time it was Beocca who interrupted me. He burst into the church and pushed past Ragnar’s men. ‘Uhtred!’ he called again.

I turned on him. ‘This is my business, father,’ I said, ‘and you will leave me to it. You remember Aidan?’ Beocca looked confused, then he recognised the steward who had been at Bebbanburg during all the years that Beocca had been my father’s priest. ‘Aidan wants these two boys to kill me,’ I said, ‘but before they oblige him,’ I was looking at the steward again, ‘tell me how Gisela can be married to a man she’s never met?’

Aidan glanced across at Guthred as if expecting help from the king, but Guthred was still motionless, so Aidan had to confront me alone. ‘I stood beside her in Lord Ælfric’s place,’ he said, ‘so in the eyes of the church she is married.’

‘Did you hump her as well?’ I demanded, and the priests and monks hissed their disapproval.

‘Of course not,’ Aidan said, offended.

‘If no one’s ridden her,’ I said, ‘then she’s not married. A mare isn’t broken until she’s saddled and ridden. Have you been ridden?’ I asked Gisela.

‘Not yet,’ she said.

‘She is married,’ Aidan insisted.

‘You stood at the altar in my uncle’s place,’ I said, ‘and you call that a marriage?’

‘It is,’ Beocca said quietly.

‘So if I kill you,’ I suggested to Aidan, ignoring Beocca, ‘she’ll be a widow?’

Aidan pushed one of the warriors towards me and, like a fool, the man came, and Serpent-Breath slashed once, very hard, and his sword was knocked away and my blade was at his belly. ‘You want your guts strewn across the floor?’ I asked him gently. ‘I am Uhtred,’ I said, my voice hard and boastful now, ‘I am the Lord of Bebbanburg and the man who killed Ubba Lothbrokson beside the sea.’ I prodded my blade, driving him back. ‘I have killed more men than I could count,’ I told him, ‘but don’t let that stop you fighting me. You want to boast that you killed me? That piece of toad-snot, Ælfric, will be pleased if you did. He’ll reward you.’ I jabbed again. ‘Go on,’ I said, my anger rising, ‘try.’ He did nothing of the sort. Instead he took another faltering backwards step and the other warrior did the same. That was hardly surprising, for Ragnar and Steapa had joined me, and behind them was a bunch of war-Danes who were dressed in mail and carrying axes and swords. I looked at Aidan. ‘You can crawl back to my uncle,’ I said, ‘and tell him he has lost his bride.’

‘Uhtred!’ Guthred had at last managed to speak.

I ignored him. Instead I walked across the church to where the priests and monks huddled. Gisela came with me, still holding my arm and I gave her Serpent-Breath to hold, then stopped in front of Jænberht. ‘You think Gisela is married?’ I asked him.

‘She is,’ he said defiantly. ‘The bride-price is paid and the union solemnised.’

‘Bride-price?’ I looked at Gisela. ‘What did they pay you?’

‘We paid them,’ she said. ‘They were given one thousand shillings and Saint Oswald’s arm.’

‘Saint Oswald’s arm?’ I almost laughed.

‘Abbot Eadred found it,’ Gisela said drily.

‘Dug it out of a pauper’s graveyard, more like,’ I said.

Jænberht bristled. ‘All has been done,’ he said, ‘according to the laws of man and of the holy church. The woman,’ he looked sneeringly at Gisela, ‘is married.’

There was something about his narrow, supercilious face that irritated me, so I reached out and grasped his tonsured hair. He tried to resist, but he was feeble and I jerked his head forward and down, then brought my right knee up hard so that his face was smashed into the mail of my thigh.

I hauled him upright and looked into his bloody face. ‘Is she married?’

‘She is married,’ he said, his voice thickened by the blood in his mouth, and I jerked his head down again and this time I felt his teeth break against my knee.

‘Is she married?’ I asked. He said nothing this time, so I yanked his head down again and felt his nose being crunched on my mail-clad knee. ‘I asked you a question,’ I said.

‘She is married,’ Jænberht insisted. He was shaking with anger, wincing with pain, and the priests were protesting at what I was doing, but I was lost in my own abrupt rage. This was my uncle’s tame monk, the man who had negotiated with Guthred to make me a slave. He had conspired against me. He had tried to destroy me and that realisation made my fury ungovernable. It was a sudden blood-red anger, fed by the memory of the humiliations I had suffered on Sverri’s Trader, so I pulled Jænberht’s head towards me again, but this time, instead of kneeing his face, I drew Wasp-Sting, my short-sword, and cut his throat. One slash. It took a heartbeat to draw the sword, and in that instant I saw the monk’s eyes widen in disbelief, and I confess that I half disbelieved what I was doing myself. But I did it anyway. I cut his throat and Wasp-Sting’s steel scraped against tendon and gristle, then sliced through their resistance so that blood sheeted down my mail coat. Jænberht, shuddering and bubbling, collapsed onto the wet rushes.

The monks and priests shrieked like women. They had been appalled when I had hammered Jænberht’s face, but none had expected outright murder. Even I was surprised by what my anger had done, but I felt no regret, nor did I see it as murder. I saw it as revenge and there was an exquisite pleasure in it. Every pull on Sverri’s oar and every blow I had taken from Sverri’s crewmen had been in that sword-cut. I looked down at Jænberht’s dying twitches, then up at his companion, Brother Ida. ‘Is Gisela married?’ I demanded of him.

‘Under church law,’ Ida began, stammering slightly, then he paused and looked at Wasp-Sting’s blade. ‘She is not married, lord,’ he went on hurriedly, ‘until the marriage is consummated.’

‘Are you married?’ I asked Gisela.

‘Of course not,’ she said.

I stooped and wiped Wasp-Sting clean on the skirts of Jænberht’s robe. He was dead now, his eyes still showing the surprise of it. One priest, braver than the rest, knelt to pray over the monk’s corpse, but the other churchmen looked like sheep confronted by a wolf. They gaped at me, too horrified to protest. Beocca was opening and closing his mouth, saying nothing. I sheathed Wasp-Sting, took Serpent-Breath from Gisela and together we turned towards her brother. He was staring at Jænberht’s corpse and at the blood that had splashed across the floor and onto his sister’s skirts, and he must have thought I was about to do the same to him, for he put a hand to his own sword. But then I pointed Serpent-Breath at Ragnar. ‘This is the Earl Ragnar,’ I said to Guthred, ‘and he’s here to fight for you. You don’t deserve his help. If it were up to me you’d go back to wearing slave shackles and emptying King Eochaid’s shit-pail.’

‘He is the Lord’s anointed!’ Father Hrothweard protested. ‘Show respect!’

I hefted Wasp-Sting. ‘I never liked you either,’ I said.

Beocca, appalled at my behaviour, thrust me aside and offered Guthred a bow. Beocca looked pale, and no wonder, for he had just seen a monk murdered, but not even that could put him off his glorious task of being the West Saxon ambassador. ‘I bring you greetings,’ he said, ‘from Alfred of Wessex who …’

‘Later, father,’ I said.

‘I bring you Christian greetings from …’ Beocca tried again, then squealed because I dragged him backwards. The priests and monks evidently thought I was going to kill him, for some of them covered their eyes.

‘Later, father,’ I said, letting go of him, then I looked at Guthred. ‘So what do you do now?’ I asked him.

‘Do?’

‘What do you do? We’ve taken away the men guarding you, so you’re free to go. So what do you do?’

‘What we do,’ it was Hrothweard who answered, ‘is punish you!’ He pointed at me and the anger came on him. He shouted that I was a murderer, a pagan and a sinner and that God would take his vengeance on Guthred if I were allowed to remain unpunished. Queen Osburh looked terrified as Hrothweard screamed his threats. He was all energy and wild hair and spluttering passion as he shouted that I had killed a holy brother. ‘The only hope for Haliwerfolkland,’ he ranted, ‘is our alliance with Ælfric of Bebbanburg. Send the Lady Gisela to Lord Ælfric and kill the pagan!’ He pointed at me. Gisela was still beside me, her hand clutching mine. I said nothing.

Abbot Eadred, who now looked as old as the dead Saint Cuthbert, tried to bring calm to the church. He held his hands aloft till there was silence, then he thanked Ragnar for killing Kjartan’s men. ‘What we must do now, lord King,’ Eadred turned to Guthred, ‘is carry the saint northwards. To Bebbanburg.’

‘We must punish the murderer!’ Hrothweard intervened.

‘Nothing is more precious to our country than the body of the holy Cuthbert,’ Eadred said, ignoring Hrothweard’s anger, ‘and we must take it to a place of safety. We should ride tomorrow, ride north, ride to the sanctuary of Bebbanburg.’

Aidan, Ælfric’s steward, sought permission to speak. He had come south, he said, at some risk and in good faith, and I had insulted him, his master and the peace of Northumbria, but he would ignore the insults if Guthred were to take Saint Cuthbert and Gisela north to Bebbanburg. ‘It is only in Bebbanburg,’ Aidan said, ‘that the saint will be safe.’

‘He must die,’ Hrothweard insisted, thrusting a wooden cross towards me.

Guthred was nervous. ‘If we ride north,’ he said, ‘Kjartan will oppose us.’

Eadred was ready for that objection. ‘If the Earl Ragnar will ride with us, lord, then we shall survive. The church will pay Earl Ragnar for that service.’

‘But there will be no safety for any of us,’ Hrothweard shouted, ‘if a murderer is permitted to live.’ He pointed the wooden cross at me again. ‘He is a murderer! A murderer! Brother Jænberht is a martyr!’ The monks and priests shouted their support, and Guthred only stopped their clamour by remembering that Father Beocca was an ambassador. Guthred demanded silence and then invited Beocca to speak.

Poor Beocca. He had been practising for days, polishing his words, saying them aloud, changing them and then changing them back. He had asked advice on his speech, rejected the advice, declaimed the words endlessly, and now he delivered his formal greeting from Alfred and I doubt Guthred heard a word of it, for he was just looking at me and at Gisela, while Hrothweard was still hissing poison in his ear. But Beocca droned on, praising Guthred and Queen Osburh, declaring that they were a godly light in the north and generally boring anyone who might have been listening. Some of Guthred’s warriors mocked his speech by making faces or pretending to squint until Steapa, tired of their cruelty, went to stand beside Beocca and put a hand on his sword hilt. Steapa was a kind man, but he looked implacably violent. He was huge, for a start, and his skin seemed to have been stretched too tight across his skull, so leaving him incapable of making any expressions other than pure hatred and wolfish hunger. He glared around the room, daring any man to belittle Beocca, and they all stayed silent and awed.

Beocca, of course, believed it was his eloquence that stilled them. He finished his speech with a low bow to Guthred, then presented the gifts Alfred had sent. There was a book which Alfred claimed to have translated from Latin into English, and maybe he had. It was full of Christian homilies, Beocca said, and he bowed as he presented the heavy volume that was enclosed in jewelled covers. Guthred turned the book this way and that, worked out how to unclasp the cover and then looked at a page upside down and declared it was the most valuable gift he had ever received. He said the same of the second gift, which was a sword. It was a Frankish blade and the hilt was of silver and the pommel was a chunk of bright crystal. The last gift was undoubtedly the most precious, for it was a reliquary of the finest gold studded with bright garnets, and inside were hairs from the beard of Saint Augustine of Contwaraburg. Even Abbot Eadred, the guardian of Northumbria’s holiest corpse, was impressed and leaned forward to touch the glittering gold. ‘The king means a message by these gifts,’ Beocca said.

‘Keep it short,’ I muttered, and Gisela pressed my hand.

‘I would be delighted to hear his message,’ Guthred said politely.

‘The book represents learning,’ Beocca said, ‘for without learning a kingdom is a mere husk of ignorant barbarism. The sword is the instrument by which we defend learning and protect God’s earthly kingdom, and its crystal stands for the inner eye which permits us to discover our Saviour’s will. And the hairs of the holy Augustine’s beard, lord King, remind us that without God we are nothing, and that without the holy church we are as chaff in the wind. And Alfred of Wessex wishes you a long and learned life, a Godly rule and a safe kingdom.’ He bowed.

Guthred made a speech of thanks, but it ended plaintively. Would Alfred of Wessex send Northumbria help?

‘Help?’ Beocca asked, not sure how else to respond.

‘I need spears,’ Guthred said, though how he thought he could last long enough for any West Saxon troops to reach him was a mystery.

‘He sent me,’ I said in answer.

‘Murderer!’ Hrothweard spat. He would not give up.

‘He sent me,’ I said again, and I let go of Gisela’s hand and went to join Beocca and Steapa in the nave’s centre. Beocca was making small flapping motions as if to tell me to go away and keep quiet, but Guthred wanted to hear me. ‘Over two years ago,’ I reminded Guthred, ‘Ælfric became your ally and my freedom was the price for that alliance. He promised you he would destroy Dunholm, yet I hear Dunholm still stands and that Kjartan still lives. So much for Ælfric’s promise. And yet you would put your faith in him again? You think that if you give him your sister and a dead saint that Ælfric will fight for you?’

‘Murderer,’ Hrothweard hissed.

‘Bebbanburg is still two days’ march away,’ I said, ‘and to get there you need the Earl Ragnar’s help. But the Earl Ragnar is my friend, not yours. He has never betrayed me.’

Guthred’s face jerked at the mention of betrayal.

‘We don’t need pagan Danes,’ Hrothweard hissed at Guthred. ‘We must rededicate ourselves to God, lord King, here in the River Jordan, and God will see us safe through Kjartan’s land!’

‘The Jordan?’ Ragnar asked behind me. ‘Where’s that?’

I thought the River Jordan was in the Christians’ holy land, but it seemed it was here, in Northumbria. ‘The River Swale,’ Hrothweard was shouting as if he addressed a congregation of hundreds, ‘was where the blessed Saint Paulinus baptised Edwin, our country’s first Christian king. Thousands of folk were baptised here. This is our holy river! Our Jordan! If we dip our swords and spears in the Swale, then God will bless them. We cannot be defeated!’

‘Without Earl Ragnar,’ I told Hrothweard scornfully, ‘Kjartan will tear you to pieces. And Earl Ragnar,’ I looked at Guthred again, ‘is my friend, not yours.’

Guthred took his wife’s hand, then summoned the courage to look me in the eye. ‘What would you do, Lord Uhtred?’

My enemies, and there were plenty of those in that church, noted that he called me Lord Uhtred and there was a shudder of distaste. I stepped forward. ‘It’s easy, lord,’ I said, and I had not known what I was going to say, but suddenly it came to me. The three spinners were either playing a joke, or else they had given me a fate as golden as Guthred’s, for suddenly it did all seem easy.

‘Easy?’ Guthred asked.

‘Ivarr has gone to Eoferwic, lord,’ I said, ‘and Kjartan has sent men to stop you reaching Bebbanburg. What they are trying to do, lord, is to keep you a fugitive. They will take your fortresses, capture your palace, destroy your Saxon supporters and when you have nowhere to hide they will take you and they will kill you.’

‘So?’ Guthred asked plaintively. ‘What do we do?’

‘We place ourselves, lord, in a fortress, of course. In a place of safety.’

‘Where?’ he asked.

‘Dunholm,’ I said, ‘where else?’

He just stared at me. No one else spoke. Even the churchmen, who only a moment before had been howling for my death, were silent. And I was thinking of Alfred, and how, in that dreadful winter when all Wessex seemed doomed, he had not thought of mere survival, but of victory.

‘If we march at dawn,’ I said, ‘and march fast, then in two days we shall take Dunholm.’

‘You can do that?’ Guthred asked.

‘No, lord,’ I said, ‘we can do it.’ Though how, I had not the slightest idea. All I knew was that we were few and the enemy numerous, and that so far Guthred had been like a mouse in that enemy’s paws, and it was time that we fought back. And Dunholm, because Kjartan had sent so many men to guard the Bebbanburg approaches, was as weak as it was ever likely to be.

‘We can do it,’ Ragnar said. He came to stand beside me.

‘Then we shall,’ Guthred said, and that was how it was decided.

The priests did not like the notion that I would live unpunished, and they liked it even less when Guthred brushed their complaints away and asked me to go with him to the small house that were his quarters. Gisela came too and she sat against the wall and watched the two of us. A small fire burned. It was cold that afternoon, the first cold of the coming winter.

Guthred was embarrassed to find himself with me. He half smiled. ‘I am sorry,’ he said haltingly.

‘You’re a bastard,’ I said.

‘Uhtred,’ he began, but could find nothing more to say.

‘You’re a piece of weasel-shit,’ I said, ‘you’re an earsling.’

‘I’m a king,’ he said, trying to regain his dignity.

‘So you’re a royal piece of weasel-shit. An earsling on a throne.’

‘I,’ he said and still could find nothing more to say, so instead he sat on the only chair in the room and gave a shrug.

‘But you did the right thing,’ I told him.

‘I did?’ he brightened.

‘But it didn’t work, did it? You were supposed to sacrifice me to get Ælfric’s troops on your side. You were supposed to crush Kjartan like a louse, but he’s still there, and Ælfric calls himself Lord of Bernicia, and you’ve got a Danish rebellion on your hands. And for that I slaved at an oar for over two years?’ He said nothing. I unbuckled my sword belt and then tugged the heavy mail coat over my head and let it collapse on the floor. Guthred was puzzled as he watched me pull the tunic off my left shoulder, then I showed him the slave scar that Hakka had carved into my upper arm. ‘You know what that is?’ I asked. He shook his head. ‘A slave mark, lord King. You don’t have one?’

‘No,’ he said.

‘I took it for you,’ I said. ‘I took it so you could be king here, but instead you’re a priest-ridden fugitive. I told you to kill Ivarr long ago.’

‘I should have done,’ he admitted.

‘And you let that miserable piece of hairy gristle, Hrothweard, impose a tithe on the Danes?’

‘It was for the shrine,’ he said. ‘Hrothweard had a dream. He said Saint Cuthbert spoke to him.’

‘Cuthbert’s talkative for a dead man, isn’t he? Why don’t you remember that you rule this land, not Saint Cuthbert?’

He looked miserable. ‘The Christian magic has always worked for me,’ he said.

‘It hasn’t worked,’ I said scornfully. ‘Kjartan lives, Ivarr lives, and you face a revolt of the Danes. Forget your Christian magic. You’ve got me now, and you’ve got Earl Ragnar. He’s the best man in your kingdom. Look after him.’

‘And you,’ he said, ‘I shall look after you. I promise.’

‘I am,’ Gisela said.

‘Because you’re going to be my brother-in-law,’ I told Guthred.

He nodded at that, then gave me a wan smile. ‘She always said you’d come back.’

‘And you thought I was dead?’

‘I hoped you were not,’ he said. Then he stood and smiled. ‘Would you believe me,’ he asked, ‘if I said I missed you?’

‘Yes, lord,’ I said, ‘because I missed you.’

‘You did?’ he asked in hope.

‘Yes, lord,’ I said, ‘I did.’ And oddly enough, that was true. I had thought I would hate him when I saw him again, but I had forgotten his infectious charm. I liked him still. We embraced. Guthred picked up his helmet and went to the door that was a piece of cloth hooked onto nails. ‘I shall leave you my house tonight,’ he said, smiling. ‘The two of you,’ he added.

And he did.

Gisela. These days, when I am old, I sometimes see a girl who reminds me of Gisela and there comes a catch into my throat. I see a girl with a long stride, see the black hair, the slim waist, the grace of her movements and the defiant upward tilt of her head. And when I see such a girl I think I am seeing Gisela again, and often, because I have become a sentimental fool in my dotage, I find myself with tears in my eyes.

‘I already have a wife,’ I told her that night.

‘You’re married?’ Gisela asked me.

‘Her name is Mildrith,’ I said, ‘and I married her a long time ago because Alfred ordered it, and she hates me, and so she’s gone into a nunnery.’

‘All your women do that,’ Gisela said. ‘Mildrith, Hild, and me.’

‘That’s true,’ I said, amused. I had not thought of it before,

‘Hild told me to go into a nunnery if I was threatened,’ Gisela told me.

‘Hild did?’

‘She said I’d be safe there. So when Kjartan said he wanted me to marry his son, I went to the nunnery.’

‘Guthred would never have married you to Sven,’ I said.

‘My brother thought about it,’ she said. ‘He needed money. He needed help and I was all he had to offer.’

‘The peace cow.’

‘That’s me,’ she said.

‘Did you like the nunnery?’

‘I hated it all the time you were away. Are you going to kill Kjartan?’

‘Yes.’

‘How?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Or perhaps Ragnar will kill him. Ragnar has more cause than me.’

‘When I refused to marry Sven,’ Gisela said, ‘Kjartan said he’d capture me and let his men rape me. He said he’d stake me on the ground and let his men use me, and when they were done he’d let his dogs have me. Did you and Mildrith have children?’

‘One,’ I said, ‘a son. He died.’

‘Mine won’t die. My sons will be warriors, and my daughter will be the mother of warriors.’

I smiled, then ran my hand down her long spine so that she shivered on top of me. We were covered by three cloaks and her hair was wet because the thatch was leaking. The floor-rushes were rotted and damp beneath me, but we were happy. ‘Did you become a Christian in your nunnery?’ I asked her.

‘Of course not,’ she said scornfully.

‘They didn’t mind?’

‘I gave them silver.’

‘Then they didn’t mind,’ I said.

‘I don’t think any Dane is a real Christian,’ she told me.

‘Not even your brother?’

‘We have many gods,’ she said, ‘and the Christian god is just another one. I’m sure that’s what Guthred thinks. What’s the Christian god’s name? A nun did tell me, but I’ve forgotten.’

‘Jehovah.’

‘There you are, then. Odin, Thor and Jehovah. Does he have a wife?’

‘No.’

‘Poor Jehovah,’ she said.

Poor Jehovah, I thought, and was still thinking it when, in a persistent rain that slashed on the stony remnants of the Roman road and turned the fields to mud, we crossed the Swale and rode north to take the fortress that could not be taken. We rode to capture Dunholm.

Nine

It seemed simple when I suggested it. We should ride to Dunholm, make a surprise attack, and thus provide Guthred with a safe refuge and Ragnar with revenge, but Hrothweard had been determined to thwart us and, before we rode, there had been another bitter argument. ‘What happens,’ Hrothweard had demanded of Guthred, ‘to the blessed saint? If you ride away, who guards Cuthbert?’

Hrothweard had passion. It was fed by anger, I suppose. I have known other men like him, men who could work themselves into a welter of fury over the smallest insult to the one thing they hold most dear. For Hrothweard that one thing was the church, and anyone who was not a Christian was an enemy to his church. He had become Guthred’s chief counsellor, and it was his passion that gained him that position. Guthred still saw Christianity as a superior kind of sorcery, and in Hrothweard he thought he had found a man capable of working the magic. Hrothweard certainly looked like a sorcerer. His hair was wild, his beard jutted, he had vivid eyes and boasted the loudest voice of any man I have ever met. He was unmarried, devoted only to his beloved religion, and men reckoned he would become the archbishop in Eoferwic when Wulfhere died.

Guthred had no passion. He was reasonable, gentle mostly, wanting those about him to be happy, and Hrothweard bullied him. In Eoferwic, where most of the citizens were Christians, Hrothweard had the power to summon a mob into the streets, and Guthred, to keep the city from riots, had deferred to Hrothweard. And Hrothweard had also learned to threaten Guthred with Saint Cuthbert’s displeasure, and that was the weapon he used on the eve of our ride to Dunholm. Our only chance of capturing the fortress was surprise, and that meant moving fast, and in turn that required that Cuthbert’s corpse and Oswald’s head and the precious gospel book must be left in Cetreht along with all the priests, monks and women. Father Hrothweard insisted that our first duty was to protect Saint Cuthbert. ‘If the saint falls into the hands of the pagans,’ he shouted at Guthred, ‘then he will be desecrated!’ He was right, of course. Saint Cuthbert would be stripped of his pectoral cross and his fine ring, then fed to the pigs, while the precious gospel book from Lindisfarena would have its jewelled cover ripped off and its pages used to light fires or wipe Danish arses. ‘Your first duty is to protect the saint,’ Hrothweard bellowed at Guthred.

‘Our first duty,’ I retorted, ‘is to preserve the king.’

The priests, of course, supported Hrothweard, and once I intervened he turned his passion against me. I was a murderer, a pagan, a heretic, a sinner, a defiler, and all Guthred needed to do to preserve his throne was bring me to justice. Beocca alone among the churchmen tried to calm the wild-haired priest, but Beocca was shouted down. Priests and monks declared that Guthred would be cursed by God if he abandoned Cuthbert, and Guthred looked confused and it was Ragnar who ended the silliness. ‘Hide the saint,’ he suggested. He had to say it three times before anyone heard him.

‘Hide him?’ Abbot Eadred asked.

‘Where?’ Hrothweard demanded scornfully.

‘There is a graveyard here,’ Ragnar said. ‘Bury him. Who would ever search for a corpse in a graveyard?’ The clerics just stared at him. Abbot Eadred opened his mouth to protest, but the suggestion was so sensible that the words died on his lips. ‘Bury him,’ Ragnar went on, ‘then go west into the hills and wait for us.’

Hrothweard tried to protest, but Guthred supported Ragnar. He named ten warriors who would stay to protect the priests, and in the morning, as we rode, those men were digging a temporary grave in the cemetery where the saint’s corpse and the other relics would be hidden. The men from Bebbanburg also stayed at Cetreht. That was on my insistence. Aidan wanted to ride with us, but I did not trust him. He could easily cause my death by riding ahead and betraying our approach to Kjartan and so we took all his horses, which forced Aidan and his men to stay with the churchmen. Osburh, Guthred’s pregnant queen, also remained. Abbot Eadred saw her as a hostage against Guthred’s return, and though Guthred made a great fuss of the girl I sensed that he had no great regrets at leaving her. Osburh was an anxious woman, as prone to tears as my wife Mildrith and, also like Mildrith, a great lover of priests. Hrothweard was her confessor and I supposed that she preached the wild man’s message in Guthred’s bed. Guthred assured her that no roving Danes would come near Cetreht once we had left, but he could not be certain of that. There was always a chance that we would return to find them all slaughtered or taken prisoner, but if we stood any hope of taking Dunholm then we had to move fast.

Was there any hope? Dunholm was a place where a man could grow old and defy his enemies in safety. And we were fewer than two hundred men, along with a score of women who insisted on coming. Gisela was one of those, and she, like the other women, wore breeches and a leather jerkin. Father Beocca also joined us. I told him he could not ride fast enough and that, if he fell behind, we would abandon him, but he would not hear of staying in Cetreht. ‘As ambassador,’ he announced grandly, ‘my place is with Guthred.’

‘Your place is with the other priests,’ I said.

‘I shall come,’ he said stubbornly and would not be dissuaded. He made us tie his legs to his saddle-girth so he could not fall off and then he endured the hard pace. He was in agony, but he never complained. I suspect he really wanted to see the excitement. He might have been a squint-eyed cripple and a club-footed priest and an ink-spattered clerk and a pedantic scholar, but Beocca had the heart of a warrior.

We left Cetreht in a misted late autumn dawn that was laced with rain, and Kjartan’s remaining riders, who had returned to the river’s northern bank, closed in behind us. There were eighteen of them now, and we let them follow us and, to confuse them, we did not stay on the Roman road which led straight across the flatter land towards Dunholm, but after a few miles turned north and west onto a smaller track which climbed into gentle hills. The sun broke through the clouds before midday, but it was low in the sky so that the shadows were long. Redwings flocked beneath the falcon-haunted clouds. This was the time of year that men culled their livestock. Cattle were being pole-axed, and pigs, fattened on the autumn’s plentiful acorns, were being slaughtered so their meat could be salted into barrels or hung to dry over smoky fires. The tanning pits stank of dung and urine. The sheep were coming down from the high pastures to be folded close to steadings, while in the valleys the trees rang with the noise of axes as men lay in their winter supply of firewood.

The few villages we passed were empty. Folk must have been warned that horsemen were coming and so they fled before we arrived. They hid in woodlands till we were past, and prayed we did not stay to plunder. We rode on, still climbing, and I had no doubt that the men following us would have sent messengers up the Roman road to tell Kjartan that we were slanting to the west in an attempt to circle Dunholm. Kjartan had to believe that Guthred was making a desperate attempt to reach Bebbanburg, and if we deceived him into that belief then I hoped he would send yet more men out of the fortress, men who would bar the crossings of the Wiire in the western hills.

We spent that night in those hills. It rained again. We had some small shelter from a wood which grew on a south-facing slope and there was a shepherd’s hut where the women could sleep, but the rest of us crouched about fires. I knew Kjartan’s scouts were watching us from across the valley, but I hoped they were now convinced we were going west. The rain hissed in the fire as Ragnar, Guthred and I talked with Sihtric, making him remember everything about the place where he had been raised. I doubt I learned anything new. Sihtric had told me all he knew long before and I had often thought of it as I rowed Sverri’s boat, but I listened again as he explained that Dunholm’s palisade went clear around the crag’s summit and was broken only at the southern end where the rock was too steep for a man to climb. The water came from a well on the eastern side. ‘The well is outside the palisade,’ he told us, ‘down the slope a bit.’

‘But the well has its own wall?’

‘Yes, lord.’

‘How steep a slope?’ Ragnar asked.

‘Very steep, lord,’ Sihtric said. ‘I remember a boy falling down there and he hit his head on a tree and became stupid. And there’s a second well to the west,’ he added, ‘but that’s not used much. The water’s murky.’

‘So he’s got food and water,’ Guthred said bitterly.

‘We can’t besiege him,’ I said, ‘we don’t have the men. The eastern well,’ I turned back to Sihtric, ‘is among trees. How many?’

‘Thick trees, lord,’ he said, ‘hornbeams and sycamore.’

‘And there has to be a gate in the palisade to let men reach the well?’

‘To let women go there, lord, yes.’

‘Can the river be crossed?’

‘Not really, lord,’ Sihtric was trying to be helpful, but he sounded despondent as he described how the Wiire flowed fast as it circled Dunholm’s crag. The river was shallow enough for a man to wade, he said, but it was treacherous with sudden deep pools, swirling currents and willow-braided fish traps. ‘A careful man can cross it in daytime, lord,’ he said, ‘but not at night.’

I tried to recall what I had seen when, dressed as the dead swordsman, I had stood so long outside the fortress. The ground fell steeply to the east, I remembered, and it was ragged ground, full of tree stumps and boulders, but even at night a man should be able to clamber down that slope to the river’s bank. But I also remembered a steep shoulder of rock hiding the view downriver, and I just hoped that shoulder was not so steep as the picture lingering in my head. ‘What we must do,’ I said, ‘is reach Dunholm tomorrow evening. Just before dark. Then attack in the dawn.’

‘If we arrive before dark,’ Ragnar pointed out, ‘they’ll see us, and be ready for us.’

‘We can’t get there after dark,’ I suggested, ‘because we’ll never find the way. Besides, I want them to be ready for us.’

‘You do?’ Guthred sounded surprised.

‘If they see men to their north they’ll pack their ramparts. They’ll have the whole garrison guarding the gate. But that isn’t where we’ll attack.’ I looked across the fire at Steapa. ‘You’re frightened of the dark, aren’t you?’

The big face stared back at me across the flames. He did not want to admit that he was frightened of anything, but honesty overcame his reluctance. ‘Yes, lord.’

‘But tomorrow night,’ I said, ‘you’ll trust me to lead you through the darkness?’

‘I’ll trust you, lord,’ he said.

‘You and ten other men,’ I said, and I thought I knew how we could capture the impregnable Dunholm. Fate would have to be on our side, but I believed, as we sat in that wet cold darkness, that the three spinners had started weaving a new golden thread into my destiny. And I had always believed Guthred’s fate was golden.

‘Just a dozen men?’ Ragnar asked.

‘A dozen sceadugengan,’ I said, because it would be the shadow-walkers who would take Dunholm. It was time for the strange things that haunt the night, the shape-shifters and horrors of the dark, to come to our help.

And once Dunholm was taken, if it could be taken, we still had to kill Ivarr.

We knew Kjartan would have men guarding the Wiire’s upstream crossings. He would also know that the farther west we went the easier the crossing would be, and I hoped that belief would persuade him to send his troops a long way upriver. If he planned to fight and stop us he had to send his warriors now, before we reached the Wiire, and to make it seem even more likely that we were going deep into the hills we did not head directly for the river next morning, but instead rode north and west onto the moors. Ragnar and I, pausing on a long windswept crest, saw six of Kjartan’s scouts break from the pursuing group and spur hard eastwards. ‘They’ve gone to tell him where we’re going,’ Ragnar said.

‘Time to go somewhere else then,’ I suggested.

‘Soon,’ Ragnar said, ‘but not yet.’

Sihtric’s horse had cast a shoe and we waited while he saddled one of the spare horses, then we kept going north-west for another hour. We went slowly, following sheep tracks down into a valley where trees grew thick. Once in the valley we sent Guthred and most of the riders ahead, still following the tracks west, while twenty of us waited in the trees. Kjartan’s scouts, seeing Guthred and the others climb onto the farther moors, followed carelessly. Our pursuers were only nine men now, the rest had been sent with messages to Dunholm, and the nine who remained were mounted on light horses, ideal for scrambling away from us if we turned on them, but they came unsuspecting into the trees. They were halfway through the wood when they saw Ragnar waiting ahead and then they turned to spur away, but we had four groups of men waiting to ambush them. Ragnar was in front of them, I was moving to bar their retreat, Steapa was on their left and Rollo on their right, and the nine men suddenly realised they were surrounded. They charged at my group in an attempt to break free of the thick wood, but the five of us blocked their path and our horses were heavier and two of the scouts died quickly, one of them gutted by Serpent-Breath, and the other seven tried to scatter, but they were obstructed by brambles and trees, and our men closed on them. Steapa dismounted to pursue the last enemy into a bramble thicket. I saw his axe rise and chop down, then heard a scream that went on and on. I thought it must stop, but on it went and Steapa paused to sneeze, then his axe rose and fell again and there was sudden silence.

‘Are you catching a cold?’ I asked him.

‘No, lord,’ he said, forcing his way out of the brambles and dragging the corpse behind him. ‘His stink got up my nose.’

Kjartan was blind now. He did not know it, but he had lost his scouts, and as soon as the nine men were dead we sounded a horn to summon Guthred back, and, as we waited for him, we stripped the corpses of anything valuable. We took their horses, arm rings, weapons, a few coins, some damp bread and two flasks of birch ale. One of the dead men had been wearing a fine mail coat, so fine that I suspected it had been made in Frankia, but the man had been so thin that the coat fitted none of us until Gisela took it for herself. ‘You don’t need mail,’ her brother said scornfully.

Gisela ignored him. She seemed astonished that so fine a coat of mail could weigh so much, but she pulled it over her head, freed her hair from the links at her neck and buckled one of the dead men’s swords about her waist. She put on her black cloak and stared defiantly at Guthred. ‘Well?’

‘You frighten me,’ he said with a smile.

‘Good,’ she said, then pushed her horse against mine so the mare would stay still as she mounted, but she had not reckoned with the weight of the mail and had to struggle into the saddle.

‘It suits you,’ I said, and it did. She looked like a Valkyrie, those warrior maidens of Odin who rode the sky in shining armour.

We turned east then, going faster now. We rode through the trees, ducking continually to keep the branches from whipping our eyes, and we went downhill, following a rain-swollen stream that must lead to the Wiire. By the early afternoon we were close to Dunholm, probably no more than five or six miles away, and Sihtric now led us, for he reckoned he knew a place where we could cross the river. The Wiire, he told us, turned south once it had passed Dunholm, and it widened as it flowed through pastureland and there were fords in those gentler valleys. He knew the country well for his mother’s parents had lived there and as a child he had often driven cattle through the river. Better still those fords were on Dunholm’s eastern side, the flank Kjartan would not be guarding, but there was a risk that the rain, which started to pour again in the afternoon, would so fill the Wiire that the fords would be impassable.

At least the rain hid us as we left the hills and rode into the river valley. We were now very close to Dunholm, that lay just to the north, but we were hidden by a wooded spur of high ground at the foot of which was a huddle of cottages. ‘Hocchale,’ Sihtric told me, nodding at the settlement, ‘it’s where my mother was born.’

‘Your grandparents are still there?’ I asked.

‘Kjartan had them killed, lord, when he fed my mother to his dogs.’

‘How many dogs does he have?’

‘There were forty or fifty when I was there, lord. Big things. They only obeyed Kjartan and his huntsmen. And the Lady Thyra.’

‘They obeyed her?’ I asked.

‘My father wanted to punish her once,’ Sihtric said, ‘and he set the dogs on her. I don’t think he was going to let them eat her, I think he just wanted to frighten her, but she sang to them.’

‘She sang to them?’ Ragnar asked. He had hardly mentioned Thyra in the last weeks. It was as if he felt guilty that he had left her so long in Kjartan’s power. I knew he had tried to find her in the early days of her disappearance, he had even faced Kjartan once when another Dane had arranged a truce between them, but Kjartan had vehemently denied that Thyra was even at Dunholm, and after that Ragnar had joined the Great Army that had invaded Wessex and then he had become a hostage, and all that while Thyra had been in Kjartan’s power. Now Ragnar looked at Sihtric. ‘She sang to them?’ he asked again.

‘She sang to them, lord,’ Sihtric confirmed, ‘and they just lay down. My father was angry with them.’ Ragnar frowned at Sihtric as though he did not believe what he heard. Sihtric shrugged. ‘They say she’s a sorcerer, lord,’ he explained humbly.

‘Thyra’s no sorcerer,’ Ragnar said angrily. ‘All she ever wanted was to marry and have children.’

‘But she sang to the dogs, lord,’ Sihtric insisted, ‘and they lay down.’

‘They won’t lie down when they see us,’ I said. ‘Kjartan will loose them on us as soon as he sees us.’

‘He will, lord,’ Sihtric said, and I could see his nervousness.

‘So we’ll just have to sing to them,’ I said cheerfully.

We followed a sodden track beside a flooded ditch to find the Wiire swirling fast and high. The ford looked impassable. The rain was getting harder, pounding the river that fretted at the top of its steep banks. There was a high hill on the far bank and the clouds were low enough to scrape the black, bare branches at its long summit. ‘We’ll never cross here,’ Ragnar said. Father Beocca, tied to his saddle and with his priest’s robes sodden, shivered. The horsemen milled in the mud, watching the river that threatened to spill over its banks, but then Steapa, who was mounted on a huge black stallion, gave a grunt and simply rode down the track into the water. His horse baulked at the river’s hard current, but he forced it onwards until the water was seething over his stirrups, and then he stopped and beckoned that I should follow.

His idea was that the biggest horses would make a barrier to break the river’s force. I pushed my horse up against Steapa’s, then more men came and we held onto each other, making a wall of horseflesh that slowly reached across the Wiire, that was some thirty or forty paces wide. We only needed to make our dam at the river’s centre where the current was strongest, and once we had a hundred men struggling to keep their horses still, Ragnar urged the rest through the calmer water provided by our makeshift dam. Beocca was terrified, poor man, but Gisela took his reins and spurred her own mare into the water. I hardly dared watch: If her horse had been swept away then the mail coat would have dragged her under, but she and Beocca made it safe to the far bank, and two by two the others followed. One woman and one warrior were swept away, but both scrambled safely across and their horses found footing downstream and reached the bank. Once the smaller horses were across we slowly unmade our wall and inched through the rising river to safety.

It was already getting dark. It was only mid afternoon, but the clouds were thick. It was a black, wet, miserable day, and now we had to climb the escarpment through the dripping trees, and in places the slope was so steep that we were forced to dismount and lead the horses. Once at the summit we turned north, and I could see Dunholm when the low cloud allowed it. The fortress showed as a dark smear on its high rock and above it I could see the smoke from the garrison fires mingling with the rain clouds. It was possible that men on the southern ramparts could see us now, except that we were riding through trees and our mail was smeared with mud, but even if they could see us they would surely not suspect we were enemies. The last they had heard of Guthred was that he and his desperate men were riding westwards, looking for a place to cross the Wiire, and now we were to the east of the fortress and already across the river.

Sihtric still led us. We dropped east off the hill’s summit, hiding ourselves from the fortress, then rode into a valley where a stream foamed westward. We forded it easily enough, climbed again, and all the time we pounded past miserable hovels where frightened folk peered from low doorways. They were Kjartan’s own slaves, Sihtric told me, their job to raise pigs and cut firewood and grow crops for Dunholm.

Our horses were tiring. They had been ridden hard across soft ground and they carried men in mail with heavy shields, but our journey was almost done. It did not matter now if the garrison saw us, because we had come to the hill on which the fortress stood and no one could leave Dunholm without fighting their way past us. If Kjartan had sent warriors west to find us then he could no longer send a messenger to summon those men back because we now controlled the only road that led to his fastness.

And so we came to the neck where the ridge dropped slightly and the road turned south before climbing to the massive gatehouse, and we stopped there and our horses spread along the higher ground and, to the men on Dunholm’s wall, we must have looked like a dark army. All of us were muddy, our horses were filthy, but Kjartan’s men could see our spears and shields and swords and axes. By now they would know we were the enemy and that we had cut their only road, and they probably laughed at us. We were so few and their fortress was so high and their wall was so big and the rain still crashed on us and the drenching dark crept along the valleys on either side of us as a slither of lightning crackled wicked and sharp across the northern sky.

We picketed the horses in a waterlogged field. We did our best to rid the beasts of mud and pick their hooves clean, then we made a score of fires in the lee of a blackthorn hedge. It took for ever to light the first fire. Many of our men carried dry kindling in leather pouches, but as soon as the kindling was exposed to the rain it became soggy. Eventually two men made a crude tent with their cloaks and I heard the click of steel on flint and saw the first trace of smoke. They protected that small fire as though it were made of gold, and at last the flames took hold and we could pile the wet firewood on top. The logs seethed and hissed and crackled, but the flames gave us some small warmth and the fires told Kjartan that his enemies were still on the hill. I doubt he thought Guthred had the courage to make such an attack, but he must have known Ragnar was returned from Wessex and he knew I had come back from the dead and perhaps, in that long wet night of rain and thunder, he felt a shiver of fear.

And while he shivered, the sceadugengan slithered in the dark.

As night fell I stared at the route I had to take in the darkness, and it was not good. I would have to go down to the river, then southwards along the water’s edge, but just beneath the fortress wall, where the river vanished about Dunholm’s crag, a massive boulder blocked the way. It was a monstrous boulder, bigger than Alfred’s new church at Wintanceaster, and if I could not find a way around it then I would have to climb over its wide, flat top which lay less than a spear’s throw from Kjartan’s ramparts. I sheltered my eyes from the rain and stared hard, and decided there might be a way past the giant stone at the river’s edge.

‘Can it be done?’ Ragnar asked me.

‘It has to be done,’ I said.

I wanted Steapa with me, and I chose ten other men to accompany us. Both Guthred and Ragnar wanted to come, but I refused them. Ragnar was needed to lead the assault on the high gate, and Guthred was simply not warrior enough. Besides, he was one of the reasons we fought this battle and to leave him dead on Dunholm’s slopes would make a nonsense of the whole gamble. I took Beocca to one side. ‘Do you remember,’ I asked him, ‘how my father made you stay by my side during the assault on Eoferwic?’

‘Of course I do!’ he said indignantly. ‘And you didn’t stay with me, did you? You kept trying to join the fight! It was all your fault that you were captured.’ I had been ten years old and desperate to see a battle. ‘If you hadn’t run away from me,’ he said, still sounding indignant, ‘you would never have been caught by the Danes! You’d be a Christian now. I blame myself. I should have tied your reins to mine.’

‘Then you’d have been captured as well,’ I said, ‘but I want you to do the same for Guthred tomorrow. Stay by him and don’t let him risk his life.’

Beocca looked alarmed. ‘He’s a king! He’s a grown man. I can’t tell him what to do.’

‘Tell him Alfred wants him to live.’

‘Alfred might want him to live,’ he said gloomily, ‘but put a sword into a man’s hand and he loses his wits. I’ve seen it happen!’

‘Then tell him you had a dream and Saint Cuthbert says he’s to stay out of trouble.’

‘He won’t believe me!’

‘He will,’ I promised.

‘I’ll try,’ Beocca said, then looked at me with his one good eye. ‘Can you do this thing, Uhtred?’

‘I don’t know,’ I told him honestly.

‘I shall pray for you.’

‘Thank you, father,’ I said. I would be praying to every god I could think of, and adding another could not hurt. In the end, I decided, it was all up to fate. The spinners already knew what we planned and knew how those plans would turn out and I could only hope they were not readying the shears to cut my life’s threads. Perhaps, above everything else, it was the madness of my idea that might give it wings and so let it succeed. There had been madness in Northumbria’s air ever since I had first returned. There had been a slaughterous madness in Eoferwic, a holy insanity in Cair Ligualid, and now this desperate idea.

I had chosen Steapa, for he was worth three or four other men. I took Sihtric because, if we got inside Dunholm, he would know the ground. I took Finan because the Irishman had a fury in his soul that I reckoned would turn to savagery in battle. I took Clapa because he was strong and fearless, and Rypere because he was cunning and lithe. The other six were from Ragnar’s men, all of them strong, all young, and all good with weapons, and I told them what we were going to do, and then made sure that each man had a black cloak that swathed him from head to foot. We smeared a mixture of mud and ash on our hands, faces and helmets. ‘No shields,’ I told them. That was a hard decision to make, for a shield is a great comfort in battle, but shields were heavy and, if they banged on stones or trees, would make a noise like a drumbeat. ‘I go first,’ I told them, ‘and we’ll be going slowly. Very slowly. We have all night.’

We tied ourselves together with leather reins. I knew how easy it was for men to get lost in the dark, and on that night the darkness was absolute. If there was any moon it was hidden by thick clouds from which the rain fell steadily, but we had three things to guide us. First there was the slope itself. So long as I kept the uphill side to my right then I knew we were on the eastern side of Dunholm, and second there was the rushing hiss of the river as it curled about the crag, and last there were the fires of Dunholm itself. Kjartan feared an assault in the night and so he had his men hurl flaming logs from the high gate’s rampart. Those logs lit the track, but to produce them he had to keep a great fire burning in his courtyard and that blaze outlined the top of the ramparts and glowed red on the belly of the low rushing clouds. That raw light did not illuminate the slope, but it was there, beyond the black shadows, a livid guide in our wet darkness.

I had Serpent-Breath and Wasp-Sting hanging from my belt and, like the others, I carried a spear with its blade wrapped in a scrap of cloth so that no stray light could reflect from the metal. The spears would serve as staffs on the uneven ground and as probes to feel the way. We did not leave until it was utterly dark, for I dared not risk a sharp-eyed sentry seeing us scramble towards the river, but even in the dark our journey was easy enough at first, for our own fires showed us a way down the slope. We headed away from the fortress so that no one on its ramparts would see us leave the firelit camp, and then we worked our way down to the river and there turned southwards. Our route now led across the base of the slope where trees had been felled and I had to feel my way between the stumps. The ground was thick with brambles and with the litter of tree-felling. There were small branches left to rot and we made a lot of noise trampling them underfoot, but the sound of the rain was louder still and the river seethed and roared to our left. My cloak kept catching on twigs or stumps and I tore its hem ragged dragging it free. Every now and then a great crack of lightning whipped earthwards and we froze each time and, in the blue-white dazzle, I could see the fort outlined high above me. I could even see the spears of the sentries like thorny sparks against the sky, and I thought those sentries must be cold, soaked and miserable. The thunder came a heartbeat later and it was always close, banging above us as if Thor were beating his war hammer against a giant iron shield. The gods were watching us. I knew that. That is what the gods do in their sky-halls. They watch us and they reward us for our daring or punish us for our insolence, and I clutched Thor’s hammer to tell him that I wanted his help, and Thor cracked the sky with his thunder and I took it as a sign of his approval.

The slope grew steeper. Rain was running off the soil which, in places, was nothing but slick mud. We all fell repeatedly as we edged southwards. The tree stumps became sparser, but now there were boulders embedded in the slope and the wet stones were slick, so slick that in some places we were forced to crawl. It was getting darker too, for the slope bulged above us to hide the fire-edged ramparts and we slid and scrambled and cursed our way into a soul-scaring blackness. The river seemed very close and I feared sliding off a slab of rock and falling into the hurrying water.

Then my groping spear cracked against stone and I realised we had come to the huge boulder which, in the dark, felt like a monstrous cliff. I thought I had seen a way past on the river’s edge and I explored that way, going slowly, always thrusting the spear shaft ahead, but if I had seen a route in the twilight I could not find it now. The boulder appeared to overhang the water and there was no choice but to climb back up the slope beside the great rock and then slither over its domed top, and so we inched our way upwards, clinging to saplings and kicking footholds in the sopping earth, and every foot we climbed took us closer to the ramparts. The leather ropes joining us kept catching on snags and it seemed to take for ever to reach a spot where the firelight glowing above the palisade showed a way onto the rock’s summit.

That summit was a stretch of open stone, pitched like a shallow roof and about fifteen paces wide. The western end rose to the ramparts while the eastern edge ended in a sheer drop to the river, and all that, I saw in a flicker of far-off lightning that ripped across the northern clouds. The centre of the boulder’s top, where we would have to cross, was no more than twenty paces from Kjartan’s wall and there was a sentry there, his spear blade revealed by the lightning as a flash of white fire. We huddled beside the stone and I made every man untie the leather rope from his belt. We would retie the reins into one rope and I would crawl across first, letting the rope out behind me, and then each man must follow. ‘One at a time,’ I said, ‘and wait till I tug the rope. I’ll tug it three times. That’s the signal for the next man to cross.’ I had to half shout to make myself heard over the pounding rain and gusting wind. ‘Crawl on your bellies,’ I told them. If lightning struck, then a prone man covered by a muddy cloak would be far less visible than a crouching warrior. ‘Rypere goes last,’ I said, ‘and he brings the rope with him.’

It seemed to me that it took half the night just to cross that short stretch of open rock. I went first, and I crawled blind in the dark and had to grope with the spear to find a place where I could slither down the boulder’s far side. Then I tugged the rope and after an interminable wait I heard a man crawling on the stone. It was one of Ragnar’s Danes who followed the rope to join me. Then one by one the others came. I counted them in. We helped each man down, and I prayed there would be no lightning, but then, just as Steapa was halfway across, there was a crackling blue-white fork that slashed clear across the hilltop and lit us like worms trapped by the fire of the gods. In that moment of brightness I could see Steapa shaking, and then the thunder bellowed over us and the rain seemed to grow even more malevolent. ‘Steapa!’ I called, ‘come on!’ but he was so shaken that he could not move and I had to wriggle back onto the boulder, take his hand and coax him onwards, and while doing that I somehow lost count of the number of men who had already crossed so that, when I thought the last had arrived I discovered Rypere was still on the far side. He scrambled over quickly, coiling the rope as he came, and then we untied the reins and again joined ourselves belt to belt. We were all chilled and wet, but fate had been with us and no challenging shout had come from the ramparts.

We slid and half fell back down the slope, seeking the river bank. The hillside was much steeper here, but sycamores and hornbeams grew thick and they made the journey easier. We went on south, the ramparts high to our right and the river ominous and loud to our left. There were more boulders, none the size of the giant that had blocked us before, but all difficult to negotiate, and each one took time, so much time, and then, as we skirted the uphill side of one great rock, Clapa dropped his spear, and it clattered down the stone and banged on a tree.

It did not seem possible that the noise could have been heard up at the ramparts. The rain was seething onto the trees and the wind was loud at the palisade, but someone in the fort heard something or suspected something, for suddenly a burning log was thrown over the wall to crash through the wet branches. It was thrown twenty paces north of us, and we happened to be stopped at the time while I found a way past yet another rock, and the light of the flames was feeble. We were nothing but black shadows among the shadows of the trees. The flickering fire was swiftly extinguished by the rain and I hissed at my men to crouch. I expected more fire to be thrown, and it was, this time a big twisted brand of oil-soaked straw that burned much brighter than the log. Again it was thrown in the wrong place, but its light reached us, and I prayed to Surtur, the god of fire, that he extinguish the flames. We huddled, still as death, just above the river, and then I heard what I feared to hear.

Dogs.

Kjartan, or whoever guarded this stretch of the wall, had sent the war dogs out through the small gate which led to the well. I could hear the huntsmen calling to them with the sing-song voices that drove hounds into undergrowth, and I could hear the dogs baying and I knew there was no escape from this steep, slippery slope. We had no chance of scrambling back up the hill and across the big boulder before the dogs would be on us. I pulled the cloth off the spear-head, thinking that at least I could drive the blade into one beast before the rest trapped, mauled and savaged us, and just then another splinter of lightning slithered across the night and the thunder cracked like the sound of the world’s ending. The noise pounded us and echoed like drumbeats in the river valley.

Hounds hate thunder, and thunder was Thor’s gift to us. A second peal boomed in the sky and the hounds were whimpering now. The rain became vicious, driving at the slope like arrows, its sound suddenly drowning the noise of the frightened dogs. ‘They won’t hunt,’ Finan shouted into my ear.

‘No?’

‘Not in this rain.’

The huntsmen called again, more urgently, and as the rain slackened slightly I heard the dogs coming down the slope. They were not racing down, but slinking reluctantly. They were terrified by the thunder, dazzled by the lightning and bemused by the rain’s malevolence. They had no appetite for prey. One beast came close to us and I thought I saw the glint of its eyes, though how that was possible in that darkness, when the hound was only a shape in the sodden blackness, I do not know. The beast turned back towards the hilltop and the rain still slashed down. There was silence now from the huntsmen. None of the hounds had given tongue so the huntsmen must have assumed no quarry had been found and still we waited, crouching in the awful rain, waiting and waiting, until at last I decided the hounds were back in the fortress and we stumbled on.

Now we had to find the well, and that proved the most difficult task of all. First we remade the rope from the reins and Finan held one end while I prowled uphill. I groped through trees, slipped on the mud, and continually mistook tree trunks for the well’s palisade. The rope snagged on fallen branches, and twice I had to go back, move everyone some yards southwards and start my search again. I was very close to despair when I tripped and my left hand slid down a lichen-covered timber. A splinter drove into my palm. I fell hard against the timber and discovered it was a wall, not some discarded branch, and then realised I had found the palisade protecting the well. I yanked on the rope so that the others could clamber up to join me.

Now we waited again. The thunder moved farther north and the rain subsided to a hard, steady fall. We crouched, shivering, waiting for the first grey hint of dawn, and I worried that Kjartan, in this rain, would not need to send anyone to the well, but could survive on the water collected in rain barrels. Yet everywhere, I assume in all the world, folk fetch water in the dawn. It is the way we greet the day. We need water to cook and shave and wash and brew, and in all the aching hours at Sverri’s oar I had often remembered Sihtric telling me that Dunholm’s wells were beyond its palisades, and that meant that Kjartan must open a gate every morning. And if he opened a gate then we could get into the impregnable fortress. That was my plan, the only plan I had, and if it failed we would be dead. ‘How many women fetch water?’ I asked Sihtric softly.

‘Ten, lord?’ he guessed.

I peered around the palisade’s edge. I could just see the glow of firelight above the ramparts and I guessed the well was twenty paces from the high wall. Not far, but twenty paces of steep uphill climbing. ‘There are guards on the gate?’ I asked, knowing the answer because I had asked the question before, but in the dark and with the killing ahead, it was comforting to speak.

‘There were only two or three guards when I was there, lord.’

And those guards would be dozy, I thought, yawning after a night of broken sleep. They would open the gate, watch the women go through, then lean on the wall and dream of other women. Yet only one of the guards had to be alert, and even if the gate guards were dreaming, then one alert sentinel on the wall would be sufficient to thwart us. I knew the wall on this eastern side had no fighting platform, but it did have smaller ledges where a man could stand and keep watch. And so I worried, imagining all that could go wrong, and beside me Clapa snored in a moment’s snatched sleep and I was amazed that he could sleep at all when he was so drenched and cold, and then he snored again and I nudged him awake.

It seemed as though dawn would never come, and if it did we would be so cold and wet that we would be unable to move, but at last, on the heights across the river, there was a hint of grey in the night. The grey spread like a stain. We huddled closer together so that the well’s palisade would hide us from any sentry on the wall. The grey became lighter and cocks crowed in the fortress. The rain was still steady. Beneath me I could see white flurries where the river foamed on rocks. The trees below us were visible now, though still shadowed. A badger walked ten paces from us, then turned and hurried clumsily downhill. A rent of red showed in a thinner patch of the eastern clouds and it was suddenly daylight, though a gloomy daylight that was shot through with the silver threads of rain. Ragnar would be making his shield wall now, lining men on the path to keep the defenders’ attention. If the women were to come for water, I thought, then it must be soon, and I eased my way down the slope so I could see all of my men. ‘When we go,’ I hissed, ‘we go fast! Up to the gate, kill the guard, then stay close to me! And once we’re inside, we go slowly. Just walk! Look as if you belong there.’

Twelve of us could not hope to attack all Kjartan’s men. If we were to win this day we had to sneak into the fortress. Sihtric had told me that behind the well’s gate was a tangle of buildings. If we could kill the guards quickly, and if no one saw their deaths, then I hoped we could hide in that tangle and then, once we were certain that no one had discovered us, just walk towards the north wall. We were all in mail or leather, we all had helmets, and if the garrison was watching Ragnar approach then they might not notice us at all, and if they did, they would assume we were defenders. Once at the wall I wanted to capture a part of the fighting platform. If we could reach that platform and kill the men guarding it, then we could hold a stretch of the wall long enough for Ragnar to join us. His nimbler men would climb the palisade by driving axes into the timbers and using the embedded weapons as steps, and Rypere was carrying our leather rope to help them up. As more men came we could fight our way down the wall to the high gate and open it to the rest of Ragnar’s force.

It had seemed a good idea when I described it to Ragnar and Guthred, but in that cold wet dawn it seemed forlorn and desperate and I was suddenly struck by a sense of hopelessness. I touched my hammer amulet. ‘Pray to your gods,’ I said, ‘pray no one sees us. Pray we can reach the wall.’ It was the wrong thing to say. I should have sounded confident, but instead I had betrayed my fears and this was no time to pray to any gods. We were already in their hands and they would help us or hurt us according to how they liked what we did. I remember blind Ravn, Ragnar’s grandfather, telling me that the gods like bravery, and they love defiance, and they hate cowardice and loathe uncertainty. ‘We are here to amuse them,’ Ravn had said, ‘that is all, and if we do it well then we feast with them till time ends.’ Ravn had been a warrior before his sight went, and afterwards he became a skald, a maker of poems, and the poems he made celebrated battle and bravery. And if we did this right, I thought, then we would keep a dozen skalds busy.

A voice sounded up the slope and I held up a hand to say we should all be silent. Then I heard women’s voices and the thump of a wooden pail against timber. The voices came closer. I could hear a woman complaining, but the words were indistinct, then another woman answered, much clearer. ‘They can’t get in, that’s all. They can’t.’ They spoke English, so they were either slaves or the wives of Kjartan’s men. I heard a splash as a bucket fell down the well. I still held up my hand, cautioning the eleven men to stay still. It would take time to fill the buckets and the more time the better because it would allow the guards to become bored. I looked along the dirty faces, looking for any sign of uncertainty that would offend the gods, and I suddenly realised we were not twelve men, but thirteen. The thirteenth man had his head bowed so I could not see his face, so I poked his booted leg with my spear and he looked up at me.

She looked up at me. It was Gisela.

She looked defiant and pleading, and I was horrified. There is no number so unlucky as thirteen. Once, in Valhalla, there was a feast for twelve gods, but Loki, the trickster god, went uninvited and he played his evil games, persuading Hod the Blind to throw a sprig of mistletoe at his brother, Baldur. Baldur was the favourite god, the good one, but he could be killed by mistletoe and so his blind brother threw the sprig and Baldur died and Loki laughed, and ever since we have known that thirteen is the evil number. Thirteen birds in the sky are an omen of disaster, thirteen pebbles in a cooking pot will poison any food placed in the pot, while thirteen at a meal is an invitation to death. Thirteen spears against a fortress could only mean defeat. Even the Christians know thirteen is unlucky. Father Beocca told me that was because there were thirteen men at Christ’s last meal, and the thirteenth was Judas. So I just stared in horror at Gisela and, to show what she had done, I put down my spear and held up ten fingers, then two, then pointed at her and held up one more. She gave a shake of her head as if to deny what I was telling her, but I pointed at her a second time and then at the ground, telling her she must stay where she was. Twelve would go to Dunholm, not thirteen.

‘If the babe won’t suck,’ a woman was saying beyond the wall, ‘then rub its lips with cowslip juice. It always works.’

‘Rub your tits with it, too,’ another voice said.

‘And put a mix of soot and honey on its back,’ a third woman advised.

‘Two more buckets,’ the first voice said, ‘then we can get out of this rain.’

It was time to go. I pointed at Gisela again, gesturing angrily that she must stay where she was, then I picked up the spear in my left hand and drew Serpent-Breath. I kissed her blade and stood. It felt unnatural to stand and move again, to be in the daylight, to start walking around the well’s palisade. I felt naked under the ramparts and I waited for a shout from a watchful sentinel, but none came. Ahead, not far ahead, I could see the gate and there was no guard standing in the open doorway. Sihtric was on my left, hurrying. The path was made of rough stone, slick and wet. I heard a woman gasp behind us, but still no one shouted the alarm from the ramparts, then I was through the gate and I saw a man to my right and I swept Serpent-Breath and she bit into his throat and I sawed her backwards so that the blood was bright in that grey morning. He fell back against the palisade and I drove the spear into his ruined throat. A second gate guard watched the killing from a dozen yards away. His armour was a blacksmith’s long leather apron and his weapon a woodcutter’s axe which he seemed unable to raise. He was standing with astonishment on his face and did not move as Finan approached him. His eyes grew wider, then he understood the danger and turned to run and Finan’s spear tangled his legs and then the Irishman was standing over him and the sword stabbed down into his spine. I held up my hand to keep everyone still and silent. We waited. No enemy shouted. Rain dripped from the thatch of the buildings. I counted my men and saw ten, then Steapa came through the gate, closing it behind him. We were twelve, not thirteen.

‘The women will stay at the well,’ Steapa told me.

‘You’re sure?’

‘They’ll stay at the well,’ he growled. I had told Steapa to talk to the women drawing water, and doubtless his size alone had quelled any ideas they might have of sounding an alarm.

‘And Gisela?’

‘She’ll stay at the well too,’ he said.

And thus we were inside Dunholm. We had come to a dark corner of the fortress, a place where two big dung-heaps lay beside a long, low building. ‘Stables,’ Sihtric told me in a whisper, though no one alive was in sight to hear us. The rain fell hard and steady. I edged about the end of the stables and could see nothing except for more wooden walls, great heaps of firewood and thatched roofs thick with moss. A woman drove a goat between two of the huts, beating the animal to make it hurry through the rain.

I wiped Serpent-Breath clean on the threadbare cloak of the man I had killed, then gave Clapa my spear and picked up the dead man’s shield. ‘Sheathe swords,’ I told everyone. If we walked through the fortress with drawn swords we would attract attention. We must look like men newly woken who were reluctantly going to a wet, cold duty. ‘Which way?’ I asked Sihtric.

He led us alongside the palisade. Once past the stables I could see three large halls that blocked our view of the northern ramparts. ‘Kjartan’s hall,’ Sihtric whispered, pointing to the right-hand building.

‘Talk naturally,’ I told him.

He had pointed to the largest hall, the only one with smoke coming from the roof-hole. It was built with its long sides east and west, and one gable end was hard up against the ramparts so we would be forced to go deep into the fortress centre to skirt the big hall. I could see folk now, and they could see us, but no one thought us strange. We were just armed men walking through the mud, and they were wet and cold and hurrying between the buildings, much too intent on reaching warmth and dryness to worry about a dozen bedraggled warriors. An ash tree grew in front of Kjartan’s hall and a lone sentry guarding the hall door crouched under the ash’s leafless branches in a vain effort to shelter from the wind and rain. I could hear shouting now. It was faint, but as we neared the gap between the halls I could see men on the ramparts. They were gazing north, some of them brandishing defiant spears. So Ragnar was coming. He would be visible even in the half-light for his men were carrying flaming torches. Ragnar had ordered his attackers to carry the fire so that the defenders would watch him instead of guarding Dunholm’s rear. So fire and steel were coming to Dunholm, but the defenders were jeering Ragnar’s men as they struggled up the slippery track. They jeered because they knew their walls were high and the attackers few, but the sceadugengan were already behind them and none of them had noticed us, and my fears of the cold dawn began to ebb away. I touched the hammer amulet and said a silent thank-you to Thor.

We were just yards from the ash tree that grew a few paces from the door to Kjartan’s hall. The sapling had been planted as a symbol of Yggdrasil, the Tree of Life about which fate writhes, though this tree looked sickly, scarce more than a sapling that struggled to find space for its roots in Dunholm’s thin soil. The sentry glanced at us once, noticed nothing odd about our appearance, then turned and looked across Dunholm’s flat summit towards the gatehouse. Men were crowded on the gatehouse rampart, while other warriors stood on the wall’s fighting platforms built to left and right. A large group of mounted men waited behind the gate, doubtless ready to pursue the beaten attackers when they were repulsed from the palisade. I tried to count the defenders, but they were too many, so I looked to the right and saw a stout ladder climbing to the fighting platform on the western stretch of ramparts. That, I thought, is where we should go. Climb that ladder, capture the western wall and we could let Ragnar inside and so revenge his father and free Thyra and astonish all Northumbria.

I grinned, suddenly elated at the realisation that we were inside Dunholm. I thought of Hild and imagined her praying in her simple chapel with the beggars already huddled outside her nunnery’s gate. Alfred would be working, ruining his eyes by reading manuscripts in the dawn’s thin light. Men would be stirring on every fortification in Britain, yawning and stretching. Oxen were being harnessed. Hounds would be excited, knowing a day’s hunting was ahead, and here we were, inside Kjartan’s stronghold and no one suspected our presence. We were wet, we were cold, we were stiff and we were outnumbered by at least twenty to one, but the gods were with us and I knew we were going to win and I felt a sudden exultation. The battle-joy was coming and I knew the skalds would have a great feat to celebrate.

Or perhaps the skalds would be making a lament. For then, quite suddenly, everything went disastrously wrong.

Ten

The sentry beneath the ash tree turned and spoke to us. ‘They’re wasting their time,’ he said, obviously referring to Ragnar’s forces. The sentry had no suspicions, he even yawned as we approached him, but then something alarmed him. Perhaps it was Steapa, for there could surely be no man in Dunholm who was as tall as the West Saxon. Whatever, the man suddenly realised we were strangers and he reacted quickly by backing away and drawing his sword. He was about to yell a warning when Steapa hurled his spear that struck hard in the sentry’s right shoulder, pitching him backwards and Rypere followed fast, running his spear into the man’s belly with such force that he pinned the man to the feeble ash tree. Rypere silenced him with his sword, and just as that blood flowed, two men appeared around the corner of the smaller hall to our left and they immediately began shouting that enemies were in the compound. One turned and ran, the other drew his sword, and that was a mistake for Finan feinted low with his spear and the man lowered his blade to parry and the spear flashed up to take him in the soft flesh beneath his jaw. The man’s mouth bubbled blood onto his beard as Finan stepped close and brought his short-sword up into the man’s belly.

Two more corpses. It was raining harder again, the drops hammering onto the mud to dilute the fresh blood and I wondered if we had time to dash across the wide open space to reach the rampart ladder, and just then, to make things worse, the door to Kjartan’s hall opened and three men jostled in the doorway and I shouted at Steapa to drive them back. He used his axe, killing the first with an upwards blow of ghastly efficiency and thrusting the gutted man back into the second who took the axe-head straight in the face, then Steapa kicked the two men aside to pursue the third who was now inside the hall. I sent Clapa to help Steapa. ‘And get him out of there fast,’ I told Clapa because the horsemen by the gate had heard the commotion now and they could see the dead men and see our drawn swords and they were already turning their horses.

And I knew then that we had lost. Everything had depended on surprise, and now that we had been discovered we had no chance of reaching the northern wall. The men on the fighting platforms had turned to watch us and some had been ordered off the ramparts and they were making a shield wall just behind the gate. The horsemen, there were about thirty riders, were spurring towards us. Not only had we failed, but I knew we would be lucky to survive. ‘Back,’ I shouted, ‘back!’ All we could hope now was to retreat into the narrow alleys and somehow hold the horsemen off and reach the well gate. Gisela must be rescued and then there would be a frantic retreat downhill in front of a vengeful pursuit. Maybe, I thought, we could cross the river. If we could just wade through the swollen Wiire we might be safe from pursuit, but it was a tremulous hope at best. ‘Steapa!’ I shouted, ‘Steapa! Clapa!’ and the two came from the hall, Steapa with a blood-soaked axe. ‘Stay together,’ I shouted. The horsemen were coming fast, but we ran back towards the stables and the horsemen seemed wary of the dark, shadowed spaces between the buildings for they reined in beside the ash tree with its dead man still pinned to the trunk and I thought their caution would let us survive just long enough to get outside the fortress. Hope revived, not of victory, but of life, and then I heard the noise.

It was the sound of hounds baying. The horsemen had not stopped for fear of attacking us, but because Kjartan had released his dogs and I stared, appalled, as the hounds poured around the side of the smaller hall and came towards us. How many? Fifty? At least fifty. They were impossible to count. A huntsman drove them on with yelping shouts and they were more like wolves than hounds. They were rough-pelted, huge, howling, and I involuntarily stepped backwards. This was the hellish pack of the wild hunt, the ghost-hounds that harry the darkness and pursue their prey across the shadow world when night falls. There was no time now to reach the gate. The hounds would surround us, they would drag us down, they would savage us, and I thought this must be my punishment for killing the defenceless Brother Jænberht in Cetreht, and I felt the cold, unmanning shudder of abject fear. Die well, I told myself, die well, but how could one die well beneath the teeth of hounds? Our mail coats would slow their savagery for a moment, but not for long. And the hounds could smell our fear. They wanted blood and they came in a howling scrabble of mud and fangs, and I lowered Serpent-Breath to take the first snarling bitch in the face and just then a new voice called to them.

It was the voice of a huntress. It called clear and loud, saying no words, just chanting a weird, shrieking call that pierced the morning like a sounding horn, and the hounds stopped abruptly, twisted about and whined in distress. The closest was just three or four paces from me, a bitch with a mud-clotted pelt, and she writhed and howled as the unseen huntress called again. There was something sad in that wordless call that was a wavering, dying shriek, and the bitch whined in sympathy. The huntsman who had released the hounds tried to whip them back towards us, but again the weird, ululating voice came clear through the rain, but sharper this time, as if the huntress were yelping in sudden anger, and three of the hounds leaped at the huntsman. He screamed, then was overwhelmed by a mass of pelts and teeth. The riders spurred at the dogs to drive them off the dying man, but the huntress was making a wild screeching now that drove the whole pack towards the horses, and the morning was filled with the seethe of rain and the unearthly cries and the howl of hounds, and the horsemen turned in panic and spurred back towards the gatehouse. The huntress called again, gentler now, and the hounds obediently milled around the feeble ash tree, letting the riders go.

I had just stared. I still stared. The hounds were crouching, teeth bared, watching the door of Kjartan’s hall and it was there that the huntress appeared. She stepped over the gutted corpse Steapa had left in the doorway and she crooned at the hounds and they flattened themselves as she stared at us.

It was Thyra.

I did not recognise her at first. It had been years since I saw Ragnar’s sister, and I only remembered her as a fair child, happy and healthy, with her sensible mind set on marrying her Danish warrior. Then her father’s hall had been burned, her Danish warrior was killed and she had been taken by Kjartan and given to Sven. Now I saw her again and she had become a thing from nightmare.

She wore a long cloak of deerskin, held by a bone brooch at her throat, but beneath the cloak she was naked. As she walked among the hounds the cloak kept being dragged away from her body that was painfully thin and foully dirty. Her legs and arms were covered with scars as though someone had slashed her repeatedly with a knife, and where there were no scars there were sores. Her golden hair was lank, matted and greasy, and she had woven strands of dead ivy into the tangle. The ivy hung about her shoulders. Finan, seeing her, made the sign of the cross. Steapa did the same and I clutched at my hammer amulet. Thyra’s curled fingernails were as long as a gelder’s knives, and she waved those sorceress’s hands in the air and suddenly screamed at the hounds who whined and writhed as if in pain. She glanced towards us and I saw her mad eyes and I felt a pulse of fear because she was suddenly crouching and pointing directly at me, and those eyes were bright as lightning and filled with hate. ‘Ragnar!’ she shouted, ‘Ragnar!’ The name sounded like a curse and the hounds twisted to stare where she pointed and I knew they would leap at me as soon as Thyra spoke again.

‘I’m Uhtred!’ I called to her, ‘Uhtred!’ I took off my helmet so she could see my face. ‘I’m Uhtred!’

‘Uhtred?’ she asked, still looking at me, and in that brief moment she looked sane, even confused. ‘Uhtred,’ she said again, this time as if she were trying to remember the name, but the tone turned the hounds away from us and then Thyra screamed. It was not a scream at the hounds, but a wailing, howling screech aimed at the clouds, and suddenly she turned her fury on the dogs. She stooped and clutched handfuls of mud that she hurled at them. She still used no words, but spoke some tongue that the hounds understood and they obeyed her, streaming across Dunholm’s rocky summit to attack the newly made shield wall behind the gate. Thyra followed them, calling to them, spitting and shuddering, filling the hell pack with frenzy, and the fear that had rooted me to the cold ground passed and I shouted at my men to go with her.

They were terrible things, those hounds. They were beasts from the world’s chaos, trained only to kill, and Thyra drove them on with her high, wailing cries, and the shield wall broke long before the dogs arrived. The men ran, scattering across Dunholm’s wide summit and the dogs followed them. A handful, braver than the rest, stayed at the gate and that was where I now wanted to go. ‘The gate!’ I shouted at Thyra, ‘Thyra! Take them to the gate!’ She began to make a barking sound, shrill and quick, and the hounds obeyed her by running towards the gatehouse. I have seen other hunters direct hounds as deftly as a horseman guides a stallion with knees and reins, but it is not a skill I have ever learned. Thyra had it.

Kjartan’s men guarding the gate died hard. The dogs swarmed over them, teeth ripping, and I heard screams. I had still not seen Kjartan or Sven, but nor did I look for them. I only wanted to reach the big gate and open it for Ragnar, and so we followed the hounds, but then one of the horsemen recovered his wits and shouted at the frightened men to circle behind us. The horseman was a big man, his mail half covered by a dirty white cloak. His helmet had gilt-bronze eyeholes that hid his face, but I was certain it was Kjartan. He spurred his stallion and a score of men followed him, but Thyra howled some short, falling cadences, and a score of hounds turned to head the horsemen off. One rider, desperate to avoid the beasts, turned his horse too quickly and it fell, sprawling and kicking in the mud and a half-dozen hounds attacked the fallen beast’s belly while others leaped across to savage the unsaddled rider. I heard the man wail and saw a dog stagger away with a leg broken by a flailing hoof. The horse was screaming. I kept running through the streaming rain and saw a spear come flashing down from the ramparts. The men on the gatehouse roof were trying to stop us with their spears. They hurled them at the pack which still tore at the fallen shield wall remnant, but there were too many hounds. We were close to the gate now, only twenty or thirty paces away. Thyra and her hounds had brought us safe across Dunholm’s summit, and the enemy was in utter confusion, but then the white-cloaked horseman, beard thick beneath his armoured eyes, dismounted and shouted at his men to slaughter the dogs.

They made a shield wall and charged. They held their shields low to fend off the dogs and used spears and swords to kill them. ‘Steapa!’ I shouted, and he understood what was wanted and bellowed at the other men to go with him. He and Clapa were first among the dogs and I saw Steapa’s axe thud down into a helmeted face as Thyra hurled the dogs at the new shield wall. Men were clambering down from the fighting platforms to join the wild fight and I knew we had to move fast before Kjartan’s men slaughtered the pack and then came to slaughter us. I saw a hound leap high and sink its teeth into a man’s face, and the man screamed and the dog howled with a sword in its belly, and Thyra was screeching at the hounds and Steapa was holding the centre of the enemy shield wall, but it was lengthening as men joined its flanks and in a heartbeat or two the wings of the wall would fold about men and dogs and cut them down. So I ran for the gatehouse archway. That archway was undefended on the ground, but the warriors on the rampart above still had spears. All I had was the dead man’s shield and I prayed it was a good one. I hoisted it over my helmet, sheathed Serpent-Breath, and ran.

The heavy spears crashed down. They banged into the shield and splashed into the mud, and at least two pierced through the shield’s limewood boards. I felt a blow on my left forearm, and the shield became heavier and heavier as the spears weighed it down, but then I was under the arch, and safe. The dogs were howling and fighting. Steapa was bellowing at the enemy to come and fight him, but men avoided him. I could see the wings of Kjartan’s wall closing and knew we would die if I could not open the gate. I saw I would need two hands to lift the huge locking bar, but one of the spears hanging from the shield had penetrated the mail of my left forearm and I could not pull it free, so I had to use Wasp-Sting to cut the leather shield-handles away. Then I could wrench the spear-point out of my mail and arm. There was blood on the mail-sleeve, but the arm was not broken and I lifted the huge locking bar and dragged it away from the gates.

Then I pulled the gates inward and Ragnar and his men were fifty paces away and they shouted when they saw me and ran with raised shields to protect themselves from the spears and axes thrown from the ramparts, and they joined the shield wall, lengthening it and carrying their blades and fury against Kjartan’s astonished men.

And that was how Dunholm, the rocky fortress in its river-loop, was taken. Years later I was flattered by a lord in Mercia whose skald chanted a song of how Uhtred of Bebbanburg scaled the fortress crag alone and fought his way through two hundred men to open the dragon-guarded high gate. It was a fine song, full of sword-work and courage, but it was all nonsense. There were twelve of us, not one, and the dogs did most of the fighting, and Steapa did much of the rest, and if Thyra had not come from the hall then Dunholm might be ruled by Kjartan’s descendants to this day. Nor was the fight over when the gate was opened, for we were still outnumbered, but we had the remaining dogs and Kjartan did not, and Ragnar brought his shield wall into the compound and there we fought the defenders.

It was shield wall against shield wall. It was the horror of two shield walls fighting. It was the thunder of shields crashing together and the grunts of men stabbing with short-swords or twisting spears into enemy bellies. It was blood and shit and guts spilled in the mud. The shield wall is where men die and where men earn the praise of skalds. I joined Ragnar’s wall and Steapa, who had taken a shield from a hound-ripped horseman, bulled in beside me with his great war axe. We stepped over dead and dying dogs as we drove forward. The shield becomes a weapon, its great iron boss a club to drive men back, and when the enemy falters you close up fast and ram the blade forward, then step over the wounded and let the men behind you kill them. It rarely lasts long before one wall breaks, and Kjartan’s line broke first. He had tried to outflank us and send men around our rear, but the surviving hounds guarded our flanks, and Steapa was flailing with his axe like a madman, and he was so huge and strong that he hacked into the enemy line and made it look easy. ‘Wessex!’ he kept shouting, ‘Wessex!’ as though he fought for Alfred, and I was on his right and Ragnar on his left and the rain crashed on us as we followed Steapa through Kjartan’s shield wall. We went clean through so that there was no enemy in front of us, and the broken wall collapsed as men ran back towards the buildings.

Kjartan was the man in the dirty white cloak. He was a big man, almost as tall as Steapa, and he was strong, but he saw his fortress fall and he shouted at his men to make a new shield wall, but some of his warriors were already surrendering. Danes did not give up readily, but they had discovered they were fighting fellow Danes, and there was no shame in yielding to such an enemy. Others were fleeing, going through the well gate, and I had a terror that Gisela would be discovered there and taken, but the women who had gone to draw water protected her. They all huddled inside the well’s small palisade and the panicked men fled past them towards the river.

Not all panicked or surrendered. A few gathered about Kjartan and locked their shields and waited for death. Kjartan might have been cruel, but he was brave. His son, Sven, was not brave. He had commanded the men on the gatehouse ramparts, and almost all those men fled northwards, leaving Sven with just two companions. Guthred, Finan and Rollo climbed to deal with them, but only Finan was needed. The Irishman hated fighting in the shield wall. He was too light, he reckoned, to be part of such weight-driven killing, but in the open he was a fiend. Finan the Agile, he had been called, and I watched, astonished, as he leaped ahead of both Guthred and Rollo and took on the three men alone, and his two swords were as fast as a viper’s strike. He carried no shield. He dazzled Sven’s defenders with feints, twisted past their attacks, and killed them both with a grin on his face, and then turned on Sven, but Sven was a coward. He had backed into a corner of the rampart and was holding his sword and shield wide apart as if to show he meant no mischief. Finan crouched, still grinning, ready to drive his long sword into Sven’s exposed belly.

‘He’s mine!’ Thyra wailed. ‘He’s mine!’

Finan glanced at her and Sven twitched his sword arm, as if to strike, but Finan’s blade whipped towards him and he froze. He was whimpering for mercy.

‘He’s mine!’ Thyra shrieked. She was writhing her ghastly fingernails towards Sven and was sobbing with hatred. ‘He’s mine!’ she cried.

‘You belong to her,’ Finan said, ‘so you do,’ and he feinted at Sven’s stomach and when Sven brought his shield down to protect himself, Finan just rammed his body into the shield, using his light weight to tip Sven backwards over the rampart. Sven screamed as he fell. It was not a long drop, no more than the height of two tall men, but he thumped into the mud like a sack of grain. He scrabbled on his back, trying to get up, but Thyra was standing over him and she had given a long, wailing call, and the surviving hounds had come to her. Even the crippled hounds hauled themselves through muck and blood to reach her side.

‘No,’ Sven said. He stared up at her with his one eye. ‘No!’

‘Yes,’ she hissed, and she bent down and took the sword from his unresisting hand, and then she gave one yelp and the hounds closed on him. He twitched and screamed as the fangs took him. Some, trained to kill quickly, went for his throat, but Thyra used Sven’s sword to fend them off, and so the hounds killed Sven by chewing him from the groin upwards. His screams pierced the rain like blades. His father heard it all and Thyra watched it and just laughed.

And still Kjartan lived. Thirty-four men stood with him and they knew they were dead men and they were ready to die as Danes, but then Ragnar walked towards them, the eagle wings on his helmet broken and wet, and he mutely pointed his sword at Kjartan and Kjartan nodded and stepped out of the shield wall. His son’s guts were being eaten by hounds and Thyra was dancing in Sven’s blood and crooning a victory song.

‘I killed your father,’ Kjartan sneered at Ragnar, ‘and I’ll kill you.’

Ragnar said nothing. The two men were six paces apart, judging each other.

‘Your sister was a good whore,’ Kjartan said, ‘before she went mad.’ He darted forward, shield up, and Ragnar stepped right to let Kjartan go past him and Kjartan anticipated the move and swept his sword low to slice Ragnar’s ankles, but Ragnar had stepped back. The two men watched each other again.

‘She was a good whore even after she went mad,’ Kjartan said, ‘except we had to tie her down to stop her struggling. Made it easier, see?’

Ragnar attacked. Shield high, sword low, and the two shields cracked together and Kjartan’s sword parried the low strike, and both men heaved, trying to topple the other, and then Ragnar stepped back again. He had learned that Kjartan was fast and skilful.

‘She’s not a good whore now, though,’ Kjartan said. ‘She’s too raddled. Too filthy. Even a beggar won’t hump her now. I know. I offered her to one last week and he wouldn’t have her. Reckoned she was too dirty for him.’ And suddenly he came forward fast and hacked at Ragnar. There was no great skill in his attack, just sheer strength and speed, and Ragnar retreated, letting his shield take the fury, and I feared for him and took a pace forward, but Steapa held me back.

‘It’s his fight,’ Steapa said.

‘I killed your father,’ Kjartan said, and his sword drove a splinter of wood from Ragnar’s shield. ‘I burned your mother,’ he boasted, and another blow rang on the shield boss, ‘and I whored your sister,’ he said, and the next sword blow drove Ragnar back two paces. ‘And I shall piss on your gutted body,’ Kjartan shouted and he reversed a swing, took his blade low and swept it at Ragnar’s ankles again. This time he struck and Ragnar staggered. His crippled hand had instinctively dropped his shield low and Kjartan brought his own shield over the top to drive his enemy down, and Ragnar, who had said nothing throughout the fight, suddenly screamed. For a heartbeat I thought it was a doomed man’s scream, but instead it was rage. He drove his body under Kjartan’s shield, pushing the bigger man back by sheer strength, and then he stepped nimbly aside. I thought he had been lamed by the blow to his ankle, but he had iron strips on his boot and, though one strip was almost cut in two, and though he was bruised, he had not been injured and suddenly he was all anger and movement. It was as though he had woken up. He began to dance around Kjartan, and that was the secret of a duel. Keep moving. Ragnar moved, and he was filled with rage, and his speed almost matched Finan’s swiftness, and Kjartan, who thought he had found his enemy’s measure, was suddenly desperate. He had no more breath for insults, only enough to defend himself, and Ragnar was all ferocity and quickness. He hacked at Kjartan, turned him, hacked again, lunged, twisted away, feinted low, used his shield to knock away a parry and swept his sword, Heart-Breaker, to strike Kjartan’s helmet. He dented the iron, but did not pierce it, and Kjartan shook his head and Ragnar banged shield on shield to drive the big man back. His next blow shattered one of the limewood boards of Kjartan’s shield, the next took the shield’s edge, splitting the iron rim, and Kjartan stepped back and Ragnar was keening, a sound so horrible that the hounds around Thyra began yelping in sympathy.

Over two hundred men watched. We all knew what would happen now for the battle-fever had come to Ragnar. It was the rage of a sword-Dane. No man could resist such anger, and Kjartan did well to survive as long as he did, but at last he was driven back and he tripped on a hound’s corpse and fell on his back and Ragnar stepped over the frantic sweep of his enemy’s heavy sword and thrust down hard with Heart-Breaker. The blow broke through the mail-sleeve of Kjartan’s coat and severed the tendons of his sword arm. Kjartan tried to get up, but Ragnar kicked him in the face, then brought his heel hard down on Kjartan’s throat. Kjartan choked. Ragnar stepped back and let his battered shield slide off his left arm. Then he used his crippled left hand to take away Kjartan’s sword. He used his two good fingers to pull it from Kjartan’s nerveless hand and he threw it into the mud and then he killed his enemy.

It was a slow death, but Kjartan did not scream once. He tried to resist at first, using his shield to fend off Ragnar’s sword, but Ragnar bled him to death cut by cut. Kjartan said one thing as he died, a plea to be given back his sword so he could go to the corpse-hall with honour, but Ragnar shook his head. ‘No,’ he said, and never spoke another word until the last blow. That blow was a two-handed downwards thrust into Kjartan’s belly, a thrust that burst through the mail links and pierced Kjartan’s body, and went through the mail beneath Kjartan’s spine to stab the ground beneath, and Ragnar left Heart-Breaker there and stepped back as Kjartan writhed in his death pain. It was then that Ragnar looked up into the rain, his abandoned sword swaying where it pinned his enemy to the ground, and he shouted at the clouds. ‘Father!’ he shouted, ‘Father!’ He was telling Ragnar the Elder that his murder was avenged.

Thyra wanted vengeance as well. She had been crouching with her hounds to watch Kjartan’s death, but now she stood and called to the hounds who ran towards Ragnar. My first thought was that she was sending the beasts to eat Kjartan’s corpse, but instead they surrounded Ragnar. There were still twenty or more of the wolf-like beasts and they snarled at Ragnar, ringing him, and Thyra screamed at him. ‘You should have come before! Why didn’t you come before?’

He stared at her, astonished at her anger. ‘I came as soon …’ he began.

‘You went viking!’ she screamed at him. ‘You left me here!’ The dogs were anguished by her grief and they writhed around Ragnar, their hides blood-matted and their tongues lolling over blood-streaked fangs, just waiting for the word that would let them tear him to red ruin. ‘You left me here!’ Thyra wailed, and she walked into the dogs to face her brother. Then she dropped to her knees and began to weep. I tried to reach her, but the dogs turned on me, teeth bared and eyes wild, and I stepped hurriedly away. Thyra wept on, her grief as great as the storm which raged over Dunholm. ‘I shall kill you!’ she screamed at Ragnar.

‘Thyra,’ he said.

‘You left me here!’ she accused him. ‘You left me here!’ She stood again, and suddenly her face looked sane once more, and I could see she was still a beauty beneath the filth and the scars. ‘The price of my life,’ she said to her brother in a calm voice, ‘is your death.’

‘No,’ a new voice said, ‘no, it is not.’

It was Father Beocca who had spoken. He had been waiting under the high gate’s arch and now he limped through the carnage and spoke with a stern authority. Thyra snarled at him. ‘You’re dead, priest!’ she said, and she gave one of her wordless yelps and the dogs turned on Beocca as Thyra began to twitch like a madwoman again. ‘Kill the priest!’ she screamed at the dogs. ‘Kill him! Kill him! Kill him!’

I ran forward, then saw I had nothing to do.

The Christians often talk of miracles and I have always wanted to witness one such piece of magic. They claim the blind can be given their sight, the cripple made to walk and the leper healed. I have heard them tell stories of men walking on water, and even of dead men raised alive from their graves, but I have never seen such things. If I had seen that great magic then I would be a Christian today, but the priests tell me we must have faith instead. But that day, in the relentless rain, I saw a thing which was as close to a miracle as ever I witnessed.

Father Beocca, the skirts of his priest’s robes filthy with mud, limped into the press of vicious hounds. They had been sent to attack him, and Thyra was screaming at them to kill, but he ignored the beasts and they simply shrank away from him. They whimpered as though they feared this squint-eyed cripple and he hobbled calmly through their fangs and did not take his eyes off Thyra whose screeching voice faded to a whimper and then to great sobs. Her cloak was open, showing her scarred nakedness, and Beocca took off his own rain-sodden cloak and draped it about her shoulders. She had her hands at her face. She was still weeping, and the hounds bayed in sympathy, and Ragnar just watched. I thought Beocca would lead Thyra away, but instead he took her head in his two hands and he suddenly shook her. He shook her hard, and as he did he cried to the clouds. ‘Lord,’ he shouted, ‘take this demon from her! Take the evil one away! Spare her from Abaddon’s grip!’ She screamed then and the hounds put their heads back and howled at the rain. Ragnar was motionless. Beocca shook Thyra’s head again, shook it so hard that I thought he might break her neck. ‘Take the fiend from her, Lord!’ he called. ‘Release her to your love and to your great mercy!’ He stared upwards. His crippled hand was gripping Thyra’s hair with its dead ivy strands, and he pushed her head backwards and forwards as he chanted in a voice as loud as a warrior lord on a field of slaughter. ‘In the name of the Father,’ he shouted, ‘and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, I command you, foul demons, to come from this girl. I cast you into the pit! I banish you! I send you to hell for evermore and a day, and I do it in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost! Be gone!’

And Thyra suddenly began to cry. Not to scream and sob and gasp and struggle for breath, but just a gentle weeping, and she laid her head on Beocca’s shoulder and he put his arms about her and cradled her and looked at us with resentment as if we, bloodstained and armed and fierce, were the allies of the demons he had banished. ‘She’s all right now,’ he said awkwardly, ‘she’s all right now. Oh, go away!’ This peevish command was to the hounds and, astonishingly, they obeyed him, slinking away and leaving Ragnar unthreatened. ‘We must get her warm,’ Beocca said, ‘and we must get her dressed properly.’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘we must.’

‘Well, if you won’t do it,’ Beocca said indignantly, because I had not moved, ‘then I shall.’ And he led Thyra towards Kjartan’s hall where the smoke still sifted from the roof-hole. Ragnar made to go after them, but I shook my head and he stopped. I put my right foot on Kjartan’s dead belly and yanked Heart-Breaker free. I gave the sword to Ragnar and he embraced me, but there was little elation in either of us. We had done the impossible, we had taken Dunholm, but Ivarr still lived and Ivarr was the greater enemy.

‘What do I say to Thyra?’ Ragnar asked me.

‘You tell her the truth,’ I said, because I did not know what else to say, and then I went to find Gisela.

Gisela and Brida washed Thyra. They washed her body and her hair, and they took the dead ivy away and they combed her golden hair, and then they dried it before the great fire in Kjartan’s hall, and afterwards they dressed her in a simple woollen robe and a cloak of otter fur. Ragnar then talked with her beside the fire. They talked alone and I walked with Father Beocca outside the hall. It had stopped raining. ‘Who is Abaddon?’ I asked him.

‘I was responsible for your education,’ he said, ‘and I am ashamed of myself. How could you not know that?’

‘Well I don’t,’ I said, ‘so who is he?’

‘The dark angel of the bottomless pit, of course. I’m sure I told you that. He’s the first demon who will torment you if you don’t repent and become a Christian.’

‘You’re a brave man, father,’ I told him.

‘Nonsense.’

‘I tried to reach her,’ I said, ‘but I was scared of the hounds. They killed thirty or more men today and you just walked into them.’

‘They’re only dogs,’ he said dismissively. ‘If God and Saint Cuthbert can’t protect me from dogs, what can they do?’

I stopped him, put both my hands on his shoulders and squeezed. ‘You were very brave, father,’ I insisted, ‘and I salute you.’

Beocca was enormously pleased with the compliment, but tried to look modest. ‘I just prayed,’ he said, ‘and God did the rest.’ I let him go and he walked on, kicking at a fallen spear with his club foot. ‘I didn’t think the dogs would hurt me,’ he said, ‘because I’ve always liked dogs. I had one as a child.’

‘You should get yourself another one,’ I said. ‘A dog would be company for you.’

‘I couldn’t work as a small boy,’ he went on as though I had not spoken. ‘Well, I could pick stones and scare birds off newly scattered seed, but I couldn’t do proper work. The dog was my friend, but he died. Some other boys killed it.’ He blinked a few times. ‘Thyra’s a pretty woman, isn’t she?’ he said, sounding wistful.

‘She is now,’ I agreed.

‘Those scars on her arms and legs,’ he said, ‘I thought Kjartan or Sven had cut her. But it wasn’t them. She did it to herself.’

‘She cut herself?’ I asked.

‘Slashed herself with knives, she told me. Why would she do that?’

‘To make herself ugly?’ I suggested.

‘But she isn’t,’ Beocca said, puzzled. ‘She’s beautiful.’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘she is,’ and again I felt sorry for Beocca. He was getting old and he had always been crippled and ugly, and he had always wanted to marry, and no woman had ever come to him. He should have been a monk and thus forbidden to marry. Instead he was a priest, and he had a priest’s mind for he looked at me sternly.

‘Alfred sent me to preach peace,’ he said, ‘and I have watched you murder a holy brother, and now this.’ He grimaced at the dead.

‘Alfred sent us to make Guthred safe,’ I reminded him.

‘And we have to make certain Saint Cuthbert is safe,’ he insisted.

‘We will.’

‘We can’t stay here, Uhtred, we have to go back to Cetreht.’ He looked up at me with alarm in his one good eye. ‘We have to defeat Ivarr!’

‘We will, father,’ I said.

‘He has the biggest army in Northumbria!’

‘But he will die alone, father,’ I said, and I was not sure why I said that. The words just came from my tongue, and I thought a god must have spoken through me. ‘He will die alone,’ I said again, ‘I promise it.’

But there were things to do first. There was Kjartan’s hoard to uncover from the hall where the dogs were kenneled, and we put Kjartan’s slaves to work, digging into the shit-stinking floor, and beneath it were barrels of silver and vats of gold and crosses from churches and arm rings and leather bags of amber, jet and garnets, and even bolts of precious imported silk that had half rotted away in the damp earth. Kjartan’s defeated warriors made a pyre for their dead, though Ragnar insisted that neither Kjartan nor what was left of Sven should be given such a funeral. Instead they were stripped of their armour and their clothes and then their naked corpses were given to those pigs which had been spared the autumn slaughter and lived in the north-west corner of the compound.

Rollo was given charge of the fortress. Guthred, in the excitement of victory, had announced that the fort was now his property and that it would become a royal fortress of Northumbria, but I took him aside and told him to give it to Ragnar. ‘Ragnar will be your friend,’ I told him, ‘and you can trust him to hold Dunholm.’ I could trust Ragnar, too, to raid Bebbanburg’s lands and to keep my treacherous uncle in fear.

So Guthred gave Dunholm to Ragnar, and Ragnar entrusted its keeping to Rollo and he left him just thirty men to hold the walls while we went south. Over fifty of Kjartan’s defeated men swore their loyalty to Ragnar, but only after he had determined that none of them had taken part in the hall-burning that had killed his parents. Any man who had helped with that murder was killed. The rest would ride with us, first to Cetreht, and then to confront Ivarr.

So half our job was done. Kjartan the Cruel and Sven the One-Eyed were dead, but Ivarr lived and Alfred of Wessex, though he had never said as much, wanted him dead too.

So we rode south.

Eleven

We left next morning. The rain had gone southwards, leaving a rinsed sky ragged with small hurrying clouds beneath which we rode from Dunholm’s high gate. We left the treasure in Rollo’s keeping. We were all wealthy men for we had taken Kjartan’s fortune, and if we survived our meeting with Ivarr then we would share those riches. I had more than replaced the hoard I had left at Fifhaden and I would go back to Alfred as a rich man, one of the richest in his kingdom, and that was a cheering thought as we followed Ragnar’s eagle-wing standard towards the nearest ford across the Wiire.

Brida rode with Ragnar, Gisela was beside me and Thyra would not leave Beocca’s side. I never did discover what Ragnar had said to her in Kjartan’s hall, but she was calm with him now. The madness was gone. Her fingernails were trimmed, her hair was tidy beneath a white bonnet and that morning she had greeted her brother with a kiss. She still looked unhappy, but Beocca had the words to comfort her and she drew on those words as if they were water and she were dying of thirst. They both rode mares and Beocca, for once, had forgotten his discomfort in the saddle as he talked with Thyra. I could see his good hand gesturing as he spoke. Behind him a servant led a packhorse which carried four big altar crosses taken from Kjartan’s hoard. Beocca had demanded they be returned to the church, and none of us could deny him for he had proved himself as great a hero as any of us, and now he leaned towards Thyra, spoke urgently, and she listened.

‘She’ll be a Christian within a week,’ Gisela said to me.

‘Sooner,’ I said.

‘So what happens to her?’ she asked.

I shrugged. ‘He’ll talk her into a nunnery, I suppose.’

‘Poor woman.’

‘At least she’ll learn obedience there,’ I said. ‘She won’t make twelve into thirteen.’

Gisela punched my arm, thus hurting herself instead of me. ‘I swore,’ she said, rubbing her knuckles where they had scraped against my mail, ‘that once I found you again I would not leave you. Not ever.’

‘But thirteen?’ I asked her. ‘How could you do that?’

‘Because I knew the gods were with us,’ she said simply. ‘I cast the runesticks.’

‘And what do the runesticks say of Ivarr?’ I asked.

‘That he will die like a snake under a hoe,’ she said grimly, then flinched as a gobbet of mud, thrown up by a hoof of Steapa’s horse, spattered onto her face. She wiped it off, then frowned at me. ‘Must we go to Wessex?’

‘I swore as much to Alfred.’

‘You swore?’

‘I gave him my oath.’

‘Then we must go to Wessex,’ she said without enthusiasm. ‘Do you like Wessex?’

‘No.’

‘Alfred?’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘He’s too pious,’ I said, ‘and he’s too earnest. And he stinks.’

‘All Saxons stink,’ she said.

‘He stinks worse than most. It’s his illness. It makes him shit all the time.’

She grimaced. ‘Doesn’t he wash?’

‘At least once a month,’ I said, ‘and probably more often. He’s very fastidious about washing, but he still stinks. Do I stink?’

‘Like a boar,’ she said, grinning. ‘Will I like Alfred?’

‘No. He won’t approve of you because you’re not a Christian.’

She laughed at that. ‘What will he do with you?’

‘He’ll give me land,’ I said, ‘and expect me to fight for him.’

‘Which means you’ll fight the Danes?’

‘The Danes are Alfred’s enemies,’ I said, ‘so yes. I’ll fight the Danes.’

‘But they’re my people,’ she said.

‘And I’ve given Alfred my oath,’ I said, ‘so I must do what he wants.’ I leaned back as the stallion picked its way down a steep hill. ‘I love the Danes,’ I said, ‘love them far more than I do the West Saxons, but it’s my fate to fight for Wessex. Wyrd bið ful aræd.’

‘Which means?’

‘That fate is fate. That it rules us.’

She thought about that. She was dressed in her mail again, but around her neck was a golden torc taken from Kjartan’s treasures. It was made from seven strands twisted into one and I had seen similar things dug from the graves of ancient British chieftains. It gave her a wild look, which suited her. Her black hair was pinned under a woollen cap and she had a faraway look on her long face, and I thought I could look at that face for ever. ‘So how long must you be Alfred’s man?’

‘Until he releases me,’ I said, ‘or until either he or I die.’

‘But you say he’s sick. So how long can he live?’

‘Probably not very long.’

‘So who becomes king then?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said, and I wished I did. Alfred’s son, Edward, was a mewling child, much too young to rule, and his nephew, Æthelwold, from whom Alfred had usurped the throne, was a drunken fool. The drunken fool had the better claim to the throne, and I suddenly found myself hoping that Alfred would live long. That did surprise me. I had told Gisela the truth, that I did not like Alfred, but I recognised that he was the true power in the island of Britain. No one else had his vision, no one else had his determination, and Kjartan’s death was not so much our doing, but Alfred’s. He had sent us north, knowing we would do what he wanted even though he had not explicitly told us what that was, and I was struck by the thought that life as his oath-man might not be as dull as I had feared. But if he died soon, I thought, then that would be the end of Wessex. The thegns would fight for his crown and the Danes would scent the weakness and come like ravens to pluck the corpse-meat.

‘If you’re Alfred’s sworn man,’ Gisela asked carefully, and her question revealed that she must have been thinking the same thoughts, ‘why did he let you come here?’

‘Because he wants your brother to rule in Northumbria.’

She thought about that. ‘Because Guthred is a Christian of sorts?’

‘That’s important to Alfred,’ I said.

‘Or because Guthred’s weak?’ she suggested.

‘Is he weak?’

‘You know he is,’ she said scornfully. ‘He’s a kind man, and folk have always liked him, but he doesn’t know how to be ruthless. He should have killed Ivarr when he first met him, and he should have banished Hrothweard a long time ago, but he didn’t dare. He’s too frightened of Saint Cuthbert.’

‘And why would Alfred want a weak king on Northumbria’s throne?’ I asked blandly.

‘So Northumbria will be weak,’ she said, ‘when the Saxons try to take back their land.’

‘Is that what your runesticks say will happen?’ I asked.

‘They say,’ she said, ‘that we will have two sons and a daughter, and that one son will break your heart, the other will make you proud, and that your daughter will be the mother of kings.’

I laughed at that prophecy, not with scorn, but because of the certainty in Gisela’s voice. ‘And does that mean,’ I asked, ‘that you will come to Wessex, even though I fight the Danes?’

‘It means,’ she said, ‘that I’m not leaving your side. That’s my oath.’

Ragnar had sent scouts ahead and as the long day passed some of those men came back on tired horses. Ivarr, they had heard, had taken Eoferwic. It had been easy for him. Guthred’s diminished garrison had surrendered the city rather than be slaughtered in its streets. Ivarr had taken what plunder he could find, placed a new garrison on the walls and was already marching back north. He would not have heard of the fall of Dunholm yet, so he was plainly hoping to catch Guthred who, he must assume, either lingered at Cetreht or was wandering disconsolately towards the wastes of Cumbraland. Ivarr’s army, the scouts had heard, was a horde. Some men said Ivarr led two thousand spears, a figure that Ragnar and I dismissed. It was certain, though, that Ivarr’s men far outnumbered ours and probable that he was marching north on the same Roman road down which we travelled south. ‘Can we fight him?’ Guthred asked me.

‘We can fight him,’ Ragnar answered for me, ‘but we can’t beat his army.’

‘So why are we marching south?’

‘To rescue Cuthbert,’ I said, ‘and to kill Ivarr.’

‘But if we can’t beat him?’ Guthred was puzzled.

‘We fight him,’ I said, adding to his confusion, ‘and if we can’t beat him then we retreat to Dunholm. That’s why we captured it, as a refuge.’

‘We’re letting the gods decide what happens,’ Ragnar explained and, because we were confident, Guthred pressed us no further.

We reached Cetreht that evening. Our journey had been fast because we had no need to leave the Roman road, and we splashed through the Swale’s ford as the sun reddened the western hills. The churchmen, rather than take refuge in those hills, had preferred to stay with Cetreht’s meagre comforts and no one had disturbed them while we had gone to Dunholm. They had seen mounted Danes on the southern hills, but none of those riders had approached the fort. The horsemen had watched, counted heads and ridden away, and I assumed those men were Ivarr’s scouts.

Father Hrothweard and Abbot Eadred seemed unimpressed that we had captured Dunholm. All they cared about was the corpse of the saint and the other precious relics which they dug up from the graveyard that same evening and carried in solemn procession to the church. It was there that I confronted Aidan, the steward of Bebbanburg, and his score of men who had stayed in the village. ‘It’s safe for you to ride home now,’ I told them, ‘because Kjartan is dead.’

I do not think Aidan believed me at first. Then he understood what we had achieved and he must have feared that the men who had captured Dunholm would march on Bebbanburg next. I wanted to do that, but I was sworn to return to Alfred before Christmas and that left me no time to confront my uncle.

‘We shall leave in the morning,’ Aidan said.

‘You will,’ I agreed, ‘and when you reach Bebbanburg you will tell my uncle that he is never far from my thoughts. You will tell him I have taken his bride. You will promise him that one day I shall slit his belly, and if he dies before I can fulfil that oath then promise him I shall slice the guts out of his sons instead, and if his sons have sons I shall kill them too. Tell him those things, and tell him that folk thought Dunholm was like Bebbanburg, impregnable, and that Dunholm fell to my sword.’

‘Ivarr will kill you,’ Aidan said defiantly.

‘You had better pray as much,’ I said.

All the Christians prayed that night. They gathered in the church and I thought they might be asking their god to give us victory over the approaching forces of Ivarr, but instead they were giving thanks that the precious relics had survived. They placed Saint Cuthbert’s body before the altar on which they put Saint Oswald’s head, the gospel book and the reliquary with the hairs of Saint Augustine’s beard and they chanted, they prayed, they chanted again, and I thought they would never stop praying, but at last, in the night’s dark heart, they fell silent.

I walked the fort’s low wall, watching the Roman road stretch south through the fields beneath the waning moon. It was from there that Ivarr would come and I could not be sure he would not send a band of picked horsemen to attack in the night and so I had a hundred men waiting in the village street. But no attack came, and in the darkness a small mist rose to blur the fields as Ragnar came to relieve me. ‘There’ll be a frost by morning,’ he greeted me.

‘There will,’ I agreed.

He stamped his feet to make them warm. ‘My sister,’ he said, ‘tells me she’s going to Wessex. She says she’ll be baptised.’

‘Are you surprised?’

‘No,’ he said. He gazed down the long straight road. ‘It’s for the best,’ he spoke bleakly, ‘and she likes your Father Beocca. So what will happen to her?’

‘I suppose she’ll become a nun,’ I said, for I could not think what other fate would wait for her in Alfred’s Wessex.

‘I let her down,’ he said, and I said nothing because it was true. ‘Must you go back to Wessex?’ he asked.

‘Yes. I’m sworn.’

‘Oaths can be broken,’ he said quietly, and that was true, but in a world where different gods ruled and fate is known only to the three spinners, oaths are our one certainty. If I broke an oath then I could not expect men to keep their oaths to me. That I had learned.

‘I won’t break my oath to Alfred,’ I said, ‘but I will make another oath to you. That I will never fight you, that what I have is yours to share, and that if you need help I will do all I can to bring it.’

Ragnar said nothing for a while. He kicked at the turf on the wall’s top and looked into the mist. ‘I swear the same,’ he said quietly and he, like me, was embarrassed and so he kicked at the turf again. ‘How many men will Ivarr bring?’

‘Eight hundred?’

He nodded. ‘And we have fewer than three hundred.’

‘There won’t be a fight,’ I said.

‘No?’

‘Ivarr will die,’ I said, ‘and that will be the end of it.’ I touched Serpent-Breath’s hilt for luck and felt the slightly raised edges of Hild’s cross. ‘He will die,’ I said, still touching the cross, ‘and Guthred will rule, and he will do what you tell him to do.’

‘You want me to tell him to attack Ælfric?’ he asked.

I thought about it. ‘No,’ I said.

‘No?’

‘Bebbanburg’s too strong,’ I said, ‘and there’s no back gate as there was at Dunholm. Besides, I want to kill Ælfric myself.’

‘Will Alfred let you do that?’

‘He will,’ I said, though in truth I doubted Alfred ever would allow me such a luxury, but I was certain that my fate was to go back to Bebbanburg and I had faith in that destiny. I turned and stared at the village. ‘All quiet there?’

‘All quiet,’ he said. ‘They’ve given up praying and are sleeping instead. You should sleep too.’

I walked back up the street, but before joining Gisela I quietly opened the church door and saw priests and monks sleeping in the small light of the few candles guttering on the altar. One of them snored and I closed the door as silently as I had opened it.

I was woken in the dawn by Sihtric who banged on the door lintel. ‘They’re here, lord!’ he shouted. ‘They’re here!’

‘Who’s here?’

‘Ivarr’s men, lord.’

‘Where?’

‘Horsemen, lord, across the river!’

There were only a hundred or so riders, and they made no attempt to cross the ford and I guessed they had only been sent to the Swale’s northern bank to cut off our escape. Ivarr’s main force would appear to the south, though that prospect was not the chief excitement in that misted dawn. Men were shouting in the village. ‘What is it?’ I asked Sihtric.

‘Christians are upset, lord,’ he said.

I walked to the church to discover that the golden reliquary of Saint Augustine’s beard, the precious gift from Alfred to Guthred, had been stolen. It had been on the altar with the other relics, but during the night it had vanished, and Father Hrothweard was wailing beside a hole scratched and torn into the wall of wattle and daub behind the altar. Guthred was there, listening to Abbot Eadred who was declaring the theft a sign of God’s disapproval.

‘Disapproval of what?’ Guthred asked.

‘The pagans, of course,’ Eadred spat.

Father Hrothweard was rocking back and forth, wringing his hands and shouting at his god to bring vengeance on the heathens who had desecrated the church and stolen the holy treasure. ‘Reveal the culprits, lord!’ he shouted, then he saw me and evidently decided the revelation had come, for he pointed at me. ‘It was him!’ he spat.

‘Was it you?’ Guthred asked.

‘No, lord,’ I said.

‘It was him!’ Hrothweard said again.

‘You must search all the pagans,’ Eadred told Guthred, ‘for if the relic isn’t found, lord, then our defeat is certain. Ivarr will crush us for this sin. It will be God’s chastisement on us.’

It seemed a strange punishment, to allow a pagan Dane to defeat a Christian king because a relic had been stolen, but as a prophecy it seemed safe enough, for in the mid-morning, while the church was still being searched in a vain attempt to find the reliquary, one of Ragnar’s men brought word that Ivarr’s army had appeared. They were marching from the south and already forming their shield wall a half-mile from Ragnar’s small force.

It was time, then, for us to go. Guthred and I were already in mail, our horses were saddled, and all we needed to do was ride south to join Ragnar’s shield wall, but Guthred had been unnerved by the loss of the relic. As we left the church he took me aside. ‘Will you ask Ragnar if he took it?’ he begged me. ‘Or ask if perhaps one of his men did?’

‘Ragnar didn’t take it,’ I said scornfully. ‘If you want to find the culprit,’ I went on, ‘search them.’ I pointed to Aidan and his horsemen who, now that Ivarr was close, were eager to start on their journey north, though they dared not leave so long as Ivarr’s men barred the ford across the Swale. Guthred had asked them to join our shield wall, but they had refused, and now they waited for a chance to escape.

‘No Christian would steal the relic!’ Hrothweard shouted. ‘It’s a pagan crime!’

Guthred was terrified. He still believed in Christian magic and he saw the theft as an omen of disaster. He plainly did not suspect Aidan, but then he did not know who to suspect and so I made it easy for him.

I summoned Finan and Sihtric who were waiting to accompany me to the shield wall. ‘This man,’ I told Guthred, pointing at Finan, ‘is a Christian. Aren’t you a Christian, Finan?’

‘I am, lord.’

‘And he’s Irish,’ I said, ‘and everyone knows the Irish have the power of scrying.’ Finan, who had no more powers of scrying than I did, tried to look mysterious. ‘He will find your relic,’ I promised.

‘You will?’ Guthred asked Finan eagerly.

‘Yes, lord,’ Finan said confidently.

‘Do it, Finan,’ I said, ‘while I kill Ivarr. And bring the culprit to us as soon as you find him.’

‘I will, lord,’ he said.

A servant brought my horse. ‘Can your Irishman really find it?’ Guthred asked me.

‘I will give the church all my silver, lord,’ I said loudly enough for a dozen men to hear, ‘and I will give it my mail, my helmet, my arm rings and my swords, if Finan does not bring you both the relic and the thief. He’s Irish and the Irish have strange powers.’ I looked at Hrothweard. ‘You hear that, priest? I promise all my wealth to your church if Finan does not find the thief!’

Hrothweard had nothing to say to that. He glared at me, but my promise had been made publicly and it was testimony to my innocence, so he contented himself by spitting at my horse’s feet. Gisela, who had come to take the stallion’s reins, had to skip aside to avoid the spittle. She touched my arm as I straightened the stirrup. ‘Can Finan find it?’ she asked in a low voice.

‘He can find it,’ I promised her.

‘Because he has strange powers?’

‘Because he stole it, my love,’ I said quietly, ‘on my orders. It’s probably hidden in a dung-heap.’ I grinned at her, and she laughed softly.

I put my foot in the stirrup and readied to heave myself up, but again Gisela checked me. ‘Be careful,’ she said. ‘Men fear to fight Ivarr,’ she warned me.

‘He’s a Lothbrok,’ I said, ‘and all Lothbroks fight well. They love it. But they fight like mad dogs, all fury and savagery, and in the end they die like mad dogs.’ I mounted the stallion, settled my right foot in its stirrup, then took my helmet and shield from Gisela. I touched her hand for farewell, then pulled the reins and followed Guthred south.

We rode to join the shield wall. It was a short wall, easily outflanked by the much larger wall that Ivarr was forming to the south. His wall was over twice as long as ours which meant his men could wrap themselves about our line and kill us from the edges inwards. If it came to battle we would be slaughtered, and Ivarr’s men knew it. Their shield wall was bright with spears and axe-heads, and noisy with anticipation of victory. They were beating their weapons against their shields, making a dull drumbeat that filled the Swale’s wide valley, and the drumbeat rose to a great clattering thunder when Ivarr’s standard of the two ravens was lifted in the centre of their line. Beneath the banner was a knot of horsemen who now broke free of the shield wall to ride towards us. Ivarr was among them, as was his rat-like son.

Guthred, Steapa, Ragnar and I rode a few paces towards Ivarr and then waited. Ten men were in the approaching party, but it was Ivarr I watched. He was mounted on Witnere, which I had hoped he would be, for that gave me cause to quarrel with him, but I hung back, letting Guthred take his horse a few steps forward. Ivarr was staring at us one by one. He looked momentarily surprised to see me, but said nothing, and he seemed irritated when he saw Ragnar and he was duly impressed by Steapa’s huge size, but he ignored the three of us, nodding instead at Guthred. ‘Worm-shit,’ he greeted the king.

‘Lord Ivarr,’ Guthred replied.

‘I am in a strangely merciful mood,’ Ivarr said. ‘If you ride away, then I shall spare your men’s lives.’

‘We have no quarrel,’ Guthred said, ‘that cannot be settled by words.’

‘Words!’ Ivarr spat, then shook his head. ‘Go beyond Northumbria,’ he said, ‘go far away, worm-shit. Run to your friend in Wessex, but leave your sister here as a hostage. If you do that I shall be merciful.’ He was not being merciful, but practical. The Danes were ferocious warriors, but far more cautious than their reputation suggested. Ivarr was willing to fight, but he was more willing to arrange a surrender, for then he would lose no men. He would win this fight, he knew that, but in gaining the victory he would lose sixty or seventy warriors and that was a whole ship’s crew and a high price to pay. It was better to let Guthred live and pay nothing. Ivarr moved Witnere sideways so he could look past Guthred at Ragnar. ‘You keep strange company, Lord Ragnar.’

‘Two days ago,’ Ragnar said, ‘I killed Kjartan the Cruel. Dunholm is mine now. I think, perhaps, I should kill you, Lord Ivarr, so that you cannot try to take it from me.’

Ivarr looked startled, as well he might. He glanced at Guthred, then at me, as if seeking confirmation of Kjartan’s death, but our faces betrayed nothing. Ivarr shrugged. ‘You had a quarrel with Kjartan,’ he told Ragnar, ‘and that was your affair, not mine. I would welcome you as a friend. Our fathers were friends, were they not?’

‘They were,’ Ragnar said.

‘Then we should remake their friendship,’ Ivarr said.

‘Why should he befriend a thief?’ I asked.

Ivarr looked at me, his serpent eyes unreadable. ‘I watched a goat vomit yesterday,’ he said, ‘and what it threw up reminded me of you.’

‘I watched a goat shit yesterday,’ I retorted, ‘and what it dropped reminded me of you.’

Ivarr sneered at that, but decided not to go on trading insults. His son, though, drew his sword and Ivarr held out a warning hand to tell the youngster that the killing time had not yet come. ‘Go away,’ he said to Guthred, ‘go far away and I will forget I ever knew you.’

‘The goat-turd reminded me of you,’ I said, ‘but its smell reminded me of your mother. It was a rancid smell, but what would you expect of a whore who gives birth to a thief?’

One of the warriors held Ivarr’s son back. Ivarr himself just looked at me in silence for a while. ‘I can make your death stretch through three sunsets,’ he said at last.

‘But if you return the stolen goods, thief,’ I said, ‘and then accept good King Guthred’s judgement on your crime, then perhaps we will show mercy.’

Ivarr looked amused rather than offended. ‘What have I stolen?’ he asked.

‘You’re riding my horse,’ I said, ‘and I want it back now.’

He patted Witnere’s neck. ‘When you are dead,’ he said to me, ‘I shall have your skin tanned and made into a saddle so I can spend the rest of my life farting on you.’ He looked at Guthred. ‘Go away,’ he said, ‘go far away. Leave your sister as hostage. I shall give you a few moments to find your senses, and if you don’t, then we shall kill you.’ He turned his horse away.

‘Coward,’ I called to him. He ignored me, pushing Witnere through his men to lead them back to their shield wall. ‘All the Lothbroks are cowards,’ I said. ‘They run away. What have you done, Ivarr? Pissed your breeches for fear of my sword? You ran away from the Scots and now you run away from me!’

I think it was the mention of the Scots that did it. That huge defeat was still raw in Ivarr’s memory, and I had scraped scorn on the rawness and suddenly the Lothbrok temper, that so far he had managed to control, took over. He hurt Witnere with the savage pull he gave on the bit, but Witnere turned obediently as Ivarr drew his long sword. He spurred towards me, but I angled past him, going towards the wide space in front of his army. That was where I wanted Ivarr to die, in sight of all his men, and there I turned my stallion back. Ivarr had followed me, but had checked Witnere, who was thumping the soft turf with his front right hoof.

I think Ivarr wished he had not lost his temper, but it was too late. Every man in both shield walls could see that he had drawn his sword and pursued me into the open meadow and he could not just ride away from that challenge. He had to kill me now, and he was not sure he could do it. He was good, but he had suffered injury, his joints were aching, and he knew my reputation.

His advantage was Witnere. I knew that horse, and knew it fought as well as most warriors. Witnere would savage my horse if he could, and he would savage me too, and my first aim was to get Ivarr out of the saddle. Ivarr watched me. I think he had decided to let me attack, for he did not release Witnere to the charge, but instead of riding at him, I turned my stallion towards Ivarr’s shield wall. ‘Ivarr is a thief!’ I shouted at his army. I let Serpent-Breath hang by my side. ‘He is a common thief,’ I shouted, ‘who ran from the Scots! He ran like a whipped puppy! He was weeping like a child when we found him!’ I laughed and kept my eyes on Ivarr’s shield wall. ‘He was crying because he was hurt,’ I said, ‘and in Scotland they call him Ivarr the Feeble.’ I saw, at the edge of my vision, that the goading had worked and that Ivarr was wheeling Witnere towards me. ‘He is a thief,’ I shouted, ‘and a coward!’ And as I screamed the last derisive insult I touched my knee to my horse so he turned and I raised my shield. Witnere was all white eyes and white teeth, big hooves flailing up sodden turf, and as he closed I shouted his name. ‘Witnere! Witnere!’ I knew that was probably not the name Ivarr had given the stallion, but perhaps Witnere remembered the name, or remembered me, for his ears pricked and his head came up and his pace faltered as I spurred my own horse straight at him.

I used the shield as a weapon. I just thrust it hard at Ivarr and, at the same moment, pushed up on my right stirrup, and Ivarr was trying to turn Witnere away, but the big stallion was confused and off balance. My shield slammed into Ivarr’s and I threw myself at him, using my weight to force him backwards. The risk was that I would fall and he would stay saddled, but I dared not let go of shield or sword to grip him. I just had to hope that my weight would drive him to the ground. ‘Witnere!’ I shouted again, and the stallion half turned towards me and that small motion, along with my weight, was enough to topple Ivarr. He fell to his right and I collapsed between the two horses. I fell hard, and my own stallion gave me an inadvertent kick that pushed me against Witnere’s hind legs. I scrambled up, slapped Witnere’s rump with Serpent-Breath to drive him away and immediately ducked beneath my shield as Ivarr attacked. He had recovered faster than me, and his sword slammed against my shield, and he must have expected me to recoil from that blow, but I stopped it dead. My left arm, wounded by the thrown spear at Dunholm, throbbed from the force of his sword, but I was taller, heavier and stronger than Ivarr and I shoved the shield hard to push him back.

He knew he was going to lose. He was old enough to be my father and he was slowed by old wounds, but he was still a Lothbrok and they learn fighting from the moment they are whelped. He came at me snarling, sword feinting high then thrusting low, and I kept moving, parrying him, taking his blows on my shield, and not even trying to fight back. I mocked him instead. I told him he was a pathetic old man. ‘I killed your uncle,’ I taunted him, ‘and he was not much better than you. And when you’re dead, old man, I’ll gut the rat you call a son. I’ll feed his corpse to the ravens. Is that the best you can do?’

He had tried to turn me, but tried too hard and his foot had slipped on the wet grass and he had gone down onto one knee. He was open to death then, off balance and with his sword hand in the grass, but I walked away from him, letting him rise, and every Dane saw that I did that, and then they saw me throw away my shield. ‘I’ll give him a chance,’ I called to them. ‘He’s a miserable little thief, but I’ll give him a chance!’

‘You whore-born Saxon bastard,’ Ivarr snarled, and rushed me again. That was how he liked to fight. Attack, attack, attack, and he tried to use his shield to hurl me back, but I stepped away and clouted him over the back of his helmet with the flat of Serpent-Breath’s blade. The blow made him stumble a second time, and again I walked away. I wanted to humiliate him.

That second stumble gave him caution, so that he circled me warily. ‘You made me a slave,’ I said, ‘and you couldn’t even do that properly. You want to give me your sword?’

‘Goat-turd,’ he said. He came in fast, lunging at my throat, dropping the sword to rake my left leg at the last moment, and I just moved aside and slapped Serpent-Breath across his rump to drive him away.

‘Give me your sword,’ I said, ‘and I’ll let you live. We’ll put you in a cage and I’ll take you around Wessex. Here is Ivarr Ivarson, a Lothbrok, I’ll tell folk. A thief who ran away from the Scots.’

‘Bastard,’ he rushed again, this time trying to disembowel me with a savage sweep of the sword, but I stepped back and his long blade hissed past me and he grunted as he brought the blade back, all fury and desperation now, and I rammed Serpent-Breath forward so that she went past his shield and struck his breast and the force of the lunge drove him back. He staggered as my next stroke came, a fast one that rang on the side of his helmet and again he staggered, dizzied by the blow, and my third blow cracked into his blade with such force that his sword arm flew back and Serpent-Breath’s tip was at his throat.

‘Coward,’ I said, ‘thief.’

He screamed in fury and brought his sword around in a savage stroke, but I stepped backwards and let it pass. Then I slashed Serpent-Breath down hard to strike his right wrist. He gasped then, for the wrist bones were broken.

‘It’s hard to fight without a sword,’ I told him, and I struck again, this time hitting the sword so that the blade flew from his hand. There was terror in his eyes now. Not the terror of a man facing death, but of a warrior dying without a blade in his hand.

‘You made me a slave,’ I said, and I rammed Serpent-Breath forward, striking him on one knee and he tried to back away, tried to reach his sword, and I slashed the knee again, much harder, sawing through leather to cut to the bone and he went down on one knee. I slapped his helmet with Serpent-Breath, then stood behind him. ‘He made me a slave,’ I shouted at his men, ‘and he stole my horse. But he is still a Lothbrok.’ I bent, picked up his sword by the blade and held it to him. He took it.

‘Thank you,’ he said.

Then I killed him. I took his head half off his shoulders. He made a gurgling noise, shuddered and went down onto the grass, but he had kept hold of the sword. If I had let him die without the sword then many of the watching Danes would have thought me wantonly cruel. They understood he was my enemy, and understood I had cause to kill him, but none would think he deserved to be denied the corpse-hall. And one day, I thought, Ivarr and his uncle would welcome me there, for in the corpse-hall we feast with our enemies and remember our fights and fight them all over again.

Then there was a scream and I turned to see Ivar, his son, galloping towards me. He came as his father had come, all fury and mindless violence, and he leaned from the saddle to cut me in half with his blade and I met the blade with Serpent-Breath and she was by far the better sword. The blow jarred up my arm, but Ivar’s blade broke. He galloped past me, holding a hand’s breadth of sword, and two of his father’s men caught up with him and forced him away before he could be killed. I called to Witnere.

He came to me. I patted his nose, took hold of the saddle and hauled myself onto his back. Then I turned him towards Ivarr’s leaderless shield wall and gestured that Guthred and Ragnar should join me. We stopped twenty paces from the painted Danish shields. ‘Ivarr Ivarson has gone to Valhalla,’ I shouted, ‘and there was no disgrace in his death! I am Uhtred Ragnarson! I am the man who killed Ubba Lothbrokson and this is my friend, Earl Ragnar, who killed Kjartan the Cruel! We serve King Guthred.’

‘Are you a Christian?’ a man shouted.

I showed him my hammer amulet. Men were passing the news of Kjartan’s death down the long line of shields, axes and swords. ‘I am no Christian!’ I shouted when they were quiet again. ‘But I have seen Christian sorcery! And the Christians worked their magic on King Guthred! Have none of you been victims of sorcerers? Have none of you known your cattle to die or your wives to be sick? You all know sorcery, and the Christian sorcerers can work great magic! They have corpses and severed heads, and they use them to make magic, and they wove their spells about our king! But the sorcerer made a mistake. He became greedy, and last night he stole a treasure from King Guthred! But Odin has swept the spells away!’ I twisted in the saddle and saw that Finan was at last coming from the fort.

He had been delayed by a scuffle at the fort’s entrance. Some churchmen had tried to prevent Finan and Sihtric from leaving, but a score of Ragnar’s Danes intervened and now the Irishman came riding across the pastureland. He was leading Father Hrothweard. Or rather Finan had a handful of Hrothweard’s hair and so the priest had no choice but to stumble along beside the Irishman’s horse.

‘That is the Christian sorcerer, Hrothweard!’ I shouted. ‘He attacked King Guthred with spells, with the magic of corpses, but we have found him out and we have taken the spells away from King Guthred! So now I ask you what we should do with the sorcerer!’

There was only one answer to that. The Danes, who knew well enough that Hrothweard had been Guthred’s adviser, wanted him dead. Hrothweard, meanwhile, was kneeling on the grass, his hands clasped, staring up at Guthred. ‘No, lord!’ He pleaded.

‘You’re the thief?’ Guthred asked. He sounded disbelieving.

‘I found the relic in his baggage, lord,’ Finan said, and held the golden pot towards Guthred. ‘It was wrapped in one of his shirts, lord.’

‘He lies!’ Hrothweard protested.

‘He’s your thief, lord,’ Finan said respectfully, then made the sign of the cross, ‘I swear it on Christ’s holy body.’

‘He’s a sorcerer!’ I shouted at Ivarr’s Danes. ‘He will give your cattle the staggers, he will put a blight on your crops, he will make your women barren and your children sickly! Do you want him?’

They roared their need of Hrothweard, who was weeping uncontrollably.

‘You may have him,’ I said, ‘if you acknowledge Guthred as your king.’

They shouted their allegiance. They were beating swords and spears against their shields again, but this time in acclamation of Guthred, and so I leaned over and took his reins. ‘Time to greet them, lord,’ I told him. ‘Time to be generous with them.’

‘But,’ he looked down at Hrothweard.

‘He is a thief, lord,’ I said, ‘and thieves must die. It is the law. It is what Alfred would do.’

‘Yes,’ Guthred said, and we left Father Hrothweard to the pagan Danes and we listened to his dying for a long time. I do not know what they did to him, for there was little left of his corpse, though his blood darkened the grass for yards around the place he died.

That night there was a poor feast. Poor because we had little enough food, though there was plenty of ale. The Danish thegns swore their allegiance to Guthred while the priests and monks huddled in the church, expecting murder. Hrothweard was dead and Jænberht had been murdered, and they all expected to become martyrs themselves, but a dozen sober men from Guthred’s household troops were enough to keep them safe. ‘I shall let them build their shrine for Saint Cuthbert,’ Guthred told me.

‘Alfred would approve of that,’ I said.

He stared across the fire that burned in Cetreht’s street. Ragnar, despite his crippled hand, was wrestling with a huge Dane who had served Ivarr. Both men were drunk and more and drunk men cheered them on and made wagers on who would win. Guthred stared, but did not see the contest. He was thinking. ‘I would never have believed,’ he said at last, puzzled, ‘that Father Hrothweard was a thief.’

Gisela, sheltering under my cloak and leaning on my shoulder, giggled. ‘No man would ever believe that you and I were slaves, lord,’ I answered, ‘but so we were.’

‘Yes,’ he said in wonderment, ‘we were.’

It is the three spinners who make our lives. They sit at the foot of Yggdrasil and there they have their jests. It pleased them to make Guthred the slave into King Guthred, just as it pleased them to send me south again to Wessex.

While at Bebbanburg, where the grey sea never ceases to beat upon the long pale sands and the cold wind frets the wolf’s head flag above the hall, they dreaded my return.

Because fate cannot be cheated, it governs us, and we are all its slaves.

Historical Note

Lords of the North opens a month or so after Alfred’s astonishing victory over the Danes at Ethandun, a tale told in The Pale Horseman. Guthrum, the leader of the defeated army, retreated to Chippenham where Alfred laid siege to him, but hostilities came to a swift end when Alfred and Guthrum agreed to a peace. The Danes withdrew from Wessex and Guthrum and his leading earls all became Christians. Alfred, in turn, recognised Guthrum as the king of East Anglia.

Readers of the two previous novels in this series will know that Guthrum hardly had a sterling record for keeping peace agreements. He had broken the truce made at Wareham, and the subsequent truce negotiated at Exeter, but this last peace treaty held. Guthrum accepted Alfred as his godfather and took the baptismal name of Æthelstan. One tradition says he was baptised in the font still to be seen in the church at Aller, Somerset, and it seems that his conversion was genuine for, once back in East Anglia, he ruled as a Christian monarch. Negotiations between Guthrum and Alfred continued, for in 886 they signed the Treaty of Wedmore which divided England into two spheres of influence. Wessex and southern Mercia were to be Saxon, while East Anglia, northern Mercia and Northumbria were to fall under Danish law. Thus the Danelaw was established, that north-eastern half of England which, for a time, was to be ruled by Danish kings and which still bears, in place-names and dialects, the imprint of that era.

The treaty was a recognition by Alfred that he lacked the forces to drive the Danes out of England altogether, and it bought him time in which he could fortify his heartland of Wessex. The problem was that Guthrum was not the king of all the Danes, let alone the Norsemen, and he could not prevent further attacks on Wessex. Those would come in time, and will be described in future novels, but in large part the victory at Ethandun and the subsequent settlement with Guthrum secured the independence of Wessex and enabled Alfred and his successors to reconquer the Danelaw. One of Alfred’s first steps in that long process was to marry his eldest daughter, Æthelflaed, to Æthelred of Mercia, an alliance intended to bind the Saxons of Mercia to those of Wessex. Æthelflaed, in time, was to prove a great heroine in the struggle against the Danes.

To move from the history of Wessex in the late ninth century to that of Northumbria is to pass from light into confusing darkness. Even the northern regnal lists, which provide the names of kings and the dates they ruled, do not agree, but soon after Ethandun a king named Guthred (some sources name him as Guthfrith) did take the throne at York (Eoferwic). He replaced a Saxon king, who was doubtless a puppet ruler, and he ruled into the 890s. Guthred is remarkable for two things; first, though Danish, he was a Christian, and second, there is a persistent story that he was once a slave, and on those slender foundations I have concocted this story. He was certainly associated with Abbot Eadred who was the guardian of Cuthbert’s corpse (and of both the head of Saint Oswald and the Lindisfarne Gospels), and Eadred was eventually to build his great shrine for Cuthbert at Cuncacester, now Chester-le-Street in County Durham. In 995 the saint’s body was finally laid to rest at Durham (Dunholm) where it remains.

Kjartan, Ragnar, and Gisela are fictional characters. There was an Ivarr, but I have taken vast liberties with his life. He is chiefly notable for his successors who will cause much trouble in the north. There is no record of a ninth-century fortress at Durham, though it seems to me unlikely that such an easily defensible site would have been ignored, and more than possible that any remnants of such a fort would have been destroyed during the construction of the cathedral and castle which have now occupied the summit for almost a thousand years. There was a fortress at Bebbanburg, transmuted over time into the present glories of Bamburgh Castle, and in the eleventh century it was ruled by a family with the name Uhtred, who are my ancestors, but we know almost nothing of the family’s activities in the late ninth century.

The story of England in the late ninth and early tenth centuries is a tale which moves from Wessex northwards. Uhtred’s fate, which he is just beginning to recognise, is to be at the heart of that West Saxon reconquest of the land that will become known as England and so his wars are far from over. He will need Serpent-Breath again.

Copyright

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it, while at times based on historical figures, are the work of the author’s imagination.

Harper

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

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Hammersmith, London W6 8JB

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2006

Copyright © Bernard Cornwell 2006

Bernard Cornwell asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Ebook Edition © September 2008 ISBN: 9780007236879

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SWORD SONG

Sword Song

BERNARD CORNWELL

Sword Song is voor Aukje,

mit liefde:

Er was eens …

CONTENTS

Title Page

Dedication

Place-names

Map

Prologue

Part One: THE BRIDE

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Part Two: THE CITY

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Part Three: THE SCOURING

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Historical Note

Copyright

PLACE-NAMES

The spelling of place names in Anglo Saxon England was an uncertain business, with no consistency and no agreement even about the name itself. Thus London was variously rendered as Lundonia, Lundenberg, Lundenne, Lundene, Lundenwic, Lundenceaster and Lundres. Doubtless some readers will prefer other versions of the names listed below, but I have usually employed whichever spelling is cited in either the Oxford Dictionary of English Place-Names or the Cambridge Dictionary of English Place-Names for the years nearest or contained within Alfred’s reign, AD 871–899, but even that solution is not foolproof. Hayling Island, in 956, was written as both Heilincigae and Hæglingaiggæ. Nor have I been consistent myself; I should spell England as Englaland, and have preferred the modern form Northumbria to Norðhymbralond to avoid the suggestion that the boundaries of the ancient kingdom coincide with those of the modern county. So this list, like the spellings themselves, is capricious.

Æscengum

Eashing, Surrey

Arwan

River Orwell, Suffolk

Beamfleot

Benfleet, Essex

Bebbanburg

Bamburgh, Northumberland

Berrocscire

Berkshire

Cair Ligualid

Carlisle, Cumbria

Caninga

Canvey Island, Essex

Cent

Kent

Cippanhamm

Chippenham, Wiltshire

Cirrenceastre

Cirencester, Gloucestershire

Cisseceastre

Chichester, Sussex

Coccham

Cookham, Berkshire

Colaun, River

River Colne, Essex

Contwaraburg

Canterbury, Kent

Cornwalum

Cornwall

Cracgelad

Cricklade, Wiltshire

Dunastopol

Dunstable (Roman name Durocobrivis), Bedfordshire

Dunholm

Durham, County Durham

Eoferwic

York, Yorkshire

Ethandun

Edington, Wiltshire

Exanceaster

Exeter, Devon

Fleot

River Fleet, London

Frankia

Germany

Fughelness

Foulness Island, Essex

Grantaceaster

Cambridge, Cambridgeshire

Gyruum

Jarrow, County Durham

Hastengas

Hastings, Sussex

Horseg

Horsey Island, Essex

Hothlege

River Hadleigh, Essex

Hrofeceastre

Rochester, Kent

Hwealf

River Crouch, Essex

Lundene

London

Mæides Stana

Maidstone, Kent

Medwæg

River Medway, Kent

Oxnaforda

Oxford, Oxfordshire

Padintune

Paddington, Greater London

Pant

River Blackwater, Essex

Scaepege

Isle of Sheppey, Kent

Sceaftes Eye

Sashes Island (at Coccham)

Sceobyrig

Shoebury, Essex

Scerhnesse

Sheerness, Kent

Sture

River Stour, Essex

Sutherge

Surrey

Suthriganaweorc

Southwark, Greater London

Swealwe

River Swale, Kent

Temes

River Thames

Thunresleam

Thundersley, Essex

Wæced

Watchet, Somerset

Wæclingastræt

Watling Street

Welengaford

Wallingford, Oxfordshire

Werham

Wareham, Dorset

Wiltunscir

Wiltshire

Wintanceaster

Winchester, Hampshire

Wocca’s Dun

South Ockenden, Essex

Wodenes Eye

Odney Island (at Coccham)

PROLOGUE

Darkness. Winter. A night of frost and no moon.

We floated on the River Temes, and beyond the boat’s high bow I could see the stars reflected on the shimmering water. The river was in spate as melted snow fed it from countless hills. The winterbournes were flowing from the chalk uplands of Wessex. In summer those streams would be dry, but now they foamed down the long green hills and filled the river and flowed to the distant sea.

Our boat, which had no name, lay close to the Wessex bank. North across the river lay Mercia. Our bows pointed upstream. We were hidden beneath the leafless, bending branches of three willow trees, held there against the current by a leather mooring rope tied to one of those branches.

There were thirty-eight of us in that nameless boat, which was a trading ship that worked the upper reaches of the Temes. The ship’s master was called Ralla and he stood beside me with one hand on the steering-oar. I could hardly see him in the darkness, but knew he wore a leather jerkin and had a sword at his side. The rest of us were in leather and mail, had helmets and carried shields, axes, swords or spears. Tonight we would kill.

Sihtric, my servant, squatted beside me and stroked a whetstone along the blade of his short-sword. ‘She says she loves me,’ he told me.

‘Of course she says that,’ I said.

He paused, and when he spoke again his voice had brightened, as though he had been encouraged by my words. ‘And I must be nineteen by now, lord! Maybe even twenty?’

‘Eighteen?’ I suggested.

‘I could have been married four years ago, lord!’

We spoke almost in whispers. The night was full of noises. The water rippled, the bare branches clattered in the wind, a night creature splashed into the river, a vixen howled like a dying soul, and somewhere an owl hooted. The boat creaked. Sihtric’s stone hissed and scraped on the steel. A shield thumped against a rower’s bench. I dared not speak louder, despite the night’s noises, because the enemy ship was upstream of us and the men who had gone ashore from that ship would have left sentries on board. Those sentries might have seen us as we slipped downstream on the Mercian bank, but by now they would surely have thought we were long gone towards Lundene.

‘But why marry a whore?’ I asked Sihtric.

‘She’s …’ Sihtric began.

‘She’s old,’ I snarled, ‘maybe thirty. And she’s addled. Ealhswith only has to see a man and her thighs fly apart! If you lined up every man who’d tupped that whore you’d have an army big enough to conquer all Britain.’ Beside me Ralla sniggered. ‘You’d be in that army, Ralla?’ I asked.

‘Twenty times over, lord,’ the shipmaster said.

‘She loves me,’ Sihtric spoke sullenly.

‘She loves your silver,’ I said, ‘and besides, why put a new sword in an old scabbard?’

It is strange what men talk about before battle. Anything except what faces them. I have stood in a shield wall, staring at an enemy bright with blades and dark with menace, and heard two of my men argue furiously about which tavern brewed the best ale. Fear hovers in the air like a cloud and we talk of nothing to pretend that the cloud is not there.

‘Look for something ripe and young,’ I advised Sihtric. ‘That potter’s daughter is ready to wed. She must be thirteen.’

‘She’s stupid,’ Sihtric objected.

‘And what are you, then?’ I demanded. ‘I give you silver and you pour it into the nearest open hole! Last time I saw her she was wearing an arm ring I gave you.’

He sniffed, said nothing. His father had been Kjartan the Cruel, a Dane who had whelped Sihtric on one of his Saxon slaves. Yet Sihtric was a good boy, though in truth he was no longer a boy. He was a man who had stood in the shield wall. A man who had killed. A man who would kill again tonight. ‘I’ll find you a wife,’ I promised him.

It was then we heard the screaming. It was faint because it came from very far off, a mere scratching noise in the darkness that told of pain and death to our south. There were screams and shouting. Women were screaming and doubtless men were dying.

‘God damn them,’ Ralla said bitterly.

‘That’s our job,’ I said curtly.

‘We should …’ Ralla started, then thought better of speaking. I knew what he was going to say, that we should have gone to the village and protected it, but he knew what I would have answered.

I would have told him that we did not know which village the Danes were going to attack, and even if I had known I would not have protected it. We might have shielded the place if we had known where the attackers were going. I could have placed all my household troops in the small houses and, the moment the raiders came, erupted into the street with sword, axe and spear, and we would have killed some of them, but in the dark many more would have escaped and I did not want one to escape. I wanted every Dane, every Norseman, every raider dead. All of them, except one, and that one I would send eastwards to tell the Viking camps on the banks of the Temes that Uhtred of Bebbanburg was waiting for them.

‘Poor souls,’ Ralla muttered. To the south, through the tangle of black branches, I could see a red glow that betrayed burning thatch. The glow spread and grew brighter to lighten the winter sky beyond a row of coppiced trees. The glow reflected off my men’s helmets, giving their metal a sheen of red, and I called for them to take the helmets off in case the enemy sentries in the large ship ahead saw the reflected glimmer.

I took off my own helmet with its silver wolf crest.

I am Uhtred, Lord of Bebbanburg, and in those days I was a lord of war. I stood there in mail and leather, cloaked and armed, young and strong. I had half my household troops in Ralla’s ship while the other half were somewhere to the west, mounted on horses and under Finan’s command.

Or I hoped they were waiting in the night-shrouded west. We in the ship had enjoyed the easier task, for we had slid down the dark river to find the enemy, while Finan had been forced to lead his men across night-black country. But I trusted Finan. He would be there, fidgeting, grimacing, waiting to unleash his sword.

This was not our first attempt in that long wet winter to set an ambush on the Temes, but it was the first that promised success. Twice before I had been told that Vikings had come through the gap in Lundene’s broken bridge to raid the soft, plump villages of Wessex, and both times we had come downriver and found nothing. But this time we had trapped the wolves. I touched the hilt of Serpent-Breath, my sword, then touched the amulet of Thor’s hammer that hung around my neck.

Kill them all, I prayed to Thor, kill them all but one.

It must have been cold in that long night. Ice skimmed the dips in the fields where the river had flooded, but I do not remember the cold. I remember the anticipation. I touched Serpent-Breath again and it seemed to me that she quivered. I sometimes thought that blade sang. It was a thin, half-heard song, a keening noise, the song of the blade wanting blood; the sword song.

We waited and, afterwards, when it was all over, Ralla told me I had never stopped smiling.

I thought our ambush would fail, for the raiders did not return to their ship till dawn blazed light across the east. Their sentries, I thought, must surely see us, but they did not. The drooping willow boughs served as a flimsy screen, or perhaps the rising winter sun dazzled them because no one saw us.

We saw them. We saw the mail-clad men herding a crowd of women and children across a rain-flooded pasture. I guessed there were fifty raiders and they had as many captives. The women would be the young ones from the burned village, and they had been taken for the raiders’ pleasure. The children would go to the slave market in Lundene and from there across the sea to Frankia or even beyond. The women, once they had been used, would also be sold. We were not so close that we could hear the prisoners sobbing, but I imagined it. To the south, where low green hills swelled from the river’s plain, a great drift of smoke dirtied the clear winter sky to mark where the raiders had burned the village.

Ralla stirred. ‘Wait,’ I murmured, and Ralla went still. He was a grizzled man, ten years older than I, with eyes reduced to slits from the long years of staring across sun-reflecting seas. He was a shipmaster, soldier and friend. ‘Not yet,’ I said softly, and touched Serpent-Breath and felt the quiver in the steel.

Men’s voices were loud, relaxed and laughing. They shouted as they pushed their prisoners into the ship. They forced them to crouch in the cold flooded bilge so that the overloaded craft would be stable for its voyage through the downriver shallows, where the Temes raced across stone ledges and only the best and bravest shipmasters knew the channel. Then the warriors clambered aboard themselves. They took their plunder with them, the spits and cauldrons and ard-blades and knives and whatever else could be sold or melted or used. Their laughter was raucous. They were men who had slaughtered, and who would become rich on their prisoners and they were in a cheerful, careless mood.

And Serpent-Breath sang soft in her scabbard.

I heard the clatter from the other ship as the oars were thrust into their rowlocks. A voice called out a command. ‘Push off!’

The great beak of the enemy ship, crowned with a monster’s painted head, turned out into the river. Men shoved oar-blades against the bank, pushing the boat farther out. The ship was already moving, carried towards us by the spate-driven current. Ralla looked at me.

‘Now,’ I said. ‘Cut the line!’ I called, and Cerdic, in our bows, slashed through the leather rope tethering us to the willow. We were only using twelve oars and those now bit into the river as I pushed my way forward between the rowers’ benches. ‘We kill them all!’ I shouted. ‘We kill them all!’

‘Pull!’ Ralla roared, and the twelve men heaved on their oars to fight the river’s power.

‘We kill every last bastard!’ I shouted as I climbed onto the small bow platform where my shield waited. ‘Kill them all! Kill them all!’ I put on my helmet, then pushed my left forearm through the shield loops, hefted the heavy wood, and slid Serpent-Breath from her fleece-lined scabbard. She did not sing now. She screamed.

‘Kill!’ I shouted. ‘Kill, kill, kill!’ and the oars bit in time to my shouting. Ahead of us the enemy ship slewed in the river as panicked men missed their stroke. They were shouting, looking for shields, scrambling over the benches where a few men still tried to row. Women screamed and men tripped each other.

‘Pull!’ Ralla shouted. Our nameless ship surged into the current as the enemy was swept towards us. Her monster’s head had a tongue painted red, white eyes, teeth like daggers.

‘Now!’ I called to Cerdic and he threw the grapnel with its chain so that it caught on the enemy ship’s bow and he hauled on the chain to sink the grapnel’s teeth into the ship’s timber and so draw her closer.

‘Now kill!’ I shouted, and leaped across the gap.

Oh the joy of being young. Of being twenty-eight years old, of being strong, of being a lord of war. All gone now, just memory is left, and memories fade. But the joy is bedded in the memory.

Serpent-Breath’s first stroke was a back-cut. I made it as I landed on the enemy’s bow platform where a man was trying to tug the grapnel free, and Serpent-Breath took him in the throat with a cut so fast and hard that it half severed his head. His whole skull flopped backwards as blood brightened the winter day. Blood splashed on my face. I was death come from the morning, blood-spattered death in mail and black cloak and wolf-crested helmet.

I am old now. So old. My sight fades, my muscles are weak, my piss dribbles, my bones ache and I sit in the sun and fall asleep to wake tired. But I remember those fights, those old fights. My newest wife, as pious a piece of stupid woman who ever whined, flinches when I tell the stories, but what else do the old have, but stories? She protested once, saying she did not want to know about heads flopping backwards in bright spraying blood, but how else are we to prepare our young for the wars they must fight? I have fought all my life. That was my fate, the fate of us all. Alfred wanted peace, but peace fled from him and the Danes came and the Norsemen came, and he had no choice but to fight. And when Alfred was dead and his kingdom was powerful, more Danes came, and more Norsemen, and the Britons came from Wales and the Scots howled down from the north, and what can a man do but fight for his land, his family, his home and his country? I look at my children and at their children and at their children’s children and I know they will have to fight, and that so long as there is a family named Uhtred, and so long as there is a kingdom on this windswept island, there will be war. So we cannot flinch from war. We cannot hide from its cruelty, its blood, its stench, its vileness or its joy, because war will come to us whether we want it or not. War is fate, and wyrd bið ful ãræd. Fate is inescapable.

So I tell these stories so that my children’s children will know their fate. My wife whimpers, but I make her listen. I tell her how our ship crashed into the enemy’s outside flank, and how the impact drove that other ship’s bows towards the southern bank. That was what I had wanted, and Ralla had achieved it perfectly. Now he scraped his ship down the enemy’s hull, our impetus snapping the Dane’s forward oars as my men jumped aboard, swords and axes swinging. I had staggered after that first cut, but the dead man had fallen off the platform to impede two others trying to reach me, and I shouted a challenge as I leaped down to face them. Serpent-Breath was lethal. She was, she is, a lovely blade, forged in the north by a Saxon smith who had known his trade. He had taken seven rods, four of iron and three of steel, and he had heated them and hammered them into one long two-edged blade with a leaf-shaped point. The four softer iron rods had been twisted in the fire and those twists survived in the blade as ghostly wisps of pattern that looked like the curling flame-breath of a dragon, and that was how Serpent-Breath had gained her name.

A bristle-bearded man swung an axe at me that I met with my out-thrust shield and slid the dragon-wisps into his belly. I gave a fierce twist with my right hand so that his dying flesh and guts did not grip the blade, then I yanked her out, more blood flying, and dragged the axe-impaled shield across my body to parry a sword cut. Sihtric was beside me, driving his short-sword up into my newest attacker’s groin. The man screamed. I think I was shouting. More and more of my men were aboard now, swords and axes glinting. Children cried, women wailed, raiders died.

The bows of the enemy ship thumped onto the bank’s mud while her stern began to swing outwards in the river’s grip. Some of the raiders, sensing death if they stayed aboard, jumped ashore, and that started a panic. More and more leaped for the bank, and it was then Finan came from the west. There was a small mist on the river meadows, just a pearly skein drifting over the iced puddles, and through it came Finan’s bright horsemen. They came in two lines, swords held like spears, and Finan, my deadly Irishman, knew his business and galloped the first line past the escaping men to cut off their retreat and let his second line crash into the enemy before he turned and led his own men back to the kill.

‘Kill them all!’ I shouted to him. ‘Kill every last one!’

A wave of a blood-reddened sword was his reply. I saw Clapa, my big Dane, spearing an enemy in the river’s shallows. Rypere was hacking his sword at a cowering man. Sihtric’s sword hand was red. Cerdic was swinging an axe, shouting incomprehensibly as the blade crushed and pierced a Dane’s helmet to spill blood and brains on the terrified prisoners. I think I killed two more, though my memory is not certain. I do remember pushing a man down onto the deck and, as he twisted around to face me, sliding Serpent-Breath into his gullet and watching his face distort and his tongue protrude from the blood welling past his blackened teeth. I leaned on the blade as the man died and watched as Finan’s men wheeled their horses to come back at the trapped enemy. The horsemen cut and slashed, Vikings screamed and some tried to surrender. One young man knelt on a rower’s bench, axe and shield discarded, and held his hands to me in supplication. ‘Pick up the axe,’ I told him, speaking Danish.

‘Lord …’ he began.

‘Pick it up!’ I interrupted him, ‘and watch for me in the corpse-hall.’ I waited till he was armed, then let Serpent-Breath take his life. I did it fast, showing mercy by slicing his throat with one quick scraping drag. I looked into his eyes as I killed him, saw his soul fly, then stepped over his twitching body, which slipped off the rower’s bench to collapse bloodily in the lap of a young woman who began to scream hysterically. ‘Quiet!’ I shouted at her. I scowled at all the other women and children screaming or weeping as they cowered in the bilge. I put Serpent-Breath into my shield hand, took hold of the mail collar of the dying man, and heaved him back onto the bench.

One child was not crying. He was a boy, perhaps nine or ten years old, and he was just staring at me, mouth agape, and I remembered myself at that age. What did that boy see? He saw a man of metal, for I had fought with the face-plates of my helmet closed. You see less with the plates hinged across the cheeks, but the appearance is more frightening. That boy saw a tall man, mail-clad, sword bloody, steel-faced, stalking a boat of death. I eased off my helmet and shook my hair loose, then tossed him the wolf-crested metal. ‘Look after it, boy,’ I told him, then I gave Serpent-Breath to the girl who had been screaming. ‘Wash the blade in river water,’ I ordered her, ‘and dry it on a dead man’s cloak.’ I gave my shield to Sihtric, then stretched my arms wide and lifted my face to the morning sun.

There had been fifty-four raiders, and sixteen still lived. They were prisoners. None had escaped past Finan’s men. I drew Wasp-Sting, my short-sword that was so lethal in a shield wall fight when men are pressed close as lovers. ‘Any of you,’ I looked at the women, ‘who wants to kill the man who raped you, then do it now!’

Two women wanted revenge and I let them use Wasp-Sting. Both of them butchered their victims. One stabbed repeatedly, the other hacked, and both men died slowly. Of the remaining fourteen men, one was not in mail. He was the enemy’s shipmaster. He was grey-haired with a scanty beard and brown eyes that looked at me belligerently. ‘Where did you come from?’ I asked him.

He thought about refusing to answer, then thought better. ‘Beamfleot,’ he said.

‘And Lundene?’ I asked him. ‘The old city is still in Danish hands?’

‘Yes.’

‘Yes, lord,’ I corrected him.

‘Yes, lord,’ he conceded.

‘Then you will go to Lundene,’ I told him, ‘and then to Beamfleot, and then to anywhere you wish, and you will tell the Northmen that Uhtred of Bebbanburg guards the River Temes. And you will tell them they are welcome to come here whenever they wish.’

That one man lived. I hacked off his right hand before letting him go. I did it so he could never wield a sword again. By then we had lit a fire and I thrust his bleeding stump into the red-hot embers to seal the wound. He was a brave man. He flinched when we cauterised his stump, but he did not scream as his blood bubbled and his flesh sizzled. I wrapped his shortened arm in a piece of cloth taken from a dead man’s shirt. ‘Go,’ I ordered him, pointing downriver. ‘Just go.’ He walked eastwards. If he were lucky he would survive the journey to spread the news of my savagery.

We killed the others, all of them.

‘Why did you kill them?’ my new wife asked once, distaste for my thoroughness evident in her voice.

‘So they would learn to fear,’ I answered her, ‘of course.’

‘Dead men can’t fear,’ she said.

I try to be patient with her. ‘A ship left Beamfleot,’ I explained, ‘and it never went back. And other men who wanted to raid Wessex heard of that ship’s fate. And those men decided to take their swords somewhere else. I killed that ship’s crew to save myself having to kill hundreds of other Danes.’

‘The Lord Jesus would have wanted you to show mercy,’ she said, her eyes wide.

She is an idiot.

Finan took some of the villagers back to their burned homes where they dug graves for their dead while my men hanged the corpses of our enemies from trees beside the river. We made ropes from strips torn from their clothes. We took their mail, their weapons and their arm rings. We cut off their long hair, for I liked to caulk my ships’ planks with the hair of slain enemies, and then we hanged them and their pale naked bodies twisted in the small wind as the ravens came to take their dead eyes.

Fifty-three bodies hung by the river. A warning to those who might follow. Fifty-three signals that other raiders were risking death by rowing up the Temes.

Then we went home, taking the enemy ship with us.

And Serpent-Breath slept in her scabbard.

PART ONE

The Bride

One

‘The dead speak,’ Æthelwold told me. He was sober for once. Sober and awed and serious. The night wind snatched at the house and the rushlights flickered red in the wintry draughts that whipped from the roof’s smoke-hole and through the doors and shutters.

‘The dead speak?’ I asked.

‘A corpse,’ Æthelwold said, ‘he rises from the grave and he speaks.’ He stared at me wide-eyed, then nodded as if to stress that he spoke the truth. He was leaning towards me, his clasped hands fidgeting between his knees. ‘I have seen it,’ he added.

‘A corpse talks?’ I asked.

‘He rises!’ He wafted a hand to show what he meant.

‘He?’

‘The dead man. He rises and he speaks.’ He still stared at me, his expression indignant. ‘It’s true,’ he added in a voice that suggested he knew I did not believe him.

I edged my bench closer to the hearth. It was ten days after I had killed the raiders and hanged their bodies by the river, and now a freezing rain rattled on the thatch and beat on the barred shutters. Two of my hounds lay in front of the fire and one gave me a resentful glance when I scraped the bench, then rested his head again. The house had been built by the Romans, which meant the floor was tiled and the walls were of stone, though I had thatched the roof myself. Rain spat through the smoke-hole. ‘What does the dead man say?’ Gisela asked. She was my wife and the mother of my two children.

Æthelwold did not answer at once, perhaps because he believed a woman should not take part in a serious discussion, but my silence told him that Gisela was welcome to speak in her own house and he was too nervous to insist that I dismiss her. ‘He says I should be king,’ he admitted softly, then gazed at me, fearing my reaction.

‘King of what?’ I asked flatly.

‘Wessex,’ he said, ‘of course.’

‘Oh, Wessex,’ I said, as though I had never heard of the place.

‘And I should be king!’ Æthelwold protested. ‘My father was king!’

‘And now your father’s brother is king,’ I said, ‘and men say he is a good king.’

‘Do you say that?’ he challenged me.

I did not answer. It was well enough known that I did not like Alfred and that Alfred did not like me, but that did not mean Alfred’s nephew, Æthelwold, would make a better king. Æthelwold, like me, was in his late twenties, and he had made a reputation as a drunk and a lecherous fool. Yet he did have a claim to the throne of Wessex. His father had indeed been king, and if Alfred had possessed a thimbleful of sense he would have had his nephew’s throat sliced to the bone. Instead Alfred relied on Æthelwold’s thirst for ale to keep him from making trouble. ‘Where did you see this living corpse?’ I asked, instead of answering his question.

He waved a hand towards the north side of the house. ‘On the other side of the street,’ he said. ‘Just the other side.’

‘Wæclingastræt?’ I asked him, and he nodded.

So he was talking to the Danes as well as to the dead. Wæclingastræt is a road that goes north-west from Lundene. It slants across Britain, ending at the Irish Sea just north of Wales, and everything to the south of the street was supposedly Saxon land, and everything to the north was yielded to the Danes. That was the peace we had in that year of 885, though it was a peace scummed with skirmish and hate. ‘Is it a Danish corpse?’ I asked.

Æthelwold nodded. ‘His name is Bjorn,’ he said, ‘and he was a skald in Guthrum’s court, and he refused to become a Christian so Guthrum killed him. He can be summoned from his grave. I’ve seen it.’

I looked at Gisela. She was a Dane, and the sorcery that Æthelwold described was nothing I had ever known among my fellow Saxons. Gisela shrugged, suggesting that the magic was equally strange to her. ‘Who summons the dead man?’ she asked.

‘A fresh corpse,’ Æthelwold said.

‘A fresh corpse?’ I asked.

‘Someone must be sent to the world of the dead,’ he explained, as though it were obvious, ‘to find Bjorn and bring him back.’

‘So they kill someone?’ Gisela asked.

‘How else can they send a messenger to the dead?’ Æthelwold asked pugnaciously.

‘And this Bjorn,’ I asked, ‘does he speak English?’ I put the question for I knew that Æthelwold spoke little or no Danish.

‘He speaks English,’ Æthelwold said sullenly. He did not like being questioned.

‘Who took you to him?’ I asked.

‘Some Danes,’ he said vaguely.

I sneered at that. ‘So some Danes came,’ I said, ‘and told you a dead poet wanted to speak to you, and you meekly travelled into Guthrum’s land?’

‘They paid me gold,’ he said defensively. Æthelwold was ever in debt.

‘And why come to us?’ I asked. Æthelwold did not answer. He fidgeted and watched Gisela, who was teasing a thread of wool onto her distaff. ‘You go to Guthrum’s land,’ I persisted, ‘you speak to a dead man, and then you come to me. Why?’

‘Because Bjorn said you will be a king too,’ Æthelwold said. He had not spoken loudly, but even so I held up a hand to hush him and I looked anxiously at the doorway as if expecting to see a spy listening from the darkness of the next room. I had no doubt Alfred had spies in my household and I thought I knew who they were, but I was not entirely certain that I had identified all of them, which was why I had made sure all the servants were well away from the room where Æthelwold and I talked. Even so it was not wise to say such things too loudly.

Gisela had stopped spinning the wool and was staring at Æthelwold. I was too. ‘He said what?’ I asked.

‘He said that you, Uhtred,’ Æthelwold went on more quietly, ‘will be crowned King of Mercia.’

‘Have you been drinking?’ I asked.

‘No,’ he said, ‘only ale.’ He leaned towards me. ‘Bjorn the Dead wishes to speak to you also, to tell you your fate. You and me, Uhtred, will be kings and neighbours. The gods want it and they sent a dead man to tell me so.’ Æthelwold was shaking slightly, and sweating, but he was not drinking. Something had scared him into sobriety, and that convinced me he spoke the truth. ‘They want to know if you are willing to meet the dead,’ he said, ‘and if you are then they will send for you.’

I looked at Gisela who merely looked back at me, her face expressionless. I stared back at her, not waiting for a response, but because she was beautiful, so beautiful. My dark Dane, my lovely Gisela, my bride, my love. She must have known what I was thinking, for her long, grave face was transformed by a slow smile. ‘Uhtred is to be king?’ she asked, breaking the silence and looking at Æthelwold.

‘The dead say so,’ Æthelwold said defiantly. ‘And Bjorn heard it from the three sisters.’ He meant the Fates, the Norns, the three sisters who weave our destiny.

‘Uhtred is to be King of Mercia?’ Gisela asked dubiously.

‘And you will be the queen,’ Æthelwold said.

Gisela looked back to me. She had a quizzical look, but I did not try to answer what I knew she was thinking. Instead I was reflecting that there was no king in Mercia. The old one, a Saxon mongrel on a Danish leash, had died, and there was no successor, while the kingdom itself was now split between Danes and Saxons. My mother’s brother had been an ealdorman in Mercia before he was killed by the Welsh, so I had Mercian blood. And there was no king in Mercia.

‘I think you had better hear what the dead man says,’ Gisela spoke gravely.

‘If they send for me,’ I promised, ‘I will.’ And so I would, because a dead man was speaking and he wanted me to be a king.

Alfred arrived a week later. It was a fine day with a pale blue sky in which the midday sun hung low above a cold land. Ice edged the sluggish channels where the River Temes flowed about Sceaftes Eye and Wodenes Eye. Coot, moorhen and dabchicks paddled at the edge of the ice, while on the thawing mud of Sceaftes Eye a host of thrush and blackbirds hunted for worms and snails.

This was home. This had been my home for two years now. Home was Coccham, at the edge of Wessex where the Temes flowed towards Lundene and the sea. I, Uhtred, a Northumbrian lord, an exile and a warrior, had become a builder, a trader and a father. I served Alfred, King of Wessex, not because I wished to, but because I had given him my oath.

And Alfred had given me a task; to build his new burh at Coccham. A burh was a town turned into a fortress and Alfred was riveting his kingdom of Wessex with such places. All around the boundaries of Wessex, on the sea, on the rivers and on the moors facing the wild Cornish savages, the walls were being built. A Danish army could invade between the fortresses, but they would discover still more strongholds in Alfred’s heartland, and each burh held a garrison. Alfred, in a rare moment of savage elation, had described the burhs to me as wasps’ nests from which men could swarm to sting the attacking Danes. Burhs were being made at Exanceaster and Werham, at Cisseceastre and Hastengas, at Æscengum and Oxnaforda, at Cracgelad and Wæced, and at dozens of places between. Their walls and palisades were manned by spears and shields. Wessex was becoming a land of fortresses, and my task was to make the little town of Coccham into a burh.

The work was done by every West Saxon man over the age of twelve. Half of them worked while the other half tended the fields. At Coccham I was supposed to have five hundred men serving at any one time, though usually there were fewer than three hundred. They dug, they banked, they cut timber for walls, and so we had raised a stronghold on the banks of the Temes. In truth it was two strongholds, one on the river’s southern bank and the other on Sceaftes Eye, which was an island splitting the river into two channels, and in that January of 885 the work was nearly done and no Danish ship could now row upstream to raid the farms and villages along the river’s bank. They could try, but they must pass my new ramparts and know that my troops would follow them, trap them ashore and kill them.

A Danish trader called Ulf had come that morning, tying his boat at the wharf on Sceaftes Eye where one of my officials prodded through the cargo to assess the tax. Ulf himself, grinning toothlessly, climbed up to greet me. He gave me a piece of amber wrapped in kidskin. ‘For the Lady Gisela, lord,’ he said. ‘She is well?’

‘She is,’ I said, touching Thor’s hammer that hung around my neck.

‘And you have a second child, I hear?’

‘A girl,’ I said, ‘and where did you hear of her?’

‘Beamfleot,’ he said, which made sense. Ulf was a northerner, but no ships were making the voyage from Northumbria to Wessex in the depth of this cold winter. He must have spent the season in southern East Anglia, on the long intricate mudflats of the Temes estuary. ‘It isn’t much,’ he said, gesturing at his cargo. ‘I bought some hides and axe blades in Grantaceaster and thought I’d come upriver to see if you Saxons have any money left.’

‘You came upriver,’ I told him, ‘to see whether we’d finished the fortress. You’re a spy, Ulf, and I think I’ll hang you from a tree.’

‘No, you won’t,’ he said, unmoved by my words.

‘I’m bored,’ I said, putting the amber into my pouch, ‘and watching a Dane twitch on a rope would be amusing, wouldn’t it?’

‘You must have been laughing when you hanged Jarrel’s crew then,’ he said.

‘Was that who it was?’ I asked. ‘Jarrel? I didn’t ask his name.’

‘I saw thirty bodies,’ Ulf said, jerking his head downstream, ‘maybe more? All hanging from trees and I thought, that looks like Lord Uhtred’s work.’

‘Only thirty?’ I said, ‘there were fifty-three. I should add your miserable corpse, Ulf, to help make up the numbers.’

‘You don’t want me,’ Ulf said cheerfully, ‘you want a young one, because young ones twitch more than us old ones.’ He peered down at his boat and spat towards a red-haired boy who was staring vacantly across the river. ‘You could hang that little bastard. He’s my wife’s oldest boy and nothing but a piece of toad gristle. He’ll twitch.’

‘So who’s in Lundene these days?’ I asked.

‘Earl Haesten’s in and out,’ Ulf said, ‘more in than out.’

I was surprised by that. I knew Haesten. He was a young Dane who had once been my oath-man, but who had broken his oath and now aspired to be a warrior lord. He called himself an earl, which amused me, but I was surprised he had gone to Lundene. I knew he had made a walled camp on the coast of East Anglia, but now he had moved much closer to Wessex, which suggested he was looking for trouble. ‘So what’s he doing?’ I asked scornfully, ‘stealing his neighbours’ ducks?’

Ulf drew in a breath and shook his head. ‘He’s got allies, lord.’

Something in his tone made me wary. ‘Allies?’

‘The Thurgilson brothers,’ Ulf said, and touched his hammer amulet.

The name meant nothing to me then. ‘Thurgilson?’

‘Sigefrid and Erik,’ Elf said, still touching the hammer. ‘Norse earls, lord.’

That was something new. The Norse did not usually come to East Anglia or to Wessex. We often heard tales of their raids in the Scottish lands and in Ireland, but Norse chieftains rarely came close to Wessex. ‘What are Norsemen doing in Lundene?’ I asked.

‘They got there two days ago, lord,’ Ulf said, ‘with twenty-two keels. Haesten went with them, and he took nine ships.’

I whistled softly. Thirty-one ships was a fleet and it meant the brothers and Haesten together commanded an army of at least a thousand men. And those men were in Lundene and Lundene was on the frontier of Wessex.

Lundene was a strange city back then. Officially it was part of Mercia, but Mercia had no king and so Lundene had no ruler. It was neither Saxon nor Dane, but a mix of both, and a place where a man could become rich, dead, or both. It stood where Mercia, East Anglia and Wessex met, a city of merchants, tradesmen and seafarers. And now, if Ulf was right, it had an army of Vikings within its walls.

Ulf chuckled. ‘They’ve got you stopped up like a rat in a sack, lord.’

I wondered how a fleet had gathered and ridden the tide upstream to Lundene without my finding out long before it sailed. Coccham was the nearest burh to Lundene and I usually knew what happened there within a day, but now an enemy had occupied the city and I had known nothing about it. ‘Did the brothers send you to tell me this?’ I asked Ulf. I was assuming that the Thurgilson brothers and Haesten had only captured Lundene so that someone, probably Alfred, would pay them to go away. In which case it served their interest to let us know of their arrival.

Ulf shook his head. ‘I sailed as they arrived, lord. Bad enough having to pay you duty without giving half my goods to them.’ He shuddered. ‘The Earl Sigefrid’s a bad man, lord. Not someone to do business with.’

‘Why didn’t I know they were with Haesten?’ I asked.

‘They weren’t. They’ve been in Frankia. Sailed straight across the sea and up the river.’

‘With twenty-two ships of Norsemen,’ I said bitterly.

‘They’ve got everything, lord,’ Ulf said. ‘Danes, Frisians, Saxons, Norse, everything. Sigefrid finds men wherever the gods shake out their shit-pots. They’re hungry men, lord. Masterless men. Rogues. They come from all over.’

The masterless man was the worst kind. He owed no allegiance. He had nothing but his sword, his hunger and his ambition. I had been such a man in my time. ‘So Sigefrid and Erik will be trouble?’ I suggested mildly.

‘Sigefrid will,’ Ulf said. ‘Erik? He’s the younger. Men speak well of him, but Sigefrid can’t wait for trouble.’

‘He wants ransom?’ I asked.

‘He might,’ Ulf said dubiously. ‘He’s got to pay all those men, and he got nothing but mouse droppings in Frankia. But who’ll pay him ransom? Lundene belongs to Mercia, doesn’t it?’

‘It does,’ I said.

‘And there’s no king in Mercia,’ Ulf said. ‘Isn’t natural, is it? A kingdom without a king.’

I thought of Æthelwold’s visit and touched my amulet of Thor’s hammer. ‘Have you ever heard of the dead being raised?’ I asked Ulf.

‘The dead being raised?’ He stared at me, alarmed, and touched his own hammer amulet. ‘The dead are best left in Niflheim, lord.’

‘An old magic, perhaps?’ I suggested. ‘Raising the dead?’

‘You hear tales,’ Ulf said, now gripping his amulet tightly.

‘What tales?’

‘From the far north, lord. From the land of ice and birch. Strange things happen there. They say men can fly in the darkness, and I did hear that the dead walk on the frozen seas, but I never saw such a thing.’ He raised the amulet to his lips and kissed it. ‘I reckon they’re just stories to scare children on winter nights, lord.’

‘Maybe,’ I said, and turned as a boy came running along the foot of the newly raised wall. He jumped the timbers that would eventually make the fighting platform, skidded in a piece of mud, clambered up the bank and then stood, panting too hard to be able to speak. I waited until he caught his breath. ‘Haligast, lord,’ he said, ‘Haligast!’

Ulf looked at me quizzically. Like all traders he spoke some English, but haligast puzzled him. ‘The Holy Ghost,’ I translated into Danish.

‘Coming, lord,’ the boy gasped excitedly and pointed upriver. ‘Coming now!’

‘The Holy Ghost is coming?’ Ulf asked in alarm. He probably had no idea what the Holy Ghost was, but he knew enough to fear all spectres, and my recent question about the living dead had scared him.

‘Alfred’s ship,’ I explained, then turned back to the boy. ‘Is the king on board?’

‘His flag’s flying, lord.’

‘Then he is,’ I said.

Ulf pulled his tunic straight. ‘Alfred? What does he want?’

‘He wants to discover my loyalties,’ I said drily.

Ulf grinned. ‘So you might be the one who twitches on a rope, eh, lord?’

‘I need axe-heads,’ I told him. ‘Take your best ones to the house and we’ll discuss a price later.’

I was not surprised by Alfred’s arrival. In those years he spent much of his time travelling between the growing burhs to inspect the work. He had been to Coccham a dozen times in as many months, but this visit, I reckoned, was not to examine the walls, but to find out why Æthelwold had come to see me. The king’s spies had done their work, and so the king had come to question me.

His ship was coming fast, carried by the Temes’s winter flow. In the cold months it was quicker to travel by ship, and Alfred liked the Haligast because it enabled him to work on board as he journeyed along the northern frontier of Wessex. The Haligast had twenty oars and room enough for half Alfred’s bodyguard and the inevitable troop of priests. The king’s banner, a green dragon, flew from the masthead, while two flags hung from the cross spar, which would have held a sail if the ship had been at sea. One flag showed a saint, while the other was a green cloth embroidered with a white cross. At the ship’s stern was a small cabin that cramped the steersman, but provided Alfred a place to keep his desk. A second ship, the Heofonhlaf, carried the rest of the bodyguard and still more priests. Heofonhlaf meant bread of heaven. Alfred never could name a ship.

Heofonhlaf berthed first and a score of men in mail, carrying shields and spears, clambered ashore to line the wooden wharf. The Haligast followed, her steersman thumping the bow hard on a piling so that Alfred, who was waiting amidships, staggered. There were kings who might have disembowelled 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 he had asked his questions of me. For now he was content to inspect the work we had been doing and he found nothing to criticise, 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 already knew what had been discussed on that night of cold wind and hard rain. ‘There are men,’ he went on, still staring at the Mercian bank, ‘who would like to be King of Mercia.’ He paused and I was certain he knew everything that Æthelwold had said to me, but then he betrayed his ignorance. ‘My nephew Æthelwold?’ he suggested.

I gave a burst of laughter that was made too loud by my relief. ‘Æthelwold!’ I said. ‘He doesn’t want to be King of Mercia! He wants your throne, lord.’

‘He told you that?’ he asked sharply.

‘Of course he told me that,’ I said. ‘He tells everyone that!’

‘Is that why he came to see you?’ Alfred asked, unable to hide his curiosity any longer.

‘He came to buy a horse, lord,’ I lied. ‘He wants my stallion, Smoca, and I told him no.’ Smoca’s hide was an unusual mix of grey and black, thus his name, Smoke, and he had won every race he had ever run in his life and, better, was not afraid of men, shields, weapons or noise. I could have sold Smoca to any warrior in Britain.

‘And he talked of wanting to be king?’ Alfred asked suspiciously.

‘Of course he did.’

‘You didn’t tell me at the time,’ he said reproachfully.

‘If I told you every time Æthelwold talked treason,’ I said, ‘you’d never cease to hear from me. What I tell you now is that you should slice his head off.’

‘He is my nephew,’ Alfred said stiffly, ‘and has royal blood.’

‘He still has a removable head,’ I insisted.

He waved a petulant hand as if my idea were risible. ‘I thought of making him king in Mercia,’ he said, ‘but he would lose the throne.’

‘He would,’ I agreed.

‘He’s weak,’ Alfred said scornfully, ‘and Mercia needs a strong ruler. Someone to frighten the Danes.’ I confess at that moment I thought he meant me and I was ready to thank him, even fall to my knees and take his hand, but then he enlightened me. ‘Your cousin, I think.’

‘Æthelred!’ I asked, unable to hide my scorn. My cousin was a bumptious little prick, full of his own importance, but he was also close to Alfred. So close that he was going to marry Alfred’s elder daughter.

‘He can be ealdorman in Mercia,’ Alfred said, ‘and rule with my blessing.’ In other words my miserable cousin would govern Mercia on Alfred’s leash and, if I am truthful, that was a better solution for Alfred than letting someone like me take Mercia’s throne. Æthelred, married to Æthelflaed, was more likely to be Alfred’s man, and Mercia, or at least that part of it south of Wæclingastræt, would be like a province of Wessex.

‘If my cousin,’ I said, ‘is to be Lord of Mercia, then he’ll be Lord of Lundene?’

‘Of course.’

‘Then he has a problem, lord,’ I said, and I confess I spoke with some pleasure at the prospect of my pompous cousin having to deal with a thousand rogues commanded by Norse earls. ‘A fleet of thirty-one ships arrived in Lundene two days ago,’ I went on. ‘The Earls Sigefrid and Erik Thurgilson command them. Haesten of Beamfleot is an ally. So far as I know, lord, Lundene now belongs to Norsemen and Danes.’

For a moment Alfred said nothing, but just stared at the swan-haunted floodwaters. He looked paler than ever. His jaw clenched. ‘You sound pleased,’ he said bitterly.

‘I do not mean to, lord,’ I said.

‘How in God’s name can that happen?’ he demanded angrily. He turned and gazed at the burh’s walls. ‘The Thurgilson brothers were in Frankia,’ he said. I might never have heard of Sigefrid and Erik, but Alfred made it his business to know where the Viking bands were roving.

‘They’re in Lundene now,’ I said remorselessly.

He fell silent again, and I knew what he was thinking. He was thinking that the Temes is our road to other kingdoms, to the rest of the world, and if the Danes and the Norse block the Temes, then Wessex was cut off from much of the world’s trade. Of course there were other ports and other rivers, but the Temes is the great river that sucks in vessels from all the wide seas. ‘Do they want money?’ he asked bitterly.

‘That is Mercia’s problem, lord,’ I suggested.

‘Don’t be a fool!’ he snapped at me. ‘Lundene might be in Mercia, but the river belongs to both of us.’ He turned around again, staring downriver almost as though he expected to see the masts of Norse ships appearing in the distance. ‘If they will not go,’ he said quietly, ‘then they will have to be expelled.’

‘Yes, lord.’

‘And that,’ he said decisively, ‘will be my wedding gift to your cousin.’

‘Lundene?’

‘And you will provide it,’ he said savagely. ‘You will restore Lundene to Mercian rule, Lord Uhtred. Let me know by the Feast of Saint David what force you will need to secure the gift.’ He frowned, thinking. ‘Your cousin will command the army, but he is too busy to plan the campaign. You will make the necessary preparations and advise him.’

‘I will?’ I asked sourly.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘you will.’

He did not stay to eat. He said prayers in the church, gave silver to the nunnery, then embarked on Haligast and vanished upstream.

And I was to capture Lundene and give all the glory to my cousin Æthelred.

The summons to meet the dead came two weeks later and took me by surprise.

Each morning, unless the snow was too thick for easy travel, a crowd of petitioners waited at my gate. I was the ruler in Coccham, the man who dispensed justice, and Alfred had granted me that power, knowing it was essential if his burh was to be built. He had given me more. I was entitled to a tenth part of every harvest in northern Berrocscire, I was given pigs and cattle and grain, and from that income I paid for the timber that made the walls and the weapons that guarded them. There was opportunity in that, and Alfred suspected me, which is why he had given me a sly priest called Wulfstan, whose task was to make sure I did not steal too much. Yet it was Wulfstan who stole. He had come to me in the summer, half grinning, and pointed out that the dues we collected from the merchants who used the river were unpredictable, which meant Alfred could never estimate whether we were keeping proper accounts. He waited for my approval and got a thump about his tonsured skull instead. I sent him to Alfred under guard with a letter describing his dishonesty, and then I stole the dues myself. The priest had been a fool. You never, ever, tell others of your crimes, not unless they are so big as to be incapable of concealment, and then you describe them as policy or statecraft.

I did not steal much, no more than another man in my position would put aside, and the work on the burh’s walls proved to Alfred that I was doing my job. I have always loved building and life has few ordinary pleasures greater than chatting with the skilled men who split, shape and join timbers. I dispensed justice too, and I did that well, because my father, who had been Lord of Bebbanburg in Northumbria, had taught me that a lord’s duty was to the folk he ruled, and that they would forgive a lord many sins so long as he protected them. So each day I would listen to misery, and some two weeks after Alfred’s visit I remember a morning of spitting rain in which some two dozen folk knelt to me in the mud outside my hall. I cannot remember all the petitions now, but doubtless they were the usual complaints of boundary stones being moved or of a marriage-price unpaid. I made my decisions swiftly, gauging my judgments by the demeanour of the petitioners. I usually reckoned a defiant petitioner was probably lying, while a tearful one elicited my pity. I doubt I got every decision right, but folk were content enough with my judgments and they knew I did not take bribes to favour the wealthy.

I do remember one petitioner that morning. He was solitary, which was unusual, for most folk arrived with friends or relatives to swear the truth of their complaints, but this man came alone and continually allowed others to get ahead of him. He plainly wanted to be the last to talk to me, and I suspected he wanted a lot of my time and I was tempted to end the morning session without granting him audience, but in the end I let him speak and he was mercifully brief.

‘Bjorn has disturbed my land, lord,’ he said. He was kneeling and all I could see of him was his tangled and dirt-crusted hair.

For a moment I did not recognise the name. ‘Bjorn?’ I demanded. ‘Who is Bjorn?’

‘The man who disturbs my land, lord, in the night.’

‘A Dane?’ I asked, puzzled.

‘He comes from his grave, lord,’ the man said, and I understood then and hushed him to silence so that the priest who noted down my judgments would not learn too much.

I tipped up the petitioner’s head to see a scrawny face. By his tongue I reckoned him for a Saxon, but perhaps he was a Dane who spoke our tongue perfectly, so I tried him in Danish. ‘Where have you come from?’ I asked.

‘From the disturbed ground, lord,’ he answered in Danish, but it was obvious from the way he mangled the words that he was no Dane.

‘Beyond the street?’ I spoke English again.

‘Yes, lord,’ he said.

‘And when does Bjorn disturb your land again?’

‘The day after tomorrow, lord. He will come after moonrise.’

‘You are sent to guide me?’

‘Yes, lord.’

We rode next day. Gisela wanted to come, but I would not allow her for I did not wholly trust the summons, and because of that mistrust I rode with six men; Finan, Clapa, Sihtric, Rypere, Eadric and Cenwulf. The last three were Saxons, Clapa and Sihtric were Danes, and Finan was the fiery Irishman who commanded my household troops, and all six were my oath-men. My life was theirs as theirs was mine. Gisela stayed behind Coccham’s walls, guarded by the fyrd and by the remainder of my household troops.

We rode in mail and we carried weapons. We went west and north first because the Temes was winter swollen and we had to ride a long way upstream to find a ford shallow enough to be crossed. That was at Welengaford, another burh, and I noted how the earth walls were unfinished and how the timber to make the palisades lay rotting and untrimmed in the mud. The commander of the garrison, a man named Oslac, wanted to know why we crossed the river, and it was his right to know because he guarded this part of the frontier between Wessex and lawless Mercia. I said a fugitive had fled Coccham and was thought to be skulking on the Temes’s northern bank, and Oslac believed the tale. It would reach Alfred soon enough.

The man who had brought the summons was our guide. He was called Huda and he told me he served a Dane named Eilaf who had an estate that bordered the eastern side of Wæclingastræt. That made Eilaf an East Anglian and a subject of King Guthrum. ‘Is Eilaf a Christian?’ I asked Huda.

‘We are all Christians, lord,’ Huda said, ‘King Guthrum demands it.’

‘So what does Eilaf wear about his neck?’ I asked.

‘The same as you, lord,’ he said. I wore Thor’s hammer because I was no Christian and Huda’s answer told me that Eilaf, like me, worshipped the older gods, though to please his king, Guthrum, he pretended to a belief in the Christian god. I had known Guthrum in the days when he had led great armies to attack Wessex, but he was getting old now. He had adopted his enemy’s religion and it seemed he no longer wanted to rule all Britain, but was content with the wide fertile fields of East Anglia as his kingdom. Yet there were many in his lands who were not content. Sigefrid, Erik, Haesten, and probably Eilaf. They were Norsemen and Danes, they were warriors, they sacrificed to Thor and to Odin, they kept their swords sharp and they dreamed, as all Northmen dream, of the richer lands of Wessex.

We rode through Mercia, the land without a king, and I noted how many farmsteads had been burned so that the only trace of their existence was now a patch of scorched earth where weeds grew. More weeds smothered what had been ploughland. Hazel saplings had invaded the pastures. Where folk did still live, they lived in fear and when they saw us coming they ran to the woodlands, or else shut themselves behind palisades. ‘Who rules here?’ I asked Huda.

‘Danes,’ he said, then jerked his head westwards, ‘Saxons over there.’

‘Eilaf doesn’t want this land?’

‘He has much of it, lord,’ Huda said, ‘but the Saxons harass him.’

According to the treaty between Alfred and Guthrum this land was Saxon, but the Danes are land hungry and Guthrum could not control all his thegns. So this was battle land, a place where both sides fought a sullen, small and endless war, and the Danes were offering me its crown.

I am a Saxon. A northerner. I am Uhtred of Bebbanburg, but I had been raised by the Danes and I knew their ways. I spoke their tongue, I had married a Dane, and I worshipped their gods. If I were to be king here then the Saxons would know they had a Saxon ruler while the Danes would accept me because I had been as a son to Earl Ragnar. But to be king here was to turn on Alfred and, if the dead man had spoken truly, to put Alfred’s drunken nephew on the throne of Wessex, and how long would Æthelwold last? Less than a year, I reckoned, before the Danes killed him, and then all England would be under Danish rule except for Mercia where I, a Saxon who thought like a Dane, would be king. And how long would the Danes tolerate me?

‘Do you want to be a king?’ Gisela had asked me the night before we rode.

‘I never thought I did,’ I answered cautiously.

‘Then why go?’

I had stared into the fire. ‘Because the dead man brings a message from the Fates,’ I told her.

She had touched her amulet. ‘The Fates can’t be avoided,’ she said softly. Wyrd bið ful ãræd.

‘So I must go,’ I said, ‘because fate demands it. And because I want to see a dead man talk.’

‘And if the dead man says you are to be a king?’

‘Then you will be a queen,’ I said.

‘And you will fight Alfred?’ Gisela asked.

‘If the Fates say so,’ I said.

‘And your oath to him?’

‘The Fates know that answer,’ I said, ‘but I don’t.’

And now we rode beneath beech-covered hills that slanted east and north. We spent the night in a deserted farm and one of us was always awake. Nothing disturbed us and, in the dawn, under a sky the colour of sword-steel, we rode on. Huda led, mounted on one of my horses. I talked to him for a while to discover that he was a huntsman and that he had served a Saxon lord killed by Eilaf, and that he reckoned himself content under the Dane’s lordship. His replies became surlier and shorter as we neared Wæclingastræt so, after a while, I dropped back to ride beside Finan. ‘Trust him?’ Finan asked, nodding at Huda.

I shrugged. ‘His master does Sigefrid and Haesten’s bidding,’ I said, ‘and I know Haesten. I saved his life and that means something.’

Finan thought about it. ‘You saved his life? How?’

‘I rescued him from some Frisians. He became my oath-man.’

‘And broke his oath?’

‘He did.’

‘So Haesten can’t be trusted,’ Finan said firmly. I said nothing. Three deer stood poised for flight at the far side of a bare pasture. We rode on an overgrown track beside a hedgerow where crocuses grew. ‘What they want,’ Finan went on, ‘is Wessex. And to take Wessex they must fight. And they know you are Alfred’s greatest warrior.’

‘What they want,’ I said, ‘is the burh at Coccham.’ And to get it they would offer me the crown of Mercia, though I had not revealed that offer to Finan or to any other man. I had only told Gisela.

Of course they wanted much more. They wanted Lundene because it gave them a walled town on the Temes, but Lundene was on the Mercian bank and would not help them invade Wessex. But if I gave them Coccham then they were on the river’s south bank and they could use Coccham as a base to raid deep into Wessex. At the very least Alfred would pay them to leave Coccham and so they would make much silver even if they failed to dislodge him from the throne.

But Sigefrid, Erik and Haesten, I reckoned, were not after mere silver. Wessex was the prize, and to gain Wessex they needed men. Guthrum would not help them, Mercia was riven between Dane and Saxon and could supply few men willing to leave their homes unguarded, but beyond Mercia was Northumbria, and Northumbria had a Danish king who commanded the loyalty of a great Danish warrior. The king was Gisela’s brother and the warrior, Ragnar, was my friend. By buying me they believed they could bring Northumbria into their war. The Danish north would conquer the Saxon south. That was what they wanted. That was what the Danes had wanted all my life. And all I needed to do was break my oath to Alfred and become king in Mercia, and the land that some called England would become Daneland. That, I reckoned, was why the dead man had summoned me.

We came to Wæclingastræt at sunset. The Romans had strengthened the road with a gravel bed and stone edges, and some of their masonry still showed through the pale winter grass beside which a moss-grown milestone read Durocobrivis V. ‘What’s Durocobrivis?’ I asked Huda.

‘We call it Dunastopol,’ he said with a shrug to indicate that the place was negligible.

We crossed the street. In a well-governed country I might have expected to see guards patrolling the road to protect travellers, but there were none in sight here. There were just crows flying to a nearby wood and silvered clouds stretching across the western sky while ahead of us the darkness lay swollen and heavy above East Anglia. Low hills lay to the north, towards Dunastopol, and Huda led us towards those hills and up a long shallow valley where bare apple trees stood stark in the gloom. Night had fallen by the time we reached Eilaf’s hall.

Eilaf’s men greeted me as though I were already a king. Servants waited at the gate of his palisade to take our horses, and another knelt at the doorway of the hall to offer me a bowl of washing water and a cloth to dry my hands. A steward took my two swords, the long-bladed Serpent-Breath and the gut-ripper called Wasp-Sting. He took them respectfully, as if he regretted the custom that no man could carry a blade inside a hall, but that was a good custom. Blades and ale do not mix well.

The hall was crowded. There were at least forty men there, most in mail or leather, standing either side of the central hearth where a great fire blazed to fill the beamed roof with smoke. Some of the men bowed as I entered, others just stared at me as I walked to greet my host, who stood with his wife and two sons beside the hearth. Haesten was beside them, grinning. A servant brought me a horn of ale.

‘Lord Uhtred!’ Haesten greeted me loudly so that every man and woman in the hall would know who I was. Haesten’s grin was somehow mischievous, as if he and I shared a secret joke in this hall. He had hair the colour of gold, a square face, bright eyes and was wearing a tunic of fine wool dyed green, above which hung a thick chain of silver. His arms were heavy with rings of silver and gold, while silver brooches were pinned to his long boots. ‘It is good to see you, lord,’ he said, and gave me a hint of a bow.

‘Still alive, Haesten?’ I asked, ignoring my host.

‘Still alive, lord,’ he said.

‘And no wonder,’ I said, ‘the last time I saw you was at Ethandun.’

‘A rainy day, lord, as I remember,’ he said.

‘And you were running like a hare, Haesten,’ I said.

I saw the shadow cross his face. I had accused him of cowardice, but he deserved an attack from me for he had sworn to be my man and had betrayed his oath by deserting me.

Eilaf, sensing trouble, cleared his throat. He was a heavy man, tall, with hair the brightest red I have ever seen. It was curly, and his beard was curly, and both were flame-coloured. Eilaf the Red, he was called, and though he was tall and heavy-set, he somehow seemed smaller than Haesten, who had a sublime confidence in his own abilities. ‘You are welcome, Lord Uhtred,’ Eilaf said.

I ignored him. Haesten was watching me, his face still clouded, but then I grinned. ‘Yet all Guthrum’s army ran that day,’ I said, ‘and the ones who didn’t are all dead. So I am glad that I saw you run.’

He smiled then. ‘I killed eight men at Ethandun,’ he said, eager for his men to know that he was no coward.

‘Then I am relieved I did not face your sword,’ I said, recovering my earlier insult with insincere flattery. Then I turned to the red-headed Eilaf. ‘And you,’ I asked, ‘were you at Ethandun?’

‘No, lord,’ he said.

‘Then you missed a rare fight,’ I said. ‘Isn’t that so, Haesten? A fight to remember!’

‘A massacre in the rain, lord,’ Haesten said.

‘And I still limp from it,’ I said, which was true, though the limp was small and hardly inconvenient.

I was named to three other men, three Danes. All of them were dressed well and had arm rings to show their prowess. I forget their names now, but they were there to see me, and they had brought their followers with them. I understood as Haesten made the introductions that he was showing me off. He was proving that I had joined him, and that it was therefore safe for them to join him. Haesten was brewing rebellion in that hall. I drew him to one side. ‘Who are they?’ I demanded.

‘They have lands and men in this part of Guthrum’s kingdom.’

‘And you want their men?’

‘We must make an army,’ Haesten said simply.

I gazed down at him. This rebellion, I thought, was not just against Guthrum of East Anglia, but against Alfred of Wessex, and if it was to succeed then all Britain would need be roused by sword, spear and axe. ‘And if I refuse to join you?’ I asked him

‘You will, lord,’ he said confidently.

‘I will?’ I asked.

‘Because tonight, lord, the dead will speak to you.’ Haesten smiled, and just then Eilaf intervened to say that all was ready. ‘We shall raise the dead,’ Haesten said dramatically, touching the hammer amulet about his neck, ‘and then we shall feast.’ He gestured towards the door at the back of the hall. ‘This way, if you will, lord. This way.’

And so I went to meet the dead.

Haesten led us into the darkness and I remember thinking how easy it was to say the dead rose and spoke if the thing was done in such darkness. How would we know? We could hear the corpse perhaps, but not see him, and I was about to protest when two of Eilaf’s men came from the hall with burning brands that flared bright in the damp night. They led us past a pen of pigs and the beasts’ eyes caught the firelight. It had rained while we were in the hall, just a passing winter shower, but water still dripped from the bare branches. Finan, nervous at the sorcery we were about to witness, stayed close to me.

We followed a path downhill to a small pasture beside what I took to be a barn, and there the torches were thrust into waiting heaps of wood that caught the fire fast so that the flames leaped up to illuminate the barn’s wooden wall and wet thatch. As the light brightened I saw that it was not a pasture at all, but a graveyard. The small field was dotted with low earth heaps, and was well fenced to stop animals rooting up the dead.

‘That was our church,’ Huda explained. He had appeared beside me and nodded at what I had assumed was the barn.

‘You’re a Christian?’ I asked.

‘Yes, lord. But we have no priest now.’ He made the sign of the cross. ‘Our dead go to their rest unshriven.’

‘I have a son in a Christian graveyard,’ I said, and wondered why I had said it. I rarely thought of my dead infant son. I had not known him. His mother and I were estranged. Yet I remembered him on that dark night in that wet place of the dead. ‘Why is a Danish skald buried in a Christian grave?’ I asked Huda. ‘You told me he was no Christian.’

‘He died here, lord, and we buried him before we knew that. Maybe that is why he is restless?’

‘Maybe,’ I said, then heard the struggle behind me and wished I had thought to ask for my swords before I left Eilaf’s hall.

I turned, expecting an attack, and instead saw that two men were dragging a third towards us. The third man was slight, young and fair-haired. His eyes looked huge in the flamelight. He was whimpering. The men who dragged him were much bigger and his struggles were useless. I looked quizzically at Haesten.

‘To raise the dead, lord,’ he explained, ‘we have to send a messenger across the gulf.’

‘Who is he?’

‘A Saxon,’ Haesten said carelessly.

‘He deserves to die?’ I asked. I was not squeamish about death, but I sensed Haesten would kill like a child drowning a mouse and I did not want a man’s death on my conscience if that man had not deserved to die. This was not battle, where a man stood a chance of going to the eternal joys of Odin’s hall.

‘He’s a thief,’ Haesten said.

‘Twice a thief,’ Eilaf added.

I crossed to the young man and lifted his head by raising his chin, and so saw that he had the brand-mark of a convicted robber burned into his forehead. ‘What did you steal?’ I asked him.

‘A coat, lord,’ he spoke in a whisper. ‘I was cold.’

‘Was that the first theft?’ I asked, ‘or the second?’

‘The first was a lamb,’ Eilaf said behind me.

‘I was hungry, lord,’ the young man said, ‘and my child was starving.’

‘You stole twice,’ I said, ‘which means you must die.’ That was the law even in this lawless place. The young man was weeping, yet still stared at me. He thought I might relent and order his life spared, but I turned away. I have stolen many things in my life, almost all of them more valuable than any lamb or coat, but I steal while the owner is watching and while he can defend his property with his sword. It is the thief who steals in the dark who deserves to die.

Huda was making the sign of the cross again and again. He was nervous. The young thief shouted incomprehensible words at me until one of his guards slapped him hard across the mouth, and then he just hung his head and cried. Finan and my three Saxons were clutching the crosses they wore about their necks.

‘You are ready, lord?’ Haesten asked me.

‘Yes,’ I said, trying to sound confident, yet in truth I was as nervous as Finan. There is a curtain between our world and the lands of the dead and part of me wished that curtain to stay closed. I instinctively felt for Serpent-Breath’s hilt, but of course she was not with me.

‘Put the message in his mouth,’ Haesten ordered. One of the guards tried to open the young man’s mouth, but the prisoner resisted until a knife stabbed at his lips and then he opened wide. An object was pushed onto his tongue. ‘A harp string,’ Haesten explained to me, ‘and Bjorn will know its meaning. Kill him now,’ he added to the guards.

‘No!’ the young man shouted, spitting out the coiled string. He started screaming and weeping as the two men dragged him to one of the earth mounds. They stood either side of the mound, holding their prisoner over the grave. The moon was silvering a gap in the clouds. The churchyard smelt of new rain. ‘No, please, no,’ the young man was shaking, crying. ‘I have a wife, I have children, no! Please!’

‘Kill him,’ Eilaf the Red ordered.

One of the guards pushed the harp string back into the messenger’s mouth, then held the jaw shut. He tilted the young man’s head back, hard back, exposing his throat and the second Dane slit it with a quick, practised thrust and a wrenching pull. I heard a stifled, guttural sound and saw the blood flicker black in the flamelight. It spattered the two men, fell across the grave and slapped wetly onto the damp grass. The messenger’s body twitched and struggled for a while as the blood flow became weaker. Then, at last, the young man slumped between his captors who let his last blood drops spurt weakly onto the grave. Only when no more blood flowed did they drag him away, dropping his corpse beside the graveyard’s wooden fence. I was holding my breath. None of us moved. An owl, its wings astonishingly white in the night, flew close above me and I instinctively touched my hammer amulet, convinced I had seen the thief’s soul going to the other world.

Haesten stood close to the blood-soaked grave. ‘You have blood, Bjorn!’ he shouted. ‘I have given you a life! I have sent you a message!’

Nothing happened. The wind sighed on the church’s thatch. Somewhere a beast moved in the darkness and then went still. A log collapsed in one of the fires and the sparks flew upwards.

‘You have blood!’ Haesten shouted again. ‘Do you need more blood?’

I thought nothing was going to happen. That I had wasted a journey.

And then the grave moved.

Two

The grave mound shifted.

I remember a coldness gripping my heart and terror consuming me, but I could neither breathe nor move. I stood fixed, watching, waiting for the horror.

The earth fell in slightly, as though a mole was scrabbling out of its small hill. More soil shifted and something grey appeared. The grey thing lurched and I saw the earth was falling away faster as the grey thing rose from the mound. It was in half darkness, for the fires were behind us and our shadows were cast across the phantom that was born out of that winter earth, a phantom that took shape as a filthy corpse that staggered out of its broken grave. I saw a dead man who twitched, half fell, struggled to find his balance and finally stood.

Finan gripped my arm. He had no idea he did such a thing. Huda was kneeling and clutching the cross at his neck. I was just staring.

And the corpse gave a coughing, choking noise like a man’s death rattle. Something spat from his mouth, and he choked again, then slowly unbent to stand fully upright and, in the shadowed flamelight, I saw that the dead man was dressed in a soiled grey winding sheet. He had a pale face streaked with dirt, a face untouched by any decay. His long hair lay lank and white on his thin shoulders. He breathed, but had trouble breathing, just as a dying man has trouble breathing. And that was right, I remember thinking, for this man was coming back from death and he would sound just as he had when he had taken his journey into death. He gave a long moan, then took something from his mouth. He threw it towards us and I took an involuntary step backwards before seeing that it was a coiled harp string. I knew then that the impossible thing I saw was real, for I had seen the guards force the harp string into the messenger’s mouth, and now the corpse had shown us that he had received the token. ‘You will not leave me in peace,’ the dead man spoke in a dry half-voice and beside me Finan made a sound that was like a despairing moan.

‘Welcome, Bjorn,’ Haesten said. Alone among us Haesten seemed unworried by the corpse’s living presence. There was even amusement in his voice.

‘I want peace,’ Bjorn said, his voice a croak.

‘This is the Lord Uhtred,’ Haesten said, pointing at me, ‘who has sent many good Danes to the place where you live.’

‘I do not live,’ Bjorn said bitterly. He began grunting and his chest heaved spasmodically as though the night air hurt his lungs. ‘I curse you,’ he said to Haesten, but so feebly that the words had no threat.

Haesten laughed. ‘I had a woman today, Bjorn. Do you remember women? The feel of their soft thighs? The warmth of their skin? You remember the noise they make when you ride them?’

‘May Hel kiss you through all time,’ Bjorn said, ‘till the last chaos.’ Hel was the goddess of the dead, a rotting corpse of a goddess, and the curse was dreadful, but Bjorn again spoke so dully that this second curse, like the first, was empty. The dead man’s eyes were closed, his chest still jerked and his hands made grasping motions at the cold air.

I was in terror and I do not mind confessing it. It is a certainty in this world that the dead go to their long homes in the earth and stay there. Christians say our corpses will all rise one day and the air will be filled with the calling of angels’ horns and the sky will glow like beaten gold as the dead come from the ground, but I have never believed that. We die and we go to the afterworld and we stay there, but Bjorn had come back. He had fought the winds of darkness and the tides of death and he had struggled back to this world and now he stood before us, gaunt and tall and filthy and croaking, and I was shivering. Finan had dropped to one knee. My other men were behind me, but I knew they would be shaking as I shook. Only Haesten seemed unaffected by the dead man’s presence. ‘Tell the Lord Uhtred,’ he commanded Bjorn, ‘what the Norns told you.’

The Norns are the Fates, the three women who spin life’s threads at the roots of Yggdrasil, the tree of life. Whenever a child is born they start a new thread, and they know where it will go, with what other threads it will weave and how it will end. They know everything. They sit and they spin and they laugh at us, and sometimes they shower us with good fortune and sometimes they doom us to hurt and to tears.

‘Tell him,’ Haesten commanded impatiently, ‘what the Norns said of him.’

Bjorn said nothing. His chest heaved and his hands twitched. His eyes were closed.

‘Tell him,’ Haesten said, ‘and I will give you back your harp.’

‘My harp,’ Bjorn said pathetically, ‘I want my harp.’

‘I will put it back in your grave,’ Haesten said, ‘and you can sing to the dead. But first speak to Lord Uhtred.’

Bjorn opened his eyes and stared at me. I recoiled from those dark eyes, but made myself stare back, pretending a bravery I did not feel.

‘You are to be king, Lord Uhtred,’ Bjorn said, then gave a long moan like a creature in pain. ‘You are to be king,’ he sobbed.

The wind was cold. A spit of rain touched my cheek. I said nothing.

‘King of Mercia,’ Bjorn said in a sudden and surprisingly loud voice. ‘You are to be king of Saxon and of Dane, enemy of the Welsh, king between the rivers and lord of all you rule. You are to be mighty, Lord Uhtred, for the three spinners love you.’ He stared at me and, though the fate he pronounced was golden, there was a malevolence in his dead eyes. ‘You will be king,’ he said, and the last word sounded like poison on his tongue.

My fear passed then, to be replaced by a surge of pride and power. I did not doubt Bjorn’s message because the gods do not speak lightly, and the spinners know our fate. We Saxons say wyrd bið ful ãræd, and even the Christians accept that truth. They might deny that the three Norns exist, but they know that wyrd bið ful ãræd. Fate is inexorable. Fate cannot be changed. Fate rules us. Our lives are made before we live them, and I was to be King of Mercia.

I did not think of Bebbanburg at that moment. Bebbanburg is my land, my fortress beside the northern sea, my home. I believed my whole life was dedicated to recovering it from my uncle, who had stolen it from me when I was a child. I dreamed of Bebbanburg, and in my dreams I saw its rocks splintering the grey sea white and felt the gales tear at the hall thatch, but when Bjorn spoke I did not think of Bebbanburg. I thought of being a king. Of ruling a land. Of leading a great army to crush my enemies.

And I thought of Alfred, of the duty I owed him and the promises I had made him. I knew I must be an oath-breaker to be a king, but to whom are oaths made? To kings, and so a king has the power to release a man from an oath, and I told myself that as a king I could release myself from any oath, and all this whipped through my mind like a swirl of wind gusting across a threshing floor to spin the chaff up into the sky. I did not think clearly. I was as confused as the chaff spinning in the wind, and I did not weigh my oath to Alfred against my future as a king. I just saw two paths ahead, one hard and hilly, and the other a wide green way leading to a kingdom. And besides, what choice did I have? Wyrd bið ful ãræd.

Then, in the silence, Haesten suddenly knelt to me. ‘Lord King,’ he said, and there was unexpected reverence in his voice.

‘You broke an oath to me,’ I said harshly. Why did I say that then? I could have confronted him earlier, in the hall, but it was by that opened grave I made the accusation.

‘I did, lord King,’ he said, ‘and I regret it.’

I paused. What was I thinking? That I was a king already? ‘I forgive you,’ I said. I could hear my heartbeat. Bjorn just watched and the light of the flaming torches cast deep shadows on his face.

‘I thank you, lord King,’ Haesten said, and beside him Eilaf the Red knelt and then every man in that damp graveyard knelt to me.

‘I am not king yet,’ I said, suddenly ashamed of the lordly tones I had used to Haesten.

‘You will be, lord,’ Haesten said. ‘The Norns say so.’

I turned to the corpse. ‘What else did the three spinners say?’

‘That you will be king,’ Bjorn said, ‘and you will be the king of other kings. You will be lord of the land between the rivers and the scourge of your enemies. You will be king.’ He stopped suddenly and went into spasm, his upper body jerking forward and then the spasms stopped and he stayed motionless, bent forward, retching drily, before slowly crumpling onto the disturbed earth.

‘Bury him again,’ Haesten said harshly, rising from his knees and speaking to the men who had cut the Saxon’s throat.

‘His harp,’ I said.

‘I will return it to him tomorrow, lord,’ Haesten said, then gestured towards Eilaf’s hall. ‘There is food, lord King, and ale. And a woman for you. Two if you want.’

‘I have a wife,’ I said harshly.

‘Then there is food, ale and warmth for you,’ he said humbly. The other men stood. My warriors looked at me strangely, confused by the message they had heard, but I ignored them. King of other kings. Lord of the land between the rivers. King Uhtred.

I looked back once and saw the two men scraping at the soil to make Bjorn’s grave again, and then I followed Haesten into the hall and took the chair at the table’s centre, the lord’s chair, and I watched the men who had witnessed the dead rise, and I saw they were convinced as I was convinced, and that meant they would take their troops to Haesten’s side. The rebellion against Guthrum, the rebellion that was meant to spread across Britain and destroy Wessex, was being led by a dead man. I rested my head on my hands and I thought. I thought of being king. I thought of leading armies.

‘Your wife is Danish, I hear?’ Haesten interrupted my thoughts.

‘She is,’ I said.

‘Then the Saxons of Mercia will have a Saxon king,’ he said, ‘and the Danes of Mercia will have a Danish queen. They will both be happy.’

I raised my head and stared at him. I knew him to be clever and sly, but that night he was carefully subservient and genuinely respectful. ‘What do you want, Haesten?’ I asked him.

‘Sigefrid and his brother,’ he said, ignoring my question, ‘want to conquer Wessex.’

‘The old dream,’ I said scornfully.

‘And to do it,’ he said, disregarding my scorn, ‘we shall need men from Northumbria. Ragnar will come if you ask him.’

‘He will,’ I agreed.

‘And if Ragnar comes, others will follow.’ He broke a loaf of bread and pushed the greater part towards me. A bowl of stew was in front of me, but I did not touch it. Instead I began to crumble the bread, feeling for the granite chips that are left from the grindstone. I was not thinking about what I did, just keeping my hands busy while I watched Haesten.

‘You didn’t answer my question,’ I said. ‘What do you want?’

‘East Anglia,’ he said.

‘King Haesten?’

‘Why not?’ he said, smiling.

‘Why not, lord King,’ I retorted, provoking a wider smile.

‘King Æthelwold in Wessex,’ Haesten said, ‘King Haesten in East Anglia, and King Uhtred in Mercia.’

‘Æthelwold?’ I asked scornfully, thinking of Alfred’s drunken nephew.

‘He is the rightful King of Wessex, lord,’ Haesten said.

‘And how long will he live?’ I asked.

‘Not long,’ Haesten admitted, ‘unless he is stronger than Sigefrid.’

‘So it will be Sigefrid of Wessex?’ I asked.

Haesten smiled. ‘Eventually, lord, yes.’

‘What of his brother, Erik?’

‘Erik likes to be a Viking,’ Haesten said. ‘His brother takes Wessex and Erik takes the ships. Erik will be a sea king.’

So it would be Sigefrid of Wessex, Uhtred of Mercia and Haesten in East Anglia. Three weasels in a sack, I thought, but did not let the thought show. ‘And where,’ I asked instead, ‘does this dream begin?’

His smile went. He was serious now. ‘Sigefrid and I have men. Not enough, but the heart of a good army. You bring Ragnar south with the Northumbrian Danes and we’ll have more than enough to take East Anglia. Half of Guthrum’s earls will join us when they see you and Ragnar. Then we take the men of East Anglia, join them to our army, and conquer Mercia.’

‘And join the men of Mercia,’ I finished for him, ‘to take Wessex?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘When the leaves fall,’ he went on, ‘and when the barns are filled, we shall march on Wessex.’

‘But without Ragnar,’ I said, ‘you can do nothing.’

He bowed his head in agreement. ‘And Ragnar will not march unless you join us.’

It could work, I thought. Guthrum, the Danish King of East Anglia, had repeatedly failed to conquer Wessex and now had made his peace with Alfred, but just because Guthrum had become a Christian and was now an ally of Alfred did not mean that other Danes had abandoned the dream of Wessex’s rich fields. If enough men could be assembled, then East Anglia would fall, and its earls, ever eager for plunder, would march on Mercia. Then Northumbrians, Mercians and East Anglians could turn on Wessex, the richest kingdom and the last Saxon kingdom in the land of the Saxons.

Yet I was sworn to Alfred. I was sworn to defend Wessex. I had given Alfred my oath and without oaths we are no better than beasts. But the Norns had spoken. Fate is inexorable, it cannot be cheated. That thread of my life was already in place, and I could no more change it than I could make the sun go backwards. The Norns had sent a messenger across the black gulf to tell me that my oath must be broken, and that I would be a king, and so I nodded to Haesten. ‘So be it,’ I said.

‘You must meet Sigefrid and Erik,’ he said, ‘and we must make oaths.’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Tomorrow,’ he said, watching me carefully, ‘we leave for Lundene.’

So it had begun. Sigefrid and Erik were readying to defend Lundene, and by doing that they defied the Mercians, who claimed the city as theirs, and they defied Alfred, who feared Lundene being garrisoned by an enemy, and they defied Guthrum, who wanted the peace of Britain kept. But there would be no peace.

‘Tomorrow,’ Haesten said again, ‘we leave for Lundene.’

We rode next day. I led my six men while Haesten had twenty-one companions, and we followed Wæclingastræt south through a persistent rain that turned the road’s verges to thick mud. The horses were miserable, we were miserable. As we rode I tried to remember every word that Bjorn the Dead had said to me, knowing that Gisela would want the conversation recounted in every detail.

‘So?’ Finan challenged me soon after midday. Haesten had ridden ahead and Finan now spurred his horse to keep pace with mine.

‘So?’ I asked.

‘So are you going to be king in Mercia?’

‘The Fates say so,’ I said, not looking at him. Finan and I had been slaves together on a trader’s ship. We had suffered, frozen, endured and learned to love each other like brothers, and I cared about his opinion.

‘The Fates,’ Finan said, ‘are tricksters.’

‘Is that a Christian view?’ I asked.

He smiled. He wore his cloak’s hood over his helmet, so I could see little of his thin, feral face, but I saw the flash of teeth when he smiled. ‘I was a great man in Ireland,’ he said, ‘I had horses to outrun the wind, women to dim the sun, and weapons that could outfight the world, yet the Fates doomed me.’

‘You live,’ I said, ‘and you’re a free man.’

‘I’m your oath-man,’ he said, ‘and I gave you my oath freely. And you, lord, are Alfred’s oath-man.’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Were you forced to make your oath to Alfred?’ Finan asked.

‘No,’ I confessed.

The rain was stinging in my face. The sky was low, the land dark. ‘If fate is unavoidable,’ Finan asked, ‘why do we make oaths?’

I ignored the question. ‘If I break my oath to Alfred,’ I said instead, ‘will you break yours to me?’

‘No, lord,’ he said, smiling again. ‘I would miss your company,’ he went on, ‘but you would not miss Alfred’s.’

‘No,’ I admitted, and we let the conversation drift away with the wind-blown rain, though Finan’s words lingered in my mind and they troubled me.

We spent that night close to the great shrine of Saint Alban. The Romans had made a town there, though that town had now decayed, and so we stayed at a Danish hall just to the east. Our host was welcoming enough, but he was cautious in conversation. He did admit to hearing that Sigefrid had moved men into Lundene’s old town, but he neither condemned nor praised the act. He wore the hammer amulet, as did I, but he also kept a Saxon priest who prayed over the meal of bread, bacon and beans. The priest was a reminder that this hall was in East Anglia, and that East Anglia was officially Christian and at peace with its Christian neighbours, but our host made certain that his palisade gate was barred and that he had armed men keeping watch through the damp night. There was a shiftless air to this land, a feeling that a storm might break at any time.

The rainstorm ended in the darkness. We left at dawn, riding into a world of frost and stillness, though Wæclingastræt became busier as we encountered men driving cattle to Lundene. The beasts were scrawny, but they had been spared the autumn slaughter so they could feed the city through its winter. We rode past them and the herdsmen dropped to their knees as so many armed men clattered by. The clouds cleared to the east so that, when we came to Lundene in the middle of the day, the sun was bright behind the thick pall of dark smoke that always hangs above the city.

I have always liked Lundene. It is a place of ruins, trade and wickedness that sprawls along the northern bank of the Temes. The ruins were the buildings the Romans left when they abandoned Britain, and their old city crowned the hills at the city’s eastern end and were surrounded by a wall made of brick and stone. The Saxons had never liked the Roman buildings, fearing their ghosts, and so had made their own town to the west, a place of thatch and wood and wattle and narrow alleys and stinking ditches that were supposed to carry sewage to the river, but usually lay glistening and filthy until a downpour of rain flooded them. That new Saxon town was a busy place, stinking with the smoke from smithy fires and raucous with the shouts of tradesmen, too busy, indeed, to bother making a defensive wall. Why did they need a wall, the Saxons argued, for the Danes were content to live in the old city and had showed no desire to slaughter the inhabitants of the new. There were palisades in a few places, evidence that some men had tried to protect the rapidly growing new town, but enthusiasm for the project always died and the palisades rotted, or else their timbers were stolen to make new buildings along the sewage-stinking streets.

Lundene’s trade came from the river and from the roads that led to every part of Britain. The roads, of course, were Roman, and down them flowed wool and pottery, ingots and pelts, while the river brought luxuries from abroad and slaves from Frankia and hungry men seeking trouble. There was plenty of that, because the city, which was built where three kingdoms met, was virtually ungoverned in those years.

To the east of Lundene the land was East Anglia, and so ruled by Guthrum. To the south, on the far bank of the Temes, was Wessex, while to the west was Mercia to which the city really belonged, but Mercia was a crippled country without a king and so there was no reeve to keep order in Lundene, and no great lord to impose laws. Men went armed in the alleyways, wives had bodyguards and great dogs were chained in gateways. Bodies were found every morning, unless the tide carried them downriver towards the sea and past the coast where the Danes had their great camp at Beamfleot from where the Northmen’s ships sailed to demand customs payments from the traders working their way up the wide mouth of the Temes. The Northmen had no authority to impose such dues, but they had ships and men and swords and axes, and that was authority enough.

Haesten had exacted enough of those illegal dues, indeed he had become rich by piracy, rich and powerful, but he was still nervous as we rode into the city. He had talked incessantly as we neared Lundene, mostly about nothing, and he laughed too easily when I made sour comments about his inane words. But then, as we passed between the half-fallen towers either side of a wide gateway, he fell silent. There were sentries on the gate, but they must have recognised Haesten for they did not challenge us, but simply pulled aside the hurdles that blocked the ruined arch. Inside the arch I could see a stack of timbers that meant the gate was being rebuilt.

We had come to the Roman town, the old town, and our horses picked a slow path up the street that was paved with wide flagstones between which weeds grew thick. It was cold. Frost still lay in the dark corners where the sun had not reached the stone all day. The buildings had shuttered windows through which woodsmoke sifted to be whirled down the street. ‘You’ve been here before?’ Haesten broke his silence with the abrupt question.

‘Many times,’ I said. Haesten and I rode ahead now.

‘Sigefrid,’ Haesten said, then found he had nothing to say.

‘Is a Norseman, I hear,’ I said.

‘He is unpredictable,’ Haesten said, and the tone of his voice told me that it was Sigefrid who had made him nervous. Haesten had faced a living corpse without flinching, but the thought of Sigefrid made him apprehensive.

‘I can be unpredictable,’ I said, ‘and so can you.’

Haesten said nothing to that. Instead he touched the hammer hanging at his neck, then turned his horse into a gateway where servants ran forward to greet us. ‘The king’s palace,’ Haesten said.

I knew the palace. It had been made by the Romans and was a great vaulted building of pillars and carved stone, though it had been patched by the kings of Mercia so that thatch, wattle and timber filled the gaps in the half-ruined walls. The great hall was lined with Roman pillars and its walls were of brick, but here and there patches of marble facing had somehow survived. I stared at the high masonry and marvelled that men had ever been able to make such walls. We built in wood and thatch, and both rotted away, which meant we would leave nothing behind. The Romans had left marble and stone, brick and glory.

A steward told us that Sigefrid and his younger brother were in the old Roman arena that lay to the north of the palace. ‘What is he doing there?’ Haesten asked.

‘Making a sacrifice, lord,’ the steward said.

‘Then we’ll join him,’ Haesten said, looking at me for confirmation.

‘We will,’ I said.

We rode the short distance. Beggars shrank from us. We had money, and they knew it, but they dared not ask for it because we were armed strangers. Swords, shields, axes and spears hung beside our horses’ muddy flanks. Shopkeepers bowed to us, while women hid their children in their skirts. Most of the folk who lived in the Roman part of Lundene were Danes, yet even these Danes were nervous. Their city had been occupied by Sigefrid’s crewmen who would be hungry for money and women.

I knew the Roman arena. When I was a child I was taught the fundamental strokes of the sword by Toki the Shipmaster, and he had given me those lessons in the great oval arena that was surrounded by decayed layers of stone where wooden benches had once been placed. The tiered stone layers were almost empty, except for a few idle folk who were watching the men in the centre of the weed-choked arena. There must have been forty or fifty men there, and a score of saddled horses were tethered at the far end, but what surprised me most as I rode through the high walls of the entrance, was a Christian cross planted in the middle of the small crowd.

‘Sigefrid’s a Christian?’ I asked Haesten in astonishment.

‘No!’ Haesten said forcefully.

The men heard our hoofbeats and turned towards us. They were all dressed for war, grim in mail or leather and armed with swords or axes, but they were cheerful. Then, from the centre of that crowd, from a place close to the cross, stalked Sigefrid.

I knew him without having to be told who he was. He was a big man, and made to look even bigger for he wore a great cloak of black bear’s fur that swathed him from neck to ankles. He had tall black leather boots, a shining mail coat, a sword belt studded with silver rivets, and a bushy black beard that sprang from beneath his iron helmet that was chased with silver patterns. He pulled the helmet off as he strode towards us and his hair was as black and bushy as his beard. He had dark eyes in a broad face, a nose that had been broken and squashed, and a wide slash of a mouth that gave him a grim appearance. He stopped, facing us, and set his feet wide apart as though he waited for an attack.

‘Lord Sigefrid!’ Haesten greeted him with forced cheerfulness.

‘Lord Haesten! Welcome back! Welcome indeed.’ Sigefrid’s voice was curiously high-pitched, not feminine, but it sounded odd coming from such a huge and malevolent-looking man. ‘And you!’ he pointed a black-gloved hand towards me, ‘must be the Lord Uhtred!’

‘Uhtred of Bebbanburg,’ I named myself.

‘And you are welcome, welcome indeed!’ He stepped forward and took my reins himself, which was an honour, and then he smiled up at me and his face, that had been so fearsome, was suddenly mischievous, almost friendly. ‘They say you are tall, Lord Uhtred!’

‘So I am told,’ I said.

‘Then let us see who is taller,’ he suggested genially, ‘you or I?’ I slid from the saddle and eased the stiffness from my legs. Sigefrid, vast in his fur cloak, still held my reins and still smiled. ‘Well?’ he demanded of the men nearest to him.

‘You are taller, lord,’ one of them said hastily.

‘If I asked you who was the prettiest,’ Sigefrid said, ‘what would you say?’

The man looked from Sigefrid to me and from me to Sigefrid and did not know what to say. He just looked terrified.

‘He fears that if he gives the wrong answer,’ Sigefrid confided to me in an amused voice, ‘that I would kill him.’

‘And would you?’ I asked.

‘I would think about it. Here!’ he called to the man, who came nervously forward. ‘Take the reins,’ Sigefrid said, ‘and walk the horse. So who’s taller?’ This last question was to Haesten.

‘You are the same height,’ Haesten said.

‘And just as pretty as each other,’ Sigefrid said, then laughed. He put his arms around me and I smelt the rank stench of his fur cloak. He hugged me. ‘Welcome, Lord Uhtred, welcome!’ He stepped back and grinned. I liked him at that moment because his smile was truly welcoming. ‘I have heard much of you!’ he declared.

‘And I of you, lord.’

‘And doubtless we were both told many lies! But good lies. I also have a quarrel with you.’ He grinned, waiting, but I offered him no response. ‘Jarrel!’ he explained, ‘you killed him.’

‘I did,’ I said. Jarrel had been the man leading the Viking crew I had slaughtered on the Temes.

‘I liked Jarrel,’ Sigefrid said.

‘Then you should have advised him to avoid Uhtred of Bebbanburg,’ I said.

‘That is true,’ Sigefrid said, ‘and is it also true that you killed Ubba?’

‘I did.’

‘He must have been a hard man to kill! And Ivarr?’

‘I killed Ivarr too,’ I confirmed.

‘But he was old and it was time he went. His son hates you, you know that?’

‘I know that.’

Sigefrid snorted in derision. ‘The son is a nothing. A piece of gristle. He hates you, but why should the falcon care about the sparrow’s hate?’ He grinned at me, then looked at Smoca, my stallion, who was being walked about the arena so he could cool slowly after his long journey. ‘That,’ Sigefrid said admiringly, ‘is a horse!’

‘It is,’ I agreed.

‘Maybe I should take him from you?’

‘Many have tried,’ I said.

He liked that. He laughed again and put a heavy hand on my shoulder to lead me towards the cross. ‘You’re a Saxon, they tell me?’

‘I am.’

‘But no Christian?’

‘I worship the true gods,’ I said.

‘May they love and reward you for that,’ he said, and he squeezed my shoulder and, even through the mail and leather, I could feel his strength. He turned then. ‘Erik! Are you shy?’

His brother stepped out of the crowd. He had the same black bushy hair, though Erik’s was tied severely back with a length of cord. His beard was trimmed. He was young, maybe only twenty or twenty-one, and he had a broad face with bright eyes that were at once full of curiosity and welcome. I had been surprised to discover I liked Sigefrid, but it was no surprise to like Erik. His smile was instant, his face open and guileless. He was, like Gisela’s brother, a man you liked from the moment you met him.

‘I am Erik,’ he greeted me.

‘He is my adviser,’ Sigefrid said, ‘my conscience and my brother.’

‘Conscience?’

‘Erik would not kill a man for telling a lie, would you, brother?’

‘No,’ Erik said.

‘So he is a fool, but a fool I love.’ Sigefrid laughed. ‘But don’t think the fool is a weakling, Lord Uhtred. He fights like a demon from Niflheim.’ He slapped his brother on the shoulder, then took my elbow and led me on towards the incongruous cross. ‘I have prisoners,’ he explained as we neared the cross, and I saw that five men were kneeling with their hands tied behind their backs. They had been stripped of cloaks, weapons and tunics so that they wore only their trews. They shivered in the cold air.

The cross had been newly made from two beams of wood that had been crudely nailed together and then sunk into a hastily dug hole. The cross leaned slightly. At its foot were some heavy nails and a big hammer. ‘You see death by the cross on their statues and carvings,’ Sigefrid explained to me, ‘and you see it on the amulets they wear, but I’ve never seen the real thing. Have you?’

‘No,’ I admitted.

‘And I can’t understand why it would kill a man,’ he said with genuine puzzlement in his voice. ‘It’s only three nails! I’ve suffered much worse than that in battle.’

‘Me too,’ I said.

‘So I thought I’d find out!’ he finished cheerfully, then jerked his big beard towards the prisoner nearest to the foot of the cross. ‘The two bastards at the end there are Christian priests. We’ll nail one of them up and see if he dies. I have ten pieces of silver that say it won’t kill him.’

I could see almost nothing of the two priests except that one had a big belly. His head was bowed, not in prayer, but because he had been beaten hard. His naked back and chest were bruised and bloody, and there was more blood in the tangle of his brown curly hair. ‘Who are they?’ I asked Sigefrid.

‘Who are you?’ he snarled at the prisoners and, when none answered, he gave the nearest man a brutal kick in the ribs. ‘Who are you?’ he asked again.

The man lifted his head. He was elderly, at least forty years old, and had a deep lined face on which was etched the resignation of those who knew they were about to die. ‘I am Earl Sihtric,’ he said, ‘counsellor to King Æthelstan.’

‘Guthrum!’ Sigefrid screamed, and it was a scream. A scream of pure rage that erupted from nowhere. One moment he had been affable, but suddenly he was a demon. Spittle flew from his mouth as he shrieked the name a second time. ‘Guthrum! His name is Guthrum, you bastard!’ He kicked Sihtric in the chest, and I reckoned that kick was hard enough to break a rib. ‘What is his name?’ Sigefrid demanded.

‘Guthrum,’ Sihtric said.

‘Guthrum!’ Sigefrid shouted, and kicked the old man again. Guthrum, when he made peace with Alfred, had become a Christian and taken the Christian name Æthelstan as his own. I still thought of him as Guthrum, as did Sigefrid, who now appeared to be trying to stamp Sihtric to death. The old man attempted to evade the blows, but Sigefrid had driven him to the ground from where he could not escape. Erik seemed unmoved by his brother’s savage anger, yet after a while he stepped forward and took Sigefrid’s arm and the bigger man allowed himself to be pulled away. ‘Bastard!’ Sigefrid spat back at the moaning man. ‘Calling Guthrum by a Christian name!’ he explained to me. Sigefrid was still shaking from his sudden anger. His eyes had narrowed and his face was contorted, but he seemed to control himself as he draped a heavy arm around my shoulder. ‘Guthrum sent them,’ he said, ‘to tell me to leave Lundene. But it’s none of Guthrum’s business! Lundene doesn’t belong to East Anglia! It belongs to Mercia! To King Uhtred of Mercia!’ That was the first time anyone had used that title so formally, and I liked the sound of it. King Uhtred. Sigefrid turned back to Sihtric who now had blood at his lips. ‘What was Guthrum’s message?’

‘That the city belongs to Mercia, and you must leave,’ Sihtric managed to say.

‘Then Mercia can throw me out,’ Sigefrid sneered.

‘Unless King Uhtred allows us to stay?’ Erik suggested with a smile.

I said nothing. The title sounded good, but strange, as if it defied the strands coming from the three spinners.

‘Alfred will not permit you to stay.’ One of the other prisoners dared to speak.

‘Who gives a turd about Alfred?’ Sigefrid snarled. ‘Let the bastard send his army to die here.’

‘That is your reply, lord?’ the prisoner asked humbly.

‘My reply will be your severed heads,’ Sigefrid said.

I glanced at Erik then. He was the younger brother, but clearly the one who did the thinking. He shrugged. ‘If we negotiate,’ he explained, ‘then we give time for our enemies to gather their forces. Better to be defiant.’

‘You’ll pick war with both Guthrum and Alfred?’ I asked.

‘Guthrum won’t fight,’ Erik said, sounding very certain. ‘He threatens, but he won’t fight. He’s getting old, Lord Uhtred, and he would prefer to enjoy what life is left to him. And if we send him severed heads? I think he will understand the message that his own head is in danger if he disturbs us.’

‘What of Alfred?’ I asked.

‘He’s cautious,’ Erik said, ‘isn’t he?’

‘Yes.’

‘He’ll offer us money to leave the city?’

‘Probably.’

‘And maybe we’ll take it,’ Sigefrid said, ‘and stay anyway.’

‘Alfred won’t attack us till the summer,’ Erik said, ignoring his brother, ‘and by then, Lord Uhtred, we hope you will have led Earl Ragnar south into East Anglia. Alfred can’t ignore that threat. He will march against our combined armies, not against the garrison in Lundene, and our job is to kill Alfred and put his nephew on the throne.’

‘Æthelwold?’ I asked dubiously. ‘He’s a drunk.’

‘Drunk or not,’ Erik said, ‘a Saxon king will make our conquest of Wessex more palatable.’

‘Until you need him no longer,’ I said.

‘Until we need him no longer,’ Erik agreed.

The big-bellied priest at the end of the line of kneeling prisoners had been listening. He stared at me, then at Sigefrid, who saw his gaze. ‘What are you looking at, turd?’ Sigefrid demanded. The priest did not answer, but just looked at me again, then dropped his head. ‘We’ll start with him,’ Sigefrid said, ‘we’ll nail the fat bastard to a cross and see if he dies.’

‘Why not let him fight?’ I suggested.

Sigefrid stared at me, unsure he had heard me correctly. ‘Let him fight?’ he asked.

‘The other priest is skinny,’ I said, ‘so much easier to nail to the cross. That fat one should be given a sword and made to fight.’

Sigefrid sneered. ‘You think a priest can fight?’

I shrugged as though I did not care one way or the other. ‘It’s just that I like seeing those fat-bellied ones lose a fight,’ I explained. ‘I like seeing their bellies slit open. I like watching their guts spill out.’ I was staring at the priest as I spoke and he looked up again to gaze into my eyes. ‘I want to see yards of gut spilled out,’ I said wolfishly, ‘and then watch as your dogs eat his intestines while he’s still alive.’

‘Or make him eat them himself,’ Sigefrid said thoughtfully. He suddenly grinned at me. ‘I like you, Lord Uhtred!’

‘He’ll die too easily,’ Erik said.

‘Then give him something to fight for,’ I said.

‘What can that fat pig of a priest fight for?’ Sigefrid demanded scornfully.

I said nothing, and it was Erik who supplied the answer. ‘His freedom?’ he suggested. ‘If he wins then all prisoners go free, but if he loses then we crucify them all. That should make him fight.’

‘He’ll still lose,’ I said.

‘Yes, but he’ll make an effort,’ Erik said.

Sigefrid laughed, amused by the incongruity of the suggestion. The priest, half naked, big-bellied and terrified, looked at each of us in turn but saw nothing but amusement and ferocity. ‘Ever held a sword, priest?’ Sigefrid demanded of the fat man. The priest said nothing.

I mocked his silence with laughter. ‘He’ll only flail around like a pig,’ I said.

‘You want to fight him?’ Sigefrid asked.

‘He wasn’t sent as an envoy to me, lord,’ I said respectfully. ‘Besides, I’ve heard there is no one to match your skill with a blade. I challenge you to make a cut straight across his belly button.’

Sigefrid liked that challenge. He turned to the priest. ‘Holy man! You want to fight for your freedom?’

The priest was shaking with fear. He glanced at his companions, but found no help there. He managed to nod his head. ‘Yes, lord,’ he said,

‘Then you can fight me,’ Sigefrid said happily, ‘and if I win? You all die. And if you win? You can ride away from here. Can you fight?’

‘No, lord,’ the priest said.

‘Ever held a sword, priest?’

‘No, lord.’

‘So are you ready to die?’ Sigefrid asked.

The priest looked at the Norseman and, despite his bruises and cuts, there was a hint of anger in his eyes that was belied by the humility in his voice. ‘Yes, lord,’ he said, ‘I’m ready to die and meet my Saviour.’

‘Cut him free,’ Sigefrid ordered one of his followers. ‘Cut the turd free and give him a sword.’ He drew his own sword that was a long two-edged blade. ‘Fear-Giver,’ he named the blade with fondness in his voice, ‘and she needs exercise.’

‘Here,’ I said, and I drew Serpent-Breath, my own beautiful blade, and I turned her so that I held her by the blade and I tossed the sword to the priest whose hands had just been cut free. He fumbled the catch, letting Serpent-Breath fall among the pale winter weeds. He stared at the sword for a moment as though he had never seen such a thing before, then stooped to pick her up. He was unsure whether to hold her in his right hand or left. He settled for the left and gave her a clumsy experimental stroke that caused the watching men to laugh.

‘Why give him your sword?’ Sigefrid asked.

‘He’ll do no good with it,’ I said scornfully.

‘And if I break it?’ Sigefrid asked forcefully.

‘Then I’ll know the smith who made it didn’t know his business,’ I said.

‘It’s your blade, your choice,’ Sigefrid said dismissively, then turned to the priest who was holding Serpent-Breath so that her tip rested on the ground. ‘Are you ready, priest?’ he demanded.

‘Yes, lord,’ the priest said, and that was the first truthful answer he had given to the Norseman. For the priest had held a sword many times before and he did know how to fight and I doubted he was ready to die. He was Father Pyrlig.

If your fields are heavy and damp with clay then you can harness two oxen to an ard blade, and you can goad the beasts bloody so that the blade ploughs your ground. The beasts must pull together, which is why they are yoked together, and in life one ox is called Fate and the other is named Oaths.

Fate decrees what we do. We cannot escape fate. Wyrd bið ful ãræd. We have no choices in life, how can we? Because from the moment we are born the three sisters know where our thread will go and what patterns it will weave and how it will end. Wyrd bið ful ãræd.

Yet we choose our oaths. Alfred, when he gave me his sword and hands to enfold in my hands did not order me to make the oath. He offered it and I chose. But was it my choice? Or did the Fates choose for me? And if they did, why bother with oaths? I have often wondered about this and even now, as an old man, I still wonder. Did I choose Alfred? Or were the Fates laughing when I knelt and took his sword and hands in mine?

The three Norns were certainly laughing on that cold bright day in Lundene, because the moment I saw that the big-bellied priest was Father Pyrlig I knew that nothing was simple. I had realised in that instant that the Fates had not spun me a golden thread leading to a throne. They were laughing from the roots of Yggdrasil, the tree of life. They had made a jest and I was its victim, and I had to make a choice.

Or did I? Maybe the Fates had made the choice, but at that moment, overshadowed by the gaunt stark makeshift cross, I believed I had to choose between the Thurgilson brothers and Pyrlig.

Sigefrid was no friend, but he was a formidable man, and with his alliance I could become king in Mercia. Gisela would be a queen. I could help Sigefrid, Erik, Haesten and Ragnar plunder Wessex. I could become rich. I would lead armies. I would fly my banner of the wolf’s head, and at Smoca’s heels would ride a mailed host of spearmen. My enemies would hear the thunder of our hooves in their nightmares. All that would be mine if I chose to ally myself with Sigefrid.

While by choosing Pyrlig I would lose all that the dead man had promised me. Which meant that Bjorn had lied, yet how could a man sent from his grave with a message from the Norns tell a lie? I remember thinking all that in the heartbeat before I made my choice, though in truth there was no hesitation. There was not even a heartbeat of hesitation.

Pyrlig was a Welshman, a Briton, and we Saxons hate the Britons. The Britons are treacherous thieves. They hide in their hill fastnesses and ride down to raid our lands, and they take our cattle and sometimes our women and children, and when we pursue them they go ever deeper into a wild place of mists, crags, marsh and misery. And Pyrlig was also a Christian, and I have no love for Christians. The choice would seem so easy! On one side a kingdom, Viking friends and wealth, and on the other a Briton who was the priest of a religion that sucks joy from this world like dusk swallowing daylight. Yet I did not think. I chose, or fate chose, and I chose friendship. Pyrlig was my friend. I had met him in Wessex’s darkest winter, when the Danes seemed to have conquered the kingdom, and Alfred with a few followers had been driven to take refuge in the western marshes. Pyrlig had been sent as an emissary by his Welsh king to discover and perhaps exploit Alfred’s weakness, but instead he had sided with Alfred and fought for Alfred. Pyrlig and I had stood in the shield wall together. We had fought side by side. We were Welshman and Saxon, Christian and pagan, and we should have been enemies, but I loved him like a brother.

So I gave him my sword and, instead of watching him nailed to a cross, I gave him the chance to fight for his life.

And, of course, it was not a fair fight. It was over in a moment! Indeed, it had hardly begun before it ended, and I alone was not astonished by its ending.

Sigefrid was expecting to face a fat, untrained priest, yet I knew that Pyrlig had been a warrior before he discovered his god. He had been a great warrior, a killer of Saxons and a man about whom his people had made songs. He did not look like a great warrior now. He was half naked, fat, dishevelled, bruised and beaten. He waited for Sigefrid’s attack with a look of horrified terror on his face and with the tip of Serpent-Breath’s blade still resting on the ground. He backed away as Sigefrid came closer, and began making mewing noises. Sigefrid laughed and swung his sword almost idly, expecting to knock Pyrlig’s blade out of his path and so expose that big belly to Fear-Giver’s gut-opening slash.

And Pyrlig moved like a weasel.

He lifted Serpent-Breath gracefully and danced a backwards pace so that Sigefrid’s careless swing went under her blade, and then he stepped towards his enemy and brought Serpent-Breath down hard, all wrist in that stroke, and sliced her against Sigefrid’s sword arm as it was still swinging outwards. The stroke was not powerful enough to break the mail armour, but it did drive Sigefrid’s sword arm further out and so opened the Norseman to a lunge. And Pyrlig lunged. He was so fast that Serpent-Breath was a silver blur that struck hard on Sigefrid’s chest.

Once again the blade did not pierce Sigefrid’s mail. Instead it pushed the big man backwards and I saw the fury come into the Norseman’s eyes and saw him bring Fear-Giver back in a mighty swing that would surely have decapitated Pyrlig in a red instant. There was so much strength and savagery in that huge cut, but Pyrlig, who seemed a heartbeat from death, simply used his wrist again. He did not seem to move, but still Serpent-Breath flickered up and sideways.

Serpent-Breath’s point met that death-swing on the inside of Sigefrid’s wrist and I saw the spray of blood like a red fog in the air.

And I saw Pyrlig smile. It was more of a grimace, but there was a warrior’s pride and a warrior’s triumph in that smile. His blade had ripped up Sigefrid’s forearm, slicing the mail apart and laying open flesh and skin and muscle from wrist to elbow, so that Sigefrid’s mighty blow faltered and stopped. The Norseman’s sword arm went limp, and Pyrlig suddenly stepped back and turned Serpent-Breath so he could cut downwards with her and at last he appeared to put some effort into the blade. She made a whistling noise as the Welshman slashed her onto Sigefrid’s bleeding wrist. He almost severed the wrist, but the blade glanced off a bone and took the Norseman’s thumb instead, and Fear-Giver fell to the arena floor and Serpent-Breath was in Sigefrid’s beard and at his throat.

‘No!’ I shouted.

Sigefrid was too appalled to be angry. He could not believe what had happened. He must have realised by that moment that his opponent was a swordsman, but still he could not believe he had lost. He brought up his bleeding hands as if to seize Pyrlig’s blade, and I saw the Welshman’s blade twitch and Sigefrid, sensing death a hair’s breadth away, went still.

‘No,’ I repeated.

‘Why shouldn’t I kill him?’ Pyrlig asked, and his voice was a warrior’s voice now, hard and merciless, and his eyes were warrior’s eyes, flint-cold and furious.

‘No,’ I said again. I knew that if Pyrlig killed Sigefrid then Sigefrid’s men would have their revenge.

Erik knew it too. ‘You won, priest,’ he said softly. He walked to his brother. ‘You won,’ he said again to Pyrlig, ‘so put down the sword.’

‘Does he know I beat him?’ Pyrlig asked, staring into Sigefrid’s dark eyes.

‘I speak for him,’ Erik said. ‘You won the fight, priest, and you are free.’

‘I have to deliver my message first,’ Pyrlig said. Blood dripped from Sigefrid’s hand. He still stared at the Welshman. ‘The message we bring from King Æthelstan,’ Pyrlig said, meaning Guthrum, ‘is that you are to leave Lundene. It is not part of the land ceded by Alfred to Danish rule. Do you understand that?’ He twitched Serpent-Breath again, though Sigefrid said nothing. ‘Now I want horses,’ Pyrlig went on, ‘and Lord Uhtred and his men are to escort us out of Lundene. Is that agreed?’

Erik looked at me and I nodded consent. ‘It is agreed,’ Erik said to Pyrlig.

I took Serpent-Breath from Pyrlig’s hand. Erik was holding his brother’s wounded arm. For a moment I thought Sigefrid would attack the unarmed Welshman, but Erik managed to turn him away.

Horses were fetched. The men in the arena were silent and resentful. They had seen their leader humiliated, and they did not understand why Pyrlig was allowed to leave with the other envoys, but they accepted Erik’s decision.

‘My brother is headstrong,’ Erik told me. He had taken me aside to talk while the horses were saddled.

‘It seems the priest knew how to fight after all,’ I said apologetically.

Erik frowned, not with anger, but puzzlement. ‘I am curious about their god,’ he admitted. He was watching his brother, whose wounds were being bandaged. ‘Their god does seem to have power,’ Erik said. I slid Serpent-Breath into her scabbard and Erik saw the silver cross that decorated her pommel. ‘You must think so too?’

‘That was a gift,’ I said, ‘from a woman. A good woman. A lover. Then the Christian god took hold of her and she loves men no more.’

Erik reached out and touched the cross tentatively. ‘You don’t think it gives the blade power?’ he asked.

‘The memory of her love might,’ I said, ‘but power comes from here.’ I touched my amulet, Thor’s hammer.

‘I fear their god,’ Erik said.

‘He’s harsh,’ I said, ‘unkind. He’s a god who likes to make laws.’

‘Laws?’

‘You’re not allowed to lust after your neighbour’s wife,’ I said.

Erik laughed at that, then saw I was serious. ‘Truly?’ he asked with disbelief in his voice.

‘Priest!’ I called to Pyrlig. ‘Does your god let men lust after their neighbours’ wives?’

‘He lets them, lord,’ Pyrlig said humbly as if he feared me, ‘but he disapproves.’

‘Did he make a law about it?’

‘Yes, lord, he did. And he made another that says you mustn’t lust after your neighbour’s ox.’

‘There,’ I said to Erik. ‘You can’t even wish for an ox if you’re a Christian.’

‘Strange,’ he said thoughtfully. He was looking at Guthrum’s envoys who had so narrowly escaped losing their heads. ‘You don’t mind escorting them?’

‘No.’

‘It might be no bad thing if they live,’ he said quietly. ‘Why give Guthrum cause to attack us?’

‘He won’t,’ I said confidently, ‘whether you kill them or not.’

‘Probably not,’ he agreed, ‘but we agreed that if the priest won, then they would all live, so let them live. And you’re sure you don’t mind escorting them away?’

‘Of course not,’ I said.

‘Then come back here,’ Erik said warmly, ‘we need you.’

‘You need Ragnar,’ I corrected him.

‘True,’ he confessed, and smiled. ‘See those men safe out of the city, then come back.’

‘I have a wife and children to fetch first,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ he said, and smiled again. ‘You are fortunate in that. But you will come back?’

‘Bjorn the Dead told me so,’ I said, carefully evading his question.

‘So he did,’ Erik said. He embraced me. ‘We need you,’ he said, ‘and together we can take this whole island.’

We left, riding through the city streets, out through the western gate that was known as Ludd’s Gate, and then down to the ford across the River Fleot. Sihtric was bent over his saddle’s pommel, still suffering from the kicking he had received from Sigefrid. I looked behind as we left the ford, half expecting that Sigefrid would have countermanded his brother’s decision and sent men to pursue us, but none appeared. We spurred through the marshy ground and then up the slight slope to the Saxon town.

I did not stay on the road that led westwards, but instead turned onto the wharves where a dozen ships were moored. These were river boats that traded with Wessex and Mercia. Few shipmasters cared to shoot the dangerous gap in the ruined bridge that the Romans had thrown across the Temes, so these ships were smaller, manned by oarsmen, and all of them had paid dues to me at Coccham. They all knew me, because they did business with me on every trip.

We forced our way through heaps of merchandise, past open fires and through the gangs of slaves loading or unloading cargoes. Only one ship was ready to make a voyage. She was named the Swan and I knew her well. She had a Saxon crew, and she was nearly ready to leave because her oarsmen were standing on the wharf while the shipmaster, a man called Osric, finished his business with the merchant whose goods he was carrying. ‘You’re taking us too,’ I told him.

We left most of the horses behind, though I insisted that room was found for Smoca, and Finan wanted to keep his stallion too, and so the beasts were coaxed into the Swan’s open hold where they stood shivering. Then we left. The tide was flooding, the oars bit, and we glided upriver. ‘Where am I taking you, lord?’ Osric the shipmaster asked me.

‘To Coccham,’ I said.

And back to Alfred.

The river was wide, grey and sullen. It flowed strongly, fed by the winter rains against which the incoming tide gave less and less resistance. The Swan made hard work of the early rowing as the ten oarsmen fought the current and I caught Finan’s eye and we exchanged smiles. He was remembering, as I was, our long months at the oars of a slave-rowed trading ship. We had suffered, bled and shivered, and we had thought that only death could release us from that fate, but now other men rowed us as the Swan fought around the great swooping bends of the Temes that were softened by the wide floods that stretched into the water meadows.

I sat on the small platform built in the ship’s blunt bow and Father Pyrlig joined me there. I had given him my cloak, which he clutched tight around him. He had found some bread and cheese, which did not surprise me because I have never known a man eat so much. ‘How did you know I’d beat Sigefrid?’ he asked.

‘I didn’t know,’ I said. ‘In fact I was hoping he’d beat you, and that there would be one less Christian.’

He smiled at that, then gazed at the waterfowl on the flood water. ‘I knew I had two or three strokes only,’ he said, ‘before he realised I knew what I was doing. Then he’d have cut the flesh off my bones.’

‘He would,’ I agreed, ‘but I reckoned you had those three strokes and they’d prove enough.’

‘Thank you for that, Uhtred,’ he said, then broke off a lump of cheese and gave it to me. ‘How are you these days?’

‘Bored.’

‘I hear you’re married?’

‘I’m not bored with her,’ I said hurriedly.

‘Good for you! Me, now? I can’t stand my wife. Dear God, what a tongue that viper has. She can split a sheet of slate just by talking to it! You’ve not met my wife, have you?’

‘No.’

‘Sometimes I curse God for taking Adam’s rib and making Eve, but then I see some young girl and my heart leaps and I think God knew what he was doing after all.’

I smiled. ‘I thought Christian priests were supposed to set an example?’

‘And what’s wrong with admiring God’s creations?’ Pyrlig asked indignantly. ‘Especially a young one with plump round tits and a fine fat rump? It would be sinful of me to ignore such signs of his grace.’ He grinned, then looked anxious. ‘I heard you were taken captive?’

‘I was.’

‘I prayed for you.’

‘Thank you for that,’ I said, and meant it. I did not worship the Christian god, but like Erik I feared he had some power, so prayers to him were not wasted.

‘But I hear it was Alfred who had you released?’ Pyrlig asked.

I paused. As ever I hated to acknowledge any debt to Alfred, but I grudgingly conceded that he had helped. ‘He sent the men who freed me,’ I said, ‘yes.’

‘And you reward him, Lord Uhtred, by naming yourself King of Mercia?’

‘You heard that?’ I asked cautiously.

‘Of course I heard it! That great oaf of a Norseman bawled it just five paces from my ear. Are you King of Mercia?’

‘No,’ I said, resisting the urge to add ‘not yet’.

‘I didn’t think you were,’ Pyrlig said mildly. ‘I’d have heard about that, wouldn’t I? And I don’t think you will be, not unless Alfred wants it.’

‘Alfred can piss down his own throat for all I care,’ I said.

‘And of course I should tell him what I heard,’ Pyrlig said.

‘Yes,’ I said bitterly, ‘you should.’

I leaned against the curving timber of the ship’s stem and stared at the backs of the oarsmen. I was also watching for any sign of a pursuing ship, half expecting to see some fast warship swept along by banks of long oars, but no mast showed above the river’s long bends, which suggested Erik had successfully persuaded his brother against taking an instant revenge for the humiliation Pyrlig had given him. ‘So whose idea is it,’ Pyrlig asked, ‘that you should be king in Mercia?’ He waited for me to answer, but I said nothing. ‘It’s Sigefrid, isn’t it?’ he demanded. ‘Sigefrid’s crazy idea.’

‘Crazy?’ I asked innocently.

‘The man’s no fool,’ Pyrlig said, ‘and his brother certainly isn’t. They know Æthelstan’s getting old in East Anglia, and they ask who’ll be king after him? And there’s no king in Mercia. But he can’t just take Mercia, can he? The Mercian Saxons will fight him and Alfred will come to their aid, and the Thurgilson brothers will find themselves facing a fury of Saxons! So Sigefrid has this idea to rally men and take East Anglia first, then Mercia, and then Wessex! And to do all that he really needs Earl Ragnar to bring men from Northumbria.’

I was appalled that Pyrlig, a friend of Alfred’s, should know all that Sigefrid, Erik and Haesten planned, but I showed no reaction. ‘Ragnar won’t fight,’ I said, trying to end the conversation.

‘Unless you ask him,’ Pyrlig said sharply. I just shrugged. ‘But what can Sigefrid offer you?’ Pyrlig asked, and, when I did not respond again, provided the answer himself. ‘Mercia.’

I smiled condescendingly. ‘It all sounds very complicated.’

‘Sigefrid and Haesten,’ Pyrlig said, ignoring my flippant comment, ‘have ambitions to be kings. But there are only four kingdoms here! They can’t take Northumbria because Ragnar won’t let them. They can’t take Mercia because Alfred won’t let them. But Æthelstan’s getting old, so they could take East Anglia. And why not finish the job? Take Wessex? Sigefrid says he’ll put that drunken nephew of Alfred’s on the throne, and that’ll help calm the Saxons for a few months until Sigefrid murders him, and by then Haesten will be King of East Anglia and someone, you perhaps, King of Mercia. Doubtless they’ll turn on you then and divide Mercia between them. That’s the idea, Lord Uhtred, and it’s not a bad one! But who’d follow those two brigands?’

‘No one,’ I lied.

‘Unless they were convinced that the Fates were on their side,’ Pyrlig said almost casually, then looked at me. ‘Did you meet the dead man?’ he asked innocently, and I was so astonished by the question that I could not answer. I just stared into his round, battered face. ‘Bjorn, he’s called,’ the Welshman said, putting another lump of cheese into his mouth.

‘The dead don’t lie,’ I blurted out.

‘The living do! By God, they do! Even I lie, Lord Uhtred,’ he grinned at me mischievously, ‘I sent a message to my wife and said she’d hate being in East Anglia!’ He laughed. Alfred had asked Pyrlig to go to East Anglia because he was a priest and because he spoke Danish, and his task there had been to educate Guthrum in Christian ways. ‘In fact she’d love it there!’ Pyrlig went on. ‘It’s warmer than home and there are no hills to speak of. Flat and wet, that’s East Anglia, and without a proper hill anywhere! And my wife’s never been fond of hills, which is why I probably found God. I used to live on hilltops just to keep away from her, and you’re closer to God on a hilltop. Bjorn isn’t dead.’

He had said the last three words with a sudden brutality, and I answered him just as harshly. ‘I saw him.’

‘You saw a man come from a grave, that’s what you saw.’

‘I saw him!’ I insisted.

‘Of course you did! And you never thought to question what you saw, did you?’ The Welshman asked the question harshly. ‘Bjorn had been put in that grave just before you came! They piled earth on him and he breathed through a reed.’

I remembered Bjorn spitting something out of his mouth as he staggered upright. Not the harp string, but something else. I had thought it a lump of earth, but in truth it had been paler. I had not thought about it at the time, but now I understood that the resurrection had all been a trick and I sat on the foredeck of the Swan and felt the last remnants of my dream crumbling. I would not be king. ‘How do you know all this?’ I asked bitterly.

‘King Æthelstan’s no fool. He has his spies.’ Pyrlig put a hand on my arm. ‘Was he very convincing?’

‘Very,’ I said, still bitter.

‘He’s one of Haesten’s men, and if we ever catch him he’ll go properly to hell. So what did he tell you?’

‘That I would be king in Mercia,’ I said softly. I was to be king of Saxon and Dane, enemy of the Welsh, king between the rivers and lord of all I ruled. ‘I believed him,’ I said ruefully.

‘But how could you be King of Mercia?’ Pyrlig asked, ‘unless Alfred made you king?’

‘Alfred?’

‘You gave him your oath, did you not?’

I was ashamed to tell the truth, but had no choice. ‘Yes,’ I admitted.

‘Which is why I must tell him,’ Pyrlig said sternly, ‘because a man breaking an oath is a serious matter, Lord Uhtred.’

‘It is,’ I agreed.

‘And Alfred will have the right to kill you when I tell him.’

I shrugged.

‘Better you keep the oath,’ Pyrlig said, ‘than be fooled by men who make a corpse from a living man. The Fates are not on your side, Lord Uhtred. Trust me.’

I looked at him and saw the sorrow in his eyes. He liked me, yet he was telling me I had been fooled, and he was right, and the dream was collapsing around me. ‘What choice do I have?’ I asked him bitterly. ‘You know I went to Lundene to join them, and you must tell Alfred that, and he will never trust me again.’

‘I doubt he trusts you now,’ Pyrlig said cheerfully. ‘He’s a wise man, Alfred. But he knows you, Uhtred, he knows you are a warrior, and he needs warriors.’ He paused to pull out the wooden cross that hung about his neck. ‘Swear on it,’ he said.

‘Swear what?’

‘That you will keep your oath to him! Do that and I will keep silent. Do that and I will deny what happened. Do that and I will protect you.’

I hesitated.

‘If you break your oath to Alfred,’ Pyrlig said, ‘then you are my enemy and I’ll be forced to kill you.’

‘You think you could?’ I asked.

He grinned his mischievous grin. ‘Ah, you like me, lord, even though I am a Welshman and a priest, and you’d be reluctant to kill me, and I’d have three strokes before you woke up to your danger, so yes, lord, I would kill you.’

I put my right hand on the cross. ‘I swear it,’ I said.

And I was still Alfred’s man.

Three

We reached Coccham that evening and I watched Gisela, who had as little love for Christianity as I did, warm to Father Pyrlig. He flirted with her outrageously, complimented her extravagantly and played with our children. We had two then, and we had been lucky, for both babies had lived, as had their mother. Uhtred was the oldest. My son. He was four years old with hair as golden-coloured as mine and a strong little face with a pug nose, blue eyes and a stubborn chin. I loved him then. My daughter Stiorra was two years old. She had a strange name and at first I had not liked it, but Gisela had pleaded with me and I could refuse her almost nothing, and certainly not the naming of a daughter. Stiorra simply meant ‘star’, and Gisela swore that she and I had met under a lucky star and that our daughter had been born under the same star. I had got used to the name by now and loved it as I loved the child, who had her mother’s dark hair and long face and sudden mischievous smile. ‘Stiorra, Stiorra!’ I would say as I tickled her, or let her play with my arm rings. Stiorra, so beautiful.

I played with her on the night before Gisela and I left for Wintanceaster. It was spring and the Temes had subsided so that the river meadows showed again and the world was hazed with green as the leaves budded. The first lambs wobbled in fields bright with cowslips, and the blackbirds filled the sky with rippling song. Salmon had returned to the river and our woven willow traps provided good eating. The pear trees in Coccham were thick with buds, and just as thick with bullfinches, which had to be scared away by small boys so that we would have fruit in the summertime. It was a good time of year, a time when the world stirred, and a time when we had been summoned to Alfred’s capital for the wedding of his daughter, Æthelflaed, to my cousin, Æthelred. And that night, as I pretended my knee was a horse and that Stiorra was the horse’s rider, I thought about my promise to provide Æthelred with his wedding gift. The gift of a city. Lundene.

Gisela was spinning wool. She had shrugged when I had told her she was not to be Queen of Mercia, and she had nodded gravely when I said I would keep my oath with Alfred. She accepted fate more readily than I did. Fate and that fortunate star, she said, had brought us together despite all that the world had done to keep us apart. ‘If you keep your oath to Alfred,’ she said suddenly, interrupting my play with Stiorra, ‘then you must capture Lundene from Sigefrid?’

‘Yes,’ I said, marvelling as I often did that her thoughts and mine were so often the same.

‘Can you?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ I said. Sigefrid and Erik were still in the old city, their men guarding the Roman walls that they had repaired with timber. No ship could now come up the Temes without paying the brothers their toll, and that toll was huge, so that the river traffic had stopped, as merchants sought other ways to bring goods to Wessex. King Guthrum of East Anglia had threatened Sigefrid and Erik with war, but his threat had proved empty. Guthrum did not want war, he just wanted to persuade Alfred that he was doing his best to keep the peace treaty, so if Sigefrid was to be removed, then it would be the West Saxons who did the work, and I who would be responsible for leading them.

I had made my plans. I had written to the king and he, in turn, had written to the ealdormen of the shires, and I had been promised four hundred trained warriors along with the fyrd of Berrocscire. The fyrd was an army of farmers, foresters and labourers, and though it would be numerous it would also be untrained. The four hundred trained men would be the ones I relied on, and spies said Sigefrid now had at least six hundred in the old city. Those same spies said that Haesten had gone back to his camp at Beamfleot, but that was not far from Lundene and he would hurry to reinforce his allies, as would those Danes of East Anglia who hated Guthrum’s Christianity and wanted Sigefrid and Erik to begin their war of conquest. The enemy, I thought, would number at least a thousand, and all of them would be skilled with sword, axe or spear. They would be war-Danes. Enemies to fear.

‘The king,’ Gisela said mildly, ‘will want to know how you plan to do it.’

‘Then I shall tell him,’ I said.

She gave me a dubious glance. ‘You will?’

‘Of course,’ I said, ‘he’s the king.’

She laid the distaff on her lap and frowned at me. ‘You will tell him the truth?’

‘Of course not,’ I said. ‘He may be the king, but I’m not a fool.’

She laughed, which made Stiorra echo the laugh. ‘I wish I could come with you to Lundene,’ Gisela said wistfully.

‘You can’t,’ I said forcefully.

‘I know,’ she answered with uncharacteristic meekness, then touched a hand to her belly. ‘I really can’t.’

I stared at her. I stared a long time as her news settled in my mind. I stared, I smiled and then I laughed. I threw Stiorra high into the air so that her dark hair almost touched the smoke-blackened thatch. ‘Your mother’s pregnant,’ I told the happily squealing child.

‘And it’s all your father’s fault,’ Gisela added sternly.

We were so happy.

Æthelred was my cousin, the son of my mother’s brother. He was a Mercian, though for years now he had been loyal to Alfred of Wessex, and that day in Wintanceaster, in the great church Alfred had built, Æthelred of Mercia received his reward for that loyalty.

He was given Æthelflaed, Alfred’s eldest daughter and second child. She was golden haired and had eyes the colour and brightness of a summer’s sky. Æthelflaed was thirteen or fourteen years old then, the proper age for a girl to marry, and she had grown into a tall young woman with an upright stance and a bold look. She was already as tall as the man who was to be her husband.

Æthelred is a hero now. I hear tales of him, tales told by firelight in Saxon halls the length of England. Æthelred the Bold, Æthelred the Warrior, Æthelred the Loyal. I smile when I hear the stories, but I do not say anything, not even when men ask if it is true that I once knew Æthelred. Of course I knew Æthelred, and it is true that he was a warrior before sickness slowed and stilled him, and he was also bold, though his shrewdest stroke was to pay poets to be his courtiers so that they would make up songs about his prowess. A man could become rich in Æthelred’s court by stringing words like beads.

He was never King of Mercia, though he wanted to be. Alfred made sure of that, for Alfred wanted no king in Mercia. He wanted a loyal follower to be the ruler of Mercia, and he made sure that loyal follower was dependent on West Saxon money, and Æthelred was his chosen man. He was given the title Ealdorman of Mercia, and in all but name he was king, though the Danes of northern Mercia never recognised his authority. They did recognise his power, and that power came from being Alfred’s son-in-law, which was why the Saxon thegns of southern Mercia also accepted him. They may not have liked Ealdorman Æthelred, but they knew he could bring West Saxon troops to confront any southward move by the Danes.

And on a spring day in Wintanceaster, a day bright with birdsong and sunlight, Æthelred came into his power. He strutted into Alfred’s big new church with a smile across his red-bearded face. He ever suffered from the delusion that others liked him and perhaps some men did like him, but not me. My cousin was short, pugnacious and boastful. His jaw was broad and belligerent, his eyes challenging. He was twice as old as his bride, and for almost five years he had been commander of Alfred’s household troops, an appointment he owed to birth rather than to ability. His good fortune had been to inherit lands that spread across most of southern Mercia, and that made him Mercia’s foremost nobleman and, I grudgingly supposed, that sad country’s natural leader. He was also, I ungrudgingly supposed, a piece of shit.

Alfred never saw that. He was deceived by Æthelred’s flamboyant piety, and by the fact that Æthelred was always ready to agree with the King of Wessex. Yes, lord, no, lord, let me empty your night soil bucket, lord, and let me lick your royal arse, lord. That was Æthelred, and his reward was Æthelflaed.

She came into the church a few moments after Æthelred and she, like him, was smiling. She was in love with love, transported that day to a height of joy that showed like radiance on her sweet face. She was a lithe young woman who already had a sway in her hips. She was long-legged, slender, and with a snub-nosed face unscarred by disease. She wore a dress of pale blue linen sewn with panels showing saints with haloes and crosses. She had a girdle of gold cloth hung with tassels and small silver bells. Over her shoulders was a cape of white linen that was fastened at her throat with a crystal brooch. The cape swept the rushes on the flagstone floor as she walked. Her hair, gold bright, was coiled about her head and held in place with ivory combs. That spring day was the first on which she wore her hair up, a sign of marriage, and it revealed her long thin neck. She was so graceful that day.

She caught my gaze as she walked towards the white-hung altar and her eyes, already filled with delight, seemed to take on a new dazzle. She smiled at me and I had to smile back, and she laughed for joy before walking on towards her father and the man who was to be her husband. ‘She’s very fond of you,’ Gisela said with a smile.

‘We have been friends since she was a child,’ I said.

‘She is still a child,’ Gisela said softly as the bride reached the flower-strewn, cross-burdened altar.

I remember thinking that Æthelflaed was being sacrificed on that altar, but if that was true then she was a most willing victim. She had always been a mischievous and wilful child, and I did not doubt that she chafed under her sour mother’s eye and her stern father’s rules. She saw marriage as an escape from Alfred’s dour and pious court, and that day Alfred’s new church was filled with her happiness. I saw Steapa, perhaps the greatest warrior of Wessex, crying. Steapa, like me, was fond of Æthelflaed.

There were close to three hundred folk in the church. Envoys had come from the Frankish kingdoms across the sea, and others had come from Northumbria, Mercia, East Anglia and the Welsh kingdoms, and those men, all priests or nobles, were given places of honour close to the altar. The ealdormen and high reeves of Wessex were there too, while nearest to the altar was a dark herd of priests and monks. I heard little of the mass, for Gisela and I were in the back of the church where we talked with friends. Once in a while a sharp command for silence would be issued by a priest, but no one took any notice.

Hild, abbess of a nunnery in Wintanceaster, embraced Gisela. Gisela had two good Christian friends. The first was Hild, who had once fled the church to become my lover, and the other was Thyra, Ragnar’s sister, with whom I had grown up and whom I loved as a sister. Thyra was a Dane, of course, and had been raised in the worship of Thor and Odin, but she had converted and come south to Wessex. She dressed like a nun. She wore a drab grey robe with a hood that hid her astonishing beauty. A black girdle encircled her waist, which was normally as thin as Gisela’s, but now was plump with pregnancy. I laid a gentle hand on the girdle. ‘Another?’ I asked.

‘And soon,’ Thyra said. She had given birth to three children, of whom one, a boy, still lived.

‘Your husband is insatiable,’ I said with mock sternness.

‘It is God’s will,’ Thyra said seriously. The humour I remembered from her childhood had evaporated with her conversion, though in truth it had probably left her when she had been enslaved in Dunholm by her brother’s enemies. She had been raped and abused and driven mad by her captors, and Ragnar and I had fought our way into Dunholm to release her, but it was Christianity that had freed her from the madness and made her into the serene woman who now looked at me so gravely.

‘And how is your husband?’ I asked her.

‘Well, thank you,’ her face brightened as she spoke. Thyra had found love, not just of God, but of a good man, and for that I was thankful.

‘You will, of course, call the child Uhtred if it’s a boy,’ I said sternly.

‘If the king permits it,’ Thyra said, ‘we shall name him Alfred, and if she’s a girl then she will be called Hild.’

That made Hild cry, and Gisela then revealed that she was also pregnant, and the three women went into an interminable discussion of babies. I extricated myself and found Steapa who was standing head and shoulders above the rest of the congregation. ‘You know I’m to throw Sigefrid and Erik out of Lundene?’ I asked him.

‘I was told,’ he said in his slow, deliberate way.

‘You’ll come?’

He gave a quick smile that I took to be consent. He had a frightening face, his skin stretched tight across his big-boned skull so that he seemed to be perpetually grimacing. In battle he was fearsome, a huge warrior with sword skill and savagery. He had been born to slavery, but his size and his fighting ability had raised him to his present eminence. He served in Alfred’s bodyguard, owned slaves himself, and farmed a wide swathe of fine land in Wiltunscir. Men were wary of Steapa because of the anger that was ever-present on his face, but I knew him to be a kind man. He was not clever. Steapa was never a thinker, but he was kind and he was loyal. ‘I’ll ask the king to release you,’ I said.

‘He’ll want me to go with Æthelred,’ Steapa said.

‘You’d rather be with the man who does the fighting, wouldn’t you?’ I asked.

Steapa blinked at me, too slow to understand the insult I had offered my cousin. ‘I shall fight,’ he said, then laid a huge arm on the shoulders of his wife, a tiny creature with an anxious face and small eyes. I could never remember her name, so I greeted her politely and pushed on through the crowd.

Æthelwold found me. Alfred’s nephew had begun drinking again and his eyes were bloodshot. He had been a handsome young man, but his face was thickening now and the veins were red and broken under his skin. He drew me to the edge of the church to stand beneath a banner on which a long exhortation had been embroidered in red wool. ‘All That You Ask of God,’ the banner read, ‘You Will Receive if You Believe. When Good Prayer Asks, Meek Faith Receives.’ I assumed Alfred’s wife and her ladies had done the embroidery, but the sentiments sounded like Alfred’s own. Æthelwold was clutching my elbow so hard that it hurt. ‘I thought you were on my side,’ he hissed reproachfully.

‘I am,’ I said.

He stared at me suspiciously. ‘You met Bjorn?’

‘I met a man pretending to be dead,’ I said.

He ignored that, which surprised me. I remembered how affected he had been by his meeting with Bjorn, so impressed indeed that Æthelwold had become sober for a while, but now he took my dismissal of the risen corpse as a thing of no importance. ‘Don’t you understand,’ he said, still gripping my elbow, ‘that this is our best chance!’

‘Our best chance of what?’ I asked patiently.

‘Of getting rid of him,’ he spoke too vehemently and some folk standing nearby turned to look at us. I said nothing. Of course Æthelwold wanted to be rid of his uncle, but he lacked the courage to strike the blow himself, which is why he was constantly seeking allies like me. He looked up into my face and evidently found no support there, for he let go of my arm. ‘They want to know if you’ve asked Ragnar,’ he said, his voice lower.

So Æthelwold was still in contact with Sigefrid? That was interesting, but perhaps not surprising. ‘No,’ I said, ‘I haven’t.’

‘For God’s sake, why not?’

‘Because Bjorn lied,’ I said, ‘and it is not my fate to be king in Mercia.’

‘If I ever become king in Wessex,’ Æthelwold said bitterly, ‘then you had better run for your life.’ I smiled at that, then just looked at him with unblinking eyes and, after a while he turned away and muttered something inaudible that was probably an apology. He stared across the church, his face dark. ‘That Danish bitch,’ he said vehemently.

‘What Danish bitch?’ I asked, and, for a heartbeat, I thought he meant Gisela.

‘That bitch,’ he jerked his head towards Thyra. ‘The one married to the idiot. The pious bitch. The one with her belly stuffed.’

‘Thyra?’

‘She’s beautiful,’ Æthelwold said vengefully.

‘So she is.’

‘And she’s married to an old fool!’ he said, staring at Thyra with loathing on his face. ‘When she’s whelped that pup inside her I’m going to put her on her back,’ he said, ‘and show her how a real man ploughs a field.’

‘You do know she’s my friend?’ I asked.

He looked alarmed. He had plainly not known of my long affection for Thyra and now tried to recant. ‘I just think she’s beautiful,’ he said sullenly, ‘that’s all.’

I smiled and leaned down to his ear. ‘You touch her,’ I whispered, ‘and I’ll put a sword up your arsehole and I’ll rip you open from the crotch to the throat and then feed your entrails to my pigs. Touch her once, Æthelwold, just once, and you’re dead.’

I walked away. He was a fool and a drunk and a lecher, and I dismissed him as harmless. In which I was wrong, as it turned out. He was, after all, the rightful King of Wessex, but only he and a few other fools truly believed he should be king instead of Alfred. Alfred was everything his nephew was not; he was sober, clever, industrious and serious.

He was also happy that day. He watched as his daughter married a man he loved almost like a son, and he listened to the monks chanting and he stared at the church he had made with its gilded beams and painted statues, and he knew that by this marriage he was taking control of southern Mercia.

Which meant that Wessex, like the infants inside Thyra and Gisela, was growing.

Father Beocca found me outside the church where the wedding guests stood in the sunshine and waited for the summons to the feast inside Alfred’s hall. ‘Too many people were talking in the church!’ Beocca complained. ‘This was a holy day, Uhtred, a sacred day, a celebration of the sacrament, and people were talking as if they were at market!’

‘I was one of them,’ I said.

‘You were?’ he asked, squinting up at me. ‘Well, you shouldn’t have been talking. It’s just plain bad manners! And insulting to God! I’m astonished at you, Uhtred, I really am! I’m astonished and disappointed.’

‘Yes, father,’ I said, smiling. Beocca had been reproving me for years. When I was a child, Beocca was my father’s priest and confessor and, like me, he had fled Northumbria when my uncle had usurped Bebbanburg. Beocca had found a refuge at Alfred’s court where his piety, his learning and his enthusiasm were appreciated by the king. That royal favour went a long way to stop men mocking Beocca, who was, in all truth, as ugly a man as you could have found in all Wessex. He had a club foot, a squint, and a palsied left hand. He was blind in his wandering eye that had gone as white as his hair, for he was now nearly fifty years old. Children jeered at him in the streets and some folk made the sign of the cross, believing that ugliness was a mark of the devil, but he was as good a Christian as any I have ever known. ‘It is good to see you,’ he said in a dismissive tone, as if he feared I might believe him. ‘You do know the king wishes to speak with you? I suggested you meet him after the feast.’

‘I’ll be drunk.’

He sighed, then reached out with his good hand to hide the amulet of Thor’s hammer that was showing at my neck. He tucked it under my tunic. ‘Try to stay sober,’ he said.

‘Tomorrow, perhaps?’

‘The king is busy, Uhtred! He doesn’t wait on your convenience!’

‘Then he’ll have to talk to me drunk,’ I said.

‘And I warn you he wants to know how soon you can take Lundene. That’s why he wishes to speak with you.’ He stopped talking abruptly because Gisela and Thyra were walking towards us, and Beocca’s face was suddenly transformed by happiness. He just stared at Thyra like a man seeing a vision and, when she smiled at him, I thought his heart would burst with pride and devotion. ‘You’re not cold, are you, my dear?’ he asked solicitously. ‘I can fetch you a cloak.’

‘I’m not cold.’

‘Your blue cloak?’

‘I am warm, my dear,’ she said, and put a hand on his arm.

‘It will be no trouble!’ Beocca said.

‘I am not cold, dearest,’ Thyra said, and again Beocca looked as though he would die of happiness.

All his life Beocca had dreamed of women. Of fair women. Of a woman who would marry him and give him children, and for all his life his grotesque appearance had made him an object of scorn until, on a hilltop of blood, he had met Thyra and he had banished the demons from her soul. They had been married four years now. To look at them was to be certain that no two people were ever more ill-suited to each other. An old, ugly, meticulous priest and a young, golden-haired Dane, but to be near them was to feel their joy like the warmth of a great fire on a winter’s night. ‘You shouldn’t be standing, my dear,’ he told her, ‘not in your condition. I shall fetch you a stool.’

‘I shall be sitting soon, dearest.’

‘A stool, I think, or a chair. And are you sure you don’t need a cloak? It would really be no trouble to fetch one!’

Gisela looked at me and smiled, but Beocca and Thyra were oblivious of us as they fussed over each other. Then Gisela gave the smallest jerk of her head and I looked to see that a young monk was standing nearby and staring at me. He had obviously been waiting to catch my eye, and he was just as obviously nervous. He was thin, not very tall, brown haired and had a pale face that looked remarkably like Alfred’s. There was the same drawn and anxious look, the same serious eyes and thin mouth, and evidently the same piety judging by the monk’s robe. He was a novice, because his hair was untonsured, and he dropped to one knee when I looked at him. ‘Lord Uhtred,’ he said humbly.

‘Osferth!’ Beocca said, becoming aware of the young monk’s presence. ‘You should be at your studies! The wedding is over and novices are not invited to the feast.’

Osferth ignored Beocca. Instead, with his head bowed, he spoke to me. ‘You knew my uncle, lord.’

‘I did?’ I asked suspiciously. ‘I have known many men,’ I said, preparing him for the refusal I was sure I would offer to whatever he requested of me.

‘Leofric, lord.’

And my suspicion and hostility vanished at the mention of that name. Leofric. I even smiled. ‘I knew him,’ I said warmly, ‘and I loved him.’ Leofric had been a tough West Saxon warrior who had taught me about war. Earsling, he used to call me, meaning something dropped from an arse, and he toughened me, bullied me, snarled at me, beat me and became my friend and remained my friend until the day he died on the rain-swept battlefield at Ethandun.

‘My mother is his sister, lord,’ Osferth said.

‘To your studies, young man!’ Beocca said sternly.

I put a hand on Beocca’s palsied arm to hold him back. ‘Your mother’s name?’ I asked Osferth.

‘Eadgyth, lord.’

I leaned down and tipped Osferth’s face up. No wonder he looked like Alfred, for this was Alfred’s bastard son who had been whelped on a palace servant-girl. No one ever admitted that Alfred was the boy’s father, though it was an open secret. Before Alfred found God he had discovered the joys of palace maids, and Osferth was the product of that youthful exuberance. ‘Does Eadgyth live?’ I asked him.

‘No, lord. She died of the fever two years ago.’

‘And what are you doing here, in Wintanceaster?’

‘He is studying for the church,’ Beocca snapped, ‘because his calling is to be a monk.’

‘I would serve you, lord,’ Osferth said anxiously, staring up into my face.

‘Go!’ Beocca tried to shoo the young man away. ‘Go! Go away! Back to your studies, or I shall have the novice-master whip you!’

‘Have you ever held a sword?’ I asked Osferth.

‘The one my uncle gave me, lord, I have it.’

‘But you’ve not fought with it?’

‘No, lord,’ he said, and still he looked up at me, so anxious and frightened, and with a face so like his father’s face.

‘We are studying the life of Saint Cedd,’ Beocca said to Osferth, ‘and I expect you to have copied the first ten pages by sundown.’

‘Do you want to be a monk?’ I asked Osferth.

‘No, lord,’ he said.

‘Then what?’ I asked, ignoring Father Beocca who was spluttering protests, but unable to advance past my sword arm that held him back.

‘I would follow my uncle’s steps, lord,’ Osferth said.

I almost laughed. Leofric had been as hard a warrior as ever lived and died, while Osferth was a puny, pale youth, but I managed to keep a straight face. ‘Finan!’ I shouted.

The Irishman appeared at my side. ‘Lord?’

‘This young man is joining my household troops,’ I said, handing Finan some coins.

‘You can’t …’ Beocca began protesting, then went silent when both Finan and I stared at him.

‘Take Osferth away,’ I told Finan, ‘find him clothes fit for a man, and get him weapons.’

Finan looked dubiously at Osferth. ‘Weapons?’ he asked.

‘He has the blood of warriors,’ I said, ‘so now we will teach him to fight.’

‘Yes, lord,’ Finan said, his tone suggesting he thought I was mad, but then he looked at the coins I had given him and saw a chance of profit. He grinned. ‘We’ll make him a warrior yet, lord,’ he said, doubtless believing he lied, then he led Osferth away.

Beocca rounded on me. ‘Do you know what you’ve just done?’ he spluttered.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘You know who that boy is?’

‘He’s the king’s bastard,’ I said brutally, ‘and I’ve just done Alfred a favour.’

‘You have?’ Beocca asked, still bristling, ‘and what kind of favour, pray?’

‘How long do you think he’ll last,’ I asked, ‘when I put him in the shield wall? How long before a Danish blade slits him like a wet herring? That, father, is the favour. I’ve just rid your pious king of his inconvenient bastard.’

We went to the feast.

The wedding feast was as ghastly as I expected. Alfred’s food was never good, rarely plentiful and his ale was always weak. Speeches were made, though I heard none, and harpists sang, though I could not hear them. I talked with friends, scowled at various priests who disliked my hammer amulet, and climbed the dais to the top table to give Æthelflaed a chaste kiss. She was all happiness. ‘I’m the luckiest girl in all the world,’ she told me.

‘You’re a woman now,’ I said, smiling at her upswept woman’s hair.

She bit her lower lip, looked shy, then grinned mischievously as Gisela approached. They embraced, golden hair against the dark, and Ælswith, Alfred’s sour wife, glowered at me. I bowed low. ‘A happy day, my lady,’ I said.

Ælswith ignored that. She was sitting beside my cousin, who gestured at me with a pork rib. ‘You and I have business to discuss,’ he said.

‘We do,’ I said.

‘We do, lord,’ Ælswith corrected me sharply. ‘Lord Æthelred is the Ealdorman of Mercia.’

‘And I’m the Lord of Bebbanburg,’ I said with an asperity that matched hers. ‘How are you, cousin?’

‘In the morning,’ Æthelred said, ‘I shall tell you our plans.’

‘I was told,’ I said, ignoring the truth that Alfred had asked me to devise the plans for the capture of Lundene, ‘that we were to meet the king tonight?’

‘I have other matters for my attention tonight,’ Æthelred said, looking at his young bride, and for an eyeblink his expression was feral, almost savage, then he offered me a smile. ‘In the morning, after prayers.’ He waved the pork rib again, dismissing me.

Gisela and I lay in the principal chamber of the Two Cranes tavern that night. We lay close, my arm around her, and we said little. Smoke from the tavern hearth sifted up through the loose floorboards and men were singing beneath us. Our children slept across the room with Stiorra’s nurse, while mice rustled in the thatch above. ‘About now, I suppose,’ Gisela said wistfully, breaking our silence.

‘Now?’

‘Poor little Æthelflaed is becoming a woman,’ she said.

‘She can’t wait for that to happen,’ I said.

Gisela shook her head. ‘He’ll rape her like a boar,’ she said, whispering the words. I said nothing. Gisela put her head on my chest so that her hair was across my mouth. ‘Love should be tender,’ she went on.

‘It is tender,’ I said.

‘With you, yes,’ she said, and for a moment I thought she was crying.

I stroked her hair. ‘What is it?’

‘I like her, that is all.’

‘Æthelflaed?’

‘She has spirit and he has none.’ She tilted her face to look at me and in the darkness I could just see the glint of her eyes. ‘You never told me,’ she said reprovingly, ‘that the Two Cranes is a brothel.’

‘There are not many beds in Wintanceaster,’ I said, ‘and not nearly enough for all the invited guests, so we were very lucky to find this room.’

‘And they know you very well here, Uhtred,’ she said accusingly.

‘It’s a tavern as well,’ I said defensively.

She laughed, then reached out a long thin arm and pushed a shutter open to find the heavens were bright with stars.

The sky was still clear next morning when I went to the palace, surrendered my two swords and was ushered by a young and very serious priest to Alfred’s room. I had met him so often in that small, bare chamber that was cluttered with parchments. He was waiting there, dressed in the brown robe that made him look like a monk, and with him was Æthelred who wore his swords because, as Ealdorman of Mercia, he had been granted that privilege within the palace. A third man was in the room, Asser the Welsh monk, who glared at me with undisguised loathing. He was a slight, short man with a very pale face that was scrupulously clean-shaven. He had good cause to hate me. I had met him in Cornwalum where I had led a slaughter of the kingdom where he was an emissary and I had tried to kill Asser too, a failure I have regretted all my life. He scowled at me and I rewarded him with a cheerful grin that I knew would annoy him.

Alfred did not look up from his work, but gestured at me with his quill. The gesture was evidently a welcome. He was standing at the upright desk he used for writing and for a moment all I could hear was the quill spluttering scratchily on the skin. Æthelred smirked, looking pleased with himself, but then he always did.

‘De consolatione philosophiae,’ Alfred said without looking up from his work.

‘Feels as if rain is coming, though,’ I said, ‘there’s a haze in the west, lord, and the wind is brisk.’

He gave me an exasperated look. ‘What is preferable,’ he asked, ‘and sweeter in this life than to serve and to be near to the king?’

‘Nothing!’ Æthelred said enthusiastically.

I made no answer because I was so astonished. Alfred liked the formalities of good manners, but he rarely wanted obsequiousness, yet the question suggested that he wished me to express some doltish adoration of him. Alfred saw my surprise and sighed. ‘It is a question,’ he explained, ‘posed in the work I am copying.’

‘I look forward to reading it,’ Æthelred said. Asser said nothing, just watched me with his dark Welsh eyes. He was a clever man, and about as trustworthy as a spavined weasel.

Alfred laid down the quill. ‘The king, in this context, Lord Uhtred, might be thought of as the representative of Almighty God, and the question suggests, does it not, the comfort to be gained from a nearness to God? Yet I fear you find no consolation in either philosophy or religion.’ He shook his head, then tried to wipe the ink from his hands with a damp cloth.

‘He had better find consolation from God, lord King,’ Asser spoke for the first time, ‘if his soul is not to burn in the eternal fire.’

‘Amen,’ Æthelred said.

Alfred looked ruefully at his hands that were now smeared with ink. ‘Lundene,’ he said, curtly changing the subject.

‘Garrisoned by brigands,’ I said, ‘who are killing trade.’

‘That much I know,’ he said icily. ‘The man Sigefrid.’

‘One-thumbed Sigefrid,’ I said, ‘thanks to Father Pyrlig.’

‘That I also know,’ the king said, ‘but I would dearly like to know what you were doing in Sigefrid’s company?’

‘Spying on them, lord,’ I said brightly, ‘just as you spied on Guthrum so many years ago.’ I referred to a winter night when, like a fool, Alfred had disguised himself as a musician and gone to Cippanhamm when it was occupied by Guthrum in the days when he was an enemy of Wessex. Alfred’s bravery had gone badly wrong, and if I had not been there then I dare say Guthrum would have become King of Wessex. I smiled at Alfred, and he knew I was reminding him that I had saved his life, but instead of showing gratitude he just looked disgusted.

‘It is not what we heard,’ Brother Asser went onto the attack.

‘And what did you hear, brother?’ I asked him.

He held up one long slender finger. ‘That you arrived in Lundene with the pirate Haesten,’ a second finger joined the first, ‘that you were welcomed by Sigefrid and his brother, Erik,’ he paused, his dark eyes malevolent, and raised a third finger, ‘and that the pagans addressed you as King of Mercia.’ He folded the three fingers slowly, as though his accusations were irrefutable.

I shook my head in feigned wonderment. ‘I have known Haesten since I saved his life many years ago,’ I said, ‘and I used the acquaintance to be invited into Lundene. And whose fault is it if Sigefrid gives me a title I neither want nor possess?’ Asser did not answer, Æthelred stirred behind me while Alfred just stared at me. ‘If you don’t believe me,’ I said, ‘ask Father Pyrlig.’

‘He has been sent back to East Anglia,’ Asser said brusquely, ‘to continue his mission. But we will ask him. You may be sure of that.’

‘I already have asked,’ Alfred said, making a calming gesture towards Asser, ‘and Father Pyrlig vouched for you,’ he added those last words cautiously.

‘And why,’ I asked, ‘has Guthrum not taken revenge for the insults to his envoys?’

‘King Æthelstan,’ Alfred said, using Guthrum’s Christian name, ‘has abandoned any claims to Lundene. It belongs to Mercia. His troops will not trespass there. But I have promised to send him Sigefrid and Erik as captives. That is your job.’ I nodded, but said nothing. ‘So tell me how you plan to capture Lundene?’ Alfred demanded.

I paused. ‘You attempted to ransom the city, lord?’ I asked.

Alfred looked irritated at the question, then nodded abruptly. ‘I offered silver,’ he said stiffly.

‘Offer more,’ I suggested.

He gave me a very sour look. ‘More?’

‘The city will be difficult to take, lord,’ I said. ‘Sigefrid and Erik have hundreds of men. Haesten will join them as soon as he hears that we have marched. We would have to assault stone walls, lord, and men die like flies in such attacks.’

Æthelred again stirred behind me. I knew he wanted to dismiss my fears as cowardice, but he had just enough sense to keep silent.

Alfred shook his head. ‘I offered them silver,’ he said bitterly, ‘more silver than a man can dream of. I offered them gold. They said they would take half of what I offered if I added one more thing.’ He looked at me belligerently. I gave a small shrug as if to suggest that he had rejected a bargain. ‘They wanted Æthelflaed,’ he said.

‘They can have my sword instead,’ Æthelred said belligerently.

‘They wanted your daughter?’ I asked, amazed.

‘They asked,’ Alfred said, ‘because they knew I would not grant their request, and because they wished to insult me.’ He shrugged, as if to suggest that the insult was as feeble as it was puerile. ‘So if the Thurgilson brothers are to be thrown out of Lundene, then you must do it. Tell me how.’

I pretended to gather my thoughts. ‘Sigefrid does not have sufficient men to guard the whole circuit of the city walls,’ I said, ‘so we send a large attack against the western gate, and then launch the real assault from the north.’

Alfred frowned and sifted through the parchments piled on the windowsill. He found the page he wanted and peered at the writing. ‘The old city, as I understand it,’ he said, ‘has six gates. To which do you refer?’

‘In the west,’ I said, ‘the gate nearest the river. The local folk call it Ludd’s Gate.’

‘And on the northern side?’

‘There are two gates,’ I said, ‘one leads directly into the old Roman fort, the other goes to the market place.’

‘The forum,’ Alfred corrected me.

‘We take the one that leads to the market,’ I said.

‘Not the fort?’

‘The fort is part of the walls,’ I explained, ‘so capture that gate and we still have to cross the fort’s southern wall. But capture the market place and our men have cut off Sigefrid’s retreat.’

I was talking nonsense for a reason, though it was plausible nonsense. Launching an attack from the new Saxon town across the River Fleot onto the old city’s walls would draw defenders to Ludd’s Gate, and if a smaller, better-trained force could then attack from the north they might find those walls lightly guarded. Once inside the city that second force could assault Sigefrid’s men from the rear and open Ludd’s Gate to let in the rest of the army. It was, in truth, the obvious way to assault the city, indeed it was so obvious that I was sure Sigefrid would be guarding against it.

Alfred pondered the idea.

Æthelred said nothing. He was waiting for his father-in-law’s opinion.

‘The river,’ Alfred said in a hesitant tone, then shook his head as though his thought was leading nowhere.

‘The river, lord?’

‘An approach by ship?’ Alfred suggested, still hesitant.

I let the idea hang, and it was like dangling a piece of gristle in front of an unschooled puppy.

And the puppy duly pounced. ‘An assault by ship is frankly a better idea,’ Æthelred said confidently. ‘Four or five ships? Travelling with the current? We can land on the wharves and attack the walls from behind.’

‘An attack by land will be hazardous,’ Alfred said dubiously, though the question suggested he was supporting his son-in-law’s ideas.

‘And probably doomed,’ Æthelred contributed confidently. He was not trying to hide his scorn of my plan.

‘You considered a shipborne assault?’ Alfred asked me.

‘I did, lord.’

‘It seems a very good idea to me!’ Æthelred said firmly.

So now I gave the puppy the whipping it deserved. ‘There’s a river wall, lord,’ I said. ‘We can land on the wharves, but we still have a wall to cross.’ The wall was built just behind the wharves. It was another piece of Roman work, all masonry, brick and studded with circular bastions.

‘Ah,’ Alfred said.

‘But of course, lord, if my cousin wishes to lead an attack on the river wall?’

Æthelred was silent.

‘The river wall,’ Alfred said, ‘it’s high?’

‘High enough, and newly repaired,’ I said, ‘but of course, I defer to your son-in-law’s experience.’

Alfred knew I did no such thing and gave me an irritable look before deciding to slap me down as I had slapped Æthelred. ‘Father Beocca tells me you took Brother Osferth into your service.’

‘I did, lord,’ I said.

‘It is not what I wish for Brother Osferth,’ Alfred said firmly, ‘so you will send him back.’

‘Of course, lord.’

‘He is called to serve the church,’ Alfred said, suspicious of my ready agreement. He turned and stared out of his small window. ‘I cannot endure Sigefrid’s presence,’ he said. ‘We need to open the river passage to shipping, and we need to do it soon.’ His ink-smeared hands were clasped behind his back and I could see the fingers clenching and unclenching. ‘I want it done before the first cuckoo sounds. Lord Æthelred will command the forces.’

‘Thank you, lord,’ Æthelred said and dropped to one knee.

‘But you will take Lord Uhtred’s advice,’ the king insisted, turning on his son-in-law.

‘Of course, lord,’Æthelred agreed untruthfully.

‘Lord Uhtred is more experienced in war than you,’ the king explained.

‘I shall value his assistance, lord,’ Æthelred lied very convincingly.

‘And I want the city taken before the first cuckoo sounds!’ the king reiterated.

Which meant we had perhaps six weeks. ‘You will summon men now?’ I asked Alfred.

‘I shall,’ he said, ‘and you will each see to your provisions.’

‘And I shall give you Lundene,’ Æthelred said enthusiastically. ‘What good prayers ask, lord, meek faith receives!’

‘I don’t want Lundene,’ Alfred retorted with some asperity, ‘it belongs to Mercia, to you,’ he gave a slight inclination of his head to Æthelred, ‘but perhaps you will allow me to appoint a bishop and a city governor?’

‘Of course, lord,’ Æthelred said.

I was dismissed, leaving father and son-in-law with the sour-faced Asser. I stood in the sunshine outside and thought about how I was to take Lundene, for I knew that I would have to do it, and do it without Æthelred ever suspecting my plans. And it could be done, I thought, but only by stealth and with good fortune. Wyrd bið ful ãræd.

I went to find Gisela. I crossed the outer courtyard to see a knot of women beside one of the doors. Eanflæd was among them and I turned to greet her. She had been a whore once, then she had become Leofric’s lover, and now she was a companion to Alfred’s wife. I doubted that Ælswith knew her companion had once been a whore, though perhaps she did and did not care because the bond between the two women was a shared bitterness. Ælswith resented that Wessex would not call the king’s wife a queen, while Eanflæd knew too much of men to be fond of any one of them. Yet I was fond of her and I veered out of my way to speak with her, but, seeing me coming, she shook her head to warn me away.

I stopped then and saw that Eanflæd had her arm about a younger woman who sat on a chair with her head bowed. She looked up suddenly and saw me. It was Æthelflaed and her pretty face was wan, drawn and scared. She had been crying and her eyes were still bright from the tears. She seemed not to recognise me, then she did and offered me a sad reluctant smile. I smiled back, bowed and walked on.

And thought about Lundene.

PART TWO

The City

Four

We had agreed at Wintanceaster that Æthelred would come downriver to Coccham, bringing with him the troops from Alfred’s household guard, his own warriors, and whatever men he could raise from his extensive lands in southern Mercia. Once he arrived we would jointly march on Lundene with the Berrocscire fyrd and my own household troops. Alfred had stressed the need for haste, and Æthelred had promised to be ready in two weeks.

Yet a whole month passed and still Æthelred had not come. The year’s first nestlings were taking wing among trees that were still not in full leaf. The pear blossom was white, and wagtails flitted in and out of their nests under the thatched eaves of our house. I watched a cuckoo staring intently at those nests, planning when to leave her egg among the wagtail’s clutch. The cuckoo had not started calling yet, but it would soon, and that was the time by which Alfred wanted Lundene captured.

I waited. I was bored, as were my household troops, who were ready for war and suffered peace. They numbered just fifty-six warriors. It was a small number, scarcely sufficient to crew a ship, but men cost money and I was hoarding my silver in those days. Five of those men were youngsters who had never faced the ultimate test of battle, which was to stand in the shield wall, and so, as we waited for Æthelred, I put those five men through day after day of hard training. Osferth, Alfred’s bastard, was one of them. ‘He’s no good,’ Finan said to me repeatedly.

‘Give him time,’ I said just as frequently.

‘Give him a Danish blade,’ Finan said viciously, ‘and pray it slits his monkish belly.’ He spat. ‘I thought the king wanted him back in Wintanceaster?’

‘He does.’

‘So why don’t you send him back? He’s no use to us.’

‘Alfred has too many other things on his mind,’ I said, ignoring Finan’s question, ‘and he won’t remember Osferth.’ That was not true. Alfred had a most methodical mind, and he would not have forgotten Osferth’s absence from Wintanceaster, nor my disobedience in not sending the youth back to his studies.

‘But why not send him back?’ Finan insisted.

‘Because I liked his uncle,’ I said, and that was true. I had loved Leofric and, for his sake, I would be kind to his nephew.

‘Or are you just trying to annoy the king, lord?’ Finan asked, then grinned and strode away without waiting for an answer. ‘Hook and pull, you bastard!’ he shouted at Osferth. ‘Hook and pull!’

Osferth turned to look at Finan and was immediately struck on the head by an oak cudgel wielded by Clapa. If it had been an axe the blade would have split Osferth’s helmet and cut deep into his skull, but the cudgel just half stunned him, so he fell to his knees.

‘Get up, you weakling!’ Finan snarled. ‘Get up, hook and pull!’

Osferth tried to get up. His pale face looked miserable under the battered helmet that I had given him. He managed to stand, but immediately wobbled and knelt again.

‘Give me that,’ Finan said, and snatched the axe out of Osferth’s feeble hands. ‘Now watch! It isn’t difficult to do! My wife could do this!’

The five new men were facing five of my experienced warriors. The youngsters had been given axes, real weapons, and told to break the shield wall that opposed them. It was a small wall, just the five overlapping shields defended by wooden clubs, and Clapa grinned as Finan approached.

‘What you do,’ Finan was speaking to Osferth, ‘is hook the axe blade over the top of the enemy bastard’s shield. Is that so difficult? Hook it, pull the shield down, and let your neighbour kill the earsling behind it. We’ll do it slowly, Clapa, to show how it’s done, and stop grinning.’

They made the hook and pull in ludicrously slow motion, the axe coming gently overhand to latch its blade behind Clapa’s shield, and Clapa then allowing Finan to pull the shield’s top down towards him. ‘There,’ Finan turned on Osferth when Clapa’s body had been exposed to a blow, ‘that’s how you break a shield wall! Now we’ll do it for real, Clapa.’

Clapa grinned again, relishing a chance to clout Finan with the cudgel. Finan stepped back, licked his lips, then struck fast. He swung the axe just as he had demonstrated, but Clapa tilted the shield back to take the axe head on the wooden surface and, at the same time, rammed his cudgel under the shield in a savage thrust at Finan’s groin.

It was always a pleasure to watch the Irishman fight. He was the quickest man with a blade that I ever saw, and I have seen many. I thought Clapa’s lunge would fold him in two and drive him to the grass in agony, but Finan sidestepped, seized the lower rim of the shield with his left hand and jerked it hard upwards to drive the top iron rim into Clapa’s face. Clapa staggered backwards, his nose already red with blood, and the axe was somehow dropped with the speed of a striking snake and its blade was hooked around Clapa’s ankle. Finan pulled, Clapa fell back and now it was the Irishman who grinned. ‘That isn’t hook and pull,’ he said to Osferth, ‘but it works just the same.’

‘Wouldn’t have worked if you’d been holding a shield,’ Clapa complained.

‘That thing in your face, Clapa?’ Finan said, ‘thing that flaps open and closed? That ugly thing you shovel food into? Keep it shut.’ He tossed the axe to Osferth who tried to snatch the handle out of the air. He missed and the axe thumped into a puddle.

The spring had turned wet. Rain sheeted down, the river spread, there was mud everywhere. Boots and clothes rotted. What little grain was left in store sprouted and I sent my men hunting or fishing to provide us with food. The first calves were born, slithering bloodily into a wet world. Every day I expected Alfred to come and inspect Coccham’s progress, but in those drenched days he stayed in Wintanceaster. He did send a messenger, a pallid priest who brought a letter sewn into a greased lambskin pouch. ‘If you cannot read it, lord,’ he suggested tentatively as I slit the pouch open, ‘I can …’

‘I can read,’ I growled. I could too. It was not an achievement I was proud of, because only priests and monks really needed the skill, but Father Beocca had whipped letters into me when I was a boy, and the lessons had proved useful. Alfred had decreed that all his lords should be able to read, not just so they could stagger their way through the gospel books the king insisted on sending as presents, but so they could read his messages.

I thought the letter might bring news of Æthelred, perhaps some explanation of why he was taking so long to bring his men to Coccham, but instead it was an order that I was to take one priest for every thirty men when I marched to Lundene. ‘I’m to do what?’ I asked aloud.

‘The king worries about men’s souls, lord,’ the priest said.

‘So he wants me to take useless mouths to feed? Tell him to send me grain and I’ll take some of his damned priests.’ I looked back to the letter, which had been written by one of the royal clerks, but at the bottom, in Alfred’s bold handwriting, was one line. ‘Where is Osferth?’ the line read. ‘He is to return today. Send him with Father Cuthbert.’

‘You’re Father Cuthbert?’ I asked the nervous priest.

‘Yes, lord.’

‘Well you can’t take Osferth back,’ I said, ‘he’s ill.’

‘Ill?’

‘He’s sick as a dog,’ I said, ‘and probably going to die.’

‘But I thought I saw him,’ Father Cuthbert said, gesturing out of the open door to where Finan was trying to goad Osferth into showing some skill and enthusiasm. ‘Look,’ the priest said brightly, trying to be of assistance.

‘Very likely to die,’ I said slowly and savagely. Father Cuthbert turned back to speak, caught my eye and his voice faltered. ‘Finan!’ I shouted, and waited till the Irishman came into the house with a naked sword in his hand. ‘How long,’ I asked, ‘do you think young Osferth will live?’

‘He’ll be lucky to survive one day,’ Finan said, assuming I had meant how long Osferth would last in battle.

‘You see?’ I said to Father Cuthbert. ‘He’s sick. He’s going to die. So tell the king I shall grieve for him. And tell the king that the longer my cousin waits, the stronger the enemy becomes in Lundene.’

‘It’s the weather, lord,’ Father Cuthbert said. ‘Lord Æthelred cannot find adequate supplies.’

‘Tell him there’s food in Lundene,’ I said and knew I was wasting my breath.

Æthelred finally came in mid April, and our joint forces now numbered almost eight hundred men, of whom fewer than four hundred were useful. The rest had been raised from the fyrd of Berrocscire or summoned from the lands in southern Mercia that Æthelred had inherited from his father, my mother’s brother. The men of the fyrd were farmers, and they brought axes or hunting bows. A few had swords or spears, and fewer still had any armour other than a leather jerkin, while some marched with nothing but sharpened hoes. A hoe can be a fearful weapon in a street brawl, but it is hardly suitable to beat down a mailed Viking armed with shield, axe, short-sword and long blade.

The useful men were my household troops, a similar number from Æthelred’s household, and three hundred of Alfred’s own guards who were led by the grim-faced, looming Steapa. Those trained men would do the real fighting, while the rest were just there to make our force look large and menacing.

Yet in truth Sigefrid and Erik would know exactly how menacing we were. Throughout the winter and early spring there had been travellers coming upriver from Lundene and some were doubtless the brothers’ spies. They would know how many men we were bringing, how many of those men were true warriors, and those same spies must have reported back to Sigefrid on the day we had last crossed the river to the northern bank.

We made the crossing upstream of Coccham, and it took all day. Æthelred grumbled about the delay, but the ford we used, which had been impassable all winter, was running high again and the horses had to be coaxed over, and the supplies had to be loaded on the ships for the crossing, though not on board Æthelred’s ship, which he insisted could not carry cargo.

Alfred had given his son-in-law the Heofonhlaf to use for the campaign. It was the smaller of Alfred’s river ships, and Æthelred had raised a canopy over the stern to make a sheltered spot just forward of the steersman’s platform. There were cushions there, and pelts, and a table and stools, and Æthelred spent all day watching the crossing from beneath the canopy while servants brought him food and ale.

He watched with Æthelflaed who, to my surprise, accompanied her husband. I first saw her as she walked the small raised deck of the Heofonhlaf and, seeing me, she had raised a hand in greeting. At midday Gisela and I were summoned to her husband’s presence and Æthelred greeted Gisela like an old friend, fussing over her and demanding that a fur cloak be fetched for her. Æthelflaed watched the fuss, then gave me a blank look. ‘You are going back to Wintanceaster, my lady?’ I asked her. She was a woman now, married to an ealdorman, and so I called her my lady.

‘I am coming with you,’ she said blandly.

That startled me. ‘You’re coming …’ I began, but did not finish.

‘My husband wishes it,’ she said very formally, then a flash of the old Æthelflaed showed as she gave me a quick smile, ‘and I’m glad. I want to see a battle.’

‘A battle is no place for a lady,’ I said firmly.

‘Don’t worry the woman, Uhtred!’ Æthelred called across the deck. He had heard my last words. ‘My wife will be quite safe, I have assured her of that.’

‘War is no place for women,’ I insisted.

‘She wishes to see our victory,’Æthelred insisted, ‘and so she shall, won’t you, my duck?’

‘Quack, quack,’ Æthelflaed said so softly that only I could hear. There was bitterness in her tone, but when I glanced at her she was smiling sweetly at her husband.

‘I would come if I could,’ Gisela said, then touched her belly. The baby did not show yet.

‘You can’t,’ I said, and was rewarded by a mocking grimace, then we heard a bellow of rage from the bows of Heofonhlaf.

‘Can’t a man sleep!’ the voice shouted. ‘You Saxon earsling! You woke me up!’

Father Pyrlig had been sleeping under the small platform at the ship’s bows, where some poor man had inadvertently disturbed him. The Welshman now crawled into the sullen daylight and blinked at me. ‘Good God,’ he said with disgust in his voice, ‘it’s the Lord Uhtred.’

‘I thought you were in East Anglia,’ I called to him.

‘I was, but King Æthelstan sent me to make sure you useless Saxons don’t piss down your legs when you see Northmen on Lundene’s walls.’ It took me a moment to remember that Æthelstan was Guthrum’s Christian name. Pyrlig came towards us, a dirty shirt covering his belly where his wooden cross hung. ‘Good morning, my lady,’ he called cheerfully to Æthelflaed.

‘It is afternoon, father,’ Æthelflaed said, and I could tell from the warmth in her voice that she liked the Welsh priest.

‘Is it afternoon? Good God, I slept like a baby. Lady Gisela! A pleasure. My goodness, but all the beauties are gathered here!’ He beamed at the two women. ‘If it wasn’t raining I would think I’d been transported to heaven. My lord,’ the last two words were addressed to my cousin and it was plain from their tone that the two men were not friends. ‘You need advice, my lord?’ Pyrlig asked.

‘I do not,’ my cousin said harshly.

Father Pyrlig grinned at me. ‘Alfred asked me to come as an adviser.’ He paused to scratch a fleabite on his belly. ‘I’m to advise Lord Æthelred.’

‘As am I,’ I said.

‘And doubtless Lord Uhtred’s advice would be the same as mine,’ Pyrlig went on, ‘which is that we must move with the speed of a Saxon seeing a Welshman’s sword.’

‘He means we must move fast,’ I explained to Æthelred, who knew perfectly well what the Welshman had meant.

My cousin ignored me. ‘Are you being deliberately offensive?’ he asked Pyrlig stiffly.

‘Yes, lord!’ Pyrlig grinned, ‘I am!’

‘I have killed dozens of Welshmen,’ my cousin said.

‘Then the Danes will be no problem to you, will they?’ Pyrlig retorted, refusing to take offence. ‘But my advice still stands, lord. Make haste! The pagans know we’re coming, and the more time you give them, the more formidable their defences!’

We might have moved fast had we possessed ships to carry us downriver, but Sigefrid and Erik, knowing we were coming, had blocked all traffic on the Temes and, not counting Heofonhlaf, we could only muster seven ships, not nearly sufficient to carry our men and so only the laggards and the supplies and Æthelred’s cronies travelled by water. So we marched and it took us four days, and every day we saw horsemen to the north of us or ships downstream of us, and I knew those were Sigefrid’s scouts, making a last count of our numbers as our clumsy army lumbered ever nearer Lundene. We wasted one whole day because it was a Sunday and Æthelred insisted that the priests accompanying the army said mass. I listened to the drone of voices and watched the enemy horsemen circle around us. Haesten, I knew, would already have reached Lundene, and his men, at least two or three hundred of them, would be reinforcing the walls.

Æthelred travelled on board the Heofonhlaf, only coming ashore in the evening to walk around the sentries I had posted. He made a point of moving those sentries, as if to suggest I did not know my business, and I let him do it. On the last night of the journey we camped on an island that was reached from the north bank by a narrow causeway, and its reed-fringed shore was thick with mud so that Sigefrid, if he had a mind to attack us, would find our camp hard to approach. We tucked our ships into the creek that twisted to the island’s north and, as the tide went down and the frogs filled the dusk with croaking, the hulls settled into the thick mud. We lit fires on the mainland that would illuminate the approach of any enemy, and I posted men all around the island.

Æthelred did not come ashore that evening. Instead he sent a servant who demanded that I go to him on board the Heofonhlaf and so I took off my boots and trousers and waded through the glutinous muck before hauling myself over the ship’s side. Steapa, who was marching with the men from Alfred’s bodyguard, came with me. A servant drew buckets of river water from the ship’s far side and we cleaned the mud from our legs, then dressed again before joining Æthelred under his canopy at the Heofonhlaf’s stern. My cousin was accompanied by the commander of his household guard, a young Mercian nobleman named Aldhelm who had a long, supercilious face, dark eyes and thick black hair that he oiled to a lustrous sheen.

Æthelflaed was also there, attended by a maid and by a grinning Father Pyrlig. I bowed to her and she smiled back, but without enthusiasm, and then bent to her embroidery, which was illuminated by a horn-shielded lantern. She was threading white wool onto a dark grey field, making the image of a prancing horse that was her husband’s banner. The same banner, much larger, hung motionless at the ship’s mast. There was no wind, so the smoke from the fires of Lundene’s two towns was a motionless smear in the darkening east.

‘We attack at dawn,’ Æthelred announced without so much as a greeting. He was dressed in a mail coat and had his swords, short and long, belted at his waist. He was looking unusually smug, though he tried to make his voice casual. ‘But I will not sound the advance for my troops,’ he went on, ‘until I hear your own attack has started.’

I frowned at those words. ‘You won’t start your attack,’ I repeated cautiously, ‘until you hear mine has started?’

‘That’s plain, isn’t it?’ Æthelred demanded belligerently.

‘Very plain,’ Aldhelm said mockingly. He treated Æthelred in the same manner that Æthelred behaved to Alfred and, secure in my cousin’s favour, felt free to offer me veiled insult.

‘It’s not plain to me!’ Father Pyrlig put in energetically. ‘The agreed plan,’ the Welshman went on, speaking to Æthelred, ‘is for you to make a feint attack on the western walls and, when you have drawn defenders from the north wall, for Uhtred’s men to make the real assault.’

‘Well I’ve changed my mind,’ Æthelred said airily. ‘Uhtred’s men will now provide the diversionary attack, and my assault will be the real one.’ He tilted up his broad chin and stared at me, daring me to contradict him.

Æthelflaed also looked at me, and I sensed she wanted me to oppose her husband, but instead I surprised all of them by bowing my head as if in acquiescence. ‘If you insist,’ I said.

‘I do,’ Æthelred said, unable to conceal his pleasure at gaining the apparent victory so easily. ‘You may take your own household troops,’ he went on grudgingly, as though he possessed the authority to take them away from me, ‘and thirty other men.’

‘We agreed I could have fifty,’ I said.

‘I have changed my mind about that too!’ he said pugnaciously. He had already insisted that the men of the Berrocscire fyrd, my men, would swell his ranks, and I had meekly agreed to that, just as I had now agreed that the glory of the successful assault could be his. ‘You may take thirty,’ he went on harshly. I could have argued and maybe I should have argued, but I knew it would do no good. Æthelred was beyond argument, wanting only to demonstrate his authority in front of his young wife. ‘Remember,’ he said, ‘that Alfred gave me command here.’

‘I had not forgotten,’ I said. Father Pyrlig was watching me shrewdly, doubtless wondering why I had yielded so easily to my cousin’s bullying. Aldhelm was half smiling, probably in the belief that I had been thoroughly cowed by Æthelred.

‘You will leave before us,’ Æthelred went on.

‘I shall leave very soon,’ I said, ‘I have to.’

‘My household troops,’ Æthelred said, now looking at Steapa, ‘will lead the real attack. You will bring the royal troops immediately behind.’

‘I’m going with Uhtred,’ Steapa said.

Æthelred blinked. ‘You are the commander,’ he said slowly, as though he talked with a small child, ‘of Alfred’s bodyguard! And you will bring them to the wall as soon as my men have laid the ladders.’

‘I’m going with Uhtred,’ Steapa said again. ‘The king ordered it.’

‘The king did no such thing!’ Æthelred said dismissively.

‘In writing,’ Steapa said. He frowned, then felt in a pouch and brought out a small square of parchment. He peered at it, not sure which way up the writing went, then just shrugged and gave the scrap to my cousin.

Æthelred frowned as he read the message in the light of his wife’s lantern. ‘You should have given me this before,’ he said petulantly.

‘I forgot,’ Steapa said, ‘and I’m to take six men of my own choosing.’ Steapa had a way of speaking that discouraged argument. He spoke slowly, harshly and dully, and managed to convey the impression that he was too stupid to understand any objection raised against his words. He also conveyed the thought that he might just slaughter any man who insisted on contradicting him. And Æthelred, faced with Steapa’s stubborn voice, and by the sheer presence of the man who was so tall and broad and skull-faced, surrendered without a fight.

‘If the king orders it,’ he said, offering back the scrap of parchment.

‘He does,’ Steapa insisted. He took the parchment and seemed uncertain what to do with it. For a heartbeat I thought he was going to eat it, but then he tossed it over the ship’s side and then frowned eastwards at the great pall of smoke that hung above the city.

‘Be certain you’re on time tomorrow,’ Æthelred said to me, ‘success depends on it.’

That was evidently our dismissal. Another man would have offered us ale and food, but Æthelred turned away from us and so Steapa and I stripped our legs bare again and waded ashore through the cloying mud. ‘You asked Alfred if you could come with me?’ I asked Steapa as we pushed through the reeds.

‘No,’ he said, ‘it was the king who wanted me to come with you. It was his idea.’

‘Good,’ I said, ‘I’m glad.’ I meant it too. Steapa and I had begun as enemies, but we had become friends, a bond forged by standing shield to shield in the face of an enemy. ‘There’s no one I’d rather have with me,’ I told him warmly as I stooped to pull on my boots.

‘I’m coming with you,’ he said in his slow voice, ‘because I’m to kill you.’

I stopped and stared at him in the darkness. ‘You’re to do what?’

‘I’m to kill you,’ he said, then remembered there was more to Alfred’s orders, ‘if you prove to be on Sigefrid’s side.’

‘But I’m not,’ I said.

‘He just wants to be sure of that,’ Steapa said, ‘and that monk? Asser? He says you can’t be trusted, so if you don’t obey your orders then I’m to kill you.’

‘Why are you telling me this?’ I asked him.

He shrugged. ‘Doesn’t matter whether you’re ready for me or not,’ he said, ‘I’ll still kill you.’

‘No,’ I said, amending his words, ‘you’ll try to kill me.’

He thought about that for quite a long time, then shook his head. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I’ll kill you.’ And so he would.

We left in the black of night under a sky smothered with clouds. The enemy horsemen who had been watching us had withdrawn to the city at dusk, but I was certain Sigefrid would still have scouts in the darkness and so for an hour or more we followed a track that led north through the marshes. It was hard keeping to the path, but after a while the ground became firmer and climbed to a village where small fires burned inside mud-walled huts piled with great heaps of thatch. I pushed a door open to see a family crouched in terror about their hearth. They were frightened because they had heard us, and they knew nothing moves at night except creatures that are dangerous, sinister and deadly. ‘What’s this place called?’ I asked and for a moment no one answered, then a man bowed his head convulsively and said he thought the settlement was named Padintune. ‘Padintune?’ I asked, ‘Padda’s estate? Is Padda here?’

‘He’s dead, lord,’ the man said, ‘he died years ago, lord. No one here knew him, lord.’

‘We’re friends,’ I told him, ‘but if anyone here leaves their house, we won’t be friends.’ I did not want some villager running to Lundene to warn Sigefrid that we had stopped in Padintune. ‘You understand that?’ I asked the man.

‘Yes, lord.’

‘Leave your house,’ I said, ‘and you die.’

I assembled my men in the small street and had Finan place a guard on every hovel. ‘No one’s to leave,’ I told him. ‘They can sleep in their beds, but no one’s to leave the village.’

Steapa loomed from the dark. ‘Aren’t we supposed to be marching north?’ he asked.

‘Yes, and we’re not,’ I retorted. ‘So this is when you’re supposed to kill me. I’m disobeying orders.’

‘Ah,’ he grunted, then crouched. I heard the leather of his armour creak and the chink of his chain mail settling.

‘You could draw your sax now,’ I suggested, ‘and gut me in one move? One cut up into my belly? Just make it fast, Steapa. Open my belly and keep the blade moving till it reaches my heart. But just let me draw my sword first, will you? I promise not to use it on you. I just want to go to Odin’s hall when I’m dead.’

He chuckled. ‘I’ll never understand you, Uhtred,’ he said.

‘I’m a very simple soul,’ I told him. ‘I just want to go home.’

‘Not Odin’s hall?’

‘Eventually,’ I said, ‘yes, but home first.’

‘To Northumbria?’

‘Where I have a fortress by the sea,’ I said wistfully, and I thought of Bebbanburg on its high crag, and of the wild grey sea rolling endlessly to break on the rocks, and of the cold wind blowing from the north and of the white gulls crying in the spindrift. ‘Home,’ I said.

‘The one your uncle stole from you?’ Steapa asked.

‘Ælfric,’ I said vengefully, and I thought of fate again. Ælfric was my father’s younger brother and he had stayed in Bebbanburg while I had accompanied my father to Eoferwic. I was a child. My father had died in Eoferwic, cut down by a Danish blade, and I had been given as a slave to Ragnar the Older, who had raised me like a son, and my uncle had ignored my father’s wishes and kept Bebbanburg for himself. That treachery was ever in my heart, seeping anger, and one day I would revenge it. ‘One day,’ I told Steapa, ‘I shall gut Ælfric from his crotch to his breastbone and watch him die, but I won’t do it quickly. I won’t pierce his heart. I shall watch him die and piss on him while he struggles. Then I’ll kill his sons.’

‘And tonight?’ Steapa asked. ‘Who do you kill tonight?’

‘Tonight we take Lundene,’ I said.

I could not see his face in the dark, but I sensed that he smiled. ‘I told Alfred he could trust you,’ Steapa said.

It was my turn to smile. Somewhere in Padintune a dog howled and was quieted. ‘But I’m not sure Alfred can trust me,’ I said after a long pause.

‘Why?’ Steapa asked, puzzled.

‘Because in one way I’m a very good Christian,’ I said.

‘You? A Christian?’

‘I love my enemies,’ I said.

‘The Danes?’

‘Yes.’

‘I don’t,’ he said bleakly. Steapa’s parents had been slaughtered by Danes. I did not respond. I was thinking of destiny. If the three spinners know our fate, then why do we make oaths? Because if we then break an oath, is it treachery? Or is it fate? ‘So will you fight them tomorrow?’ Steapa asked.

‘Of course,’ I said. ‘But not in the way Æthelred expects. So I’m disobeying orders, and your orders are to kill me if I do that.’

‘I’ll kill you later,’ Steapa said.

Æthelred had changed our agreed plan without ever suspecting that I had never intended to keep to it anyway. It was too obvious. How else would an army assault a city, except by trying to draw defenders away from the targeted ramparts? Sigefrid would know our first assault was a feint, and he would leave his garrison in place until he was certain he had identified the real threat, and then we would die under his walls and Lundene would remain a stronghold of the Northmen.

So the only way to capture Lundene was by trickery, stealth and by taking a desperate risk. ‘What I’m going to do,’ I told Steapa, ‘is wait for Æthelred to leave the island. Then we go back there, and we take two of the ships. It will be dangerous, very, because we have to go through the bridge’s gap in the dark and ships die there even in daylight. But if we can get through then there is an easy way into the old city.’

‘I thought there was a wall along the river?’

‘There is,’ I said, ‘but it’s broken in one place.’ A Roman had built a great house by the river and had cut a small channel beside his house. The channel pierced the wall, breaking it. I assumed the Roman had been wealthy and he had wanted a place to berth his ship and so he had pulled down a stretch of the river wall to make his channel and that was my way into Lundene.

‘Why didn’t you tell Alfred?’ Steapa asked.

‘Alfred can keep a secret,’ I said, ‘but Æthelred can’t. He would have told someone and within two days the Danes would have known what we planned.’ And that was true. We had spies and they had spies, and if I had revealed my real intentions then Sigefrid and Erik would have blocked the channel with ships and garrisoned the big house beside the river with men. We would have died on the wharves, and we still might die because I did not know that we could find the gap in the bridge, and if we did find it whether we could shoot through that perilous broken space where the river level dropped and the water foamed. If we missed, if one of the ships was just a half oar’s length too far south or north, then it would be swept onto the jagged pilings and men would be tipped into the river and I would not hear them drown because their armour and weapons would drag them under instantly.

Steapa had been thinking, always a slow process, but now he posed a shrewd question. ‘Why not land upriver of the bridge?’ he suggested. ‘There must be gates through the wall?’

‘There are a dozen gates,’ I said, ‘maybe a score, and Sigefrid will have blocked them all, but the last thing he’ll expect is for ships to try and run the gap in the bridge.’

‘Because ships die there?’ Steapa said.

‘Because ships die there,’ I agreed. I had watched it happen once, watched a trading ship run the gap at slack water, and somehow the steersman had veered too far to one side and the broken pilings had ripped the planks from the bottom of his hull. The gap was some forty paces wide and, when the river was calm with neither tide nor wind to churn the water, the gap looked innocent, but it never was. Lundene’s bridge was a killer, and to take Lundene I had to run the bridge.

And if we survived? If we could find the Roman dock and get ashore? Then we would be few and the enemy would be many, and some of us would die in the streets before Æthelred’s force could ever cross the wall. I touched Serpent-Breath’s hilt and felt the small silver cross that was embedded there. Hild’s gift. A lover’s gift. ‘Have you heard a cuckoo yet?’ I asked Steapa.

‘Not yet.’

‘It’s time to go,’ I said, ‘unless you want to kill me?’

‘Maybe later,’ Steapa said, ‘but for the moment I’ll fight beside you.’

And we would have a fight. That I knew. And I touched my hammer amulet and sent a prayer into the darkness that I would live to see the child in Gisela’s belly.

Then we went back south.

Osric, who had brought me away from Lundene with Father Pyrlig, was one of our shipmasters, and the other was Ralla, the man who had carried my force to ambush the Danes whose corpses I had hanged beside the river. Ralla had negotiated the gap in Lundene’s bridge more times than he could remember. ‘But never at night,’ he told me that night when we returned to the island.

‘But it can be done?’

‘We’re going to discover that, lord, aren’t we?’

Æthelred had left a hundred men to guard the island where the ships lay and those men were under the command of Egbert, an old warrior whose authority was denoted by a silver chain hanging about his neck, and who challenged me when we unexpectedly returned. He did not trust me and believed I had abandoned my northern attack because I did not want Æthelred to succeed. I needed him to give me men, but the more I pleaded the more he bristled with hostility. My own men were boarding the two ships, wading through the cold water and hauling themselves over the sides. ‘How do I know you’re not just going back to Coccham?’ Egbert asked suspiciously.

‘Steapa!’ I called. ‘Tell Egbert what we’re doing.’

‘Killing Danes,’ Steapa growled from beside a campfire. The flames reflected from his mail coat and from his hard, feral eyes.

‘Give me twenty men,’ I pleaded with Egbert.

He stared at me, then shook his head. ‘I can’t,’ he said.

‘Why not?’

‘We have to guard the Lady Æthelflaed,’ he said. ‘Those are the Lord Æthelred’s orders. We’re here to guard her.’

‘Then leave twenty men on her ship,’ I said, ‘and give me the rest.’

‘I can’t,’ Egbert insisted doggedly.

I sighed. ‘Tatwine would have given me men,’ I said. Tatwine had been the commander of the household troops for Æthelred’s father. ‘I knew Tatwine,’ I said.

‘I know you did. I remember you.’ Egbert spoke curtly and the hidden message in his tone was that he did not like me. As a young man I had served under Tatwine for a few months, and back then I had been brash, ambitious and arrogant. Egbert plainly thought I was still brash, ambitious and arrogant, and perhaps he was right.

He turned away and I thought he was dismissing me, but instead he watched as a pale and ghostly shape appeared beyond the campfires. It was Æthelflaed, who had evidently seen our return and had waded ashore wrapped in a white cloak to discover what we did. Her hair was unbound and fell in golden tangles over her shoulders. Father Pyrlig was with her.

‘You didn’t go with Æthelred?’ I asked, surprised to see the Welsh priest.

‘His lordship felt he needed no more advice,’ Pyrlig said, ‘so asked me to stay here and pray for him.’

‘He didn’t ask,’ Æthelflaed corrected him, ‘he ordered you to stay and pray for him.’

‘He did,’ Pyrlig said, ‘and as you can see, I am dressed for praying.’ He was in a mail coat and had his swords strapped at his waist. ‘And you?’ he challenged me. ‘I thought you were marching to the city’s north?’

‘We’re going downriver,’ I explained, ‘and attacking Lundene from the wharf.’

‘Can I come?’ Æthelflaed asked instantly.

‘No.’

She smiled at that curt refusal. ‘Does my husband know what you’re doing?’

‘He’ll find out, my lady.’

She smiled again, then walked to my side and pulled my cloak aside to lean against me. She wrapped my dark cloak over her white one. ‘I’m cold,’ she explained to Egbert, whose face showed surprise and indignation at her behaviour.

‘We are old friends,’ I said to Egbert.

‘Very old friends,’ Æthelflaed agreed, and she put an arm around my waist and clung to me. Egbert could not see her arm beneath my cloak. I was aware of her golden hair just beneath my beard, and I could feel her thin body shivering. ‘I think of Uhtred as an uncle,’ she told Egbert.

‘An uncle who is going to give your husband victory,’ I told her, ‘but I need men. And Egbert won’t give me men.’

‘He won’t?’ she asked.

‘He says he needs all his men to guard you.’

‘Give him your best men,’ she said to Egbert in a light, pleasant voice.

‘My lady,’ Egbert said, ‘my orders are to …’

‘You will give him your best men!’ Æthelflaed’s voice was suddenly hard as she stepped from beneath my cloak into the harsh light of the campfires. ‘I am a king’s daughter!’ she said arrogantly, ‘and wife to Mercia’s Ealdorman! And I am demanding that you give Uhtred your best men! Now!’

She had spoken very loudly so that men all across the island were staring at her. Egbert looked offended, but said nothing. He straightened instead and looked stubborn. Pyrlig caught my eye and smiled slyly.

‘None of you have the courage to fight alongside Uhtred?’ Æthelflaed demanded of the watching men. She was fourteen years old, a slight, pale girl, yet in her voice was the lineage of ancient kings. ‘My father would want you to show courage tonight!’ she went on, ‘or am I to return to Wintanceaster and tell my father that you sat by the fires while Uhtred fought?’ This last question was directed at Egbert.

‘Twenty men,’ I pleaded with him.

‘Give him more!’ Æthelflaed said firmly.

‘There’s only room in the boats for forty more,’ I said.

‘Then give him forty!’ Æthelflaed said.

‘Lady,’ Egbert said hesitantly, but stopped when Æthelflaed held up one small hand. She turned to look at me.

‘I can trust you, Lord Uhtred?’ she asked.

It seemed a strange question from a child I had known nearly all her life and I smiled at it. ‘You can trust me,’ I said lightly.

Her face grew harder and her eyes flinty. Perhaps that was the reflection of the fire from her pupils, but I was suddenly aware that this was far more than a child, she was a king’s daughter. ‘My father,’ she said in a clear voice so that others could hear, ‘says you are the best warrior in his service. But he does not trust you.’

There was an awkward silence. Egbert cleared his throat and stared at the ground. ‘I have never let your father down,’ I said harshly.

‘He fears your loyalty is for sale,’ she said.

‘He has my oath,’ I replied, my voice still harsh.

‘And I want it now,’ she demanded and held out a slender hand.

‘What oath?’ I asked.

‘That you keep your oath to my father,’ Æthelflaed said, ‘and that you swear loyalty to Saxon over Dane, and that you will fight for Mercia when Mercia asks it.’

‘My lady,’ I began, appalled at her list of demands.

‘Egbert!’ Æthelflaed interrupted me. ‘You will give Lord Uhtred no men unless he swears to serve Mercia while I live.’

‘No, lady,’ Egbert muttered.

While she lived? Why had she said that? I remember wondering about those words, and I remember, too, thinking that my plan to capture Lundene hung in the balance. Æthelred had stripped me of the forces I needed, and Æthelflaed had the power to restore my numbers, but to win my victory I had to lock myself in yet another oath that I did not want to swear. What did I care for Mercia? But I cared that night about taking men through a bridge of death to prove that I could do it. I cared about reputation, I cared about my name, I cared about fame.

I drew Serpent-Breath, knowing that was why she held out her hand, and I gave the blade to her, hilt first. Then I knelt and I folded my hands around hers that, in turn, were clasped about the hilt of my sword. ‘I swear it, lady,’ I said.

‘You swear,’ she said, ‘that you will serve my father faithfully?’

‘Yes, lady.’

‘And, as I live, you will serve Mercia?’

‘As you live, lady,’ I said, kneeling in the mud, and wondering what a fool I was. I wanted to be in the north, I wanted to be free of Alfred’s piety, I wanted to be with my friends, yet here I was, swearing loyalty to Alfred’s ambitions and to his golden-haired daughter. ‘I swear it,’ I said, and gave her hands a slight squeeze as a signal of my truthfulness.

‘Give him men, Egbert,’ Æthelflaed ordered.

He gave me thirty and, to give Egbert his due, he gave me his fit men, the young ones, leaving his older and sick warriors to guard Æthelflaed and the camp. So now I led over seventy men and those men included Father Pyrlig. ‘Thank you, my lady,’ I said to Æthelflaed.

‘You could reward me,’ she said, and once again sounded child-like, her solemnity gone and her old mischief back.

‘How?’

‘Take me with you?’

‘Never,’ I said harshly.

She frowned at my tone and looked up into my eyes. ‘Are you angry with me?’ she asked in a soft voice.

‘With myself, lady,’ I said and turned away.

‘Uhtred!’ She sounded unhappy.

‘I will keep the oaths, lady,’ I said, and I was angry that I had taken them again, but at least they had provided me with seventy men to take a city, seventy men on board two boats that pushed away from the creek into the Temes’s strong current.

I was on board Ralla’s boat, the same ship that we had captured from Jarrel, the Dane whose hanged body had long been reduced to a skeleton. Ralla was at the stern, leaning on the steering-oar. ‘Not sure we should be doing this, lord,’ he said.

‘Why not?’

He spat over the side into the black river. ‘Water’s running too fast. It’ll be spilling through the gap like a waterfall. Even at slack water, lord, that gap can be wicked.’

‘Take it straight,’ I said, ‘and pray to whatever god you believe in.’

‘If we can even see the gap,’ he said gloomily. He peered behind, looking for a glimpse of Osric’s boat, but it was swallowed in the darkness. ‘I’ve seen it done on a falling tide,’ Ralla said, ‘but that was in daylight, and the river wasn’t in spate.’

‘The tide’s falling?’ I asked.

‘Like a stone,’ Ralla said gloomily.

‘Then pray,’ I said curtly.

I touched the hammer amulet, then the hilt of Serpent-Breath as the boat gathered speed on the surging current. The riverbanks were far off. Here and there was a glimmer of light, evidence of a fire smouldering in a house, while ahead, under the moonless sky, was a dull glow smeared with a black veil, and that, I knew, was the new Saxon Lundene. The glow came from the sullen fires in the town and the veil was the smoke of those fires, and I knew that somewhere beneath that veil Æthelred would be marshalling his men for their advance across the valley of the Fleot and up to the old Roman wall. Sigefrid, Erik and Haesten would know he was there because someone would have run from the new town to warn the old. Danes, Norsemen and Frisians, even some masterless Saxons, would be rousing themselves and hurrying to the old city’s ramparts.

And we swept down the black river.

No one spoke much. Every man in both boats knew the danger we faced. I edged my way forward between the crouching figures, and Father Pyrlig must have sensed my approach or else a gleam of light reflected from the wolf’s head that served as the silver crest of my helmet because he greeted me before I saw him. ‘Here, lord,’ he said.

He was sitting on the end of a rower’s bench and I stood beside him, my boots splashing in the bilge water. ‘Have you prayed?’ I asked him.

‘I haven’t stopped praying,’ he said seriously. ‘I sometimes think God must be tired of my voice. And Brother Osferth here is praying.’

‘I’m not a brother,’ Osferth said sullenly.

‘But your prayers might work better if God thinks you are,’ Pyrlig said.

Alfred’s bastard son was crouching by Father Pyrlig. Finan had equipped Osferth with a mail coat that had been mended after some Dane had been belly-gutted by a Saxon spear. He also had a helmet, tall boots, leather gloves, a round shield and both a long-and a short-sword, so that at least he looked like a warrior. ‘I’m supposed to send you back to Wintanceaster,’ I told him.

‘I know.’

‘Lord,’ Pyrlig reminded Osferth.

‘Lord,’ Osferth said, though reluctantly.

‘I don’t want to send the king your corpse,’ I said, ‘so stay close to Father Pyrlig.’

‘Very close, boy,’ Pyrlig said, ‘pretend you love me.’

‘Stay behind him,’ I ordered Osferth.

‘Forget about being my lover,’ Pyrlig said hurriedly, ‘pretend you’re my dog instead.’

‘And say your prayers,’ I finished. There was no other useful advice I could give Osferth, unless it was to strip off his clothes, swim ashore and go back to his monastery. I had as much faith in his fighting skills as Finan, which meant I had none. Osferth was sour, inept and clumsy. If it had not been for his dead uncle, Leofric, I would have happily sent him back to Wintanceaster, but Leofric had taken me as a young raw boy and had turned me into a sword warrior and so I would endure Osferth for Leofric’s sake.

We were abreast of the new town now. I could smell the charcoal fires of the smithies, and see the reflected glow of fires flickering deep in alleyways. I looked ahead to where the bridge spanned the river, but all was black there.

‘I need to see the gap,’ Ralla called from the steering platform.

I worked my way aft again, stepping blindly between the crouching men.

‘If I can’t see it,’ Ralla heard me coming, ‘then I can’t try it.’

‘How close are we?’

‘Too close.’ There was panic in his voice.

I clambered up beside him. I could see the old city now, the city on the hills surrounded by its Roman wall. I could see it because the fires in the city made a dull glow and Ralla was right. We were close.

‘We have to make a decision,’ he said. ‘We’ll have to land upriver of the bridge.’

‘They’ll see us if we land there,’ I said. The Danes would be certain to have men guarding the river wall upstream of the bridge.

‘So you either die there with a sword in your hand,’ Ralla said brutally, ‘or you drown.’

I stared ahead and saw nothing. ‘Then I choose the sword,’ I said dully, seeing the death of my desperate idea.

Ralla took a deep breath to shout at the oarsmen, but the shout never came because, quite suddenly and far ahead, out where the Temes spread and emptied into the sea, a scrap of yellow showed. Not bright yellow, not a wasp’s yellow, but a sour, leprous, dark yellow that leaked through a rent in the clouds. It was dawn beyond the sea, a dark dawn, a reluctant dawn, but it was light, and Ralla neither shouted nor turned the steering-oar to take us into the bank. Instead he touched the amulet at his neck and kept the boat on its headlong course. ‘Crouch down, lord,’ he said, ‘and hold hard to something.’

The boat was quivering like a horse before battle. We were helpless now, caught in the river’s grip. The water was sweeping down from far inland, fed by spring rains and subsiding floods, and where it met the bridge it piled itself in great white ragged heaps. It seethed, roared and foamed between the stone pilings, but in the bridge’s centre, where the gap was, it poured in a sheeting, gleaming stream that fell a man’s height to the new water level beyond where the river swirled and grumbled before becoming calm again. I could hear the water fighting the bridge, hear the thunder of it loud as wind-driven breakers assaulting a beach.

And Ralla steered for the gap, which he could just see outlined against the dull yellow of the broken eastern sky. Behind us was blackness, though once I did see that sour morning light reflect from the water-glossed stem of Osric’s ship and I knew he was close behind us.

‘Hold hard!’ Ralla called to our crew, and the ship was hissing, still quivering, and she seemed to race faster, and I saw the bridge come towards us and it loomed black over us as I crouched beside the ship’s side and gripped the timber hard.

And then we were in the gap, and I had the sensation of falling as though we had tipped into an abyss between the worlds. The noise was deafening. It was the noise of water fighting stone, water tearing, water breaking, water pouring, a noise to fill the skies, a noise louder even than Thor’s thunder, and the ship gave a lurch and I thought she must have struck and would slew sideways and tip us to our deaths, but somehow she straightened and flew on. There was blackness above, the blackness of the stub ends of the bridge’s broken timbers, and then the noise doubled and spray flew across the deck and we were slamming downwards, ship tipping, and there was a crack like the gates of Odin’s hall banging shut and I was spilled forward as water cascaded over us. We had struck stone, I thought, and I waited to drown and I even remembered to grip Serpent-Breath’s hilt so I would die with my sword in my hand, but the ship staggered up and I understood the crash had been the bows striking the river beyond the bridge and that we were alive.

‘Row!’ Ralla shouted. ‘Oh you lucky bastards, row!’

Water was deep in the bilge, but we were afloat, and the eastern sky was ragged with rents and in their shadowy light we could see the city, and see the place where the wall was broken. ‘And the rest,’ Ralla said with pride in his voice, ‘is up to you, lord.’

‘It’s up to the gods,’ I said, and looked behind to see Osric’s boat fighting up from the maelstrom where the river fell. So both our ships had lived, and the current was sweeping us downstream of the place we wished to land, but the oarsmen turned us and fought against the water so that we came to the wharf from the east, and that was good, because anyone watching would assume we had rowed upriver from Beamfleot. They would think we were Danes who had come to reinforce the garrison that now readied itself for Æthelred’s assault.

There was a large sea-going ship moored in the dock where we wanted to land. I could see her clearly because torches blazed on the white wall of the mansion the dock served. The ship was a fine thing, her stem and stern rearing high and proud. There were no beast-heads on the ship, for no Northman would let his carved heads frighten the spirit of a friendly land. A lone man was on board the ship and he watched us approach. ‘Who are you?’ he shouted.

‘Ragnar Ragnarson!’ I called back. I heaved him a line woven from walrus hide. ‘Has the fighting started?’

‘Not yet, lord,’ he said. He took the line and twisted it around the other ship’s stem. ‘And when it does they’ll get slaughtered!’

‘We’re not too late, then?’ I said. I staggered as our ship struck the other, then stepped over the sheer-strakes onto one of the empty rowers’ benches. ‘Whose ship is this?’ I asked the man.

‘Sigefrid’s, lord. The Wave-Tamer.’

‘She’s beautiful,’ I said, then turned back. ‘Ashore!’ I shouted in English and watched as my men retrieved shields and weapons from the flooded bilge. Osric’s ship came in behind us, low in the water, and I realised she had been half swamped as she shot the bridge’s gap. Men began clambering onto the Wave-Tamer and the Northman who had taken my line saw the crosses hanging from their necks.

‘You …’ he began, and found he had nothing more to say. He half turned to run ashore, but I had blocked his escape. There was shock on his face, shock and puzzlement.

‘Put your hand on your sword hilt,’ I said, drawing Serpent-Breath.

‘Lord,’ he said, as if about to plead for his life, but then he understood his life was ending because I could not leave him alive. I could not let him go, because then he would warn Sigefrid of our arrival, and if I had tied his hands and feet and left him aboard the Wave-Tamer then some other person might have found and released him. He knew all that, and his face changed from puzzlement to defiance and, instead of just gripping his sword’s hilt, he began to pull the weapon free of its scabbard.

And died.

Serpent-Breath took him in the throat. Hard and fast. I felt her tip pierce muscle and tough tissue. Saw the blood. Saw his arm falter and the blade drop back into its scabbard, and I reached out with my left hand to grip his sword hand and hold it over his hilt. I made sure that he kept hold of his sword as he died, for then he would be taken to the feasting hall of the dead. I held his hand tight and let him collapse onto my chest where his blood ran down my mail. ‘Go to Odin’s hall,’ I told him softly, ‘and save a place for me.’

He could not speak. He choked as blood spilled down his windpipe.

‘My name is Uhtred,’ I said, ‘and one day I will feast with you in the corpse-hall and we shall laugh together and drink together and be friends.’

I let his body drop, then knelt and found his amulet, Thor’s hammer, which I cut from his neck with Serpent-Breath. I put the hammer in a pouch, cleaned my sword’s tip on the dead man’s cloak, then slid the blade back into her fleece-lined scabbard. I took my shield from Sihtric, my servant.

‘Let’s go ashore,’ I said, ‘and take a city.’

Because it was time to fight.

Five

Then all, suddenly, was quiet.

Not really quiet, of course. The river hissed where it ran through the bridge, small waves slapped on the boat hulls, the guttering torches on the house wall crackled and I could hear my men’s footsteps as they clambered ashore. Shields and spear butts thumped on ships’ timbers, dogs barked in the city and somewhere a gander was giving its harsh call, but it seemed quiet. Dawn was now a paler yellow, half concealed by dark clouds.

‘And now?’ Finan appeared beside me. Steapa loomed beside him, but said nothing.

‘We go to the gate,’ I said, ‘Ludd’s Gate.’ But I did not move. I did not want to move. I wanted to be back at Coccham with Gisela. It was not cowardice. Cowardice is always with us, and bravery, the thing that provokes the poets to make their songs about us, is merely the will to overcome the fear. It was tiredness that made me reluctant to move, but not a physical tiredness. I was young then and the wounds of war had yet to sap my strength. I think I was tired of Wessex, tired of fighting for a king I did not like, and, standing on that Lundene wharf, I did not understand why I fought for him. And now, looking back over the years, I wonder if that lassitude was caused by the man I had just killed and whom I had promised to join in Odin’s hall. I believe the men we kill are inseparably joined to us. Their life threads, turned ghostly, are twisted by the Fates around our own thread and their burden stays to haunt us till the sharp blade cuts our life at last. I felt remorse for his death.

‘Are you going to sleep?’ Father Pyrlig asked me. He had joined Finan.

‘We’re going to the gate,’ I said.

It seemed like a dream. I was walking, but my mind was somewhere else. This, I thought, was how the dead walked our world, for the dead do come back. Not as Bjorn had pretended to come back, but in the darkest nights, when no one alive can see them, they wander our world. They must, I thought, only half see it, as if the places they knew were veiled in a winter mist, and I wondered if my father was watching me. Why did I think that? I had not been fond of my father, nor he of me, and he had died when I was young, but he had been a warrior. The poets sang of him. And what would he think of me? I was walking through Lundene instead of attacking Bebbanburg, and that was what I should have done. I should have gone north. I should have spent my whole hoard of silver on hiring men and leading them in an assault across Bebbanburg’s neck of land and up across the walls to the high hall where we could make great slaughter. Then I could live in my own home, my father’s home, for ever. I could live near Ragnar and be far from Wessex.

Except my spies, for I employed a dozen in Northumbria, had told me what my uncle had done to my fortress. He had closed the landside gates. He had taken them away altogether and in their place were ramparts, newly built, high and reinforced with stone, and now, if a man wished to get inside the fortress, he needed to follow a path that led to the northern end of the crag on which the fortress stood. And every step of that path would be under those high walls, under attack, and then, at the northern end, where the sea broke and sucked, there was a small gate. Beyond that gate was a steep path leading to another wall and another gate. Bebbanburg had been sealed, and to take it I would need an army beyond even the reach of my hoarded silver.

‘Be lucky!’ a woman’s voice startled me from my thoughts. The folk of the old city were awake and they saw us pass and took us for Danes because I had ordered my men to hide their crosses.

‘Kill the Saxon bastards!’ another voice shouted.

Our footsteps echoed from the high houses that were all at least three storeys tall. Some had beautiful stonework over their bricks and I thought how the world had once been filled with these houses. I remember the first time I ever climbed a Roman staircase, and how odd it felt, and I knew that in times gone by men must have taken such things for granted. Now the world was dung and straw and damp-ridden wood. We had stone masons, of course, but it was quicker to build from wood, and the wood rotted, but no one seemed to care. The whole world rotted as we slid from light into darkness, getting ever nearer to the black chaos in which this middle world would end and the gods would fight and all love and light and laughter would dissolve. ‘Thirty years,’ I said aloud.

‘Is that how old you are?’ Father Pyrlig asked me.

‘It’s how long a hall lasts,’ I said, ‘unless you keep repairing it. Our world is falling apart, father.’

‘My God, you’re gloomy,’ Pyrlig said, amused.

‘And I watch Alfred,’ I went on, ‘and see how he tries to tidy our world. Lists! Lists and parchment! He’s like a man putting wattle hurdles in the face of a flood.’

‘Brace a hurdle well,’ Steapa was listening to our conversation and now intervened, ‘and it’ll turn a stream.’

‘And better to fight a flood than drown in it,’ Pyrlig commented.

‘Look at that!’ I said, pointing to the carved stone head of a beast that was fixed to a brick wall. The beast was like none I had ever seen, a shaggy great cat, and its open mouth was poised above a chipped stone basin suggesting that water had once flowed from mouth to bowl. ‘Could we make that?’ I asked bitterly.

‘There are craftsmen who can make such things,’ Pyrlig said.

‘Then where are they?’ I demanded angrily, and I thought that all these things, the carvings and bricks and marble, had been made before Pyrlig’s religion came to the island. Was that the reason for the world’s decay? Were the true gods punishing us because so many men worshipped the nailed god? I did not make the suggestion to Pyrlig, but kept silent. The houses loomed above us, except where one had collapsed into a heap of rubble. A dog rooted along a wall, stopped to cock its leg, then turned a snarl on us. A baby cried in a house. Our footsteps echoed from the walls. Most of my men were silent, wary of the ghosts they believed inhabited these relics of an older time.

The baby wailed again, louder. ‘Be a young mother in there,’ Rypere said happily. Rypere was his nickname and meant ‘thief’, and he was a skinny Angle from the north, clever and sly, and he at least was not thinking of ghosts.

‘I should stick to goats, if I were you,’ Clapa said, ‘they don’t mind your stink.’ Clapa was a Dane, one who had taken an oath to me and served me loyally. He was a hulking great boy raised on a farm, strong as an ox, ever cheerful. He and Rypere were friends who never stopped goading each other.

‘Quiet!’ I said before Rypere could make a retort. I knew we had to be getting close to the western walls. At the place where we had come ashore, the city climbed the wide terraced hill to the palace at the top, but that hill was flattening now, which meant we were nearing the valley of the Fleot. Behind us the sky was lightening to morning and I knew Æthelred would think I had failed to make my feint attack just before the dawn and that belief, I feared, might have persuaded him to abandon his own assault. Perhaps he was already leading his men back to the island? In which case we would be alone, surrounded by our enemies, and doomed.

‘God help us,’ Pyrlig suddenly said.

I held up my hand to stop my men because, in front of us, in the last stretch of the street before it passed under the stone arch called Ludd’s Gate, was a crowd of men. Armed men. Men whose helmets, axe blades and spear-points caught and reflected the dull light of the clouded and newly-risen sun.

‘God help us,’ Pyrlig said again and made the sign of the cross. ‘There must be two hundred of them.’

‘More,’ I said. There were so many men that they could not all stand in the street, forcing some into the alleyways on either side. All the men we could see were facing the gate, and that made me understand what the enemy was doing and my mind cleared at that instant as if a fog had lifted. There was a courtyard to my left and I pointed through its gateway. ‘In there,’ I ordered.

I remember a priest, a clever fellow, visiting me to ask for my memories of Alfred, which he wanted to put in a book. He never did, because he died of the flux shortly after he saw me, but he was a shrewd man and more forgiving than most priests, and I recall how he asked me to describe the joy of battle. ‘My wife’s poets will tell you,’ I said to him.

‘Your wife’s poets never fought,’ he pointed out, ‘and they just take songs about other heroes and change the names.’

‘They do?’

‘Of course they do,’ he had said, ‘wouldn’t you, lord?’

I liked that priest and so I talked to him, and the answer I eventually gave him was that the joy of battle was the delight of tricking the other side. Of knowing what they will do before they do it, and having the response ready so that, when they make the move that is supposed to kill you, they die instead. And at that moment, in the damp gloom of the Lundene street, I knew what Sigefrid was doing and knew too, though he did not know it, that he was giving me Ludd’s Gate.

The courtyard belonged to a stone-merchant. His quarries were Lundene’s Roman buildings and piles of dressed masonry were stacked against the walls ready to be shipped to Frankia. Still more stones were heaped against the gate that led through the river wall to the wharves. Sigefrid, I thought, must have feared an assault from the river and had blocked every gate through the walls west of the bridge, but he had never dreamed anyone would shoot the bridge to the unguarded eastern side. But we had, and my men were hidden in the courtyard while I stood in the entrance and watched the enemy throng at Ludd’s Gate.

‘We’re hiding?’ Osferth asked me. His voice had a whine to it, as if he were perpetually complaining.

‘There are hundreds of men between us and the gate,’ I explained patiently, ‘and we are too few to cut through them.’

‘So we failed,’ he said, not as a question, but as a petulant statement.

I wanted to hit him, but managed to stay patient. ‘Tell him,’ I said to Pyrlig, ‘what is happening.’

‘God in his wisdom,’ the Welshman explained, ‘has persuaded Sigefrid to lead an attack out of the city! They’re going to open that gate, boy, and stream across the marshes, and hack their way into Lord Æthelred’s men. And as most of Lord Æthelred’s men are from the fyrd, and most of Sigefrid’s are real warriors, then we all know what’s going to happen!’ Father Pyrlig touched his mail coat where the wooden cross was hidden. ‘Thank you, God!’

Osferth stared at the priest. ‘You mean,’ he said after a pause, ‘that Lord Æthelred’s men will be slaughtered?’

‘Some of them are going to die!’ Pyrlig allowed cheerfully, ‘and I hope to God they die in grace, boy, or they’ll never hear that heavenly choir, will they?’

‘I hate choirs,’ I growled.

‘No, you don’t,’ Pyrlig said. ‘You see, boy,’ he looked back to Osferth, ‘once they’ve gone out of the gate, then there’ll only be a handful of men guarding it. So that’s when we attack! And Sigefrid will suddenly find himself with an enemy in front and another one behind, and that predicament can make a man wish he’d stayed in bed.’

A shutter opened in one of the high windows over the courtyard. A young woman stared out at the lightening sky, then stretched her hands high and yawned hugely. The gesture stretched her linen shift tight across her breasts, then she saw my men beneath her and instinctively clutched her arms to her chest. She was clothed, but must have felt naked. ‘Oh, thank you dear Saviour for another sweet mercy,’ Pyrlig said, watching her.

‘But if we take the gate,’ Osferth said, worrying at the problems he saw, ‘the men left in the city will attack us.’

‘They will,’ I agreed.

‘And Sigefrid …’ he began.

‘Will probably turn back to slaughter us,’ I finished his sentence for him.

‘So?’ he said, then checked, because he saw nothing but blood and death in his future.

‘It all depends,’ I said, ‘on my cousin. If he comes to our aid then we should win. If he doesn’t?’ I shrugged, ‘then keep good hold of your sword.’

A roar sounded from Ludd’s Gate and I knew it had been swung open and that men were streaming down the road that led to the Fleot. Æthelred, if he was still readying his assault, would see them coming and have a choice to make. He could stand and fight in the new Saxon town, or else run. I hoped he would stand. I did not like him, but I never saw a lack of courage in him. I did see a great deal of stupidity, which suggested he would probably welcome a fight.

It took a long time for Sigefrid’s men to get through the gate. I watched from the shadows at the courtyard’s entrance and reckoned at least four hundred men were leaving the city. Æthelred had over three hundred good troops, most of them from Alfred’s household, but the rest of his force was from the fyrd and would never stand against a hard, savage attack. The advantage lay with Sigefrid whose men were warm, rested and fed, while Æthelred’s troops had stumbled through the night and would be tired.

‘The sooner we do it,’ I said to no one in particular, ‘the better.’

‘Go now, then?’ Pyrlig suggested.

‘We just walk to the gate!’ I shouted to my men. ‘You don’t run! Look as if you belong here!’

Which is what we did.

And so, with a stroll down a Lundene street, that bitter fight began.

There were no more than thirty men left at Ludd’s Gate. Some were sentries posted to guard the archway, but most were idlers who had climbed to the rampart to watch Sigefrid’s sally. A big man with one leg was climbing the uneven stone steps on his crutches. He stopped halfway and turned to watch our approach. ‘If you hurry, lord,’ he shouted to me, ‘you can join them!’

He called me lord because he saw a lord. He saw a warrior lord.

A handful of men could go to war as I did. They were chieftains, earls, kings, lords; the men who had killed enough other men to amass the fortune needed to buy mail, helmet and weapons. And not just any mail. My coat was of Frankish make and would cost a man more than the price of a warship. Sihtric had polished the metal with sand so that it shone like silver. The hem of the coat was at my knees and was hung with thirty-eight hammers of Thor; some made of bone, some of ivory, some of silver, but all had once hung about the necks of brave enemies I had killed in battle, and I wore the amulets so that when I came to the corpse-hall the former owners would know me, greet me and drink ale with me.

I wore a cloak of wool dyed black on which Gisela had embroidered a white lightning flash that ran from my neck to my heels. The cloak could be an encumbrance in battle, but I wore it now, for it made me look larger, and I was already taller and broader than most men. Thor’s hammer hung at my neck, and that alone was a poor thing, a miserable amulet made of iron that rusted constantly, and all the scraping and cleaning had worn it thin and misshapen over the years, but I had taken that little iron hammer with my fists when I was a boy and I loved it. I wear it to this day.

My helmet was a glorious thing, polished to an eye-blinding shine, inlaid with silver and crested with a silver wolf’s head. The face-plates were decorated with silver spirals. That helmet alone told an enemy I was a man of substance. If a man killed me and took that helmet he would be instantly rich, but my enemies would rather have taken my arm rings, which, like the Danes, I wore over my mail sleeves. My rings were silver and gold, and there were so many that some had to be worn above my elbows. They spoke of men killed and wealth hoarded. My boots were of thick leather and had iron plates sewn around them to deflect the spear thrust that comes under the shield. The shield itself, rimmed with iron, was painted with a wolf’s head, my badge, and at my left hip hung Serpent-Breath and at my right Wasp-Sting, and I strode towards the gate with the sun rising behind me to throw my long shadow on the filth-strewn street.

I was a warlord in my glory, I had come to kill, and no one at the gate knew it.

They saw us coming, but assumed we were Danes. Most of the enemy were on the high rampart, but five were standing in the open gate and all were watching Sigefrid’s force that streamed down the brief steep slope to the Fleot. The Saxon settlement was not far beyond and I hoped Æthelred was still there. ‘Steapa,’ I called, still far enough from the gate so that no one there could hear me speak English, ‘take your men and kill those turds in the archway.’

Steapa’s skull face grinned. ‘You want me to close the gate?’ he asked.

‘Leave it open,’ I said. I wanted to lure Sigefrid back to prevent his hardened men getting among Æthelred’s fyrd, and if the gate were open Sigefrid would be more inclined to attack us.

The gate was built between two massive stone bastions, each with its own stairway and I remembered how, when I was a child, Father Beocca had once described the Christian heaven to me. It would have crystal stairs, he had claimed, and enthusiastically described a great flight of glassy steps climbing to a white-hung throne of gold where his god sat. Angels would surround that throne, each brighter than the sun, while the saints, as he had called the dead Christians, would cluster about the stairs and sing. It sounded dull then and still does. ‘In the next world,’ I told Pyrlig, ‘we will all be gods.’

He looked at me with surprise, wondering where that statement had come from. ‘We will be with God,’ he corrected me.

‘In your heaven, maybe,’ I said, ‘but not in mine.’

‘There is only one heaven, Lord Uhtred.’

‘Then let mine be that one heaven,’ I said, and I knew at that moment that my truth was the truth, and that Pyrlig, Alfred and all the other Christians were wrong. They were wrong. We did not go towards the light, we slid from it. We went to chaos. We went to death and to death’s heaven, and I began to shout as we drew nearer the enemy. ‘A heaven for men! A heaven for warriors! A heaven where swords shine! A heaven for brave men! A heaven of savagery! A heaven of corpse-gods! A heaven of death!’

They all stared at me, friend and enemy alike. They stared and they thought me mad, and perhaps I was mad as I climbed the right-hand stairway where the man on crutches gazed at me. I kicked one of his crutches away so that he fell. The crutch clattered down the stairs and one of my men booted it back to the ground. ‘Death’s heaven!’ I screamed, and every man on the rampart had his eyes on me and still they thought I was a friend because I shouted my weird war cry in Danish.

I smiled behind my twin face-plates, then drew Serpent-Breath. Beneath me, out of my sight, Steapa and his men had begun their killing.

Not ten minutes before I had been in a waking dream, and now the madness had come. I should have waited for my men to climb the stairs and form a shield wall, but some impulse drove me forward. I was screaming still, but screaming my own name now, and Serpent-Breath was singing her hunger-song and I was a lord of war.

The happiness of battle. The ecstasy. It is not just deceiving an enemy, but feeling like a god. I had once tried to explain it to Gisela and she had touched my face with her long fingers and smiled. ‘It’s better than this?’ she had asked.

‘The same,’ I had said.

But it is not the same. In battle a man risks all to gain reputation. In bed he risks nothing. The joy is comparable, but the joy of a woman is fleeting, while reputation is for ever. Men die, women die, all die, but reputation lives after a man, and that was why I screamed my name as Serpent-Breath took her first soul. He was a tall man with a battered helmet and a long-bladed spear that he instinctively thrust at me and, just as instinctively, I turned his lunge away with my shield and put Serpent-Breath into his throat. There was a man to my right and I shoulder-charged him, driving him down, and stamped on his groin while my shield took a sword swing from my left. I stepped over the man whose groin I had pulped and the rampart’s protective wall was on my right now, where I wanted it, and ahead of me was the enemy.

I drove into them. ‘Uhtred!’ I was shouting, ‘Uhtred of Bebbanburg!’

I was inviting death. By attacking alone I let the enemy get behind me, but at that moment I was immortal. Time had slowed so that the enemy moved like snails and I was fast as the lightning on my cloak. I was shouting still as Serpent-Breath lunged into a man’s eye, driving hard till the bone of his socket stopped her thrust, and then I swept her left to slam down a sword coming at my face, and my shield lifted to take an axe blow, and Serpent-Breath dropped and I pushed her hard forward to pierce the leather jerkin of the man whose sword I had parried. I twisted her so the blade would not be seized by his belly while she gouged his blood and guts, and then I stepped left and rammed the iron boss of the shield at the axeman.

He staggered back. Serpent-Breath came from the swordsman’s belly and flew wide right to crash against another sword. I followed her, still screaming, and saw the terror on that enemy’s face, and terror on an enemy breeds cruelty. ‘Uhtred,’ I shouted, and stared at him, and he saw death coming, and he tried to back from me, but other men came behind to block his retreat and I was smiling as I slashed Serpent-Breath across his face. Blood sprayed in the dawn, and the backswing sliced his throat and two men pushed past him and I parried one with the sword and the other with my shield.

Those two men were no fools. They came with their shields touching and their only ambition was to push me back against the rampart and hold me there, pinned by their shields, so that I could not use Serpent-Breath. And once they had trapped me they would let other men come to jab me with blades until I lost too much blood to stand. Those two knew how to kill me, and they came to do it.

But I was laughing. I was laughing because I knew what they planned, and they seemed so slow and I rammed my own shield forward to crash against theirs and they thought they had trapped me because I could not hope to push two men away. They crouched behind their shields and heaved forward and I just stepped back, snatching my own shield backwards so that they stumbled forward as my resistance vanished. Their shields were slightly lowered as they stumbled and Serpent-Breath flickered like a viper’s tongue so that her bloodied tip smashed into the forehead of the man on my left. I felt his thick bone break, saw his eyes glaze, heard the crash of his dropped shield, and I swept her to the right and the second man parried. He rammed his shield at me, hoping to unbalance me, but just then there was a mighty shout from my left. ‘Christ Jesus and Alfred!’ It was Father Pyrlig, and behind him the wide bastion was now swarming with my men. ‘You damned heathen fool,’ Pyrlig shouted at me.

I laughed. Pyrlig’s sword cut into my opponent’s arm, and Serpent-Breath beat down his shield. I remember he looked at me then. He had a fine helmet with raven wings fixed to its sides. His beard was golden, his eyes blue, and in those eyes was the knowledge of his imminent death as he tried to lift his sword with a wounded arm.

‘Hold tight to your sword,’ I told him. He nodded.

Pyrlig killed him, though I did not see it. I was moving past the man to attack the remaining enemy and beside me Clapa was swinging a huge axe so violently that he was as much a danger to our side as to the enemy, but no enemy wanted to face the two of us. They were fleeing along the ramparts and the gate was ours.

I leaned on the low outer wall and immediately stood upright because the stones shifted under my weight. The masonry was crumbling. I slapped the loose stonework and laughed aloud for joy. Sihtric grinned at me. He had a bloodied sword. ‘Any amulets, lord?’ he asked.

‘That one,’ I pointed to the man whose helmet was decorated with raven wings, ‘he died well, I’ll take his.’

Sihtric stooped to find the man’s hammer-image. Beyond him Osferth was staring at the half-dozen dead men who lay in splats of blood across the stones. He was carrying a spear that had a reddened tip. ‘You killed someone?’ I asked him.

He looked at me wide-eyed, then nodded. ‘Yes, lord.’

‘Good,’ I said and jerked my head towards the sprawling corpses. ‘Which one?’

‘It wasn’t here, lord,’ he said. He seemed puzzled for a moment, then looked back at the steps we had climbed. ‘It was over there, lord.’

‘On the steps?’

‘Yes,’ he said.

I stared at him long enough to make him uncomfortable. ‘Tell me,’ I said at last, ‘did he threaten you?’

‘He was an enemy, lord.’

‘What did he do,’ I asked, ‘wave his one crutch at you?’

‘He,’ Osferth began, then appeared to run out of words. He stared down at a man I had killed, then frowned. ‘Lord?’

‘Yes?’

‘You told us it was death to leave the shield wall.’

I stooped to clean Serpent-Breath’s blade on a dead man’s cloak. ‘So?’

‘You left the shield wall, lord,’ Osferth said, almost reprovingly.

I straightened and touched my arm rings. ‘You live,’ I told him harshly, ‘by obeying the rules. You make a reputation, boy, by breaking them. But you do not make a reputation by killing cripples.’ I spat those last words, then turned to see that Sigefrid’s men had crossed the River Fleot, but had now become aware of the commotion behind them and had stopped to stare back at the gate.

Pyrlig appeared beside me. ‘Let’s get rid of this rag,’ he said, and I saw there was a banner hanging from the wall. Pyrlig hauled it up and showed me Sigefrid’s raven badge. ‘We’ll let them know,’ Pyrlig said, ‘that the city has a new master.’ He hauled up his mail coat and pulled out a banner that had been folded and tucked into his waistband. He shook it loose to reveal a black cross on a dull white field. ‘Praise God,’ Pyrlig said, then dropped the banner over the wall, securing it by weighting its top edge with dead men’s weapons. Now Sigefrid would know that Ludd’s Gate was lost. The Christian banner was flaunted in his face.

Yet, for the next few moments, things were quiet. I suppose Sigefrid’s men were astonished by what had happened and were recovering from that surprise. They were no longer moving towards the new Saxon town, but were still staring back at the cross-hung gate, while inside the city groups of men gathered in the streets and gazed up at us.

I was staring towards the new town. I could see no sign of Æthelred’s men. There was a wooden palisade cresting the low slope where the Saxon town was built and it was possible Æthelred’s troops were behind the fence that had decayed in places and was entirely missing in others.

‘If Æthelred doesn’t come,’ Pyrlig said softly.

‘Then we’re dead,’ I finished the remark for him. To my left the river slid grey as misery towards the broken bridge and distant sea. Gulls were white on the grey. Far off, on the southern bank, I could see a few hovels where smoke rose. That was Wessex. In front of me, where Sigefrid’s men remained motionless, was Mercia, while behind me, north of the river, was East Anglia.

‘Do we shut the gate?’ Pyrlig asked.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I told Steapa to leave it open.’

‘You did?’

‘We want Sigefrid to attack us,’ I said, and I thought that if Æthelred had abandoned his attack then I would die in the gate where the three kingdoms met. I still could not see Æthelred’s force, yet I was relying on my cousin’s men to give us victory. If I could tempt Sigefrid’s warriors back to the gate, and hold them there, then Æthelred could assail them from behind. That was why I had to leave the gate open, as an invitation to Sigefrid. If I had shut it then he could have used another entrance to the Roman city, and his men would not be exposed to my cousin’s assault.

The more immediate problem was that the Danes who had stayed in the city were at last recovering from their surprise. Some were in the streets while others gathered on the walls either side of Ludd’s Gate. The walls were lower than the gate’s bastion, which meant any attack on us had to be made up the narrow stone steps which climbed from wall to bastion. Each of those steps would need five men to hold them, as would the twin stairways climbing from the street. I thought about abandoning the bastion’s top, but if the fight went badly in the archway, then the high rampart was our best refuge. ‘You’ll have twenty men,’ I told Pyrlig, ‘to hold this bastion. And you can have him as well,’ I nodded towards Osferth. I did not want Alfred’s cripple-killing son in the arch below where the fighting would be fiercest. It was down there that we would make two shield walls, one facing into the city and the other looking out towards the Fleot, and there the shield walls would clash, and there, I thought, we would die because I still could not see Æthelred’s army.

I was tempted to run away. It would have been simple enough to have retreated the way we had come, thrusting aside the enemy in the streets. We could have taken Sigefrid’s boat, the Wave-Tamer, and used her to cross to the West Saxon bank. But I was Uhtred of Bebbanburg, stuffed full of warrior pride, and I had sworn to take Lundene. We stayed.

Fifty of us went down the stairways and filled the gate. Twenty men faced into the city while the rest faced out towards Sigefrid. Inside the gate arch there was just room for eight men to stand abreast with their shields touching and so we made our twin shield walls under the shadows of the stone. Steapa commanded the twenty, while I stood in the front rank of the wall looking west.

I left the shield wall and walked a few paces towards the Fleot valley. The small river, fouled by the tanners’ pits upstream, ran dirty and sluggish towards the Temes. Beyond the river Sigefrid, Haesten and Erik had at last turned their force around and what had been their rearmost ranks of northern warriors were now wading back across the shallow Fleot to thrust my little force aside.

I stood on their skyline. The cloud-veiled sun was behind me, but its pale light would be reflecting from the silver of my helmet and from the smoky sheen of Serpent-Breath’s blade. I had drawn her again, and now I stood with sword held out to my right and shield to my left. I stood above them, a lord in glory, a man in mail, a warrior inviting warriors to fight, and I saw no friendly troops on the farther hill.

And if Æthelred had gone, I thought, then we would die.

I gripped Serpent-Breath’s hilt. I stared at Sigefrid’s men, then clashed Serpent-Breath’s blade against my shield. I beat her three times and the sound echoed from the walls behind me, and then I turned and went back to my small shield wall.

And, with a roar of anger and the howling of men who see victory, Sigefrid’s army came to kill us.

A poet should have written the tale of that fight.

That is what poets are for.

My present wife, who is a fool, pays poets to sing of Christ Jesus, who is her god, but her poets falter into embarrassed silence when I limp into the hall. They know scores of songs about their saints, and they sing melancholy chants about the day their god was nailed to the cross, but when I am present they sing the real poems, those poems that the clever priest told me had been written about other men whose names had been taken out so mine could be inserted.

They are poems about slaughter, poems about warriors, real poems.

Warriors defend the home, they defend children, they defend women, they defend the harvest, and they kill the enemies who come to steal those things. Without warriors the land would be a waste place, desolate and full of laments. Yet a warrior’s real reward is not the silver and gold he can wear on his arms, but his reputation, and that is why there are poets. Poets tell the tales of the men who defend the land and kill a land’s enemies. That is what poets are for, yet there is no poem about the fight in Ludd’s Gate of Lundene.

There is a poem sung in what used to be Mercia that tells of Lord Æthelred’s capture of Lundene, and it is a fine poem, yet it does not mention my name, nor Steapa’s name, nor Pyrlig’s name, nor the names of the men who really fought that day. You would think, listening to that poem, that Æthelred came and those whom the poet calls ‘the heathen’ just ran.

But it was not like that.

It was not like that at all.

I say that the Northmen came in a rush, and they did, but Sigefrid was no fool when it came to a fight. He could see how few of us blocked that gateway and he knew that if he could break my shield wall quickly then we would all die under that old Roman arch.

I had gone back to my troops. My shield overlapped the shields of the men to my left and right, and it was just as I set myself, ready for their charge, that I saw what Sigefrid planned.

His men had not just been staring at Ludd’s Gate, but had been reorganised so that eight warriors had been placed in the van of his attack. Four of them carried massive long spears that needed two hands to hold level. Those four had no shields, but next to each spearman was a massive warrior armed with shield and axe, and behind them were more men with shields, spears and long-swords. I knew just what was about to happen. The four men would come at a run and hammer their spears into four of our shields. The weight of the spears and the power of the charge would drive four of us into the rank behind, and then the axemen would strike. They would not try to batter our shields into splinters, but would instead widen the gaps the four spearmen had made, hook and pull down the shields of our second rank, and so expose us to the long weapons of the men following the axe-warriors. Sigefrid had only one ambition, and that was to break our wall fast, and I had no doubt that the eight men were not only trained to break a shield wall quickly, but had done it before.

‘Brace yourselves!’ I shouted, though it was a pointless shout. My men knew what they had to do. They had to stand and die. That was what they had sworn in their oaths to me.

And I knew we would die unless Æthelred came. The power of Sigefrid’s attack would hammer into our shield wall and I had no spears long enough to counter the four that were coming. We could only try to stand fast, but we were outnumbered and the enemy’s confidence was plain. They were shouting insults, promising us death, and death was coming.

‘Close the gate, lord?’ Cerdic, standing beside me, suggested nervously.

‘Too late,’ I said.

And the attack came.

The four spearmen screamed as they ran at us. Their weapons were as big as oar shafts and had spearheads the size of short-swords. They held the spears low and I knew they aimed to strike the lower part of our shields to tip the upper rims forward so the axemen could hook more easily and thus strip our defence in an instant.

And I knew it would work because the men attacking us were Sigefrid’s breakers of shield walls. This was what they had trained to do, and had done, and the corpse-hall must have been full of their victims. They screamed their incoherent challenge as they ran at us. I could see their distorted faces. Eight men, big men, big-bearded and mail-coated, warriors to fear, and I braced my shield and crouched slightly, hoping a spear would strike the heavy metal boss in the shield’s centre. ‘Push against us,’ I called to my second rank.

I could see one of the spears was aimed at my shield. If it struck low enough then my shield would be tilted forward and the axeman would strike down with his big blade. Death in a spring morning, and so I put my left leg against the shield, hoping that would stop the shield being driven inward, but I suspected the spear would shatter the limewood anyway and the blade would gouge into my groin. ‘Brace yourselves!’ I shouted again.

And the spears came for us. I saw the spearman grimacing as he readied to hurl his weight against my shield. And that crash of metal on wood was just a heartbeat away when Pyrlig struck instead.

I did not know what happened at first. I was waiting for the spear’s blow and readying to parry an axe blow with Serpent-Breath, when something fell from the sky to slam into the attackers. The long spears dropped and their blades gouged the roadway just paces in front of me, and the eight men staggered, all cohesion and impetus gone. At first I thought two of Pyrlig’s men had jumped from the gate’s high rampart, but then I saw that the Welshman had hurled two corpses from the bastion’s top. The bodies, both of big men, were still dressed in mail and their weight slammed onto the spear shafts, driving the weapons down and causing chaos in the enemy’s front rank. One moment they had been in line, threatening, and now they were stumbling on corpses.

I moved without thinking. Serpent-Breath hissed in a backswing and her blade crashed into an axeman’s helmet and I sawed her back, seeing blood show through the broken metal. That axeman went down as I slammed my shield’s heavy boss into a spearman’s face and felt his bones collapse.

‘Shield wall!’ I shouted, stepping back.

Finan had gone forward like me and had killed another spearman. The road was obstructed now by three corpses and at least one stunned man, and as I backed towards the gate’s arch, two more bodies were hurled from the bastion. The corpses thumped heavily on the roadway, bounced, then lay as extra stumbling blocks to Sigefrid’s advance, and it was then that I saw Sigefrid.

He was in the second rank, a baleful figure in his thick bear cloak. That fur alone could stop most sword blows, and beneath it he wore shining mail. He was roaring at his men to advance, but the sudden corpse fall had checked them. ‘Forward!’ Sigefrid bellowed, and pushed his way into the front rank and came straight for me. He was staring at me and shouting, but what he shouted I do not remember.

Sigefrid’s attack had lost all its impetus. Instead of hitting us at a run, they closed on us at a walk and I remember thrusting my shield forward, and the crash as our two shields banged together, and the shock of Sigefrid’s weight, though he must have felt the same because neither of us was thrown off balance. He rammed a sword at me and I felt a thudding blow on my shield, and I did the same to him. I had sheathed Serpent-Breath. She was and is a lovely blade, but a long-sword is no use when the shield walls come close as lovers. I had drawn Wasp-Sting, my short-sword, and I felt with her blade for a gap between the enemy’s shields and drove her forward. She struck nothing.

Sigefrid heaved at me. We heaved back. A line of shields had crashed against another line, and behind them, on both sides, men pushed and swore, grunted and heaved. An axe came towards my head, swung by the man behind Sigefrid, but behind me Clapa had his shield raised and caught the blow, which was powerful enough to drive his shield down onto my helmet. For a moment I could see nothing, but I shook my head and my vision cleared. Another axe had hooked its blade over my shield’s top edge and the man was trying to pull my shield down, but it was crammed so tight against Sigefrid’s shield that it would not move. Sigefrid was cursing me, spitting into my face, and I was calling him the son of a goat-humping whore and stabbing at him with Wasp-Sting. She had found something solid behind the enemy wall and I gouged her, then shoved her hard forward and gouged the blade again, but what damage she did I do not know to this day.

The poets tell of those battles, but no poet I know was ever in the front rank of a shield wall. They boast of a warrior’s prowess and they record how many men he killed. Bright his blade flashed, they sing, and great was his spear’s slaughter, but it was never like that. Blades were not bright, but cramped. Men swore, pushed and sweated. Not many men died once the shields touched and the heaving began because there was not room enough to swing a blade. The real killing began when a shield wall broke, but ours held against that first attack. I saw little because my helmet had been shoved low over my eyes, but I remember Sigefrid’s open mouth, all rotten teeth and yellow spittle. He was cursing me, and I was cursing him, and my shield shuddered from blows and men were shouting. One was screaming. Then I heard another scream and Sigefrid suddenly stepped back. His whole line was moving away from us and for a moment I thought they were trying to tempt us out of the gate’s archway, but I stayed where I was. I dared not take my little shield wall out of the arch, for the great stone walls on either side protected my flanks. Then there was a third scream and at last I saw why Sigefrid’s men had faltered. Big blocks of stone were falling from the ramparts. Pyrlig was evidently not being attacked and so his men were prising away lumps of masonry and dropping them on the enemy, and the man behind Sigefrid had been struck on the head and Sigefrid stumbled on him.

‘Stay here!’ I shouted at my men. They were tempted to go forward and take advantage of the enemy’s disarray, but that would mean leaving the gate’s safety. ‘Stay!’ I bellowed angrily, and they stayed.

It was Sigefrid who retreated. He looked angry and puzzled. He had expected an easy victory, but instead he had lost men while we were unscathed. Cerdic’s face was covered in blood, but he shook his head when I asked if he had been badly wounded. Then from behind me I heard a roar of voices and my men, packed together in the archway, shuddered forward as an enemy struck from the streets. Steapa was there and I did not even bother to turn and see the fight because I knew Steapa would hold. I could also hear the clash of blades above me and knew that Pyrlig too was now fighting for his life.

Sigefrid saw Pyrlig’s men fighting and deduced he would be spared their shower of masonry and so he shouted at his men to ready themselves. ‘Kill the bastards!’ he bellowed, ‘kill them! But take the big one alive. I want him.’ He swept his sword to point at me and I remembered his blade’s name; Fear-Giver. ‘You’re mine!’ he shouted at me, ‘and I still have to crucify a man! And you’re the man!’ He laughed, sheathed Fear-Giver and took a long-handled war axe from one his followers. He offered me a malevolent grin, covered his body with his raven-decorated shield, and shouted at his men to advance. ‘Kill them all! All but the big bastard! Kill them!’

But this time, instead of pushing close to shove us through the gate like a stopper being forced through a bottle’s neck, he made his men pause at sword’s length and try to haul our shields down with their long-hafted war axes. And so the work became desperate.

An axe is a vicious weapon in a fight between shield walls. If it does not hook a shield down it can still break the boards into splinters. I felt Sigefrid’s blows crashing into the shield, saw the axe blade appear through a rent in the limewood, and all I could do was endure the assault. I dared not go forward because that would break our wall, and if our whole wall stepped forward then the men on the flanks would be exposed and we would die.

A spear was jabbing at my ankles. A second axe crashed on the shield. All along our short line the blows were falling, the shields were breaking and death was looming. I had no axe to swing, for I was never fond of it as a weapon, though I recognised how lethal it was. I kept Wasp-Sting in my hand, hoping Sigefrid would close the gap and I could slide the blade past his shield and deep into his big belly, but Sigefrid stayed an axe’s length away, and my shield was broken, and I knew a blow would soon crack my forearm into a useless mess of blood and shattered bone.

I risked one step forward. I made it suddenly so that Sigefrid’s next swing was wasted, though the axe shaft bruised my left shoulder. He had to drop his shield to swing the axe and I lunged Wasp-Sting across his body and the blade rammed into his right shoulder, but his expensive mail held. He recoiled. I sliced her at his face, but he rammed his shield into mine, driving me back, and an instant later his axe slammed into my shield again.

He grimaced then, all rotten teeth and angry eyes and bushy beard. ‘I want you alive,’ he said. He swung the axe sideways and I managed to pull the shield inwards just enough so that the blade crashed against the boss. ‘Alive,’ he said again, ‘and you will die a death fit for a man who breaks his oath.’

‘I made no oath to you,’ I said.

‘But you will die as though you had,’ he said, ‘with your hands and feet nailed to a cross, and your screams won’t stop until I tire of them.’ He grimaced again as he drew the axe back for a last shield-splintering stroke. ‘And I’ll flay your corpse, Uhtred the Betrayer,’ he said, ‘and cover my shield with your tanned skin. I’ll piss in your dead throat and dance on your bones.’ He swung the axe, and the sky fell.

A whole length of heavy masonry had been toppled from the rampart and slammed into Sigefrid’s ranks. There was dust and screaming and broken men. Six warriors were either on the ground or clutching shattered bones. All were behind Sigefrid, and he turned, astonished, and just then Osferth, Alfred’s bastard son, jumped from the gate’s top.

He should have broken his ankles in that desperate leap, but somehow he survived. He landed amid the broken stones and shattered bodies that had been Sigefrid’s second rank and he screamed like a girl as he swung his sword at the huge Norseman’s head. The blade thumped into Sigefrid’s helmet. It did not break the metal, but it must have stunned Sigefrid for an instant. I had broken my shield wall by taking two paces forward and I rammed my broken shield at the dazed man and stabbed Wasp-Sting into his left thigh. This time she broke through the links of his mail and I twisted her, ripping muscle. Sigefrid staggered and it was then that Osferth, whose face was a picture of pure terror, stabbed his sword into the small of the Norseman’s back. I do not think Osferth was aware of what he was doing. He had pissed himself with fear, he was dazed, he was confused, the enemy was recovering their sense and coming to kill him, and Osferth just stabbed his sword with enough desperate force to pierce the bear-fur cloak, Sigefrid’s mail, and then Sigefrid himself.

The big man screamed with agony. Finan was beside me, dancing as he always danced in battle, and he fooled the man next to Sigefrid with a lunge that was a feint, flicked his sword sideways across the man’s face, then shouted at Osferth to come to us.

But Alfred’s son was frozen by terror. He would have lived no longer than one more heartbeat if I had not shaken off the remnants of my shattered shield and reached past the screaming Sigefrid to haul Osferth towards me. I shoved him back into the second rank and, with no shield to protect myself, waited for the next attack.

‘My God, thank you, thank you, Lord God,’ Osferth was saying. He sounded pathetic.

Sigefrid was on his knees, whimpering. Two men dragged him away, and I saw Erik staring appalled at his wounded brother. ‘Come and die!’ I shouted at him, and Erik answered my anger with a sad look. He nodded to me, as if to acknowledge that custom forced me to threaten him, but that the threat in no way diminished his regard for me. ‘Come on!’ I goaded him, ‘come and meet Serpent-Breath!’

‘In my own time, Lord Uhtred,’ Erik called back, his courtesy a reproof to my snarl. He stooped beside his wounded brother, and Sigefrid’s plight had persuaded the enemy to hesitate before attacking us again. They hesitated long enough for me to turn and see that Steapa had beaten off the attack from the inside of the city.

‘What’s happening on the bastion?’ I asked Osferth.

He stared at me with pure terror on his face. ‘Thank you, Lord Jesus,’ he stammered.

I rammed my left fist into his belly. ‘What’s happening up there!’ I shouted at him.

He gaped at me, stammered again, then managed to speak coherently. ‘Nothing, lord. The pagans can’t get up the stairs.’

I turned back to face the enemy. Pyrlig was holding the bastion’s top, Steapa was holding the inner side of the gate, so I had to hold here. I touched my hammer amulet, brushed my left hand over Serpent-Breath’s hilt, and thanked the gods I was still alive. ‘Give me your shield,’ I said to Osferth. I snatched it from him, put my bruised arm through the leather loops, and saw the enemy was forming a new line.

‘Did you see Æthelred’s men?’ I asked Osferth.

‘Æthelred?’ he responded as though he had never heard the name.

‘My cousin!’ I snarled. ‘Did you see him?’

‘Oh yes, lord, he’s coming,’ Osferth said, giving the news as though it were utterly unimportant, as if he were telling me that he had seen rain in the distance.

I risked turning to face him. ‘He is coming?’

‘Yes, lord,’ Osferth said.

And so Æthelred was, and so he did. Our fight more or less ended there, because Æthelred had not abandoned his plan to assault the city, and now brought his men across the Fleot to attack the rear of the enemy, and that enemy fled north towards the next gate. We pursued for a while. I drew Serpent-Breath because she was a better weapon for an open fight, and I caught a Dane who was too fat to run hard. He turned, lunged at me with a spear, and I slid the lunge away with my borrowed shield and sent him to the corpse-hall with a lunge of my own. Æthelred’s men were howling as they fought up the slope, and I reckoned they might easily mistake my men for the enemy and so I called for my troops to return to Ludd’s Gate. The arch was empty now, though on either side were bloodied corpses and broken shields. The sun was higher, but the clouds still made it look a dirty yellow behind their veil.

Some of Sigefrid’s men died outside the walls and such was their panic that some were even hacked to death with sharpened hoes. Most managed to get through the next gate and into the old city, and there we hunted them down.

It was a wild and howling hunt. Sigefrid’s troops, those who had not sallied beyond the walls, were slow to learn of their defeat. They stayed on their ramparts until they saw death coming, and then they fled into streets and alleys already choked with men, women and children fleeing the Saxon assault. They ran down the terraced hills of the city, going for the boats that were tied to the wharves downstream of the bridge. Some, the fools, tried to save their belongings, and that was fatal for they were burdened by their possessions, caught in the streets and cut down. A young girl screamed as she was dragged into a house by a Mercian spearman. Dead men lay in gutters, sniffed by dogs. Some houses showed a cross, denoting that Christians lived there, but the protection meant nothing if a girl in the house was pretty. A priest held a wooden crucifix aloft outside a low doorway, and shouted that there were Christian women sheltering in his small church, but the priest was cut down by an axe and the screaming began. A score of Northmen were caught in the palace where they guarded the treasury amassed by Sigefrid and Erik and they all died there, their blood trickling between the small tiles of the mosaic floor of the Roman hall.

It was the fyrd that did most destruction. The household troops had discipline and stayed together, and it was those trained troops who chased the Northmen out of Lundene. I stayed on the street next to the river wall, the street that we had followed from our half-swamped ships, and we drove the fugitives as though they were sheep running from wolves. Father Pyrlig had attached his cross banner to a Danish spear and he waved it over our heads to show Æthelred’s men that we were friends. Screams and howling sounded from the higher streets. I stepped over a dead child, her golden curls thick with the blood of her father who had died beside her. His last act had been to seize his child’s arm and his dead hand was still curled about her elbow. I thought of my daughter, Stiorra. ‘Lord!’ Sihtric shouted, ‘lord!’ he was pointing with his sword.

He had seen that one large group of Northmen, presumably cut off as they retreated towards their ships, had taken refuge on the broken bridge. The bridge’s northern end was guarded by a Roman bastion through which an arch led, though the arch had long lost its gateway. Instead the passage to the bridge’s broken timber roadway was blocked by a shield wall. They were in the same position I had been in Ludd’s Gate with their flanks protected by high stonework. Their shields filled the arch, and I could see at least six ranks of men behind the front line of round overlapping shields.

Steapa made a low growling noise and hefted his axe. ‘No,’ I said, laying a hand on his massive shield arm.

‘Make a boar’s tusk,’ he said vengefully, ‘kill the bastards. Kill them all.’

‘No,’ I said again. A boar’s tusk was a wedge of men that would drive into a shield wall like a human spear-point, but no boar’s tusk would pierce this Northmen’s wall. They were too tightly packed in the archway, and they were desperate, and desperate men will fight fanatically for the chance to live. They would die in the end, that was true, but many of my men would die with them.

‘Stay here,’ I told my men. I handed my borrowed shield to Sihtric, then gave him my helmet. I sheathed Serpent-Breath. Pyrlig copied me, taking off his helmet. ‘You don’t have to come,’ I told him.

‘And why shouldn’t I?’ he asked, smiling. He handed his makeshift standard to Rypere, laid his shield down, and, because I was glad of the Welshman’s company, the two of us walked to the bridge’s gate.

‘I am Uhtred of Bebbanburg,’ I announced to the hard-faced men staring over their shield rims, ‘and if you wish to feast in Odin’s corpse-hall this night then I am willing to send you there.’

Behind me the city screamed and smoke drifted dense across the sky. The nine men in the enemy’s front rank stared at me, but none spoke.

‘But if you want to taste the joys of this world longer,’ I went on, ‘then speak to me.’

‘We serve our earl,’ one of the men finally said.

‘And he is?’

‘Sigefrid Thurgilson,’ the man said.

‘Who fought well,’ I said. I had been screaming insults at Sigefrid not two hours before, but now was the time for softer speech. A time to arrange for an enemy to yield and thus save my men’s lives. ‘Does the Earl Sigefrid live?’ I asked.

‘He lives,’ the man said curtly, jerking his head to indicate that Sigefrid was somewhere behind him on the bridge.

‘Then tell him Uhtred of Bebbanburg would speak with him, to decide whether he lives or dies.’

That was not my choice to make. The Fates had already made the decision, and I was but their instrument. The man who had spoken to me called the message to the men behind on the bridge and I waited. Pyrlig was praying, though whether he beseeched mercy for the folk who screamed behind us or death for the men in front of us, I never asked.

Then the tight-packed shield wall in the arch shuffled aside as men made a passage down the roadway’s centre. ‘The Earl Erik will speak with you,’ the man told me.

And Pyrlig and I went to meet the enemy.

Six

‘My brother says I should kill you,’ Erik greeted me. The younger of the Thurgilson brothers had been waiting for me on the bridge and, though his words held menace, there was none in his face. He was placid, calm and apparently unworried by his predicament. His black hair was crammed beneath a plain helmet and his fine mail was spattered with blood. There was a rent at the mail’s hem, and I guessed that marked where a spear had come beneath his shield, but he was evidently unwounded. Sigefrid, though, was horribly injured. I could see him on the roadway, lying on his bear-fur cloak, twisting and jerking in pain, and being tended by two men.

‘Your brother,’ I said, still watching Sigefrid, ‘thinks that death is the answer to everything.’

‘Then he’s like you in that regard,’ Erik said with a wan smile, ‘if you are what men say you are.’

‘What do men say of me?’ I asked, curious.

‘That you kill like a Northman,’ Erik said. He turned to stare downriver. A small fleet of Danish and Norse ships had managed to escape the wharves, but some now rowed back upstream in an attempt to save the fugitives who crowded the river’s edge, but the Saxons were already among that doomed crowd. A furious fight was raging on the wharves where men hacked at each other. Some, to escape the fury, were leaping into the river. ‘I sometimes think,’ Erik said sadly, ‘that death is the real meaning of life. We worship death, we give it, we believe it leads to joy.’

‘I don’t worship death,’ I said.

‘Christians do,’ Erik remarked, glancing at Pyrlig, whose mailed chest displayed his wooden cross.

‘No,’ Pyrlig said.

‘Then why the image of a dead man?’ Erik asked.

‘Our Lord Jesus Christ rose from the dead,’ Pyrlig said energetically, ‘he conquered death! He died to give us life and regained his own life in his dying. Death, lord, is just a gate to more life.’

‘Then why do we fear death?’ Erik asked in a voice that suggested he expected no answer. He turned to look at the downstream chaos. The two ships we had used to shoot the bridge’s gap had been commandeered by fleeing men, and one of those ships had foundered just yards from the wharf where it now lay on its side, half sunken. Men had been spilled into the water where many must have drowned, but others had managed to reach the muddy foreshore where they were being hacked to death by gleeful men with spears, swords, axes and hoes. The survivors clung to the wreck, trying to shelter from a handful of Saxon bowmen whose long hunting arrows thudded into the ship’s timbers. There was so much death that morning. The streets of the broken city reeked of blood and were filled with the wailing of women beneath the smoke-smeared yellow sky. ‘We trusted you, Lord Uhtred,’ Erik said bleakly, still staring downriver. ‘You were going to bring us Ragnar, you were to be king in Mercia and you were to give us the whole island of Britain.’

‘The dead man lied,’ I said, ‘Bjorn lied.’

Erik turned back to me, his face grave. ‘I said we should not try and trick you,’ he said, ‘but Earl Haesten insisted.’ Erik shrugged, then looked at Father Pyrlig, noting his mail coat and the well-worn hilts of his swords. ‘But you also tricked us, Lord Uhtred,’ Erik went on, ‘because I think you knew this man was no priest, but a warrior.’

‘He is both,’ I said.

Erik grimaced, perhaps remembering the skill with which Pyrlig had defeated his brother in the arena. ‘You lied,’ he said sadly, ‘and we lied, but we still could have taken Wessex together. And now?’ he turned and looked along the bridge’s roadway, ‘now I don’t know whether my brother will live or die.’ He grimaced. Sigefrid was motionless now and for a moment I thought he might have gone to the corpse-hall already, but then he slowly turned his head to give me a baleful stare.

‘I shall pray for him,’ Pyrlig said.

‘Yes,’ Erik said simply, ‘please.’

‘And what shall I do?’ I asked.

‘You?’ Erik frowned, puzzled by my question.

‘Do I let you live, Erik Thurgilson?’ I asked. ‘Or kill you?’

‘You will find us difficult to kill,’ he said.

‘But kill you I will,’ I responded, ‘if I must.’ That was the real negotiation in those two sentences. The truth was that Erik and his men were trapped and doomed, but to kill them we would need to hack our way through a fearsome shield wall, and then batter down desperate men whose only thought would be to take many of us with them to the next world. I would lose twenty or more men here, and others of my household troops would be crippled for life. That was a price I did not want to pay, and Erik knew it, but he also knew that the price would be paid if he was not reasonable. ‘Is Haesten here?’ I asked him, looking down the broken bridge.

Erik shook his head. ‘I saw him leave,’ he said, nodding downriver.

‘A pity,’ I said, ‘because he broke an oath to me. If he had been here I would have let you all go in exchange for his life.’

Erik stared at me for a few heartbeats, judging whether I had spoken the truth. ‘Then kill me instead of Haesten,’ he said at last, ‘and let all these others leave.’

‘You broke no oath to me,’ I said, ‘so you owe me no life.’

‘I want these men to live,’ Erik said with a sudden passion, ‘and my life is a small price for theirs. I will pay it, Lord Uhtred, and in return you give my men their lives, and give them Wave-Tamer,’ he pointed to his brother’s ship that was still tied in the small dock where we had landed.

‘Is it a fair price, father?’ I asked Pyrlig.

‘Who can set a value on life?’ Pyrlig asked in return.

‘I can,’ I said harshly, and turned back to Erik. ‘The price is this,’ I told him. ‘You will leave every weapon you carry on this bridge. You will leave your shields. You will leave your mail coats, and you will leave your helmets. You will leave your arm rings, your chains, your brooches, your coins and your belt buckles. You will leave everything of value, Erik Thurgilson, and then you may take a ship that I choose to give you, and you may go.’

‘A ship that you choose,’ Erik said.

‘Yes.’

He smiled wanly. ‘I made Wave-Tamer for my brother,’ he said. ‘I first found her keel in the forest. It was an oak with a trunk straight as an oar shaft and I cut that myself. We used eleven other oaks, Lord Uhtred, for her ribs and her cross-pieces, for her stem and her planking. Her caulking was hair from seven bears I killed with my own spear, and I made her nails on my own forge. My mother made her sail, I wove her lines, and I gave her to Thor by killing a horse I loved and sprinkling his blood on her stem. She has carried my brother and me through storms and fog and ice. She is,’ he turned to look at Wave-Tamer, ‘she is beautiful. I love that ship.’

‘You love her more than your life?’

He thought for an instant, then shook his head. ‘No.’

‘Then it will be a ship of my choice,’ I said stubbornly, and that might have ended the negotiation except there was a commotion under the archway where the Northmen’s shield wall still faced my troops.

Æthelred had come to the bridge, and was demanding to be allowed through the gate. Erik offered me a quizzical look when the news was brought to us and I shrugged. ‘He commands here,’ I said.

‘So I will need his permission to leave?’

‘You will,’ I said.

Erik sent word that the shield wall was to let Æthelred onto the roadway and my cousin strutted onto the bridge with his customary cockiness. Aldhelm, the commander of his guard, was his only companion. Æthelred ignored Erik, instead facing me with a belligerent expression. ‘You presume to negotiate on my behalf?’ he accused me.

‘No,’ I said.

‘Then what are you doing here?’

‘Negotiating on my own behalf,’ I said. ‘This is the Earl Erik Thurgilson,’ I introduced the Norseman in English, but now changed to Danish. ‘And this,’ I said to Erik, ‘is the Ealdorman of Mercia, the Lord Æthelred.’

Erik responded to the introduction by offering Æthelred a small bow, but the courtesy was wasted. Æthelred looked around the bridge, counting the men who had taken refuge there. ‘Not so many,’ he said brusquely. ‘They must all die.’

‘I have already offered them their lives,’ I said.

Æthelred rounded on me. ‘We had orders,’ he said bitingly, ‘to capture Sigefrid, Erik and Haesten, and deliver them as captives to King Æthelstan.’ I saw Erik’s eyes widen slightly. I had assumed he spoke no English, but now realised he must have learned enough of the language to understand Æthelred’s words. ‘Are you disobeying my father-in-law?’ Æthelred challenged me when I made no response.

I kept my temper. ‘You can fight them here,’ I explained patiently, ‘and you’ll lose many good men. Too many. You can trap them here, but at slack water a ship will row to the bridge and rescue them.’ That would be a hard thing to do, but I had learned never to underestimate the seamanship of the Northmen. ‘Or you can rid Lundene of their presence,’ I said, ‘and that is what I chose to do.’ Aldhelm sniggered at that, implying that I had chosen the coward’s option. I looked at him and he challenged my gaze, refusing to look away.

‘Kill them, lord,’ Aldhelm said to Æthelred, though he continued staring at me.

‘If you wish to fight them,’ I said, ‘then that is your privilege, but I’ll have none of it.’

For a moment both Æthelred and Aldhelm were tempted to accuse me of cowardice. I could see the thought on their faces, but they could also see something in my face and they let the thought go unsaid. ‘You always loved pagans,’ Æthelred sneered instead.

‘I loved them so well,’ I said angrily, ‘that I took two ships through that gap in the black of night,’ I pointed to where the jagged stumps of the bridge’s planking ended. ‘I brought men into the city, cousin, and I captured Ludd’s Gate, and I fought a battle in that gate such as I would never wish to fight again, and in that fight I killed pagans for you. And yes, I love them.’

Æthelred looked at the gap. Spray showed continually there, thrown up by the seethe of water falling through the break with such force that the ancient wooden roadway quivered and the air was filled with the river’s noise. ‘You had no orders to come by ship,’ Æthelred said indignantly, and I knew he resented my actions because they might detract from the glory he expected to garner from his capture of Lundene.

‘I had orders to give you the city,’ I retorted, ‘so here it is!’ I gestured at the smoke drifting over the scream-filled hill. ‘Your wedding present,’ I said, mocking him with a bow.

‘And not just the city, lord,’ Aldhelm said to Æthelred, ‘but everything in it.’

‘Everything?’ Æthelred asked, as if he could not believe his good fortune.

‘Everything,’ Aldhelm said wolfishly.

‘And if you’re grateful for that,’ I interjected sourly, ‘then thank your wife.’

Æthelred jerked around to stare wide-eyed at me. Something in my words had astonished him for he looked as though I had struck him. There was disbelief on his broad face, and anger, and for a moment he was incapable of speaking. ‘My wife?’ he finally asked.

‘If it had not been for Æthelflaed,’ I explained, ‘we could not have taken the city. Last night she gave me men.’

‘You saw her last night?’ he asked incredulously.

I looked at him, wondering if he was mad. ‘Of course I saw her last night!’ I said. ‘We went back to the island to board the ships! She was there! She shamed your men into coming with me.’

‘And she made Lord Uhtred give her an oath,’ Pyrlig added, ‘an oath to defend your Mercia, Lord Æthelred.’

Æthelred ignored the Welshman. He was still staring at me, but now with an expression of hatred. ‘You boarded my ship?’ he could barely speak for loathing and anger, ‘and saw my wife?’

‘She came ashore,’ I said, ‘with Father Pyrlig.’

I meant nothing by saying that. I had merely reported what had happened and hoped that Æthelred would admire his wife for her initiative, but the moment I spoke I saw I had made a mistake. I thought for a heartbeat that Æthelred was going to hit me, so fierce was the sudden fury on his broad face, but then he controlled himself and turned and walked away. Aldhelm hurried after him and managed to check my cousin’s haste long enough to speak with him. I saw Æthelred make a furious, careless gesture, then Aldhelm turned back to me. ‘You must do what you think best,’ he called, then followed his master through the arch where the Northmen’s shield wall made a passage for them.

‘I always do,’ I said to no one in particular.

‘Do what?’ Father Pyrlig asked, staring at the arch where my cousin had so abruptly vanished.

‘What I think is best,’ I said, then frowned. ‘What happened there?’ I asked Pyrlig.

‘He doesn’t like other men speaking to his wife,’ The Welshman said. ‘I noticed that when I was on the ship with them, coming down the Temes. He’s jealous.’

‘But I’ve known Æthelflaed for ever!’ I exclaimed.

‘He fears you know her only too well,’ Pyrlig said, ‘and it drives him to madness.’

‘But that’s stupid!’ I spoke angrily.

‘It’s jealousy,’ Pyrlig said, ‘and all jealousy is stupid.’

Erik had also watched Æthelred walk away and was as confused as I was. ‘He is your commander?’ the Norseman asked.

‘He’s my cousin,’ I said bitterly.

‘And he’s your commander?’ Erik asked again.

‘The Lord Æthelred commands,’ Pyrlig explained, ‘and the Lord Uhtred disobeys.’

Erik smiled at that. ‘So, Lord Uhtred, do we have an agreement?’ He asked that question in English, hesitating slightly over the words.

‘Your English is good,’ I said, sounding surprised.

He smiled. ‘A Saxon slave taught me.’

‘I hope she was beautiful,’ I said, ‘and yes, we do have an agreement, but with one change.’

Erik bridled, but stayed courteous. ‘One change?’ he asked cautiously.

‘You may take Wave-Tamer,’ I said.

I thought Erik would kiss me. For a heartbeat he did not believe my words, then he saw that I was sincere and he smiled broadly. ‘Lord Uhtred,’ he began.

‘Take her,’ I interrupted him, not wanting his gratitude, ‘just take her and go!’

It had been Aldhelm’s words that had changed my mind. He had been right; everything in the city now belonged to Mercia, and Æthelred was Mercia’s ruler, and my cousin had a lust for anything beautiful and, if he discovered I wanted Wave-Tamer for myself, which I did, he would be sure to take it from me, and so I kept the ship from his grasp by giving it back to the Thurgilson brothers.

Sigefrid was carried to his own ship. The Northmen, stripped of their weapons and valuables, were guarded by my men as they walked to the Wave-Tamer. It took a long time, but at last they were all on board and they shoved away from the quay, and I watched as they rowed downstream towards the small mists that still hovered above the lower reaches of the river.

And somewhere in Wessex the first cuckoo called.

I wrote Alfred a letter. I have always hated writing, and it has been years since I last used a quill. My wife’s priests now scratch letters for me, but they know I can read what they write so they take care to write what I tell them. But on the night of Lundene’s fall, I wrote in my own hand to Alfred. ‘Lundene is yours, lord King,’ I told him, ‘and I am staying here to rebuild its walls.’

Writing even that much exhausted my patience. The quill spluttered, the parchment was uneven and the ink, which I had found in a wooden chest containing plunder evidently stolen from a monastery, spat droplets over the parchment. ‘Now fetch Father Pyrlig,’ I told Sihtric, ‘and Osferth.’

‘Lord,’ Sihtric said nervously.

‘I know,’ I said impatiently, ‘you want to marry your whore. But fetch Father Pyrlig and Osferth first. The whore can wait.’

Pyrlig arrived a moment later and I pushed the letter across the table to him. ‘I want you to go to Alfred,’ I told him, ‘give him that, and tell him what happened here.’

Pyrlig read my message and I saw a small smile flicker on his ugly face, a smile that vanished swiftly so that I would not be offended by his opinion of my handwriting. He said nothing of my short message, but glanced around with surprise as Sihtric brought Osferth into the room.

‘I’m sending Brother Osferth with you,’ I explained to the Welshman.

Osferth stiffened. He hated being called brother. ‘I want to stay here,’ he said, ‘lord.’

‘The king wants you in Wintanceaster,’ I said dismissively, ‘and we obey the king.’ I took the letter back from Pyrlig, dipped the quill in the ink that had faded to a rusty brown, and added more words. ‘Sigefrid,’ I wrote laboriously, ‘was defeated by Osferth, who I would like to keep in my household guard.’

Why did I write that? I did not like Osferth any more than I liked his father, yet he had leaped from the bastion and that had shown courage. Foolish courage, perhaps, but still courage, and if Osferth had not leaped then Lundene might be in Norse or Danish hands to this day. Osferth had earned his place in the shield wall, even if his prospects of surviving there were still desperately low. ‘Father Pyrlig,’ I said to Osferth as I blew on the ink, ‘will tell the king of your actions today, and this letter requests that you be returned to me. But you must leave that decision to Alfred.’

‘He’ll say no,’ Osferth said sullenly.

‘Father Pyrlig will persuade him,’ I said. The Welshman raised an eyebrow in silent question and I gave him the smallest nod to show I spoke the truth. I gave the letter to Sihtric and watched as he folded the parchment, then sealed it with wax. I pressed my badge of the wolf’s head into the seal, then handed the letter to Pyrlig. ‘Tell Alfred the truth about what happened here,’ I said, ‘because he’s going to hear a different version from my cousin. And travel fast!’

Pyrlig smiled. ‘You want us to reach the king before your cousin’s messenger?’

‘Yes,’ I said. That was a lesson I had learned; that the first news is generally the version that is believed. I had no doubt Æthelred would be sending a triumphant message to his father-in-law, and I had no doubt either that in his telling, our part in the victory would be diminished to nothing. Father Pyrlig would ensure that Alfred heard the truth, though whether the king would believe what he heard was another matter.

Pyrlig and Osferth left before dawn, using two horses out of the many we had captured in Lundene. I walked around the circuit of the walls as the sun rose, noting those places that still needed repair. My men were standing guard. Most were from the Berrocscire fyrd, which had fought under Æthelred the previous day, and their excitement at their apparently easy victory had still not subsided.

A few of Æthelred’s men were also posted on the walls, though most were recovering from the ale and mead they had drunk through the night. At one of the northern gates, which looked towards misted green hills, I met Egbert, the elderly man who had yielded to Æthelflaed’s demands and had given me his best men. I rewarded him with the gift of a silver arm ring I had taken from one of the many corpses. Those dead were still unburied and, in the dawn, ravens and kites were feasting. ‘Thank you,’ I said.

‘I should have trusted you,’ he said awkwardly.

‘You did trust me.’

He shrugged. ‘Because of her, yes.’

‘Is Æthelflaed here?’ I asked.

‘Still at the island,’ Egbert said.

‘I thought you were guarding her?’

‘I was,’ Egbert said dully, ‘but Lord Æthelred had me replaced last night.’

‘Had you replaced?’ I asked, then saw that his silver chain, the symbol that he commanded men, had been taken from him.

He shrugged as if to tell me he did not understand the decision. ‘Ordered me to come here,’ he said, ‘but when I arrived he wouldn’t see me. He was sick.’

‘Something serious, I hope?’

A half-smile flickered and died on Egbert’s face. ‘He was vomiting, I’m told. Probably nothing.’

My cousin had taken the palace at the top of Lundene’s hill as his quarters, while I stayed in the Roman house by the river. I liked it. I have always liked Roman buildings because their walls possess the great virtue of keeping out wind, rain and snow. That house was large. You entered through an arch leading from the street into a courtyard surrounded by a pillared arcade. On three sides of the courtyard were small rooms that must have been used by servants or for storage. One was a kitchen and had a brick bread oven so large that you could bake enough loaves to feed three crews at one time. The courtyard’s fourth side led into six rooms, two of them big enough to assemble my whole bodyguard. Beyond those two big rooms was a paved terrace that overlooked the river and at evening time that was a pleasant place, though at low tide the stench of the Temes could be overwhelming.

I could have gone back to Coccham, but I stayed anyway and the men of Berrocscire’s fyrd also stayed, though they were unhappy because it was springtime and there was work to do on their farms. I kept them in Lundene to strengthen the city’s walls. I would have gone home if I thought Æthelred would have done that work, but he seemed blithely unaware of the sad state of the city’s defences. Sigefrid had patched a few places and he had strengthened the gates, but there was still much to do. The old masonry was crumbling and had even fallen into the outer ditch in places, and my men cut and trimmed trees to make new palisades wherever the wall was weak. Then we cleared the ditch outside the wall, scraping out matted filth and planting sharpened stakes to welcome any attacker.

Alfred sent orders that the whole of the old city was to be rebuilt. Any Roman building in good repair was to be kept, while dilapidated ruins were to be pulled down and replaced with sturdy timber and thatch, but there were neither the men nor the funds to attempt such work. Alfred’s idea was that the Saxons of the undefended new town would move into old Lundene and be safe behind its ramparts, but those Saxons still feared the ghosts of the Roman builders and they stubbornly resisted every invitation to take over the deserted properties. My men of the Berrocscire fyrd were just as frightened of the ghosts, but they were still more frightened of me and so they stayed and worked.

Æthelred took no notice of what I did. His sickness must have passed for he busied himself hunting. Every day he rode to the wooded hills north of the city where he pursued deer. He never took fewer than forty men, for there was always a chance that some marauding Danish band might come close to Lundene. There were many of those bands, but fate decreed that none went near Æthelred. Every day I would see horsemen to the east, picking their way through the desolate dark marshes that lay seawards of the city. They were Danes, watching us, and doubtless reporting back to Sigefrid.

I got news of Sigefrid. He lived, the reports said, though he was so crippled by his wound that he could neither walk nor stand. He had taken refuge at Beamfleot with his brother and with Haesten, and from there they sent raiders into the mouth of the Temes. Saxon ships dared not sail to Frankia, for the Northmen were in a vengeful mood after their defeat in Lundene. One Danish ship, dragon-prowed, even rowed up the Temes to taunt us from the churning water just below the gap in the broken bridge. They had Saxon prisoners aboard and the Danes killed them, one by one, making sure we could see the bloody executions. There were also women captives aboard and we could hear them screaming. I sent Finan and a dozen men to the bridge and they carried a clay pot of fire, and once on the bridge they used hunting bows to shoot fire-arrows at the intruder. All shipmasters fear fire, and the arrows, most of which missed altogether, persuaded them to drop downriver until the arrows could no longer reach them, but they did not go far and their oarsmen held the ship against the current as more prisoners were killed. They did not leave until I had assembled a crew to man one of the captured boats tied at the wharves, and only then did they turn and row downriver into the darkening evening.

Other ships from Beamfleot crossed the wide estuary of the Temes and landed men in Wessex. That part of Wessex was an alien place. It had once been the kingdom of Cent until it was conquered by the West Saxons and, though the men of Cent were Saxons, they spoke in a strange accent. It had always been a wild place, close to the other lands across the sea, and ever liable to be raided by Vikings. Now Sigefrid’s men launched ship after ship across the estuary and pillaged deep into Cent. They took slaves and burned villages. A messenger came from Swithwulf, Bishop of Hrofeceastre, to beg for my help. ‘The heathen were at Contwaraburg,’ the messenger, a young priest, told me gloomily.

‘Did they kill the archbishop?’ I asked cheerfully.

‘He was not there, lord, thank God.’ The priest made the sign of the cross. ‘The pagans are everywhere, lord, and no one is safe. Bishop Swithwulf begs your help.’

But I could not help the bishop. I needed men to guard Lundene, not Cent, and I needed men to guard my family too for, a week after the city’s fall, Gisela, Stiorra and a half-dozen maids arrived. I had sent Finan and thirty men to escort them safely down the river and the house by the Temes seemed to grow warmer with the echoes of women’s laughter. ‘You might have swept the house,’ Gisela chided me.

‘I did!’

‘Ha!’ she pointed to a ceiling, ‘what are those?’

‘Cobwebs,’ I said, ‘they’re holding the beams in place.’

The cobwebs were swept away and the kitchen fires were lit. In the courtyard, under a corner where the tiled arcade roofs met, there was an old stone urn that was choked with rubbish. Gisela cleaned the filth out, then she and two maids scrubbed the outside of the urn to reveal white marble carved with delicate women who appeared to be chasing each other and waving harps. Gisela loved those carvings. She crouched beside them, tracing a finger over the hair of the Roman women, and then she and the maids tried to copy the hairstyle. She loved the house too, and even endured the river’s stench to sit on the terrace in the evening and watch the water slide by. ‘He beats her,’ she told me one evening.

I knew of whom she spoke and said nothing.

‘She’s bruised,’ Gisela said, ‘and she’s pregnant, and he beats her.’

‘She’s what?’ I asked in surprise.

‘Æthelflaed,’ Gisela said patiently, ‘is pregnant.’ Almost every day Gisela went to the palace and spent time with Æthelflaed, though Æthelflaed was never allowed to visit our house.

I was surprised by Gisela’s news of Æthelflaed’s pregnancy. I do not know why I should have been surprised, but I was. I suppose I still thought of Æthelflaed as a child. ‘And he hits her?’ I asked.

‘Because he thinks she loves other men,’ Gisela said.

‘Does she?’

‘No, of course she doesn’t, but he fears she does.’ Gisela paused to gather more wool that she was spinning onto a distaff. ‘He thinks she loves you.’

I thought of Æthelred’s sudden anger on Lundene’s bridge. ‘He’s mad!’ I said.

‘No, he’s jealous,’ Gisela said, laying a hand on my arm. ‘And I know he has nothing to be jealous about.’ She smiled at me, then went back to gathering her wool. ‘It’s a strange way to show love, isn’t it?’

Æthelflaed had come to the city the day after it fell. She travelled by boat to the Saxon town, and from there an ox cart had carried her across the Fleot and so up to her husband’s new palace. Men lined the route waving leafy green boughs, a priest walked ahead of the oxen scattering holy water while a choir of women followed the cart, which, like the oxen’s horns, was hung with spring flowers. Æthelflaed, clutching the cart’s side to steady herself, had looked uncomfortable, but she had given me a wan smile as the oxen dragged her over the uneven stones inside the gate.

Æthelflaed’s arrival was celebrated by a feast in the palace. I am certain Æthelred had not wanted to invite me, but my rank had given him little choice and a grudging message had arrived on the afternoon before the celebration. The feast had been nothing special, though the ale was plentiful enough. A dozen priests shared the top table with Æthelred and Æthelflaed, and I was given a stool at the end of that long board. Æthelred glowered at me, the priests ignored me, and I left early, pleading that I had to walk the walls and make certain the sentries were awake. I remember my cousin had looked pale that night, but it was soon after his vomiting fit. I had asked after his health and he had waved the question away as though it were irrelevant.

Gisela and Æthelflaed became friends in Lundene. I repaired the wall and Æthelred hunted while his men plundered the city for his palace’s furnishings. I went home one day to find six of his followers in the courtyard of my house. Egbert, the man who had given me the troops on the eve of the attack, was one of the six and his face showed no expression as I came into the courtyard. He just watched me. ‘What do you want?’ I asked the six men. Five were in mail and had swords, the sixth wore a finely embroidered jerkin that showed hounds chasing deer. That sixth man also wore a silver chain, a sign of noble rank. It was Aldhelm, my cousin’s friend and the commander of his household troops.

‘This,’ Aldhelm answered. He was standing by the urn that Gisela had cleaned. It served now to catch rainwater that fell from the roof, and that water was sweet and clean-tasting, a rarity in any city.

‘Two hundred silver shillings,’ I told Aldhelm, ‘and it’s yours.’

He sneered at that. The price was outrageous. The four younger men had succeeded in tipping the urn so that its water had flowed out and now they were struggling to right it again, though they had stopped their efforts when I appeared.

Gisela came from the main house and smiled at me. ‘I told them they couldn’t have it,’ she said.

‘Lord Æthelred wants it,’ Aldhelm insisted.

‘You’re called Aldhelm,’ I said, ‘just Aldhelm, and I am Uhtred, Lord of Bebbanburg, and you call me “Lord”.’

‘Not this one,’ Gisela spoke silkily. ‘He called me an interfering bitch.’

My men, there were four of them, moved to my side and put hands on sword hilts. I gestured for them to step back and unbuckled my own sword belt. ‘Did you call my wife a bitch?’ I asked Aldhelm.

‘My lord requires this statue,’ he said, ignoring my question.

‘You will apologise to my wife,’ I told him, ‘and then to me.’ I laid the belt with its two heavy swords on the flagstones.

He pointedly turned away from me. ‘Leave it on its side,’ he told the four men, ‘and roll it out to the street.’

‘I want two apologies,’ I said.

He heard the menace in my voice and turned back to me, alarmed now. ‘This house,’ Aldhelm explained, ‘belongs to the Lord Æthelred. If you live here it is by his gracious permission.’ He became even more alarmed as I drew closer. ‘Egbert!’ he said loudly, but Egbert’s only response was a calming motion with his right hand, a signal that his men should keep their swords scabbarded. Egbert knew that if a single blade left its long scabbard there would be a fight between his men and mine, and he had the sense to avoid that slaughter, but Aldhelm had no such sense. ‘You impertinent bastard,’ he said, and snatched a knife from a sheath at his waist and lunged it at my belly.

I broke Aldhelm’s jaw, his nose, both his hands and maybe a couple of his ribs before Egbert hauled me away. When Aldhelm apologised to Gisela he did so while spitting teeth through bubbling blood, and the urn stayed in our courtyard. I gave his knife to the girls who worked in the kitchen, where it proved useful for cutting onions.

And the next day, Alfred came.

The king came silently, his ship arriving at a wharf upstream of the broken bridge. The Haligast waited for a river trader to pull away, then ghosted in on short, efficient oar strokes. Alfred, accompanied by a score of priests and monks, and guarded by six mailed men, came ashore unheralded and unannounced. He threaded the goods stacked on the wharf, stepped over a drunken man sleeping in the shade and ducked through the small gate in the wall leading to a merchant’s courtyard.

I heard he went to the palace. Æthelred was not there, he was hunting again, but the king went to his daughter’s chamber and stayed there a long time. Afterwards he walked back down the hill and, still with his priestly entourage, came to our house. I was with one of the groups making repairs to the walls, but Gisela had been warned of Alfred’s presence in Lundene and, suspecting he might come to our house, had prepared a meal of bread, ale, cheese and boiled lentils. She offered no meat, for Alfred would not touch flesh. His stomach was tender and his bowels in perpetual torment and he had somehow persuaded himself that meat was an abomination.

Gisela had sent a servant to warn me of the king’s arrival, yet even so I arrived at the house long after Alfred to find my elegant courtyard black with priests, among whom was Father Pyrlig and, next to him, Osferth, who was once again dressed in monkish robes. Osferth gave me a sour look, as if blaming me for his return to the church, while Pyrlig embraced me. ‘Æthelred said nothing of you in his report to the king,’ he murmured those words, gusting ale-smelling breath over my face.

‘We weren’t here when the city fell?’ I asked.

‘Not according to your cousin,’ Pyrlig said, then chuckled. ‘But I told Alfred the truth. Go on, he’s waiting for you.’

Alfred was on the river terrace. His guards stood behind him, lined against the house, while the king was seated on a wooden chair. I paused in the doorway, surprised because Alfred’s face, usually so pallid and solemn, had an animated look. He was even smiling. Gisela was seated next to him and the king was leaning forward, talking, and Gisela, whose back was to me, was listening. I stayed where I was, watching that rarest of sights, Alfred happy. He tapped a long white finger on her knee once to stress some point. There was nothing untoward in the gesture, except it was so unlike him.

But then, of course, maybe it was very like him. Alfred had been a famous womaniser before he was caught in the snare of Christianity, and Osferth was a product of that early princely lust. Alfred liked pretty women, and it was obvious he liked Gisela. I heard her laugh suddenly and Alfred, flattered by her amusement, smiled shyly. He seemed not to mind that she was no Christian and that she wore a pagan amulet about her neck, he was simply happy to be in her company and I was tempted to leave them alone. I had never seen him happy in the company of Ælswith, his weasel-tongued, stoat-faced, shrike-voiced wife. Then he happened to glance over Gisela’s shoulder and saw me.

His face changed immediately. He stiffened, sat upright and reluctantly beckoned me forward.

I picked up a stool that our daughter used and heard a hiss as Alfred’s guards drew swords. Alfred waved the blades down, sensible enough to know that if I had wanted to attack him then I would hardly use a three-legged milking stool. He watched as I gave my swords to one of the guards, a mark of respect, then as I carried the stool across the terrace flagstones. ‘Lord Uhtred,’ he greeted me coldly.

‘Welcome to our house, lord King.’ I gave him a bow, then sat with my back to the river.

He was silent for a moment. He was wearing a brown cloak that was drawn tight around his thin body. A silver cross hung at his neck, while on his thinning hair was a circlet of bronze, which surprised me, for he rarely wore symbols of kingship, thinking them vain baubles, but he must have decided that Lundene needed to see a king. He sensed my surprise for he clawed the circlet off his head. ‘I had hoped,’ he said coldly, ‘that the Saxons of the new town would have abandoned their houses. That they would live here instead. They could be protected here by the walls! Why won’t they move?’

‘They fear the ghosts, lord,’ I said.

‘And you do not?’

I thought for a while. ‘Yes,’ I said after thinking about my answer.

‘Yet you live here?’ he waved at the house.

‘We propitiate the spirits, lord,’ Gisela explained softly and, when the king raised an eyebrow, she told how we placed food and drink in the courtyard to greet any ghosts who came to our house.

Alfred rubbed his eyes. ‘It might be better,’ he said, ‘if our priests exorcise the streets. Prayer and holy water! We shall drive the ghosts away.’

‘Or let me take three hundred men to sack the new town,’ I suggested. ‘Burn their houses, lord, and they’ll have to live in the old city.’

A half-smile flickered on his face, gone as quickly as it had showed. ‘It is hard to force obedience,’ he said, ‘without encouraging resentment. I sometimes think the only true authority I have is over my family, and even then I wonder! If I release you with sword and spear onto the new town, Lord Uhtred, then they will learn to hate you. Lundene must be obedient, but it must also be a bastion of Christian Saxons, and if they hate us then they will welcome a return of the Danes, who left them in peace.’ He shook his head abruptly. ‘We shall leave them in peace, but don’t build them a palisade. Let them come into the old city of their own accord. Now, forgive me,’ those last two words were to Gisela, ‘but we must speak of still darker things.’

Alfred gestured to a guard who pushed open the door from the terrace. Father Beocca appeared and with him a second priest; a black-haired, pouchy-faced, scowling creature called Father Erkenwald. He hated me. He had once tried to have me killed by accusing me of piracy and, though his accusations had been entirely true, I had slipped away from his bad-tempered clutches. He gave me a sour look while Beocca offered a solemn nod, then both men stared attentively at Alfred.

‘Tell me,’ Alfred said, looking at me, ‘what Sigefrid, Haesten and Erik do now?’

‘They’re at Beamfleot, lord,’ I said, ‘strengthening their camp. They have thirty-two ships, and men enough to crew them.’

‘You’ve seen this place?’ Father Erkenwald demanded. The two priests, I knew, had been fetched onto the terrace to serve as witnesses to this conversation. Alfred, ever careful, liked to have a record, either written or memorised, of all such discussions.

‘I’ve not seen it,’ I said coldly.

‘Your spies, then?’ Alfred resumed the questions.

‘Yes, lord.’

He thought for a moment. ‘The ships can be burned?’ he asked.

I shook my head. ‘They’re in a creek, lord.’

‘They must be destroyed,’ he said vengefully, and I saw his long thin hands clench on his lap. ‘They raided Contwaraburg!’ he said, sounding distraught.

‘I heard of it, lord.’

‘They burned the church!’ he said indignantly, ‘and stole everything! Gospel books, crosses, even the relics!’ he shuddered. ‘The church possessed a leaf of the fig tree that our Lord Jesus withered! I touched it once, and felt its power.’ He shuddered again. ‘It is all gone to pagan hands.’ He sounded as if he might weep.

I said nothing. Beocca had started writing, his pen scratching on a parchment held awkwardly in his lamed hand. Father Erkenwald was holding a pot of ink and had a look of disdain as if such a chore was belittling him. ‘Thirty-two ships, did you say?’ Beocca asked me.

‘That was the last I heard.’

‘Creeks can be entered,’ Alfred said acidly, his distress suddenly gone.

‘The creek at Beamfleot dries at low tide, lord,’ I explained, ‘and to reach the enemy ships we must pass their camp, which is on a hill above the mooring. And the last report I received, lord, said a ship was permanently moored across the channel. We could destroy that ship and fight our way through, but you’ll need a thousand men to do it and you’ll lose at least two hundred of them.’

‘A thousand?’ he asked sceptically.

‘The last I heard, lord, said Sigefrid had close to two thousand men.’

He closed his eyes briefly. ‘Sigefrid lives?’

‘Barely,’ I said. I had received most of this news from Ulf, my Danish trader, who loved the silver I paid him. I had no doubt Ulf was receiving silver from Haesten or Erik for telling them what I did in Lundene, but that was a price worth paying. ‘Brother Osferth wounded him badly,’ I said.

The king’s shrewd eyes rested on me. ‘Osferth,’ he said tonelessly.

‘Won the battle, lord,’ I said just as tonelessly. Alfred just watched me, still expressionless. ‘You heard from Father Pyrlig?’ I asked, and received a curt nod. ‘What Osferth did, lord, was brave,’ I said, ‘and I am not certain I would have had the courage to do it. He jumped from a great height and attacked a fearsome warrior, and he lived to remember the achievement. If it was not for Osferth, lord, Sigefrid would be in Lundene today and I would be in my grave.’

‘You want him back?’ Alfred asked.

The answer, of course, was no, but Beocca gave an almost imperceptible nod of his grey head and I understood Osferth was not wanted in Wintanceaster. I did not like the youth and, judging from Beocca’s silent message, no one liked him in Wintanceaster either, yet his courage had been exemplary. Osferth was, I thought, a warrior at heart. ‘Yes, lord,’ I said, and saw Gisela’s secret smile.

‘He’s yours,’ Alfred said shortly. Beocca rolled his good eye to heaven in gratitude. ‘And I want the Northmen out of the Temes estuary,’ Alfred went on.

I shrugged. ‘Isn’t that Guthrum’s business?’ I asked. Beamfleot lay in the kingdom of East Anglia with which, officially, we were at peace.

Alfred looked irritated, probably because I had used Guthrum’s Danish name. ‘King Æthelstan has been informed of the problem,’ he said.

‘And does nothing?’

‘He makes promises.’

‘And Vikings use his land with impunity,’ I observed.

Alfred bridled. ‘Are you suggesting I declare war on King Æthelstan?’

‘He allows raiders to come to Wessex, lord,’ I said, ‘so why don’t we return the favour? Why don’t we send ships to East Anglia to hurt King Æthelstan’s holdings?’

Alfred stood, ignoring my suggestion. ‘What is most important,’ he said, ‘is that we do not lose Lundene.’ He held a hand towards Father Erkenwald who opened a leather satchel and took out a scroll of parchment sealed with brown wax. Alfred held the parchment to me. ‘I have appointed you as Military Governor of this city. Do not let the enemy retake it.’

I took the parchment. ‘Military Governor?’ I asked pointedly.

‘All troops and fyrd members will be under your command.’

‘And the city, lord?’ I asked.

‘Will be a godly place,’ Alfred said.

‘We shall cleanse it of its iniquity,’ Father Erkenwald interjected, ‘and wash it whiter than snow.’

‘Amen,’ Beocca said fervently.

‘I am naming Father Erkenwald as Bishop of Lundene,’ Alfred said, ‘and the civil governance will reside with him.’

I felt a lurch in my heart. Erkenwald? Who hated me? ‘And what about the Ealdorman of Mercia?’ I asked, ‘does he not have civil governance here?’

‘My son-in-law,’ Alfred said distantly, ‘will not countermand my appointments.’

‘And how much authority does he have here?’ I asked.

‘This is Mercia!’ Alfred said, tapping the terrace with a foot, ‘and he rules Mercia.’

‘So he can appoint a new military governor?’ I asked.

‘He will do as I tell him,’ Alfred said, and there was a sudden anger in his voice. ‘And in four days’ time we shall all gather,’ he had recovered his poise quickly, ‘and discuss what needs to be done to make this city safe and full of grace.’ He nodded brusquely to me, inclined his head to Gisela and turned away.

‘Lord King,’ Gisela spoke softly, checking Alfred’s departure, ‘how is your daughter? I saw her yesterday and she was bruised.’

Alfred’s gaze flickered to the river where six swans rode the water beneath the tumult of the broken bridge. ‘She’s well,’ he said distantly.

‘The bruising …’ Gisela began.

‘She was always a mischievous child,’ Alfred interrupted her.

‘Mischievous?’ Gisela’s response was tentative.

‘I love her,’ Alfred said, and there could have been no doubt of that from the unexpected passion in his voice, ‘but while mischief in a child is amusing, in an adult it is sinful. My dear Æthelflaed must learn obedience.’

‘So she learns to hate?’ I asked, echoing the king’s earlier words.

‘She’s married now,’ Alfred said, ‘and her duty before God is to be obedient to her husband. She will learn that, I am sure, and be grateful for the lesson. It is hard to inflict punishment on a child you love, but it is a sin to withhold such punishment. I pray God she comes to a state of good grace.’

‘Amen,’ Father Erkenwald said.

‘Praise God,’ Beocca said.

Gisela said nothing and the king left.

I should have known that the summons to the palace on top of Lundene’s low hill would involve priests. I had expected a council of war and a hard-headed discussion on how best to scour the Temes of the brigands who infested the estuary, but instead, once I had been relieved of my swords, I was shown into the pillared hall where an altar had been erected. Finan and Sihtric were with me. Finan, a good Christian, made the sign of the cross, but Sihtric, like me, was a pagan and he looked at me with alarm as though he feared some religious magic.

I endured the service. Monks chanted, priests prayed, bells were rung and men genuflected. There were some forty men in the room, most of them priests, but only one woman. Æthelflaed was seated beside her husband. She was dressed in a white robe, gathered at her waist by a blue sash, and her corn-gold hair had speedwell woven into its bun. I was behind her, but once, when she turned to look at her father, I saw the purplish bruise around her right eye. Alfred did not look at her, but stayed on his knees. I watched him, watched Æthelflaed’s slumped shoulders, and thought about Beamfleot, and how that wasps’ nest could be burned out. First, I thought, I needed to take a ship downriver and see Beamfleot for myself.

Alfred suddenly stood up and I assumed the service was at last over, but instead the king turned to us and delivered a mercifully brief homily. He encouraged us to ponder the words of the prophet Ezekiel, whoever he was. ‘“Then the heathen that are left round about you,”’ the king read to us, ‘“shall know that I the Lord build the ruined places, and plant that which was desolate”. Lundene,’ the king put down the parchment with Ezekiel’s words, ‘is again a Saxon city, and though it is in ruins, with God’s help we shall rebuild it. We shall make it a place of God, a light to the pagans.’ He paused, smiled gravely and beckoned to Bishop Erkenwald who, draped in a white cape hung with red strips on which silver crosses had been embroidered, stood to deliver a sermon. I groaned. We were supposed to be discussing how to rid the Temes of our enemies, and instead were being tortured with dull piety.

I had long learned to ignore sermons. It has been my unhappy fate to hear many, and the words of most have passed over me like rain running down newly laid thatch, but some minutes into Erkenwald’s hoarse harangue I began to take notice.

Because he was not preaching about remaking ruined cities, nor even about the heathen who threatened Lundene, instead he was preaching to Æthelflaed.

He stood by the altar and he shouted. He was ever an angry man, but on that spring day in the old Roman hall, he was filled with a passionate fury. God, he said, was speaking through him. God had a message, and God’s word could not be ignored or else the brimstone fires of hell would consume all mankind. He never used Æthelflaed’s name, but he stared at her, and no man in the room could doubt the message that the Christian’s god was sending to the poor girl. God, it seemed, had even written the message down in a gospel book, and Erkenwald snatched a copy from the altar, held it up so that the light from the smoke-hole in the roof caught the page, and read aloud.

‘“To be discreet,”’ he looked up to glare at Æthelflaed, ‘“chaste! Keepers of the home! Good! Obedient to their husbands!” Those are God’s own words! That is what God demands of a woman! To be discreet, to be chaste, to be home-keepers, to be obedient! God spoke to us!’ He almost writhed in ecstasy as he said those last four words. ‘God still speaks to us!’ he gazed up at the roof as if he could glimpse his god peering through the ceiling. ‘God speaks to us!’

He preached for over an hour. His spittle spun through the ray of sunlight cast through the smoke-hole. He cringed, he shouted, he shuddered. And time and again he went back to the words in the gospel book that wives must be obedient to their husbands.

‘Obedient!’ he shouted, and paused.

I heard a thump from the outer hall as a guard rested his shield.

‘Obedient!’ Erkenwald shrieked again.

Æthelflaed’s head was held high. From my view behind her it seemed as if she were staring straight at that mad, vicious priest who was now the bishop and ruler of Lundene. Æthelred, beside her, fidgeted, but the few glimpses I got of his face showed a smug, self-satisfied look. Most of the men there looked bored and only one, Father Beocca, seemed to disapprove of the bishop’s sermon. He caught my eye once and made me smile by raising an indignant eyebrow. I am certain Beocca did not dislike the message, but he doubtless believed it should not have been preached in so public a manner. As for Alfred, he just gazed serenely at the altar as the bishop ranted, yet his passivity disguised involvement because that bitter sermon could never have been preached without the king’s knowledge and permission.

‘Obedient!’ Erkenwald cried again, and stared up at heaven as though that one word was the solution to all mankind’s troubles. The king nodded approval, and it occurred to me that Alfred had not only approved Erkenwald’s rant, but must have requested it. Perhaps he thought that a public admonition would save Æthelflaed from private beatings? The message certainly matched Alfred’s philosophy, for he believed that a kingdom could only thrive if it was ruled by law, was ordered by government and was obedient to the will of God and the king. Yet he could look at his daughter, see her bruises and approve? He had always loved his children. I had watched them grow, and I had seen Alfred play with them, yet his religion could allow him to humiliate a daughter he loved? Sometimes, when I pray to my gods, I thank them fervently that they let me escape Alfred’s god.

Erkenwald at last ran out of words. There was a pause, then Alfred stood and turned to face us. ‘The word of God,’ he said, smiling. The priests murmured brief prayers, then Alfred shook his head as though clearing it of pious matters. ‘The city of Lundene is now a proper part of Mercia,’ he said, and a louder murmur of approval echoed through the room. ‘I have entrusted its civil government to Bishop Erkenwald,’ he turned and smiled at the bishop, who smirked and bowed, ‘while Lord Uhtred will be responsible for the defence of the city,’ Alfred said, looking at me. I did not bow.

Æthelflaed turned then. I think she had not known I was in the room, but she turned when my name was spoken and stared at me. I winked at her, and her bruised face smiled. Æthelred did not see the wink. He was pointedly ignoring me.

‘The city, of course,’ Alfred went on, his voice suddenly ice cold because he had seen my wink, ‘falls under the authority and rule of my beloved son-in-law. In time it will become a valuable part of his possessions, yet for the moment he has graciously agreed that Lundene must be administered by men experienced in government.’ In other words Lundene might be part of Mercia, but Alfred had no intention of allowing it out of West Saxon hands. ‘Bishop Erkenwald has the authority to set dues and raise taxes,’ Alfred explained, ‘and one third of the money will be spent on civil government, one third on the church, and one third on defending the city. And I know that under the bishop’s guidance and with the help of Almighty God we can raise a city that glorifies Christ and His church.’

I did not know most of the men in the room because they were almost all Mercian thegns who had been summoned to Lundene to meet Alfred. Aldhelm was among them, his face still black and bloodied from my hands. He had glanced at me once and twisted fast away. The summons had been unexpected and only a few thegns had made the journey to Lundene, and those men now listened politely enough to Alfred, but almost all were torn between two masters. Northern Mercia was under Danish rule, and only the southern part, which bordered Wessex, could be called free Saxon land and even that land was under constant harassment. A Mercian thegn who wished to stay alive, who wished his daughters safe from slavers and his livestock free of cattle-raiders, did well to pay tribute to the Danes as well as pay taxes to Æthelred who, because of his inherited landholdings, marriage and lineage, was acknowledged as the most noble of the Mercian thegns. He might call himself king if he wished, and I had no doubt he did so wish, but Alfred did not, and Æthelred without Alfred was nothing.

‘It is our intention,’ Alfred said, ‘to rid Mercia of its pagan invaders. To do that we needed to secure Lundene and so put a stop to the Northmen’s ships raiding up the Temes. Now we must hold Lundene. How is that to be done?’

The answer to that was obvious, though it did not stop a general discussion that meandered aimlessly as men argued about how many troops would be needed to defend the walls. I took no part. I leaned against the back wall and noted which of the thegns were enthusiastic and which were guarded. Bishop Erkenwald glanced at me occasionally, plainly wondering why I did not contribute my grain of wheat to the threshing floor, but I kept silent. Æthelred listened intently and finally summed up the discussion. ‘The city, lord King,’ he said brightly, ‘needs a garrison of two thousand men.’

‘Mercians,’ Alfred said. ‘Those men must come from Mercia.’

‘Of course,’ Æthelred agreed quickly. I noted that many of the thegns looked dubious.

Alfred saw it too and glanced at me. ‘This is your responsibility, Lord Uhtred. Have you no opinion?’

I almost yawned, but managed to resist the impulse. ‘I have better than an opinion, lord King,’ I said, ‘I can give you fact.’

Alfred raised an eyebrow and managed to look disapproving at the same time. ‘Well?’ he asked irritably when I paused too long.

‘Four men for every pole,’ I said. A pole was six paces, or thereabouts, and the allocation of four men to a pole was not mine, but Alfred’s. When he ordered the burhs built he had worked out in his meticulous way how many men would be needed to defend each, and the distance about the walls determined the final figure. Coccham’s walls were one thousand four hundred paces in length and so my household guards and the fyrd had to supply a thousand men for its defence. But Coccham was a small burh, Lundene a city.

‘And the distance about Lundene’s walls?’ Alfred demanded.

I looked at Æthelred, as though expecting him to answer and Alfred, seeing where I looked, also gazed at his son-in-law. Æthelred thought for a heartbeat and, instead of telling the truth which was that he did not know, made a guess. ‘Eight hundred poles, lord King?’

‘The landward wall,’ I broke in harshly, ‘is six hundred and ninety-two poles. The river wall adds a further three hundred and fifty-eight. The defences, lord King, stretch for one thousand and fifty poles.’

‘Four thousand, two hundred men,’ Bishop Erkenwald said immediately, and I confess I was impressed. It had taken me a long time to discover that number, and I had not been certain my computation had been correct until Gisela also worked the problem out.

‘No enemy, lord King,’ I said, ‘can attack everywhere at once, so I reckon the city can be defended by a garrison of three thousand, four hundred men.’

One of the Mercian thegns made a hissing noise, as though such a figure was an impossibility. ‘Only one thousand men more than your garrison in Wintanceaster, lord King,’ I pointed out. The difference, of course, was that Wintanceaster lay in a loyal West Saxon shire that was accustomed to its men serving their turn in the fyrd.

‘And where do you find those men?’ a Mercian demanded.

‘From you,’ I said harshly.

‘But …’ the man began, then faltered. He was going to point out that the Mercian fyrd was a useless thing, grown weak by disuse, and that any attempt to raise the fyrd might draw the malevolent attention of the Danish earls who ruled in northern Mercia, and so these men had learned to lie low and keep silent. They were like deerhounds who shiver in the undergrowth for fear of attracting the wolves.

‘But nothing,’ I said, louder and harsher still. ‘For if a man does not contribute to his country’s defence then that man is a traitor. He should be dispossessed of his land, put to death, and his family reduced to slavery.’

I thought Alfred might object to those words, but he kept silent. Indeed, he nodded agreement. I was the blade inside his scabbard and he was evidently pleased that I had shown the steel for an instant. The Mercians said nothing.

‘We also need men for ships, lord King,’ I went on.

‘Ships?’ Alfred asked.

‘Ships?’ Erkenwald echoed.

‘We need crewmen,’ I explained. We had captured twenty-one ships when we took Lundene, of which seventeen were fighting boats. The others were wider beamed, built for trading, but they could be useful too. ‘I have the ships,’ I went on, ‘but they need crews, and those crews have to be good fighters.’

‘You defend the city with ships?’ Erkenwald asked defiantly.

‘And where will your money come from?’ I asked him. ‘From customs dues. But no trader dare sail here, so I have to clear the estuary of enemy ships. That means killing the pirates, and for that I need crews of fighting men. I can use my household troops, but they have to be replaced in the city’s garrison by other men.’

‘I need ships,’ Æthelred suddenly intervened.

Æthelred needed ships? I was so astonished that I said nothing. My cousin’s job was to defend southern Mercia and push the Danes northwards from the rest of his country, and that would mean fighting on land. Now, suddenly, he needed ships? What did he plan? To row across pastureland?

‘I would suggest, lord King,’ Æthelred was smiling as he spoke, his voice smooth and respectful, ‘that all the ships west of the bridge be given to me, for use in your service,’ and he bowed to Alfred when he said that, ‘and my cousin be given the ships east of the bridge.’

‘That …’ I began, but was cut off by Alfred.

‘That is fair,’ the king said firmly. It was not fair, it was ridiculous. There were only two fighting ships in the stretch of river east of the bridge, and fifteen upstream of the obstruction. The presence of those fifteen ships suggested that Sigefrid had been planning a major raid on Alfred’s territory before we struck him, and I needed those ships to scour the estuary clear of enemies. But Alfred, eager to be seen supporting his son-in-law, swept my objections aside. ‘You will use what ships you have, Lord Uhtred,’ he insisted, ‘and I will put seventy of my household guard under your command to crew one ship.’

So I was to drive the Danes from the estuary with two ships? I gave up, and leaned against the wall as the discussion droned on, mostly about the level of customs to be charged, and how much the neighbouring shires were to be taxed, and I wondered yet again why I was not in the north where a man’s sword was free and there was small law and much laughter.

Bishop Erkenwald cornered me when the meeting was over. I was strapping on my sword belt when he peered up at me with his beady eyes. ‘You should know,’ he greeted me, ‘that I opposed your appointment.’

‘As I would have opposed yours,’ I said bitterly, still angry at Æthelred’s theft of the fifteen warships.

‘God may not look with blessing on a pagan warrior,’ the newly appointed bishop explained himself, ‘but the king, in his wisdom, considers you a soldier of ability.’

‘And Alfred’s wisdom is famous,’ I said blandly.

‘I have spoken with the Lord Æthelred,’ he went on, ignoring my words, ‘and he has agreed that I can issue writs of assembly for Lundene’s adjacent counties. You have no objection?’

Erkenwald meant that he now had the power to raise the fyrd. It was a power that might better have been given me, but I doubted Æthelred would have agreed to that. Nor did I think that Erkenwald, nasty man though he was, would be anything but loyal to Alfred. ‘I have no objection,’ I said.

‘Then I shall inform Lord Æthelred of your agreement,’ he said formally.

‘And when you speak with him,’ I said, ‘tell him to stop hitting his wife.’

Erkenwald jerked as though I had just struck him in the face. ‘It is his Christian duty,’ he said stiffly, ‘to discipline his wife, and it is her duty to submit. Did you not listen to what I preached?’

‘To every word,’ I said.

‘She brought it on herself,’ Erkenwald snarled. ‘She has a fiery spirit, she defies him!’

‘She’s little more than a child,’ I said, ‘and a pregnant child at that.’

‘And foolishness is deep in the heart of a child,’ Erkenwald responded, ‘and those are the words of God! And what does God say should be done about the foolishness of a child? That the rod of correction shall beat it far away!’ He shuddered suddenly. ‘That is what you do, Lord Uhtred! You beat a child into obedience! A child learns by suffering pain, by being beaten, and that pregnant child must learn her duty. God wills it! Praise God!’

I heard only last week that they want to make Erkenwald into a saint. Priests come to my home beside the northern sea where they find an old man, and they tell me I am just a few paces from the fires of hell. I only need repent, they say, and I will go to heaven and live for evermore in the blessed company of the saints.

And I would rather burn till time itself burns out.

Seven

Water dripped from oar-blades, the drips spreading ripples in a sea that was shining slabs of light that slowly shifted and parted, joined and slid.

Our ship was poised on that shifting light, silent.

The sky to the east was molten gold pouring around a bank of sun-drenched cloud, while the rest was blue. Pale blue to the east and dark blue to the west where night fled towards the unknown lands beyond the distant ocean.

To the south I could see the low shore of Wessex. It was green and brown, treeless and not that far away, though I would go no closer for the light-sliding sea concealed mudbanks and shoals. Our oars were resting and the wind was dead, but we moved relentlessly eastwards, carried by the tide and by the river’s strong flow. This was the estuary of the Temes; a wide place of water, mud, sand and terror.

Our ship had no name and she carried no beast-heads on her prow or stern. She was a trading ship, one of the two I had captured in Lundene, and she was wide-beamed, sluggish, big-bellied and clumsy. She carried a sail, but the sail was furled on the yard, and the yard was in its crutches. We drifted on the tide towards the golden dawn.

I stood with the steering-oar in my right hand. I wore mail, but no helmet. My two swords were strapped to my waist, but they, like my mail coat, were hidden beneath a dirty brown woollen cloak. There were twelve rowers on the benches, Sihtric was beside me, one man was on the bow platform and all those men, like me, showed neither armour nor weapons.

We looked like a trading ship drifting along the Wessex shore in hope that no one on the northern side of the estuary would see us.

But they had seen us.

And a sea-wolf was stalking us.

She was rowing to our north, slanting south and eastwards, waiting for us to turn and try to escape upriver against the tide. She was perhaps a mile away and I could see the short black upright line of her stemhead, which ended in a beast’s head. She was in no hurry. Her shipmaster could see we were not rowing and he would take that inactivity as a sign of panic. He would think we were discussing what to do. His own oar banks were dipping slow, but every stroke surged that distant boat forward to cut off our seaward escape.

Finan, who was manning one of the stern oars of our ship, glanced over his shoulder. ‘Crew of fifty?’ he suggested.

‘Maybe more,’ I said.

He grinned. ‘How many more?’

‘Could be seventy?’ I guessed.

We numbered forty-three, and all but fifteen of us were hidden in the place where the ship would normally have carried goods. Those hidden men were covered by an old sail, making it look as though we carried salt or grain, some cargo that needed to be protected from any rain or spray. ‘Be a rare fight if it’s seventy,’ Finan said with relish.

‘Won’t be any fight at all,’ I said, ‘because they won’t be ready for us,’ and that was true. We looked like an easy victim, a handful of men on a tubby ship, and the sea-wolf would come alongside and a dozen men would leap aboard while the rest of the crew just watched the slaughter. That, at least, was what I hoped. The watching crew would be armed, of course, but they would not be expecting battle, and my men were more than ready.

‘Remember,’ I called loudly so the men beneath the sail would hear me, ‘we kill them all!’

‘Even women?’ Finan asked.

‘Not women,’ I said. I doubted there would be women aboard the far ship.

Sihtric was crouching beside me and now squinted up. ‘Why kill them all, lord?’

‘So they learn to fear us,’ I said.

The gold in the sky was brightening and fading. The sun was above the cloud bank and the sea shimmered with its new brilliance. The reflected image of the enemy was long on the light-flickering, slow-moving water.

‘Steorbord oars!’ I called, ‘back water. Clumsy now!’

The oarsmen grinned as they deliberately churned the water with clumsy strokes that slowly turned our prow upriver so that it appeared as though we were trying to escape. The sensible thing for us to have done, had we been as innocent and vulnerable as we looked, would have been to row to the southern shore, ground the boat and run for our lives, but instead we turned and started rowing against tide and current. Our oars clashed, making us look like incompetent, scared fools.

‘He’s taken the bait,’ I said to our rowers, though, because our bows now pointed westwards, they could see for themselves that the enemy had started rowing hard. The Viking was coming straight for us, her oar banks rising and falling like wings and the white water swelling and shrinking at her stem as each blade-beat surged the ship.

We kept feigning panic. Our oars banged into each other so that we did little except stir the water around our clumsy hull. Two gulls circled our stubby mast, their cries sad in the limpid morning. Far to the west, where the sky was darkened by the smoke of Lundene that lay beyond the horizon, I could just see a tiny dark streak, which I knew to be the mast of another ship. She was coming towards us, and I knew the enemy ship would have seen her too and would be wondering whether she was friend or foe.

Not that it mattered, for it would take the enemy only five minutes to capture our small, under-manned cargo ship and it would be the best part of an hour before the ebbing tide and steady rowing could bring that western ship to where we struggled. The Viking boat came on fast, her oars working in lovely unison, but the ship’s speed meant that her oarsmen would be tired as well as unprepared by the time she reached us. Her beast-head, proud on her high stem, was an eagle with an open beak painted red as if the bird had just ripped bloody flesh from a victim, while beneath the carved head a dozen armed men were crowded on the bow platform. They were the men supposed to board and kill us.

Twenty oars a side made forty men. The boarding party added a dozen, though it was hard to count the men who were crowded so close together, and two men stood beside the steering-oar. ‘Between fifty and sixty,’ I called aloud. The enemy rowers were not in mail. They did not expect to fight, and most would have their swords at their feet and their shields stacked in the bilge.

‘Stop oars!’ I called. ‘Rowers, get up!’

The eagle-prowed ship was close now. I could hear the creak of her oar tholes, the splash of her blades and the hiss of the sea at her cutwater. I could see bright axe blades, the helmeted faces of the men who thought they would kill us, and the anxiety on the steersman’s face as he attempted to lay his bows directly on ours. My rowers were milling about, feigning panic. The Viking oarsmen gave a last heave and I heard their shipmaster order them to cease rowing and ship oars. She ran on towards us, water sliding away from her stem and she was very close now, close enough to smell, and the men on her bow platform hefted their shields as the steersman aimed her bows to slide along our flank. Her oars were drawn inboard as she swooped to her kill.

I waited a heartbeat, waited until the enemy could no longer avoid us, then sprang our ambush. ‘Now!’ I shouted.

The sail was dragged away and suddenly our little ship bristled with armed men. I threw off my cloak and Sihtric brought me my helmet and shield. A man shouted a warning on the enemy ship and the steersman threw his weight on his long oar and his vessel turned slightly, but she had turned away too late, and there was a splintering sound as her bows cracked through our oar shafts. ‘Now!’ I shouted again.

Clapa was my man in our bows and he hurled a grapnel to haul the enemy into our embrace. The grapnel slammed over her sheer-strake, Clapa heaved and the impetus of the enemy ship made her swing on the line to crash against our flank. My men immediately swarmed over her side. These were my household troops, trained warriors, dressed in mail and hungry for slaughter, and they leaped among unarmoured oarsmen who were utterly unprepared for a fight. The enemy boarders, the only men armed and keyed for a battle, hesitated as the two ships crashed together. They could have attacked my men who were already killing, but instead their leader shouted at them to jump across onto our ship. He hoped to take my men in the rear, and it was a shrewd enough tactic, but we still had enough men left aboard to thwart them. ‘Kill them all!’ I shouted.

One Dane, I assume he was a Dane, tried to jump onto my platform and I simply banged my shield into him and he disappeared between the ships where his mail took him instantly to the sea’s bed. The other Viking boarders had reached the stern rowers’ benches where they hacked and cursed at my men. I was behind and above them, and only had Sihtric for company, and the two of us could have stayed safe by remaining on the steering platform, but a man does not lead by staying out of a fight. ‘Stay where you are,’ I told Sihtric, and jumped.

I shouted a challenge as I jumped and a tall man turned to face me. He had an eagle’s wing on his helmet, and his mail was fine, and his arms were bright with rings, and his shield was painted with an eagle, and I knew he must be the owner of the enemy ship. He was a Viking lord, fair-bearded and brown-eyed, and he carried a long-handled axe, its blade already reddened, and he swept it at me and I parried with the shield and his axe dropped at the last moment to cut at my ankles and, by the gift of Thor, the ship lurched and the axe lost its force in a rib of the trading ship. He kept my sword lunge away with his shield as he raised the axe again and I shield-charged him, throwing him back with my weight.

He should have fallen, but he staggered back into his own men and so stayed on his feet. I cut at his ankle and Serpent-Breath rasped on metal. His boots were protected as mine were by metal strips. The axe hurtled around and thumped into my shield, and his shield crashed into my sword and I was hurled back by the double blow. I hit the edge of the steering platform with my shoulderblades and he charged me again, trying to drive me down, and I was half aware of Sihtric still standing on the small stern platform and beating a sword at my enemy, but the blade glanced off the Dane’s helmet and wasted itself on the man’s mailed shoulders. He kicked at my feet, knowing I was unbalanced, and I fell.

‘Turd,’ he snarled, then took one backwards step. Behind him his men were dying, but he had time to kill me before he died himself. ‘I am Olaf Eagleclaw,’ he told me proudly, ‘and I will meet you in the corpse-hall.’

‘Uhtred of Bebbanburg,’ I said, and I was still on the deck as he lifted his axe high.

And Olaf Eagleclaw screamed.

I had fallen on purpose. He was heavier than me, and he had me cornered, and I knew he would go on beating at me and I would be helpless to push him away, and so I had fallen. Sword blades were wasted on his fine mail and on his shining helmet, but now I thrust Serpent-Breath upwards, under the skirt of his mail, up into his unarmoured groin, and I followed her up, ripping the blade into him and through him as the blood drenched the deck between us. He was staring at me, wide-eyed and mouth open, as the axe fell from his hand. I was standing now, still hauling on Serpent-Breath, and he fell away, twitching, and I yanked her out of his body and saw his right hand scrabbling for his axe handle, and I kicked it towards him and watched his fingers curl around the haft before I killed him with a quick thrust into the throat. More blood spilled across the ship’s timbers.

I make that small fight sound easy. It was not. It is true I fell on purpose, but Olaf made me fall, and instead of resisting, I let myself drop. Sometimes, in my old age, I wake shivering in the night as I remember the moments I should have died and did not. That is one of those moments. Perhaps I remember it wrong? Age clouds old things. There must have been the sound of feet scraping on the deck, the grunt of men making a blow, the stench of the filthy bilge, the gasps of wounded men. I remember the fear as I fell, the gut-souring, mind-screaming panic of imminent death. It was but a moment of life, soon gone, a flurry of blows and panic, a fight hardly worth remembering, yet still Olaf Eagleclaw can wake me in the darkness and I lie, listening to the sea beat on the sand, and I know he will be waiting for me in the corpse-hall where he will want to know whether I killed him by pure luck or whether I planned that fatal thrust. He will also remember that I kicked the axe back into his grasp so that he could die with a weapon in his hand, and for that he will thank me.

I look forward to seeing him.

By the time Olaf was dead his ship was taken and his crew slaughtered. Finan had led the charge onto the Sea-Eagle. I knew she was called that, for her name was cut in runic letters on her stem-post. ‘It was no fight,’ Finan reported, sounding disgusted.

‘I told you,’ I said.

‘A few of the rowers found weapons,’ he said, dismissing their effort with a shrug. Then he pointed down into the Sea-Eagle’s bilge that was sodden with blood. Five men crouched there, shivering, and Finan saw my questioning look. ‘They’re Saxons, lord,’ he explained why the men still lived.

The five men were fishermen who told me they lived at a place called Fughelness. I hardly understood them. They spoke English, but in such a strange way that it was like a foreign language, yet I understood them to say that Fughelness was a barren island in a waste of marshes and creeks. A place of birds, emptiness, and a few poor folk who lived in the mud by trapping birds, catching eels and netting fish. They said Olaf had captured them a week before and forced them to his rowing benches. There had been eleven of them, but six had died in the fury of Finan’s assault before these survivors had managed to convince my men that they were prisoners, not enemies.

We stripped the enemy of everything, then piled their mail, weapons, arm rings and clothes at the foot of Sea-Eagle’s mast. In time we would divide those spoils. Each man would receive one share, Finan would take three and I would take five. I was supposed to yield one third to Alfred and another third to Bishop Erkenwald, but I rarely gave them the plunder I took in battle.

We threw the naked dead into the trading ship where they made a grisly cargo of blood-spattered bodies. I remember thinking how white those bodies looked, yet how dark their faces were. A cloud of gulls screamed at us, wanting to come down and peck the corpses, but the birds were too nervous of our proximity to dare try. By now the ship that had been coming downtide from the west had reached us. She was a fine fighting ship, her bow crowned with a dragon’s head, her stern showing a wolf’s head and her masthead decorated with a raven wind-vane. She was one of the two warships we had captured in Lundene and Ralla had christened her Sword of the Lord. Alfred would have approved. She slewed to a stop and Ralla, her shipmaster, cupped his hands. ‘Well done!’

‘We lost three men,’ I called back. All three had died in the fight against Olaf’s boarders, and those men we carried aboard Sea-Eagle. I would have dropped them into the sea and let them sink to the sea-god’s embrace, but they were Christians and their friends wanted them carried back to a Christian graveyard in Lundene.

‘You want me to tow her?’ Ralla shouted, gesturing at the trading ship.

I said yes, and there was a pause while he fixed a line to the stem-post of the cargo ship. Then, in consort, we rowed northwards across the estuary of the Temes. The gulls, emboldened now, were plucking at the dead men’s eyes.

It was close to midday and the tide had gone slack. The estuary heaved oily and sluggish under the high sun as we rowed slowly, conserving our strength, sliding across the sun-silvered sea. And slowly, too, the estuary’s northern shore came into view.

Low hills shimmered in the day’s heat. I had rowed that shore before and knew that wooded hills lay beyond a flat shelf of waterlogged land. Ralla, who knew the coast much better than I, guided us, and I memorised the landmarks as we approached. I noted a slightly higher hill, a bluff and a clump of trees, and I knew I would see those things again because we were rowing our ships towards Beamfleot. This was the den of sea-wolves, the sea-serpent’s haunt, Sigefrid’s refuge.

This was also the old kingdom of the East Saxons, a kingdom that had long vanished, though ancient stories said they had once been feared. They had been a sea-people, raiders, but the Angles to their north had conquered them and now this coast was a part of Guthrum’s realm, East Anglia.

It was a lawless coast, far from Guthrum’s capital. Here, in the creeks that dried at low tide, ships could wait and, as the tide rose, they could slip out of their inlets to raid the merchants whose goods were carried up the Temes. This was a pirates’ nest, and here Sigefrid, Erik and Haesten had their camp.

They must have seen us approach, but what did they see? They saw the Sea-Eagle, one of their own ships, and with her another Danish ship, both boats proudly decorated with beast-heads. They saw a third ship, a tubby cargo ship, and would have assumed Olaf was returning from a successful foray. They would have thought Sword of the Lord a Northmen’s ship newly come to England. In short, they saw us, but they suspected nothing.

As we neared the land I ordered the beast-heads taken from stern and stem-posts. Such things were never left on display as a boat entered its home waters, for the animals were there to frighten hostile spirits and Olaf would have assumed that the spirits inhabiting the creeks at Beamfleot were friendly, and he would have been loath to frighten them. And so the watchers from Sigefrid’s camp saw the carved heads heaved off and they would have thought we were friends rowing homewards.

And I stared at that shore, knowing that fate would bring me back, and I touched the hilt of Serpent-Breath, for she had a fate too, and I knew she would come to this place again. This was a place for my sword to sing.

Beamfleot lay beneath a hill that sloped steeply down to the creek. One of the fishermen, a younger man who seemed blessed with more wit than his companions, stood beside me and named the places as I pointed at them. The settlement beneath the hill, he confirmed, was Beamfleot, and the creek he insisted was a river, the Hothlege. Beamfleot lay on the Hothlege’s northern bank while the southern bank was a low, dark, wide and sullen island. ‘Caninga,’ the fisherman told me.

I repeated the names, memorising them as I memorised the land I saw.

Caninga was a sodden place, an island of marsh and reeds, wildfowl and mud. The Hothlege, which looked to me more like a creek than a river, was a tangle of mudbanks through which a channel twisted towards the hill above Beamfleot, and now, as we rounded the eastern tip of Caninga, I could see Sigefrid’s camp crowning that hill. It was a green hill, and his walls, made of earth and topped with a timber palisade, lay like a brown scar on its domed summit. The slope from his southern wall was precipitous, dropping to where a crowd of ships lay canted on the mud exposed by low tide. The Hothlege’s mouth was guarded by a ship that blocked the channel. She lay athwart the waterway, held against the tides by chains at stem and stern. One chain led to a massive post sunk on Caninga’s shore, while the other was attached to a tree that grew lonely on the smaller island that formed the northern bank of the channel’s mouth. ‘Two-Tree Island,’ the fisherman saw where I was looking and named the islet.

‘But there’s only one tree there,’ I pointed out.

‘In my father’s day there were two, lord.’

The tide had turned. The flood had begun, and the great waters were surging into the estuary so that our three ships were being carried towards the enemy’s camp. ‘Turn!’ I shouted to Ralla, and saw the relief on his face, ‘but put the dragon’s head back first!’

And so Sigefrid’s men saw the dragon’s head replaced, and the eagle’s beaked head put high on Sea-Eagle’s stem, and they must have known something was wrong, not just because we displayed our beasts, but because we turned our ships and Ralla cut the smaller cargo boat loose. And, as they watched from their high fort, they would have seen my banner unfurled from Sea-Eagle’s mast. Gisela and her women had made that flag of the wolf’s head, and I flew it so that the watching men would know who had killed the Sea-Eagle’s crew.

Then we rowed away, pulling hard against that flooding tide. We turned south and west about Caninga, then let the strong new tide carry us upriver towards Lundene.

And the cargo ship, its hold filled with blood-laced gull-pecked corpses, rode the same tide up the creek to bump against the longship moored athwart the channel.

I had three fighting ships now while my cousin possessed fifteen. He had moved those captured boats upriver where, for all I knew, they rotted. If I had possessed ten more ships and had the crews to man them I could have taken Beamfleot, but all I had was three ships and the creek beneath the high fort was crammed with masts.

Still, I was sending a message.

That death was coming to Beamfleot.

Death visited Hrofeceastre first. Hrofeceastre was a town close to Lundene on the southern bank of the Temes estuary in the old kingdom of Cent. The Romans had made a fort there, and now a sizeable town had grown in and around the old stronghold. Cent, of course, had long been a part of Wessex and Alfred had ordered the town’s defences to be strengthened, which was easily done for the old earth walls of the Roman fort still stood, and all that had to be added was a deepening of the ditch, the making of an oak palisade and the destruction of some buildings that were outside and too close to the ramparts. And it was well that the work had been completed because, early that summer, a great fleet of Danish ships came from Frankia. They found refuge in East Anglia, from where they sailed south, rode the tide up the Temes and then beached their ships on the River Medwæg, the tributary on which Hrofeceastre stood. They had hoped to storm the town, sacking it with fire and terror, but the new walls and the strong garrison defied them.

I had news of their coming before Alfred. I sent a messenger to tell him of the attack and, that same day, took Sea-Eagle down the Temes and up the Medwæg to find that I was helpless. At least sixty warships were beached on the river’s muddy bank, and two others had been chained together and moored athwart the Medwæg to deter any attack by West Saxon ships. On shore I could see the invaders throwing up an earthen embankment, suggesting that they intended to ring Hrofeceastre with their own wall.

The leader of the invaders was a man called Gunnkel Rodeson. I learned later he had sailed from a lean season in Frankia in hope of taking the silver reputed to be in Hrofeceastre’s big church and monastery. I rowed away from his ships and, in a brisk south-east wind, hoisted Sea-Eagle’s sail and crossed the estuary. I hoped to find Beamfleot deserted, but though it was obvious that many of Sigefrid’s ships and men had gone to join Gunnkel, sixteen vessels remained and the fort’s high wall still bristled with men and spear-points.

And so we went back to Lundene.

‘Do you know Gunnkel?’ Gisela asked me. We spoke in Danish as we almost always did.

‘Never heard of him.’

‘A new enemy?’ she asked, smiling.

‘They come from the north endlessly,’ I said. ‘Kill one and two more sail south.’

‘A very good reason to stop killing them, then,’ she said. That was as close as Gisela ever came to chiding me for killing her own people.

‘I am sworn to Alfred,’ I said in bleak explanation.

Next day I woke to find ships coming through the bridge. A horn alerted me. The horn was blown by a sentry on the walls of a small burh I was building at the bridge’s southern end. We called that burh Suthriganaweorc, which simply meant the southern defence, and it was being built and guarded by men of the Suthrige fyrd. Fifteen warships were coming downstream, and they rowed through the gap at high water when the tumult in the broken middle was at its calmest. All fifteen ships came through safely and the third, I saw, flew my cousin Æthelred’s banner of the prancing white horse. Once below the bridge the ships rowed for the wharves where they tied up three abreast. Æthelred, it seemed, was returning to Lundene. At the beginning of summer he had taken Æthelflaed back to his estates in western Mercia, there to fight against the Welsh cattle thieves who loved riding into Mercia’s fat lands. Now he was back.

He went to his palace. Æthelflaed, of course, was with him for Æthelred refused to allow her out of his sight, though I do not think that was love. It was jealousy. I half expected to receive a summons to his presence, but none came and, next morning, when Gisela walked to the palace, she was turned away. The Lady Æthelflaed, she was informed, was unwell. ‘They weren’t rude to me,’ she said, ‘just insistent.’

‘Maybe she is unwell?’ I suggested.

‘Even more reason to see a friend,’ Gisela said, staring through the open shutters to where the summer sun splattered the Temes with glinting silver. ‘He has put her in a cage, hasn’t he?’

We were interrupted by Bishop Erkenwald, or rather by one of his priests, who announced the bishop’s imminent arrival. Gisela, knowing that Erkenwald would never speak openly in front of her, went to the kitchens while I greeted him at my door.

I never liked that man. In time we were to hate each other, but he was loyal to Alfred and he was efficient and he was conscientious. He did not waste time with small talk, but told me he had issued a writ for raising the local fyrd. ‘The king,’ he said, ‘has ordered the men of his bodyguard to join your cousin’s ships.’

‘And me?’

‘You will stay here,’ he said brusquely, ‘as will I.’

‘And the fyrd?’

‘Is for the city’s defence. They replace the royal troops.’

‘Because of Hrofeceastre?’

‘The king is determined to punish the pagans,’ Erkenwald said, ‘but while he is doing God’s work at Hrofeceastre there is a chance that other pagans will attack Lundene. We will prevent any such attack succeeding.’

No pagans did attack Lundene, and so I sat in the city while the events at Hrofeceastre unfolded and, strangely, those events have become famous. Men often come to me these days and they ask me about Alfred for I am one of the few men alive who remember him. They are all churchmen, of course, and they want to hear of his piety, of which I pretend to know nothing, and some, a few, ask about his wars. They know of his exile in the marshes and the victory at Ethandun, but they also want to hear of Hrofeceastre. That is strange. Alfred was to gain many victories over his enemies and Hrofeceastre was undoubtedly one of them, but it was not the great triumph that men now believe it to have been.

It was, of course, a victory, but it should have been a great victory. There was a chance to destroy a whole fleet of Vikings and to turn the Medwæg dark with their blood, but the chance was lost. Alfred trusted the defences at Hrofeceastre to hold the invaders in place, and those walls and the garrison did their job while he assembled an army of horsemen. He had the troops of his own royal household, and to that he added the household warriors of every ealdorman between Wintanceaster and Hrofeceastre, and they all rode eastwards, the army getting larger as they travelled, and they gathered at the Mæides Stana, just south of the old Roman fort that was now the town of Hrofeceastre.

Alfred had moved fast and well. The town had defeated two Danish attacks, and now Gunnkel’s men found themselves threatened not just by Hrofeceastre’s garrison, but by over a thousand of Wessex’s finest warriors. Gunnkel, knowing he had lost his gamble, sent an envoy to Alfred, who agreed to talk. What Alfred was waiting for was the arrival of Æthelred’s ships at the mouth of the Medwæg, for then Gunnkel would be trapped, and so Alfred talked and talked, and still the ships did not come. And when Gunnkel realised that Alfred would not pay him to leave, and that the talking was a ruse and that the West Saxon king planned to fight, he ran away. At midnight, after two days of evasive negotiations, the invaders left their campfires burning bright to suggest they were still on land, then boarded their ships and rode the ebb tide to the Temes. And so the siege of Hrofeceastre ended, and it was a great victory in that a Viking army had been ignominiously expelled from Wessex, but the waters of the Medwæg were not thickened by blood. Gunnkel lived, and the ships that had come from Beamfleot returned there, and some other ships went with them so that Sigefrid’s camp was strengthened with new crews of hungry fighters. The rest of Gunnkel’s fleet either went to look for easier prey in Frankia or found refuge on the East Anglian coast.

And, while all this happened, Æthelred was still in Lundene.

He complained that the ale on his ships was sour. He told Bishop Erkenwald that his men could not fight if their bellies were churning and their bowels spewing, and so he insisted that the barrels were emptied and refilled with freshly brewed ale. That took two days, and on the next he insisted on giving judgment in court, a job that properly belonged to Erkenwald, but which Æthelred, as Ealdorman of Mercia, had every right to do. He might not have wished to see me, and Gisela might have been turned away from the palace when she had tried to visit Æthelflaed, but no free citizen could be barred from witnessing judgments and so we joined the crowd in the big pillared hall.

Æthelred sprawled in a chair that could well have been a throne. It had a high back, ornately carved arms and was cushioned with fur. I do not know if he saw us, and if he did he took no notice of us, but Æthelflaed, who was sitting in a lower chair beside him, certainly saw us. She stared at us with an apparent lack of recognition, then turned her face away as if she was bored. The cases occupying Æthelred were trivial, but he insisted on listening to every oath-taker. The first complaint was about a miller who was accused of using false weights, and Æthelred questioned the oath-takers relentlessly. His friend, Aldhelm, sat just behind him and kept whispering advice into Æthelred’s ear. Aldhelm’s once handsome face was scarred from the beating I had given him, his nose crooked and one cheekbone flattened. It seemed to me, who had often judged such matters, that the miller was plainly guilty, but it took Æthelred and Aldhelm a long time to reach the same conclusion. The man was sentenced to the loss of one ear and a brand-mark on one cheek, then a young priest read aloud an indictment against a prostitute accused of stealing from the poor box in the church of Saint Alban. It was while the priest was still speaking that Æthelflaed suddenly griped. She jerked forward with one hand clutching at her belly. I thought she was going to vomit, but nothing came from her open mouth except a low moan of pain. She stayed bent forward, mouth open and with the one hand clasped to her stomach that still showed no sign of any pregnancy.

The hall had gone silent. Æthelred stared at his young wife, apparently helpless in the face of her distress, then two women came from an open archway and, after going on one knee to Æthelred and evidently receiving his permission, helped Æthelflaed away. My cousin, his face pale, gestured at the priest. ‘Start again at the beginning of the indictment, father,’ Æthelred said, ‘my attention wandered.’

‘I had almost finished, lord,’ the priest said helpfully, ‘and have oath-takers who can describe the crime.’

‘No, no, no!’ Æthelred held up a hand. ‘I wish to hear the indictment. We must be seen to be thorough in our judgment.’

So the priest began again. Folk shuffled their feet in boredom as he droned on, and it was then that Gisela touched my elbow.

A woman had just spoken to Gisela who, twitching my tunic, turned and followed the woman through the door at the back of the hall. I went too, hoping that Æthelred was too involved in his pretence of being the perfect judge to see our departure.

We followed the woman down a corridor that had once been the cloistered side of a courtyard, but at some time the pillars of the open arcade had been filled with screens of wattle and mud. At the corridor’s end a crude wooden door had been hung in a stone frame. Carved vines writhed up the masonry. On the far side was a room with a floor of small tiles that showed some Roman god casting a thunderbolt and beyond that was a sunlit garden where three pear trees cast shade on a patch of grass bright with daisies and buttercups. Æthelflaed waited for us beneath the trees.

She showed no sign of the distress that had sent her crouching and dry-retching from the hall. Instead she was standing tall, her back straight and with a solemn expression, though that solemnity brightened into a smile when she saw Gisela. They hugged, and I saw Æthelflaed’s eyes close as if she was fighting back tears.

‘You’re not ill, lady?’ I asked.

‘Just pregnant,’ she said, her eyes still shut, ‘not ill.’

‘You looked ill just now,’ I said.

‘I wanted to talk with you,’ she said, pulling away from Gisela, ‘and pretending to be ill was the only way to have privacy. He can’t stand it when I’m sick. He leaves me alone when I vomit.’

‘Are you often sick?’ Gisela asked.

‘Every morning,’ Æthelflaed said, ‘sick like a hound, but isn’t everyone?’

‘Not this time,’ Gisela said, and touched her amulet. She wore a small image of Frigg, wife of Odin and Queen of Asgard where the gods live. Frigg is the goddess of pregnancy and childbirth, and the amulet was supposed to give Gisela a safe delivery of the child she carried. The little image had worked well with our first two children and I prayed daily that it would work again with the third.

‘I vomit every morning,’ Æthelflaed said, ‘then feel fine for the rest of the day.’ She touched her belly, then stroked Gisela’s stomach that was now distended with her child. ‘You must tell me about childbirth,’ Æthelflaed said anxiously. ‘It’s painful, isn’t it?’

‘You forget the pain,’ Gisela said, ‘because it’s swamped by joy.’

‘I hate pain.’

‘There are herbs,’ Gisela said, trying to sound convincing, ‘and there is so much joy when the child comes.’

They talked of childbirth and I leaned on the brick wall and stared at the patch of blue sky beyond the pear tree leaves. The woman who had brought us had gone away and we were alone. Somewhere beyond the brick wall a man was shouting at recruits to keep their shields up and I could hear the bang of staves on wood as they practised. I thought of the new city, the Lundene outside the walls where the Saxons had made their town. They wanted me to make a new palisade there, and defend it with my garrison, but I was refusing because Alfred had ordered me to refuse and because, with the new town enclosed by a wall, there would be too many ramparts to protect. I wanted those Saxons to move into the old city. A few had come, wanting the protection of the old Roman wall and my garrison, but most stubbornly stayed in the new town. ‘What are you thinking?’ Æthelflaed suddenly interrupted my thoughts.

‘He’s thanking Thor that he’s a man,’ Gisela said, ‘and that he doesn’t have to give birth.’

‘True,’ I said, ‘and I was thinking that if people prefer to die in the new town rather than live in the old, then we should let them die.’

Æthelflaed smiled at that callous statement. She crossed to me. She was barefoot and looked very small. ‘You don’t hit Gisela, do you?’ she asked, gazing up at me.

I glanced at Gisela and smiled. ‘No, lady,’ I said gently.

Æthelflaed went on staring at me. She had blue eyes with brown flecks, a slightly snub nose, and her lower lip was larger than her top lip. Her bruises had gone, though a faint dark blush on one cheek showed where she had last been struck. She looked very serious. Wisps of golden hair showed around her bonnet. ‘Why didn’t you warn me, Uhtred?’ she asked.

‘Because you didn’t want to be warned,’ I said.

She thought about that, then nodded abruptly. ‘No, I didn’t, you’re right. I put myself in the cage, didn’t I? Then I locked it.’

‘Then unlock it,’ I said brutally.

‘Can’t,’ she said curtly.

‘No?’ Gisela asked.

‘God has the key.’

I smiled at that. ‘I never did like your god,’ I said.

‘No wonder my husband says you’re a bad man,’ Æthelflaed retorted with a smile.

‘Does he say that?’

‘He says you are wicked, untrustworthy and treacherous.’

I smiled, said nothing.

‘Pig-headed,’ Gisela kept the litany going, ‘simple-minded and brutal.’

‘That’s me,’ I said.

‘And very kind,’ Gisela finished.

Æthelflaed still looked up at me. ‘He fears you,’ she said, ‘and Aldhelm hates you,’ she went on. ‘He’ll kill you if he can.’

‘He can try,’ I said.

‘Aldhelm wants my husband to be king,’ Æthelflaed said.

‘And what does your husband think?’ I asked.

‘He would like it,’ Æthelflaed said and that did not surprise me. Mercia lacked a king, and Æthelred had a claim, but my cousin was nothing without Alfred’s support and Alfred wanted no man to be called king in Mercia.

‘Why doesn’t your father just declare himself King of Mercia?’ I asked Æthelflaed.

‘I think he will,’ she said, ‘one day.’

‘But not yet?’

‘Mercia is a proud country,’ she said, ‘and not every Mercian loves Wessex.’

‘And you’re there to make them love Wessex?’

She touched her belly. ‘Perhaps my father wants his first grandchild to be king in Mercia,’ she suggested. ‘A king with West Saxon blood?’

‘And Æthelred’s blood,’ I said sourly.

She sighed. ‘He’s not a bad man,’ she said wistfully, almost as if she were trying to persuade herself.

‘He beats you,’ Gisela said drily.

‘He wants to be a good man,’ Æthelflaed said. She touched my arm. ‘He wants to be like you, Uhtred.’

‘Like me!’ I said, almost laughing.

‘Feared,’ Æthelflaed explained.

‘Then why,’ I asked, ‘is he wasting time here? Why isn’t he taking his ships to fight the Danes?’

Æthelflaed sighed. ‘Because Aldhelm tells him not to,’ she said. ‘Aldhelm says that if Gunnkel stays in Cent or East Anglia,’ she went on, ‘then my father has to keep more forces here. He has to keep looking eastwards.’

‘He has to do that anyway,’ I said.

‘But Aldhelm says that if my father has to worry all the time about a horde of pagans in the Temes estuary, then he might not notice what happens in Mercia.’

‘Where my cousin will declare himself king?’ I guessed.

‘It will be the price he demands,’ Æthelflaed said, ‘for defending the northern frontier of Wessex.’

‘And you’ll be queen,’ I said.

She grimaced at that. ‘You think I want that?’

‘No,’ I admitted.

‘No,’ she agreed. ‘What I want is the Danes gone from Mercia. I want the Danes gone from East Anglia. I want the Danes gone from Northumbria.’ She was little more than a child, a thin child with a snub nose and bright eyes, but she had steel in her. She was talking to me, who loved the Danes because I had been raised by them, and to Gisela, who was a Dane, but Æthelflaed did not try to soften her words. There was a hatred of the Danes in her, a hatred she had inherited from her father. Then, suddenly, she shuddered and the steel vanished. ‘And I want to live,’ she said.

I did not know what to say. Women died giving birth. So many died. I had sacrificed to Odin and Thor both times that Gisela had given birth and I had still been scared, and I was frightened now because she was pregnant again.

‘You use the wisest women,’ Gisela said, ‘and you trust the herbs and charms they use.’

‘No,’ Æthelflaed said firmly, ‘not that.’

‘Then what?’

‘Tonight,’ Æthelflaed said, ‘at midnight. In St Alban’s church.’

‘Tonight?’ I asked, utterly confused, ‘in the church?’

She stared up at me with huge blue eyes. ‘They might kill me,’ she said.

‘No!’ Gisela protested, not believing what she heard.

‘He wants to be sure the child is his!’ Æthelflaed interrupted her, ‘and of course it is! But they want to be sure and I’m frightened!’

Gisela gathered Æthelflaed into her arms and stroked her hair. ‘No one will kill you,’ she said softly, looking at me.

‘Be at the church, please,’ Æthelflaed said in a voice made small because her head was crushed against Gisela’s breasts.

‘We’ll be with you,’ Gisela said.

‘Go to the big church, the one dedicated to Alban,’ Æthelflaed said. She was crying softly. ‘So how bad is the pain?’ she asked. ‘Is it like being torn in two? That’s what my mother says!’

‘It is bad,’ Gisela admitted, ‘but it leads to a joy like no other.’ She stroked Æthelflaed and stared at me as though I could explain what was to happen at midnight, but I had no idea what was in my cousin’s suspicious mind.

Then the woman who had led us to the pear tree garden appeared at the door. ‘Your husband, mistress,’ she said urgently, ‘he wants you in the hall.’

‘I must go,’ Æthelflaed said. She cuffed her eyes with her sleeve, smiled at us without joy, and fled.

‘What are they going to do to her?’ Gisela asked angrily.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Sorcery?’ she demanded. ‘Some Christian sorcery?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said again, nor did I, except that the summons was for midnight, the darkest hour, when evil appears and shape-shifters stalk the land and the Shadow-Walkers come. At midnight.

Eight

The church of Saint Alban was ancient. The lower walls were of stone, which meant the Romans had built it, though at some time the roof had fallen in and the upper masonry had crumbled, so that now almost everything above head height was made of timber, wattle and thatch. The church lay on the main street of Lundene, which ran north and south from what was now called the Bishop’s Gate down to the broken bridge. Beocca once told me that the church had been a royal chapel for the Mercian kings, and perhaps he was right. ‘And Alban was a soldier!’ Beocca had added. He always got enthusiastic when he talked about the saints whose stories he knew and loved, ‘So you should like him!’

‘I should like him simply because he was a soldier?’ I had asked sceptically.

‘Because he was a brave soldier!’ Beocca told me, ‘and,’ he paused, snuffling excitedly because he had important information to impart, ‘and when he was martyred the eyes of his executioner fell out!’ He beamed at me with his own one good eye. ‘They fell out, Uhtred! Just popped out of his head! That was God’s punishment, you see? You kill a holy man and God pulls out your eyes!’

‘So Brother Jænberht wasn’t holy?’ I had suggested. Jænberht was a monk I had killed in a church, much to the horror of Father Beocca and a crowd of other watching churchmen. ‘I’ve still got my eyes, father,’ I pointed out.

‘You deserve to be blinded!’ Beocca had said, ‘but God is merciful. Strangely merciful at times, I must say.’

I had thought about Alban for a while. ‘Why,’ I had then asked, ‘if your god can pull out a man’s eyes, didn’t he just save Alban’s life?’

‘Because God chose not to, of course!’ Beocca had answered sniffily, which is just the kind of answer you always get when you ask a Christian priest to explain another inexplicable act of their god.

‘Alban was a Roman soldier?’ I had asked, choosing not to query his god’s capriciously cruel nature.

‘He was a Briton,’ Beocca told me, ‘a very brave and very holy Briton.’

‘Does that mean he was Welsh?’

‘Of course it does!’

‘Maybe that’s why your god let him die,’ I said, and Beocca had made the sign of the cross and rolled his good eye to heaven.

So, though Alban was a Welshman, and we Saxons have no love for the Welsh, there was a church named for him in Lundene, and that church appeared as dead as the dead saint’s corpse when Gisela, Finan and I arrived. The street was night black. Some small firelight escaped past the window shutters of a few houses, and a tavern was loud with singing in a nearby street, but the church was black and silent. ‘I don’t like it,’ Gisela whispered, and I knew she had touched the amulet around her neck. Before we left the house she had cast her runesticks, hoping to see some pattern to this night, but the random fall of the sticks had mystified her.

Something moved in a nearby alleyway. It might have been nothing more than a rat, but both Finan and I turned, swords hissing out of our scabbards, and the noise in the alleyway immediately stopped. I let Serpent-Breath slide back into her fleece-lined scabbard.

The three of us were wearing dark cloaks with hoods so, if anyone was watching, they must have thought we were priests or monks as we stood outside Saint Alban’s dark and silent door. No light showed past that door’s edges. I tried to open it, pulling on the short rope that lifted the latch inside, but the door was apparently barred. I pushed hard, rattling the locked door, then beat on its timbers with a fist, but there was no response. Then Finan touched my arm and I heard the footsteps. ‘Over the street,’ I whispered, and we crossed to the alleyway where we had heard the noise. The small, tight passage stank of sewage.

‘They’re priests,’ Finan whispered to me.

Two men were walking down the street. They were momentarily visible in the small light cast by a loosely shuttered window and I saw their black robes and the glint from the silver crosses they wore on their breasts. They stopped at the church and one knocked hard on the barred door. He gave three knocks, paused, gave a single rap, paused again, then knocked three times more.

We heard the bar lifted and the creak of hinges as the door was swung open, then light flooded into the street as a curtain inside the doorway was pulled aside. A priest or monk let the two men step into the candlelit church, then peered up and down the roadway and I knew he was searching for whoever had rattled the door a few moments earlier. A question must have been called to him, for he turned and gave an answer. ‘No one here, lord,’ he said, then pulled the door shut. I heard the locking bar drop and, for an instant, light showed about the doorframe until the curtain inside was pulled closed and the church was dark again.

‘Wait,’ I said.

We waited, listening to the wind rustle across the thatched roofs and moan in the ruined houses. I waited a long time, letting the memory of the rattled door subside.

‘It must be close to midnight,’ Gisela whispered.

‘Whoever opens the door,’ I said softly, ‘has to be silenced.’ I did not know what was happening inside the church, but I did know it was so secret that the church was locked and a coded knock was needed to enter, and I also knew that we were uninvited, and that if the man who opened the door made a protest at our arrival then we might never discover Æthelflaed’s danger.

‘Leave him to me,’ Finan said happily.

‘He’s a churchman,’ I whispered, ‘does that worry you?’

‘In the dark, lord, all cats are black.’

‘Meaning?’

‘Leave him to me,’ the Irishman said again.

‘Then let’s go to church,’ I said, and the three of us crossed the street and I knocked hard on the door. I knocked three times, gave a single rap, then knocked three times again.

It took a long time for the door to be opened, but at last the bar was lifted and the door was pushed outwards. ‘They’ve started,’ a robed figure whispered, then gasped as I seized his collar and pulled him into the street where Finan hit him in the belly. The Irishman was a small man, but had extraordinary strength in his lithe arms, and the robed figure bent double with a sudden gasp. The door’s inner curtain had fallen across the opening and no one inside the church could see what happened outside. Finan punched the man again, felling him, then knelt on the fallen figure. ‘You go away,’ Finan whispered, ‘if you want to live. You just go a very long way from the church and you forget you ever saw us. Do you understand?’

‘Yes,’ the man said.

Finan tapped the man on the head to reinforce the order, then stood up and we saw the dark figure scrabble to his feet and stumble away downhill. I waited a brief while to make sure he had really gone, then the three of us stepped inside and Finan pulled the door shut and dropped the bar into its brackets.

And I pushed the curtain aside.

We were in the darkest part of the church, but I still felt exposed because the far end, where the altar stood, was ablaze with rushlights and wax candles. A line of robed men stood facing the altar and their shadows shrouded us. One of those priests turned towards us, but he just saw three cloaked and hooded figures and must have assumed we were more priests because he turned back to the altar.

It took me a moment to see who was on the altar’s wide shallow dais because they were hidden by the priests and monks, but then the churchmen all bowed to the silver crucifix and I saw Æthelred and Aldhelm standing on the left-hand side of the altar while Bishop Erkenwald was on the right. Between them was Æthelflaed. She wore a white linen shift belted just beneath her small breasts and her fair hair was hanging loose, as if she were a girl again. She looked frightened. An older woman stood behind Æthelred. She had hard eyes and her grey hair was rolled into a tight scroll on the crown of her skull.

Bishop Erkenwald was praying in Latin and every few minutes the watching priests and monks, there were nine of them altogether, echoed his words. Erkenwald was dressed in red and white robes on which jewelled crosses had been sewn. His voice, always harsh, echoed from the stone walls, while the responses of the churchmen were a dull murmur. Æthelred looked bored, while Aldhelm seemed to be taking a quiet delight in whatever mysteries unfolded in that flame-lit sanctuary.

The bishop finished his prayers, the watching men all said amen, and then there was a slight pause before Erkenwald took a book from the altar. He unwrapped the leather covers, then turned the stiff pages to a place he had marked with a seagull’s feather. ‘This,’ he spoke in English now, ‘is the word of the Lord.’

‘Hear the word of the Lord,’ the priests and monks muttered.

‘If a man fears his wife has been unfaithful,’ the bishop spoke louder, his grating voice repeated by the echo, ‘he shall bring her before the priest! And he shall bring an offering!’ He stared pointedly at Æthelred who was dressed in a pale green cloak over a full coat of mail. He even wore his swords, something most priests would never allow in a church. ‘An offering!’ the bishop repeated.

Æthelred started as if he had been woken from a half-sleep. He fumbled in a pouch hanging from his sword belt and produced a small bag that he held towards the bishop. ‘Barley,’ he said.

‘As the Lord God commanded it,’ Erkenwald responded, but did not take the offered barley.

‘And silver,’ Æthelred added, hurriedly taking a second bag from his pouch.

Erkenwald took the two offerings and laid them in front of the crucifix. He bowed to the bright-gleaming image of his nailed god, then picked up the big book again. ‘This is the word of the Lord,’ he said fiercely, ‘that we take holy water in an earthen vessel, and of the dust that is on the floor of the tabernacle the priest shall take, and he shall put that dust in the water.’

The book was put back on the altar as a priest offered the bishop a crude pottery cup that evidently held holy water, for Erkenwald bowed to it, then stooped to the floor and scraped up a handful of dirt and dust. He poured the dirt into the water, then placed the cup on the altar before taking up the book again.

‘I charge thee, woman,’ he said savagely, looking from the book to Æthelflaed, ‘if no man hath lain with thee, and if thou hast not gone aside to uncleanness with another man instead of thy husband, then be thou free of the curse of this bitter water!’

‘Amen,’ one of the priests said.

‘The word of the Lord!’ another said.

‘But if thou hast gone aside to another man,’ Erkenwald spat the words as he read them, ‘and be defiled, then the Lord shall make thy thigh to rot and thy belly to swell.’ He put the book back on the altar. ‘Speak, woman.’

Æthelflaed just stared at the bishop. She said nothing. Her eyes were wide with fear.

‘Speak, woman!’ The bishop snarled. ‘You know what words you must say! So say them!’

Æthelflaed seemed too frightened to speak. Aldhelm whispered something to Æthelred who nodded, but did nothing. Aldhelm whispered again, and again Æthelred nodded, and this time Aldhelm took a pace forward and hit Æthelfaed. It was not a hard blow, just a slap around the head, but it was enough to force me to take an involuntary step forward. Gisela snatched my arm, checking me. ‘Speak, woman,’ Aldhelm ordered Æthelflaed.

‘Amen,’ Æthelflaed managed to whisper, ‘amen.’

Gisela’s hand was still on my arm. I patted her fingers as a signal that I was calm. I was angry, I was astonished, but I was calm. I stroked Gisela’s hand, then dropped my fingers to Serpent-Breath’s hilt.

Æthelflaed had evidently spoken the right words because Bishop Erkenwald took the earthen cup from the altar. He raised it high in front of the crucifix, as if showing it to his god, then he carefully poured a little of its dust-fouled water into a silver chalice. He held the pottery cup high again, then ceremoniously offered it to Æthelflaed. ‘Drink the bitter water,’ he ordered her.

Æthelflaed hesitated, then saw Aldhelm’s mailed arm ready to strike her again and so she obediently reached for the cup. She took it, held it poised by her mouth for a brief moment, then closed her eyes, screwed up her face and drank the contents. The men watched intently, making certain she drained the cup. The candle flames flickered in a draught from the smoke-hole in the roof and somewhere in the city a dog suddenly howled. Gisela was clutching my arm now, her fingers tight as claws.

Erkenwald took the cup and, when he was satisfied that it was empty, nodded to Æthelred. ‘She drank it,’ the bishop confirmed. Æthelflaed’s face glistened where her tears reflected the wavering light from the altar on which, I now saw, was a quill pen, a pot of ink and a piece of parchment. ‘What I do now,’ Erkenwald said solemnly, ‘is in accordance with the word of God.’

‘Amen,’ the priests said. Æthelred was watching his wife as if he expected her flesh to start rotting before his eyes, while Æthelflaed herself was trembling so much that I thought she might collapse.

‘God commands me to write the curses down,’ the bishop announced, then bent to the altar. The quill scratched for a long time. Æthelred was still staring intently at Æthelflaed. The priests also watched her as the bishop scratched on. ‘And having written the curses,’ Erkenwald said, capping the ink pot, ‘I wipe them out according to the commands of Almighty God, our Father in heaven.’

‘Hear the word of the Lord,’ a priest said.

‘Praise his name,’ another said.

Erkenwald picked up the silver chalice into which he had poured a small amount of the dirty water and dribbled the contents onto the newly written words. He scrubbed at the ink with a finger, then held up the parchment to show that the writing had been smeared into oblivion. ‘It is done,’ he said pompously, then nodded at the grey-haired woman. ‘Do your duty!’ he commanded her.

The old, bitter-faced woman stepped to Æthelflaed’s side. The girl shrank away, but Aldhelm seized her by the shoulders. Æthelflaed shrieked in terror, and Aldhelm’s response was to cuff her hard around the head. I thought Æthelred must respond to that assault on his wife by another man, but he evidently approved for he did nothing except watch as Aldhelm took Æthelflaed by her shoulders again. He held her motionless as the old woman stooped to seize the hem of Æthelflaed’s linen shift. ‘No!’ Æthelflaed protested in a wailing, despairing voice.

‘Show her to us!’ Erkenwald snapped. ‘Show us her thighs and her belly!’

The woman obediently lifted the shift to reveal Æthelflaed’s thighs.

‘Enough!’ I shouted that word.

The woman froze. The priests were stooping to gaze at Æthelflaed’s bare legs and waiting for the dress to be lifted to reveal her belly. Aldhelm still held her by the shoulders, while the bishop was gaping towards the shadows at the church door from where I had spoken. ‘Who is that?’ Erkenwald demanded.

‘You evil bastards,’ I said as I walked forward, my steps echoing from the stone walls, ‘you filthy earslings.’ I remember my anger from that night, a cold and savage fury that had driven me to intervene without thinking of the consequences. My wife’s priests all preach that anger is a sin, but a warrior who does not have anger is no true warrior. Anger is a spur, it is a goad, it overcomes fear to make a man fight, and I would fight for Æthelflaed that night. ‘She is a king’s daughter,’ I snarled, ‘so drop the dress!’

‘You will do as God tells you,’ Erkenwald snarled at the woman, but she dared neither drop the hem nor raise it further.

I pushed my way through the stooping priests, kicking one in the arse so hard that he pitched forward onto the dais at the bishop’s feet. Erkenwald had seized his staff, its silver finial curved like a shepherd’s crook, and he swung it towards me, but checked his swing when he saw my eyes. I drew Serpent-Breath, her long steel scraping and hissing on the scabbard’s throat. ‘You want to die?’ I asked Erkenwald, and he heard the menace in my voice and his shepherd’s staff slowly went down. ‘Drop the dress,’ I told the woman. She hesitated. ‘Drop it, you filthy bitch-hag,’ I snarled, then sensed the bishop had moved and whipped Serpent-Breath around so that her blade shimmered just beneath his throat. ‘One word, bishop,’ I said, ‘just one word, and you meet your god here and now. Gisela!’ I called, and Gisela came to the altar. ‘Take the hag,’ I told her, ‘and take Æthelflaed, and see whether her belly has swollen or whether her thighs have rotted. Do it in decent privacy. And you!’ I turned the blade so that it pointed at Aldhelm’s scarred face, ‘take your hands off King Alfred’s daughter, or I will hang you from Lundene’s bridge and the birds will peck out your eyes and eat your tongue.’ He let go of Æthelflaed.

‘You have no right …’ Æthelred said, finding his tongue.

‘I come here,’ I interrupted him, ‘with a message from Alfred. He wishes to know where your ships are. He wishes you to set sail. He wishes you to do your duty. He wants to know why you are skulking here when there are Danes to kill.’ I put the tip of Serpent-Breath’s blade into the scabbard and let her fall home. ‘And,’ I went on when the sound of the sword had finished echoing in the church, ‘he wishes you to know that his daughter is precious to him, and he dislikes things that are precious to him being maltreated.’ I invented that message, of course.

Æthelred just stared at me. He said nothing, though there was a look of indignation on his jaw-jutting face. Did he believe I came with a message from Alfred? I could not tell, but he must have feared such a message for he knew he had been shirking his duty.

Bishop Erkenwald was just as indignant. ‘You dare to carry a sword in God’s house?’ he demanded angrily.

‘I dare do more than that, bishop,’ I said. ‘You’ve heard of Brother Jænberht? One of your precious martyrs? I killed him in a church and your god neither saved him nor stopped my blade.’ I smiled, remembering my own astonishment as I had cut Jænberht’s throat. I had hated that monk. ‘Your king,’ I said to Erkenwald, ‘wants his god’s work done, and that work is killing Danes, not amusing yourself by looking at a young girl’s nakedness.’

‘This is God’s work!’ Æthelred shouted at me.

I wanted to kill him then. I felt the twitch as my hand went to Serpent-Breath’s hilt, but just then the hag came back. ‘She’s …’ the woman started, then fell silent as she saw the look of hatred I was giving Æthelred.

‘Speak, woman!’ Erkenwald commanded.

‘She shows no signs, lord,’ the woman said grudgingly. ‘Her skin is unmarked.’

‘Belly and thighs?’ Erkenwald pressed the woman.

‘She is pure,’ Gisela spoke from a recess at the side of the church. She had an arm around Æthelflaed and her voice was bitter.

Erkenwald seemed discomfited by the report, but drew himself up and grudgingly acknowledged that Æthelflaed was indeed pure. ‘She is evidently undefiled, lord,’ he said to Æthelred, pointedly ignoring me. Finan was standing behind the watching priests, his presence a threat to them. The Irishman was smiling and watching Aldhelm who, like Æthelred, wore a sword. Either man could have tried to cut me down, but neither touched their weapon.

‘Your wife,’ I said to Æthelred, ‘is not undefiled. She’s defiled by you.’

His face jerked up as though I had slapped him. ‘You are …’ he began.

I unleashed the anger then. I was much taller and broader than my cousin, and I bullied him back from the altar to the side wall of the church, and there I spoke to him in a hiss of fury. Only he could hear what I said. Aldhelm might have been tempted to rescue Æthelred, but Finan was watching him, and the Irishman’s reputation was enough to ensure that Aldhelm did not move. ‘I have known Æthelflaed since she was a small child,’ I told Æthelred, ‘and I love her as if she was my own child. Do you understand that, earsling? She is like a daughter to me, and she is a good wife to you. And if you touch her again, cousin, if I see one more bruise on Æthelflaed’s face, I shall find you and I shall kill you.’ I paused, and he was silent.

I turned and looked at Erkenwald. ‘And what would you have done, bishop,’ I sneered, ‘if the Lady Æthelflaed’s thighs had rotted? Would you have dared kill Alfred’s daughter?’

Erkenwald muttered something about condemning her to a nunnery, not that I cared. I had stopped close beside Aldhelm and looked at him. ‘And you,’ I said, ‘struck a king’s daughter.’ I hit him so hard that he spun into the altar and staggered for balance. I waited, giving him a chance to fight back, but he had no courage left so I hit him again and then stepped away and raised my voice so that everyone in the church could hear. ‘And the King of Wessex orders the Lord Æthelred to set sail.’

Alfred had sent no such orders, but Æthelred would hardly dare ask his father-in-law whether he had or not. As for Erkenwald, I was sure he would tell Alfred that I had carried a sword and made threats inside a church, and Alfred would be angry at that. He would be more angry with me for defiling a church than he would be with the priests for humiliating his daughter, but I wanted Alfred to be angry. I wanted him to punish me by dismissing me from my oath and thus releasing me from his service. I wanted Alfred to make me a free man again, a man with a sword, a shield and enemies. I wanted to be rid of Alfred, but Alfred was far too clever to allow that. He knew just how to punish me.

He would make me keep my oath.

It was two days later, long after Gunnkel had fled from Hrofeceastre, that Æthelred at last sailed. His fleet of fifteen warships, the most powerful fleet Wessex had ever assembled, slid downriver on the ebb tide, propelled by an angry message that was delivered to Æthelred by Steapa. The big man had ridden from Hrofeceastre, and the message he carried from Alfred demanded to know why the fleet lingered while the defeated Vikings fled. Steapa stayed that night at our house. ‘The king is unhappy,’ he told me over supper, ‘I’ve never seen him so angry!’ Gisela was fascinated by the sight of Steapa eating. He was using one hand to hold pork ribs that he flensed with his teeth, while the other fed bread into a spare corner of his mouth. ‘Very angry,’ he said, pausing to drink ale. ‘The Sture,’ he added mysteriously, picking up a new slab of ribs.

‘The Sture?’

‘Gunnkel made a camp there, and Alfred thinks he’s probably gone back to it.’

The Sture was a river in East Anglia, north of the Temes. I had been there once and remembered a wide mouth protected from easterly gales by a long spit of sandy land. ‘He’s safe there,’ I said.

‘Safe?’ Steapa asked.

‘Guthrum’s territory.’

Steapa paused to pull a scrap of meat from between his teeth. ‘Guthrum sheltered him there. Alfred doesn’t like it. Thinks Guthrum has to be smacked.’

‘Alfred’s going to war with East Anglia?’ Gisela asked, surprised.

‘No, lady. Just smacking him,’ Steapa said, crunching his jaws on some crackling. I reckoned he had eaten half a pig and showed no signs of slowing down. ‘Guthrum doesn’t want war, lady. But he has to be taught not to shelter pagans. So he’s sending the Lord Æthelred to attack Gunnkel’s camp on the Sture, and while he’s at it to steal some of Guthrum’s cattle. Just smack him.’ Steapa gave me a solemn look. ‘Pity you can’t come.’

‘It is,’ I agreed.

And why, I wondered, had Alfred chosen Æthelred to lead an expedition to punish Guthrum? Æthelred was not even a West Saxon, though he had sworn an oath to Alfred of Wessex. My cousin was a Mercian, and the Mercians have never been famous for their ships. So why choose Æthelred? The only explanation I could find was that Alfred’s eldest son, Edward, was still a child with an unbroken voice and Alfred himself was a sick man. He feared his own death, and he feared the chaos that could descend on Wessex if Edward took the throne as a child. So Alfred was offering Æthelred a chance to redeem himself for his failure to trap Gunnkel’s ships in the Medwæg, and an opportunity to make himself a reputation large enough to persuade the thegns and ealdormen of Wessex that Æthelred, Lord of Mercia, could rule them if Alfred died before Edward was old enough to succeed.

Æthelred’s fleet carried a message to the Danes of East Anglia. If you raid Wessex, Alfred was saying, then we shall raid you. We shall harry your coast, burn your houses, sink your ships and leave your beaches stinking of death. Alfred had made Æthelred into a Viking, and I was jealous. I wanted to take my ships, but I had been ordered to stay in Lundene, and I obeyed. Instead I watched the great fleet leave Lundene. It was impressive. The largest of the captured warships had thirty oars a side, and there were six of those, while the smallest had banks of twenty. Æthelred was leading almost a thousand men on his raid, and they were all good men; warriors from Alfred’s household and from his own trained troops. Æthelred sailed in one of the large ships that had once carried a great raven’s head, scorched black, on her stem, but that beaked image was gone and now the ship was named Rodbora, which meant ‘carrier of the cross’, and her stem-post was now decorated with a massive cross and she sailed with warriors aboard, and with priests, and, of course, with Æthelflaed, for Æthelred would go nowhere without her.

It was summer. Folk who have never lived in a town during the summer cannot imagine the stench of it, nor the flies. Red kites flocked in the streets, living off carrion. When the wind was north the smell of the urine and animal dung in the tanners’ pits mixed with the city’s own stench of human sewage. Gisela’s belly grew, and my fear for her grew with it.

I went to sea as often as I could. We took Sea-Eagle and Sword of the Lord down the river on the ebb tide and came back with the flood. We hunted ships from Beamfleot, but Sigefrid’s men had learned their lesson and they never left their creek with fewer than three ships in company. Yet, though those groups of ships hunted prey, trade was at last reaching Lundene, for the merchants had learned to sail in large convoys. A dozen ships would keep each other company, all with armed men aboard and so Sigefrid’s pickings were scanty, but so were mine.

I waited two weeks for news of my cousin’s expedition, and learned its fate on a day when I made my usual excursion down the Temes. There was always a blessed moment as we left the smoke and smells of Lundene and felt the clean sea winds. The river looped about wide marshes where herons stalked. I remember being happy that day because there were blue butterflies everywhere. They settled on the Sea-Eagle and on the Sword of the Lord that followed in our wake. One insect perched on my outstretched finger where it opened and closed its wings.

‘That means good luck, lord,’ Sihtric said.

‘It does?’

‘The longer it stays there, the longer your luck lasts,’ Sihtric said, and held out his own hand, but no blue butterfly settled there.

‘Looks like you’ve no luck,’ I said lightly. I watched the butterfly on my finger and thought of Gisela and of childbirth. Stay there, I silently ordered the insect, and it did.

‘I’m lucky, lord,’ Sihtric said, grinning.

‘You are?’

‘Ealhswith’s in Lundene,’ he said. Ealhswith was the whore whom Sihtric loved.

‘There’s more trade for her in Lundene than in Coccham,’ I said.

‘She stopped doing that,’ Sihtric said fiercely.

I looked at him, surprised. ‘She has?’

‘Yes, lord. She wants to marry me, lord.’

He was a good-looking young man, hawk-faced, black-haired and well built. I had known him since he was almost a child, and I supposed that altered my impression of him, for I still saw the frightened boy whose life I had spared in Cair Ligualid. Ealhswith, perhaps, saw the young man he had become. I looked away, watching a tiny trickle of smoke rising from the southern marshes and I wondered whose fire it was and how they lived in that mosquito-haunted swamp. ‘You’ve been with her a long time,’ I said.

‘Yes, lord.’

‘Send her to me,’ I said. Sihtric was sworn to me and he needed my permission to marry because his wife would become a part of my household and thus my responsibility. ‘I’ll talk to her,’ I added.

‘You’ll like her, lord.’

I smiled at that. ‘I hope so,’ I said.

A flight of swans beat between our boats, their wings loud in the summer air. I was feeling content, all but for my fears about Gisela, and the butterfly was allaying that worry, though after a while it launched itself from my finger and fluttered clumsily in the southwards wake of the swans. I touched Serpent-Breath’s hilt, then my amulet, and sent a prayer to Frigg that Gisela would be safe.

It was midday before we were abreast of Caninga. The tide was low and the mudflats stretched into the calm estuary where we were the only ships. I took Sea-Eagle close to Caninga’s southern shore and stared towards Beamfleot’s creek, but I could see nothing useful through the heat haze that shimmered above the island. ‘Looks like they’ve gone,’ Finan commented. Like me he was staring northwards.

‘No,’ I said, ‘there are ships there.’ I thought I could see the masts of Sigefrid’s ships through the wavering air.

‘Not as many as there should be,’ Finan said.

‘We’ll take a look,’ I said, and so we rowed around the island’s eastern tip, and discovered that Finan was right. Over half of Sigefrid’s ships had left the little River Hothlege.

Only three days before there had been thirty-six masts in the creek and now there were just fourteen. I knew the missing ships had not gone upriver towards Lundene, for we would have seen them, and that left only two choices. Either they had gone east and north about the East Anglian coast, or else they had rowed south to make another raid into Cent. The sun, so hot and high and bright, winked reflected dazzling light from the spear-points on the ramparts of the high camp. Men watched us from that high wall, and they saw us turn and hoist our sails and use a small north-east wind that had stirred since dawn to carry us south across the estuary. I was looking for a great smear of smoke that would tell me a raiding party had landed to attack, plunder and burn some town, but the sky over Cent was clear. We dropped the sail and rowed east towards the Medwæg’s mouth, and still saw no smoke, and then Finan, sharp-eyed and posted in our bows, saw the ships.

Six ships.

I was looking for a fleet of at least twenty boats, not some small group of ships, and at first I took no notice, assuming the six were merchant ships keeping company as they rowed towards Lundene, but then Finan came hurrying back between the rowers’ benches. ‘They’re warships,’ he said.

I peered eastwards. I could see the dark flecks of the hulls, but my eyes were not so keen as Finan’s and I could not make out their shapes. The six hulls flickered in the heat haze. ‘Are they moving?’ I asked.

‘No, lord.’

‘Why anchor there?’ I wondered. The ships were on the far side of the Medwæg’s mouth, just off the point called Scerhnesse, which means ‘bright headland’, and it was a strange place to anchor for the currents swirled strong off the low point.

‘I think they’re grounded, lord,’ Finan said. If the ships had been anchored I would have assumed they were waiting for the flood tide to carry them upriver, but grounded boats usually meant men had gone ashore, and the only reason to go ashore was to find plunder.

‘But there’s nothing left to steal on Scaepege,’ I said, puzzled. Scerhnesse lay at the western end of Scaepege, which was an island on the southern side of the Temes’s estuary, and Scaepege had been harried and harrowed and harried again by Viking raids. Few folk lived there, and those that did hid in the creeks. The channel between Scaepege and the mainland was known as the Swealwe, and whole Viking fleets had sheltered there in bad weather. Scaepege and the Swealwe were dangerous places, but not places to find silver or slaves.

‘We’ll go closer,’ I said. Finan went back to the prow as Ralla, in Sword of the Lord, pulled abreast of the Sea-Eagle. I pointed at the distant ships. ‘We’re taking a look at those six boats!’ I called across the gap. Ralla nodded, shouted an order, and his oars bit into the water.

I saw Finan was right as we crossed the Medwæg’s wide mouth; the six were warships, all of them longer and leaner than any cargo-carrying vessel, and all six had been beached. A trickle of smoke drifted south and west, suggesting the crews had lit a fire ashore. I could see no beast-heads on the prows, but that meant nothing. Viking crews might well regard the whole of Scaepege as Danish territory and so take down their dragons, eagles, ravens and serpents to prevent frightening the spirits of the island.

I called Clapa to the steering-oar. ‘Take her straight towards the ships,’ I ordered him, then went forward to join Finan in the prow. Osferth was on one of the oars, sweating and glowering. ‘Nothing like rowing to put on muscle,’ I told him cheerfully, and was rewarded with a scowl.

I clambered up beside the Irishman. ‘They look like Danes,’ he greeted me.

‘We can’t fight six crews,’ I said.

Finan scratched his groin. ‘They making a camp there, you think?’ That was a nasty thought. It was bad enough that Sigefrid’s ships sailed from the northern side of the estuary, without another vipers’ nest being built on the southern bank.

‘No,’ I said, because for once my eyes had proved sharper than the Irishman’s. ‘No,’ I said, ‘they’re not making a camp.’ I touched my amulet.

Finan saw the gesture and heard the anger in my voice. ‘What?’ he asked.

‘The ship on the left,’ I said, pointing, ‘that’s Rodbora.’ I had seen the cross mounted on the stem-post.

Finan’s mouth opened, but he said nothing for a moment. He just stared. Six ships, just six ships, and fifteen had left Lundene. ‘Sweet Jesus Christ,’ Finan finally spoke. He made the sign of the cross. ‘Perhaps the others have gone upriver?’

‘We’d have seen them.’

‘Then they’re coming behind?’

‘You’d better be right,’ I said grimly, ‘or else it’s nine ships gone.’

‘God, no.’

We were close now. The men ashore saw the eagle’s head on my boat and took me for a Viking and some ran into the shallows between two of the stranded ships and made a shield wall there, daring me to attack. ‘That’s Steapa,’ I said, seeing the huge figure at the centre of the shield wall. I ordered the eagle taken down, then stood with my arms outstretched, empty-handed, to show I came in peace. Steapa recognised me, and the shields went down and the weapons were sheathed. A moment later Sea-Eagle’s bows slid soft onto the sandy mud. The tide was rising, so she was safe.

I dropped over the side into water that came to my waist and waded ashore. I reckoned there were at least four hundred men on the beach, far too many for just six ships and, as I neared the shore, I could see that many of those men were wounded. They lay with blood-soaked bandages and pale faces. Priests knelt among them while, at the top of the beach, where pale grass topped the low dunes, I could see that crude driftwood crosses had been driven into newly dug graves.

Steapa waited for me, his face grimmer than ever. ‘What happened?’ I asked him.

‘Ask him,’ Steapa said, sounding bitter. He jerked his head along the beach and I saw Æthelred sitting close to the fire on which a cooking pot bubbled gently. His usual entourage was with him, including Aldhelm, who watched me with a resentful face. None of them spoke as I walked towards them. The fire crackled. Æthelred was toying with a piece of bladderwrack and, though he must have been aware of my approach, he did not look up.

I stopped beside the fire. ‘Where are the other nine ships?’ I asked.

Æthelred’s face jerked up, as though he were surprised to see me. He smiled. ‘Good news,’ he said. He expected me to ask what that news was, but I just watched him and said nothing. ‘We have won,’ he said expansively, ‘a great victory!’

‘A magnificent victory,’ Aldhelm interjected.

I saw that Æthelred’s smile was forced. His next words were halting, as if it took a great effort to string them together. ‘Gunnkel,’ he said, ‘has been taught the power of our swords.’

‘We burned their ships!’ Aldhelm boasted.

‘And made great slaughter,’ Æthelred said, and I saw that his eyes were glistening.

I looked up and down the beach where the wounded lay and where the uninjured sat with bowed heads. ‘You left with fifteen ships,’ I said.

‘We burned their ships,’ Æthelred said, and I thought he was going to cry.

‘Where are the other nine ships?’ I demanded.

‘We stopped here,’ Aldhelm said, and he must have thought I was being critical of their decision to beach the boats, ‘because we could not row against the falling tide.’

‘The other nine ships?’ I asked again, but received no answer. I was still searching the beach and what I sought I could not find. I looked back at Æthelred, whose head had dropped again, and I feared to ask the next question, but it had to be asked. ‘Where is your wife?’ I demanded.

Silence.

‘Where,’ I spoke louder, ‘is Æthelflaed?’

A gull sounded its harsh, forlorn cry. ‘She is taken,’ Æthelred said at last in a voice so small that I could barely hear him.

‘Taken?’

‘A captive,’ Æthelred said, his voice still low.

‘Sweet Jesus Christ,’ I said, using Finan’s favourite expletive. The wind stirred the bitter smoke into my face. For a moment I did not believe what I had heard, but all around me was evidence that Æthelred’s magnificent victory had really been a catastrophic defeat. Nine ships were gone, but ships could be replaced, and half of Æthelred’s troops were missing, yet new men could be found to replace those dead, but what could replace a king’s daughter? ‘Who has her?’ I asked.

‘Sigefrid,’ Aldhelm muttered.

Which explained where the missing ships from Beamfleot had gone.

And Æthelflaed, sweet Æthelflaed, to whom I had made an oath, was a captive.

Our eight ships rode the flooding tide back up the Temes to Lundene. It was a summer’s evening, limpid and calm, in which the sun seemed to linger like a giant red globe suspended in the veil of smoke that clouded the air above the city. Æthelred made the voyage in Rodbora and, when I let Sea-Eagle drop back to row alongside that ship, I saw the black streaks where blood had stained her timbers. I quickened the oar strokes and pulled ahead again.

Steapa travelled with me in the Sea-Eagle and the big man told me what had happened in the River Sture.

It had, indeed, been a magnificent victory. Æthelred’s fleet had surprised the Vikings as they made their encampment on the river’s southern bank. ‘We came at dawn,’ Steapa said.

‘You stayed all night at sea?’

‘Lord Æthelred ordered it,’ Steapa said.

‘Brave,’ I commented.

‘It was a calm night,’ Steapa said dismissively, ‘and at first light we found their ships. Sixteen ships.’ He stopped abruptly. He was a taciturn man and found it difficult to speak more than a few words together.

‘Beached?’ I asked.

‘They were anchored,’ he said.

That suggested the Danes had wanted their vessels to be ready at any state of the tide, but it also meant the ships could not be defended because their crews had been mostly ashore where they were throwing up earth walls to make a camp. Æthelred’s fleet had made short work of the few men aboard the enemy vessels, and then the great rope-wrapped stones that served as anchors had been hauled up and the sixteen ships were towed to the northern bank and beached there. ‘He was going to keep them there,’ Steapa explained, ‘till he was finished, then bring them back.’

‘Finished?’ I asked.

‘He wanted to kill all the pagans before we left,’ Steapa said, and explained how Æthelred’s fleet had marauded up the Sture and its adjacent river, the Arwan, landing men along the banks to burn Danish halls, slaughter Danish cattle and, when they could, to kill Danes. The Saxon raiders had caused panic. Folk had fled inland, but Gunnkel, left shipless in his encampment at the mouth of the Sture, had not panicked.

‘You didn’t attack the camp?’ I asked Steapa.

‘Lord Æthelred said it was too well protected.’

‘I thought you said it was unfinished?’

Steapa shrugged. ‘They hadn’t built the palisade,’ he said, ‘at least on one side, so we could have got in and killed them, but we’d have lost a lot of our own men too.’

‘True,’ I admitted.

‘So we attacked farms instead,’ Steapa went on, and while Æthelred’s men raided the Danish settlements, Gunnkel had sent messengers southwards to the other rivers of the East Anglian coast. There, on those riverbanks, were other Viking encampments. Gunnkel was summoning reinforcements.

‘I told Lord Æthelred to leave,’ Steapa said gloomily, ‘I told him on the second day. I said we’d stayed long enough.’

‘He wouldn’t listen to you?’

‘He called me a fool,’ Steapa said with a shrug. Æthelred had wanted plunder, and so he had stayed in the Sture and his men brought him anything they could find of value, from cooking pots to reaping knives. ‘He found some silver,’ Steapa said, ‘but not much.’

And while Æthelred stayed to enrich himself, the sea-wolves gathered.

Danish ships came from the south. Sigefrid’s ships had sailed from Beamfleot, joining other boats that rowed from the mouths of the Colaun, the Hwealf and the Pant. I had passed those rivers often enough and imagined the lean fast boats sliding out through the mudbanks on the ebbing tides, with their high prows fiercely decorated with beasts and their hulls filled with vengeful men, shields and weapons.

The Danish ships gathered off the island of Horseg, south of the Sture in the wide bay that is haunted by wildfowl. Then, on a grey morning, under a summer rainstorm that blew in from the sea, and on a flooding tide made stronger by a full moon, thirty-eight ships came from the ocean to enter the Sture.

‘It was a Sunday,’ Steapa said, ‘and the Lord Æthelred insisted we listen to a sermon.’

‘Alfred will be pleased to hear that,’ I said sarcastically.

‘It was on the beach,’ Steapa said, ‘where the Danish boats were grounded.’

‘Why there?’

‘Because the priests wanted to drive the evil spirits from the boats,’ he said, and told me how the beast-heads from the captured ships had been stacked in a great pile on the sand. Driftwood had been packed around them, along with straw from a nearby thatch, and then, to loud prayers from the priests, the heap had been set alight. Dragons and eagles, ravens and wolves had burned, their flames leaping high, and the smoke of the great fire must have blown inland as the rain spat and hissed on the burning wood. The priests had prayed and chanted, crowing their victory over the pagans, and no one had noticed the dark shapes coming through the seawards drizzle.

I can only imagine the fear, the flight and the slaughter. Danes leaping ashore. Sword-Danes, spear-Danes, axe-Danes. The only reason so many men had escaped was that so many were dying. The Danes had started their killing, and found so many men to kill that they could not reach those who fled to the ships. Other Danish boats were attacking the Saxon fleet, but Rodbora had held them off. ‘I’d left men aboard,’ Steapa said.

‘Why?’

‘Don’t know,’ he said bleakly. ‘I just had a feeling.’

‘I know that feeling,’ I said. It was the prickle at the back of the neck, the vague unformed suspicion that danger was close, and it was a feeling that should never be ignored. I have seen my hounds suddenly raise their heads from sleep and growl softly, or whine piteously with their eyes staring at me in mute appeal. I know when that happens that thunder is coming, and it always does, but how the dogs sense it I cannot tell. But it must be the same feeling, the discomfort of hidden danger.

‘It was a rare fight,’ Steapa said dully.

We were rounding the last bend in the Temes before the river reached Lundene. I could see the city’s repaired wall, the new timber raw against the older Roman stone. Banners were hung from those ramparts, most of the flags showing saints or crosses; bright symbols to defy the enemy who came every day to inspect the city from the east. An enemy, I thought, who had just won a victory that would stun Alfred.

Steapa was sparing with details of the fight and I had to prise what little I learned out of him. The enemy boats, he said, had mostly landed on the eastern end of the beach, drawn there by the great fire, and Rodbora and seven other Saxon boats had been farther west. The beach was a place of screaming chaos as pagans howled and killed. The Saxons tried to reach the western ships and Steapa had made a shield wall to protect those boats as the fugitives scrambled aboard.

‘Æthelred reached you,’ I commented sourly.

‘He can run fast,’ Steapa said.

‘And Æthelflaed?’

‘We couldn’t go back for her,’ he said.

‘No, I’m sure,’ I said, and knew he spoke the truth. He told me how Æthelflaed had been trapped and surrounded by the enemy. She had been with her maids close to the great fire, while Æthelred had been accompanying the priests who sprinkled holy water on the prows of the captured Danish ships.

‘He did want to go back for her,’ Steapa admitted.

‘So he should,’ I said.

‘But it couldn’t be done,’ he said, ‘so we rowed away.’

‘They didn’t try and stop you?’

‘They tried,’ he said.

‘And?’ I prompted him.

‘Some got on board,’ he said, and shrugged. I imagined Steapa, axe in hand, cutting down the boarders. ‘We managed to row past them,’ he said, as if it had been easy. The Danes, I thought, should have stopped every boat escaping, but the six ships had managed to escape to sea. ‘But eight boats left altogether,’ Steapa added.

So two Saxon boats had been successfully boarded, and I flinched at the thought of the axe-work and sword strokes, of the bottom timbers sloppy with blood. ‘Did you see Sigefrid?’ I asked.

Steapa nodded. ‘He was in a chair. Strapped in.’

‘And do you know if Æthelflaed lives?’ I asked.

‘She lives,’ Steapa said. ‘As we left, we saw her. She was on that ship that was in Lundene? The ship you let go?’

‘The Wave-Tamer,’ I said.

‘Sigefrid’s ship,’ Steapa said, ‘and he showed her to us. He made her stand on the steering platform.’

‘Clothed?’

‘Clothed?’ he asked, frowning as though my question was somehow improper. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘she was clothed.’

‘With any luck,’ I said, hoping I spoke the truth, ‘they won’t rape her. She’s more valuable unharmed.’

‘Valuable?’

‘Brace yourself for the ransom,’ I said as we smelt Lundene’s filthy stench.

Sea-Eagle slid into her dock. Gisela was waiting and I gave her the news, and she gave a small cry as though she were in pain, and then she waited for Æthelred to come ashore, but he ignored her just as he ignored me. He walked uphill towards his palace and his face was pale. His men, those that survived, closed protectively around him.

And I found the stale ink, sharpened a quill and wrote another letter to Alfred.

PART THREE

The Scouring

Nine

We were forbidden to sail down the Temes.

Bishop Erkenwald gave me the order and my instinctive response was to snarl at him, saying that we should have every Saxon ship in the wide estuary harrying the Danes mercilessly. He listened to me without comment and, when I had finished, he appeared to ignore everything I had said. He was writing, copying some book that was propped on his upright desk. ‘And what would your violence achieve?’ he finally asked in an acid voice.

‘It would teach them to fear us,’ I said.

‘To fear us,’ he echoed, saying each word very distinctly and imbuing them with mockery. His quill scratched on the parchment. He had summoned me to his house, which was next to Æthelred’s palace and was a surprisingly comfortless place, with nothing in the main large room except an empty hearth, a bench and the upright desk on which the bishop was writing. A young priest sat on the bench, saying nothing, but watching the two of us anxiously. The priest, I was certain, was simply there to be a witness so that, should an argument arise over what was said in this meeting, the bishop would have someone to back his version. Not that much was being said, for Erkenwald ignored me again for another long period, bending low over the desk with his eyes fixed on the words he laboriously scratched. ‘If I am right,’ he suddenly spoke, though he continued to peer at his work, ‘the Danes have just destroyed the largest fleet ever to be deployed from Wessex. I hardly think they will take fright if you stir the water with your few oars.’

‘So we leave the water calm?’ I asked angrily.

‘I dare say,’ he said, then paused as he made another letter, ‘that the king will want us to do nothing that might aggravate,’ another pause as still another letter was formed, ‘an unfortunate situation.’

‘The unfortunate situation,’ I said, ‘being that his daughter is being raped daily by the Danes? And you expect us to do nothing?’

‘Precisely. You have seized upon the essence of my orders. You are to do nothing to make a bad situation worse.’ He still did not look at me. He dipped the quill in his pot and carefully drained the excess ink from the tip. ‘How do you prevent a wasp from stinging you?’ he asked.

‘By killing it first,’ I said.

‘By remaining motionless,’ the bishop said, ‘and that is how we shall behave now, by doing nothing to aggravate the situation. Do you have any evidence that the lady is being raped?’

‘No.’

‘She is valuable to them,’ the bishop said, repeating the argument I had myself used to Steapa, ‘and I surmise they will do nothing to lessen that value. No doubt you are more informed than I of pagan ways, but if our enemies possess even a scrap of good sense they will treat her with the proper respect due to her rank.’ He at last looked at me, offering a sideways glance of pure loathing. ‘I will need soldiers,’ he said, ‘when the time comes to raise the ransom.’

Meaning my men were to threaten every other man who might possess a battered coin. ‘And how much will that be?’ I asked sourly, wondering what contribution would be expected of me.

‘Thirty years ago in Frankia,’ the bishop was writing again, ‘the Abbot Louis of the monastery of Saint Denis was captured. A pious and good man. The ransom for the abbot and his brother amounted to six hundred and eighty-six pounds of gold and three thousand, two hundred and fifty pounds of silver. The Lady Æthelflaed might be a mere woman, but I cannot imagine our enemies will settle for a dissimilar sum.’ I said nothing. The ransom the bishop had quoted was unimaginable, yet he was surely right in thinking that Sigefrid would want the same or, more likely, a greater amount. ‘So you see,’ the bishop went on coldly, ‘the lady’s value is of considerable significance to the pagans, and they will not wish to devalue her. I have assured the Lord Æthelred on this point, and I would be grateful if you do not disabuse him of that hope?’

‘Have you heard from Sigefrid?’ I asked, thinking that Erkenwald seemed very certain that Æthelflaed was being well treated.

‘No, have you?’ The question was a challenge, implying that I might be in secret negotiations with Sigefrid. I did not answer and the bishop did not expect me to. ‘I foresee,’ he continued, ‘that the king will wish to supervise the negotiations himself. So until he arrives here, or until he offers me contrary orders, you are to stay in Lundene. Your ships will not sail!’

Nor did they. But the Northmen’s ships were sailing. Trade, which had increased through the summer, died to nothing as swarms of beast-headed boats rowed out from Beamfleot to scour the estuary. My best sources of information died with the traders, though a few men did find their way upriver. They were usually fishermen bringing their catch to Lundene’s fish market, and they claimed that over fifty ships now grounded their keels in the drying creek beneath Beamfleot’s high fort. Vikings were flocking to the estuary.

‘They know Sigefrid and his brother will be rich,’ I told Gisela the night after the bishop had ordered me to do nothing provocative.

‘Very rich,’ she said drily.

‘Rich enough to assemble an army,’ I went on bitterly because, once the ransom was paid, the Thurgilson brothers would be gold-givers and ships would come from every sea, swelling into a horde that could drive into Wessex. The brothers’ dream of conquering all the Saxon lands, which had once depended on Ragnar’s help, now looked as though it might come true without any northern help, and all thanks to Æthelflaed’s capture.

‘Will they attack Lundene?’ Gisela asked.

‘If I were Sigefrid,’ I said, ‘I would cross the Temes and slash into Wessex through Cent. He’ll have enough ships to carry an army across the river and we have nowhere near enough to stop him.’

Stiorra was playing with a wooden doll I had carved out of beechwood and which Gisela had clothed with scraps of linen. My daughter looked so intent on her play and so happy, and I tried to imagine losing her. I tried to imagine Alfred’s distress, and found my heart could not even endure the mere thought. ‘The baby’s kicking,’ Gisela said, stroking her belly.

I felt the panic I always experienced when I thought of the approaching childbirth. ‘We must find a name for him,’ I said, hiding my thoughts.

‘Or her?’

‘Him,’ I said firmly, though without joy because the future, that night, seemed so bleak.

Alfred came, as the bishop had foreseen, and once again I was summoned to the palace, though this time we were spared any sermon. The king came with his bodyguard, what was left of it after the disaster on the Sture, and I greeted Steapa in the outer courtyard where a steward collected our swords. The priests had come in force, a flock of cawing crows, but among them were the friendly faces of Father Pyrlig, Father Beocca and, to my surprise, Father Willibald. Willibald, all bounce and cheerfulness, scurried across the courtyard to embrace me. ‘You’re taller than ever, lord!’ he said.

‘And how are you, father?’

‘The Lord sees fit to bless me!’ he said happily. ‘I minister to souls in Exanceaster these days!’

‘I like that town,’ I said.

‘You had a house nearby, didn’t you? With your …’ Willibald paused, embarrassed.

‘With that pious misery I married before Gisela,’ I said. Mildrith still lived, though these days she was in a nunnery and I had long forgotten most of the pain of that unhappy union. ‘And you?’ I asked. ‘You’re married?’

‘To a lovely woman,’ Willibald said brightly. He had been my tutor once, though he had taught me little, yet he was a good man, kind and dutiful.

‘Does the Bishop of Exanceaster still keep the whores busy?’ I asked.

‘Uhtred, Uhtred!’ Willibald chided me, ‘I know you only say these things to shock me!’

‘I also tell the truth,’ I said, which I did. ‘There was a red-headed one,’ I went on, ‘who he really liked. The story was that he liked her to dress in his robes and then …’

‘We have all sinned,’ Willibald interrupted me hurriedly, ‘and fallen short of God’s expectations.’

‘You too? Was she red-headed?’ I asked, then laughed at his discomfort. ‘It’s good to see you, father. So what brings you from Exanceaster to Lundene?’

‘The king, God bless him, wanted the company of old friends,’ Willibald said, then shook his head. ‘He is in a bad way, Uhtred, a bad way. Do not, I pray you, say anything to upset him. He needs prayers!’

‘He needs a new son-in-law,’ I said sourly.

‘The Lord Æthelred is a faithful servant of God,’ Willibald said, ‘and a noble warrior! Perhaps he does not have your reputation yet, but his name inspires fear among our enemies.’

‘It does?’ I asked. ‘What are they frightened of? That they might die laughing if he attacks them again?’

‘Lord Uhtred!’ he chided me again.

I laughed, then followed Willibald into the pillared hall where thegns, priests and ealdormen gathered. This was not an official witanegemot, that royal council of great men that met twice a year to advise the king, but almost every man present was in the Witan. They had travelled from all across Wessex, while others had come from southern Mercia, all summoned to Lundene so that whatever Alfred decided would have the support of both kingdoms. Æthelred was already inside, meeting no one’s eye and slumped in a chair below the dais where Alfred would preside. Men avoided Æthelred, all except Aldhelm who crouched beside his chair and whispered in his ear.

Alfred arrived, accompanied by Erkenwald and Brother Asser. I had never seen the king look so haggard. He had one hand clutched to his belly, suggesting that his sickness was bad, but I do not think that was what gave his face the deep lines and the wan, almost hopeless look. His hair was thinning and, for the first time, I saw him as an old man. He was thirty-six years old that year. He took his chair on the dais, waved a hand to show that men might be seated, but said nothing. It was left to Bishop Erkenwald to say a brief prayer, then ask for any man who had a suggestion to speak up.

They talked, and they talked and then they talked some more. The mystery that gripped them was why no message had come from the camp at Beamfleot. A spy had reported to Alfred that his daughter lived, even that she was being treated with respect as Erkenwald had surmised, but no messenger had come from Sigefrid. ‘He wants us to be the supplicant,’ Bishop Erkenwald suggested, and no one had a better idea. It was pointed out that Æthelflaed was being held prisoner on territory that belonged to King Æthelstan of East Anglia, and surely that Christianised Dane would help? Bishop Erkenwald said a delegation had already travelled to meet the king.

‘Guthrum won’t fight,’ I said, making my first contribution.

‘King Æthelstan,’ Bishop Erkenwald said, stressing Guthrum’s Christian name, ‘is proving a constant ally. He will, I am sure, offer us succour.’

‘He won’t fight,’ I said again.

Alfred waved a weary hand towards me, indicating he wanted to hear what I had to say.

‘Guthrum is old,’ I said, ‘and he doesn’t want war. Nor can he take on the men near Beamfleot. They get stronger every day. If Guthrum fights them, then he might well lose, and if he loses then Sigefrid will be king in East Anglia.’ No one liked that thought, but nor could they argue with it. Sigefrid, despite the wound that Osferth had given him, was becoming ever more powerful and already had enough followers to challenge Guthrum’s forces.

‘I would not want King Æthelstan to fight,’ Alfred said unhappily, ‘for any war will risk my daughter’s life. We must, instead, contemplate the necessity of a ransom.’

There was silence as the men in the room imagined the vast sum that would be needed. Some, the wealthiest, avoided Alfred’s gaze, while all, I am sure, were wondering where they could hide their wealth before Alfred’s tax-collectors and troops came to visit. Bishop Erkenwald broke the silence by observing, with regret, that the church was impoverished or else he would have been happy to contribute. ‘What small sums we have,’ he said, ‘are dedicated to the work of God.’

‘They are, indeed,’ a fat abbot whose chest gleamed with three silver crosses agreed.

‘And the Lady Æthelflaed is now a Mercian,’ a thegn from Wiltunscir growled, ‘so the Mercians must carry the greater burden.’

‘She is my daughter,’ Alfred said quietly, ‘and I will, of course, contribute all I can afford.’

‘But how much will we need?’ Father Pyrlig enquired energetically. ‘We need to know that first, lord King, and that means someone must travel to meet the pagans. If they will not talk to us, then we must talk to them. As the good bishop says,’ and here Pyrlig bowed gravely in Erkenwald’s direction, ‘they want us to be the supplicants.’

‘They wish to humiliate us,’ a man growled.

‘They do indeed!’ Father Pyrlig agreed. ‘So we must send a delegation to suffer that humiliation.’

‘You would go to Beamfleot?’ Alfred asked Pyrlig hopefully.

The Welshman shook his head. ‘Lord King,’ he said, ‘those pagans have cause to hate me. I am not the man to send. The Lord Uhtred, though,’ Pyrlig indicated me, ‘did Erik Thurgilson a favour.’

‘What favour?’ Brother Asser demanded quickly.

‘I warned him about the treachery of Welsh monks,’ I said, and there was a rustle of laughter as Alfred shot me a disapproving look. ‘I let him take his own ship from Lundene,’ I explained.

‘A favour,’ Asser retorted, ‘that has enabled this unhappy situation to occur. If you had killed the Thurgilsons as you should have, then we would not be here.’

‘What brought us here,’ I said, ‘was the stupidity of lingering in the Sture. If you collect a fat flock you don’t leave it grazing beside a wolf’s den.’

‘Enough!’ Alfred said harshly. Æthelred was shuddering with anger. He had not spoken a word so far, but now he turned in his chair and pointed at me. He opened his mouth and I waited for his angry retort, but instead he twisted away and vomited. It was sudden and violent, his stomach voiding itself in a thick, stinking rush. He was jerking as his vomit splashed noisily on the dais. Alfred, appalled, just watched. Aldhelm stepped hastily away. Some of the priests made the sign of the cross. No one spoke or moved to help him. The vomiting appeared to have ceased, but then he twitched again and another spate poured from his mouth. Æthelred spat the last remnants out, wiped his lips on his sleeve and leaned back in his chair with closed eyes and a pale face.

Alfred had watched his son-in-law’s sudden attack, but now turned back to the room and said nothing of what had happened. A servant hovered at the edge of the room, plainly tempted to go to Æthelred’s assistance, but was frightened of trespassing on the dais. Æthelred was groaning slightly, one hand held across his belly. Aldhelm was staring at the pool of vomit as though he had never seen such a thing.

‘Lord Uhtred,’ the king broke the embarrassed silence.

‘Lord King,’ I answered, bowing.

Alfred frowned at me. ‘There are those, Lord Uhtred, who say you are too friendly with the Northmen?’

‘I gave you an oath, lord King,’ I said harshly, ‘and I renewed that oath to Father Pyrlig and then again to your daughter. If the men who say I am too friendly with the Northmen wish to accuse me of breaking that triple oath then I will meet them at sword’s length in any place they wish. And they will face a sword that has killed more Northmen than I can count.’

That brought silence. Pyrlig smiled slyly. Not one man there wanted to fight me, and the only one who might have beaten me, Steapa, was grinning, though Steapa’s grin was a deathly rictus that could have frightened a demon back into its lair.

The king sighed as if my display of anger had been tiresome. ‘Will Sigefrid talk to you?’ he asked.

‘The Earl Sigefrid hates me, lord King.’

‘But will he talk to you?’ Alfred insisted.

‘Either that or kill me,’ I said, ‘but his brother likes me, and Haesten is in debt to me so, yes, I think they’ll talk.’

‘You must also send a skilled negotiator, lord King,’ Erkenwald said unctuously, ‘a man who will not be tempted to do further favours to pagans. I would suggest my treasurer? He is a most subtle man.’

‘He’s also a priest,’ I said, ‘and Sigefrid hates priests. He also has a burning ambition to watch a priest being crucified.’ I smiled at Erkenwald. ‘Maybe you should send your treasurer. Or maybe come yourself?’

Erkenwald stared at me blankly. I assumed he was praying that his god send a thunderbolt to punish me, but his god failed to oblige. The king sighed again. ‘You can negotiate yourself?’ he asked me patiently.

‘I’ve purchased horses, lord,’ I said, ‘so yes, I can negotiate.’

‘Bargaining for a horse is not the same as …’ Erkenwald began angrily, then subsided as the king waved a weary hand towards him.

‘The Lord Uhtred sought to annoy you, bishop,’ the king said, ‘and it is best not to give him the satisfaction of showing that he has succeeded.’

‘I can negotiate, lord King,’ I said, ‘but in this case I’m bargaining for a mare of very great value. She will not be cheap.’

Alfred nodded. ‘Perhaps you should take the bishop’s treasurer?’ he suggested hesitantly.

‘I want only one companion, lord,’ I said, ‘Steapa.’

‘Steapa?’ Alfred sounded surprised.

‘When you face an enemy, lord,’ I explained, ‘then it is well to take a man whose very presence is a threat.’

‘You will take two companions,’ the king corrected me. ‘Despite Sigefrid’s hatred I want my daughter to receive the blessings of the sacraments. You must take a priest, Lord Uhtred.’

‘If you insist, lord,’ I said, not bothering to hide my scorn.

‘I do insist,’ Alfred’s voice regained some of its force. ‘And be back here quickly,’ he went on, ‘for I would have news of her.’ He stood, and everyone else scrambled to their feet and bowed.

Æthelred had not spoken a word.

And I was going to Beamfleot.

One hundred of us rode. Only three of us would go to Sigefrid’s camp, but three men could not ride through the countryside between Lundene and Beamfleot unprotected. This was frontier land, the wild flat land of East Anglia’s border, and we rode in mail, with shields and weapons, letting folk know we were ready to fight. It would have been faster to go by ship, but I had persuaded Alfred that there was an advantage in taking horses. ‘I’ve seen Beamfleot from the sea,’ I had told him the previous evening, ‘and it’s impregnable. A steep hill, lord, and a fort on its summit. I haven’t seen that fort from inland, lord, and I need to.’

‘You need to?’ It had been Brother Asser who answered. He was standing close by Alfred’s chair as though he protected the king.

‘If it comes to a fight,’ I had said, ‘we might have to attack from the landward side.’

The king had looked at me wearily. ‘You want there to be a fight?’ he had asked.

‘The Lady Æthelflaed will die if there’s a fight,’ Asser had said.

‘I want to return your daughter to you,’ I had said to Alfred, ignoring the Welsh monk, ‘but only a fool, lord, would assume we will not have to fight them before the summer is over. Sigefrid is becoming too powerful. If we let his power grow we will have an enemy that can threaten all Wessex, and we have to break him before he becomes too strong.’

‘No fighting now,’ Alfred had insisted. ‘Go there by land if you must, speak to them and bring me news quickly.’

He had insisted on sending a priest, but to my relief it was Father Willibald who was chosen. ‘I’m an old friend of the Lady Æthelflaed,’ Willibald explained as we rode from Lundene. ‘She’s always been fond of me,’ he went on, ‘and I of her.’

I rode Smoca. Finan and my household warriors were with me, as were fifty of Alfred’s picked men who were commanded by Steapa. We carried no banners, instead Sihtric held a leafy alder branch as a signal that we came seeking a truce.

It was an awful country to the east of Lundene, a flat and desolate place of creeks, ditches, reeds, bog grass and wildfowl. To our right, where sometimes the Temes was visible as a grey sheet, the marshland looked dark even under the summer sun. Few folk lived in this wet wasteland, though we did pass some low hovels thatched with reed. No people were apparent. The eel fishermen who lived in the hovels would have seen us coming and hurried their families to safe hiding places.

The track, it was hardly a road, followed slightly higher ground at the edge of the marsh and led across small, thorn-hedged fields that were heavy with clay. The few trees were stunted and wind bent. The further east we went, the more houses we saw, and gradually those buildings became larger. At midday we stopped at a hall to water and rest the horses. The hall had a palisade, and a servant came cautiously from the gate to ask our business. ‘Where are we?’ I demanded of him before answering his question.

‘Wocca’s Dun, lord,’ he answered. He spoke English.

I laughed grimly at that for dun meant hill and there was no hill that I could see, though the hall did stand on a very slight mound. ‘Is Wocca here?’ I asked.

‘His grandson owns the land now, lord. He is not here.’

I slid out of Smoca’s saddle and tossed the reins to Sihtric. ‘Walk him before you let him drink,’ I told Sihtric, then turned back to the servant. ‘So this grandson,’ I asked, ‘to whom does he owe oath-duty?’

‘He serves Hakon, lord.’

‘And Hakon?’ I asked, noting that a Saxon owned the hall, but had sworn an oath to a Dane.

‘Is sworn to King Æthelstan, lord.’

‘To Guthrum?’

‘Yes, lord.’

‘Has Guthrum summoned men?’

‘No, lord,’ the servant said.

‘And if Guthrum did,’ I asked, ‘would Hakon and your master obey?’

The servant looked cautious. ‘They have gone to Beamfleot,’ he said, and that was a truly interesting answer. Hakon, the servant told me, held a wide swathe of this clay-heavy land, which he had been granted by Guthrum, but Hakon was now torn between his oath-sworn allegiance to Guthrum and his fear of Sigefrid.

‘So Hakon will follow the Earl Sigefrid?’ I asked.

‘I think so, lord. A summons came from Beamfleot, lord, I know that much, and my master went there with Hakon.’

‘Did they take their warriors?’

‘Only a few, lord.’

‘The warriors weren’t summoned?’

‘No, lord.’

So Sigefrid was not gathering an army yet, but rather assembling the richer men of East Anglia to tell them what was expected of them. He would want their warriors when the time came, and doubtless he was now enticing them with visions of the riches that would be theirs when Æthelflaed’s ransom was paid. And Guthrum? Guthrum, I supposed, was simply staying silent, while his oath-men were seduced by Sigefrid. He was certainly making no attempt to stop that process and had probably reckoned he was powerless to prevent it in the face of the Norseman’s lavish promises. Better, in that case, to let Sigefrid lead his forces against Wessex than to tempt him to usurp the throne of East Anglia. ‘And Wocca’s grandson,’ I asked even though I knew the answer, ‘your master, he is a Saxon?’

‘Yes, lord. Though his daughter is married to a Dane.’

So it seemed that the Saxons of this dull land would fight for the Danes, perhaps because they had no choice or perhaps because, with marriages, their allegiance was changing.

The servant gave us ale, smoked eel and hard bread and, when we had eaten, we rode on as the sun slid into the west to shine on a great line of hills that rose abruptly out of the flat country. The sun-facing slopes were steep so that the hills looked like a green rampart. ‘That’s Beamfleot,’ Finan said.

‘It’s up there,’ I agreed. Beamfleot would lie at the southern end of the hills though, at this distance, it was impossible to discern the fort. I felt my spirits sinking. If we had to attack Sigefrid then the clear course would have been to lead troops from Lundene, but I had no wish to fight my way up those steep slopes. I could see Steapa eyeing the escarpment with the same foreboding. ‘If it comes to a fight, Steapa!’ I called cheerfully, ‘I’ll send you and your troops up there first!’

I got a sour look as the only reply.

‘They’ll have seen us,’ I said to Finan.

‘They’ve been watching us for an hour, lord,’ he said.

‘They have?’

‘I’ve been watching the glint from their spear-points,’ the Irishman said. ‘They aren’t trying to hide from us.’

It was the beginning of a long summer’s evening as we climbed the hill. The air was warm and the slanting light was beautiful among the leaves that shrouded the slope. A road zig-zagged its way to the heights and, as we slowly climbed, I saw the splinters of light from high above and knew they were reflections from spear-points or helmets. Our enemies had been watching us and were ready for us.

There were just three horsemen waiting. All three were in mail, all wore helmets and the helmets had long horsehair plumes that made their wearers look savage. They had seen Sihtric’s alder branch and, as we neared the summit, the three men spurred towards us. I held up my hand to stop my troops and, accompanied only by Finan, rode to greet the three plumed riders.

‘You come at last,’ one of them called in heavily accented English.

‘We come in peace,’ I said in Danish.

The man laughed. I could not see his face because his helmet had cheek-pieces and all I could make out was his bearded mouth and the glint of his shadowed eyes. ‘You come in peace,’ he said, ‘because you daren’t come any other way. Or do you want us to disembowel your king’s daughter after we’ve all rutted between her thighs?’

‘I would speak with the Earl Sigefrid,’ I said, ignoring his provocation.

‘But does he want to speak with you?’ the man asked. He touched a spur to his horse and the stallion turned prettily, not to any purpose, but merely to show off his rider’s skill in horsemanship. ‘And who are you?’ he asked.

‘Uhtred of Bebbanburg.’

‘I’ve heard the name,’ the man allowed.

‘Then tell it to the Earl Sigefrid,’ I said, ‘and say I bring him greetings from King Alfred.’

‘I’ve heard that name too,’ the man said. He paused, playing with our patience. ‘You may follow the road,’ he finally said, pointing to where the track disappeared over the brow of the hill, ‘and you will come to a great stone. Beside the stone is a hall and that is where you and all your men will wait. Earl Sigefrid will inform you tomorrow if he wishes to speak with you, or whether he wishes you to leave, or whether he desires the amusement of your deaths.’ He touched the spur to his horse’s flank again and all three men rode swiftly away, their hoofbeats loud in the still summer air.

And we rode on to find the hall beside the great stone.

The hall, very ancient, was made from oak that had turned almost black over the years. Its thatched roof was steep, and the building was surrounded by tall oaks that shielded it from the sun. In front of the hall, standing in a patch of rank grass, was a pillar of uncut stone taller than a man. The stone had a hole through it, and in the hole were pebbles and scraps of bone, tokens from the folk who believed that the boulder had magical properties. Finan made the sign of the cross. ‘The old people must have put it there,’ he said.

‘What old people?’

‘The ones who lived here when the world was young,’ he said, ‘the ones who came before us. They put such stones all across Ireland.’ He eyed the stone warily and made his horse pass as far away from it as possible.

A single lame servant waited outside the hall. He was a Saxon and he said the place was named Thunresleam, and that name was old too. It meant Thor’s Grove and it told me that the hall must have been built in a place where the old Saxons, the Saxons who did not acknowledge the Christian’s nailed god, had worshipped their more ancient god, my god, Thor. I bent from Smoca’s saddle to touch the stone, and I sent a prayer to Thor that Gisela would survive childbirth and that Æthelflaed would be rescued. ‘There is food for you, lord,’ the lame servant said, taking Smoca’s reins.

There was not just food and ale, there was a feast, and there were Saxon women slaves to prepare the feast and pour the ale, mead and birch wine. There was pork, beef, duck, dried cod and dried haddock, eels, crabs and goose. There was bread, cheese, honey and butter. Father Willibald feared the food might be poisoned and watched fearfully as I ate a leg of goose. ‘There,’ I said, wiping the grease from my lips onto the back of my hand, ‘I’m still alive.’

‘Praise God,’ Willibald said, still watching me anxiously.

‘Praise Thor,’ I said, ‘this is his hill.’

Willibald made the sign of the cross, then gingerly speared his knife into a piece of duck. ‘I am told,’ he said nervously, ‘that Sigefrid hates Christians.’

‘He does. Especially priests.’

‘Then why does he feed us so well?’

‘To show that he despises us,’ I said.

‘Not to poison us?’ Willibald asked, still worried.

‘Eat,’ I said, ‘enjoy.’ I doubted the Northmen would poison us. They might want us dead, but not before they had humiliated us, yet even so I set a careful guard on the paths leading to the hall. I half feared that Sigefrid’s chosen humiliation would be to burn the hall at dead of night, with us sleeping inside. I had watched a hall-burning once, and it is a terrible thing. Warriors wait outside to drive the panicked occupants back into the inferno of falling, burning thatch in which folk scream before they die. Next morning, after the hall-burning, the victims had been small as little children, their corpses shrunken and blackened, their hands curled, and their burned lips drawn back from their teeth in a terrible and eternal scream of pain.

But no one tried to kill us in that short summer night. I stood guard for a time, listening to the owls, then watching as the sun rose through the thick tangle of trees. Some time later I heard a horn blowing. It made a mournful wail that was repeated three times, then sounded three times again, and I knew Sigefrid must be summoning his men. He would send for us soon, I thought, and I dressed carefully. I chose to wear my best mail, and my fine war helmet and, though the day promised to be warm, my black cloak with its lightning bolt streaking down the long back. I pulled on my boots and strapped on my swords. Steapa also wore mail, though his armour was dirty and tarnished, while his boots were scuffed and his scabbard-covering torn, yet somehow he looked much more fearsome than I did. Father Willibald was dressed in his black gown and carried a small bag, which contained a gospel book and the sacraments. ‘You will translate for me, won’t you?’ he asked earnestly.

‘Why didn’t Alfred send a priest who spoke Danish?’ I asked.

‘I do speak some!’ Willibald said, ‘but not as much as I’d like. No, the king sent me because he thought I might be a comfort to the Lady Æthelflaed.’

‘Make sure you are,’ I said, then turned because Cerdic had come running down the track that led through the trees from the south.

‘They’re coming, lord,’ he said.

‘How many?’

‘Six, lord. Six horsemen.’

The six men rode into the clearing about the hall. They stopped and looked around them. Their helmet masks restricted their vision, forcing them to move their heads extravagantly in order to see our picketed horses. They were counting heads, making sure I had not sent a scouting party to explore the country. Finally, satisfied that no such party existed, their leader deigned to look at me. I thought he was the same man who had greeted us on the hilltop the previous day. ‘You alone must come,’ he said, pointing at me.

‘Three of us are coming,’ I said.

‘You alone,’ he insisted.

‘Then we leave for Lundene now,’ I said, and turned. ‘Pack up! Saddles! Hurry! We’re going!’

The man made no fight of it. ‘Three, then,’ he said carelessly, ‘but you do not ride to Earl Sigefrid’s presence. You walk.’

I made no fight of that. I knew it was part of Sigefrid’s purpose to humiliate us, and how better than to make us walk to his camp? Lords rode while common men walked, but Steapa, Father Willibald and I meekly walked behind the six horsemen as they followed a track through the trees and out onto a wide grassy down that overlooked the sun-shimmering Temes. The down was covered by crude shelters, places built by the new crews who had come to support Sigefrid in anticipation of the treasure he would soon possess and distribute.

I was sweating fiercely by the time we climbed the slope to Sigefrid’s encampment. I could see Caninga now, and the eastern part of the creek, both places I knew intimately from their seaward side, but which I had never seen from this eagle’s height. I could see, too, that there were now many more ships crammed into the drying Hothlege. The Vikings roamed the world in search of a weak spot into which they could pour with axe, sword and spear, and Æthelflaed’s capture had revealed just such an opportunity and so the Northmen gathered.

Hundreds of men waited inside the gate. They made a passageway towards the fort’s great hall and the three of us had to walk between those twin grim lines of bearded, armed men towards two big farm wagons that had been placed together to make a long platform. In the centre of that makeshift stage was a chair in which Sigefrid slouched. He was in his black bear robe despite the heat. His brother Erik stood to one side of the big chair while Haesten, grinning slyly, stood on the other. A row of helmeted guards was behind the trio, while in front of them, hanging from the wagons’ beds, were banners of ravens, eagles and wolves. On the ground in front of Sigefrid were the standards captured from Æthelred’s fleet. The Lord of Mercia’s own great banner of a prancing horse was there, and beside it were flags showing crosses and saints. The standards were soiled, and I guessed the Danes had taken it in turns to piss on the captured flags. There was no sign of Æthelflaed. I had half expected that we should see her paraded in public, but she must have been under guard in one of the dozen buildings on the hilltop.

‘Alfred has sent his puppies to yelp at us!’ Sigefrid announced as we reached the fouled banners.

I took off my helmet. ‘Alfred sends you greetings,’ I said. I had half expected to be met by Sigefrid inside his hall, then realised he had wanted to greet me in the open air so that as many of his followers as possible could see my humiliation.

‘You whine like a puppy,’ Sigefrid said.

‘And he wishes you joy of the Lady Æthelflaed’s company,’ I went on.

He scowled in puzzlement. His broad face looked fatter, indeed his body looked fatter because the wound Osferth had given him had taken away the use of his legs but not his appetite, and so he sat, a cripple, slumped and gross, staring indignantly at me. ‘Joy of her, puppy?’ he growled. ‘What are you yapping about?’

‘The King of Wessex,’ I said loudly, letting the audience hear me, ‘has other daughters! There is the lovely Æthelgifu, and her sister, Æfthryth, so what need does he have of Æthelflaed? And what use are daughters anyway? He is a king and he has sons, Edward and Æthelweard, and sons are a man’s glory, while daughters are his burden. So he wishes you joy of her, and sent me to bid her farewell.’

‘The puppy tries to amuse us,’ Sigefrid said scornfully. He did not believe me, of course, but I hoped I had sown a small seed of doubt, just enough to justify the low ransom I was going to offer. I knew, and Sigefrid knew, that the final price would be huge, but maybe, if I repeated it often enough, I could persuade him that Alfred did not care deeply about Æthelflaed. ‘Perhaps I shall take her for my lover?’ Sigefrid suggested.

I noticed Erik, beside his brother, shifting uncomfortably.

‘She would be fortunate in that,’ I said carelessly.

‘You lie, puppy,’ Sigefrid said, but there was just the smallest note of uncertainty in his voice. ‘But the Saxon bitch is pregnant. Perhaps her father will buy her child?’

‘If it’s a boy,’ I said dubiously, ‘perhaps.’

‘Then you must make an offer,’ Sigefrid said.

‘Alfred might pay a small sum for a grandchild,’ I began.

‘Not to me,’ Sigefrid interrupted me. ‘You must persuade Weland of your good faith.’

‘Wayland?’ I asked, thinking he meant the blacksmith to the gods.

‘Weland the Giant,’ Sigefrid said and, smiling, nodded past me. ‘He’s a Dane,’ Sigefrid went on, ‘and no man has ever out-wrestled Weland.’

I turned and facing me was the biggest man I have ever seen. A huge man. A warrior, doubtless, though he wore neither weapons nor mail. He wore leather trews and boots, but above the waist he was naked to reveal muscles like twisted cord under a skin that had been scored and coloured with ink so that his wide chest and massive arms writhed with black dragons. His forearms were thick with rings larger than any I had seen, for no normal ring would have fitted Weland. His beard, black as the dragons on his body, was tied with small amulets, while his skull was bald. His face was malevolent, scarred, brutish, though he smiled when I caught his eye.

‘You must persuade Weland,’ Sigefrid said, ‘that you do not lie, puppy, or else I will not talk with you.’

I had expected something of this sort. In Alfred’s mind we would have come to Beamfleot, conducted a civilised discussion and reached a moderate compromise that I would duly report back to him, but I was more used to the Northmen. They needed amusement. If I were to negotiate then I must first show my strength. I must needs prove myself, but as I stared at Weland I knew I would fail. He was a head taller than me, and I was a head taller than most men, but the same instinct that had warned me of an ordeal had also persuaded me to bring Steapa.

Who smiled his death’s-head smile. He had not understood anything I had said to Sigefrid, or Sigefrid to me, but he understood Weland’s stance. ‘He has to be beaten?’ he asked me.

‘Let me do it,’ I said.

‘Not while I live,’ Steapa answered. He unbuckled his sword belt and gave the weapons to Father Willibald, then hauled the heavy mail coat over his head. The watching men, anticipating the fight, gave a raucous cheer.

‘You had best hope your man wins, puppy,’ Sigefrid said behind me.

‘He will,’ I said, with a confidence I did not feel.

‘In the spring, puppy,’ Sigefrid growled, ‘you stopped me from crucifying a priest. I am still curious, so if your man loses I shall crucify that piece of priestly piss beside you.’

‘What’s he saying?’ Willibald had seen the malevolent glance Sigefrid had shot in his direction and, unsurprisingly, sounded nervous.

‘He says you’re not to use your Christian magic to influence the fight,’ I lied.

‘I shall pray anyway,’ Father Willibald said bravely.

Weland was stretching his huge arms and flexing his thick fingers. He stamped his feet, then settled into a wrestler’s stance, though I doubted this fight would keep to the grappling rules of wrestling. I had been watching him carefully. ‘He’s favouring his right leg,’ I said quietly to Steapa, ‘which could mean his left leg was wounded once.’

I might have saved my breath because Steapa was not listening to me. His eyes were narrow and furious, while his face, always stark, was now a taut mask of concentrated anger. He looked like a madman. I remembered the one time I had fought him. It had been on a day just before Yule, the same day that Guthrum’s Danes had descended unexpectedly on Cippanhamm, and Steapa had been calm before that fight. He had seemed to me, on that far-off winter’s day, like a workman going about his trade, confident in his tools and skill, but that was not how he looked now. Now he was in a private fury, and whether it was because he fought a hated pagan, or whether because, in Cippanhamm, he had underestimated me, I did not know. Nor did I care. ‘Remember,’ I tried again, ‘Wayland the Smith was lame.’

‘Start!’ Sigefrid called behind me.

‘God and Jesus,’ Steapa bellowed, ‘hell and Christ!’ He was not reacting to Sigefrid’s command, indeed I doubt he even heard it. Instead he was summoning his last tension, like a bowman drawing the cord of a hunting bow an extra inch to give the arrow deadly force, then Steapa howled like an animal and charged.

Weland charged too and they met like stags in the rutting season.

The Danes and Norsemen had crowded around, making a circle that was limited by the spears of Sigefrid’s bodyguard, and the watching warriors gave a gasp as those two men-animals crashed together. Steapa had lowered his head, hoping to drive his skull into Weland’s face, but Weland had moved at the last instant and instead their bodies slammed together and there was a flurry as they sought holds on each other. Steapa had a handful of Weland’s trews, Weland was pulling on Steapa’s hair, and both were using their free hands to flail at each other with clenched fists. Steapa tried to bite Weland, Weland butted him, then Steapa reached down in an attempt to crush Weland’s groin, and there was another desperate flurry as Weland brought a massive knee hard up between Steapa’s thighs.

‘Dear Jesus,’ Willibald murmured beside me.

Weland broke away from Steapa’s grip and punched hard at Steapa’s face and the sound of the fist landing was like the splintering wet noise of a butcher’s axe striking meat. There was blood pouring from Steapa’s nose now, but he seemed oblivious to it. He traded blows, driving his fists at Weland’s ribs and head, then straightened his fingers and jabbed hard at the Dane’s eyes. Weland managed to avoid the gouging thrust and landed a knuckle-crunching blow on Steapa’s throat so that the Saxon staggered back, suddenly unable to breathe.

‘Oh, my God, my God,’ Willibald whispered, making the sign of the cross.

Weland followed fast, punching, then using his heavy arm rings to clout Steapa’s skull so that the metal ornaments raked across the Saxon’s scalp. More blood showed. Steapa was reeling, staggering, gasping, choking, and suddenly he dropped to his knees and the watching crowd gave a great jeer at his weakness. Weland drew back a mighty fist, but, before the blow was even launched, Steapa threw himself forward and seized the Dane’s left ankle. He pulled and twisted, and Weland went down like a felled oak. He crashed onto the turf and Steapa, snarling and bleeding, threw himself on top of his enemy and started punching again.

‘They’ll kill each other,’ Father Willibald said in a frightened voice.

‘Sigefrid won’t allow his champion to die,’ I said, though having said it I wondered if that was true. I turned to look at Sigefrid and found that he was watching me. He gave me a sly smile, then looked back to the fighters. This was his game, I thought. The outcome of the battle would make no difference to the discussions. Nothing, except perhaps Father Willibald’s life, depended on the savage display. It was just a game.

Weland managed to turn Steapa so they lay side by side on the grass. They exchanged ineffective blows and then, as if by mutual consent, rolled away from each other and stood again. There was a pause as both men drew breath, then they crashed together a second time. Steapa’s face was a pulp of blood, Weland’s bottom lip and left ear were bleeding, one eye was almost closed and his ribs had taken a pounding. For a moment the two men grappled, seeking holds, feet shifting, grunting, then Weland managed to grasp Steapa’s trews and threw him so that the big Saxon turned on the Dane’s left hip and thumped down to the turf. Weland raised his foot to stamp Steapa’s groin, and Steapa seized the foot and twisted.

Weland yelped. It was an odd, small sound from such a big man, and the damage being done to him seemed trivial after the hammering he had already taken, but Steapa had at last remembered that Wayland the Smith had been lamed by Nidung, and his twisting of the Dane’s foot was aggravating an ancient injury. Weland tried to pull away, but lost his balance and fell again, and Steapa, breathing thick and spitting blood, crawled towards him and began hitting again. He was hitting blindly, his hammer fists thumping on arms, chest and head. Weland responded by trying to gouge out Steapa’s eyes, but the Saxon snapped at the groping hand with his teeth and I distinctly heard the crunch as he bit off Weland’s small finger. Weland twitched away, Steapa spat the finger out and dropped his huge hands onto the Dane’s neck. He started to squeeze and Weland, choking for breath, began to jerk and flap like a banked trout.

‘Enough!’ Erik called.

No one moved. Weland’s eyes were widening while Steapa, blood blinded and teeth bared, had his hands around the Dane’s neck. Steapa was making mewing noises, then grunting as he tried to drive his fingers into the Dane’s gullet.

‘Enough!’ Sigefrid roared.

Steapa’s blood dripped onto Weland’s face as the Saxon throttled the Dane. I could hear Steapa growling and knew he would never stop until the huge man was dead and so I pushed past one of the horizontal spears that held the spectators back. ‘Stop!’ I shouted at Steapa, and when he ignored me I drew Wasp-Sting and slapped the flat of her short blade hard across his bloodied skull. ‘Stop!’ I shouted again.

He snarled at me and I thought, for an instant, he was going to attack me, but then sense came to his half-closed eyes and he let go of Weland’s neck and stared up at me. ‘I won,’ he said angrily. ‘Tell me I won!’

‘Oh, you won,’ I said.

Steapa got to his feet. He stood unsteadily, then he braced himself on spread legs and punched both arms into the summer air. ‘I won!’ he shouted.

Weland was still gasping for breath. He tried to stand, but fell back again.

I turned to Sigefrid. ‘The Saxon won,’ I said, ‘and the priest lives.’

‘The priest lives,’ it was Erik who answered. Haesten was grinning, Sigefrid looked amused, and Weland was making a grating noise as he tried to breathe.

‘Then make your offer,’ Sigefrid said to me, ‘for Alfred’s bitch.’

And the haggling could begin.

Ten

Sigefrid was carried from the wagon platform by four men who struggled to lift his chair and lower it safely to the ground. He shot me a resentful scowl, as if I were to blame for his crippled condition, which, I suppose, I was. The four men carried the chair to his hall and Haesten, who had neither greeted me nor even acknowledged my presence other than by smiling slyly, gestured that we should follow.

‘Steapa needs help,’ I said

‘A woman will mop his blood,’ Haesten said carelessly, then laughed suddenly. ‘So you discovered Bjorn was an illusion?’

‘A good one,’ I acknowledged grudgingly.

‘He’s dead now,’ Haesten said, with as much feeling as if he spoke of a hound that had died. ‘He caught a fever about two weeks after you saw him. And now he can’t come from his grave any more, the bastard!’ Haesten wore a gold chain now, a rope of thick links that hung heavy on his broad chest. I remembered him as a young man, he had been scarce more than a boy when I had rescued him, but now I saw the adult in Haesten and I did not like what I saw. His eyes were friendly enough, but they had a guarded quality as if, behind them, was a soul ready to strike like a snake. He punched my arm familiarly. ‘You know this royal Saxon bitch is going to cost you a lot of silver?’

‘If Alfred decides he wants her back,’ I said airily, ‘then I suppose he might pay something.’

Haesten laughed at that. ‘And if he doesn’t want her back? We’ll take her around Britain, around Frankia and back to our homeland, and we’ll strip her naked and strap her to a frame with her legs open, and let everyone come and see the King of Wessex’s daughter. You want that for her, Lord Uhtred?’

‘You want me for an enemy, Earl Haesten?’ I asked.

‘I think we’re enemies already,’ Haesten said, for once allowing the truth to show, but he immediately smiled as if to prove he was not serious. ‘Folk will pay good silver to see the daughter of the King of Wessex, don’t you think? And men will pay gold to enjoy her.’ He laughed. ‘I think your Alfred will want to prevent that humiliation.’

He was right, of course, though I dared not acknowledge it. ‘Has she been harmed?’ I asked.

‘Erik won’t let us near her!’ Haesten said, evidently amused. ‘No, she’s unscratched. If you’re selling a sow you don’t beat her with a holly stick, do you?’

‘True,’ I said. Beating a pig with a stick made from a branch of holly left bruises so deep that the beast’s compacted flesh could never be properly salt-cured. Haesten’s entourage waited nearby and among them I recognised Eilaf the Red, the man whose hall had been used to show me Bjorn, and he gave me a small bow. I ignored the courtesy.

‘We’d best go in,’ Haesten said, gesturing towards Sigefrid’s hall, ‘and see how much gold we can squeeze out of Wessex.’

‘I must see Steapa first,’ I said, though by the time I found Steapa he was surrounded by Saxon women slaves, who were using a lanolin salve on his cuts and bruises. He did not need me and so I followed Haesten into the hall.

A ring of stools and benches had been placed around the hall’s central hearth. Willibald and I were given two of the lowest stools, while Sigefrid glared at us from his chair on the far side of the empty hearth. Haesten and Erik took their places on either side of the cripple, then other men, all of them with lavish arm rings, filled the circle. These, I knew, were the more important Northmen, the ones who had brought two or more ships, and the men who, if Sigefrid succeeded in conquering Wessex, would be rewarded with rich grants of land. Their followers crowded at the hall’s edges where women distributed horns of ale. ‘Make your offer,’ Sigefrid commanded me abruptly.

‘She is a daughter, not a son,’ I said, ‘so Alfred is not minded to pay a great sum. Three hundred pounds of silver would seem adequate.’

Sigefrid stared at me for a long while, then stared around the hall where the men watched and listened. ‘Did I hear a Saxon fart?’ he demanded, and was rewarded with laughter. He sniffed ostentatiously, then wrinkled his nose, while the spectators erupted into a chorus of farting noises. Then Sigefrid slammed a huge fist onto the arm of his chair and the hall went immediately silent. ‘You insult me,’ he said, and I saw the anger in his eyes. ‘If Alfred is minded to offer so little, then I am minded to bring the girl here now and make you watch while we tup her. Why shouldn’t I!’ He struggled in the chair as if he wanted to get to his feet, then slumped back. ‘Is that what you want, you Saxon fart? You want to see her raped?’

The anger, I thought, had been feigned. Just as I had to try and diminish Æthelflaed’s value, so Sigefrid had to exaggerate the threat to her, but I had noticed a flicker of disgust on Erik’s face when Sigefrid suggested rape, and that disgust had been aimed at his brother, not at me. I kept my voice calm. ‘The king,’ I said, ‘gave me some discretion to increase his offer.’

‘Oh, what a surprise!’ Sigefrid said sarcastically, ‘so let me discover the limits of your discretion. We wish to be given ten thousand pounds of silver and five thousand pounds of gold.’ He paused, wanting a response from me, but I kept silent. ‘And the money,’ Sigefrid finally went on, ‘is to be brought here by Alfred himself. He is to pay it in person.’

That was a long day, a very long day, lubricated by ale, mead and birch wine, and the negotiations were punctuated by threats, anger and insults. I drank little, just some ale, but Sigefrid and his captains drank heavily and that, perhaps, is why they yielded more than I expected. The truth is they wanted money; they wanted a boatload of silver and gold so they could hire more men and more weapons and so begin their conquest of Wessex. I had made a rough estimate of the numbers in that high fort and reckoned Sigefrid could assemble an army of about three thousand men, and that was nowhere near sufficient to invade Wessex. He needed five or six thousand men, and even that many might not be sufficient, but if he could raise eight thousand warriors then he would win. With such an army he could conquer Wessex and become the crippled king of her fertile fields, and to get those extra warriors he needed silver, and if he did not receive the ransom then even the men he now possessed would quickly melt away in search of other lords who could give them bright gold and shining silver.

By mid afternoon they had settled for three thousand pounds of silver and five hundred pounds of gold. They still insisted Alfred deliver the money in person, but I resolutely refused that demand, even going so far as to stand and pluck Father Willibald’s arm, telling him we were leaving because we could reach no agreement. Many of the spectators were bored, and more than a few were drunk, and they growled with anger when they saw me stand so that, for a moment, I thought we would be attacked, but then Haesten intervened.

‘What about the bitch’s husband?’ he asked.

‘What about him?’ I asked, turning back as the hall slowly quietened.

‘Doesn’t her husband call himself the Lord of Mercia?’ Haesten enquired, mocking the title with laughter. ‘So let the Lord of Mercia bring the money.’

‘And let him beg me for his wife,’ Sigefrid added, ‘on his knees.’

‘Agreed,’ I said, surprising them by the ease of my surrender to their suggestion.

Sigefrid frowned, suspecting I had given in much too easily. ‘Agreed?’ he asked, not sure he had heard me correctly.

‘Agreed,’ I said, sitting again. ‘The Lord of Mercia will deliver the ransom and he will go on his knees to you.’ Sigefrid was still suspicious. ‘The Lord of Mercia is my cousin,’ I explained, ‘and I hate the little bastard,’ and at that even Sigefrid laughed.

‘The money is to be here before the full moon,’ he said, then pointed a blunt finger at me, ‘and you come the day before to tell me the silver and gold is on its way. You will fly a green branch at your masthead as a signal you come in peace.’

He wanted the full day’s warning of the ransom’s arrival so he could assemble as many men as possible to witness his triumph, and so I agreed to come the day before the treasure ship sailed, but explained that he could not expect that to happen soon because such a vast sum would take time to collect. Sigefrid growled at that, but I hurried on, assuring him that Alfred was a man who kept his word and that, by the next full moon, as large a down payment as could be assembled would be brought to Beamfleot. Æthelflaed was to be released then, I insisted, and the rest of the silver and gold would arrive before the following full moon. They haggled over those demands, but by now the bored men in the hall were getting restless and angry, so Sigefrid yielded the point that the ransom could be paid in two parts, and I yielded that Æthelflaed would not be freed until the second part had been delivered. ‘And I wish to see the Lady Æthelflaed now,’ I said, making my last demand.

Sigefrid waved a careless hand. ‘Why not? Erik will take you.’ Erik had hardly spoken all day. Like me he had stayed sober, and had neither joined in the insults nor the laughter. Instead he had sat, serious and withdrawn, his watchful eyes going from his brother to me. ‘You will eat with us tonight,’ Sigefrid said. He smiled suddenly, showing some of the charm I had felt when I had first met him in Lundene. ‘We shall celebrate our agreement with a feast,’ he went on, ‘and your men at Thunresleam will also be fed. You can talk to the girl now! Go with my brother.’

Erik led Father Willibald and me towards a smaller hall that was guarded by a dozen men in long mail coats, all of them carrying shields and weapons. It was plainly the place where Æthelflaed was being held captive and it lay close to the seawards rampart of the camp. Erik did not speak as we walked, indeed he seemed almost oblivious of my company, keeping his eyes fixed so firmly on the ground at his feet that I had to steer him around some trestles on which men were shaping new oars. The long curling wood-shavings peeled off and smelt oddly sweet in the late afternoon warmth. Erik stopped just beyond the trestles and turned on me with a frown. ‘Did you mean what you said today?’ he demanded angrily.

‘I said a lot today,’ I answered cautiously.

‘About King Alfred not wanting to pay much for the Lady Æthelflaed? Because she’s a girl?’

‘Sons are worth more than daughters,’ I said truthfully enough.

‘Or were you just bargaining?’ he asked fiercely.

I hesitated. It struck me as a strange question because Erik was surely clever enough to have seen through that feeble attempt to lower Æthelflaed’s value, but there was real passion in his voice and I sensed he needed to hear the truth. Besides, nothing I said now could change the arrangements I had made with Sigefrid. The two of us had drunk the scot-ale to show that we had reached agreement, we had spat on our hands and touched palms, then sworn on a hammer amulet to keep faith with each other. That agreement was made, and that meant I could now tell the truth to Erik. ‘Of course I was bargaining,’ I said. ‘Æthelflaed is dear to her father, very dear. He’s suffering because of all this.’

‘I thought you had to be bargaining,’ Erik said, sounding wistful. He turned and stared across the wide estuary of the Temes. A dragon ship was sliding on the flooding tide towards the creek, her oar-blades rising and falling to catch and reflect the settling sun with every lazy stroke. ‘How much would the king have paid for his daughter?’ he asked.

‘Whatever was necessary,’ I said.

‘Truly?’ He sounded eager now. ‘He set no limit?’

‘He told me,’ I answered truthfully, ‘to pay whatever was necessary to take Æthelflaed home.’

‘To her husband,’ he said flatly.

‘To her husband,’ I agreed.

‘Who should die,’ Erik said, and he shuddered uncontrollably, a swift shudder, but something that told me he had a touch of his brother’s anger in his soul.

‘When the Lord Æthelred comes with the gold and silver,’ I warned Erik, ‘then you cannot touch him. He will come under a banner of truce.’

‘He hits her! Is that true?’ The question was abrupt.

‘Yes,’ I said.

Erik stared at me for a heartbeat and I could see him struggling to control that sudden burst of anger. He nodded and turned. ‘This way,’ he said, leading me towards the smaller hall. The hall’s guards, I noticed, were all older men, and I guessed they were trusted not just to guard Æthelflaed, but not to molest her either. ‘She has not been harmed,’ Erik said, perhaps reading my thoughts.

‘So I’ve been assured.’

‘She has three of her own maids here,’ Erik went on, ‘and I gave her two Danish girls, both nice girls. And I put these guards on the house.’

‘Men you trust,’ I said.

‘My men,’ he said warmly, ‘and yes, trustworthy.’ He held out a hand to check me. ‘I’ll bring her out here to meet you,’ he explained, ‘because she likes being in the open air.’

I waited while Father Willibald looked nervously back at the Northmen who watched us from outside Sigefrid’s hall. ‘Why are we meeting her out here?’ he asked.

‘Because Erik says she likes being in the fresh air,’ I explained.

‘But will they kill me if I give her the sacrament here?’

‘Because they think you’re doing Christian magic?’ I asked. ‘I doubt it, father.’ I watched as Erik pulled aside the leather curtain that served as the hall’s door. He had said something to the guards first, and those warriors now moved to each side, leaving an open space between the building’s facade and the fort’s walls. Those ramparts were a thick bank of earth, only some three feet high, but I knew their farther side would fall a much greater depth. The bank was topped by a palisade of stout oak logs that had been sharpened into points. I could not imagine climbing the hill from the creek and then trying to cross that formidable wall. But nor could I envisage attacking from the fort’s landwards side, climbing in the open down to the ditch, wall, and palisade that protected this place. It was a good camp, not impregnable, but its capture would be unimaginably expensive in men’s lives.

‘She lives,’ Father Willibald breathed, and I looked back to the hall to see Æthelflaed ducking under the leather curtain that was being held aside by an unseen hand. She looked smaller and younger than ever and, though her pregnancy had at last begun to show, she still looked lissom. Lissom and vulnerable, I thought, and then she saw me, and a smile came to her face. Father Willibald started towards her, but I held him back by gripping his shoulder. Something in Æthelflaed’s demeanour made me detain him. I had half expected Æthelflaed to run to me in relief, but instead she hesitated by the door and the smile she had offered me was merely dutiful. She was pleased to see me, that was certain, but there was a wariness in her eyes until she turned to watch Erik follow her through the curtain. He gestured that she should greet me, and only then, when she had received his encouragement, did she come towards me.

And now her face was radiant.

And I remembered her face on the day she had been married in her father’s new church in Wintanceaster. She looked the same today as she had then. She looked happy. She glowed. She walked as lightly as a dancer, and she smiled so beautifully, and I recalled how I had thought, in that church, that she had been in love with love, and that, I suddenly realised, was the difference between that day and this.

Because the radiant smile was not for me. She looked behind once more and caught Erik’s eye, and I just stared. I should have known from everything Erik had said. I should have known, for it was as plain as new-shed blood on virgin snow.

Æthelflaed and Erik were in love.

Love is a dangerous thing.

It comes in disguise to change our life. I had thought I loved Mildrith, but that was lust, though for a time I had believed it was love. Lust is the deceiver. Lust wrenches our lives until nothing matters except the one we think we love, and under that deceptive spell we kill for them, give all for them, and then, when we have what we have wanted, we discover that it is all an illusion and nothing is there. Lust is a voyage to nowhere, to an empty land, but some men just love such voyages and never care about the destination.

Love is a voyage too, a voyage with no destination except death, but a voyage of bliss. I loved Gisela, and we were fortunate because our threads had come together and stayed together and were twined about each other, and the three Norns, for a time at least, were kind to us. Love even works when the threads do not lie comfortingly side by side. I had come to see that Alfred loved his Ælswith, though she was like a streak of vinegar in his milk. Perhaps he just got used to her, and perhaps love is friendship more than it is lust, though the gods know the lust is always there. Gisela and I had gained that contentment, as Alfred did with Ælswith, though I think our voyage was happier because our boat danced on sunlit seas and was driven by a brisk warm wind.

And Æthelflaed? I saw it in her face. I saw in her radiance all her sudden love and all the unhappiness that was to come, and all the tears, and all the heartbreak. She was on a voyage, and it was a journey of love, but it was sailing into a storm so bleak and dark that my own heart almost broke for her.

‘Lord Uhtred,’ she said as she came close.

‘My lady,’ I said, and bowed to her, and then we said nothing.

Willibald chattered, but I do not think either of us heard him. I looked at her and she smiled at me and the sun shone on that springy high turf beneath the singing skylarks, but all I could hear was thunder wrecking the sky and all I could see were waves shattering in white-whipping fury and a ship swamping and her crew drowning in despair. Æthelflaed was in love.

‘Your father sends his affection,’ I said, finding my voice.

‘Poor Father,’ she said. ‘Is he angry with me?’

‘He shows no anger to anybody,’ I said, ‘but he should be furious with your husband.’

‘Yes,’ she agreed calmly, ‘he should.’

‘And I am here to arrange your release,’ I told her, ignoring my certainty that release was the very last thing she now desired, ‘and you will be pleased to know, my lady, that all is agreed and you will be home soon.’

She showed no pleasure at that news. Father Willibald, blind to her true feelings, beamed at her, and Æthelflaed rewarded him with a wry smile. ‘I am here to give you the sacraments,’ Willibald said.

‘I would like that,’ Æthelflaed answered gravely, then looked up at me and, for an instant, there was despair on her face. ‘Will you wait for me?’ she asked.

‘Wait for you?’ I asked, puzzled by the question.

‘Out here,’ she explained, ‘and dear Father Willibald can pray with me inside.’

‘Of course,’ I said.

She smiled her thanks and led Willibald back to the hall while I went to the ramparts and climbed the brief bank so that I could lean on the sun-warmed palisade and stare down into the creek so far below. The dragon ship, her carved head dismounted, was rowing into the channel and I watched as men unchained the moored guard-ship that blocked the Hothlege. The blocking ship was tethered at bow and stern by heavy chains connected to massive posts sunk into the muddy banks and the crew slipped the ship’s stern chain and then paid it out with a long rope. The chain sank to the creek bed as the ship swung on her bow chain to open like a gate on the incoming tide to clear the passage. The newly-arrived boat was rowed past, then the blocking ship’s crew hauled on the rope to retrieve the chain and so dragged the ship back to bar the creek again. There were at least forty men on that blocking ship, and they were not just there to haul on lines and chains. The flanks of the ship had been built up with extra strakes, all of heavy timber, so that her sheerline was well above the height of any vessel that might attack her. To assault that blocking ship would be like tackling the palisade of a fortress. The dragon ship glided up the Hothlege, passing the boats hauled high on the muddy creek bank where men were caulking the planks with hair and tar. Smoke from the fires under the tar pots drifted up the slope where gulls circled, their cries raucous in the afternoon’s warmth.

‘Sixty-four ships,’ Erik said. He had climbed up beside me.

‘I know,’ I said, ‘I counted them.’

‘And by next week,’ Erik said, ‘we will have a hundred crews here.’

‘And you’ll run out of food with so many mouths to feed.’

‘There’s plenty of food here,’ Erik said dismissively. ‘We have fish traps and eel traps, we net wildfowl and eat well. And the prospect of silver and gold buys a lot of wheat, barley, oats, meat, fish and ale.’

‘It will buy men too,’ I said.

‘It will,’ he agreed.

‘And thus,’ I said, ‘Alfred of Wessex pays for his own destruction.’

‘So it would seem,’ Erik said quietly. He stared southwards to where great clouds piled over Cent, their tops silver white and their bases dark above the distant green land.

I turned to look at the encampment inside its ring of ramparts and saw Steapa, walking with a slight limp and with his head bandaged, appear from a hut. He looked slightly drunk. He saw me, waved and sat in the shade of Sigefrid’s hall where he appeared to fall asleep. ‘Do you think,’ I said, my back still turned on Erik, ‘that Alfred has not thought of what you’ll buy with the ransom money?’

‘But what can he do about it?’

‘That’s not for me to tell you,’ I said, trying to imply that there was an answer. In truth, if seven or eight thousand Northmen appeared in Wessex then we would have no choice but to fight, and the battle, I thought, would be horrendous. It would be a blood-letting even greater than Ethandun, and at its end there would most likely be a new king in Wessex and a new name for the kingdom. Norseland, perhaps.

‘Tell me about Guthred,’ Erik asked abruptly.

‘Guthred!’ I turned back to him, surprised by the question. Guthred was Gisela’s brother and King of Northumbria, and what he had to do with Alfred, Æthelflaed or Erik I could not imagine.

‘He’s a Christian, isn’t he?’ Erik asked.

‘So he says.’

‘Is he?’

‘How would I know?’ I asked. ‘He claims to be a Christian, but I doubt he’s given up his worship of the true gods.’

‘You like him?’ Erik asked anxiously.

‘Everyone likes Guthred,’ I said, and that was true, yet it constantly astonished me that a man so affable and indecisive had held on to his throne for so long. Mainly, I knew, that was because my brother-in-law had the support of Ragnar, my soul brother, and no man would want to fight Ragnar’s wild forces.

‘I was thinking,’ Erik said, and then fell silent, and in his silence I suddenly understood what he was dreaming.

‘You were thinking,’ I told him the brutal truth, ‘that you and Æthelflaed can take a ship, maybe your brother’s ship, and go to Northumbria and live under Guthred’s protection?’

Erik stared at me as though I were a magician. ‘She told you?’ he asked.

‘Your faces told me,’ I said.

‘Guthred would protect us,’ Erik said.

‘How?’ I asked. ‘You think he’ll summon his army if your brother comes after you?’

‘My brother?’ Erik asked, as if Sigefrid would forgive him anything.

‘Your brother,’ I said harshly, ‘who is expecting a payment of three thousand pounds of silver and five hundred pounds of gold, and if you take Æthelflaed away, then he loses that money. You think he won’t want her back?’

‘Your friend, Ragnar,’ Erik suggested hesitantly.

‘You want Ragnar to fight for you?’ I asked. ‘Why should he?’

‘Because you ask him to,’ Erik said firmly. ‘Æthelflaed says you love each other like brothers.’

‘We do.’

‘Then ask him,’ he demanded.

I sighed and stared at those distant clouds and thought how love wrenches our lives and drives us to such sweet insanity. ‘And what will you do,’ I asked, ‘against the murderers who come in the night? Against the vengeful men who will burn your hall?’

‘Guard against them,’ he said stubbornly.

I watched the clouds pile higher and thought that Thor would be sending his thunderbolts down to the fields of Cent before the summer evening was over. ‘Æthelflaed is married,’ I said gently.

‘To a vicious bastard,’ Erik said angrily.

‘And her father,’ I went on, ‘regards marriage as sacred.’

‘Alfred won’t fetch her back from Northumbria,’ Erik said confidently, ‘no West Saxon army could reach that far.’

‘He will send priests to gnaw her conscience, though,’ I said, ‘and how do you know he won’t send men to fetch her? It doesn’t have to be an army. One crew of determined men might be enough.’

‘All I ask,’ Erik said, ‘is a chance! A hall in some valley, fields to till, beasts to raise, a place to be at peace!’

I said nothing for a while. Erik, I thought, was building a ship in his dreams, a beautiful ship, a swift-hulled ship of elegance, but it was all a dream! I closed my eyes, trying to frame my words. ‘Æthelflaed,’ I finally said, ‘is a prize. She has value. She is a king’s daughter and her marriage portion was land. She’s rich, she’s beautiful, she’s valuable. Any man who wants to be rich will know where she is. Any scavenger wanting a fast ransom will know where to find her. You will never have peace.’ I turned and looked at him. ‘Every night when you bar your door you will fear the enemies in the dark and every day you will look for enemies. There will be no peace for you, none.’

‘Dunholm,’ he said flatly.

I half smiled. ‘I know the place,’ I said.

‘Then you know that it is a fortress that cannot be captured,’ Erik said stubbornly.

‘I captured it,’ I said.

‘And no one else will do what you did,’ Erik said, ‘not till the world falls. We can live in Dunholm.’

‘Ragnar holds Dunholm.’

‘Then I will swear oaths to him,’ Erik said fervently, ‘I will become his man, I will swear my life to him.’

I thought about that for a moment, testing Erik’s wild dream against the harsh realities of this life. Dunholm, cradled in its loop of the river and poised on its high crag, was indeed almost unassailable. A man might think of dying in his bed if he held Dunholm, because even a handful of troops was sufficient to defend the steep rocky path that was its only approach. And Ragnar, I knew, would be amused by Erik and Æthelflaed, and so I felt myself being seduced by Erik’s passion. Maybe his dream was not as crazy as I thought? ‘But how,’ I asked, ‘do you take Æthelflaed from here without your brother knowing?’

‘With your help,’ he said.

And with that answer I could hear the three Norns laughing. A horn blew in the camp, a summons, I supposed, to the feast that Sigefrid had promised. ‘I am sworn to Alfred,’ I said flatly.

‘I don’t ask you to break that oath,’ Erik said.

‘Yes, you do!’ I said sharply. ‘Alfred gave me a mission. I have fulfilled half of it. The other half is to retrieve his daughter!’

Erik’s big fists curled and uncurled on the palisade’s top. ‘Three thousand pounds of silver,’ he said, ‘and five hundred pounds of gold. Think how many men that will buy.’

‘I have thought of it.’

‘A crew of seasoned warriors can be purchased for a pound of gold,’ Erik said.

‘True.’

‘And we have enough men now to challenge Wessex.’

‘You can challenge Wessex, but not defeat it.’

‘But we will, when we have the gold and the men.’

‘True,’ I allowed again.

‘And the gold will bring more men,’ Erik went on relentlessly, ‘and more ships, and either this autumn or next spring we will lead a horde into Wessex. We will make the army you defeated at Ethandun look small. We shall blacken the land. We shall bring spears and axes and swords to Wessex. We will burn your towns, enslave your children, use your women, take your land and kill your men. Is that what serving Alfred means to you?’

‘That is what your brother plans?’

‘And to do it,’ Erik said, ignoring my question for he knew I already knew its answer, ‘he must sell Æthelflaed back to her father.’

‘Yes,’ I acknowledged. If no ransom was paid then the men already encamped in and around Beamfleot would vanish like dew on a hot morning. No more ships would come and Wessex would not be threatened.

‘Your oath, as I understand it,’ Erik said respectfully, ‘is to serve Alfred of Wessex. Do you serve him, Lord Uhtred, by allowing my brother to become rich enough to destroy him?’

So love, I thought, had turned Erik against his brother. Love would make him slash a blade through every oath he had ever sworn. Love has power over power itself. The horn blew again, more urgently. Men were hurrying towards the great hall. ‘Your brother,’ I said, ‘knows you love Æthelflaed?’

‘He believes I love her for now, but will lose her for silver. He thinks I use her for my pleasure and he is amused by that.’

‘And do you use her?’ I asked harshly, looking into his honest eyes.

‘Is that your business?’ he asked defiantly.

‘No,’ I said, ‘but you do want my help.’

He hesitated, then nodded. ‘I would not call it that,’ he said, sounding defensive, ‘but we love each other.’

So Æthelflaed had drunk the bitter water before the sin and that, I thought, was very clever of her. I smiled for her, then went to Sigefrid’s feast.

Æthelflaed was seated in the place of honour to Sigefrid’s right, and I was next to her. Erik was on the farther side of Sigefrid, with Haesten beside him. Æthelflaed, I noticed, never looked at Erik. No one watching, and plenty of men in the hall were curious about the King of Wessex’s daughter, could surely have guessed that she had become his lover.

The Northmen know how to give a feast. The food was plentiful, the ale was generous and the entertainment diverting. There were jugglers and stilt walkers, musicians and acrobats, and lunatics who dissolved the lower tables into gusts of laughter. ‘We should not laugh at the mad,’ Æthelflaed told me. She had hardly eaten, except to nibble at a bowl of seethed cockles.

‘They get treated well,’ I said, ‘and it’s surely better to be fed and housed than left to the beasts.’ I was watching a naked madman convulsively search his groin. He kept peering around at the laughing tables, unable to understand the noise. A tangle-haired woman, egged on by raucous shouts, took off her clothes one by one, not knowing why she did it.

Æthelflaed stared at the table. ‘There are monasteries that will look after the insane,’ she said.

‘Not where the Danes rule,’ I said.

She was silent for a while. Two dwarves were dragging the now naked woman to the naked man and the watching men were collapsing with laughter. Æthelflaed looked up briefly, shuddered and stared down at the table again. ‘You talked to Erik?’ she asked. We could talk English safely for no one could overhear us, and even if they could they would not have understood most of what we said.

‘As you meant me to,’ I observed, realising that was why she had insisted on taking Father Willibald into the hall. ‘Did you make a proper confession?’

‘Is that any business of yours?’

‘No,’ I said, then laughed.

She looked at me and offered a very shy grin. She blushed. ‘So will you help us?’

‘To do what?’

She frowned. ‘Erik didn’t tell you?’

‘He said you wanted my help, but what sort of help?’

‘Help us to leave here,’ she said.

‘And what will your father do to me if I help you?’ I asked, and got no answer. ‘I thought you hated the Danes.’

‘Erik is Norse,’ she said.

‘Danes, Norse, Northmen, Vikings, pagans,’ I said, ‘they’re all your father’s enemies.’

She glanced down at the open space beside the hearth where the two naked lunatics were now wrestling instead of making love as the audience had doubtless anticipated. The man was much bigger, but more stupid, and the woman, to huge cheers, was beating him on the head with a handful of floor rushes. ‘Why do they let them do that?’ Æthelflaed asked.

‘Because it amuses them,’ I said, ‘and because they don’t have a pack of black-robed clergy telling them what’s right and what’s wrong, and that, my lady, is why I like them.’

She looked down again. ‘I didn’t want to like Erik,’ she said in a very small voice.

‘But you did.’

There were tears in her eyes. ‘I couldn’t help it,’ she said. ‘I prayed that it wouldn’t happen, but the more I prayed the more I thought about him.’

‘And so you love him,’ I said.

‘Yes.’

‘He’s a good man,’ I assured her.

‘You think so?’ she asked eagerly.

‘I do, truly.’

‘And he’s going to become a Christian,’ she went on enthusiastically. ‘He’s promised me that. He wants to. Really!’

That did not surprise me. Erik had long shown a fascination with Christianity, and I doubted it had taken much persuasion on Æthelflaed’s part. ‘And what of Æthelred?’ I asked her.

‘I hate him,’ she hissed those words so vehemently that Sigefrid turned to stare at her. He shrugged, unable to comprehend her, then looked back at the naked fight.

‘You will lose your family,’ I warned her.

‘I will make a family,’ she said firmly. ‘Erik and I will make a family.’

‘And you’ll live among the Danes whom you told me you hate.’

‘You live among the Christians, Lord Uhtred,’ she said with a flash of her old mischief.

I smiled at that. ‘You’re sure about this?’ I asked her, ‘about Erik?’

‘Yes,’ she said intensely, and that was love speaking, of course.

I sighed. ‘If I can,’ I said, ‘I will help you.’

She laid a small hand on mine. ‘Thank you.’

Two dogs had begun to fight now and the guests were cheering the beasts on. Rushlights were lit and candles brought to the top table as the summer evening dimmed outside. More ale came, and birch wine too, and the first drunks were singing raucously. ‘They’ll start fighting soon,’ I told Æthelflaed, and they did. Four men suffered broken bones before the feast was over, while another had an eye gouged out before his angry drunken assailant was pulled away from him. Steapa was seated next to Weland, and the two men, though they spoke different languages, were sharing a silver-rimmed drinking horn and appeared to be making disparaging comments about the brawlers who spilt across the floor in drunken rage. Weland was obviously drunk himself, for he draped a huge arm around Steapa’s shoulders and began to sing.

‘You sound like a calf being gelded!’ Sigefrid roared at Weland, then demanded that a real singer be fetched, and so a blind skald was given a chair by the hearth and he struck his harp and chanted a song of Sigefrid’s prowess. He told of the Franks whom Sigefrid had killed, of the Saxons cut down by Sigefrid’s sword, Fear-Giver, and of the Frisian women who had been widowed by the bear-cloaked Norseman. The poem mentioned many of Sigefrid’s men by name, recounting their heroism in battle, and as each new name was chanted the man would stand and his friends would cheer him. If the named hero was dead then the listening men beat three times on the tables so that the dead man would hear the solemn ovation in Odin’s hall. But the biggest cheers were for Sigefrid, who hoisted an ale-horn every time his name was mentioned.

I stayed sober. That was hard, for I was tempted to match Sigefrid horn for horn, but I knew I had to return to Lundene next morning and that meant Erik had to finish his talk with me that same night, though in truth the eastern sky was already lightening by the time I left the hall. Æthelflaed, escorted by sober and older guards, had left for her bed hours before. Drunken men were sprawled in noisy sleep beneath the benches as I walked out, while Sigefrid was slumped on the table. He had opened one eye and frowned as I left. ‘We have agreement?’ he asked sleepily.

‘We have an agreement,’ I confirmed.

‘Bring the money, Saxon,’ he growled, and fell back to sleep.

Erik was waiting for me outside Æthelflaed’s quarters. I had expected him to be there, and we took our old places on the rampart from where I watched the grey light spread like a stain across the calm waters of the estuary.

‘That’s Wave-Tamer,’ Erik said, nodding down at the ships drawn up on the muddy beach. He might have been able to discern the beautiful boat he had made, but to me the whole fleet was nothing but black shapes in the grey. ‘I have scraped her hull clean,’ he told me, ‘caulked her, and made her swift again.’

‘Your crew can be trusted?’

‘They are my oath-men. They can be trusted.’ Erik paused. A small wind lifted his dark hair. ‘But what they will not do,’ he went on in a low voice, ‘is fight my brother’s men.’

‘They might have to.’

‘They will defend themselves,’ he said, ‘but not attack. There are kinsmen on both sides.’

I stretched, yawned, and thought of the long ride home to Lundene. ‘So your problem,’ I said, ‘is the ship that blocks the channel?’

‘Which is manned by my brother’s men.’

‘Not Haesten’s?’

‘I would kill his men,’ he said bitterly, ‘there’s no kinship there.’

Nor affection either, I noted. ‘So you want me to destroy the ship?’ I asked him.

‘I want you to open the channel,’ he corrected me.

I stared at that dark blocking ship with her reinforced sheerline. ‘Why don’t you just demand that they get out of your way?’ I asked. That seemed to me to be the least complicated and safest way for Erik to escape. The chained ship’s crew was accustomed to moving the heavy hull to allow vessels to enter or leave the creek, so why would they stop Erik?

‘No ships are to sail before the ransom arrives,’ Erik explained.

‘None?’

‘None,’ he said flatly.

And that made some sense, because what was to stop some enterprising man taking three or four ships upriver to wait in a reed-shrouded creek for Alfred’s treasure fleet to pass, then slide out, oars beating, swords drawn and men howling? Sigefrid had pinned his monstrous ambition on the arrival of the ransom and he would not risk losing it to some Viking even more scoundrelly than himself, and that thought suggested the person who probably embodied Sigefrid’s fear. ‘Haesten?’ I asked Erik.

He nodded. ‘A sly man.’

‘Sly,’ I agreed, ‘and untrustworthy. An oath-breaker.’

‘He will share the ransom, of course,’ Erik said, ignoring the fact that if he got his wish then no ransom would ever be paid, ‘but I’m certain he would rather have it all.’

‘So no ships sail,’ I said, ‘until you sail. But can you take Æthelflaed to your ship without your brother knowing?’

‘Yes,’ he said. He drew a knife from its sheath on his belt. ‘It’s a fortnight till the next full moon,’ he went on, then scored a deep mark in the sharpened top of an oak log. ‘That’s today,’ he said, tapping the fresh cut, then carved another deep mark with the blade’s sharp edge. ‘Tomorrow’s dawn,’ he continued, indicating the new cut, then went on slashing the palisade’s top until he had made seven raw scars in the timbers. ‘Will you come at dawn one week from now?’

I nodded cautiously. ‘But the moment I attack,’ I pointed out, ‘someone blows a horn and wakes the camp.’

‘We’ll be afloat,’ he said, ‘ready to go. No one can reach you from the camp before you’re back out at sea.’ He looked worried at my doubts. ‘I’ll pay you!’

I smiled at those words. Dawn was bleaching the world, colouring the low long wisps of cloud with streaks of pale gold and edges of shining silver. ‘Æthelflaed’s happiness is my pay,’ I said. ‘And one week from today,’ I went on, ‘I’ll open your channel for you. You can sail away together, make landfall at Gyruum, ride hard to Dunholm and give Ragnar my greetings.’

‘You’ll send him a message?’ Erik asked anxiously, ‘to warn him of our coming?’

I shook my head. ‘Carry the message for me,’ I said, and some instinct made me turn to see that Haesten was watching us. He was standing with two companions outside the big hall where he was strapping on his swords, brought by Sigefrid’s steward from the place where we had all surrendered our weapons before the feast. There was nothing strange in what Haesten did, except my senses prickled because he seemed so watchful. I had a horrid suspicion that he knew what Erik and I talked about. He went on looking at me. He was very still, but at last he gave me a low, mocking bow and walked away. Eilaf the Red, I saw, was one of his two companions. ‘Does Haesten know about you and Æthelflaed?’ I asked Erik.

‘Of course not. He just thinks I’m responsible for guarding her.’

‘He knows you like her?’

‘That’s all he knows,’ Erik insisted.

Sly, untrustworthy Haesten, who owed me his life. Who had broken his oath. Whose ambitions probably outstretched even Sigefrid’s dreams. I watched him until he went through the doorway of what I assumed was his own hall. ‘Be careful with Haesten,’ I warned Erik, ‘I think he is easily underestimated.’

‘He’s a weasel,’ Erik said, dismissing my fears. ‘What message do I take to Ragnar?’ he asked.

‘Tell Ragnar,’ I said, ‘that his sister is happy and let Æthelflaed give him news of her.’ There was no point in writing anything, even if I had possessed parchment or ink, because Ragnar could not read, but Æthelflaed knew Thyra and her news of Beocca’s wife would convince Ragnar that the runaway lovers told the truth. ‘And one week from now,’ I said, ‘as the upper edge of the sun touches the world’s rim, be ready.’

Erik thought for a heartbeat, making a fast computation in his head. ‘It will be low tide,’ he said, ‘slack water. We’ll be ready.’

For madness, I thought, or for love. Madness. Love. Madness.

And how the three sisters at the world’s root must have been laughing.

I spoke little as we rode home. Finan chattered happily, saying how generous Sigefrid had been with his food, ale and female slaves. I half listened until the Irishman finally sensed my mood and fell into a companionable silence. It was not till we were in sight of the banners on Lundene’s eastern ramparts that I gestured he should ride ahead with me, leaving my other men out of earshot. ‘Six days from now,’ I said, ‘you must have the Sea-Eagle ready for a voyage. We’ll need ale and food for three days.’ I did not expect to be away that long, but it was good to be prepared. ‘Clean her hull between tides,’ I went on, ‘and make sure every man is sober when we leave. Sober, with weapons sharpened, and battle-ready.’

Finan half smiled, but said nothing. We were riding through hovels that had sprung up on the edges of the marshlands beside the Temes. Many of the folk who lived here were slaves who had escaped their Danish masters in East Anglia, and they made a living by scratching through the refuse of the city, though a few had planted tiny fields of rye, barley or oats. The meagre harvest was being gathered and I listened to the scrape of blades cutting through the handfuls of stalks.

‘No one in Lundene is to know we’re sailing,’ I told Finan.

‘They won’t,’ the Irishman said grimly.

‘Battle-ready,’ I told him again.

‘They’ll be that, so they will.’

I rode in silence for a while. People saw my mail and scuttled out of our way. They touched their foreheads or knelt in the mud, then scrambled when I threw pennies to them. It was evening and the sun was already behind the great cloud of smoke rising from Lundene’s cooking fires, and the stench of the city drifted sour and thick in the air. ‘Did you see that ship blocking the channel at Beamfleot?’ I asked Finan.

‘I took a squint at her, lord.’

‘If we attacked her,’ I said, ‘they’d see us coming. They’d be behind that raised sheerline.’

‘Almost a man’s height above us,’ Finan agreed, revealing that he had done more than just take a squint.

‘So think how we might get that ship out of the channel.’

‘Not that we’re thinking of doing that, lord, are we?’ he asked slyly.

‘Of course not,’ I said, ‘but think on it anyway.’

Then a squeal of ungreased hinges announced the opening of the nearest gate and we rode into the city’s gloom.

Alfred had been waiting for us, and messengers had already informed him of our return so that, even before I could greet Gisela, I was summoned to the high palace. I went with Father Willibald, Steapa and Finan. The king waited for us in the great hall that was lit with the high candles by which he reckoned the passing time. Wax ran thick down the banded shafts and a servant was trimming the wicks so that the light stayed steady. Alfred had been writing, but he stopped as we entered. Æthelred was also there, as were Brother Asser, Father Beocca and Bishop Erkenwald.

‘Well,’ Alfred snapped. It was not anger, but worry that made his voice so sharp.

‘She lives,’ I said, ‘she is unharmed, she is treated with the respect due to her rank, she is properly and well guarded, and they will sell her back to us.’

‘Thank God,’ Alfred said, and made the sign of the cross. ‘Thank God,’ he repeated, and I thought he was going to drop to his knees. Æthelred said nothing, but just stared at me with serpent eyes.

‘How much?’ Bishop Erkenwald demanded.

‘Three thousand pounds of silver and five hundred of gold,’ I said, and explained that the first metal had to be delivered by the next full moon and the balance was to be taken downriver one month later. ‘And the Lady Æthelflaed will not be released until the last coin is paid,’ I finished.

Bishop Erkenwald and Brother Asser both winced at the amount of the ransom, though Alfred showed no such reaction. ‘We will be paying for our own destruction,’ Bishop Erkenwald growled.

‘My daughter is dear to me,’ Alfred said mildly.

‘With that money,’ the bishop warned, ‘they will raise thousands of men!’

‘And without that money?’ Alfred turned to me, ‘what will happen to her?’

‘Humiliation,’ I said. In truth Æthelflaed might have found happiness with Erik if the ransom was not paid, but I could hardly say as much. Instead I described the fate that Haesten had suggested so wolfishly. ‘She’ll be taken to every place where Northmen live,’ I said, ‘and she will be shown naked to mocking crowds.’ Alfred winced. ‘Then,’ I went on remorselessly, ‘she’ll be whored to the highest bidders.’

Æthelred gazed at the floor, the churchmen were silent. ‘It is the dignity of Wessex that is at stake,’ Alfred said quietly.

‘So men must die for the dignity of Wessex?’ Bishop Erkenwald asked.

‘Yes!’ Alfred was suddenly angry. ‘A country is its history, bishop, the sum of all its stories. We are what our fathers made us, their victories gave us what we have, and you would make me leave my descendants a tale of humiliation? You want men to tell how Wessex was made a laughing stock to howling heathens? That is a story, bishop, that would never die, and if that tale is told then whenever men think of Wessex they will think of a Princess of Wessex paraded naked to pagans. Whenever they think of England, they will think of that!’ And that, I thought, was interesting. We rarely used that name in those days; England. That was a dream, but Alfred, in his anger, had lifted a curtain on his dream and I knew then he wanted his army to continue north, ever north, until there was no more Wessex, no more East Anglia, no more Mercia and no more Northumbria, only England.

‘Lord King,’ Erkenwald said with unnatural humility, ‘I do not know if there will be a Wessex if we pay the pagans to raise an army.’

‘Raising an army takes time,’ Alfred said firmly, ‘and no pagan army can attack until after the harvest. And once the harvest is gathered we can raise the fyrd. We will have the men to oppose them.’ That was true, but most of our men would be untrained farmers, while Sigefrid would bring howling, hungry Northmen who had been bred to the sword. Alfred turned on his son-in-law. ‘And I will expect the fyrd of southern Mercia to be at our side.’

‘It will be, lord,’ Æthelred said enthusiastically. There was no sign on his face of the sickness that had assailed him the last time I had seen him in this hall. His colour was back, and his jaunty confidence seemed undiminished.

‘Maybe this is God’s doing,’ Alfred said, speaking again to Erkenwald. ‘In His mercy He has offered our enemies a chance to gather in their thousands so that we can defeat them in one great battle.’ His voice strengthened with that thought. ‘The Lord is on my side,’ he said firmly, ‘I will not fear!’

‘The word of the Lord,’ Brother Asser said piously, making the sign of the cross.

‘Amen,’ Æthelred said, ‘and amen. We shall defeat them, lord!’

‘But before you win that great victory,’ I said to Æthelred, taking a malicious pleasure in what I was about to say, ‘you have a duty to perform. You are to deliver the ransom in person.’

‘By God, I will not!’ Æthelred said indignantly, then caught Alfred’s eye and subsided back into his chair.

‘And you are to kneel to Sigefrid,’ I said, twisting the knife.

Even Alfred looked appalled at that. ‘Sigefrid insists on that condition?’ he asked.

‘He does, lord,’ I said, ‘even though I argued with him! I appealed, lord, and I argued and I pleaded, but he would not yield.’

Æthelred was just staring at me with horror on his face.

‘Then so be it,’ Alfred said. ‘Sometimes the Lord God asks more than we can bear, but for His glorious sake we must endure it.’

‘Amen,’ I said fervently, deserving and receiving a sceptical look from the king.

They talked for as long as it took one of Alfred’s banded candles to burn through two hours’ worth of wax, and it was all wasted talk; talk of how the money was to be raised, and how it was to be transported to Lundene and how it was to be delivered to Beamfleot. I made suggestions while Alfred wrote notes on the margin of his parchment, and it was all useless effort because if I was successful then no ransom would be paid and Æthelflaed would not return and Alfred’s throne would be safe.

And I was to make it all possible.

In one week’s time.

Eleven

Darkness. The last light of day was just gone, and a new darkness now shrouded us.

There was moonlight, but the moon was hidden so that the cloud edges were silvered, and beneath that vast sky of silver, black and starlight, the Sea-Eagle slid down the Temes.

Ralla was at the steering-oar. He was a far better seaman than I could ever hope to be, and I trusted him to take us around the river’s sweeping bends in the blackness. Most of the time it was impossible to tell where the water ended and the marshes began, but Ralla seemed unconcerned. He stood with legs spread and one foot tapping the deck in time to the slow beat of the oars. He said little, but now and then made tiny course corrections with the oar’s long loom and never once did a blade touch the shelving mud at the river’s margins. Occasionally the moon would slither out from behind a cloud and the water would suddenly gleam a glittering silver before us. There were red sparks on the banks that came and went, small fires in the marsh hovels.

We were using the last of the ebb to take us downriver. The intermittent sheen of moon on water showed the banks going ever farther apart as the river widened imperceptibly into the sea. I kept glancing northwards, waiting to see the glow in the sky that would betray the fires in and around the high camp at Beamfleot.

‘How many pagan ships at Beamfleot?’ Ralla suddenly asked me.

‘Sixty-four a week ago,’ I said, ‘but probably nearer eighty by now. Maybe a hundred or more?’

‘And just us, eh?’ he asked, amused.

‘Just us,’ I agreed.

‘And there’ll be more ships up the coast,’ Ralla said. ‘I heard they were making a camp at Sceobyrig?’

‘They’ve been there a month now,’ I said, ‘and there’s at least fifteen crews there. Probably thirty by now.’ Sceobyrig was a desolate spit of mud and muddy land a few miles east of Beamfleot and the fifteen Danish ships had landed there and made a fort of earth walls and wooden posts. I suspected they had chosen Sceobyrig because there was scarcely any room left in Beamfleot’s creek any more, and because their proximity to Sigefrid’s fleet offered them his protection. Doubtless they paid him silver, and doubtless they hoped to follow him into Wessex to snap up what plunder they could. On the banks of every sea, and in camps upriver, and all across the Northmen’s world, the news was spreading that the kingdom of Wessex was vulnerable and so the warriors were gathering.

‘But we’re not going to fight today?’ Ralla asked.

‘I hope not,’ I said, ‘fighting’s very dangerous.’

Ralla chuckled, but said nothing.

‘There shouldn’t be any fighting,’ I said, after a pause.

‘Because if there is,’ Ralla pointed out, ‘we have no priest aboard.’

‘We never do have a priest aboard,’ I said defensively.

‘But we should, lord,’ he remonstrated.

‘Why?’ I asked belligerently.

‘Because you want to die with a sword in your hand,’ Ralla said reprovingly, ‘and we like to die shriven.’

His words chided me. My duty was to these men, and if they died without the benefit of whatever a priest did to the dying, then I had failed them. For a moment I did not know what to say, then an idea sprang unbidden into my head. ‘Brother Osferth can be our priest today,’ I said.

‘I will,’ Osferth said from a rower’s bench, and I was pleased with that reply because at last he was willing to do something I knew he did not wish to do. I later discovered that, as a man who had only ever been a failed novice monk, he had no power to administer the Christian sacraments, but my men believed he was closer to their god than they were and that, as it turned out, was good enough.

‘But I don’t expect to fight,’ I said firmly.

A dozen men, those closest to the steering platform, were listening. Finan was with me, of course, and Cerdic and Sihtric and Rypere and Clapa. They were my household troops, my house carls, my companions, my blood brothers, my oath-men, and they had followed me to sea this night and they trusted me, even though they did not know where we sailed or what we did.

‘So what are we doing?’ Ralla asked.

I paused, knowing the answer would excite them. ‘We’re rescuing the Lady Æthelflaed,’ I finally said.

I heard gasps from the listening men, then the murmur of voices as that news was passed up the benches to the Sea-Eagle’s bows. My men knew this voyage meant trouble, and they had been intrigued by my savage imposition of secrecy, and they must have guessed that we sailed in connection with Æthelflaed’s plight, but now I had confirmed it.

The steering-oar creaked as Ralla made a slight correction. ‘How?’ he asked.

‘Any day now,’ I said, ignoring his question and speaking loudly enough for every man in the boat to hear me, ‘the king starts to collect the ransom for his daughter. If you have ten arm rings, he will want four of them! If you have silver hoarded, the king’s men will find it and take their share! But what we do today could stop that!’

Another murmur. There was already a deep unhappiness in Wessex at the thought of the money that would be forced from landowners and merchants. Alfred had pledged his own wealth, but he would need more, much more, and the only reason the collection had not already begun was the arguments that raged among his advisers. Some wanted the church to contribute because, despite the clergy’s insistence that they had no treasure, every man knew that the monasteries were stuffed with wealth. The church’s response had been to threaten excommunication on anyone who dared touch so much as one silver penny that belonged to God or, more particularly, to God’s bishops and abbots. I, even though I secretly hoped that no ransom would be necessary, had recommended raising the whole amount from the church, but that wise advice, of course, had been ignored.

‘And if the ransom is paid,’ I went on, ‘then our enemies will be rich enough to hire ten thousand swords! We will have war all across Wessex! Your houses will be burned, your women raped, your children stolen and your wealth confiscated. But what we do today could stop that!’

I exaggerated a little, but not by much. The ransom could certainly raise five thousand more spears, axes and swords and that was why the Vikings were gathering in the estuary of the Temes. They smelt weakness, and weakness meant blood, and blood meant wealth. The longships were coming south, their keels ploughing the sea as they headed for Beamfleot and then for Wessex.

‘But the Northmen are greedy!’ I continued. ‘They know that in Æthelflaed they have a girl of high value, and they are snarling at each other like hungry dogs! Well, one of them is ready to betray the others! At dawn today he will bring Æthelflaed out of the camp! He will give her to us and he will accept a much lower ransom! He would rather keep that smaller ransom all to himself than take a share of the larger! He will become wealthy! But he will not be wealthy enough to buy an army!’

That was the story I had decided to tell. I could not return to Lundene and say I had helped Æthelflaed run away with her lover, so instead I would pretend that Erik had offered to betray his brother and that I had sailed to assist that treachery, and that Erik had then betrayed me by breaking the agreement we had made. Instead of giving me Æthelflaed, I would claim he had just sailed away with her. Alfred would still be furious with me, but he could not accuse me of betraying Wessex. I had even brought a big wooden chest aboard. It was filled with sand, and locked with two great hasps secured with iron pins that had been hammered into circles so that the lid could not be opened. Every man had seen the chest brought onto the Sea-Eagle and there stowed under her steering platform, and they would surely think that big box carried Erik’s price.

‘Before dawn,’ I went on, ‘the Lady Æthelflaed will be taken to a ship! As the sun touches the sky’s edge, that ship will bring her out! But in their way is a blocking ship, a ship chained so she lies from shore to shore across the creek’s mouth. Our job is to clear that ship out of the way! That is all! We just have to move that one ship and the Lady Æthelflaed will be free, and we shall take her back to Lundene and we’ll be celebrated as heroes! The king will be grateful!’

They liked that. They liked the thought that they would be rewarded by the king, and I felt a pang because I knew we would only provoke Alfred’s anger, though we would also save him the necessity of raising the ransom.

‘I did not tell you this before,’ I said, ‘nor did I tell Alfred, because if I had told you then one of you or one of the king’s men would have got drunk and blabbered the news in a tavern and Sigefrid’s spies would have told Sigefrid and we would reach Beamfleot to find an army waiting to greet us! Instead they’re asleep! And we shall rescue Æthelflaed!’

They cheered that. Only Ralla was silent and, when the clamour ended, he asked a soft question. ‘And how do we move that ship?’ he asked. ‘She’s bigger than us, her sides have been raised, she carries a fighting crew, and they won’t be asleep.’

‘We don’t do it,’ I said. ‘I do it. Clapa? Rypere? You two will help me. The three of us will move the ship.’

And Æthelflaed would be free, and love would win, and the wind would always blow warm, and there would be food all winter, and none of us would ever grow old, and silver would grow on trees, and gold would appear like dew on grass, and the lovers’ bright stars would dazzle for ever.

It was all so simple.

As we rowed on eastwards.

Before leaving Lundene we had taken down the Sea-Eagle’s mast that now lay in crutches along the ship’s centre-line. I had not put her beast-heads on her stem or stern because I wanted her to lie low in the water. I wanted her to be a black shape against blackness, and with no rearing eagle’s head or high mast to show above the horizon. We came in stealth before the dawn. We were the Shadow-Walkers of the sea.

And I touched Serpent-Breath’s hilt and felt no tingle there, no singing, no hunger for blood and I took comfort from that. I thought we would open the creek and watch Æthelflaed sail to freedom and that Serpent-Breath would sleep silently in her fleece-lined scabbard.

Then, at last, I saw the higher glow in the sky, the dull red glow that marked where fires burned in Sigefrid’s hilltop encampment. The glow grew brighter as we rowed through the slack water of high tide, and beyond it, on the hills that slowly fell away to the east, were more reflections of fire on clouds. Those red glows marked the sites of the new encampments that stretched from high Beamfleot to low Sceobyrig. ‘Even without the ransom,’ Ralla remarked to me, ‘they might be tempted to attack.’

‘They might,’ I agreed, though I doubted Sigefrid had enough men yet to feel sure of success. Wessex, with its newly built burhs, was a hard place to attack, and I guessed Sigefrid would want at least three thousand more men before he rolled the dice of war, and to get those men he needed the ransom. ‘You know what to do?’ I asked Ralla.

‘I know,’ he said patiently, also knowing that my question had been provoked by nervousness rather than by necessity. ‘I’ll go seaward of Caninga,’ he said, ‘and collect you at the eastern end.’

‘And if the channel isn’t open?’ I asked.

I sensed that he grinned in the darkness. ‘Then I’ll collect you,’ he said, ‘and you make that decision.’

Because if I failed to move the ship that blocked the channel then Æthelflaed would be trapped in the creek and I would have to decide whether to commit Sea-Eagle to a fight against a ship with higher sides and an angry crew. It was not a fight I wanted and I doubted we could win it, which meant I had to open the channel before such a fight became necessary.

‘Slow!’ Ralla called to the oarsmen. He had turned the ship northwards and now we rowed slow and cautious towards Caninga’s black shore. ‘You’ll get wet,’ he told me.

‘How long till dawn?’

‘Five hours? Six?’ he guessed.

‘Long enough,’ I said, and just then the Sea-Eagle’s bows touched the shelving mud and her long hull shivered.

‘Back oars!’ Ralla shouted, and the oar banks churned the shallow water to pull the bows away from that treacherous shore. ‘Go quickly,’ he told me, ‘tide falls fast here. Don’t want to be stranded.’

I led Clapa and Rypere to the bows. I had debated whether to wear mail, hoping that I would need to do no fighting in the approaching summer dawn, but in the end caution had prevailed and I wore a mail coat, two swords but had no helmet. I feared my helmet, with its bright wolf-symbol, would reflect the night’s small light, and so I wore a dark leather helmet liner instead. I also wore the black cloak that Gisela had woven for me, that dark night-hiding cloak with its savage stab of lightning running down the back from nape to hem. Rypere and Clapa also wore dark cloaks that covered their mail and each of them had swords, while Clapa carried a huge, beard-bladed war axe strapped to his back.

‘You should let me come,’ Finan said to me.

‘You’re in charge here,’ I told him. ‘And if we get into trouble you might have to abandon us. That will be your decision.’

‘Back oars!’ Ralla shouted again, and the Sea-Eagle retreated another few feet from the threat of being grounded on the falling tide.

‘We won’t abandon you,’ Finan said, and held out a hand. I clasped it, then let him lower me over the ship’s side where I splashed into a soggy mess of mud and water.

‘See you at dawn,’ I called up to Finan’s dark shape, then led Clapa and Rypere across the wide mudflats. I heard the creak and splashing of Sea-Eagle’s oars as Ralla backed her offshore, but when I turned she had already vanished.

We had landed at the western end of Caninga, the island that bordered Beamfleot’s creek, and we had come ashore a long way from where Sigefrid’s ships were moored or beached. We were far enough away so that the sentries on the fort’s high walls would not have seen our dark dismasted ship come to the dark land, or so I prayed, and now we had a long walk. We crossed the wide, glistening, moon-rippled stretch of mud that widened as the tide receded, and in places we could not walk, but only struggle. We waded and tripped, fought the sucking mud, we cursed and splashed. That foreshore was neither land nor water, but a sticky, clinging morass, and so I hurried on until, at last, there was more land than water and the shrieks of woken birds surrounded us. The night air was filled with the beat of their wings and the shrillness of their protests. That noise, I thought, would surely alert the enemy, but all I could do was strike inland, praying for higher ground, and at last the going became easier, though still the land smelled of salt. At the highest tides, Ralla had told me, Caninga could vanish entirely beneath the waves and I thought of the Danes I had drowned on the western sea-marshes when I had lured them into just such a rising tide. That had been before Ethandun when Wessex had seemed doomed, but Wessex still lived and the Danes had died.

We found a path. Sheep were sleeping among the tussocks and this was a sheep track, though it was a crude and treacherous path for it was constantly interrupted by ditches through which the tendrils of the falling tide gurgled. I wondered if a shepherd was close by. Perhaps these sheep, being on an island, did not need guarding from wolves, which would mean no shepherd and, better, no dogs to wake and bark. But if there were dogs, they slept as we moved eastwards. I looked for the Sea-Eagle, but though there was moonshine glittering wide on the estuary, I could not see her.

After a while we rested, first kicking three sleeping sheep awake so we could occupy their patches of warm dry earth. Clapa was soon asleep and snoring, while I gazed out to the Temes trying once more to see the Sea-Eagle, but she was a shadow among shadows. I was thinking of Ragnar, my friend, and how he would react when Erik and Alfred’s daughter turned up at Dunholm. He would be amused, I knew, but how long would that amusement last? Alfred would send envoys to Guthred, King of Northumbria, demanding his daughter’s return, and every Northman with a sword would eye Dunholm’s crag hungrily. Madness, I thought, as the wind rustled across the stiff marsh grasses.

‘What’s happening there, lord?’ Rypere asked, startling me. He had sounded alarmed and I turned from searching the water to see a huge blaze springing from Beamfleot’s hilltop. Flames were leaping into the dark sky, outlining the ramparts of the fort, and above those tortuous flames bright sparks whirled in the thick pillar of fire-lit smoke that churned above Sigefrid’s hall.

I swore, kicked Clapa awake and stood.

Sigefrid’s hall was ablaze, and that meant the whole encampment was awake, but whether the fire was an accident or deliberate, I could not tell. Perhaps this was the diversion that Erik had planned so he could smuggle Æthelflaed from her smaller hall, but somehow I did not think Erik would risk burning his brother to death. ‘Whatever caused that fire,’ I said grimly, ‘is bad news.’

The fire had only just taken hold, but the thatch must have been dry because the flames were spreading with extraordinary swiftness. The blaze grew larger, lighting the hilltop and throwing garish shadows across Caninga’s low, marshy land. ‘They’ll see us, lord,’ Clapa said nervously.

‘We have to risk that,’ I said, and hoped that the men on the ship that blocked the channel would be watching the fire instead of looking for enemies on Caninga.

I planned to reach the creek’s southern bank where the great chain that held the ship against the currents was looped about its huge post. Cut or release that chain and the ship must drift with the outgoing tide and so swing open like a great gate as her bow chain held her fast to the post on the northern bank.

‘Let’s go,’ I said, and we followed the sheep track, our journey now made easy by the light thrown by the great fire. I kept glancing eastwards where the sky was turning pale. Dawn was close, but the sun would not show for a long time. I thought I saw Sea-Eagle once, her low shape stark against the shimmer of grey and black, but I could not be certain of what I saw.

As we drew closer to the moored guard-ship we moved off the sheep track to push our way through reed beds that grew high enough to conceal us. Birds screamed again. We stopped every few paces and I would look over the reeds and see the crew of the blocking ship staring up at the high burning hill. The fire was vast now, an inferno in the sky, scorching the high clouds red. We reached the edge of the reeds, and crouched there, a hundred paces from the huge post that tethered the ship’s stern.

‘We might not need your axe,’ I told Clapa. We had brought the axe to try to chop through the heavy iron links.

‘You’re going to bite the chain, lord?’ Rypere asked, amused.

I gave him a friendly cuff around the head. ‘If you stand on Clapa’s shoulders,’ I said, ‘you should be able to lift that chain clean off the post. It’ll be quicker.’

‘We should do it before it gets light,’ Clapa said.

‘Mustn’t give them time to re-moor the ship,’ I said, and wondered if I should have brought more men ashore, and then knew I should.

Because we were not alone on Caninga.

I saw the other men and laid a hand on Clapa’s arm to silence him. And everything that had seemed easy became difficult.

I saw men running down the southern bank of the creek. There were six men armed with swords and axes, six men who ran towards the post that was our goal. And I understood what happened then, or I hoped I did, but it was a moment when all the future hung in the balance. I had an instant to make a decision, and I thought of the three Norns sitting at Yggdrasil’s roots and I knew that if I made the wrong choice, the choice they already knew I would make, then I could ruin all that I wanted of that morning.

Perhaps, I thought, Erik had decided to open the channel himself.

Perhaps he believed I would not come. Or perhaps he had realised that he could open the channel without attacking his brother’s men. Perhaps the six men were Erik’s warriors.

Or perhaps they were not.

‘Kill them,’ I said, hardly aware that I spoke, hardly aware of the decision I had made.

‘Lord?’ Clapa asked.

‘Now!’ I was already moving. ‘Fast, come on!’

The guard-ship’s crew were hurling spears at the six men, but none struck home as the three of us raced towards the post. Rypere, lithe and quick, ran ahead of me and I hauled him back with my left hand before drawing Serpent-Breath.

And so death came in the wolf-light before dawn. Death on a muddy bank. The six men reached the post before we did and one of them, a tall man, swung a war axe at the looped chain, but a spear flung from the ship thudded into his thigh and he staggered back, cursing, as his five companions turned in astonishment to face us. We had surprised them.

I screamed a huge challenge, an incoherent challenge, and leaped at the five men. It was a mad attack. A sword could have pierced my belly and left me writhing in blood, but the gods were with me. Serpent-Breath struck a shield plumb centre and the man went backwards, knocked off his feet and I followed him, trusting that Rypere and Clapa would keep his four comrades busy. Clapa was swinging his huge axe, while Rypere danced the sword-dance Finan had taught him. I slashed Serpent-Breath at the fallen man and her blade crashed on his helmet so that he fell back again and then I twisted to lunge Serpent-Breath at the tall man who had been trying to sever the chain.

He turned, his axe swinging, and there was enough light in the sky to let me see the bright red hair under his helmet’s rim and the bright red beard jutting beneath the helmet’s cheek-plates. He was Eilaf the Red, Haesten’s oath-man, and I knew then what must have happened in this treacherous morning.

Haesten had set the fire.

And Haesten must have taken Æthelflaed.

And now he wanted the channel opened so that his ships could escape.

So now we had to keep the channel closed. We had come to open it, and now we would fight on Sigefrid’s side to keep it shut up, and I rammed the sword at Eilaf who somehow sidestepped the blade, and his axe struck me at the waist, but there was no power in his blow and I scarce felt the blade’s impact through my cloak and mail. A spear hissed past me, thrown from the ship, then another thudded hard into the post and stayed there, quivering. I had stumbled past Eilaf, my footing uncertain in the marshy ground.

He was quick and I had no shield. The axe swung and I ducked as I turned back to him, then thrust Serpent-Breath two-handed at his belly, but his shield took the lunge. I heard splashing behind me and I guessed the guard-ship’s crew were coming to our aid. A man screamed where Clapa and Rypere fought, but I had no time to discover what happened there. I thrust again, and a sword is a faster weapon than an axe and Eilaf the Red was still drawing his right arm back and had to move the shield to deflect my blade and I flicked it up and slid it scraping and ringing across his shield’s iron rim and banged her tip into his skull beneath his helmet’s edge.

I felt bone break. The axe was coming, but slowly, and I caught the haft with my left hand and hauled on it as Eilaf staggered, his eyes glazed from the wound I had given him. I kicked his spear-pierced leg, wrenched Serpent-Breath free, then stabbed her down. She punctured his mail to make him jerk like an eel on a spear, then he thumped into the mud and tried to pull his axe free of my grasp. He was snarling at me, his forehead a mass of blood. I swore at him, kicked his hand free of the axe’s handle, slashed Serpent-Breath down on his neck and watched him quiver. Men from the guard-ship’s crew ran past me to kill Eilaf’s men and I snatched Eilaf’s helmet off his bloody head. It dripped with gore, but I rammed it over my leather headgear and hoped the cheek-plates would conceal my face.

The men who had come from the ship might well have seen me at Sigefrid’s feast, and if they recognised me they would turn their swords on me. There were ten or eleven of the crewmen and they had killed Eilaf the Red’s five companions, but not before Clapa had been given his last wound. Poor Clapa, so slow in thought, so gentle in manner, so strong in war, and now he lay, mouth open, blood spilling down his beard, and I saw a tremor in his body and jumped to him and found a fallen sword that I put into his empty right hand and closed his fingers about the hilt. His chest had been mangled by an axe blow so that ribs and lung and mail were tangled in a bloody, bubbling mess.

‘Who are you?’ a man shouted.

‘Ragnar Olafson,’ I invented a name.

‘Why are you here?’

‘Our ship stranded on the coast,’ I said, ‘we were coming to find help.’

Rypere was in tears. He was holding Clapa’s left hand, saying his friend’s name over and over.

We make friends in battle. We tease each other, jeer at each other and insult each other, yet we also love each other. In battle you become closer than brothers, and Clapa and Rypere were friends who had known that closeness, and now Clapa, who was Danish, was dying and Rypere, who was Saxon, was weeping. Yet his tears were not from weakness, but from rage, and as I held Clapa’s dying hand tight on the sword hilt I watched Rypere turn and lift his own sword. ‘Lord,’ he said, and I swivelled to see still more men coming down the bank.

Haesten had sent a whole crew to open the channel. Their ship had been beached fifty paces down the bank and, beyond it, I could see a mass of other ships waiting to row out to sea when the channel was cleared. Haesten and all his men were fleeing Beamfleot, and they were taking Æthelflaed with them, and beyond the creek, on the steep hill beneath the burning hall, I could see Sigefrid and Erik’s men running recklessly down the precipitous slope to assault the treacherous Haesten.

Whose men now came at us in overwhelming numbers.

‘Shield wall!’ a voice roared. I have no idea who shouted and only remember that I thought we must die here on this muddy bank and I patted Clapa’s bloody cheek and saw his axe lying in the mud and I felt the same rage that Rypere felt. I sheathed Serpent-Breath and snatched up the huge, wide-bladed, long-bearded war axe.

Haesten’s crew came screaming, driven by an urgency to escape the creek before Sigefrid’s men came to slaughter them. Haesten was doing his best to slow that pursuit by burning Sigefrid’s ships where they were beached on the far side of the creek. I was only dimly aware of those new fires, of flames rippling quick up tarred rigging, of smoke blowing across the incoming tide, but I had no time to watch, only to brace myself as the screaming men came closer.

And then they charged the last few paces, and we should have died there, but whoever had shouted at us to form a shield wall had chosen his place well, for one of Caninga’s many ditches snaked across our front. It was not much of a ditch, scarce a muddy rivulet, but our attackers stumbled on its slippery sides and we went forward, our turn to scream, and the fury in me became the red rage of battle. I swung the huge axe at a man recovering from his stumble and my war shout rose to a scream of triumph as my blade slashed through a helmet, chopped into a skull and sliced a brain in two. Blood sluiced black into the air as I still screamed and jerked the axe free and swung it again. I knew nothing but madness, anger and desperation. Battle-joy. Blood-mad. Warriors to the slaughter, and our whole shield wall had moved to the ditch’s edge where our enemy was floundering and we had a moment’s furious slaughter, blades in the moonlight, blood black as pitch, and men’s screams as wild as the wild birds’ screams in the darkness.

Yet we were outnumbered and we were outflanked. We should have died there about the post that held the guard-ship’s chain, except that more men dropped overboard from that tethered ship and came running through the shallows to assail our attackers’ left flank. But Haesten’s men still outnumbered us, and the men in the ranks behind pushed past their dying comrades to attack us. We were forced slowly back, as much by their weight as by their weapons. I had no shield. I was swinging the axe two-handed, snarling, keeping men at bay with the heavy blade, though a spearman, out of reach of my axe blade, jabbed repeatedly at me. Rypere, beside me, had found a fallen shield and did his best to cover me, but the spearman managed to dodge the shield and stabbed low to slice open my left calf. I hurled the axe and the heavy blade smashed into his face as I slid Serpent-Breath from her scabbard and let her scream her war song. My wound was trivial, the wounds Serpent-Breath gave were not. A demented man, mouth agape to reveal toothless gums, flailed an axe at me and Serpent-Breath took his soul with elegant ease, so elegant that I laughed in triumph as I wrenched the blade from his upper belly. ‘We’re holding them!’ I bellowed, and no one noticed I shouted in English, but though our small shield wall was indeed holding firm just in front of the great post, our attackers had outflanked the left of our line and the men there, attacked from two sides, broke and ran. We stumbled backwards to follow them. Blades crashed into our shields, axes splintered boards, swords rang on swords, and back we went, unable to hold our ground against so many, and we were driven past the great mooring post and now there was light enough in the sky for me to see the green slime clinging to the post’s base where the huge chain lay rusted.

Haesten’s men screamed a great howl of victory. Their mouths were distended, their eyes were bright with light reflected from the east and they knew they had won, and we just ran away. There is no other way to describe that moment just before the full dawn. Sixty or seventy men were trying to kill us, and they had already killed some of the crewmen from the moored guard-ship, and the rest of us ran back onto the foreshore where the mud was thick and I thought again that I must die there where the sea ran in slithering ripples across the slick flats, but our attackers, content that they had driven us off, turned back to the post and chain. Some watched us, daring us to go back to the firmer ground and challenge them, while the others slashed at the chain with axes. Beyond them, dark against the darkest part of the sky where the last stars faded, I could see Haesten’s ships waiting to slide out to sea.

The axes rang and chopped, and then a cheer sounded and I saw the heavy chain slither snake-like across the mud. The tide had turned now and the new flood was running strong, and the blocking ship was being swung westwards, carried into the creek by that surge of water, and I could do nothing but watch as Haesten’s escape was made possible.

Our attackers were running back to their own ship. The chain had vanished into the low water as the blocking ship slowly dragged it away. I remember stumbling forward through the mud, one hand on Rypere’s shoulder and my left foot squelching the blood in my boot. I held Serpent-Breath and knew I was powerless to stop Æthelflaed being carried away to a worse captivity.

The ransom, I thought, would be doubled now, and Haesten would become a lord of warriors, a man wealthy beyond even his inordinate greed. He would assemble an army. He would come to destroy Wessex. He would be king, and all because that chain had been severed and the Hothlege at last was being unblocked.

I saw Haesten then. He was standing in the bows of his ship, which I knew was named the Dragon-Voyager, and she was the first ship waiting for the creek mouth to be fully clear. Haesten stood in cloak and armour, stood proud beneath the raven’s head that crowned his ship’s prow, and his helmet glinted with the new dawn, and his drawn blade was shining, and he was smiling. He had won. Æthelflaed, I was certain, was in that ship, and behind him were twenty other ships; his fleet, his men.

Sigefrid and Erik’s men had reached the creek and had launched some of the boats that had been spared the fire. They had begun to fight Haesten’s rearward ships and in the glare of the burning ships I saw the glint of weapons and knew that more men were dying, but it was all too late. The creek was opening.

The blocking ship, held now by its bow chain alone, swung faster and faster. In a few heartbeats, I knew, the narrow channel would be wide open. I watched Haesten’s oars dip to keep the Dragon-Voyager steady against the flooding tide and knew that at any moment the oars would pull hard instead and I would see his lean vessel speed past the stranded guard-ship. He would row away eastwards, away to a new encampment, away to a future that would bring him a kingdom that had once been called Wessex.

None of us spoke. I did not know the men beside whom I had fought, and they did not know me, and we just stood there, disconsolate strangers, watching the channel widen and the sky brighten. The sun had almost touched the world’s rim and the east was ablaze with red, gold and silver light. And that sunlight flashed off Haesten’s wet oar-blades as his men brought them far forward. For a moment the sun slashed into my eyes from all those reflections, then Haesten shouted a command and the blades vanished in the water and his longship surged forward.

And it was then I realised that there had been panic in Haesten’s voice. ‘Row!’ he was shouting, ‘pull!’

I did not understand his panic. None of Sigefrid’s hastily manned ships were anywhere near him and the open sea lay before him, yet his voice sounded desperate. ‘Row!’ he screamed, ‘row!’ and the Dragon-Voyager slid still faster towards the gold-bright east. Her dragon’s head, snout raised and teeth bared, defied the rising sun.

And then I saw why Haesten panicked.

The Sea-Eagle was coming.

Finan had made the decision. Later he explained it to me, but even days afterwards he found it hard to justify the choice he had made. It was instinct as much as anything. He knew I wanted the channel open, yet by bringing Sea-Eagle into the Hothlege he would bar the passage again, yet still he decided to come. ‘I saw your cloak,’ he explained.

‘My cloak?’

‘The bolt of lightning, lord. And you were defending the chain-post, not attacking it.’

‘Suppose I’d been killed?’ I suggested. ‘Suppose an enemy had taken my cloak?’

‘And I recognised Rypere, too,’ Finan said, ‘you can’t mistake that ugly little man, can you?’ And so Finan had told Ralla to bring the Sea-Eagle into the channel. They had been lurking at the eastern end of Two-Tree Island, the patch of marsh and mud that formed the northern bank of the channel’s entrance, and Ralla had ridden the incoming tide into the Hothlege. Just before they entered the channel he ordered the oars to be shipped inboard, then he had steered the Sea-Eagle so that she struck one bank of the Dragon-Voyager’s oars.

I watched. The Sea-Eagle was in the channel’s centre while Haesten’s ship was nearer to me so I did not see the long oar looms snap, though I heard them shatter. I heard the splintering sound as shaft after shaft broke, and I heard the screams from Haesten’s men as the oar handles were driven back to crush their chests, and that is a horrible injury. Those screams were still sounding as the Dragon-Voyager jarred to a sudden stop. Ralla had thrust on the steering-oar to push Haesten’s ship onto Caninga’s mud shelving bank, and then the Sea-Eagle also stopped abruptly as she was trapped between the stranded blocking ship and the newly beached Dragon-Voyager. The channel was closed again, plugged now by three ships.

And the sun rose full above the sea, brilliant as gold, flooding the earth with a dazzling new light.

And Beamfleot’s creek became the killing place.

Haesten ordered his men to board the mastless Sea-Eagle and kill its crew. I doubt he knew whose ship it was, only that it had thwarted him, and his men screamed as they leaped aboard to find Finan leading my household warriors to meet them, and the two shield walls met on the forward rowing benches. Axe and spear, sword and shield. For a moment I could only watch. I heard the crack of shields slamming together, saw that new light flicker from raised blades, and saw more of Haesten’s men crowding onto Sea-Eagle’s bows.

That fight filled the creek’s entrance. Behind those three ships the flooding tide was drifting the rest of Haesten’s fleet back towards the burning boats on the shore, but not all of Sigefrid’s boats were burning, and more and more were being manned and rowed towards Haesten’s rearward vessels. The fighting had started there too. Above me, on Beamfleot’s looming green hill, the hall still burned, and on Hothlege’s shore the ships burned too, and so the new golden light was veiled with palls of smoke beneath which men died while wisps of black ash, fluttering like moths, drifted from the sky.

Haesten’s men ashore, the ones who had driven us onto the mud and released the guard-ship’s chain, splashed through the shallow water to haul themselves onto Dragon-Voyager so they could join the fight aboard Sea-Eagle. ‘Follow them,’ I shouted.

There was no reason for Sigefrid’s men to obey me. They did not know who I was, only that I had fought beside them, but they understood what I wanted and they were infused with a fighting-man’s rage. Haesten had betrayed his agreement with Sigefrid, and these were Sigefrid’s men, and so Haesten’s men must die.

Those men, the ones who had driven us to ignominious flight, had forgotten us. They were on board Dragon-Voyager now and scrambled towards the Sea-Eagle, intent on killing the crew that had frustrated Haesten’s escape, and we were unopposed as we climbed aboard their ship. The men I led were my enemies, but they did not know that and they followed me willingly, eager to serve their lord, and we struck Haesten’s men from the rear and, for an instant, we were the lords of killing. Our blades took men in the spine, they died without knowing they were under attack, and then the survivors turned and we were nothing but a handful of men facing a hundred.

There were far too many men aboard Haesten’s ship, and there was not nearly room enough in the Sea-Eagle’s bows for all of them to join that fight. But the men on Dragon-Voyager now had their own enemy. They had us.

But a ship is narrow. Our shield wall, that had easily been outflanked on land, here stretched from side to side of the Dragon-Voyager, and the rowing benches made obstacles that stopped a man charging home. They had to come slowly or else risk tripping on the knee-high benches, but they still came eagerly. They had Æthelflaed, and every man was fighting for a dream of riches, and all they needed to do to become wealthy was kill us. I had picked up a shield from one of the men I had struck down in our first sudden assault, and now I stood, Rypere on my right and a stranger on my left, and let them come.

I used Serpent-Breath. My short-sword, Wasp-Sting, was usually better in a shield wall fight, but here the enemy could not close on us because we stood behind a rowing bench. At the ship’s centreline, where I stood, there was no bench, but a mast crutch served as an obstacle, and I had to keep looking left and right, past the high crutch, to see where the worst danger threatened. A wild-bearded man climbed onto the bench in front of Rypere, meaning to hack an axe down onto his head, but the man held his shield too high and Serpent-Breath pierced his belly from beneath and I turned her, ripped her sideways and his axe fell behind Rypere as the Northman screamed and twisted on my blade. Something, axe or sword, was beating on my shield, then the stomach-ripped man fell sideways across that weapon, and blood ran down Serpent-Breath’s blade to warm my hand.

A spear slashed beside me, the lunge deflected by my shield. The blade vanished, pulled back, and I overlapped my shield on Rypere’s just before the spear struck again. Let it, I remember thinking. They could thrust spears at shields all morning and get nowhere. To break us they had to cross the obstructing bench and fight us face to face, and I looked over the shield’s rim to see the bearded faces. They were shouting, I have no idea what insults they hurled at us, I only knew that they would come again, and they did, and I thrust the shield up at a man on the bench to my left and stabbed Serpent-Breath at his leg, a puny stroke, but my shield boss caught his belly and hurled him backwards, and a blade rammed my lower belly, but the mail did not break. They were crowding down the ship now, the men behind forcing the men in front onto our blades, but the sheer weight of the attack was driving us backwards, and I was dimly aware that some of our men were defending our spines against a counter attack from those of Haesten’s men who had boarded Sea-Eagle and now tried to get back on board Dragon-Voyager. Two men managed to get past the crutch and shield-charged me, their slamming impact staggering me sideways and back and I tripped on something and sat heavily on the edge of a rower’s bench and, in blind panic, stabbed Serpent-Breath past the edge of my shield and felt her puncture mail, leather, skin, muscle and flesh. Things crashed on my shield and I heaved forward, sword still trapped in an enemy’s flesh, and miraculously there was no enemy to keep me down and I touched shields right and left and roared a challenge as I ripped and twisted Serpent-Breath free. An axe hooked on my shield’s upper rim and tried to haul it down, but I dropped the shield, lost the axe, and raised the shield and my sword was free again and I could lunge her at the axeman. All instinct, all rage, all screaming hate, all a blur in my mind now.

How long did that fight last?

It might have been a moment or an hour. To this day I do not know. I listen to my poets sing of age-old fights and I think no, it was not like that, and certainly that fight aboard Haesten’s ship was nothing like the version my poets warble. It was not heroic and grand, and it was not a lord of war giving out death with unstoppable sword-skill. It was panic. It was abject fear. It was men shitting themselves with fright, men pissing, men bleeding, men grimacing and men crying as pathetically as whipped children. It was a chaos of flying blades, of shields breaking, of half-caught glimpses, of despairing parries and blind lunges. Feet slipped on blood and the dead lay with curling hands and the injured clutched awful wounds that would kill them and they cried for their mothers and the gulls cried, and all that the poets celebrate, because that is their job. They make it sound marvellous. And the wind blew soft across the flooding tide that filled Beamfleot’s creek with swirling water in which the new-shed blood twisted and faded, faded and twisted, until the cold green sea diluted it.

There had been two battles at the beginning. My crew aboard Sea-Eagle, led by Finan and helped by the remnants of Sigefrid’s warriors who had been manning the stranded blocking ship, fought a desperate defence against Haesten’s household troops. We helped them by boarding Dragon-Voyager while, at the creek’s far end, where the ships burned bright, Sigefrid and Erik’s men attacked the rearward boats of Haesten’s fleet.

But now it changed. Erik had seen what happened at the creek’s mouth and, instead of boarding a ship, he led his men up the southern bank, splashed through the small channel that led to Two-Tree Island, and then swarmed onto the beached blocking ship. From there they jumped onto Sea-Eagle and so added their weight to Finan’s shield wall. And they were needed, for Haesten’s leading ships had at last rowed to their lord’s rescue and still more men were trying to board the Sea-Eagle, while others were climbing aboard the Dragon-Voyager. It was chaos. And when Sigefrid’s men saw what Erik did, many followed, and Sigefrid himself, aboard a smaller longship, found water enough to row against the tide and was bringing that ship towards the fight at the channel’s mouth where the three boats were locked together, and men fought in ignorance of who they fought. Everyone, it seemed, was against everyone. This, I remember thinking, was like the battles that wait for us in Odin’s corpse-hall, that eternity of joy in which warriors will fight all day and are resurrected to drink and eat and to love their women all night.

Erik’s men, flooding aboard the Sea-Eagle, helped Finan drive Haesten’s boarders back. Some jumped into the creek, which was just deep enough to drown a man, others escaped onto the newly arrived ships of Haesten’s fleet, while a stubborn rearguard made a defiant shield wall in the Sea-Eagle’s bows. Finan, helped by Erik, had won his battle, and that meant many of his men could come aboard Dragon-Voyager to stiffen our beleaguered shield wall, and the fight on Haesten’s ship lessened in intensity as his men saw nothing but death. They backed away, stepping over benches and leaving their dead, and snarled at us from a safe distance. Now they waited for us to attack.

And it was then, in that small pause as men on both sides balanced the probabilities of life and death, that I saw Æthelflaed.

She was crouched beneath the steering platform of Dragon-Voyager from where she stared at the tangle of death and blades in front of her, but there was no fear on her face. She had her arms around two of her maidservants and she watched, wide-eyed, but with no apparent fear. She had to have been terrified, for the last few hours had been nothing but fire, death and panic. Haesten, we later learned, had ordered the fire set to Sigefrid’s thatch and, in the ensuing chaos, his men had rushed the guards Erik had placed on Æthelflaed’s hall. Those guards had died, and Æthelflaed had been snatched from her chamber and dragged precipitately down the hill to the waiting Dragon-Voyager. It had been well done; a clever, simple and brutal plan, and it might have worked except that Sea-Eagle had been waiting just beyond the creek’s mouth, and now hundreds of men hacked and stabbed at each other in a wild fight where no man knew exactly who his enemy was, and men just fought because fighting was their joy.

‘Kill them! Kill them!’ That was Haesten, urging his men back to the slaughter. He only had to kill our men and Erik’s men and he would be free of the creek, but behind him, coming fast, Sigefrid’s ship surged past Haesten’s other vessels. Her steersman aimed her at the three ships blocking the channel, and there was room enough for the oars to get three hard strokes so that the smaller ship crashed hard into the fight. She rammed Sea-Eagle’s bows, just where the last of Haesten’s boarders had their shield wall, and I saw those warriors stagger sideways under the shock of the impact, and I also saw Sea-Eagle’s planks driven inwards as Sigefrid’s stem-post drove hard into my ship. Sigefrid was almost thrown from his chair by the impact, but he struggled back upright, bear-cloaked, sword in hand, and bellowed at his enemies to come and be killed by his sword, Fear-Giver.

Sigefrid’s men leaped into the battle, while Erik, tousle-haired and sword in hand, had already crossed the Sea-Eagle’s stern to board Dragon-Voyager and was hacking his wild way towards Æthelflaed. The fight was turning. The arrival of Erik and his men and the impact of Sigefrid’s ship had put Haesten’s warriors on the defensive. The remnant on board Sea-Eagle gave up first. I saw them struggling to board Dragon-Voyager and thought Sigefrid’s men must have attacked with a howling intensity to put them to flight so quickly, but then I saw that my ship was sinking. Sigefrid’s ship had splintered her side and the sea was flooding through the broken planks.

‘Kill them!’ Erik was screaming. ‘Kill them!’ and under his leadership we went forward and the men in front of us gave way, yielding a row of benches. We followed, clambering over the obstacle to receive a rain of blows on our shields. I stabbed Serpent-Breath forward and struck nothing but shield-wood. An axe hissed over my head, the blow missing only because the Dragon-Voyager lurched at that moment and I realised the rising tide had lifted her from the mud. We were afloat.

‘Oars!’ I heard a huge shout.

An axe buried itself in my shield, splitting the wood apart, and I saw a man with mad eyes staring at me as he tried to retrieve his blade. I pushed the shield wide and lunged Serpent-Breath at his chest, using all my force so that her steel went through his mail and he went on staring at me as the sword found his heart.

‘Oars!’ It was Ralla, shouting at those of my men who no longer had to defend themselves against Haesten’s attackers. ‘Oars, you bastards,’ he shouted, and I thought he must be mad to try and row a sinking ship.

But Ralla was not mad. He was thinking sensibly. Sea-Eagle was sinking, but Dragon-Voyager was floating, and Dragon-Voyager’s bows were pointing to the open estuary. But Ralla had splintered one bank of her oars and now he forced some of my men to carry Sea-Eagle’s oars across the gap. He was planning to take Haesten’s ship.

Except the Dragon-Voyager was now a maelstrom of desperate men. Sigefrid’s crew had crossed Sea-Eagle’s sinking bows to gain a lodgement on the steering platform above Æthelflaed and from there they were hacking at Haesten’s men, who were being pushed back by my companions and by Erik’s crew, who fought with a maniacal fury. Erik had no shield, just his long-sword, and I thought he must die a dozen times as he hurled himself on his enemies, but the gods loved him at that moment and Erik lived while his enemies died. And still more of Sigefrid’s men came from the stern so that Haesten and his crew were squeezed between us.

‘Haesten!’ I shouted, ‘come and die!’

He saw me, and looked astonished, but whether he heard me, I do not know, for Haesten wanted to live to fight again. Dragon-Voyager was floating, but in water so shallow that I could feel her keel bumping on the mud, and behind her were more of Haesten’s ships. He jumped overboard, landing in the knee-deep water, and his crew followed, running down Caninga’s bank to the safety of their next ship. The fighting, that had been so furious, died in an eyeblink.

‘I have the bitch!’ Sigefrid shouted. He had somehow boarded Haesten’s ship. His men had not carried him, for his chair with its lifting poles was still on the ship that had sunk Sea-Eagle, but the massive strength in Sigefrid’s arms had hauled him across the sinking boat and up into Dragon-Voyager, and now he lay on useless legs, a sword in one hand and Æthelflaed’s unbound hair in his other.

His men grinned. They had won. They had retrieved the prize.

Sigefrid smiled at his brother. ‘I have the bitch,’ he said again.

‘Give her to me,’ Erik said.

‘We’ll take her back,’ Sigefrid said, still not understanding.

Æthelflaed was staring at Erik. She had been wrenched down to the deck, her golden hair in Sigefrid’s huge hand.

‘Give her to me,’ Erik said again.

I will not say there was silence. There could not have been silence for the battle still raged along the line of Haesten’s ships, and the fires roared and the wounded moaned, but it seemed like silence, and Sigefrid’s eyes looked along the line of Erik’s men and settled on me. I was taller than the others, and though my back was to the rising sun, he must have seen something he recognised for he lifted his sword to point the blade at me. ‘Take off the helmet,’ he ordered in his curiously high voice.

‘I am not your man to be commanded,’ I said.

I still had some of Sigefrid’s men with me, the same men who had come from the blocking ship to thwart Haesten’s first attempt to open the channel, and those men now turned towards me with weapons rising, but Finan was also there, and with him were my household troops.

‘Don’t kill them,’ I said, ‘just drop them overboard. They fought beside me.’

Sigefrid let go of Æthelflaed’s hair, shoving her back towards his men, and heaved his huge, black-swathed cripple’s body forward. ‘You and the Saxon, eh?’ he said to Erik. ‘You and that treacherous Saxon? You betray me, brother?’

‘I will pay your share of the ransom,’ Erik said.

‘You? Pay? In what? Piss?’

‘I will pay the ransom,’ Erik insisted.

‘You couldn’t pay a goat to lick the sweat off your balls!’ Sigefrid bellowed. ‘Take her ashore!’ This last command was to his men.

And Erik charged. He did not need to. There was no way that Sigefrid’s men could take Æthelflaed ashore for the Dragon-Voyager had been carried by the incoming tide past the half-sunken Sea-Eagle and now we were drifting down onto Haesten’s next boats, and I feared we would be boarded any minute. Ralla had the same fear and was dragging some of my men to the forward rowers’ benches. ‘Pull,’ he shouted, ‘pull!’

And Erik charged, meaning to cut down the men who now held Æthelflaed, and he had to pass his brother who squatted dark and angry on the blood-slicked deck, and I saw Sigefrid lift the sword and saw Erik’s look of astonishment that his own brother would raise a blade against him, and I heard Æthelflaed’s scream as her lover ran onto Fear-Giver. Sigefrid’s face showed nothing, neither rage nor sorrow. He held the sword as his brother folded on the blade, and then, without an order, the rest of us charged. Erik’s men and my men, shoulder to shoulder, went to start the killing again and I paused only long enough to seize one of my warriors by the shoulder. ‘Keep Sigefrid alive,’ I ordered him, and never saw who it was, then carried Serpent-Breath to the last slaughter of that bloody morning.

Sigefrid’s men died fast. There were few of them and many of us. They stood for a moment, meeting our rush with a locked shield wall, but we came with a fury born of bitter anger and Serpent-Breath sang like a screaming gull. I had thrown down my shield, wanting only to hack into these men, and my first stroke beat down a shield and sliced off the jaw of a man who tried to scream and only spat blood as Sihtric drove a blade into the open red maw of his mouth. The shield wall broke under our fury. Erik’s men fought to avenge their lord, and my men fought for Æthelflaed who crouched, arms over her head, as Sigefrid’s men died around her. She was shrieking, screaming inconsolably like a woman at the burial of the dead, and perhaps that was what kept her alive because, in that slaughter on the Dragon-Voyager’s stern, men feared those awful shrieks. The noise was terrifying, overwhelming, a sadness to fill the world, and it went on even after the last of Sigefrid’s men had leaped overboard to escape our swords and axes.

And only Sigefrid remained, and the Dragon-Voyager was under way, pulling against the tide to creep out of the channel under her few oars.

I draped my blood-soaked cloak over Æthelflaed’s shoulders. The ship was moving faster as Ralla’s oarsmen found their rhythm and as more men, dropping shields and weapons, snatched up the long oars and fitted them through the holes in Dragon-Voyager’s flanks. ‘Row!’ Ralla called as he came down the blood-slopping deck to take the steering-oar. ‘Row!’

Sigefrid remained and Sigefrid lived. He was on the deck, his useless legs curled beneath him, his sword hand empty, and with a blade held at his throat. Osferth, Alfred’s son, held that sword, and he looked at me nervously. Sigefrid was cursing and spitting. His brother’s body, with Fear-Giver still piercing the belly, lay beside him. Small waves broke on Caninga’s point as the new tide raced across the wide mudflats.

I went to stand over Sigefrid. I stared down at him, not hearing his insults. I looked at Erik’s corpse and thought that was a man I could have loved, could have fought beside, could have known like a brother, and then I looked at Osferth’s face, so like his father’s. ‘I told you once,’ I said, ‘that killing a cripple was no way to make a reputation.’

‘Yes, lord,’ he said.

‘I was wrong,’ I said, ‘kill him.’

‘Give me my sword!’ Sigefrid demanded.

Osferth hesitated as I looked back to the Norseman. ‘I will spend my life beyond death,’ I told him, ‘in Odin’s hall. And there I shall feast with your brother, and neither he nor I wishes your company.’

‘Give me my sword!’ Sigefrid was pleading now. He reached for Fear-Giver’s hilt, but I kicked his hand away from Erik’s corpse. ‘Kill him,’ I told Osferth.

We dropped Sigefrid Thurgilson overboard somewhere on the sun-dancing sea beyond Caninga, then turned westwards so that the flooding tide could carry us upriver. Haesten had managed to board another of his ships and, for a time, he pursued us, but we had the longer and faster boat, and we drew away from him and, after a time, his ships abandoned the chase and the smoke of Beamfleot receded until it looked like a long low cloud. And Æthelflaed still wept.

‘What do we do?’ a man asked me. He was one of Erik’s men, the leader now of the twenty-two survivors who had escaped with us.

‘Whatever you wish,’ I said.

‘We hear that your king hangs all Northmen,’ the man said.

‘Then he will hang me first,’ I said. ‘You will live,’ I promised him, ‘and in Lundene I shall give you a ship and you may go wherever you want.’ I smiled. ‘You can even stay and serve me.’

Those men had laid Erik’s body reverently on a cloak. They pulled Sigefrid’s sword from their lord’s belly and gave it to me, and I in turn handed it to Osferth. ‘You earned it,’ I said, and so he had, for in that welter of death Alfred’s son had fought like a man. Erik held his own sword in his dead hand and I thought he would already be at the feasting hall, waiting for me.

I took Æthelflaed away from her lover’s corpse and led her to the stern and there I held her as she cried in my arms. Her golden hair brushed my beard. She clung to me and cried till she had no more tears, and then she whimpered and hid her face against my bloody mail coat.

‘The king will be pleased with us,’ Finan said.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘he will.’ No ransom would be paid. Wessex was safe. The Northmen had fought and killed each other, and their ships were burning and their dreams were ashes.

I felt Æthelflaed’s body shaking against mine and I stared eastwards to where the sun dazzled above the smoke of burning Beamfleot. ‘You’re taking me back to Æthelred, aren’t you?’ she said accusingly.

‘I’m taking you to your father,’ I said. ‘Where else can I take you?’ She did not answer because she knew there was no choice. Wyrd bið ful ãræd. ‘And no one must ever know,’ I went on quietly, ‘about you and Erik.’

Again she did not answer, but now she could not answer. She was sobbing too heavily and I held my arms around her as though I could hide her from the watching men and from the world and from the husband who awaited her.

The long oars dipped, the riverbanks closed on us and in the west the smoke of Lundene smudged the summer sky.

As I took Æthelflaed home.

There is more fiction in Sword Song than in the previous novels about Uhtred of Bebbanburg. If Æthelflaed ever was captured by the Vikings then the chroniclers were curiously silent about the incident, so that strand of the story is my invention. What is true is that Alfred’s eldest daughter did marry Æthelred of Mercia, and there is a good deal of evidence that the marriage was not made in heaven. I suspect I have been extremely unfair to the real Æthelred, but fairness is not the historical novelist’s first duty.

The records of Alfred’s reign are comparatively rich, partly because the king was a scholar and wanted such records kept, but even so there are mysteries. We know that his forces captured London, but there is controversy over the exact year in which that city was essentially incorporated into Wessex. Legally it remained in Mercia, but Alfred was an ambitious man, and he was evidently determined to keep kingless Mercia subservient to Wessex. With the capture of Lundene he has begun the inexorable northwards expansion that will eventually, after Alfred’s death, transmute the Saxon kingdom of Wessex into the land we know as England.

Much of the rest of the story is based on truth. There was a determined Viking attack on Rochester (Hrofeceastre) in Kent that ended in utter failure. That failure vindicated Alfred’s defensive policy of ringing Wessex with burhs that were fortified towns, permanently garrisoned by the fyrd. A Viking chieftain could still invade Wessex, but few Viking armies travelled with siege equipment, and any such invasion thus risked leaving a strong enemy in its rear. The burh system was immaculately organised, a reflection, I suspect, of Alfred’s own obsession with order, and we are fortunate to possess a sixteenth-century copy of an eleventh-century copy of the original document describing the burh’s organisation. The Burghal Hildage, as the document is known, prescribes how many men would be needed in each burh, and how those men were to be raised, and it reflects an extraordinary defensive effort. Ancient ruined towns were revived and ramparts rebuilt. Alfred even planned some of those towns and, to this day, if you walk the streets of Wareham in Dorset or Wallingford in Oxford you are following the streets his surveyors laid out and passing property lines that have endured for twelve centuries.

If Alfred’s defensive scheme was a brilliant success, then his first efforts at offensive warfare were less remarkable. I have no evidence that Æthelred of Mercia led the fleet that attacked the Danes in the River Stour, indeed I doubt that foray was any of Æthelred’s business, but other than that the tale is essentially true and the expedition, after its initial success, was overwhelmed by the Vikings. Nor do I have a shred of evidence that Æthelred ever subjected his young wife to the ordeal of bitter water, but anyone fascinated by such ancient and malicious sorcery can find God’s instructions for the ceremony in the Old Testament (Numbers 5).

Alfred the Great, as Sword Song ends, still has some years to reign, Æthelflaed of Mercia has glory to find, and Uhtred of Bebbanburg, a fictional character, though based on a real man who happens to be one of my paternal ancestors, has a long road to travel. England, in the late ninth century, is still a dream in the minds of a few visionaries. Yet dreams, as the more fortunate of my characters discover, can come true, and so Uhtred and his story will continue.

Historical Note

There is more fiction in Sword Song than in the previous novels about Uhtred of Bebbanburg. If Æthelflaed ever was captured by the Vikings then the chroniclers were curiously silent about the incident, so that strand of the story is my invention. What is true is that Alfred’s eldest daughter did marry Æthelred of Mercia, and there is a good deal of evidence that the marriage was not made in heaven. I suspect I have been extremely unfair to the real Æthelred, but fairness is not the historical novelist’s first duty.

The records of Alfred’s reign are comparatively rich, partly because the king was a scholar and wanted such records kept, but even so there are mysteries. We know that his forces captured London, but there is controversy over the exact year in which that city was essentially incorporated into Wessex. Legally it remained in Mercia, but Alfred was an ambitious man, and he was evidently determined to keep kingless Mercia subservient to Wessex. With the capture of Lundene he has begun the inexorable northwards expansion that will eventually, after Alfred’s death, transmute the Saxon kingdom of Wessex into the land we know as England.

Much of the rest of the story is based on truth. There was a determined Viking attack on Rochester (Hrofeceastre) in Kent that ended in utter failure. That failure vindicated Alfred’s defensive policy of ringing Wessex with burhs that were fortified towns, permanently garrisoned by the fyrd. A Viking chieftain could still invade Wessex, but few Viking armies travelled with siege equipment, and any such invasion thus risked leaving a strong enemy in its rear. The burh system was immaculately organised, a reflection, I suspect, of Alfred’s own obsession with order, and we are fortunate to possess a sixteenth-century copy of an eleventh-century copy of the original document describing the burh’s organisation. The Burghal Hildage, as the document is known, prescribes how many men would be needed in each burh, and how those men were to be raised, and it reflects an extraordinary defensive effort. Ancient ruined towns were revived and ramparts rebuilt. Alfred even planned some of those towns and, to this day, if you walk the streets of Wareham in Dorset or Wallingford in Oxford you are following the streets his surveyors laid out and passing property lines that have endured for twelve centuries.

If Alfred’s defensive scheme was a brilliant success, then his first efforts at offensive warfare were less remarkable. I have no evidence that Æthelred of Mercia led the fleet that attacked the Danes in the River Stour, indeed I doubt that foray was any of Æthelred’s business, but other than that the tale is essentially true and the expedition, after its initial success, was overwhelmed by the Vikings. Nor do I have a shred of evidence that Æthelred ever subjected his young wife to the ordeal of bitter water, but anyone fascinated by such ancient and malicious sorcery can find God’s instructions for the ceremony in the Old Testament (Numbers 5).

Alfred the Great, as Sword Song ends, still has some years to reign, Æthelflaed of Mercia has glory to find, and Uhtred of Bebbanburg, a fictional character, though based on a real man who happens to be one of my paternal ancestors, has a long road to travel. England, in the late ninth century, is still a dream in the minds of a few visionaries. Yet dreams, as the more fortunate of my characters discover, can come true, and so Uhtred and his story will continue.

Copyright

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it, while at times based on historical figures, are the work of the author’s imagination.

Harper

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

77–85 Fulham Palace Road,

Hammersmith, London W6 8JB

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2007

Copyright © Bernard Cornwell 2007

Map © John Gilkes 2007

Bernard Cornwell asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Ebook Edition © December 2010 ISBN: 9780007279654

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THE BURNING LAND

The Burning Land

BERNARD CORNWELL

The Burning Land

is for

Alan and Jan Rust

CONTENTS

Title Page

Dedication

Place-names

Map

Family Tree

Part One: THE WARLORD

Not long ago …

Morning, and I …

The first thing …

Next day was …

Part Two: VIKING

I stayed furious …

I snatched open …

I tried to …

I had told …

Part Three: BATTLE’S EDGE

The deep winter …

A storm came …

Seventy of us …

Next day Ealdorman …

Æthelflæd joined me …

For a moment …

HISTORICAL NOTE

Copyright

PLACE-NAMES

The spelling of place names in Anglo Saxon England was an uncertain business, with no consistency and no agreement even about the name itself. Thus London was variously rendered as Lundonia, Lundenberg, Lundenne, Lundene, Lundenwic, Lundenceaster and Lundres. Doubtless some readers will prefer other versions of the names listed below, but I have usually employed whichever spelling is cited in either the Oxford Dictionary of English Place-Names or the newer Cambridge Dictionary of English Place-Names for the years nearest or contained within Alfred’s reign, AD 871–899, but even that solution is not foolproof. Hayling Island, in 956, was written as both Heilincigae and Hæglingaiggæ. Nor have I been consistent myself; I have preferred the modern form Northumbria to Nor hymbralond to avoid the suggestion that the boundaries of the ancient kingdom coincide with those of the modern county. So this list, like the spellings themselves, is capricious.

Æsc’s Hill

Ashdown, Berkshire

Æscengum

Eashing, Surrey

Æthelingæg

Athelney, Somerset

Beamfleot

Benfleet, Essex

Bebbanburg

Bamburgh Castle, Northumberland

Caninga

Canvey Island, Essex

Cent

Kent

Defnascir

Devonshire

Dumnoc

Dunwich, Suffolk (now mostly vanished beneath the sea)

Dunholm

Durham, County Durham

East Sexe

Essex

Eoferwic

York

Ethandun

Edington, Wiltshire

Exanceaster

Exeter, Devon

Farnea Islands

Farne Islands, Northumberland

Fearnhamme

Farnham, Surrey

Fughelness

Foulness Island, Essex

Grantaceaster

Cambridge, Cambridgeshire

Gleawecestre

Gloucester, Gloucestershire

Godelmingum

Godalming, Surrey

Hæthlegh

Hadleigh, Essex

Haithabu

Hedeby, southern Denmark

Hocheleia

Hockley, Essex

Hothlege

Hadleigh Ray, Essex

Humbre

River Humber

Hwealf

River Crouch, Essex

Lecelad

Lechlade, Gloucestershire

Liccelfeld

Lichfield, Staffordshire

Lindisfarena

Lindisfarne (Holy Island), Northumberland

Lundene

London

Sæfern

River Severn

Scaepege

Isle of Sheppey, Kent

Silcestre

Silchester, Hampshire

Sumorsæte

Somerset

Suthriganaweorc

Southwark, Greater London

Temes

River Thames

Thunresleam

Thundersley, Essex

Tinan

River Tyne

Torneie

Thorney Island, an island that has disappeared – it lay close to the West Drayton station near Heathrow Airport

Tuede

River Tweed

Uisc

River Exe, Devonshire

Wiltunscir

Wiltshire

Wintanceaster

Winchester, Hampshire

Yppe

Epping, Essex

Zegge

Fictional Frisian island

The Royal Family of Wessex

PART ONE

The Warlord

Not long ago I was in some monastery. I forget where except that it was in the lands that were once Mercia. I was travelling home with a dozen men, it was a wet winter’s day, and all we needed was shelter, food and warmth, but the monks behaved as though a band of Norsemen had arrived at their gate. Uhtred of Bebbanburg was within their walls and such is my reputation that they expected me to start slaughtering them. ‘I just want bread,’ I finally made them understand, ‘cheese if you have it, and some ale.’ I threw money on the hall floor. ‘Bread, cheese, ale, and a warm bed. Nothing more!’

Next morning it was raining like the world was ending and so I waited until the wind and weather had done their worst. I roamed the monastery and eventually found myself in a dank corridor where three miserable-looking monks were copying manuscripts. An older monk, white-haired, sour-faced and resentful, supervised them. He wore a fur stole over his habit, and had a leather quirt with which he doubtless encouraged the industry of the three copyists. ‘They should not be disturbed, lord,’ he dared to chide me. He sat on a stool beside a brazier, the warmth of which did not reach the three scribblers.

‘The latrines haven’t been licked clean,’ I told him, ‘and you look idle.’

So the older monk went quiet and I looked over the shoulders of the ink-stained copyists. One, a slack-faced youth with fat lips and a fatter goitre on his neck, was transcribing a life of Saint Ciaran, which told how a wolf, a badger and a fox had helped build a church in Ireland, and if the young monk believed that nonsense then he was as big a fool as he looked. The second was doing something useful by copying a land grant, though in all probability it was a forgery. Monasteries are adept at inventing old land grants, proving that some ancient half-forgotten king has granted the church a rich estate, thus forcing the rightful owner to either yield the ground or pay a vast sum in compensation. They tried it on me once. A priest brought the documents and I pissed on them, and then I posted twenty sword-warriors on the disputed land and sent word to the bishop that he could come and take it whenever he wished. He never did. Folk tell their children that success lies in working hard and being thrifty, but that is as much nonsense as supposing that a badger, a fox and a wolf could build a church. The way to wealth is to become a Christian bishop or a monastery’s abbot and thus be imbued with heaven’s permission to lie, cheat and steal your way to luxury.

The third young man was copying a chronicle. I moved his quill aside so I could see what he had just written. ‘You can read, lord?’ the old monk asked. He made it sound like an innocent enquiry, but the sarcasm was unmistakable.

‘“In this year,”’ I read aloud, ‘“the pagans again came to Wessex, in great force, a horde as had never been seen before, and they ravaged all the lands, causing mighty distress to God’s people, who, by the grace of Our Lord Jesus Christ, were rescued by the Lord Æthelred of Mercia who came with his army to Fearnhamme, in which place he did utterly destroy the heathen.”’ I prodded the text with a finger. ‘What year did this happen?’ I asked the copyist.

‘In the year of our Lord 892, lord,’ he said nervously.

‘So what is this?’ I asked, flicking the pages of the parchment from which he copied.

‘They are annals,’ the elderly monk answered for the younger man, ‘the Annals of Mercia. That is the only copy, lord, and we are making another.’

I looked back at the freshly-written page. ‘Æthelred rescued Wessex?’ I asked indignantly.

‘It was so,’ the old monk said, ‘with God’s help’

‘God?’ I snarled. ‘It was with my help! I fought that battle, not Æthelred!’ None of the monks spoke. They just stared at me. One of my men came to the cloister end of the passageway and leaned there, a grin on his half-toothless face. ‘I was at Fearnhamme!’ I added, then snatched up the only copy of the Annals of Mercia and turned its stiff pages. Æthelred, Æthelred, Æthelred, and not a mention of Uhtred, hardly a mention of Alfred, no Æthelflæd, just Æthelred. I turned to the page which told of the events after Fearnhamme. ‘“And in this year,”’ I read aloud, ‘“by God’s good grace, the lord Æthelred and the Ætheling Edward led the men of Mercia to Beamfleot where Æthelred took great plunder and made mighty slaughter of the pagans.”’ I looked at the older monk. ‘Æthelred and Edward led that army?’

‘So it is said, lord.’ He spoke nervously, his earlier defiance completely gone.

‘I led them, you bastard,’ I said. I snatched up the copied pages and took both them and the original annals to the brazier.

‘No!’ the older man protested.

‘They’re lies,’ I said.

He held up a placatory hand. ‘For forty years, lord,’ he said humbly, ‘those records have been compiled and preserved. They are the tale of our people! That is the only copy!’

‘They’re lies,’ I said again. ‘I was there. I was on the hill at Fearnhamme and in the ditch at Beamfleot. Were you there?’

‘I was just a child, lord,’ he said.

He gave an appalled shriek when I tossed the manuscripts onto the brazier. He tried to rescue the parchments, but I knocked his hand away. ‘I was there,’ I said again, staring at the blackening sheets that curled and crackled before the fire flared bright at their edges. ‘I was there.’

‘Forty years’ work!’ the old monk said in disbelief.

‘If you want to know what happened,’ I said, ‘then come to me in Bebbanburg and I’ll tell you the truth.’

They never came. Of course they did not come.

But I was at Fearnhamme, and that was just the beginning of the tale.

Morning, and I was young, and the sea was a shimmer of silver and pink beneath wisps of mist that obscured the coasts. To my south was Cent, to my north lay East Anglia and behind me was Lundene, while ahead the sun was rising to gild the few small clouds that stretched across the dawn’s bright sky.

We were in the estuary of the Temes. My ship, the Seolferwulf, was newly built and she leaked, as new ships will. Frisian craftsmen had made her from oak timbers that were unusually pale, and thus her name, the Silverwolf. Behind me were the Kenelm, named by King Alfred for some murdered saint, and the Dragon-Voyager, a ship we had taken from the Danes. Dragon-Voyager was a beauty, built as only the Danes could build. A sleek killer of a ship, docile to handle yet lethal in battle.

Seolferwulf was also a beauty; long-keeled, wide-beamed and high-prowed. I had paid for her myself, giving gold to Frisian shipwrights, and watching as her ribs grew and as her planking made a skin and as her proud bow reared above the slipway. On that prow was a wolf’s head, carved from oak and painted white with a red lolling tongue and red eyes and yellow fangs. Bishop Erkenwald, who ruled Lundene, had chided me, saying I should have named the ship for some Christian milksop saint, and he had presented me with a crucifix that he wanted me to nail to Seolferwulf’s mast, but instead I burned the wooden god and his wooden cross and mixed their ashes with crushed apples, that I fed to my two sows. I worship Thor.

Now, on that distant morning when I was still young, we rowed eastwards on that pink and silver sea. My wolf’s-head prow was decorated with a thick-leaved bough of oak to show we intended no harm to our enemies, though my men were still dressed in mail and had shields and weapons close to their oars. Finan, my second in command, crouched near me on the steering platform and listened with amusement to Father Willibald, who was talking too much. ‘Other Danes have received Christ’s mercy, Lord Uhtred,’ he said. He had been spouting this nonsense ever since we had left Lundene, but I endured it because I liked Willibald. He was an eager, hard-working and cheerful man. ‘With God’s good help,’ he went on, ‘we shall spread the light of Christ among these heathen!’

‘Why don’t the Danes send us missionaries?’ I asked.

‘God prevents it, lord.’ Willibald said. His companion, a priest whose name I have long forgotten, nodded earnest agreement.

‘Maybe they’ve got better things to do?’ I suggested.

‘If the Danes have ears to hear, lord,’ Willibald assured me, ‘then they will receive Christ’s message with joy and gladness!’

‘You’re a fool, father,’ I said fondly. ‘You know how many of Alfred’s missionaries have been slaughtered?’

‘We must all be prepared for martyrdom, lord,’ Willibald said, though anxiously.

‘They have their priestly guts slit open,’ I said ruminatively, ‘they have their eyes gouged out, their balls sliced off, and their tongues ripped out. Remember that monk we found at Yppe?’ I asked Finan. Finan was a fugitive from Ireland, where he had been raised a Christian, though his religion was so tangled with native myths that it was scarcely recognisable as the same faith that Willibald preached. ‘How did that poor man die?’ I asked.

‘They skinned the poor soul alive,’ Finan said.

‘Started at his toes?’

‘Just peeled it off slowly,’ Finan said, ‘and it must have taken hours.’

‘They didn’t peel it,’ I said, ‘you can’t skin a man like a lamb.’

‘True,’ Finan said. ‘You have to tug it off. Takes a lot of strength!’

‘He was a missionary,’ I told Willibald.

‘And a blessed martyr too,’ Finan added cheerfully. ‘But they must have got bored because they finished him off in the end. They used a tree-saw on his belly.’

‘It was probably an axe,’ I said.

‘No, it was a saw, lord,’ Finan insisted, grinning, ‘and one with savage big teeth. Ripped him into two, it did.’ Father Willibald, who had always been a martyr to seasickness, staggered to the ship’s side.

We turned the ship southwards. The estuary of the Temes is a treacherous place of mudbanks and strong tides, but I had been patrolling these waters for five years now and I scarcely needed to look for my landmarks as we rowed towards the shore of Scaepege. And there, ahead of me, waiting between two beached ships, was the enemy. The Danes. There must have been a hundred or more men, all in chain mail, all helmeted, and all with bright weapons. ‘We could slaughter the whole crew,’ I suggested to Finan. ‘We’ve got enough men.’

‘We agreed to come in peace!’ Father Willibald protested, wiping his mouth with a sleeve.

And so we had, and so we did.

I ordered Kenelm and Dragon-Voyager to stay close to the muddy shore, while we drove Seolferwulf onto the gently shelving mud between the two Danish boats. Seolferwulf’s bows made a hissing sound as she slowed and stopped. She was firmly grounded now, but the tide was rising, so she was safe for a while. I jumped off the prow, splashing into deep wet mud, then waded to firmer ground where our enemies waited.

‘My Lord Uhtred,’ the leader of the Danes greeted me. He grinned and spread his arms wide. He was a stocky man, golden-haired and square-jawed. His beard was plaited into five thick ropes fastened with silver clasps. His forearms glittered with rings of gold and silver, and more gold studded the belt from which hung a thick-bladed sword. He looked prosperous, which he was, and something about the openness of his face made him appear trustworthy, which he was not. ‘I am so overjoyed to see you,’ he said, still smiling, ‘my old valued friend!’

‘Jarl Haesten,’ I responded, giving him the title he liked to use, though in my mind Haesten was nothing but a pirate. I had known him for years. I had saved his life once, which was a bad day’s work, and ever since that day I had been trying to kill him, yet he always managed to slither away. He had escaped me five years before and, since then, I had heard how he had been raiding deep inside Frankia. He had amassed silver there, had whelped another son on his wife, and had attracted followers. Now he had brought eighty ships to Wessex.

‘I hoped Alfred would send you,’ Haesten said, holding out a hand.

‘If Alfred hadn’t ordered me to come in peace,’ I said, taking the hand, ‘I’d have cut that head off your shoulders by now.’

‘You bark a lot,’ he said, amused, ‘but the louder a cur barks, lord, the weaker its bite.’

I let that pass. I had not come to fight, but to do Alfred’s bidding, and the king had ordered me to bring missionaries to Haesten. Willibald and his companion were helped ashore by my men, then came to stand beside me, where they smiled nervously. Both priests spoke Danish, which is why they had been chosen. I had also brought Haesten a message gilded with treasure, but he feigned indifference, insisting I accompany him to his encampment before Alfred’s gift was delivered.

Scaepege was not Haesten’s main encampment, that was some distance to the east where his eighty ships were drawn up on a beach protected by a newly-made fort. He had not wanted to invite me into that fastness, and so he had insisted Alfred’s envoys meet him among the wastes of Scaepege which, even in summer, is a place of dank pools, sour grass and dark marshes. He had arrived there two days before, and had made a crude fort by surrounding a patch of higher ground with a tangled wall of thorn bushes, inside which he had raised two sailcloth tents. ‘We shall eat, lord,’ he invited me grandly, gesturing to a trestle table surrounded by a dozen stools. Finan, two other warriors and the pair of priests accompanied me, though Haesten insisted the priests should not sit at the table. ‘I don’t trust Christian wizards,’ he explained, ‘so they can squat on the ground.’ The food was a fish stew and rock-hard bread, served by half-naked slave women, none more than fourteen or fifteen years old, and all of them Saxons.

Haesten was humiliating the girls as a provocation and he watched for my reaction. ‘Are they from Wessex?’ I asked.

‘Of course not,’ he said, pretending to be offended by the question. ‘I took them from East Anglia. You want one of them, lord? There, that little one has breasts firm as apples!’

I asked the apple-breasted girl where she had been captured, and she just shook her head dumbly, too frightened to answer me. She poured me ale that had been sweetened with berries. ‘Where are you from?’ I asked her again.

Haesten looked at the girl, letting his eyes linger on her breasts. ‘Answer the lord,’ he said in English.

‘I don’t know, lord,’ she said.

‘Wessex?’ I demanded. ‘East Anglia? Where?’

‘A village, lord,’ she said, and that was all she knew, and I waved her away.

‘Your wife is well?’ Haesten asked, watching the girl walk away.

‘She is.’

‘I am glad,’ he said convincingly enough, then his shrewd eyes looked amused. ‘So what is your master’s message to me?’ he asked, spooning fish broth into his mouth and dripping it down his beard.

‘You’re to leave Wessex,’ I said.

‘I’m to leave Wessex!’ He pretended to be shocked and waved a hand at the desolate marshes, ‘why would a man want to leave all this, lord?’

‘You’re to leave Wessex,’ I said doggedly, ‘agree not to invade Mercia, give my king two hostages, and accept his missionaries.’

‘Missionaries!’ Haesten said, pointing his horn spoon at me. ‘Now you can’t approve of that, Lord Uhtred! You, at least, worship the real gods.’ He twisted on the stool and stared at the two priests. ‘Maybe I’ll kill them.’

‘Do that,’ I said, ‘and I’ll suck your eyeballs out of their sockets.’

He heard the venom in my voice and was surprised by it. I saw a flicker of resentment in his eyes, but he kept his voice calm. ‘You’ve become a Christian, lord?’

‘Father Willibald is my friend,’ I said.

‘You should have said,’ he reproved me, ‘and I would not have jested. Of course they will live and they can even preach to us, but they’ll achieve nothing. So, Alfred instructs me to take my ships away?’

‘Far away,’ I said.

‘But where?’ he asked in feigned innocence.

‘Frankia?’ I suggested.

‘The Franks have paid me to leave them alone,’ Haesten said, ‘they even built us ships to hasten our departure! Will Alfred build us ships?’

‘You’re to leave Wessex,’ I said stubbornly, ‘you’re to leave Mercia untroubled, you’re to accept missionaries, and you are to give Alfred hostages.’

‘Ah,’ Haesten smiled, ‘the hostages.’ He stared at me for a few heartbeats, then appeared to forget the matter of hostages, waving seawards instead. ‘And where are we to go?’

‘Alfred is paying you to leave Wessex,’ I said, ‘and where you go is not my concern, but make it very far from the reach of my sword.’

Haesten laughed. ‘Your sword, lord,’ he said, ‘rusts in its scabbard.’ He jerked a thumb over his shoulder, towards the south. ‘Wessex burns,’ he said with relish, ‘and Alfred lets you sleep.’ He was right. Far to the south, hazed in the summer sky, were pyres of smoke from a dozen or more burning villages, and those plumes were only the ones I could see. I knew there were more. Eastern Wessex was being ravaged, and, rather than summon my help to repel the invaders, Alfred had ordered me to stay in Lundene to protect that city from attack. Haesten grinned. ‘Maybe Alfred thinks you’re too old to fight, lord?’

I did not respond to the taunt. Looking back down the years I think of myself as young back then, though I must have been all of thirty-five or thirty-six years old that year. Most men never live that long, but I was fortunate. I had lost none of my sword-skill or strength, I had a slight limp from an old battle-wound, but I also had the most golden of all a warrior’s attributes; reputation. But Haesten felt free to goad me, knowing that I came to him as a supplicant.

I came as a supplicant because two Danish fleets had landed in Cent, the easternmost part of Wessex. Haesten’s was the smaller fleet, and so far he had been content to build his fortress and let his men raid only enough to provide themselves with sufficient food and a few slaves. He had even let the shipping in the Temes go unmolested. He did not want a fight with Wessex, not yet, because he was waiting to see what happened to the south, where another and much greater Viking fleet had come ashore.

Jarl Harald Bloodhair had brought more than two hundred ships filled with hungry men, and his army had stormed a half-built burh and slaughtered the men inside, and now his warriors were spreading across Cent, burning and killing, enslaving and robbing. It was Harald’s men who had smeared the sky with smoke. Alfred had marched against both invaders. The king was old now, old and ever more sick, so his troops were supposedly commanded by his son-in-law, Lord Æthelred of Mercia, and by the Ætheling Edward, Alfred’s eldest son.

And they had done nothing. They had put their men on the great wooded ridge at the centre of Cent from where they could strike north against Haesten or south against Harald, and then they had stayed motionless, presumably frightened that if they attacked one Danish army the other would assault their rear. So Alfred, convinced that his enemies were too powerful, had sent me to persuade Haesten to leave Wessex. Alfred should have ordered me to lead my garrison against Haesten, allowed me to soak the marshes with Danish blood, but instead I was instructed to bribe Haesten. With Haesten gone, the king thought, his army might deal with Harald’s wild warriors.

Haesten used a thorn to pick at his teeth. He finally scraped out a scrap of fish. ‘Why doesn’t your king attack Harald?’ he asked.

‘You’d like that,’ I said.

He grinned. ‘With Harald gone,’ he admitted, ‘and that rancid whore of his gone as well, a lot of crews would join me.’

‘Rancid whore?’

He grinned, pleased that he knew something I did not. ‘Skade,’ he said flatly.

‘Harald’s wife?’

‘His woman, his bitch, his lover, his sorceress.’

‘Never heard of her,’ I said.

‘You will,’ he promised, ‘and if you see her, my friend, you’ll want her. But she’ll nail your skull to her hall gable if she can.’

‘You’ve seen her?’ I asked, and he nodded. ‘You wanted her?’

‘Harald’s impulsive,’ he said, ignoring my question. ‘And Skade will goad him to stupidity. And when that happens a lot of his men will look for another lord.’ He smiled slyly. ‘Give me another hundred ships, and I could be King of Wessex inside a year.’

‘I’ll tell Alfred,’ I said, ‘and maybe that will persuade him to attack you first.’

‘He won’t,’ Haesten said confidently. ‘If he turns on me then he releases Harald’s men to spread across all Wessex.’

That was true. ‘So why doesn’t he attack Harald?’ I asked.

‘You know why.’

‘Tell me.’

He paused, wondering whether to reveal all he knew, but he could not resist showing off his knowledge. He used the thorn to scratch a line in the wood of the table, then made a circle that was bisected by the line. ‘The Temes,’ he said, tapping the line, ‘Lundene,’ he indicated the circle. ‘You’re in Lundene with a thousand men, and behind you,’ he tapped higher up the Temes, ‘Lord Aldhelm has five hundred Mercians. If Alfred attacks Harald, he’s going to want Aldhelm’s men and your men to go south, and that will leave Mercia wide open to attack.’

‘Who would attack Mercia?’ I asked innocently.

‘The Danes of East Anglia?’ Haesten suggested just as innocently. ‘All they need is a leader with courage.’

‘And our agreement,’ I said, ‘insists you will not invade Mercia.’

‘So it does,’ Haesten said with a smile,’ ‘except we have no agreement yet.’

But we did. I had to yield the Dragon-Voyager to Haesten, and in her belly lay four iron-bound chests filled with silver. That was the price. In return for the ship and the silver, Haesten promised to leave Wessex and ignore Mercia. He also agreed to accept missionaries and gave me two boys as hostages. He claimed one was his nephew, and that might have been true. The other boy was younger and dressed in fine linen with a lavish gold brooch. He was a good-looking lad with bright blond hair and anxious blue eyes. Haesten stood behind the boy and placed his hands on the small shoulders. ‘This, lord,’ he said reverently, ‘is my eldest son, Horic. I yield him as a hostage,’ Haesten paused, and seemed to sniff away a tear, ‘I yield him as a hostage, lord, to show goodwill, but I beg you to look after the boy. I love him dearly.’

I looked at Horic. ‘How old are you?’ I asked.

‘He is seven,’ Haesten said, patting Horic’s shoulder.

‘Let him answer for himself,’ I insisted. ‘How old are you?’

The boy made a guttural sound and Haesten crouched to embrace him. ‘He is a deaf-mute, Lord Uhtred,’ Haesten said. ‘The gods decreed my son should be deaf and mute.’

‘The gods decreed that you should be a lying bastard,’ I said to Haesten, but too softly for his followers to hear and take offence.

‘And if I am?’ he asked, amused. ‘What of it? And if I say this boy is my son, who is to prove otherwise?’

‘You’ll leave Wessex?’ I asked.

‘I’ll keep this treaty,’ he promised.

I pretended to believe him. I had told Alfred that Haesten could not be trusted, but Alfred was desperate. He was old, he saw his grave not far ahead, and he wanted Wessex rid of the hated pagans. And so I paid the silver, took the hostages, and, under a darkening sky, rowed back to Lundene.

Lundene is built in a place where the ground rises in giant steps away from the river. There is terrace after terrace, rising to the topmost level where the Romans built their grandest buildings, some of which still stood, though they were sadly decayed, patched with wattle and scabbed by the thatched huts we Saxons made.

In those days Lundene was part of Mercia, though Mercia was like the grand Roman buildings; half fallen, and Mercia was also scabbed with Danish jarls who had settled its fertile lands. My cousin Æthelred was the chief Ealdorman of Mercia, its supposed ruler, but he was kept on a tight lead by Alfred of Wessex, who had made certain his own men controlled Lundene. I commanded that garrison, while Bishop Erkenwald ruled everything else.

These days, of course, he is known as Saint Erkenwald, but I remember him as a sour weasel of a man. He was efficient, I grant him that, and the city was well-governed in his time, but his unadulterated hatred of all pagans made him my enemy. I worshipped Thor, so to him I was evil, but I was also necessary. I was the warrior who protected his city, the pagan who had kept the heathen Danes at bay for over five years now, the man who kept the lands around Lundene safe so that Erkenwald could levy his taxes.

Now I stood on the topmost step of a Roman house built on the topmost of Lundene’s terraces. Bishop Erkenwald was on my right. He was much shorter than I, but most men are, yet my height irked him. A straggle of priests, ink-stained, pale-faced and nervous, were gathered on the steps beneath, while Finan, my Irish fighter, stood on my left. We all stared southwards.

We saw the mix of thatch and tile that roof Lundene, all studded with the stubby towers of the churches Erkenwald had built. Red kites wheeled above them, riding the warm air, though higher still I could see the first geese flying southwards above the wide Temes. The river was slashed by the remnants of the Roman bridge, a marvellous thing which was crudely broken in its centre. I had made a roadway of timbers that spanned the gap, but even I was nervous every time I needed to cross that makeshift repair which led to Suthriganaweorc, the earth and timber fortress that protected the bridge’s southern end. There were wide marshes there and a huddle of huts where a village had grown around the fort. Beyond the marshes the land rose to the hills of Wessex, low and green, and above those hills, far off, like ghostly pillars in the still, late-summer sky, were plumes of smoke. I counted fifteen, but the clouds hazed the horizon and there could have been more.

‘They’re raiding!’ Bishop Erkenwald said, sounding both surprised and outraged. Wessex had been spared any large Viking raid for years now, protected by the burhs, which were the towns Alfred had walled and garrisoned, but Harald’s men were spreading fire, rape and theft in all the eastern parts of Wessex. They avoided the burhs, attacking only the smaller settlements. ‘They’re well beyond Cent!’ the bishop observed.

‘And going deeper into Wessex,’ I said.

‘How many of them?’ Erkenwald demanded.

‘We hear two hundred ships landed,’ I said, ‘so they must have at least five thousand fighting men. Maybe two thousand of those are with Harald.’

‘Only two thousand?’ the bishop asked sharply.

‘It depends how many horses they have,’ I explained. ‘Only mounted warriors will be raiding, the rest will be guarding his ships.’

‘It’s still a pagan horde,’ the bishop said angrily. He touched the cross hanging about his neck. ‘Our lord king,’ he went on, ‘has decided to defeat them at Æscengum.’

‘Æscengum!’

‘And why not?’ the bishop bridled at my tone, then shuddered when I laughed. ‘There is nothing amusing in that,’ he said tartly. But there was. Alfred, or perhaps it had been Æthelred, had advanced the army of Wessex into Cent, placing it on high wooded ground between the forces of Haesten and Harald, and then they had done nothing. Now it seemed that Alfred, or perhaps his son-in-law, had decided to retreat to Æscengum, a burh in the centre of Wessex, presumably hoping that Harald would attack them and be defeated by the burh’s walls. It was a pathetic idea. Harald was a wolf, Wessex was a flock of sheep, and Alfred’s army was the wolfhound that should protect the sheep, but Alfred was tethering the wolfhound in hope that the wolf would come and be bitten. Meanwhile the wolf was running free among the flock. ‘And our lord king,’ Erkenwald continued loftily, ‘has requested that you and some of your troops join him, but only if I am satisfied that Haesten will not attack Lundene in your absence.’

‘He won’t,’ I said, and felt a surge of elation. Alfred, at last, had called for my help, which meant the wolfhound was being given sharp teeth.

‘Haesten fears we’ll kill the hostages?’ the bishop asked.

‘Haesten doesn’t care a cabbage-smelling fart for the hostages,’ I said. ‘The one he calls his son is some peasant boy tricked out in rich clothes.’

‘Then why did you accept him?’ the bishop demanded indignantly.

‘What was I supposed to do? Attack Haesten’s main camp to find his pups?’

‘So Haesten is cheating us?’

‘Of course he’s cheating us, but he won’t attack Lundene unless Harald defeats Alfred.’

‘I wish we could be certain of that.’

‘Haesten is cautious,’ I said. ‘He fights when he’s certain he can win, otherwise he waits.’

Erkenwald nodded. ‘So take men south tomorrow,’ he ordered, then walked away, followed by his scurrying priests.

I look back now across the long years and realise Bishop Erkenwald and I ruled Lundene well. I did not like him, and he hated me, and we begrudged the time we needed to spend in each other’s company, but he never interfered with my garrison and I did not intervene in his governance. Another man might have asked how many men I planned to take south, or how many would be left to guard the city, but Erkenwald trusted me to make the right decisions. I still think he was a weasel.

‘How many men ride with you?’ Gisela asked me that night.

We were in our house, a Roman merchant’s house built on the northern bank of the Temes. The river stank often, but we were used to it and the house was happy. We had slaves, servants and guards, nurses and cooks, and our three children. There was Uhtred, our oldest, who must have been around ten that year, and Stiorra his sister, and Osbert, the youngest, just two and indomitably curious. Uhtred was named after me, as I had been named after my father and he after his, but this newest Uhtred irritated me because he was a pale and nervous child who clung to his mother’s skirts.

‘Three hundred men,’ I answered.

‘Only?’

‘Alfred has sufficient,’ I said, ‘and I must leave a garrison here.’

Gisela flinched. She was pregnant again, and the birth could not be far off. She saw my worried expression and smiled. ‘I spit babies like pips,’ she said reassuringly. ‘How long to kill Harald’s men?’

‘A month?’ I guessed.

‘I shall have given birth by then,’ she said, and I touched the carving of Thor’s hammer which hung at my neck. Gisela smiled reassurance again. ‘I have been lucky with childbirth,’ she went on, which was true. Her births had been easy enough and all three children had lived. ‘You’ll come back to find a new baby crying,’ she said, ‘and you’ll get annoyed.’

I answered that truth with a swift smile, then pushed through the leather curtain onto the terrace. It was dark. There were a few lights on the river’s far bank where the fort guarded the bridge, and their flames shimmered on the water. In the west there was a streak of purple showing in a cloud rift. The river seethed through the bridge’s narrow arches, but otherwise the city was quiet. Dogs barked occasionally, and there was sporadic laughter from the kitchens. Seolferwulf, moored in the dock beside the house, creaked in the small wind. I glanced downstream to where, at the city’s edge, I had built a small tower of oak at the riverside. Men watched from that tower night and day, watching for the beaked ships that might come to attack Lundene’s wharves, but no warning fire blazed from the tower’s top. All was quiet. There were Danes in Wessex, but Lundene was resting.

‘When this is over,’ Gisela said from the doorway, ‘maybe we should go north.’

‘Yes,’ I said, then turned to look at the beauty of her long face and dark eyes. She was a Dane and, like me, she was weary of Wessex’s Christianity. A man should have gods, and perhaps there is some sense in acknowledging only one god, but why choose one who loves the whip and spur so much? The Christian god was not ours, yet we were forced to live among folk who feared him and who condemned us because we worshipped a different god. Yet I was sworn to Alfred’s service and so I remained where he demanded that I remain. ‘He can’t live much longer,’ I said.

‘And when he dies you’re free?’

‘I gave no oath to anyone else,’ I said, and I spoke honestly. In truth I had given another oath, and that oath would come back to find me, but it was so far from my mind that night that I believed I answered Gisela truthfully.

‘And when he’s dead?’

‘We go north,’ I said. North, back to my ancestral home beside the Northumbrian sea, a home usurped by my uncle. North to Bebbanburg, north to the lands where pagans could live without the incessant nagging of the Christians’ nailed god. We would go home. I had served Alfred long enough, and I had served him well, but I wanted to go home. ‘I promise,’ I told Gisela, ‘on my oath, we will go home.’

The gods laughed.

We crossed the bridge at dawn, three hundred warriors with half as many boys who came to tend the horses and carry the spare weapons. The hooves clattered loud on the makeshift bridge as we rode towards the pyres of smoke that told of Wessex being ravaged. We crossed the wide marsh where, at high tide, the river puddles dark among lank grasses, and climbed the gentle hills beyond. I left most of the garrison to guard Lundene, taking only my own household troops, my warriors and oath-men, the fighters I trusted with my own life. I left just six of those men in Lundene to guard my house under the command of Cerdic, who had been my battle-companion for many years and who had almost wept as he had pleaded with me to take him. ‘You must guard Gisela and my family,’ I had told him, and so Cerdic stayed as we rode west, following tracks trampled by the sheep and cattle that were driven to slaughter in Lundene. We saw little panic. Folk were keeping their eyes on the distant smoke, and thegns had placed lookouts on rooftops and high among the trees. We were mistaken for Danes more than once, and there would be a flurry as people ran towards the woods, but once our identity was discovered they would come back. They were supposed to drive their livestock to the nearest burh if danger threatened, but folk are ever reluctant to leave their homes. I ordered whole villages to take their cattle, sheep and goats to Suthriganaweorc, but I doubt they did. They would rather stay until the Danes were breathing down their throats.

Yet the Danes were staying well to the south, so perhaps those villagers had judged well. We swerved southwards ourselves, climbing higher and expecting to see the raiders at any moment. I had scouts riding well ahead, and it was mid-morning before one of them waved a red cloth to signal he had seen something to alarm him. I spurred to the hill crest, but saw nothing in the valley beneath.

‘There were folk running, lord,’ the scout told me. ‘They saw me and hid in the trees.’

‘Maybe they were running from you?’

He shook his head. ‘They were already panicked, lord, when I saw them.’

We were gazing out across a wide valley, green and lush beneath the summer sun. At its far side were wooded hills and the nearest smoke pyre was beyond that skyline. The valley looked peaceful. I could see small fields, the thatched roofs of a village, a track going west, and the glimmer of a stream twisting between meadows. I saw no enemy, but the heavy-leafed trees could have hidden Harald’s whole horde. ‘What did you see exactly?’ I asked.

‘Women, lord. Women and children. Some goats. They were running that way.’ He pointed westwards.

So the fugitives were fleeing the village. The scout had glimpsed them between the trees, but there was no sign of them now, nor of whatever had made them run. No smoke showed in this long wide valley, but that did not mean Harald’s men were not there. I plucked the scout’s reins, leading him beneath the skyline, and remembered the day, so many years before, when I had first gone to war. I had been with my father, who had been leading the fyrd, the host of men plucked from their farmlands who were mostly armed with hoes or scythes or axes. We had marched on foot and, as a result, we had been a slow, lumbering army. The Danes, our enemy, had ridden. Their ships landed and the first thing they did was find horses, and then they danced about us. We had learned from that. We had learned to fight like the Danes, except that Alfred was now trusting to his fortified towns to stop Harald’s invasion, and that meant Harald was being given the freedom of the Wessex countryside. His men, I knew, would be mounted, except he led too many warriors, and so his raiding parties were doubtless still scouring the land for yet more horses. Our first job was to kill those raiders and take back any captured horses, and I suspected just such a band was at the eastern end of the valley. I found a man in my ranks who knew this part of the country. ‘Edwulf has an estate here, lord,’ he said.

‘Edwulf?’

‘A thegn, lord.’ He grinned and used a hand to sketch a bulge in front of his stomach. ‘He’s a big fat man.’

‘So he’s rich?’

‘Very, lord.’

All of which suggested some Danes had found a plump nest to plunder, and we had found an easy prey to slaughter. The only difficulty was getting three hundred men across the skyline without being seen from the valley’s eastern end, but we discovered a route that was shrouded by trees, and by midday I had my men hidden in the woods to the west of Edwulf’s estate. Then I baited the trap.

I sent Osferth and twenty men to follow a track that led south towards the smoke pyres. They led a half-dozen riderless horses and went slowly, as if they were tired and lost. I ordered them never to look directly at Edwulf’s hall where, by now, I knew the Danes were busy. Finan, who could move among trees like a ghost, had crept close to the hall and brought back news of a village with a score of houses, a church and two fine barns. ‘They’re pulling down the thatch,’ Finan told me, meaning the Danes were searching the roofs of all the buildings, because some folk hid their treasures in the thatch before they fled. ‘And they’re taking turns on some women.’

‘Horses?’

‘Just women,’ Finan said, then caught my glance and stopped grinning. ‘They’ve a whole herd of horses in a paddock, lord.’

So Osferth rode, and the Danes took the bait like a trout rising to a fly. They saw him, he pretended not to see them, and suddenly forty or more Danes were galloping to intercept Osferth, who pretended to wake to the danger, turned westwards and galloped across the front of my hidden men.

And then it was as simple as stealing silver from a church. A hundred of my men crashed from the trees onto the flank of the Danes, who had no chance to escape. Two of the enemy turned their horses too fast and the beasts went down in a screaming chaos of hooves and turf. Others tried to turn back and were caught by spears in their spines. The experienced Danes swerved towards us, hoping to ride straight through our charge, but we were too many, and my men curled around the enemy horsemen so that a dozen were trapped in a circle. I was not there. I was leading the rest of my men to Edwulf’s hall, where the remainder of the Danes were running to mount their horses. One man, bare below the waist, scrambled away from a screaming woman and twisted as he saw me coming. Smoka, my horse, slowed, the man dodged again, but Smoka needed no guidance from me, and Serpent-Breath, my sword, took the man in the skull. The blade lodged there, so that the dying Dane was dragged along as I rode. Blood sprayed up my arm, then at last his twitching body fell away.

I spurred on, taking most of the men east of the settlement, and so cutting off the retreat of the surviving Danes. Finan had already sent scouts to the southern hill crest. Why, I wondered, had the Danes not posted sentinels on the hilltop from which we had first seen the fugitives?

There were so many skirmishes in those days. The Danes of East Anglia would raid the farmlands about Lundene, and we would retaliate, taking men deep into Danish territory to burn, kill and plunder. There was officially a peace treaty between Alfred’s Wessex and East Anglia, but a hungry Dane took no notice of words on parchment. A man who wanted slaves, livestock, or simply wanted an adventure, would cross into Mercia and take what he wanted, and we would then ride east and do the same. I liked such raids. They gave me a chance to train my youngest men, to let them see the enemy and cross swords. You can drill a man for a year, practise sword craft and spear skills forever, but he will learn more in just five minutes of battle.

There were so many skirmishes that I have forgotten most, yet I recall that skirmish at Edwulf’s hall. In reality it was nothing. The Danes had been careless and we took no casualties, yet I remember because, when it was over, and the swords were still, one of my men called me to the church.

It was a small church, hardly big enough for the fifty or sixty souls who lived or had lived around the hall. The building was made of oak and had a thatched roof on which a wooden cross stood tall. A crude bell hung at the western gable above the only door, while each side wall had two large timber-barred windows through which light streamed to illuminate a fat man who had been stripped naked and tied to a table that I assumed was the church’s altar. He was moaning. ‘Untie him,’ I snarled, and Rypere, who had led the men who captured the Danes inside the church, started forward as if I had just woken him from a trance.

Rypere had seen much horror in his few years, but he, like the men he led, seemed numbed by the cruelty inflicted on the fat man. His eye sockets were a mess of blood and jelly, his cheeks laced red, his ears sliced off, his manhood cut, his fingers first broken and then chiseled from his palms. Two Danes stood beyond the table, guarded by my men, their reddened hands betraying they had been the torturers. Yet it was the leader of the Danish band who was chiefly responsible for the cruelty, and that is why I remember the skirmish.

Because that was how I met Skade, and if ever any woman ate the apples of Asgard that gave the gods their eternal beauty, it was Skade. She was tall, almost as tall as I was, with a wiry body disguised by the mail coat she wore. She was maybe twenty years old, her face was narrow, high-nosed, haughty, with eyes as blue as any I have ever seen. Her hair, dark as the feathers of Odin’s ravens, hung long and straight to her slender waist, where a sword belt held an empty scabbard. I stared at her.

And she stared at me. And what did she see?

She saw Alfred’s warlord. She saw Uhtred of Bebbanburg, the pagan in service to a Christian king. I was tall, and in those days I had broad shoulders. I was a sword-warrior, spear-warrior, and fighting had made me rich so that my mail shone and my helmet was inlaid with silver and my arm rings glittered above the mail sleeves. My sword belt was decorated with silver wolf-heads, Serpent-Breath’s scabbard was cased with jet slivers, while my belt buckle and cloak clasp were made of heavy gold. Only the small image of Thor’s hammer, hanging around my neck, was cheap, but I had owned that talisman since I was a child. I have it still. The glory of my youth has gone, eroded by time, but that was what Skade saw. She saw a warlord.

And so she spat at me. The spittle landed on my cheek and I left it there. ‘Who is the bitch?’ I asked.

‘Skade,’ Rypere gave me her name, then nodded at the two torturers, ‘they say she’s their leader.’

The fat man moaned. He had been cut free and now curled his body into a ball. ‘Find someone to tend him,’ I said irritably, and Skade spat again, this time striking my mouth. ‘Who is he?’ I demanded, ignoring her.

‘We think he’s Edwulf,’ Rypere said.

‘Get him out of here,’ I said, then turned to look at the beauty who spat at me. ‘And who,’ I asked, ‘is Skade?’

She was a Dane, born to a steading in the northern part of their bleak country, daughter to a man who had no great riches and so left his widow poor. But the widow had Skade, and her beauty was astonishing, and so she had been married to a man willing to pay for that long, lithe body in his bed. The husband was a Frisian chieftain, a pirate, but then Skade had met Harald Bloodhair, and Jarl Harald offered her more excitement than living behind a rotting palisade on some tide-besieged sandbank, and so she had run away with him. All that I was to learn, but for now I just knew she was Harald’s woman, and that Haesten had spoken the truth; to see her was to want her. ‘You will release me,’ she said with an astonishing confidence.

‘I’ll do what I choose,’ I told her, ‘and I don’t take orders from a fool.’ She bridled at that, and I saw she was about to spit again, and so raised a hand as if to strike her and she went very still. ‘No lookouts,’ I said to her, ‘what leader doesn’t post sentries? Only a fool.’ She hated that. She hated it because it was true.

‘Jarl Harald will give you money for my freedom,’ she said.

‘My price for your freedom,’ I said, ‘is Harald’s liver.’

‘You are Uhtred?’ she asked.

‘I am the Lord Uhtred of Bebbanburg.’

She gave a ghost of a smile. ‘Then Bebbanburg will need a new lord if you don’t release me. I shall curse you. You will know agony, Uhtred of Bebbanburg, even greater agony than him.’ She nodded at Edwulf, who was being carried out of the church by four of my men.

‘He’s a fool too,’ I said, ‘because he set no sentries.’ Skade’s raiding party had descended on the village in the morning sunlight and no one saw them coming. Some villagers, those we had seen from the skyline, escaped, but most had been captured, and of those only the young women and the children who might have been sold as slaves still lived.

We let one Dane live, one Dane and Skade. The rest we killed. We took their horses, their mail and their weapons. I ordered the surviving villagers to drive their livestock north to Suthriganaweorc because Harald’s men had to be denied food, though as the harvest was already in the barns and the orchards were heavy, that would be hard. We were still slaughtering the last of the Danes when Finan’s scouts reported that horsemen were approaching the hill crest to the south.

I went to meet them, taking seventy men, the one Dane I would spare, Skade and also the long piece of hemp rope that had been attached to the church’s small bell. I joined Finan and we rode to where the hill’s crest was gentle grassland and from where we could look far to the south. New smoke pyres thickened in the distant sky, but nearer, much nearer, was a band of horsemen who rode on the banks of a willow-shadowed stream. I estimated they numbered about the same as my men, who were now lined on the crest either side of my wolf’s-head banner. ‘Get off the horse,’ I ordered Skade.

‘Those men are searching for me,’ she said defiantly, nodding at the horsemen who had paused at the sight of my battle line.

‘Then they’ve found you,’ I said, ‘so dismount.’

She just stared at me proudly. She was a woman who hated being given orders.

‘You can dismount,’ I said patiently, ‘or I can pull you out of the saddle. The choice is yours.’

She dismounted and I gestured for Finan to dismount. He drew his sword and stood close to the girl. ‘Now undress,’ I told her.

A look of utter fury darkened her face. She did nothing, but I sensed an anger like a tensed adder inside her. She wanted to kill me, she wanted to scream, she wanted to call the gods down from the smoke-patterned sky, but there was nothing she could do. ‘Undress,’ I said, ‘or have my men strip you.’

She turned as if looking for a way to escape, but there was none. There was a glint of tears in her eyes, but she had no choice but to obey me. Finan looked at me quizzically, because I was not known for being cruel to women, but I did not explain to him. I was remembering what Haesten had told me, how Harald was impulsive, and I wanted to provoke Harald Bloodhair. I would insult his woman and so hope to force Harald to anger instead of sober judgement.

Skade’s face was an expressionless mask as she stripped herself of her mail coat, a leather jerkin and linen breeches. One or two of my men cheered when her jerkin came off to reveal high, firm breasts, but they went silent when I snarled at them. I tossed the rope to Finan. ‘Tie it round her neck,’ I said.

She was beautiful. Even now I can close my eyes and see that long body standing in the buttercup-bright grass. The Danes in the valley were staring up, my men were gazing, and Skade stood there like a creature from Asgard come to the middle-earth. I did not doubt Harald would pay for her. Any man might have impoverished himself to possess Skade.

Finan gave me the rope’s end and I kicked my stallion forward and led her a third of the way down the slope. ‘Is Harald there?’ I asked her, nodding at the Danes who were two hundred paces away.

‘No,’ she said. Her voice was bitter and tight. She was ashamed and angry. ‘He’ll kill you for this,’ she said.

I smiled. ‘Harald Bloodhair,’ I said, ‘is a puking, shit-filled rat.’ I twisted in the saddle and waved to Osferth, who brought the surviving Danish prisoner down the slope. He was a young man and he looked up at me with fear in his pale blue eyes. ‘This is your chieftain’s woman,’ I said to him, ‘look at her.’

He hardly dared look at Skade’s nakedness. He just gave her a glance then gazed back at me.

‘Go,’ I told him, ‘and tell Harald Bloodhair that Uhtred of Bebbanburg has his whore. Tell Harald I have her naked, and that I’ll use her for my amusement. Go, tell him. Go!’

The man ran down the slope. The Danes in the valley were not going to attack us. Our numbers were evenly matched, and we had the high ground, and the Danes are ever reluctant to take too many casualties. So they just watched us and, though one or two rode close enough to see Skade clearly, none tried to rescue her.

I had carried Skade’s jerkin, breeches and boots. I threw them at her feet, then leaned down and took the rope from her neck. ‘Dress,’ I said.

I saw her consider escape. She was thinking of running long-legged down the slope, hoping to reach the watching horsemen before I caught her, but I touched Smoka’s flank and he moved in front of her. ‘You’d die with a sword in your skull,’ I told her, ‘long before you could reach them.’

‘And you’ll die,’ she said, stooping for her clothes, ‘without a sword in your hand.’

I touched the talisman about my neck. ‘Alfred,’ I said, ‘hangs captured pagans. You had better hope that I can keep you alive when we meet him.’

‘I shall curse you,’ she said, ‘and those you love.’

‘And you had better hope,’ I went on, ‘that my patience lasts, or else I’ll give you to my men before Alfred hangs you.’

‘A curse and death,’ she said, and there was almost triumph in her voice.

‘Hit her if she speaks again,’ I told Osferth.

Then we rode west to find Alfred.

The first thing I noticed was the cart.

It was enormous, big enough to carry the harvest from a dozen fields, but this wagon would never carry anything so mundane as sheaves of wheat. It had two thick axles and four solid wheels rimmed with iron. The wheels had been painted with a green cross on a white background. The sides of the cart were panelled, and each of the panels bore the image of a saint. There were Latin words carved into the top rails, but I never bothered to ask what they meant because I neither wanted to know nor needed to ask. They would be some Christian exhortation, and one of those is much like any other. The bed of the cart was mostly filled by woolsacks, presumably to protect the passengers from the jolting of the vehicle, while a well-cushioned chair stood with its high back against the driver’s bench. A striped sailcloth awning supported by four serpentine-carved poles had been erected over the whole gaudy contraption, and a wooden cross, like those placed on church gables, reared from one of the poles. Saints’ banners hung from the remaining three poles.

‘A church on wheels?’ I asked sourly.

‘He can’t ride any more,’ Steapa told me gloomily.

Steapa was the commander of the royal bodyguard. He was a huge man, one of the few who were taller than me, and unremittingly fierce in battle. He was also unremittingly loyal to King Alfred. Steapa and I were friends, though we had started as enemies when I had been forced to fight him. It had been like attacking a mountain. Yet the two of us had survived that meeting, and there was no man I would rather have stood beside in a shield wall. ‘He can’t ride at all?’ I asked.

‘He does sometimes,’ Steapa said, ‘but it hurts too much. He can hardly walk.’

‘How many oxen drag this thing?’ I asked, gesturing at the wagon.

‘Six. He doesn’t like it, but he has to use it.’

We were in Æscengum, the burh built to protect Wintanceaster from the east. It was a small burh, nothing like the size of Wintanceaster or Lundene, and it protected a ford which crossed the River Wey, though why the ford needed protection was a mystery because the river could be easily crossed both north and south of Æscengum. Indeed, the town guarded nothing of importance, which was why I had argued against its fortification. Yet Alfred had insisted on making Æscengum into a burh because, years before, some half-crazed Christian mystic had supposedly restored a raped girl’s virginity at the place, and so it was a hallowed spot. Alfred had ordered a monastery built there, and Steapa told me the king was waiting in its church. ‘They’re talking,’ he said bleakly, ‘but none of them knows what to do.’

‘I thought you were waiting for Harald to attack you here?’

‘I told them he wouldn’t,’ Steapa said, ‘but what happens if he doesn’t?’

‘We find Harald and kill the earsling, of course,’ I said, gazing east to where new smoke pyres betrayed where Harald’s men were plundering new villages.

Steapa gestured at Skade. ‘Who’s she?’

‘Harald’s whore,’ I said, loud enough for Skade to hear, though her face showed no change from her customary haughty expression. ‘She tortured a man called Edwulf,’ I explained, ‘trying to get him to reveal where he’d buried his gold.’

‘I know Edwulf,’ Steapa said, ‘he eats and drinks his gold.’

‘He did,’ I said, ‘but he’s dead now.’ Edwulf had died before we left his estate.

Steapa held out a hand to take my swords. The monastery was serving this day as Alfred’s hall, and no one except the king, his relatives and his guards could carry a weapon in the royal presence. I surrendered Serpent-Breath and Wasp-Sting, then dipped my hands in a bowl of water offered by a servant. ‘Welcome to the king’s house, lord,’ the servant said in formal greeting, then watched as I looped the rope about Skade’s neck.

She spat in my face and I grinned. ‘Time to meet the king, Skade,’ I said, ‘spit at him and he’ll hang you.’

‘I will curse you both,’ she said.

Finan alone accompanied Steapa, Skade and I into the monastery. The rest of my men took their horses through the western gate to water them in a stream while Steapa led us to the abbey church, a fine stone building with heavy oak roof beams. The high windows lit painted leather hides, and the one above the altar showed a white-robed girl being raised to her feet by a bearded and haloed man. The girl’s apple-plump face bore a look of pure astonishment, and I assumed she was the newly-restored virgin, while the man’s expression suggested she might soon need the miracle repeated. Beneath her, seated on a rug-draped chair placed in front of the silver-piled altar, was Alfred.

A score of other men were in the church. They had been talking as we arrived, but the voices dropped to silence as I entered. On Alfred’s left was a gaggle of churchmen, among whom were my old friend Father Beocca and my old enemy Bishop Asser, a Welshman who had become the king’s most intimate adviser. In the nave of the church, seated on benches, were a half-dozen ealdormen, the leaders of those shires whose men had been summoned to join the army that faced Harald’s invasion. To Alfred’s right, seated on a slightly smaller chair, was his son-in-law, my cousin Æthelred, and behind him was his wife, Alfred’s daughter, Æthelflæd.

Æthelred was the Lord of Mercia. Mercia, of course, was the country to the north of Wessex, and its northern and eastern parts were ruled by the Danes. It had no king, instead it had my cousin, who was the acknowledged ruler of the Saxon parts of Mercia, though in truth he was in thrall to Alfred. Alfred, though he never made the claim explicit, was the actual ruler of Mercia, and Æthelred did his father-in-law’s bidding. Though how long that bidding could continue was dubious, for Alfred looked sicker than I had ever seen him. His pale, clerkly face was thinner than ever and his eyes had a bruised look of pain, though they had lost none of their intelligence.

He looked at me in silence, waited till I had bowed, then nodded a curt greeting. ‘You bring men, Lord Uhtred?’

‘Three hundred, lord.’

‘Is that all?’ Alfred asked, flinching.

‘Unless you wish to lose Lundene, lord, it’s all.’

‘And you bring your woman?’ Bishop Asser sneered.

Bishop Asser was an earsling, which is anything that drops out of an arse. He had dropped out of some Welsh arse, from where he had slimed his way into Alfred’s favour. Alfred thought the world of Asser who, in turn, hated me. I smiled at him. ‘I bring you Harald’s whore,’ I said.

No one answered that. They all just stared at Skade, and none stared harder than the young man standing just behind Alfred’s throne. He had a thin face with prominent bones, pale skin, black hair that curled just above his embroidered collar, and eyes that were quick and bright. He seemed nervous, overawed perhaps by the presence of so many broad-shouldered warriors, while he himself was slender, almost fragile, in his build. I knew him well enough. His name was Edward, and he was the Ætheling, the king’s eldest son, and he was being groomed to take his father’s throne. Now he was gaping at Skade as though he had never seen a woman before, but when she met his gaze he blushed and pretended to take a keen interest in the rush-covered floor.

‘You brought what?’ Bishop Asser broke the surprised silence.

‘Her name is Skade,’ I said, thrusting her forward. Edward raised his eyes and stared at Skade like a puppy seeing fresh meat.

‘Bow to the king,’ I ordered Skade in Danish.

‘I do what I wish,’ she said and, just as I supposed she would, she spat towards Alfred.

‘Strike her!’ Bishop Asser yapped.

‘Do churchmen strike women?’ I asked him.

‘Be quiet, Lord Uhtred,’ Alfred said tiredly. I saw how his right hand was curled into a claw that clutched the arm of the chair. He gazed at Skade, who returned the stare defiantly. ‘A remarkable woman,’ the king said mildly, ‘does she speak English?’

‘She pretends not to,’ I said, ‘but she understands it well enough.’

Skade rewarded that truth with a sidelong look of pure spite. ‘I’ve cursed you,’ she said under her breath.

‘The easiest way to be rid of a curse,’ I spoke just as softly, ‘is to cut out the tongue that made it. Now be silent, you rancid bitch.’

‘The curse of death,’ she said, just above a whisper.

‘What is she saying?’ Alfred asked.

‘She is reputed to be a sorceress, lord,’ I said, ‘and claims to have cursed me.’

Alfred and most of the churchmen touched the crosses hanging about their necks. It is a strange thing I have noticed about Christians, that they claim our gods have no power yet they fear the curses made in the names of those gods. ‘How did you capture her?’ Alfred asked.

I gave a brief account of what had happened at Edwulf’s hall and when I was done Alfred looked at her coldly. ‘Did she kill Edwulf’s priest?’ he asked.

‘Did you kill Edwulf’s priest, bitch?’ I asked her in Danish.

She smiled at me. ‘Of course I did,’ she said, ‘I kill all priests.’

‘She killed the priest, lord,’ I told Alfred.

He shuddered. ‘Take her outside,’ he ordered Steapa, ‘and guard her well.’ He held up a hand. ‘She is not to be molested!’ He waited till Skade was gone before looking at me. ‘You’re welcome, Lord Uhtred,’ he said, ‘you and your men. But I had hoped you would bring more.’

‘I brought enough, lord King,’ I said.

‘Enough for what?’ Bishop Asser asked.

I looked at the runt. He was a bishop, but still wore his monkish robes cinched tight around his scrawny waist. He had a face like a starved stoat, with pale green eyes and thin lips. He spent half his time in the wastelands of his native Wales, and half whispering pious poison into Alfred’s ears, and together the two men had made a law code for Wessex, and it was my amusement and ambition to break every one of those laws before either the king or the Welsh runt died. ‘Enough,’ I said, ‘to tear Harald and his men into bloody ruin.’

Æthelflæd smiled at that. She alone of Alfred’s family was my friend. I had not seen her in four years and she looked much thinner now. She was only a year or two above twenty, but appeared older and sadder, yet her hair was still lustrous gold and her eyes as blue as the summer sky. I winked at her, as much as anything to annoy her husband, my cousin, who immediately rose to the bait and snorted. ‘If Harald were that easy to destroy,’ Æthelred said, ‘we would have done it already.’

‘How?’ I asked, ‘by watching him from the hills?’ Æthelred grimaced. Normally he would have argued with me, because he was a belligerent and proud man, but he looked pale. He had an illness, no one knew what, and it left him tired and weak for long stretches. He was perhaps forty in that year, and his red hair had strands of white at his temples. This, I guessed, was one of his bad days. ‘Harald should have been killed weeks ago,’ I taunted him scornfully.

‘Enough!’ Alfred slapped the arm of his chair, startling a leather-hooded falcon that was perched on a lectern beside the altar. The bird flapped his wings, but the jesses held him firm. Alfred grimaced. His face told me what I well knew, that he needed me and did not want to need me. ‘We could not attack Harald,’ he explained patiently, ‘so long as Haesten threatened our northern flank.’

‘Haesten couldn’t threaten a wet puppy,’ I said, ‘he’s too frightened of defeat.’

I was arrogant that day, arrogant and confident, because there are times when men need to see arrogance. These men had spent days arguing about what to do, and in the end they had done nothing, and all that time they had been multiplying Harald’s forces in their minds until they were convinced he was invincible. Alfred, meanwhile, had deliberately refrained from seeking my help because he wanted to hand the reins of Wessex and Mercia to his son and to his son-in-law, which meant giving them reputations as leaders, but their leadership had failed, and so Alfred had sent for me. And now, because they needed it, I countered their fears with an arrogant assurance.

‘Harald has five thousand men,’ Ealdorman Æthelhelm of Wiltunscir said softly. Æthelhelm was a good man, but he too seemed infected by the timidity that had overtaken Alfred’s entourage. ‘He brought two hundred ships!’ he added.

‘If he has two thousand men, I’d be astonished,’ I said. ‘How many horses does he have?’ No one knew, or at least no one answered. Harald might well have brought as many as five thousand men, but his army consisted only of those who had horses.

‘However many men he has,’ Alfred said pointedly, ‘he must attack this burh to advance further into Wessex.’

That was a nonsense, of course. Harald could go north or south of Æscengum, but there was no future in arguing that with Alfred, who had a peculiar affection for the burh. ‘So you plan to defeat him here, lord?’ I asked instead.

‘I have nine hundred men here,’ he said, ‘and we have the burh’s garrison, and now your three hundred. Harald will break himself on these walls.’ I saw Æthelred, Æthelhelm and Ealdorman Æthelnoth of Sumorsæte all nod their agreement.

‘And I have five hundred men at Silcestre,’ Æthelred said, as though that made all the difference.

‘And what are they doing there?’ I asked, ‘pissing in the Temes while we fight?’

Æthelflæd grinned, while her brother Edward looked affronted. Dear Father Beocca, who had been my childhood tutor, gave me a long-suffering look of reproof. Alfred just sighed. ‘Lord Æthelred’s men can harry the enemy while they besiege us,’ he explained.

‘So our victory, lord,’ I said, ‘depends on Harald attacking us here? On Harald allowing us to kill his men while they try to cross the wall?’ Alfred did not answer. A pair of sparrows squabbled among the rafters. A thick beeswax candle on the altar behind Alfred guttered and smoked and a monk hurried to trim the wick. The flame grew again, its light reflected from a high golden reliquary that seemed to contain a withered hand.

‘Harald will want to defeat us.’ Edward made his first tentative contribution to the discussion.

‘Why?’ I asked, ‘when we’re doing our best to defeat ourselves?’ There was an aggrieved murmur from the courtiers, but I overrode it. ‘Let me tell you what Harald will do, lord,’ I said, speaking to Alfred. ‘He’ll take his army north of us and advance on Wintanceaster. There’s a lot of silver there, all conveniently piled in your new cathedral, and you’ve brought your army here so he won’t have much trouble breaking through Wintanceaster’s walls. And even if he does besiege us here,’ I spoke even louder to drown Bishop Asser’s angry protest, ‘all he needs do is surround us and let us starve. How much food do we have here?’

The king gestured to Asser, requesting that he stop spluttering. ‘So what would you do, Lord Uhtred?’ Alfred asked, and there was a plaintive note in his voice. He was old and he was tired and he was ill, and Harald’s invasion seemed to threaten all that he had achieved.

‘I would suggest, lord,’ I said, ‘that Lord Æthelred order his five hundred men to cross the Temes and march to Fearnhamme.’

A hound whined in a corner of the church, but otherwise there was no sound. They all stared at me, but I saw some faces brighten. They had been wallowing with indecision and had needed the sword stroke of certainty.

Alfred broke the silence. ‘Fearnhamme?’ he asked cautiously.

‘Fearnhamme,’ I repeated, watching Æthelred, but his pale face displayed no reaction, and no one else in the church made any comment.

I had been thinking about the country to the north of Æscengum. War is not just about men, nor even about supplies, it is also about the hills and valleys, the rivers and marshes, the places where land and water will help defeat an enemy. I had travelled through Fearnhamme often enough on my journeys from Lundene to Wintanceaster, and wherever I travelled I noted how the land lay and how it might be used if an enemy was near. ‘There’s a hill just north of the river at Fearnhamme,’ I said.

‘There is! I know it well,’ one of the monks standing to Alfred’s right said, ‘it has an earthwork.’

I looked at him, seeing a red-faced, hook-nosed man. ‘And who are you?’ I asked coldly.

‘Oslac, lord,’ he said, ‘the abbot here.’

‘The earthwork,’ I asked him, ‘is it in good repair?’

‘It was dug by the ancient folk,’ Abbot Oslac said, ‘and it’s much overgrown with grass, but the ditch is deep and the bank is still firm.’

There were many such earthworks in Britain, mute witnesses to the warfare that had rolled across the land before we Saxons came to bring still more. ‘The bank’s high enough to make defence easy?’ I asked the abbot.

‘You could hold it for ever, given enough men,’ Oslac said confidently. I gazed at him, noting the scar across the bridge of his nose. Abbot Oslac, I decided, had been a warrior before he became a monk.

‘But why invite Harald to besiege us there?’ Alfred asked, ‘when we have Æscengum and its walls and its storehouses?’

‘And how long will those storehouses last, lord?’ I asked him. ‘We have enough men inside these walls to hold the enemy till Judgement Day, but not enough food to reach Christmas.’ The burhs were not provisioned for a large army. The intent of the walled towns was to hold the enemy in check and allow the army of household warriors, the trained men, to attack the besiegers in the open country outside.

‘But Fearnhamme?’ Alfred asked.

‘Is where we shall destroy Harald,’ I said unhelpfully. I looked at Æthelred. ‘Order your men to Fearnhamme, cousin, and we’ll trap Harald there.’

There was a time when Alfred would have questioned and tested my ideas, but that day he looked too tired and too sick to argue, and he plainly did not have the patience to listen to other men challenging my plans. Besides, he had learned to trust me when it came to warfare, and I expected his assent to my vague proposal, but then he surprised me. He turned to the churchmen and gestured that one of them should join him, and Bishop Asser took the elbow of a young, stocky monk and guided him to the king’s chair. The monk had a hard, bony face and black tonsured hair as bristly and stiff as a badger’s pelt. He might have been handsome except his eyes were milky, and I guessed he had been blind from birth. He groped for the king’s chair, found it and knelt beside Alfred, who laid a fatherly hand on the monk’s bowed head. ‘So, Brother Godwin?’ he asked gently.

‘I am here, lord, I am here,’ Godwin said in a voice scarce above a hoarse whisper.

‘And you heard the Lord Uhtred?’

‘I heard, lord, I heard.’ Brother Godwin raised his blind eyes to the king. He said nothing for a while, but his face was twisting all that time, twisting and grimacing like a man possessed by an evil spirit. He started to utter a choking noise, and what astonished me was that none of this alarmed Alfred, who waited patiently until, at last, the young monk regained a normal expression. ‘It will be well, lord King,’ Godwin said, ‘it will be well.’

Alfred patted Brother Godwin’s head again and smiled at me. ‘We shall do as you suggest, Lord Uhtred,’ he said decisively. ‘You will direct your men to Fearnhamme,’ he spoke to Æthelred, then looked back to me, ‘and my son,’ he went on, ‘will command the West Saxon forces.’

‘Yes, lord,’ I said dutifully. Edward, the youngest man in the church, looked embarrassed, and his eyes flicked nervously from me to his father.

‘And you,’ Alfred turned to look at his son, ‘will obey the Lord Uhtred.’

Æthelred could contain himself no longer. ‘What guarantees do we have,’ he asked petulantly, ‘that the heathens will go to Fearnhamme?’

‘Mine,’ I said harshly.

‘But you cannot be certain!’ Æthelred protested.

‘He will go to Fearnhamme,’ I said, ‘and he will die there.’

I was wrong about that.

Messengers rode to Æthelred’s men at Silcestre, ordering them to march on Fearnhamme at first light next morning. Once there they were to occupy the hill that stands just north of the river. Those five hundred men were the anvil, while the men at Æscengum were my hammer, but to lure Harald onto the anvil would mean dividing our forces, and it is a rule of war not to do that. We had, at my best estimate, about five hundred men fewer than the Danes, and by keeping our army in two parts I was inviting Harald to destroy them separately. ‘But I’m relying on Harald being an impulsive fool, lord,’ I told Alfred that night.

The king had joined me on Æscengum’s eastern rampart. 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 enquired 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 towards the small town of Godelmingum that lay just a few miles eastwards. 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 honoured, 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 judgement.’

‘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’s like 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 favour of the older religion. ‘Don’t your gods reward you for good behaviour?’

‘My gods are capricious, lord.’ I had learned that word from Bishop Erkenwald who had intended it as an insult, but once I had learned its meaning I liked it. My gods are capricious.

‘How can you serve a capricious god?’ Alfred asked.

‘I don’t.’

‘But you said. …’

‘They are capricious,’ I interrupted him, ‘but that’s their pleasure. My task is not to serve them, but to amuse them, and if I do then they will reward me in the life to come.’

‘Amuse them?’ He sounded shocked.

‘Why not?’ I demanded. ‘We have cats, dogs and falcons for our pleasure, the gods made us for the same reason. Why did your god make you?’

‘To be His servant,’ he said firmly. ‘If I’m God’s cat then I must catch the devil’s mice. That is duty, Lord Uhtred, duty.’

‘While my duty,’ I said, ‘is to catch Harald and slice his head off. That, I think, will amuse my gods.’

‘Your gods are cruel,’ he said, then shuddered.

‘Men are cruel,’ I said, ‘and the gods made us like themselves, and some of the gods are kind, some are cruel. So are we. If it amuses the gods then Harald will slice my head off.’ I touched the hammer amulet.

Alfred grimaced. ‘God made you his instrument, and I do not know why he chose you, a pagan, but so he did and you have served me well.’

He had spoken fervently, surprising me, and I bowed my head in acknowledgement. ‘Thank you, lord.’

‘And now I wish you to serve my son,’ he added.

I should have known that was coming, but somehow the request took me by surprise. I was silent a moment as I tried to think what to say. ‘I agreed to serve you, lord,’ I said finally, ‘and so I have, but I have my own battles to fight.’

‘Bebbanburg,’ he said sourly.

‘Is mine,’ I said firmly, ‘and before I die I wish to see my banner flying over its gate and my son strong enough to defend it.’

He gazed at the glow of the enemy fires. I was noticing how scattered those fires were, which told me Harald had not yet concentrated his army. It would take time to pull those men together from across the ravaged countryside, which meant, I thought, that the battle would not be fought tomorrow, but the next day. ‘Bebbanburg,’ Alfred said, ‘is an island of the English in a sea of Danes.’

‘True, lord,’ I said, noting how he used the word ‘English’. It embraced all the tribes who had come across the sea, whether they were Saxon, Angle or Jute, and it spoke of Alfred’s ambition, that he now made explicit.

‘The best way to keep Bebbanburg safe,’ he said, ‘is to surround it with more English land.’

‘Drive the Danes from Northumbria?’ I asked.

‘If it is God’s will,’ he said, ‘then I will wish my son to do that great deed.’ He turned to me, and for a moment he was not a king, but a father. ‘Help him, Lord Uhtred,’ he said pleadingly. ‘You are my dux bellorum, my lord of battles, and men know they will win when you lead them. Scour the enemy from England, and so take your fortress back and make my son safe on his God-given throne.’

He had not flattered me, he had spoken the truth. I was the warlord of Wessex and I was proud of that reputation. I went into battle glittering with gold, silver and pride, and I should have known that the gods would resent that.

‘I want you,’ Alfred spoke softly but firmly, ‘to give my son your oath.’

I cursed inwardly, but spoke respectfully. ‘What oath, lord?’

‘I wish you to serve Edward as you have served me.’

And thus Alfred would tie me to Wessex, to Christian Wessex that lay so far from my northern home. I had spent my first ten years in Bebbanburg, that great rock-fastness on the northern sea, and when I had first ridden to war the fortress had been left in the care of my uncle, who had stolen it from me.

‘I will swear an oath to you, lord,’ I said, ‘and to no one else.’

‘I already have your oath,’ he said harshly.

‘And I will keep it,’ I said.

‘And when I’m dead,’ he asked bitterly, ‘what then?’

‘Then, lord, I shall go to Bebbanburg and take it, and keep it, and spend my days beside the sea.’

‘And if my son is threatened?’

‘Then Wessex must defend him,’ I said, ‘as I defend you now.’

‘And what makes you think you can defend me?’ He was angry now. ‘You would take my army to Fearnhamme? You have no certainty that Harald will go there!’

‘He will,’ I said.

‘You can’t know that!’

‘I shall force it on him,’ I said.

‘How?’ he demanded.

‘The gods will do that for me,’ I said.

‘You’re a fool,’ he snapped.

‘If you don’t trust me,’ I spoke just as forcibly, ‘then your son-in-law wants to be your lord of battles. Or you can command the army yourself? Or give Edward his chance?’

He shuddered, I thought with anger, but when he spoke again his voice was patient. ‘I just wish to know,’ he said, ‘why you are so sure that the enemy will do what you want.’

‘Because the gods are capricious,’ I said arrogantly, ‘and I am about to amuse them.’

‘Tell me,’ he said tiredly.

‘Harald is a fool,’ I said, ‘and he is a fool in love. We have his woman. I shall take her to Fearnhamme, and he will follow because he is besotted with her. And even if I did not have his woman,’ I went on, ‘he would still follow me.’

I had thought he would scoff at that, but he considered my words quietly, then joined his hands prayerfully. ‘I am tempted to doubt you, but Brother Godwin assures me you will bring us victory.’

‘Brother Godwin?’ I had wanted to ask about the strange blind monk.

‘God speaks to him,’ Alfred said with a quiet assurance.

I almost laughed, but then thought that the gods do speak to us, though usually by signs and portents. ‘Does he take all your decisions, lord?’ I asked sourly.

‘God assists me in all things,’ Alfred said sharply, then turned away because the bell was summoning the Christians to prayer in Æscengum’s new church.

The gods are capricious, and I was about to amuse them. And Alfred was right. I was a fool.

What did Harald want? Or, for that matter, Haesten? It was simpler to answer for Haesten, because he was the cleverer and more ambitious man, and he wanted land. He wanted to be a king.

The northmen had come to Britain in search of kingdoms, and the lucky ones had found their thrones. A northman reigned in Northumbria, and another in East Anglia, and Haesten wanted to be their equal. He wanted the crown, the treasures, the women and the status, and there were two places those things could be found. One was Mercia and the other Wessex.

Mercia was the better prospect. It had no king and was riven by warfare. The north and east of the country was ruled by jarls, powerful Danes who kept strong troops of household warriors and barred their gates each night, while the south and east was Saxon land. The Saxons looked to my cousin, Æthelred, for protection and he gave it to them, but only because he had inherited great wealth and enjoyed the firm support of his father-in-law, Alfred. Mercia was not part of Wessex, but it did Wessex’s bidding, and Alfred was the true power behind Æthelred. Haesten might attack Mercia and he would find allies in the north and east, but eventually he would find himself facing the armies of Saxon Mercia and Alfred’s Wessex. And Haesten was cautious. He had made his camp on a desolate shore of Wessex, but he did nothing provocative. He waited, certain that Alfred would pay him to leave, which Alfred had done. He also waited to see what damage Harald might achieve.

Harald probably wanted a throne, but above all he wanted everything that glittered. He wanted silver, gold and women. He was like a child that sees something pretty and screams until he possesses it. The throne of Wessex might fall into his hands as he greedily scooped up his baubles, but he did not aim for it. He had come to Wessex because it was full of treasures, and now he was ravaging the land, taking plunder, while Haesten just watched. Haesten hoped, I think, that Harald’s wild troops would so weaken Alfred that he could come behind and take the whole land. If Wessex was a bull, then Harald’s men were blood-maddened terriers who would attack in a pack and most would die in the attacking, but they would weaken the bull, and then Haesten, the mastiff, would come and finish the job. So to deter Haesten I needed to crush Harald’s stronger forces. The bull could not be weakened, but the terriers had to be killed, and they were dangerous, they were vicious, but they were also ill-disciplined, and I would now tempt them with treasure. I would tempt them with Skade’s sleek beauty.

The fifty men I had posted in Godelmingum fled from that town next morning, retreating from a larger group of Danes. My men splashed their horses through the river and streamed into Æscengum as the Danes lined the farther bank to stare at the banners hanging bright on the burh’s eastern palisade. Those banners showed crosses and saints, the panoply of Alfred’s state, and to make certain the enemy knew the king was in the burh I made Osferth walk slowly along the wall dressed in a bright cloak and with a circlet of shining bronze on his head.

Osferth, my man, was Alfred’s bastard. Few people knew, even though Osferth’s resemblance to his father was striking. He had been born to a servant girl whom Alfred had taken to his bed in the days before Christianity had captured his soul. Once, in an unguarded moment, Alfred had confided to me that Osferth was a continual reproof. ‘A reminder,’ he had told me, ‘of the sinner I once was.’

‘A sweet sin, lord,’ I had replied lightly.

‘Most sins are sweet,’ the king said, ‘the devil makes them so.’

What kind of perverted religion makes pleasures into sins? The old gods, even though they never deny us pleasure, fade these days. Folk abandon them, preferring the whip and bridle of the Christians’ nailed god.

So Osferth, a reminder of Alfred’s sweet sin, played the king that morning. I doubt he enjoyed it, for he resented Alfred, who had tried to turn him into a priest. Osferth had rebelled against that destiny, becoming one of my house-warriors instead. He was not a natural fighter, not like Finan, but he brought a keen intelligence to the business of war, and intelligence is a weapon that has a sharp edge and a long reach.

All war ends with the shield wall, where men hack in drink-sodden rage with axes and swords, but the art is to manipulate the enemy so that when that moment of screaming rage arrives it comes to your advantage. By parading Osferth on Æscengum’s wall I was trying to tempt Harald. Where the king is, I was suggesting to our enemies, there is treasure. Come to Æscengum, I was saying, and to increase the temptation I displayed Skade to the Danish warriors who gathered on the river’s far bank.

A few arrows had been shot at us, but those ended when the enemy recognised Skade. She unwittingly helped me by screaming at the men across the water. ‘Come and kill them all!’ she shouted.

‘I’ll shut her mouth,’ Steapa volunteered.

‘Let the bitch shout,’ I said.

She pretended to speak no English, yet she gave me a withering glance before looking back across the river. ‘They’re cowards,’ she shouted at the Danes, ‘Saxon cowards! Tell Harald they will die like sheep.’ She stepped close to the palisade. She could not cross the wall because I had ordered her tied by a rope that was looped about her neck and held by one of Steapa’s men.

‘Tell Harald his whore is here!’ I called over the river, ‘and that she’s noisy! Maybe we’ll cut out her tongue and send it to Harald for his supper!’

‘Goat turd,’ she spat at me, then reached over the palisade’s top and plucked out an arrow that had lodged in one of the oak trunks. Steapa immediately moved to disarm her, but I waved him back. Skade ignored us. She was gazing fixedly at the arrow head which, with a sudden wrench, she freed from the feathered shaft, that she tossed over the wall. She gave me a glance, raised the arrow head to her lips, closed her eyes and kissed the steel. She muttered some words I could not hear, touched her lips to the steel again, then pushed it beneath her gown, hesitated, then jabbed the point into one of her breasts. She gave me a triumphant look as she brought the blood-stained steel into view, then she flung the arrow head into the river and lifted her hands and face to the late summer sky. She screamed to get the attention of the gods, and when the scream faded she turned back to me. ‘You’re cursed, Uhtred,’ she said with a tone she might have used to remark on unremarkable weather.

I resisted the impulse to touch the hammer hanging about my neck because to have done so would have shown that I feared her curse, which instead I pretended to dismiss with a sneer. ‘Waste your breath, whore,’ I said, yet I still moved my hand to my sword and rubbed a finger across the silver cross embedded in Serpent-Breath’s hilt. The cross meant nothing to me, except it had been a gift from Hild, once my lover and now an abbess of extraordinary piety. Did I think that touching the cross was a substitute for the hammer? The gods would not think so.

‘When I was a child,’ Skade said suddenly, and still using a conversational tone as though she and I were old friends, ‘my father beat my mother senseless.’

‘Because she was like you?’ I asked.

She ignored that. ‘He broke her ribs, an arm and her nose,’ she went on, ‘and later that day he took me to the high pastures to help bring back the herd. I was twelve years old. I remember there were snowflakes flying and I was frightened of him. I wanted to ask why he had hurt my mother, but I didn’t like to speak in case he beat me, but then he told me anyway. He said he wanted to marry me to his closest friend, and my mother had opposed the idea. I hated it too, but he said I would marry the man anyway.’

‘Am I supposed to feel sorry for you?’ I asked.

‘So I pushed him over a bluff,’ she said, ‘and I remember him falling through the snowflakes and I watched him bounce on the rocks and I heard him scream. His back was broken.’ She smiled. ‘I left him there. He was still alive when I brought the herd down. I scrambled down the rocks and pissed on his face before he died.’ She looked calmly at me. ‘That was my first curse, Lord Uhtred, but not my last. I will lift the curse on you if you let me go.’

‘You think you can frighten me into giving you back to Harald?’ I asked, amused.

‘You will,’ she said confidently, ‘you will.’

‘Take her away,’ I ordered, tired of her.

Harald came at midday. One of Steapa’s men brought me the news and I climbed again to the ramparts to discover that Harald Bloodhair was on the river’s farther bank with fifty companions, all in mail. His banner showed an axe blade and its pole was surmounted by a wolf-skull that had been painted red.

He was a big man. His horse was big too, but even so Harald Bloodhair seemed to dwarf the stallion. He was too distant for me to see him clearly, but his yellow hair, long, thick and unstained with any blood, was plainly visible, as was his broad beard. For a time he just stared at Æscengum’s wall, then he unbuckled his sword belt, threw the weapon to one of his men and spurred his horse into the river. It was a warm day, but his mail was still covered by a great cloak of black bear fur that made him appear monstrously huge. He wore gold on his wrists and about his neck, and more gold decorated his horse’s bridle. He urged the stallion to the river’s centre where the water surged over his boot tops. Any of the archers on Æscengum’s wall could have shot an arrow, but he had ostentatiously disarmed himself, which meant he wanted to talk and I gave orders that no one was to loose a bow at him. He took off his helmet and searched the men crowding the rampart until he saw Osferth in his circlet. Harald had never seen Alfred and mistook the bastard for the father. ‘Alfred!’ he shouted.

‘The king doesn’t talk with brigands,’ I called back.

Harald grinned. His face was broad as a barley-shovel, his nose hooked and crooked, his mouth wide, his eyes as feral as any wolf. ‘Are you Uhtred Turdson?’ he greeted me.

‘I know you’re Harald the Gutless,’ I responded with a dutiful insult.

He gazed at me. Now that he was closer I could see that his yellow hair and beard were dirt-flecked, ropy and greasy, like the hair from a corpse buried in dung. The river surged by his stallion. ‘Tell your king,’ Harald called to me, ‘that he can save himself much trouble by giving me his throne.’

‘He invites you to come and take it,’ I said.

‘But first,’ he leaned forward and patted his horse’s neck, ‘you will return my property.’

‘We have nothing of yours,’ I said.

‘Skade,’ he said flatly.

‘She’s yours?’ I asked, pretending surprise. ‘But surely a whore belongs to whoever can pay her?’

He gave me a look of instant hatred. ‘If you have touched her,’ he said, pointing a leather-gloved finger at me, ‘or if any of your men have touched her, then I swear on Thor’s prick I’ll make your deaths so slow that your screams will stir the dead in their caves of ice.’ He was a fool, I thought. A clever man would have pretended the woman meant little or nothing to him, but Harald was already revealing his price. ‘Show her to me!’ he demanded.

I hesitated, as if making up my mind, but I wanted Harald to see the bait and so I ordered two of Steapa’s men to fetch Skade. She arrived with the rope still around her neck, yet such was her beauty and her calm dignity that she dominated the rampart. I thought, at that moment, that she was the most queenlike of any woman I had ever seen. She moved to the palisade and smiled at Harald, who kicked his horse a few paces forward. ‘Have they touched you?’ he shouted up to her.

She gave me a mocking look before answering. ‘They’re not men enough, my lord,’ she called.

‘Promise me!’ he shouted, and the desperation was plain in his voice.

‘I promise you,’ she answered, and her voice was a caress.

Harald wheeled his horse so it was sideways to me, then raised his gloved hand to point at me. ‘You showed her naked, Uhtred Turdson.’

‘Would you like me to show her that way again?’

‘For that you will lose your eyes,’ he said, prompting Skade to laugh. ‘Let her go now,’ Harald went on, ‘and I won’t kill you! Instead I’ll keep you blind and naked, on a rope’s end, and display you to all the world.’

‘You yelp like a puppy,’ I called.

‘Take the rope from her neck,’ Harald ordered me, ‘and send her to me now!’

‘Come and take her, puppy!’ I shouted back. I was feeling elated. Harald, I thought, was proving to be a headstrong fool. He wanted Skade more than he wanted Wessex, indeed more than he wanted all the treasures of Alfred’s kingdom. I remember thinking that I had him exactly where I wished him to be, on the end of my lead, but then he turned his horse and gestured towards the growing crowd of warriors on the river bank.

And from the trees that grew thick on that far bank emerged a line of women and children. They were our people, Saxons, and they were roped together because they had been taken for slavery. Harald’s men, as they ravaged through eastern Wessex, had doubtless captured every child and young woman they could find, and, when they had finished amusing themselves, would ship them to the slave markets of Frankia. But these women and infants were brought to the river’s edge where, on an order from Harald, they were made to kneel. The youngest child was about the age of my own Stiorra, and I can still see that child’s eyes as she stared up at me. She saw a warlord in shining glory and I saw nothing but pitiable despair.

‘Start,’ Harald called to his men.

One of his warriors, a grinning brute who looked as if he could out-wrestle an ox, stepped behind the woman at the southern end of the line. He was carrying a battle-axe that he swung high, then brought down so that the blade split her skull and buried itself in her trunk. I heard the crunch of the blade in bone over the noise of the river, and saw blood jetting higher than Harald on his horse. ‘One,’ Harald called, and gestured to the blood-spattered axeman who stepped briskly to his left to stand behind a child who was screaming because she had just seen her mother murdered. The red-bladed axe rose.

‘Wait,’ I called.

Harald held up his hand to check the axe, then gave me a mocking smile. ‘You said something, Lord Uhtred?’ he asked. I did not answer. I was watching a swirl of blood vanish and fade downstream. A man severed the rope tying the dead woman to her child, then kicked the corpse into the river. ‘Speak, Lord Uhtred, please do speak,’ Harald said with exaggerated courtesy.

There were thirty-three women and children left. If I did nothing then all would die. ‘Cut her free,’ I said softly.

The rope round Skade’s neck was cut. ‘Go,’ I told her.

I hoped she would break her legs as she jumped from the palisade, but she landed lithely, climbed the ditch’s far slope, then walked to the river’s edge. Harald spurred his horse to her, held out a hand and she swung up behind his saddle. She looked at me, touched a finger to her mouth and held the hand towards me. ‘You’re cursed, Lord Uhtred,’ she said, smiling, then Harald kicked his horse back to the far bank where the women and children had been led back into the thick-leaved trees.

So Harald had what he wanted.

But Skade wanted to be queen, and Harald wanted me blind.

‘What now?’ Steapa asked in his deep growling voice.

‘We kill the bastard,’ I said. And, like a faint shadow on a dull day, I sensed her curse.

That night I watched the glow of Harald’s fires; not the nearer ones in Godelmingum, though they were thick enough, but the fainter glimmer of more distant blazes, and I noted that much of the sky was now dark. For the last few nights the fires had been scattered across eastern Wessex, but now they drew closer and that meant Harald’s men were concentrating. He doubtless hoped that Alfred would stay in Æscengum and so he was gathering his army, not to besiege us, but probably to launch a sudden and fast attack on Alfred’s capital, Wintanceaster.

A few Danes had crossed the river to ride round Æscengum’s walls, but most were still on the far bank. They were doing what I wanted, yet my heart felt dour that night and I had to pretend confidence. ‘Tomorrow, lord,’ I told Edward, Alfred’s son, ‘the enemy will cross the river. They will be pursuing me, and you will let them all get past the burh, wait one hour and then follow.’

‘I understand,’ he said nervously.

‘Follow them,’ I said, ‘but don’t get into a fight till you reach Fearnhamme.’

Steapa, standing beside Edward, frowned. ‘Suppose they turn on us?’

‘They won’t,’ I said. ‘Just wait till his army has gone past, then follow it all the way to Fearnhamme.’

That sounded an easy enough instruction, but I doubted it would be so easy. Most of the enemy would cross the river in a great rush, eager to pursue me, but the stragglers would follow all day. Edward had to judge when the largest part of Harald’s army was an hour ahead and then, ignoring those stragglers, pursue Harald to Fearnhamme. It would be a difficult decision, but he had Steapa to advise him. Steapa might not have been clever, but he had a killer’s instinct that I trusted.

‘At Fearnhamme,’ Edward began, then hesitated. The half-moon, showing between clouds, lit his pale and anxious face. He looked like his father, but there was an uncertainty in him which was not surprising. He was only about seventeen years old, yet he was being given a grown man’s responsibility. He would have Steapa with him, but if he was to be a king then he would have to learn the hard business of making choices.

‘Fearnhamme will be simple,’ I said dismissively. ‘I shall be north of the river with the Mercians. We’ll be on a hill protected by earthworks. Harald’s men will cross the ford to attack us, and you will attack their rear. When you do that we attack their vanguard.’

‘Simple?’ Steapa echoed with a trace of amusement.

‘We crush them between us,’ I said.

‘With God’s help,’ Edward said firmly.

‘Even without that,’ I snarled.

Edward questioned me for the better part of an hour, right until the bell summoned him to prayers. He was like his father. He wanted to understand everything and have everything arranged in neat lists, but this was war and war was never neat. I believed Harald would follow me, and I trusted Steapa to bring the greater part of Alfred’s army behind Harald, but I could give Edward no promises. He wanted certainty, but I was planning battle, and I was relieved when he went to pray with his father.

Steapa left me and I stood alone on the rampart. Sentries gave me room, somehow aware of my baleful mood, and when I heard footsteps I ignored them, hoping that whoever it was would go away and leave me in peace.

‘The Lord Uhtred,’ a gently mocking voice said when the steps paused behind me.

‘The Lady Æthelflæd,’ I said, not turning to look at her.

She came and stood beside me, her cloak touching mine. ‘How is Gisela?’

I touched Thor’s hammer at my neck. ‘About to give birth again.’

‘The fourth child?’

‘Yes,’ I said, and shot a prayer towards the house of the gods that Gisela would survive the birth. ‘How is Ælfwynn?’ I asked. Ælfwynn was Æthelflæd’s daughter, still an infant.

‘She thrives.’

‘An only child?’

‘And going to stay that way,’ Æthelflæd said bitterly and I looked at her profile, so delicate in the moonlight. I had known her since she was a small child when she had been the happiest, most carefree of Alfred’s children, but now her face was guarded, as though she shrank from bad dreams. ‘My father’s angry with you,’ she said.

‘When is he not?’

She gave a hint of a smile, quickly gone. ‘He wants you to give an oath to Edward.’

‘I know.’

‘Then why won’t you?’

‘Because I’m not a slave to be handed on to a new master.’

‘Oh!’ she sounded sarcastic, ‘you’re not a woman?’

‘I’m taking my family north,’ I said.

‘If my father dies,’ Æthelflæd said, then hesitated. ‘When my father dies, what happens to Wessex?’

‘Edward rules.’

‘He needs you,’ she said. I shrugged. ‘As long as you live, Lord Uhtred,’ she went on, ‘the Danes hesitate to attack.’

‘Harald didn’t hesitate.’

‘Because he’s a fool,’ she said scornfully, ‘and tomorrow you’ll kill him.’

‘Perhaps,’ I said cautiously.

A murmur of voices made Æthelflæd turn to see men spilling from the church. ‘My husband,’ she said, investing those two words with loathing, ‘sent a message to Lord Aldhelm.’

‘Aldhelm leads the Mercian troops?’

Æthelflæd nodded. I knew Aldhelm. He was my cousin’s favourite and a man of unbounded ambition, sly and clever. ‘I hope your husband ordered Aldhelm to Fearnhamme,’ I said.

‘He did,’ Æthelflæd said, then lowered and quickened her voice, ‘but he also sent word that Aldhelm was to withdraw north if he thought the enemy too strong.’

I had half suspected that would happen. ‘So Aldhelm is to preserve Mercia’s army?’

‘How else can my husband take Wessex when my father dies?’ Æthelflæd asked in a voice of silken innocence. I glanced down at her, but she just gazed at the fires of Godelmingum.

‘Will Aldhelm fight?’ I asked her.

‘Not if it means weakening Mercia’s army,’ she said.

‘Then tomorrow I shall have to persuade Aldhelm to his duty.’

‘But you have no authority over him,’ Æthelflæd said.

I patted Serpent-Breath’s hilt. ‘I have this.’

‘And he has five hundred men,’ Æthelflæd said. ‘But there is one person he will obey.’

‘You?’

‘So tomorrow I ride with you,’ she said.

‘Your husband will forbid it,’ I answered.

‘Of course he will,’ she said calmly, ‘but my husband won’t know. And you will do me a service, Lord Uhtred.’

‘I am ever at your service, my lady,’ I said, too lightly.

‘Are you?’ she asked, turning to look up into my eyes.

I looked at her sad lovely face, and knew her question was serious. ‘Yes, my lady,’ I said gently.

‘Then tomorrow,’ she said bitterly, ‘kill them all. Kill all the Danes. Do that for me, Lord Uhtred,’ she touched my hand with the tips of her fingers, ‘kill them all.’

She had loved a Dane and she had lost him to a blade, and now she would kill them all.

There are three spinners at the root of Yggdrasil, the Tree of Life, and they weave our threads, and those spinners had made a skein of purest gold for Æthelflæd’s life, but in those years they wove that bright thread into a much darker cloth. The three spinners see our future. The gift of the gods to humankind is that we cannot see where the threads will go.

I heard songs from the Danes camped across the river.

And tomorrow I would draw them to the old hill by the river. And there kill them.

Next day was a Thursday, Thor’s Day, which I took as a good omen. Alfred had once proposed renaming the days of the week, suggesting the Thursday became Maryday, or perhaps it was Haligastday, but the idea had faded like dew under the summer sun. In Christian Wessex, whether its king liked it or not, Tyr, Odin, Thor and Frigg were still remembered each week.

And on that Thor’s Day I was taking two hundred warriors to Fearnhamme, though more than six hundred horsemen gathered in the burh’s long street before the sun rose. There was the usual chaos. Stirrup leathers broke and men tried to find replacements, children darted between the big horses, swords were given a last sharpening, the smoke of cooking fires drifted between the houses like fog, the church bell clanged, monks chanted, and I stood on the ramparts and watched the river’s far bank.

The Danes who had crossed to our bank the previous day had gone back before nightfall. I could see smoke from their fires rising among the trees, but the only visible enemy was a pair of sentries crouching at the river’s edge. For a moment I was tempted to abandon everything I had planned and instead lead the six hundred men across the river and let them rampage through Harald’s camp, but it was only a fleeting temptation. I assumed most of his men were in Godelmingum, and they would be well awake by the time we reached them. A swirling battle might result, but the Danes would inevitably realise their advantage in numbers and grind us to bloody shreds. I wanted to keep my promise to Æthelflæd. I wanted to kill them all.

I made my first move when the sun rose, and I made it loudly. Horns were sounded inside Æscengum, then the northern gate was dragged open, and four hundred horsemen streamed into the fields beyond. The first riders gathered at the river bank, in clear view of the Danes, and waited while the rest of the men filed through the gate. Once all four hundred were gathered they turned west and spurred away through the trees towards the road which would eventually lead to Wintanceaster. I was still on the ramparts from where I watched the Danes gather to stare at the commotion on our bank, and I did not doubt that messengers were galloping to find Harald and inform him that the Saxon army was retreating.

Except we were not retreating because, once among the trees, the four hundred men doubled back and re-entered Æscengum by the western gate, which was out of the enemy’s sight. It was then that I went down to the main street and hauled myself into Smoka’s saddle. I was dressed for war in mail, gold and steel. Alfred appeared at the church door, his eyes half closing against the sudden sunlight as he came from the holy gloom. He returned my greeting with a nod, but said nothing. Æthelred, my cousin, was noisier, demanding to know where his wife was. I heard a servant report that Æthelflæd was at prayer in the nunnery, and that seemed to satisfy Æthelred, who assured me loudly that his Mercian troops would be waiting at Fearnhamme. ‘Aldhelm’s a good man,’ he said, ‘he likes a fight.’

‘I’m glad of it,’ I said, pretending friendship with my cousin, just as Æthelred was pretending that Aldhelm had not been given secret instructions to retreat northwards if he took fright at the numbers opposing him. I even held my hand down from Smoka’s high saddle, ‘we shall win a great victory, Lord Æthelred,’ I said loudly.

Æthelred seemed momentarily astonished by my apparent affability, but clasped my hand anyway. ‘With God’s help, cousin,’ he said, ‘with God’s help.’

‘I pray for that,’ I answered. The king gave me a suspicious look, but I just smiled cheerfully. ‘Bring the troops when you think best,’ I called to Alfred’s son, Edward, ‘and always take Lord Æthelred’s advice.’

Edward looked to his father for some guidance on what he should reply, but received none. He nodded nervously. ‘I shall, Lord Uhtred,’ he said, ‘and God go with you!’

God might go with me, but Æthelred would not. He had chosen to ride with the West Saxon troops who would follow the Danes, and thus be part of the hammer that would shatter Harald’s forces on the anvil of his Mercian warriors. I had half feared he would come with me, but it made sense for Æthelred to stay with his father-in-law. That way, if Aldhelm chose to retreat, Æthelred could not be blamed. I suspected there was another reason. When Alfred died, Edward would be named king unless the witan wanted an older and more experienced man, and Æthelred doubtless believed he would gain more renown by fighting with the West Saxons this day.

I pulled on my wolf-crested helmet and nudged Smoka towards Steapa who, grim in mail and hung with weapons, waited beside a smithy. Charcoal smoke sifted from the door. I leaned down and slapped my friend’s helmet. ‘You know what to do?’ I asked.

‘Tell me one more time,’ he growled, ‘and I’ll rip your liver out and cook it.’

I grinned. ‘I’ll see you tonight,’ I said. I was pretending that Edward commanded the West Saxons, and that Æthelred was his chief adviser, but in truth I trusted Steapa to make the day go as I had planned. I wanted Steapa to choose the moment when the seven hundred warriors left Æscengum to pursue Harald’s men. If they left too soon Harald could turn and cut them to ribbons, while leaving too late would mean my seven hundred troops would be slaughtered at Fearnhamme. ‘We’re going to make a famous victory this day,’ I told Steapa.

‘If God wills it, lord,’ he said.

‘If you and I will it,’ I said happily, then leaned down and took my heavy linden shield from a servant. I hung the shield on my back, then spurred Smoka to the northern gate where Alfred’s gaudy wagon waited behind a team of six horses. We had harnessed horses to the cumbersome cart because they were faster than oxen. Osferth, looking miserable, was the wagon’s only passenger. He was dressed in a bright blue cloak and wearing a circlet of bronze on his head. The Danes did not know that Alfred eschewed most symbols of kingship. They expected a king to wear a crown and so I had ordered Osferth to wear the polished bauble. I had also persuaded Abbot Oslac to give me two of his monastery’s less valuable reliquaries. One, a silver box moulded with pictures of saints and studded with stones of jet and amber, had held the toe bones of Saint Cedd, but now contained some pebbles which would puzzle the Danes if, as I hoped, they captured the wagon. The second reliquary, also of silver, had a pigeon feather inside, because Alfred famously travelled nowhere without the feather that had been plucked from the dove Noah had released from the ark. Besides the reliquaries we had also put an iron-bound wooden chest in the wagon. The chest was half filled with silver and we would probably lose it, but I expected to gain far more. Abbot Oslac, wearing a mail coat beneath his monkish robes, had insisted on accompanying my two hundred men. A shield hung at his left side and a monstrous war axe was strapped to his broad back. ‘That looks well used,’ I greeted him, noting the nicks in the axe’s wide blade.

‘It’s sent many a pagan to hell, Lord Uhtred,’ he answered happily.

I grinned and spurred to the gate where Father Beocca, my old and stern friend, waited to bless us. ‘God go with you,’ he said as I reached him.

I smiled down at him. He was lame, white-haired, cross-eyed and club-footed. He was also one of the best men I knew, though he mightily disapproved of me. ‘Pray for me, father,’ I said.

‘I never cease,’ Beocca said.

‘And don’t let Edward lead the men out too soon! Trust Steapa! He might be dumb as a parsnip, but he knows how to fight.’

‘I shall pray that God gives them both good judgement,’ my old friend said. He reached up his good hand to clutch my gloved hand. ‘How is Gisela?’

‘Maybe a mother again. And Thyra?’

His face lit up like tinder catching flame. This ugly, crippled man who was mocked by children in the street had married a Dane of startling beauty. ‘God keeps her in his loving hand,’ he told me. ‘She is a pearl of great price!’

‘So are you, father,’ I said, then ruffled his white hair to annoy him.

Finan spurred beside me. ‘We’re ready, lord.’

‘Open the gate!’ I shouted.

The wagon was first through the wide arch. Its holy banners swayed alarmingly as it lurched onto the rutted track, then my two hundred men, bright in mail, rode after it and turned westwards. We flew standards, braying horns announced our departure and the sun shone on the royal wagon. We were the lure, and the Danes had seen us. And so the hunt began.

The wagon led the way, lumbering along a farm track that would lead us to the Wintanceaster road. A shrewd Dane might well wonder why, if we wanted to retreat to the larger burh at Wintanceaster, we would use Æscengum’s northern gate instead of the western, which led directly onto the road, but I somehow doubted those worries would reach Harald. Instead he would hear that the King of Wessex was running away, leaving Æscengum to be protected by its garrison that was drawn from the fyrd. The men of the fyrd were rarely trained warriors. They were farmers and labourers, carpenters and thatchers, and Harald would undoubtedly be tempted to assault their wall, but I did not believe he would yield to the temptation, not while a much greater prize, Alfred himself, was apparently vulnerable. The Danish scouts would be telling Harald that the King of Wessex was in the open country, travelling in a slow wagon protected by a mere couple of hundred horsemen, and Harald’s army, I was certain, would be ordered to the pursuit.

Finan commanded my rearguard, his job to tell me when the enemy pursuit got too close. I stayed near the wagon and, just as we reached the Wintanceaster road a half-mile west of Æscengum, a slender rider spurred alongside me. It was Æthelflæd, clad in a long mail coat that appeared to be made from silver rings close-linked over a deerskin tunic. The mail coat fitted her tightly, clinging to her thin body, and I guessed that it was fastened at the back with loops and buttons because no one could pull such a tight coat over their head and shoulders. Over the mail she wore a white cloak, lined with red, and she had a white-scabbarded sword at her side. A battered old helmet with face-plates hung from her saddle’s pommel and she had doubtless used the helmet to hide her face before we left Æscengum, though she had also taken the precaution of covering her distinctive cloak and armour with an old black cape that she tossed into the ditch as she joined me. She grinned, looking as happy as she had once looked before her marriage, then nodded towards the lumbering wagon. ‘Is that my half-brother?’

‘Yes. You’ve seen him before.’

‘Not often. Doesn’t he look like his father!’

‘He does,’ I said, ‘and you don’t, for which I’m grateful.’ That made her laugh. ‘Where did you get the mail?’ I asked.

‘Æthelred likes me to wear it,’ she said. ‘He had it made for me in Frankia.’

‘Silver links?’ I asked. ‘I could pierce those with a twig!’

‘I don’t think my husband wants me to fight,’ she said drily, ‘he just wants to display me.’ And that, I thought, was understandable. Æthelflæd had grown to be a lovely woman, at least when her beauty was not clouded by unhappiness. She was clear-eyed and clear-skinned, with full lips and golden hair. She was clever, like her father, and a good deal cleverer than her husband, but she had been married for one reason only, to bind the Mercian lands to Alfred’s Wessex, and in that sense, if in no other, the marriage had been a success.

‘Tell me about Aldhelm,’ I said.

‘You already know about him,’ she retorted.

‘I know he doesn’t like me,’ I said happily.

‘Who does?’ she asked, grinning. She slowed her horse, that was getting too close to the crawling wagon. She wore gloves of soft kid leather over which six bright rings glittered with gold and rare stones. ‘Aldhelm,’ she said softly, ‘advises my husband, and he has persuaded Æthelred of two things. The first is that Mercia needs a king.’

‘Your father won’t allow it,’ I said. Alfred preferred Mercia look to Wessex for its kingly authority.

‘My father will not live for ever,’ she said, ‘and Aldhelm has also persuaded my husband that a king needs an heir.’ She saw my grimace and laughed. ‘Not me! Ælfwynn was enough!’ She shuddered. ‘I have never known such pain. Besides, my dear husband resents Wessex. He resents his dependency. He hates the hand that feeds him. No, he would like an heir from some nice Mercian girl.’

‘You mean. …’

‘He won’t kill me,’ she interrupted blithely, ‘but he would love to divorce me.’

‘Your father would never allow that!’

‘He would if I was taken in adultery,’ she said in a remarkably flat tone. I stared at her, not quite believing what she told me. She saw my incredulity and mocked it with a smile. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘you did ask me about Aldhelm.’

‘Æthelred wants you to. …’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘then he can condemn me to a nunnery and forget I ever existed.’

‘And Aldhelm encourages this idea?’

‘Oh, he does, he does,’ she smiled as if my question was silly. ‘Luckily I have West Saxon attendants who protect me, but after my father dies?’ she shrugged.

‘Have you told your father?’

‘He’s been told,’ she said, ‘but I don’t think he believes it. He does, of course, believe in faith and prayer, so he sent me a comb that once belonged to Saint Milburga and he says it will strengthen me.’

‘Why doesn’t he believe you?’

‘He thinks I am prone to bad dreams. He also finds Æthelred very loyal. And my mother, of course, adores Æthelred.’

‘She would,’ I said gloomily. Alfred’s wife, Ælswith, was a sour creature and, like Æthelred, a Mercian. ‘You could try poison,’ I suggested. ‘I know a woman in Lundene who brews some vicious potions.’

‘Uhtred!’ she chided me, but before she could say more, one of Finan’s men came galloping from the rearguard, his horse throwing up clods of earth torn from the meadow beside the road.

‘Lord!’ he shouted, ‘time to hurry!’

‘Osferth!’ I called, and our pretend king happily jumped from his father’s wagon and hauled himself into the saddle of a horse. He threw the bronze circlet back into the wagon and pulled on a helmet.

‘Dump it,’ I shouted to the wagon’s driver. ‘Take it into the ditch!’

He managed to get two wheels in the ditch and we left the heavy vehicle there, canted over, the frightened horses still in their harness. Finan and our rearguard came pounding up the road and we spurred ahead of them into a stretch of woodland where I waited until Finan caught up, and just as he did so the first of the pursuing Danes came into sight. They were pushing their horses hard, but I reckoned the abandoned wagon with its tawdry treasures would delay them a few moments and, sure enough, the leading pursuers milled about the vehicle as we turned away.

‘It’s a horse race,’ Finan told me.

‘And our horses are faster,’ I said, which was probably true. The Danes were mounted on whatever animals their raiding parties had succeeded in capturing, while we were riding some of Wessex’s best stallions. I snatched a last glance as dismounted enemies swarmed over the wagon, then plunged deeper into the trees. ‘How many of them are there?’ I shouted at Finan.

‘Hundreds,’ he called back, grinning. Which meant, I guessed, that any man in Harald’s army who could saddle a horse had joined the pursuit. Harald was feeling the ecstasy of victory. His men had plundered all eastern Wessex, now he believed he had turned Alfred’s army out of Æscengum, which effectively opened the way for the Danes to maraud the whole centre of the country. Before those pleasures, however, he wanted to capture Alfred himself and so his men were wildly following us, and Harald, unconcerned about their lack of discipline, believed his good fortune must hold. This was the wild hunt, and Harald had loosed his men and sent them to deliver him the King of Wessex.

We led them, we enticed them and we tempted them. We did not ride as fast as we might, instead we kept the pursuing Danes in sight and only once did they catch us. Rypere, one of my valued men, was riding wide to our right and his horse thrust a hoof into a molehill. He was thirty paces away, but I heard the crack of breaking bone and saw Rypere tumbling and the horse flailing as it collapsed in screaming pain. I turned Smoka towards him and saw a small group of Danes coming fast. I shouted at another of my men, ‘spear!’

I grabbed his heavy ash-shafted spear and headed straight towards the leading Danes who were spurring to kill Rypere. Finan had turned with me, as had a dozen others, and the Danes, seeing us, tried to swerve away, but Smoka was pounding the earth now, nostrils wide, and I lowered the spear and caught the nearest Dane in the side of his chest. The ash shaft jarred back, my gloved hand slid along the wood, but the spear-point pierced deep and blood was welling and spilling in the spaces between the links of the Dane’s mail coat. I let the spear go. The dying man stayed in his saddle as a second Dane flailed at me with a sword, but I threw the stroke off with my shield and turned Smoka by the pressure of my knees as Finan ripped his long blade across another man’s face. I snatched the reins from the man I had speared and dragged his horse to Rypere. ‘Throw the bastard off and get up,’ I called.

The surviving Danes had retreated. There had been fewer than a dozen and they were the forerunners, the men on the fastest horses, and it took time for reinforcements to reach them and by then we had spurred safely away. Rypere’s legs were too short to reach his new stirrups, and he was cursing as he clung to the saddle’s pommel. Finan was smiling. ‘That’ll annoy them, lord,’ he said.

‘I want them mad,’ I said.

I wanted them to be impetuous, careless and confident. Already, on that summer’s day, as we followed the road alongside a meandering stream where crowsfoot grew thick, Harald was doing all I could ask. And was I confident? It is a dangerous thing to assume that your enemy will do what you want, but on that Thor’s Day I had a growing conviction that Harald was falling into a carefully laid trap.

Our road led to the ford where we could cross the river to reach Fearnhamme. If we had truly been fleeing to Wintanceaster we would have stayed south of the river and taken the Roman road which led west, and I wanted the Danes to believe that was our intention. So, when we reached the river, we stopped just south of the ford. I wanted our pursuers to see us, I wanted them to think we were indecisive, I wanted them, eventually, to think we panicked.

The land was open, a stretch of river meadow where folk grazed their goats and sheep. To the east, where the Danes were coming, was woodland, to the west was the road Harald would expect us to take, and to the north were the crumbling stone piers of the bridge the Romans had made across the Wey. Fearnhamme and its low hill were on the ruined bridge’s farther side. I stared at the hill and could see no troops.

‘That’s where I wanted Aldhelm,’ I snarled, pointing to the hill.

‘Lord!’ Finan shouted in warning.

The pursuing Danes were gathering at the edge of a wood a half-mile eastwards. They could see us clearly, and they understood that we were too many to attack until more pursuers arrived, but those reinforcements were appearing by the minute. I looked across the river again and saw no one. The hill, with its ancient earthwork, was supposed to be my anvil strengthened with five hundred Mercian warriors, yet it looked deserted. Would my two hundred men be enough?

‘Lord!’ Finan called again. The Danes, who now outnumbered us by two to one, were spurring their horses towards us.

‘Through the ford!’ I shouted. I would spring the trap anyway, and so we kicked our tired horses through the deep ford which lay just upstream of the bridge and, once across, I called for my men to gallop to the hill’s top. I wanted the appearance of panic. I wanted it to look as though we had abandoned our ambitions to reach Wintanceaster and instead were taking refuge on the nearest hill.

We rode through Fearnhamme. It was a huddle of thatched huts around a stone church, though there was one fine-looking Roman building that had lost its tiled roof. There were no inhabitants, just a single cow bellowing pathetically because she needed to be milked. I assumed the folk had fled from the rumours of the approaching Danes. ‘I hope your damned men are on the hill!’ I shouted to Æthelflæd, who was staying close to me.

‘They’ll be there!’ she called back.

She sounded confident, but I was dubious. Aldhelm’s first duty, at least according to her husband, was to keep the Mercian army intact. Had he simply refused to advance on Fearnhamme? If he had, then I would be forced to fight off an army of Danes with just two hundred men, and those Danes were approaching fast. They smelt victory and they pounded their horses through the river and up into Fearnhamme’s street. I could hear their shouts, and then I reached the grassy bank that was the ancient earthwork and, as Smoka crested the bank’s summit, I saw that Æthelflæd was right. Aldhelm had come, and he had brought five hundred men. They were all there, but Aldhelm had kept them at the northern side of the old fortress so they would be hidden from an enemy approaching from the south.

And so, just as I had planned, I had seven hundred men on the hill, and another seven hundred, I hoped, approaching from Æscengum, and between those two forces were some two thousand rampaging, careless, over-confident Danes who believed they were about to achieve the old Viking dream of conquering Wessex.

‘Shield wall!’ I shouted at my men. ‘Shield wall!’

The Danes had to be checked for a moment, and the easiest way to do that was to show them a shield wall at the hill’s top. There was a moment of chaos as men slid from their saddles and ran to the bank’s top, but these were good men, well-trained, and their shields locked together fast. The Danes, coming from the houses onto the hill’s lower slope, saw the wall of iron-bound willow, they saw the spears, the swords and the axe blades, and they saw the steepness of the slope, and their wild charge stopped. Scores of men were crossing the river and still more were coming from the trees on the southern bank, so in a few moments they would have more than enough warriors to overwhelm my short shield wall, but for now they paused.

‘Banners!’ I said. We had brought our banners, my wolf’s-head flag and Wessex’s dragon, and I wanted them flown as an invitation to Harald’s men.

Aldhelm, tall and sallow, had come to greet me. He did not like me and his face showed that dislike, but it also showed astonishment at the number of Danes who converged on the ford.

‘Divide your men into two,’ I told him peremptorily, ‘and line them either side of my men. Rypere!’

‘Lord?’

‘Take a dozen men and tether those horses!’ Our abandoned horses were wandering the hilltop and I feared some would stray back over the bank.

‘How many Danes are there?’ Aldhelm asked.

‘Enough to give us a day’s good killing,’ I said, ‘now bring your men here.’

He bridled at my tone. He was a thin man, elegant in a superb long coat of mail that had bronze crescent moons sewn to the links. He had a cloak of blue linen, lined with red cloth, and he wore a chain of heavy gold looped twice about his neck. His boots and gloves were black leather, his sword belt was decorated with golden crosses, while his long black hair, scented and oiled, was held at the nape of his neck with a comb of ivory teeth clasped in a golden frame. ‘I have my orders,’ he said distantly.

‘Yes, to bring your men here. We have Danes to kill.’

He had always disliked me, ever since I had spoiled his handsome looks by breaking his jaw and his nose, though on that far day he had been armed and I had not. He could barely bring himself to look at me, instead he stared at the Danes gathering at the foot of the hill. ‘I am instructed,’ he said, ‘to preserve the Lord Æthelred’s forces.’

‘Your instructions have changed, Lord Aldhelm.’ A cheerful voice spoke from behind us, and Aldhelm turned to gaze in astonishment at Æthelflæd, who smiled from her high saddle.

‘My lady,’ he said, bowing, then glancing from her to me. ‘Is the Lord Æthelred here?’

‘My husband sent me to countermand his last orders,’ Æthelflæd said sweetly. ‘He is now so confident of victory that he requires you to stay here despite the numbers opposing us.’

Aldhelm began to reply, then assumed I did not know what his last orders from Æthelred had been. ‘Your husband sent you, my lady?’ he asked instead, plainly confused by Æthelflæd’s unexpected presence.

‘Why else would I be here?’ Æthelflaed asked beguilingly, ‘and if there were any real danger, my lord, would my husband have allowed me to come?’

‘No, my lady,’ Aldhelm said, but without any conviction.

‘So we are going to fight!’ Æthelflæd called those words loudly, speaking to the Mercian troops. She turned her grey mare so they could see her face and hear her more clearly. ‘We are going to kill Danes! And my husband sent me to witness your bravery, so do not disappoint me! Kill them all!’

They cheered her. She rode her horse along their front rank and they cheered her wildly. I had always thought Mercia a miserable place, defeated and sullen, kingless and downtrodden, but in that moment I saw how Æthelflæd, radiant in silver mail, was capable of lifting the Mercians to enthusiasm. They loved her. I knew they had small fondness for Æthelred, Alfred was a distant figure and, besides, King of Wessex, but Æthelflæd inspired them. She gave them pride.

The Danes were still gathering at the foot of the hill. There must have been three hundred men who had dismounted and who now made their own shield wall. They could still only see my two hundred men, but it was time to sweeten the bait. ‘Osferth,’ I shouted, ‘get back on your horse, then come and be kingly.’

‘Must I, lord?’

‘Yes, you must!’

We made Osferth stand his horse beneath the banners. He was cloaked, and he now wore a helmet that I draped with my own gold chain so that, from a distance, it looked like a crowned helmet. The Danes, seeing him, bellowed insults up the gentle slope. Osferth looked kingly enough, though anyone familiar with Alfred should have known the mounted figure was not Wessex’s king simply because he was not surrounded by priests, but I decided Harald would never notice the lack. I was amused to see Æthelflæd, obviously curious about her half-brother, push her horse next to his stallion.

I turned to look back to the south where still more Danes were crossing the river and, so long as I live, I will never forget that landscape. All the country beyond the river was covered with Danish horsemen, their stallions’ hooves kicking up dust as the riders spurred towards the ford, all eager to be present at the destruction of Alfred and his kingdom. So many men wanted to cross the river that they were forced to wait in a great milling herd at the ford’s farther side.

Aldhelm was ordering his men forward. He probably did it unwillingly, but Æthelflæd had inspired them and he was caught between her disdain and their enthusiasm. The Danes at the foot of the hill saw my short line lengthen, they saw more shields and more blades, more banners. They would still outnumber us, but now they would need half their army to make an assault on the hill. A man in a black cloak and carrying a red-hafted war axe, was marshalling Harald’s men, thrusting them into line. I guessed there were five hundred men in the enemy shield wall now, and more were coming every moment. Some of the Danes had stayed on horseback, and I supposed they planned to ride about our rear to make an attack when the shield walls met. The enemy line was only a couple of hundred paces away, close enough for me to see the ravens and axes and eagles and serpents painted on their iron-bossed shields. Some began clashing their weapons against those shields, making the thunder of war. Others bellowed that we were milksop children, or goat-begotten bastards.

‘Noisy, aren’t they?’ Finan remarked beside me. I just smiled. He raised his drawn sword to his helmet-framed face and kissed the blade. ‘Remember that Frisian girl we found in the marshes? She was noisy.’ It is strange what men think of before battle. The Frisian girl had escaped a Danish slaver and had been terrified. I wondered what had happened to her.

Aldhelm was nervous, so nervous that he overcame his hatred of me and stood close. ‘What if Alfred doesn’t come?’ he asked.

‘Then we each have to kill two Danes before the rest lose heart,’ I said with false confidence. If Alfred’s seven hundred men did not come then we would be surrounded, cut down and slaughtered.

Only about half the Danes had crossed the river, such was the congestion at the narrow ford, and still more horsemen were streaming from the east to join the crowd waiting to cross the Wey. Fearnhamme was filled with men pulling down thatch in search of treasure. The unmilked cow lay dead in the street. ‘What,’ Aldhelm began, then hesitated. ‘What if Alfred’s forces come late?’

‘Then all the Danes will be across the river,’ I said.

‘And attacking us,’ Finan said.

I knew Aldhelm was thinking of retreat. Behind us, to the north, were higher hills that offered greater protection, or perhaps, if we retreated fast enough, we could cross the Temes before the Danes caught and destroyed us. For unless Alfred’s men came we would surely die, and at that moment I felt the death-serpent slither cold about my heart that was thumping like a war drum. Skade’s curse, I thought, and I suddenly understood the magnitude of the risk I was running. I had assumed the Danes would do exactly what I wanted, and that the West Saxon army would appear at just the right moment, but instead we were stranded on a low hill and our enemy was getting ever stronger. There was still a great crowd on the river’s far bank, but in less than an hour the whole of Harald’s army would be across the river, and I felt the imminence of disaster and the fear of utter defeat. I remembered Harald’s threat, that he would blind me, geld me and then lead me about on a rope’s end. I touched the hammer and stroked Serpent-Breath’s hilt.

‘If the West Saxon troops don’t arrive,’ Aldhelm began, his voice grim with purpose.

‘God be praised,’ Æthelflæd interrupted from behind us.

Because there was a glint of sun-reflecting steel from the far distant trees.

And more horsemen appeared. Hundreds of horsemen.

The army of Wessex had come.

And the Danes were trapped.

Poets exaggerate. They live by words and my household bards fear I will stop throwing them silver if they do not exaggerate. I remember skirmishes where a dozen men might have died, but in the poet’s telling the slain are counted in the thousands. I am forever feeding the ravens in their endless recitations, but no poet could exaggerate the slaughter that occurred that Thor’s Day on the banks of the River Wey.

It was a swift slaughter too. Most battles take time to start as the two sides summon their courage, hurl insults and watch to see what the enemy will do, but Steapa, leading Alfred’s seven hundred men, saw the confusion on the river’s southern bank and, just as soon as he had sufficient men in hand, charged on horseback. Æthelred, Steapa told me later, had wanted to wait till all seven hundred had gathered, but Steapa ignored the advice. He began with three hundred men and allowed the others to catch up as they emerged from the trees into the open land.

The three hundred attacked the enemy’s rear where, as might be expected, the least enthusiastic of Harald’s army were waiting to cross the river. They were the laggards, the servants and boys, some women and children, and almost all of them were cumbered with pillage. None was ready to fight; there was no shield wall, some did not even possess shields. The Danes most eager for a battle had already crossed the river and were forming to attack the hill, and it took them some moments to understand that a vicious slaughter had begun on the river’s farther bank.

‘It was like killing piglets,’ Steapa told me later. ‘A lot of squealing and blood.’

The horsemen slammed into the Danes. Steapa led Alfred’s own household troops, the remainder of my men, and battle-hardened warriors from Wiltunscir and Sumorsæte. They were eager for a fight, well mounted, armed with the best weapons, and their attack caused chaos. The Danes, unable to form a shield wall, tried to run, except the only safety lay across the ford and that was blocked by the men waiting to cross, and so the panicked enemy clawed at their own men, stopping any chance of a shield wall forming, and Steapa’s men, huge on their horses, hacked and slashed and stabbed their way into the crowd. More Saxons came from the woods to join the fight. Horses were fetlock deep in blood, and still the swords and axes crushed and cut. Alfred had endured the ride despite the pain the saddle caused him, and he watched from the edge of the trees while the priests and monks sang praises to their god for the slaughter of the heathen that was reddening the water-meadows on the Wey’s southern bank.

Edward fought with Steapa. He was a slight young man, but Steapa was full of praise afterwards. ‘He has courage,’ he told me.

‘Does he have sword craft?’

‘He has a quick wrist,’ Steapa said approvingly.

Æthelred understood before Steapa that eventually the horsemen must be stopped by the sheer crush of bodies, and he persuaded Ealdorman Æthelnoth of Sumorsæte to dismount a hundred of his men and form a shield wall. That wall advanced steadily and, as horses were wounded or killed, more Saxons joined that wall, which went forward like a row of harvesters wielding sickles. Hundreds of Danes died. On that southern bank, under the high sun, there was a massacre, and the enemy never once managed to organise themselves and so fight back. They died or else they crossed the river or else they were taken captive.

Yet perhaps half of Harald’s army had crossed the ford, and those men were ready for a fight and, even as the slaughter began behind them, they came to kill us. Harald himself had arrived, a servant bringing a packhorse behind, and Harald came a few steps forward of his swelling shield wall to make certain we saw the ritual with which he scared his enemies. He faced us, huge in cloak and mail, then spread his arms as though crucified, and in his right hand was a massive battle axe with which, after bellowing that we would all be fed to the slime worms of death, he killed the horse. He did it with one stroke of the axe and, while the beast was still twitching in its death throes, he slit open its belly and plunged his unhelmeted head deep into the bloody entrails. My men watched in silence. Harald, ignoring the spasms of the hooves, held his head deep in the horse’s belly, then stood and turned to show a blood-masked face and blood-soaked hair and a thick beard dripping with blood. Harald Bloodhair was ready for battle. ‘Thor!’ he shouted, lifting his face and axe to the sky, ‘Thor!’ He pointed the axe towards us. ‘Now we kill you all!’ he screamed. A servant brought him his great axe-painted shield.

I am not certain Harald knew what happened on the river’s farther bank, that was hidden from him by the houses in Fearnhamme. He must have known that Saxons were attacking his rear, indeed he would have heard reports of fighting all morning because, as Steapa was to tell me, the pursuing Saxons were forever meeting Danish stragglers on the road from Æscengum, but Harald’s attention was fixed on Fearnhamme’s hill where, he believed, Alfred was trapped. He could lose the battle on the river’s southern bank and still win a kingdom on the northern bank. And so he led his men forward.

I had planned to let the Danes attack us, and to rely on the ancient earthwork to give us added protection, but as Harald’s line advanced with a great bellow of rage, I saw they were vulnerable. Harald might have been unaware of the disaster his men were suffering across the river, but many of his Danes were turning, trying to see what happened there, and men scared of an attack on their rear will not fight with full vigour. We had to attack them. I sheathed Serpent-Breath and drew Wasp-Sting, my short-sword. ‘Swine head!’ I shouted, ‘swine head!’

My men knew what I wanted. They had rehearsed it hundreds of times until they were tired of practising it, but now those hours of practice paid off as I led the way off the earthen bank and crossed the ditch.

A swine head was simply a wedge of men, a human spear-point, and it was the fastest way I knew to break a shield wall. I took the lead, though Finan tried to edge me aside. The Danes had slowed, perhaps surprised that we were abandoning the earthwork, or perhaps because at last they understood the trap that closed on them. There was only one way out of that trap, and that was to destroy us. Harald knew it and bellowed at his men to charge uphill. I was shouting at my men to charge downhill. That fight started so fast. I was taking the swine head down the shallow slope and he was urging his men up, but the Danes were confused, suddenly frightened, and his wall frayed before we even reached it. Some men obeyed Harald, others hung back, and so the line bent, though at the centre, where Harald’s banner of the wolf-skull and the axe flew, the shield wall remained firm. That was where Harald’s own crewmen were concentrated, and where my swine head was aimed.

We were screaming a great shout of defiance. My shield, iron-rimmed, was heavy on my left arm, Wasp-Sting was drawn back. She was a short stabbing blade. Serpent-Breath was my magnificent sword, but a long sword, like a long-hafted axe, can be a hindrance in a battle of shield walls. I knew when we clashed, that I would be pressed close as a lover to my enemies and in that crush a short blade could be lethal.

I aimed for Harald himself. He wore no helmet, relying on the sun-glistening blood to terrify his enemies, and he was terrifying; a big man, snarling, eyes wild, ropy-hair dripping red, his shield painted with an axe blade and a short-hafted, heavy-bladed war axe as his chosen weapon. He was shouting like a fiend, his eyes fixed on me, his mouth a snarl in a mask of blood. I remember thinking as we charged downhill that he would use the axe to chop down at me, which would make me raise my shield, and his neighbour, a dark-faced man with a short stabbing sword, would slide the blade beneath my shield to gut my belly. But Finan was on my right and that meant the dark-faced man was doomed. ‘Kill them all!’ I shouted Æthelflæd’s war cry, ‘kill them all!’ I did not even turn to see if Aldhelm had brought his men forward, though he had. I just felt the fear of the shield wall fight and the elation of the shield wall fight. ‘Kill them all!’ I screamed.

And the shields crashed together.

The poets say six thousand Danes came to Fearnhamme, and sometimes they reckon it was ten thousand and, doubtless, as the story gets older the number will become higher. In truth I think Harald brought around sixteen hundred men, because some of his army stayed close to Æscengum. He led many more men than those who were at Æscengum and Fearnhamme. He had crossed from Frankia with some two hundred ships, and maybe five or six thousand men came in all those ships, but fewer than half had found horses, and not all those mounted men rode to Fearnhamme. Some stayed in Cent where they laid claim to captured land, others stayed to plunder Godelmingum, so how many men did we face? Perhaps half of Harald’s force had crossed the river, so my troops and Aldhelm’s warriors were attacking no more than eight hundred, and some of those were not even in the shield wall, but were still seeking plunder in Fearnhamme’s houses. The poets tell me we were outnumbered, but I think we probably had more men.

And we were more disciplined. And we had the advantage of the higher ground. And we hit the shield wall.

I struck with my shield. To make the swine head work the thrust must be hard and fast. I remember shouting Æthelflæd’s war cry, ‘kill them all!’ then leaping the last pace, all my weight concentrated into my left arm with its heavy shield, and it slammed into Harald’s shield and he was thrown back as I rammed Wasp-Sting beneath the lower rim of my round shield. The blade struck and pierced. That moment is vague, a confusion. I know Harald swung down with his axe because the blade mangled the mail on my back, though without touching my skin. My sudden leap must have carried me inside the swing. I later found my left shoulder was bruised a deep black, and I guess that was where his axe’s haft struck, but I was unaware of the pain during the fight.

I call it a fight, but it was soon over. I do remember Wasp-Sting piercing and I felt the sensation of the blade in flesh, and I knew I had wounded Harald, but then he twisted away to my left, thrust aside by the weight and speed of our attack, and Wasp-Sting was wrenched free. Finan, on my right, covered me with his shield as I slammed into the second rank and I lunged Wasp-Sting again, and still I was moving forward. I slammed the shield’s iron boss at a Dane and saw Rypere’s spear take him in the eye. There was blood in the air, screaming, and a sword lunged from my right, going between the shield and my body, and I just kept going forward as Finan sliced his short-sword at the man’s arm. The sword fell feebly away. I was moving slowly now, pushing against a crush of men and being pushed by my men behind. I was stabbing Wasp-Sting in short hard lunges, and in my memory that passage of the battle was quite silent. It cannot have been silent, of course, but so it seems when I remember Fearnhamme. I see men’s mouths open, full of rotting teeth. I see grimaces. I see the flash of blades. I recall crouching as I shoved forward, I remember the axe swing that came from my left, and how Rypere caught it on his shield, that split open. I remember tripping on the corpse of the horse Harald had sacrificed to Thor, but I was pushed upright by a Dane who tried to gut me with a short blade that was stopped by the gold buckle of my sword belt, and I remember ripping Wasp-Sting up between his legs and sawing her backwards and watching his eyes open in terrible pain, and then he was suddenly gone and, just as suddenly, so very suddenly, there were no shields in front of me, just a vegetable plot and a dungheap and a cottage with its mauled thatch heaped on the ground, and I remember all that, but I do not remember any noise.

Æthelflæd told me later that our swine head had gone straight through Harald’s line. It must have seemed that way as she watched from the hilltop, though to me it had seemed slow and hard work, but we did get through, we split Harald’s shield wall and now the real slaughter could begin.

The Danish shield wall was shattered. Now, instead of neighbour helping neighbour, each man was on his own, and our men, West Saxon and Mercian alike, were still ranked shield to shield and they slashed and cut and stabbed at frantic enemies. The panic spread fast, like fire in dry stubble, and the Danes fled and my only regret was that our horses were still on the hilltop, guarded by boys, or else we could have pursued and cut them down from behind.

Not all the Danes ran. Some horsemen who had been readying to circle the hill and attack us from behind charged our shield wall, but horses are reluctant to slam home into a well-made wall. The Danes rammed spears at shields and forced our line to bend, and more Danes came to help the horsemen. My swine head was no longer wedge-shaped, but my men were still staying together and I led them towards the sudden fury. A horse reared at me, hooves flailing, and I let my shield take the thumping blows. The stallion snapped its teeth at me and the rider hacked down with a sword that was stopped by the shield’s iron rim. My men were encircling the attackers who realised their danger and pulled away, and it was then I saw why they had attacked in the first place. They had come to rescue Harald. Two of my men had captured Harald’s standard, the red-coloured wolf-skull still fixed to its axe-banner staff, but Harald himself lay in blood among pea-plants. I shouted that we should capture him, but the horse was in my way and the rider was still slashing wildly with the sword. I rammed Wasp-Sting into the beast’s belly and saw Harald being dragged backwards by his ankles. A huge Dane threw Harald over a saddle and other men led the horse away. I tried to reach him, but Wasp-Sting was embedded in the shuddering horse and the rider was still ineptly trying to kill me, so I let go of the short-sword’s hilt, grabbed his wrist and hauled. I heard a shriek as the rider toppled from the saddle. ‘Kill him,’ I snarled at the man beside me, then pulled Wasp-Sting free, but it was too late, the Danes had managed to rescue the wounded Harald.

I sheathed Wasp-Sting and drew Serpent-Breath. There would be no more shield wall fighting this day, because now we would hunt the Danes through Fearnhamme’s alleys and beyond. Most of Harald’s men fled eastwards, but not all. Our two attacks had pinched Harald’s horde, splitting it, and some had to run westwards, deeper into Wessex. The first Saxon horsemen were crossing the river now and they pursued the fugitives. The Danes that survived that pursuit would be hunted by peasants. The men who went eastwards, the ones who carried their fallen leader, were more numerous and they checked to rally a half-mile away, though as soon as West Saxon horsemen appeared those Danes went on retreating. And still there were Danes in Fearnhamme, men who had taken refuge in the houses where we hunted them like rats. They shouted for mercy, but we showed none because we were still under the thrall of Æthelflæd’s savage wish.

I killed a man on a dungheap, hacking him down with Serpent-Breath and slicing his throat with her point. Finan chased two into a house and I hurried after him, but both were dead when I crashed through the door. Finan tossed me a golden arm ring, then we both went into the sunlit chaos. Horsemen cantered up the street, looking for victims. I heard shouting from behind a hovel and Finan and I ran there to see a huge Dane, bright with silver and gold rings and with a golden chain about his neck, fighting off three Mercians. He was a shipmaster, I guessed, a man who had brought his crews to Harald’s service in hope of finding West Saxon lands, but instead he was finding a West Saxon grave. He was good and fast, his sword and his battered shield holding off his attackers, and then he saw me and recognised the wealth in my war-gear and, at the same moment, the three Mercians stepped back as if to give me the privilege of killing the big man. ‘Hold your sword tight,’ I told him.

He nodded. He glanced at the hammer hanging at my neck. He was sweating, but not with fear. It was a warm day and we were all in leather and mail.

‘Wait for me in the feast hall,’ I said.

‘My name is Othar.’

‘Uhtred.’

‘Othar the Storm-Rider,’ he said.

‘I have heard that name,’ I said politely, though I had not. Othar wanted me to know so that I could tell men that Othar the Storm-Rider had died well, and I had told him to keep a tight hold of his sword so that Othar the Storm-Rider would go to the feast hall in Valhalla where all warriors who die bravely go after death. These days, although I am old and feeble, I always wear a sword, so that when death comes I will go to that far hall where men like Othar wait for me. I look forward to meeting them.

‘The sword,’ he said, lifting the weapon, ‘is called Brightfire.’ He kissed the blade. ‘She has served me well.’ He paused. ‘Uhtred of Bebbanburg?’

‘Yes.’

‘I met Ælfric the Generous,’ Othar said.

It took me a heartbeat or two to realise he meant my uncle who had usurped my inheritance in Northumbria. ‘The generous?’ I asked.

‘How else does he keep his lands?’ Othar asked in return, ‘except by paying Danes to stay away?’

‘I hope to kill him too,’ I said.

‘He has many warriors,’ Othar said, and with that he thrust Brightfire fast, hoping to surprise me, hoping that he could go to Valhalla with my death as a boast, but I was as quick as him and Serpent-Breath sliced the lunge aside and I hammered my shield boss into him, pushing him back and brought my sword round fast and realised he was not even trying to parry as Serpent-Breath slid across his throat.

I took Brightfire from his dead hand. I had cut his throat to keep his mail from further damage. Mail is expensive, a trophy as valuable as the rings on Othar’s arms.

Fearnhamme was filled with the dead and with the triumphant living. Almost the only Danes to survive were those who had taken refuge in the church, and they only lived because Alfred had crossed the river and insisted that the church was a refuge. He sat in the saddle, his face tight with pain, and the priests surrounded him as the Danes were led out of the church. Æthelred was there, his sword bloody. Aldhelm was grinning. We had won a famous victory, a great victory, and news of the slaughter would spread wherever the northmen took their boats, and shipmasters would know that going to Wessex was a short route to the grave. ‘Praise God,’ Alfred greeted me.

My mail was sheeted with blood. I knew I was grinning like Aldhelm. Father Beocca was almost crying with joy. Æthelflæd appeared then, still on horseback, and two of her Mercians were leading a prisoner. ‘She was trying to kill you, Lord Uhtred!’ Æthelflæd said happily, and I realised the prisoner was the rider whose horse I had stabbed with Wasp-Sting.

It was Skade.

Æthelred was staring at his wife, no doubt wondering what she did in Fearnhamme dressed in mail, but he had no time to ask because Skade began howling. It was a terrible shrieking like the screams of a woman being eaten by the death-worm, and she tore at her hair and fell to the ground and started writhing. ‘I curse you all,’ she wailed. She grabbed handfuls of earth and rubbed them into her black hair, crammed them into her mouth, and all the time she writhed and screeched. One of her guards was carrying the mail coat she had been wearing in battle, leaving her in a linen shift that she suddenly ripped open to expose her breasts. She smeared earth on her breasts and I had to smile as Edward, beside his father, stared wide-eyed at Skade’s nakedness. Alfred looked even more pained.

‘Silence her,’ he ordered.

One of the Mercian guards cracked a spear pole across her skull and Skade fell sideways onto the street. There was blood mixed with the soil in her raven hair now, and I thought she was unconscious, but then she spat out the soil and looked up at me. ‘Cursed,’ she snarled.

And one of the spinners took my thread. I like to think she hesitated, but maybe she did not. Maybe she smiled. But whether she hesitated or not, she thrust her bone needle sideways into the darker weave.

Wyrd bið ful ãræd.

Sharp blades thrusting, spear-blades killing

As Æthelred Lord of Slaughter, slaughtered thousands,

Swelling the river with blood, sword-fed river,

And Aldhelm, noble warrior, followed his lord

Into the battle, hard-fought, felling foemen

And so the poem goes on for many, many, many more lines. I have the parchment in front of me, though I shall burn it in a moment. My name is not mentioned, of course, and that is why I shall burn it. Men die, women die, cattle die, but reputation lives on like the echo of a song. Yet why should men sing of Æthelred? He fought well enough that day, but Fearnhamme was not his battle, it was mine.

I should pay my own poets to write down their songs, but they prefer lying in the sun and drinking my ale and, to be frank, poets bore me. I endure them for the sake of the guests in my hall who expect to hear the harp and the boasts. Curiosity drove me to buy this about-to-be-burned parchment from a monk who sells such things to noble halls. He had come from the lands that were Mercia, of course, and it is natural that Mercian poets should extol their country or else no one would ever hear of it, and so they write their lies, but even they cannot compete with the churchmen. The annals of our time are all written by monks and priests, and a man might have run away from a hundred battles and never once have killed a Dane, but so long as he gives money to the church he will be written down as a hero.

The battle at Fearnhamme was won by two things. The first was that Steapa brought Alfred’s men to the field just when they were needed and, looking back, that could so easily have gone wrong. The Ætheling Edward, of course, was notionally in charge of that half of the army, and both he and Æthelred possessed far more authority than Steapa, indeed they both insisted he gave the command to leave Æscengum too soon and countermanded his order, but Alfred overruled them. Alfred was too sick to command the army himself, but, like me, he had learned to trust Steapa’s brute instinct. And so the horsemen arrived at the rear of Harald’s army when it was disorganised and when half still waited to cross the river.

The second reason for success was the speed with which my swine head shattered Harald’s shield wall. Such attacks did not always work, but we had the advantage of the slope, and the Danes, I think, were already dispirited by the slaughter beyond the ford. And so we won.

The Lord God granted victory, blessings to Æthelred,

Who, beside the river, broke the hedge of shields.

And Edward was there, noble Edward, Alfred’s son.

Who, shielded by angels, watched as Æthelred

Cut down the northmen’s leader. …

Burning is too good for it. Maybe I shall tear it to squares and leave it in the latrine.

We were too tired to organise a proper pursuit, and our men were dazed by the speed of their triumph. They had also found ale, mead and Frankish wine in the Danes’ saddlebags and many became drunk as they wandered the butcher’s shop they had made. Some men began heaving Danish corpses into the river, but there were so many that the bodies jammed against the Roman bridge piers to make a dam that flooded the ford’s banks. Mail coats were being heaped and captured weapons piled. The few prisoners were under guard in a barn, their sobbing women and children gathered outside, while Skade had been placed in an empty granary where two of my men now guarded her. Alfred, naturally, went to the church to give thanks to his god, and all the priests and monks went with him. Bishop Asser paused before going to his prayers. He stared at the dead and at the plunder, then turned his cold eyes on me. He just gazed at me, as if I were one of those two-headed calves that are shown at fairs, then he looked puzzled and gestured that Edward should go with him to the church.

Edward hesitated. He was a shy young man, but it was plain he felt he should say something to me and had no idea what words to use. I spoke instead. ‘I congratulate you, lord,’ I said.

He frowned and for a moment looked as puzzled as Asser, then he twitched and straightened. ‘I’m not a fool, Lord Uhtred.’

‘I never thought so,’ I said.

‘You must teach me,’ he said.

‘Teach you?’

He waved at the carnage and, for a heartbeat, looked horrified. ‘How you do this,’ he blurted out.

‘You think like your enemy, lord,’ I said, ‘and then you think harder.’ I would have said more, but just then I saw Cerdic in an alley between two cottages. I half turned, then was distracted by Bishop Asser sternly calling Edward away, and when I looked back there was no Cerdic. Nor could there have been, I told myself. I had left Cerdic in Lundene to guard Gisela, and I decided it was just one of the tricks that tired thoughts can play.

‘Here, lord.’ Sihtric, who had been my servant, but was now one of my household warriors, dumped a heavy coat of mail at my feet. ‘It’s got gold links, lord,’ he said excitedly.

‘You keep it,’ I said.

‘Lord?’ He stared up at me with astonishment.

‘Your wife has expensive tastes, doesn’t she?’ I asked. Sihtric had married a whore, Ealhswith, much against my advice and without my permission, but I had forgiven him and then been surprised that the marriage was happy. They had two children now, both sturdy little boys. ‘Take it away,’ I said.

‘Thank you, lord.’ Sihtric scooped up the mail coat.

Time slows.

It is strange how I have forgotten some things. I cannot truly remember the moment when I led the swine head into Harald’s line. Was I looking into his face? Do I truly remember the horse’s fresh blood flicking from his beard as his head turned? Or was I looking at the man to his left whose shield half protected Harald? I forget so much, but not that moment as Sihtric picked up the mail coat. I saw a man leading a dozen captured horses across the flooded ford. Two other men were tugging bodies free of the corpse-dam at the ruined bridge. One of the men had red curly hair and the other was doubled over in laughter at some jest. Three other men were tossing corpses into the river, adding to the blockage of bodies faster than the pair could relieve it. A thin dog was scratching itself on the street where Osferth, Alfred’s bastard, was talking to the Lady Æthelflæd, and I was surprised that she was not in the church with her father, brother and husband, and surprised that she and her half-brother appeared to have struck up a friendly relationship so soon. I remember Oswi, my new servant lad, leading Smoka into the street and pausing to talk to a woman, and I realised that Fearnhamme’s townsfolk were returning already. I supposed they must have hidden in the nearby woods as soon as they saw armed men across the river. Another woman, wearing a dull yellow cloak, was using a paring knife to cut a ring-circled finger from a dead Dane’s hand. I remember a raven, circling blue-black in the blood-smelling sky, and I felt a sharp elation as I stared at the bird. Was that one of Odin’s two ravens? Would the gods themselves hear of this carnage? I laughed aloud, the sound incongruous because in my memory there was just silence at that moment.

Till Æthelflæd spoke. ‘Lord?’ She had come close and was staring at me. ‘Uhtred?’ she said gently. Finan was a couple of paces behind her, and with him was Cerdic, and that was when I knew. I knew, but I said nothing, and Æthelflæd walked to me and laid a hand on my arm. ‘Uhtred?’ she said again. I think I just stared into her face. Her blue eyes were bright with tears. ‘Childbirth,’ she said gently.

‘No,’ I said, quite quietly, ‘no.’

‘Yes,’ she said simply. Finan was looking at me, pain on his face.

‘No,’ I said louder.

‘Mother and child,’ Æthelflæd said very softly.

I closed my eyes. My world went dark, had gone dark, for my Gisela was dead.

Wyn eal gedreas. That is from another poem I sometimes hear chanted in my hall. It is a sad poem, and thus a true poem. Wyrd bið ful ãræd, it says. Fate is inexorable. And wyn eal gedreas. All the joy has died.

All my joy had died and I had gone into the dark. Finan said I howled like a wolf, and perhaps I did, though I do not remember that. Grief must be hidden. The man who first chanted that fate is inexorable went on to say that we must bind our inmost thoughts in chains. A saddened mind does no good, he said, and its thoughts must be hidden, and maybe I did howl, but then I shook off Æthelflæd’s hand and snarled at the men heaving corpses into the river, ordering that two of them should help the men trying to clear the bodies from between the ruined bridge piers. ‘Make sure all our horses are down from the hilltop,’ I told Finan.

I did not think of Skade at that moment, or else I might have let Serpent-Breath take her rotten soul. It was her curse, I realised later, that killed Gisela, because she had died on the same morning that Harald had forced me to free Skade. Cerdic had ridden to tell me, his heart heavy as he took his horse through Dane-infested country to Æscengum, only to find us gone.

Alfred, when he heard, came to me, took my arm and walked down Fearnhamme’s street. He was limping and men stepped aside to give us room. He gripped my elbow, and seemed about to speak a dozen times, yet the words always died on his lips. Finally he checked me and looked into my eyes. ‘I have no answer why God inflicts such grief,’ he said, and I said nothing. ‘Your wife was a jewel,’ Alfred went on. He frowned, and his next words were as generous as they were difficult for him to say. ‘I pray your gods give you comfort, Lord Uhtred.’ He led me to the Roman house which had been sequestered as the royal hall, and there Æthelred looked uncomfortable, while Father Beocca, dear man, embarrassed me by clinging to my sword hand and praying aloud that his god should treat me with mercy. He was crying. Gisela might have been a pagan, but Beocca had loved her. Bishop Asser, who hated me, nevertheless spoke gentle words, while Brother Godwin, the blind monk who eavesdropped on God, made a plangent moaning sound until Asser led him away. Finan, later that day, brought me a jar of mead and sang his sad Irish songs until I was too drunk to care. He alone saw me weep that day, and he told no one.

‘We’re ordered back to Lundene,’ Finan told me next morning. I just nodded, too oblivious of the world to care what my orders were. ‘The king returns to Wintanceaster,’ Finan went on, ‘and the Lords Æthelred and Edward are to pursue Harald.’

Harald, badly wounded, had been taken by the remnants of his army north across the Temes until, in too much agony to continue, he ordered them to find refuge, which they did on a thorn-covered island called, naturally enough, Torneie. The island was in the River Colaun, not far from where it joins the Temes, and Harald’s men fortified Torneie, first making a great palisade with the plentiful thorn bushes, then throwing up earthworks. Lord Æthelred and the Ætheling Edward caught up with them there and laid siege. Alfred’s household troops, under Steapa, swept eastwards through Cent, driving out the last of Harald’s men and recovering vast quantities of plunder. Fearnhamme was a magnificent victory, leaving Harald stranded on a fever-infested island, while the remainder of his men fled to their boats and abandoned Wessex, though many of the crews joined Haesten, who was still camped on Cent’s northern shore.

And I was in Lundene. Tears still come to my eyes when I remember greeting Stiorra, my daughter, my little motherless daughter who clung to me and would not let go. And she was crying and I was crying, and I held her as though she was the only thing that could ever keep me alive. Osbert, the youngest, wept and clung to his nurse, while Uhtred, my eldest son, might have wept for all I know, but never in front of me, and that was not an admirable reticence, but rather because he feared me. He was a nervous, fussy child and I found him irritating. I insisted he learned sword-craft, but he had no skill with a blade, and when I took him downriver in Seolferwulf, he showed no enthusiasm for ships or the sea.

He was with me aboard Seolferwulf on the day that I next saw Haesten. We had left Lundene in the dark, feeling our way downriver on the tide and beneath a paling moon. Alfred had passed a law, he loved making laws, which said that the sons of ealdormen and thegns must go to school, but I refused to allow Uhtred the Younger to attend the school which Bishop Erkenwald had established in Lundene. I did not care whether he learned to read and write, both skills are much overrated, but I did care that he should not be exposed to the bishop’s preaching. Erkenwald tried to insist I send the boy, but I argued that Lundene was really part of Mercia, which in those days it was, and that Alfred’s laws did not apply. The bishop glowered at me, but was helpless to force the boy’s attendance. I preferred to train my son as a warrior and, that day on the Seolferwulf, I had dressed him in a leather coat and given him a boy’s sword belt so he would become accustomed to wearing war-gear, but instead of showing pride he just looked abashed. ‘Put your shoulders back,’ I snarled, ‘stand straight. You’re not a puppy!’

‘Yes, Father,’ he whined. He was slouch-shouldered, just staring at the deck.

‘When I die you’ll be Lord of Bebbanburg,’ I said, and he said nothing.

‘You must show him Bebbanburg, lord,’ Finan suggested.

‘Maybe I will,’ I said.

‘Take the ship north,’ Finan said enthusiastically, ‘a proper sea voyage!’ He slapped my son’s shoulder, ‘you’ll like that, Uhtred! Maybe we’ll see a whale!’

My son just stared at Finan and said nothing. ‘Bebbanburg is a fortress beside the sea,’ I told my son, ‘a great fortress. Windswept, sea-washed, invincible.’ And I felt the prick of tears, for I had so often dreamed of making Gisela the Lady of Bebbanburg.

‘Not invincible, lord,’ Finan said, ‘because we’ll take it.’

‘We will,’ I said, though I could feel no enthusiasm, not even for the prospect of storming my own stronghold and slaughtering my uncle and his men. I turned from my pale son and stood in the ship’s prow, beneath the wolf’s head, and gazed east to where the sun was rising, and there, in the haze beneath the rising sun, in the mist of sea and air, in the shimmer of light above the slow-swelling sea, I saw the ships. A fleet. ‘Slow!’ I called.

Our oar-banks rose and fell gently, so it was mostly the ebbing tide that swept us towards that fleet, which rowed northwards across our path. ‘Back oars!’ I called, and we slowed, stopped and slewed broadside to the current. ‘That must be Haesten,’ Finan said. He had come to stand beside me.

‘He’s leaving Wessex,’ I said. I was certain it was Haesten, and so it was, for a moment later a single ship turned from the fleet and I saw the flash of its oar-blades as the rowers pulled hard towards us. Beyond it the other ships went on northwards and there were many more than the eighty that Haesten had brought to Cent, because his fleet had been swollen by the fugitives from Harald’s army. The approaching ship was close now. ‘That’s Dragon-Voyager,’ I said, recognising the ship, the same one we had given to Haesten on the day he took Alfred’s treasure and gave us the valueless hostages.

‘Shields?’ Finan asked.

‘No,’ I said. If Haesten wanted to attack me he would have brought more than one ship, and so our shields stayed in Seolferwulf’s bilge.

The Dragon-Voyager backed her oars a ship’s half-length away. She lay close, heaving on the water’s slow swell, and for a moment her crew stared at my crew, and then I saw Haesten climbing up to the steering platform. He waved. ‘Can I come aboard?’ he shouted.

‘You can come aboard,’ I called back, and watched as his aftermost oarsmen expertly turned Dragon-Voyager so her stern came close to ours. The long oars were shipped as the two vessels closed, then Haesten leaped. Another man was waving to me from Dragon-Voyager’s steering platform, and I saw it was Father Willibald. I waved back, then worked my way aft to greet Haesten.

He was bareheaded. He spread his hands as I approached, a gesture that spoke of helplessness, and he seemed to have difficulty speaking, but he finally found his voice. ‘I am sorry, lord,’ he said, and his tone was humble, convincing. ‘There are no words, Lord Uhtred,’ he said.

‘She was a good woman,’ I said.

‘Famously,’ he said, ‘and I do feel sorrow, lord.’

‘Thank you.’

He glanced at my oarsmen, doubtless casting an eye on their weaponry, then looked back to me. ‘That sad news, lord,’ he said, ‘shadowed the reports of your victory. It was a great triumph, lord.’

‘It seems to have persuaded you to leave Wessex,’ I said drily.

‘I always intended to leave, lord,’ he said, ‘once we had our agreement, but some of our ships needed repair.’ He noticed Uhtred then, and saw the silver plates sewn onto the boy’s sword belt. ‘Your son, lord?’ he asked.

‘My son,’ I said, ‘Uhtred.’

‘An impressive boy,’ Haesten lied.

‘Uhtred,’ I called, ‘come here!’

He approached nervously, his eyes darting left and right as if expecting an attack. He was about as impressive as a duckling. ‘This is the Jarl Haesten,’ I told him, ‘a Dane. One day I’ll kill him, or he’ll kill me.’ Haesten chuckled, but my son just looked at the deck. ‘If he kills me,’ I went on, ‘your duty is to kill him.’

Haesten waited for some response from Uhtred the Younger, but the boy just looked embarrassed. Haesten grinned wickedly. ‘And my own son, Lord Uhtred?’ he asked innocently, ‘he thrives, I trust, as a hostage?’

‘I drowned the little bastard a month ago,’ I said.

Haesten laughed at the lie. ‘There was no need for hostages anyway,’ he said, ‘as I shall keep our agreement. Father Willibald will confirm that.’ He gestured towards Dragon-Voyager. ‘I was going to send Father Willibald to Lundene,’ he went on, ‘with a letter. You might take him there yourself, lord?’

‘Just Father Willibald?’ I asked. ‘Didn’t I bring you two priests?’

‘The other one died,’ Haesten said carelessly, ‘after eating too many eels. You’ll take Willibald?’

‘Of course,’ I said and glanced at the fleet that still rowed northwards. ‘Where do you go?’

‘North,’ Haesten said airily, ‘East Anglia. Somewhere. Not Wessex.’

He did not want to tell me his destination, but it was plain that his ships were heading towards Beamfleot. We had fought there five years before and Haesten might have had bad memories of the place, yet Beamfleot, on the northern bank of the Temes estuary, offered two priceless assets. First was the creek called Hothlege, tucked behind the island of Caninga, and that creek could shelter three hundred ships, while above it, rearing high on a green hill, was the old fort. It was a place of great safety, much safer than the encampment Haesten had made on the shore of Cent, but he had only made that to entice Alfred to pay him to leave. Now he was leaving, but going to a place far more dangerous to Wessex. In Beamfleot he would have an almost unassailable fortress, yet still be within easy striking distance of Lundene and Wessex. He was a serpent.

That was not Father Willibald’s opinion. We had to bring the two ships within touching distance so the priest could clamber from one to the other. He sprawled clumsily onto Seolferwulf’s deck, then bade a friendly farewell to Haesten, who gave me a parting grin before leaping back aboard his own ship.

Father Willibald looked at me with confusion. One moment his face was all concern, the next it was excitement, both expressions accompanied by an impatient fidgeting as he tried to find words for one mood or the other. Concern won. ‘Lord,’ he said, ‘tell me, tell me it isn’t true.’

‘It’s true, father.’

‘Dear God!’ he shook his head and made the sign of the cross. ‘I shall pray for her soul, lord. I shall pray for her soul nightly, lord, and for the souls of your dear children.’ His voice trailed away under my baleful gaze, but then his excitement got the better of him. ‘Such news, lord,’ he said, ‘such news I have!’ Then, despairing of my expression, he turned to pick up his pathetic sack of belongings that had been tossed from the Dragon-Voyager.

‘What news?’ I asked.

‘The Jarl Haesten, lord,’ Willibald said eagerly. ‘He’s requesting that his wife and two sons be baptised, lord!’ He smiled as if expecting me to share his joy.

‘He’s what?’ I asked in surprise.

‘He seeks baptism for his family! I wrote the letter for him, addressed to our king! It seems our preaching bore fruit, lord. The jarl’s wife, God bless her soul, has seen the light! She seeks our Lord’s redemption! She has come to love our Saviour, lord, and her husband has approved of her conversion.’

I just looked at him, corroding his joy with my sour face, but Willibald was not to be so easily discouraged. He gathered his enthusiasm again. ‘Don’t you see, lord?’ he asked. ‘If she converts then he will follow! It’s often thus, lord, that the wife first finds salvation, and when wives lead, husbands follow!’

‘He’s lulling us to sleep, father,’ I said. Dragon-Voyager had rejoined the fleet by now and was rowing steadily north.

‘The jarl is a troubled soul,’ Willibald said, ‘he talked to me often.’ He raised his hands to the sky where a myriad waterfowl beat south on throbbing wings. ‘There is rejoicing in heaven, lord, when just one sinner repents. And he is so close to redemption! And when a chieftain converts, lord, then his people follow him to Christ.’

‘Chieftain?’ I sneered. ‘Haesten’s just an earsling. He’s a turd. And he’s not troubled, father, except by greed. We’ll have to kill him yet.’

Willibald despaired of my cynicism and went to sit beside my son. I watched the two of them talk and wondered why Uhtred never showed any enthusiasm for my conversation, though he seemed fascinated by Willibald’s. ‘I hope you’re not poisoning the boy’s brain,’ I called.

‘We’re talking about birds, lord,’ Willibald explained brightly, ‘and where they go in winter.’

‘Where do they go?’

‘Beneath the sea?’ he suggested.

The tide slackened, stilled and turned, and we rode the flood back up the river. I sat brooding on the steering platform while Finan tended the big steering oar. My men rowed gently, content to let the tide do the work, and they sang the song of Ægir, god of the sea, and of Rán, his wife, and of his nine daughters, all of whom must be flattered if a ship is to be safe on the wild waters. They sang the song because they knew I liked it, but the tune seemed empty and the words meaningless, and I did not join in. I just gazed at the smoke haze above Lundene, the darkness darkening a summer sky and wished I were a bird, high in that nothingness, vanishing.

Haesten’s letter stirred Alfred to a new liveliness. The letter, he said, was a sign of God’s grace, and Bishop Erkenwald, of course, agreed. God, the bishop preached, had slaughtered the heathen at Fearnhamme and now had worked a miracle in the heart of Haesten. Willibald was sent to Beamfleot with an invitation for Haesten to bring his family to Lundene where both Alfred and Æthelred would stand as godfathers to Brunna, Haesten the Younger and the real Horic. No one now bothered to pretend that the deaf and dumb hostage was Haesten’s son, but the deception was forgiven in the ebullience that marked Wessex as that summer faded into autumn.

The deaf and dumb hostage, I gave him the name Harald, was sent to my household. He was a bright lad and I set him to work in the armoury where he showed a skill with the sharpening stone and an eagerness to learn weapons. I also had custody of Skade, because no one else seemed to want her. For a time I displayed her in a cage beside my door, but that humiliation was small consolation for her curse. She was valueless as a hostage now, for her lover was mewed up on Torneie Island and one day I took her upriver in one of the smaller boats we kept above Lundene’s broken bridge.

Torneie was close to Lundene and, with thirty men on the oars, we reached the River Colaun before midday. We rowed slowly up the smaller river, but there was little to be seen. Harald’s men, they numbered fewer than three hundred, had made an earth wall topped by a thick thorn palisade. Spears showed above that spiny obstacle, but no roofs, because Torneie had no timber with which to make houses. The river flowed sluggish either side of the island, and was edged by marshland, beyond which I could see the twin camps of the Saxon forces that besieged the island. Two ships were moored in the river, both manned by Mercians, their job to prevent any supplies reaching the trapped Danes. ‘There’s your lover,’ I told Skade, pointing to the thorns.

I ordered Ralla, who was steering the ship, to take us as close as he could to the island, and, when our bows were almost touching the reeds, I dragged Skade to the bows. ‘There’s your one-legged, impotent lover,’ I told Skade. A handful of Danes had deserted, and they reported that Harald had been wounded in the left leg and groin. Wasp-Sting had evidently struck him beneath the skirt of his mail, and I remembered the blade striking bone and how I had forced it harder so that the steel had slid up his thigh, ripping muscles and opening blood vessels, and ended in his groin. The leg had turned rotten and had been cut off. He still lived, and perhaps it was his hatred and fervour that gave life to his men, who now faced the bleakest of futures.

Skade said nothing. She gazed at the thorn wall above which a few spear-points showed. She was dressed in a slave’s tunic, belted tight around her thin waist.

‘They’ve eaten their horses,’ I told her, ‘and they catch eels, frogs and fish.’

‘They will live,’ she said dully.

‘They’re trapped,’ I said scornfully, ‘and this time Alfred won’t pay bright gold for them to go away. When they starve this winter, they’ll surrender, and Alfred will kill them all. One by one, woman.’

‘They will live,’ she insisted.

‘You see the future?’

‘Yes,’ she said, and I touched Thor’s hammer.

I hated her, and I found it hard to take my eyes from her. She had been given the gift of beauty, yet it was the beauty of a weapon. She was sleek, hard and shining. Even as a degraded captive, unwashed and dressed in rags, she shone. Her face was bony, but softened by lips and by the thickness of her hair. My men gazed at her. They wanted me to give her to them as a plaything, and then kill her. She was reckoned to be a Danish sorceress, as dangerous as she was desirable, and I knew it was her curse that had killed my Gisela, and Alfred would not have objected had I executed her, yet I could not kill her. She fascinated me.

‘You can go to them,’ I said.

She turned her big, dark eyes onto me, said nothing.

‘Jump overboard,’ I said. We were not that far from Torneie’s shelving bank. She might have to swim a couple of paces, but then she would be able to wade ashore. ‘Can you swim?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then go to him,’ I said, and waited. ‘Don’t you want to be Queen of Wessex?’ I sneered.

She looked back to the bleak island. ‘I dream,’ she told me quietly, ‘and in my dreams Loki comes to me.’

Loki was the trickster god, the nuisance in Asgard, the god who deserved death. The Christians talk of the serpent in paradise, and that was Loki. ‘He talks evil to you?’ I asked.

‘He is sad,’ she said, ‘and he talks. I comfort him.’

‘What has that to do with you jumping overboard?’

‘It is not my fate,’ she said.

‘Loki told you that?’

She nodded.

‘Did he tell you that you would be Queen of Wessex?’

‘Yes,’ she said simply.

‘But Odin has more power,’ I said, and wished Odin had thought to protect Gisela instead of Wessex, and then I wondered why the gods had allowed the Christians to win at Fearnhamme instead of letting their worshippers capture Wessex, but the gods are capricious, full of mischief, and none more so than the cunning Loki. ‘And what does Loki tell you to do now?’ I asked harshly.

‘To submit.’

‘I have no need of you,’ I said, ‘so jump. Swim. Go. Starve.’

‘It is not my fate,’ she said again. Her voice was dull, as though there was no life in her soul.

‘What if I push you?’

‘You won’t,’ she said confidently, and she was right. I left her in the bows as we turned the ship and let the swift current take us back to the Temes and Lundene. That night I released her from the storeroom that served as her prison. I told Finan she was not to be touched, she was not to be restrained, that she was free, and in the morning she was still in my courtyard, crouching, watching me, saying nothing.

She became a kitchen slave. The other slaves and servants feared her. She was silent, baleful, as if the life had been drained from her. Most of my household were Christian and they made the sign of the cross when Skade crossed their path, but my orders that she was to be unmolested were obeyed. She could have left any time, but she stayed. She could have poisoned us, but no one fell ill.

The autumn brought wet cold winds. Envoys had been sent to the lands across the sea, and to the Welsh kingdoms, announcing that Haesten’s family was to be baptised and inviting envoys to witness the ceremony. Alfred evidently regarded Haesten’s willingness to sacrifice his wife and sons to Christianity as a victory to set alongside Fearnhamme, and he ordered that the streets of Lundene were to be hung with banners to welcome the Danes. Alfred came to the city late one afternoon in a seething rainstorm. He hurried to Bishop Erkenwald’s palace that lay beside the rebuilt church at the top of the hill, and that evening there was a service of thanksgiving that I refused to attend.

Next morning I took my three children to the palace. Æthelred andÆthelflæd, who at least pretended to a happy marriage when ceremony demanded, had come to Lundene, and Æthelflæd had offered to let my three children play with her daughter. ‘Does that mean,’ I asked her, ‘that you’re not going to the church?’

‘Of course I’m going,’ she said, smiling, ‘if Haesten even arrives.’ Every church bell in the city was ringing in anticipation of the arrival of the Danes, and crowds were gathering in the streets, despite a spitting cold rain that blew from the east.

‘He’s coming,’ I said.

‘You know that?’

‘They left at dawn,’ I said. I kept watchers on the mudflats of the widening Temes and the beacons had been lit at first light, signalling that ships had left Beamfleot’s creek and were heading upriver.

‘He’s only doing it,’ Æthelflæd said, ‘so my father doesn’t attack him.’

‘He’s a weasel’s earsling,’ I said.

‘He wants East Anglia,’ she said, ‘Eohric’s a weak king and Haesten would like his crown.’

‘Maybe,’ I said dubiously, ‘but he’d prefer Wessex.’

She shook her head. ‘My husband has an informer in his encampment and he’s certain Haesten plans an attack on Grantaceaster.’

Grantaceaster was where East Anglia’s new Danish king had his capital, and a successful attack might well give Haesten the throne of East Anglia. He certainly wanted a throne, and all reports said that Eohric was a feeble ruler, but Alfred had made a treaty with Guthrum, the previous king, which agreed that Wessex would not interfere in East Anglia’s affairs, so if Haesten’s ambition was to take that throne, why should he need to placate Alfred? Haesten really wanted Wessex, of course, but Fearnhamme would have persuaded him that it was far too difficult an ambition. Then I remembered the one vacant throne, and it all made sense to me. ‘I think he’s more interested in Mercia,’ I said.

Æthelflæd considered that idea, then shook her head. ‘He knows he’d have to fight both us and Wessex to conquer Mercia. And my husband’s spy is certain it’s East Anglia.’

‘We’ll see.’

She glanced into the next room where the children were playing with carved wooden toys. ‘Uhtred’s old enough to attend church,’ she said.

‘I’m not raising him as a Christian,’ I said firmly.

She smiled at me, her lovely face momentarily showing the mischief I remembered from her childhood. ‘Dear Lord Uhtred,’ she said, ‘still swimming against the current.’

‘And you, lady?’ I asked, remembering how nearly she had fled with a pagan Dane.

‘I drift in my husband’s boat,’ she sighed, then servants came to summon her to Æthelred’s side. Haesten, it seemed, was within sight of the city walls.

He arrived in Dragon-Voyager, which he berthed at one of the decaying quays downstream of my house. He was greeted by Alfred and by Æthelred, both men wearing fur-trimmed robes and bronze coronets. Horns sounded and drummers beat out a swift rhythm that was spoiled when the rain became harder and made the drum skins soggy. Haesten, presumably advised by Willibald, wore no armour or weapons, though his long leather coat looked thick enough to withstand a sword thrust. His beard plaits were tied with leather laces and I swore a hammer amulet was tucked inside one of the braids. His wife and two sons were in penitential white and they walked barefoot in the procession that climbed Lundene’s hill. His wife was called Brunna, though on this day she would be given a new and Christian name. She was small and dumpy with nervous eyes that flickered left and right as though she expected an attack from the crowds that lined the narrow streets. I was surprised by her unattractive looks. Haesten was an ambitious man, eager to be recognised as one of the great warlords, and to such a man a wife’s appearance was as important as the splendour of his armour or the wealth of his followers, but Haesten had not married Brunna for her looks. He had married her because she had brought a dowry that had started him on his upwards journey. She was his wife, but I guessed she was not his companion in bed, hall or anywhere else. He was willing to have her baptised simply because she was not important to him, though Alfred, with his high-minded view of marriage, would never have comprehended such cynicism. As to Haesten’s sons, I doubt he took their baptism seriously and, just as soon as he got them away from Lundene, he would order them to forget the ceremony. Children are easily swayed by religion, which is why it is a good thing that most eventually grow into sense.

Chanting monks led the procession, then came children with green boughs, more monks, a group of abbots and bishops, then Steapa and fifty men of the royal guard, who walked immediately in front of Alfred and his guests. Alfred walked slowly, clearly in discomfort, but he had refused the offer of a cart. His old wagon, which I had ditched outside Fearnhamme, had been recovered, but Alfred insisted on walking because he liked the humility of approaching his god on foot. He leaned on Æthelred sometimes, and so king and son-in-law limped painfully uphill together. Æthelflaed walked a pace behind her husband and, behind her and behind Haesten, were the emissaries from Wales and Frankia who had travelled to witness the miracle of this Danish conversion.

Haesten hesitated before entering the church. I suspect he half thought it was an ambush, but Alfred encouraged him, and the Danes stepped gingerly inside to find nothing more threatening than a black-robed gaggle of monks. There was precious little room in the church. I had not wanted to be there, but a messenger from Alfred had insisted on my presence, and so I stood at the very back and watched the smoke rise from tall candles and listened to the chanting of the monks that, at times, was drowned by the sheer beat of rain on the thatched roof. A crowd had gathered in the small square outside, and a bedraggled priest stood on a stool in the sanctuary door to repeat Bishop Erkenwald’s words to the sopping people. The priest had to bellow to make himself heard above the wind and the rain.

Three silver-hooped barrels stood in front of the altar, each half filled with water from the Temes. Brunna, looking completely confused, was persuaded to climb into the centre barrel. She gave a small cry of horror as she dropped into the cold water, then stood shivering with her arms crossed over her breasts. Her two sons were unceremoniously dumped into the barrels on either side, then Bishop Erkenwald and Bishop Asser used ladles to scoop water over the frightened boys’ heads. ‘Behold the spirit descends!’ Bishop Asser shouted as he drenched the lads. Both bishops then soaked Brunna’s hair and pronounced her new Christian name, Æthelbrun. Alfred beamed with delight. The three Danes stood shivering as a choir of white-robed children sang an endless song. I remember Haesten turning slowly to catch my eye. He raised an eyebrow and had a hard time suppressing a grin and I suspected he had enjoyed the watery humiliation of his plain-looking wife.

Alfred talked with Haesten after the ceremony, and then the Danes left, laden down with gifts. Alfred gave them coins in a chest, a great silver crucifix, a gospel book, and a reliquary which held a finger bone of Saint Æthelburg, a saint who had apparently been drawn up to heaven by golden chains, but must have left at least one finger behind. The rain was pouring down even harder as Dragon-Voyager eased away from the quay. I heard Haesten snap an order at his oarsmen, the blades dug into the filthy Temes water, and the ship surged eastwards.

That night there was a feast to celebrate the great day’s events. Haesten, it seemed, had begged to be excused from the meal, which was discourteous of him as the food and ale were in his honour, but it was probably a wise decision. Men may not carry weapons in a royal hall, but the ale would doubtless have started fights between Haesten’s men and the Saxons. Alfred, anyway, took no offence. He was simply too happy. He might have seen his own death approaching, but he reckoned his god had granted him great gifts. He had seen Harald utterly defeated and watched as Haesten brought his family for baptism. ‘I will leave Wessex safe,’ he told Bishop Erkenwald in my hearing.

‘I trust you will not leave us for many years to come, lord,’ Erkenwald replied piously.

Alfred patted the bishop’s shoulder. ‘That is in God’s hands, bishop.’

‘And God listens to his people’s prayers, lord.’

‘Then pray for my son,’ Alfred said, turning to look at Edward, who sat uneasily at the top table.

‘I never cease to pray,’ the bishop said.

‘Then pray now,’ Alfred said happily, ‘and ask God to bless our feast!’

Erkenwald waited for the king to seat himself at the high table, then he prayed loud and long, beseeching his god’s blessing on the food that was getting cold, and then thanking his god for the peace that now ensured the future of Wessex.

But his god was not listening.

It was the feast that started the trouble. I suppose the gods were bored with us; they looked down and saw Alfred’s happiness and decided, as the gods will, that it was time to roll the dice.

We were in the great Roman palace, a building of brick and marble patched with Saxon thatch and wattle. There was a dais on which a throne usually sat, but now had a long trestle table hung with green linen cloths. Alfred sat in the centre of the table’s long side, flanked by Ælswith, his wife, and Æthelflæd, his daughter. They were the only women present, other than servants. Æthelred sat beside Æthelflæd, while Edward sat beside his mother. The other six places at the high table were occupied by Bishop Erkenwald, Bishop Asser, and the most important envoys from other countries. A harpist sat to one side of the dais and chanted a long hymn of praise to Alfred’s god.

Beneath the dais, between the hall’s pillars, were four more trestle tables where the guests ate. Those guests were a mixture of churchmen and warriors. I sat between Finan and Steapa in the darkest corner of the hall, and I confess I was in a foul temper. It seemed plain to me that Haesten had fooled Alfred. The king was one of the wisest men I ever knew, yet he had a weakness for his god, and it never occurred to him that there might have been a political calculation behind Haesten’s apparent concessions. To Alfred it simply seemed that his god had worked a miracle. He knew, of course, from his son-in-law and from his own spies, that Haesten had an ambition to take the throne of East Anglia, but that did not worry him because he had already conceded that country to Danish rule. He dreamed of recovering it, but he knew what was possible and what was just aspiration. In those last years of his life Alfred always referred to himself as the King of the Angelcynn, King of the English folk, and by that he meant all the land in Britain where the Saxon languages were spoken, but he knew that title was a hope, not a reality. It had fallen to Alfred to make Wessex secure and to extend its authority over much of Mercia, but the rest of the Angelcynn were under Danish rule, and Alfred could do little about that. Yet he was proud that he had made Wessex strong enough to destroy Harald’s great army and to force Haesten to seek baptism for his family.

I brooded on those things. Steapa growled conversation, which I hardly heard, and Finan made sour jokes at which I dutifully smiled, but all I wanted was to get out of that hall. Alfred’s feasts were never festive. The ale was in short supply and the entertainment was pious. Three monks chanted a long Latin prayer, then the children’s choir sang a ditty about being lambs of god, which made Alfred beam with pleasure. ‘Beautiful!’ he exclaimed when the grubby-robed infants had finished their caterwauling. ‘Truly beautiful!’ I thought he was about to demand another song from the children, but Bishop Asser leaned behind Ælswith and evidently suggested something that made Alfred’s eyes light up. ‘Brother Godwin,’ he called down to the blind monk, ‘you haven’t sung for us in many weeks!’

The young monk looked startled, but a table companion took him by the elbow and led him to the open space as the children, shepherded by a nun, were taken away. Brother Godwin stood alone as the harpist struck a series of chords on his horsehair strings. I thought the blind monk was not going to sing at all, because he made no sounds, but then he started to jerk his head backwards and forwards as the chords became swooping and eerie. Some men crossed themselves, then Brother Godwin began to make small whimpering noises. ‘He’s moon mad,’ I muttered to Finan.

‘No, lord,’ Finan whispered, ‘he’s possessed.’ He fingered the cross which always hung from his neck. ‘I’ve seen holy men in Ireland,’ he went on softly, ‘just like him.’

‘The spirit talks through him,’ Steapa said in awe. Alfred must have heard our low voices because he turned an irritated face on us. We went silent, and suddenly Godwin began to writhe and then he let out a great shout that echoed in the hall. Smoke from the braziers wreathed around him before vanishing through the smoke-hole ripped in the Roman roof.

I learned much later that Brother Godwin had been discovered by Bishop Asser, who had found the young, blind monk locked in a cell at the monastery of Æthelingæg. He was kept locked away because the abbot believed Godwin to be mad as a bat, but Bishop Asser decided Godwin really did hear his god’s voice and so had brought the monk to Alfred who, of course, believed that anything from Æthelingæg was auspicious because that was where he had survived the greatest crisis of his reign.

Godwin began to yelp. The sound was of a man in great pain and the harpist took his hands from the strings. Dogs responded to the sounds, howling in the dark back rooms of the palace. ‘The holy spirit comes,’ Finan whispered reverently, and Godwin let out a great scream as if his bowels were being torn from him.

‘Praise God,’ Alfred said. He and his family were gazing at the monk who now stood as though crucified, then he relaxed his outspread arms and began speaking. He shivered as he spoke and his voice meandered up and down, now shrill, then almost too low to hear. If it was singing, then it was the strangest noise I ever heard. At first his words sounded like nonsense, or else were being chanted in an unknown language, but slowly, from the jabber, coherent sentences emerged. Alfred was the chosen of God. Wessex was the promised land. Milk and honey abounded. Women brought sin into the world. God’s bright angels had spread their wings over us. The Lord most high is terrible. The waters of Israel were turned to blood. The whore of Babylon was among us.

He stopped after chanting that. The harpist had detected a rhythm in Godwin’s words and was playing softly, but his hands checked on the strings again as the monk turned his blind face about the hall with a look of puzzlement. ‘The whore!’ he suddenly started shouting over and over. ‘The whore! The whore! The whore! She is among us!’ He made a mewing sound and twisted down to his knees and began sobbing.

No one spoke, no one moved. I heard the wind in the smoke-hole and I thought of my children somewhere in Æthelflæd’s quarters and wondered if they were listening to this craziness.

‘The whore,’ Godwin said, drawing the word ‘whore’ into a long throbbing howl. Then he stood and looked quite sane. ‘The whore is among us, lord,’ he said towards Alfred, in a perfectly normal voice.

‘The whore?’ Alfred asked uncertainly.

‘The whore!’ Godwin screamed again, then once again reverted to sanity. ‘The whore, lord, is the maggot in the fruit, the rat in the granary, the locust in the wheatfield, the disease in the child of God. It saddens God, lord,’ he said, and began weeping.

I touched Thor’s hammer. Godwin was mad beyond help, I thought, but all the Christians in that hall gazed at him as though he had been sent from heaven. ‘Where’s Babylon?’ I whispered to Finan.

‘Somewhere a long way off, lord,’ he answered softly, ‘maybe beyond Rome even?’

Godwin was weeping silently, but saying nothing, so Alfred gestured that the harpist should touch his strings again. The chords sounded and Godwin responded by starting to chant again, though now his words lacked rhythm. ‘Babylon is the devil’s home,’ he shouted, ‘the whore is the devil’s child, the yeast in the bread will fail, the whore has come to us. The whore died and the devil raised her up, the whore will destroy us, stop!’

This last command was to the harpist who, in frightened obedience, flattened his hands on the strings to stop their quivering.

‘God is on our side,’ Alfred said in a kindly voice, ‘so who can destroy us?’

‘The whore can destroy us,’ Bishop Asser said, and I thought, I could not be sure, that he glanced towards me, though I doubt he could see me because I was deep in the shadows.

‘The whore!’ Godwin shouted at Alfred, ‘you fool! The whore!’

No one reproved him for calling the king a fool.

‘God will surely protect us!’ Bishop Erkenwald said.

‘The whore was among us, and the whore died, and God sent her to the fires of hell and the devil raised her and she is here,’ Godwin said forcibly. ‘She is here! Her stench sours God’s chosen people! She must be killed. She must be cut into pieces and her foul parts cast into the bottomless sea! God commands it! God weeps in his heaven because you do not obey his commandments, and he commands that the whore must die! God weeps! He hurts! God weeps! The tears of God fall on us like drops of fire, and it is the whore who makes those tears!’

‘What whore?’ Alfred asked, then Finan put a warning hand on my arm.

‘She was called Gisela,’ Godwin had hissed.

At first I thought I had misheard. Men were looking at me, and Finan was holding my arm, and I was certain I had misheard, but then Godwin began to chant again. ‘Gisela, the great whore, is now Skade. She is a piece of filth in human guise, a whore of rottenness, a devil’s turd with breasts, a whore, Gisela! God killed her because she was filth and now she is back!’

‘No,’ Finan said to me, but without much urgency. I had stood.

‘Lord Uhtred!’ Alfred called sharply. Bishop Asser was watching me, half smiling, as his pet monk writhed and screamed. ‘Lord Uhtred!’ Alfred called again, slapping the table.

I had strode to the hall’s centre where I took Godwin’s shoulder and turned his blind face towards me.

‘Lord Uhtred!’ Alfred had stood.

‘You lie, monk,’ I said.

‘She was filth!’ Godwin spat at me. He began striking my chest with his fists. ‘Your wife was the devil’s whore, a whore hated by God, and you are the devil’s instrument, you whore-husband, heathen, sinner!’

The hall was in uproar. I was aware of none of it, only of a red anger that consumed me and flared in me and filled my ears with its howling sound. I had no weapons. This was a royal hall and weapons were forbidden, but the mad monk was hitting me and howling at me and I drew back my right hand and hit him.

My hand half hit him. Maybe he sensed the blow was coming because he backed away fast, and my hand caught him on the jaw, dislocating it so that his chin was skewed sideways as blood poured from his lips. He spat out a tooth and took a wild swing at me.

‘Enough!’ Alfred shouted. Men were at last moving, but it seemed to me they moved with exaggerated slowness as Godwin spat blood at me.

‘Whore-lover,’ he snarled, or I think that was what he said.

‘Stop! I command it!’ Alfred called.

‘Whore-husband,’ the bloody mouth said distinctly.

So I hit him again, and with that second blow I broke his neck.

I had not meant to kill him, merely silence him, but I heard his neck crunch. I saw his head loll unnaturally to one side, and then he fell across one of the braziers and his short black hair blazed into bright flame. He collapsed on the floor’s broken mosaics and the hall was filled with the stink of burning hair and scorched flesh.

‘Arrest him!’ I heard Bishop Asser’s loud shout.

‘He must die!’ Bishop Erkenwald called.

Alfred was staring at me in horror. His wife, who had ever hated me, was screaming that I must pay for my sins.

Finan took my arm and pulled me towards the hall’s door. ‘To the house, lord,’ he said.

‘Steapa! Hold him!’ Alfred called.

But Steapa liked me. He did move towards me, but slowly enough so that I reached the door where the royal guards made a half-hearted effort to bar my way, but a menacing growl from Finan drove their spears aside. He dragged me into the night. ‘Now come,’ he said, ‘fast!’

We ran down the hill to the dark river.

And behind us was a dead monk and uproar.

PART TWO

Viking

I stayed furious, unrepentant, pacing the large room beside the river where servants, cowed to silence by my rage, revived the fire. It is strange how news spreads in a city. Within minutes a crowd had gathered outside the house to see how the night would end. The folk were silent, just watching. Finan had barred the outer doors and ordered torches lit in the courtyard. Rain hissed in the flames and slicked the paving stones. Most of my men lived close by and they came one by one, some of them drunk, and Finan or Cerdic met them at the outer door and sent them to fetch their mail and weapons. ‘Are you expecting a fight?’ I asked Finan.

‘They’re warriors,’ he said simply.

He was right, so I put on my own mail. I dressed as a warlord. I dressed for battle, with gold on my arms and both swords at my waist, and it was just after I had buckled the belt that Alfred’s emissary arrived.

The emissary was Father Beocca. My old friend came alone, his priest’s robes muddy from the streets and wet from the rain. He was shivering and I put a stool beside the central hearth and draped a fur cloak about his shoulders. He sat, then held his good hand towards the flames. Finan had escorted him from the front gate and he stayed. I saw that Skade, too, had crept into a shadowed corner. I caught her eye and gave a curt nod that she could remain.

‘You’ve looked under the floor?’ Father Beocca said suddenly.

‘Under the floor?’

‘The Romans,’ he said, ‘would heat this house with a furnace that vented its heat into the space under the floor.’

‘I know.’

‘And we hack holes in their roofs and make hearths,’ he said sadly.

‘You’ll make yourself ill if you insist on walking about on cold, wet nights,’ I said.

‘Of course a lot of those floors have collapsed,’ Beocca said as if it was a very important point he needed to make. He rapped the tiles with the stick he now used to help himself walk. ‘Yours seems in good repair, though.’

‘I like a hearth.’

‘A hearth is comforting,’ Beocca said. He turned his good eye to me and smiled. ‘The monastery at Æscengum cleverly managed to flood the space under their floor with sewage, and the only solution was to pull the whole house down and build anew! It was a blessing, really.’

‘A blessing?’

‘They found some gold coins among the turds,’ he said, ‘so I suspect God directed their effluent, don’t you?’

‘My gods have better things to do than worry about shit.’

‘That’s why you’ve never gold among your turds!’ Beocca said and started laughing. ‘There, Uhtred,’ he said triumphantly, ‘I have at last proved my God is mightier than your false idols!’ He smiled at me, but the smile slowly faded so that he looked old and tired again. I loved Beocca. He had been my childhood tutor and he was always exasperating and pedantic, but he was a good man. ‘You have until dawn,’ he said.

‘To do what?’

He spoke tiredly, as if he despaired of what he told me. ‘You will go to the king in penitence,’ he said, ‘without mail or weapons. You will abase yourself. You will hand the witch to the king. All the land you hold in Wessex is forfeited. You will pay a wergild to the church for the life of Brother Godwin, and your children will be held hostages against that payment.’

Silence.

Sparks whirled upwards. A couple of my wolfhounds came into the room. One smelled Beocca’s robes, whined, and then both settled by the fire, their doleful eyes looking at me for a moment before closing.

‘The wergild,’ Finan asked for me, ‘how much?’

‘One thousand and five hundred shillings,’ Beocca said.

I sneered. ‘For a mad monk?’

‘For a saint,’ Beocca said.

‘A mad fool,’ I snarled.

‘A holy fool,’ Beocca said mildly.

The wergild is the price we pay for death. If I am judged guilty of unjustly killing a man or woman I must pay their kin a price, that price depending on their rank, and that is fair, but Alfred had set Godwin’s wergild at almost a royal level. ‘To pay that,’ I said, ‘I’d have to sell almost everything I own, and the king has just taken all my land.’

‘And you must also swear an oath of loyalty to the ætheling,’ Beocca said. He usually became exasperated with me and would splutter as his exasperation grew, but that night he was very calm.

‘So the king would impoverish me,’ I asked, ‘and tie me to his son?’

‘And he will return the sorceress to her husband,’ Beocca said, looking at the black-cloaked Skade, whose eyes glittered from the room’s darkest corner. ‘Skirnir has offered a reward for her return.’

‘Skirnir?’ I asked. The name was unfamiliar to me.

‘Skirnir is her husband,’ Beocca said. ‘A Frisian.’

I looked at Skade who nodded abruptly.

‘If you return her,’ I said, ‘she dies.’

‘Does that concern you?’ Beocca asked.

‘I don’t like killing women.’

‘The law of Moses tells us we should not allow a witch to live,’ Beocca said. ‘Besides, she is an adulterer, so her husband has the God-given right to kill her if that is his wish.’

‘Is Skirnir a Christian?’ I asked, but neither Skade nor Father Beocca answered. ‘Will he kill you?’ I asked Skade and she just nodded. ‘So,’ I turned back to Beocca, ‘until I pay the wergild, make my oath to Edward, and send Skade to her death, my children are hostages?’

‘The king has decreed that your children will be cared for in the Lady Æthelflæd’s household,’ Beocca answered. He looked me up and down with his good eye. ‘Why are you dressed for war?’ I made no answer and Beocca shrugged. ‘Did you think the king would send his guards?’

‘I thought he might.’

‘And you would have fought them?’ he sounded shocked.

‘I would have them know who they came to arrest,’ I said.

‘You killed a man!’ Beocca at last found some energy. ‘The man offended you, I know, but it was the Holy Spirit who spoke in him! You hit him, Uhtred! The king forgave the first blow, but not the second, and you must pay for that!’ He leaned back, looking tired again. ‘The wergild is well within your ability to pay. Bishop Asser wished it set much higher, but the king is merciful.’ A log in the hearth spat suddenly, startling the hounds, who twitched and whined. The fire found new life, brightening the room and casting shaky shadows.

I faced Beocca across the flames. ‘Bishop Asser,’ I spat angrily.

‘What of him?’

‘Godwin was his puppy.’

‘The bishop saw holiness in him, yes.’

‘He saw a way to his ambition,’ I snarled, ‘to rid Wessex of me.’ I had been thinking of the feast’s events ever since my hand took Godwin’s life, and I had decided that Asser was behind the mad monk’s words. Bishop Asser believed Wessex safe. Harald’s power was destroyed, and Haesten had sent his family to be baptised, so Wessex had no need of a pagan warlord, and Asser had used Godwin to poison Alfred’s mind against me. ‘That twist of Welsh shit told Godwin what to say,’ I said. ‘It wasn’t the holy spirit speaking in Godwin, father, it was Bishop Asser.’

Beocca looked at me through the shimmer of fire. ‘Did you know,’ he asked, ‘that the flames in hell cast no light?’

‘I didn’t,’ I said.

‘It is one of the mysteries of God,’ Beocca said, then grunted as he stood. He shrugged off the borrowed fur cloak and leaned heavily on his stick. ‘What shall I tell the king?’

‘Is your god responsible for hell?’ I asked.

He frowned, thinking. ‘A good question,’ he finally said, though he did not answer it. ‘As is mine. What shall I tell the king?’

‘That he will have my answer at dawn.’

Beocca half smiled. ‘And what will that answer be, Lord Uhtred?’

‘He will discover that at dawn.’

Beocca nodded. ‘You are to come to the palace alone, without weapons, without mail, and dressed simply. We shall send men to take the witch. Your children will be returned on payment of one hundred shillings, the remainder of the wergild is to be paid within six months.’ He limped towards the courtyard door, then turned and stared at me. ‘Let me die in peace, Lord Uhtred.’

‘By watching my humiliation?’

‘By knowing that your sword will be at King Edward’s command. That Wessex will be safe. That Alfred’s work will not die with him.’

That was the first time I heard Edward called king.

‘You’ll have my answer at sunrise,’ I said.

‘God be with you,’ Beocca responded, and hobbled into the night.

I listened to the heavy outer door bang shut and the locking bar drop into place, and I remembered Ravn, the blind skald who had been Ragnar the Elder’s father, telling me that our lives are like a voyage across an unknown sea, and sometimes, he said, we get tired of calm waters and gentle winds, and we have no choice but to slam the steering oar’s loom hard over and head for the grey clouds and the whitecaps and the tumult of danger. ‘That is our tribute to the gods,’ he had told me, and I still do not know quite what he meant, but in that sound of the door closing I heard the echo of the steering oar slamming hard to one side.

‘What do we do?’ Finan asked me.

‘I tell you what I won’t do,’ I snarled. ‘I will not give that damned child my oath.’

‘Edward’s no child,’ Finan said mildly.

‘He’s a milksop little bastard,’ I said angrily. ‘He’s addled by his god, just like his father. He was weaned on that bitch wife’s vinegar tits, and I will not give him an oath.’

‘He’ll be King of Wessex soon,’ Finan observed.

‘And why? Because you and me kept their kingdom safe, you and me! If Wessex lives, my friend, it’s because an Irish runt and a Northumbrian pagan kept it alive! And they forget that!’

‘Runt?’ Finan asked, smiling.

‘Look at the size of you,’ I said. I liked teasing him because of his small stature, though that was deceptive because he had a speed with the sword that was astonishing. ‘I hope their god damns their damn kingdom,’ I spat, then went to a chest in the corner of the room. I opened it and felt inside, finding a bundle that I carried to Skade. I felt a pang as I touched the leather wrapping, for these things had belonged to Gisela. ‘Read those,’ I said, tossing her the package.

She unwrapped the alder sticks. There were two dozen, none longer than a man’s forearm, and all polished with beeswax to a fine gleam. Finan made the sign of the cross as he saw this pagan magic, but I had learned to trust the runesticks. Skade held them in one hand, raised them slightly, closed her eyes, and let them fall. The sticks clattered on the floor and she leaned forward to deduce their message.

‘She won’t see her own death there,’ Finan warned me softly, implying I could not trust her interpretation.

‘We all die,’ Skade said, ‘and the sticks don’t talk of me.’

‘What do they say?’ I asked.

She stared at the pattern. ‘I see a stronghold,’ she finally said, ‘and I see water. Grey water.’

‘Grey?’ I asked.

‘Grey, lord,’ she said, and that was the first time she called me ‘lord’. ‘Grey like the frost giants,’ she added, and I knew she meant northwards towards the ice-world where the frost giants stalk the world.

‘And the fortress?’ I asked.

‘It burns, lord. It burns and it burns and it burns. The sand of the shore is black with its ashes.’

I motioned her to sweep up the runesticks, then walked onto the terrace. It was still the middle of the night and the sky was black with cloud and spiteful with small rain. I listened to the rush of water squeezing through the piles of the old bridge and I thought of Stiorra, my daughter.

‘Grey?’ Finan asked, joining me.

‘It means north,’ I said, ‘and Bebbanburg is in the north and a south wind will carry its ashes to the sands of Lindisfarena.’

‘North,’ Finan said quietly.

‘Tell the men they have a choice,’ I said. ‘They can stay and serve Alfred, or they can come with me. You have the same choice.’

‘You know what I’ll do.’

‘And I want Seolferwulf ready by dawn.’

Forty-three men came with me, the rest stayed in Lundene. Forty-three warriors, twenty-six wives, five whores, a huddle of children, and sixteen hounds. I wanted to take my horses, especially Smoka, but the boat was not equipped with the wooden frames that hold stallions safe during a voyage, and so I patted his nose and felt sad to abandon him. Skade came aboard, because to stay in Lundene would mean her death. I had put my mail and weapons and helmets and shields and treasure chest into the small space beneath the steering platform, and I saw her place her own small bundle of clothes in the same place.

We did not have a full crew, but sufficient men took their places on the rowing benches. The dawn was breaking as I ordered the wolf’s head mounted on the prow. That carving, with its snarling mouth, was stored beneath the platform in the bows and was only displayed when we were away from our home waters. It risks bad fortune to threaten the spirits of home with a defiant dragon or a snarling wolf or a carved raven, but now I had no home and so I let the wolf defy the spirits of Lundene. Alfred had sent men to guard my house, and though those mailed warriors could see us in the dock beside the terrace, none interfered as we cast off the lines and pushed Seolferwulf into the Temes’s strong current. I turned and watched the city beneath its smear of smoke. ‘Raise!’ Finan called, and twenty oar-blades were poised above the river’s filth.

‘And strike!’ Finan called and the boat surged towards the dawn.

I was without a lord. I was outcast. I was free. I was going Viking.

There is a joy at being afloat. I was still under the thrall of Gisela’s death, but going to sea brought hope again. Not much, but some. To drive a boat into the grey waves, to watch the wolf’s head dip into the crests and rear in an explosion of white water, to feel the wind hard and cold, to see the sail taut as a pregnant woman’s belly, to hear the hiss of the sea against the hull, and to feel the steering oar tremble in the hand like the very heartbeat of the boat, all that brings joy.

For five years I had not taken a ship beyond the wide waters of the Temes estuary, but once we had cleared the treacherous shoals at the point of Fughelness we could turn north and there I had hoisted the sail, shipped the long oars, and let Seolferwulf run free. Now we went northwards into the wider ocean, into the angry wind-whipped ship-killing sea, and the coast of East Anglia lay low and dull on our left and the grey sea ran into the grey sky to our right, while ahead of me was the unknown.

Cerdic was with me, and Sihtric, and Rypere, as were most of my best men. What surprised me was that Osferth, Alfred’s bastard, came too. He had stepped silently aboard, almost the last man to make the choice, and I had raised an eyebrow and he had just given a half-smile and taken his place on a rower’s bench. He had been beside me as we lashed the oars to the cradles that usually held the sail on its long yard and I had asked if he was certain about his decision.

‘Why should I not be with you, lord?’ he asked.

‘You’re Alfred’s son,’ I said, ‘a West Saxon.’

‘Half these men are West Saxons, lord,’ he said, glancing at the crew, ‘probably more than half.’

‘Your father won’t be pleased you’ve stayed with me.’

‘And what has he done for me?’ Osferth asked bitterly. ‘Tried to make me a monk or priest so he could forget I existed? And if I stayed in Wessex what could I expect? Favour?’ he laughed bitterly.

‘You may never see Wessex again,’ I said.

‘Then I’ll thank God for that,’ he said and then, unexpectedly, he smiled. ‘There’s no stench, lord,’ he added.

‘Stench?’

‘The stink of Lundene,’ he explained, ‘it’s gone.’

And so it had, because we were at sea and the sewage-soured streets were far behind us. We ran under sail all that day and saw no other ships except a handful of small craft that were fishing and those vessels, seeing our rampant wolf’s head, scattered from our path, their men pulling desperately on oars to escape Seolferwulf’s threat. That evening we ran the ship close inshore, lowered the sail, and felt our way under oars into a shallow channel to make a camp. It was late in the year to be voyaging and so the cold dark came early. We had no horses so it was impossible to explore the country about our landing place, but I had no fears because I could see no settlements except for one reed-thatched hovel a long way north, and whoever lived there would fear us far more than we feared them. This was a place of mud and reed and grass and creeks beneath a vast wind-driven sky. I say camp, but all we did was carry cloaks above the thick tideline of weed and driftwood. I left sentries on the boat, and placed others at the small island’s extremities, and then we lit fires and sang songs beneath the night clouds.

‘We need men,’ Finan said, sitting next to me.

‘We do,’ I agreed.

‘Where do we find them?’

‘In the north,’ I said. I was going to Northumbria, going far from Wessex and its priests, going to where my friend had a fortress in the bend of a river and my uncle had a fortress by the sea. I was going home.

‘If we’re attacked,’ Finan said, and did not finish the thought.

‘We won’t be,’ I said confidently. Any ship at sea was prey to pirates, but Seolferwulf was a warship, not a trader. She was longer than most merchant ships and, though her belly was wide, she had a sleekness that only fighting ships possessed. And from a distance she would appear fully manned because of the number of women aboard. A pair of ships might dare to attack us, but even that was unlikely while there was easier prey afloat. ‘But we do need men,’ I agreed, ‘and silver.’

‘Silver?’ He grinned. ‘What’s in that big treasure chest?’ He jerked his head towards the grounded ship.

‘Silver,’ I said, ‘but I need more. Much more.’ I saw the quizzical look on his face. ‘I am Lord of Bebbanburg,’ I explained, ‘and to take that stronghold I need men, Finan. Three crews at least. And even that might not be enough.’

He nodded. ‘And where do we find silver?’

‘We steal it, of course.’

He watched the brilliant heart of the fire where the driftwood burned brightest. Some folk say that the future can be read from the shifting shapes inside that glowing inferno, and perhaps he was trying to scry what fate held for us, but then he frowned. ‘Folk have learned to guard their silver,’ he said softly. ‘There are too many wolves and the sheep have become canny.’

‘That’s true,’ I said. In my childhood, when the northmen returned to Britain, the plundering was easy. Viking men landed, killed and stole, but now almost anything of value was behind a palisade guarded by spears, though there were still a few monasteries and churches that trusted their defence to the nailed god.

‘And you can’t steal from the church,’ Finan said, thinking the same thoughts.

‘I can’t?’

‘Most of your men are Christians,’ he said, ‘and they’ll follow you, lord, but not into the gates of hell.’

‘Then we’ll steal from the pagans,’ I said.

‘The pagans, lord, are the thieves.’

‘Then they have the silver I want.’

‘And what of her?’ Finan asked softly, looking at Skade, who crouched close to me, but slightly behind the ring of folk around the fire.

‘What of her?’

‘The women don’t like her, lord. They fear her.’

‘Why?’

‘You know why.’

‘Because she’s a sorceress?’ I twisted to look at her. ‘Skade,’ I asked, ‘do you see the future?’

She looked at me in silence for a while. A night-bird called in the marsh and perhaps its harsh voice prompted her because she gave a curt nod. ‘I glimpse it, lord,’ she said, ‘sometimes.’

‘Then say what you see,’ I ordered her, ‘stand up and tell us. Tell us what you see.’

She hesitated, then stood. She was wearing a black woollen cloak and it shrouded her body so that, with her black hair that she wore unbound like an unmarried girl, she appeared a tall slim night-dark figure in which her pale face shone white. The singing faltered, then died away, and I saw some of my people make the sign of the cross. ‘Tell us what you see,’ I commanded her again.

She raised her pale face to the clouds, but said nothing for a long while. No one else spoke. Then she shuddered and I was irresistibly reminded of Godwin, the man I had murdered. Some men and women do hear the whisper of the gods, and other folk fear them, and I was convinced Skade saw and heard things hidden from the rest of us. Then, just as it seemed as though she would never speak, she laughed aloud.

‘Tell us,’ I said irritably.

‘You will lead armies,’ she said, ‘armies to shadow the land, lord, and behind you the crops will grow tall, fed by the blood of your enemies.’

‘And these people?’ I asked, waving at the men and women who listened to her.

‘You are their gold-giver, their lord. You will make them rich.’

There were murmurs round the fire. They liked what they heard. Men follow a lord because the lord is a gift-giver.

‘And how do we know you do not lie?’ I asked her.

She spread her arms. ‘If I lie, lord,’ she said, ‘then I will die now.’ She waited, as if inviting a blow from Thor’s hammer, but the only sounds were the sighing of wind in the reeds, the crackle of burning driftwood and the slur of water creeping into the marsh on the night’s tide.

‘And you?’ I asked, ‘what of you?’

‘I am to be greater than you, lord,’ she said, and some of my people hissed, but the words gave me no offence.

‘And what is that, Skade?’ I asked.

‘What the Fates decide, lord,’ she said, and I waved her to sit down. I was thinking back across the years to another woman who had eavesdropped on the murmurs of the gods, and she had also said I would lead armies. Yet now I was a man who was the most contemptible of men; a man who had broken an oath, a man running from his lord.

Our peoples are bound by oaths. When a man swears his loyalty to me he becomes closer than a brother. My life is his as his is mine, and I had sworn to serve Alfred. I thought of that as the singing began again and as Skade crouched behind me. As Alfred’s oath-man I owed him service, yet I had run away, and that stripped me of honour and left me despicable.

Yet we do not control our lives. The three spinners make our threads. Wyrd bið ful ãræd, we say, and it is true. Fate is inexorable. Yet if fate decrees, and the spinners know what that fate will be, why do we make oaths? It is a question that has haunted me all my life, and the closest I have come to an answer is that oaths are made by men, while fate is decreed by the gods, and that oaths are men’s attempts to dictate fate. Yet we cannot decree what we would wish. Making an oath is like steering a course, but if the winds and tides of fate are too strong, then the steering oar loses its power. So we make oaths, but we are helpless in the face of wyrd. I had lost honour by fleeing from Lundene, but the honour had been taken from me by fate, and that was some consolation in that dark night on the cold East Anglian shore.

There was another consolation. I woke in the dark and went to the ship. Her stern was rising gently on the incoming tide. ‘You can sleep,’ I told the sentries. Our fires ashore were still glowing, though their flames were low now. ‘Join your women,’ I told them, ‘I’ll guard the ship.’

Seolferwulf did not need guarding because there was no enemy, but it is a habit to set sentries, and so I sat in her stern and thought of fate and of Alfred, and of Gisela and of Iseult, of Brida and of Hild, and of all the women I had known and all the twists of life, and I ignored the slight lurch as someone climbed over Seolferwulf’s still-grounded bow. I said nothing as the dark figure threaded the rowers’ benches.

‘I did not kill her, lord,’ Skade said.

‘You cursed me, woman.’

‘You were my enemy then,’ she said, ‘what was I supposed to do?’

‘And the curse killed Gisela,’ I said.

‘That was not the curse,’ she said.

‘Then what was it?’

‘I asked the gods to yield you captive to Harald,’ she said.

I looked at her then for the first time since she had come aboard. ‘It didn’t work,’ I said.

‘No.’

‘So what kind of sorceress are you?’

‘A frightened one,’ she said.

I would flog a man for not keeping alert when he is supposed to be standing watch, but a thousand enemies could have come that night, for I was not doing my duty. I took Skade beneath the steering platform, to the small space there, and I took off her cloak and I lay her down, and when we were done we were both in tears. We said nothing, but lay in each other’s arms. I felt Seolferwulf lift from the mud and pull gently at her mooring line, yet I did not move. I held Skade close, not wanting the night to end.

I had persuaded myself that I had left Alfred because he would impose an oath on me, an oath I did not want, the oath to serve his son. Yet that had not been the whole truth. There was another of his conditions I could not accept, and now I held her close. ‘Time to go,’ I said at last because I could hear voices. I later learned that Finan had seen us and had held the crew ashore. I loosened my embrace, but Skade held onto me.

‘I know where you can find all the gold in the world,’ she said.

I looked into her eyes. ‘All the gold?’

She half smiled. ‘Enough gold, lord,’ she whispered, ‘more than enough, a dragon-haunted hoard, lord, gold.’

Wyrd bið ful ãræd

I took a golden chain from my treasure chest and I hung it about Skade’s neck, which was announcement enough, if any announcement were needed, of her new status. I thought that my people would resent her more, but the opposite happened. They seemed relieved. They had seen her as a threat, but now she was one of us, and so we sailed north.

North along East Anglia’s low coast beneath grey skies and driven by a southerly wind that brought thick and constant fogs. We sheltered in marshy creeks when the fog blew dense above the sea or, if a fog took us by surprise and gave us no time to discover a safe inlet, we steered the ship offshore where there were no mudbanks to wreck us.

The fog slowed us, so that it took six long days to reach Dumnoc. We arrived at that port on a misted afternoon, rowing Seolferwulf into the river’s mouth between glistening mounds of mud thick with waterfowl. The channel was well marked with withies, though I still had a man in the bows probing with an oar in case the withies betrayed us onto some shipwrecker’s shoal. I had taken down the wolf’s head to show that we came peacefully, but sentries keeping watch from a rickety wooden tower still sent a boy racing to the town to warn of our coming.

Dumnoc was a good and wealthy port. It was built on the river’s southern bank and a palisade surrounded the town to deter a land attack, though the port was wide open from the water that was studded with piers and thick with fishing and trading boats. The tide was almost at the flood when we arrived and I saw how the sea spread from the muddy banks to drown the lower part of the palisade. Some of the houses nearest the sea were built on short stilts, and all the town’s timbers had been weather-beaten to a silvery grey. It was an attractive place, smelling richly of salt and shellfish. A church tower crowned with a wooden cross was the highest building, a reminder that Guthrum, the Dane who had become King of East Anglia, had converted his realm to Christianity.

My father had never loved the East Anglians because, years in the past, their kingdom had combined with Mercia to attack Northumbria. Later, much later, during my own childhood, the East Anglians had provided food, horses and shelter to the Danish army that had conquered Northumbria, though that treachery had rebounded on them when the Danes returned to take East Anglia that still remained a Danish kingdom, though now it was supposedly a Christian kingdom as the church tower attested. Mist blew past the high cross as I steered Seolferwulf to the river’s centre, just upstream of the piers. We turned her there, slewing her about by backing one bank of oars, and only when her wolfless bows faced the sea did I take her alongside a fat-bellied merchant ship that was tied to the largest of the piers. Finan grinned. ‘Ready to make a quick escape to sea, lord?’ he asked.

‘Always,’ I said. ‘Remember the Sea-Raven?’

He laughed. Shortly after we had captured Lundene, the Sea-Raven, a Danish ship, had come to the city and innocently tied to a wharf only to discover that a West Saxon army now occupied the place and was not friendly to Danes. The crew had fled back to their ship, but needed to turn her before they could escape downriver, and panic muddled them so that their oars clashed and she had drifted back to the wharf, where we captured her. She was a horrible boat, leaky and with a stinking bilge, and eventually I broke her up and used her ribs as roofbeams for some cottages we built at Lundene’s eastern side.

A big-bellied, fat-bearded man in rusty mail clambered from the pier onto the trading boat, then, after receiving permission, hauled himself up and over Seolferwulf’s flank. ‘Guthlac,’ he introduced himself, ‘Reeve of Dumnoc. Who are you?’ The question was peremptory, backed by a dozen men who waited on the pier with swords and axes. They looked nervous, and no wonder, for my crew outnumbered them.

‘My name is Uhtred,’ I said.

‘Uhtred of where?’ Guthlac asked. He spoke Danish and was belligerent, pretending to be unworried by my crew’s formidable appearance. He had long moustaches bound with black-tarred twine that hung well below his clean-shaven chin. He kept tugging on one moustache, a sign, I deduced, of nervousness.

‘Uhtred of Bebbanburg,’ I said.

‘And where’s Bebbanburg?’

‘Northumbria.’

‘You’re a long way from home, Uhtred of Bebbanburg,’ Guthlac said. He was peering into our bilge to see what cargo we carried. ‘A long way from home,’ he repeated. ‘Are you trading?’

‘Do we look like traders?’ I asked. Other men were gathering on the low shore in front of the closest houses. They were mostly unarmed, so their presence was probably explained by curiosity.

‘You look like vagabonds,’ Guthlac said. ‘Two weeks ago there was an attack a few miles south. A steading was burned, men killed, women taken. How do I know that wasn’t you?’

‘You don’t know it,’ I said, returning a mild answer to his hostility.

‘Maybe I should hold you here until we can prove it one way or the other?’

‘And maybe you should clean your mail?’ I suggested.

He challenged me with a glare, held my gaze a few heartbeats, then nodded abruptly. ‘So what’s your business here?’ he demanded.

‘We need food, ale.’

‘That we have,’ he said, then waited as some gulls screamed above us, ‘but first you have to pay the king’s wharfage fee.’ He held out a hand. ‘Two shillings.’

‘Two pence, perhaps.’

We settled on four pence, of which no doubt two went into Guthlac’s pouch, and after that we were free to go ashore, though Guthlac sensibly insisted we were to carry no weapons other than short knives. ‘The Goose is a good tavern,’ he said, pointing to a large building hung with the sign of a painted goose, ‘and it can sell you dried herring, dried oysters, flour, ale and Saxon whores.’

‘The tavern is yours?’ I asked.

‘What of it?’

‘I just hope its ale is better than its owner’s welcome,’ I said.

He laughed at that. ‘Welcome to Dumnoc,’ he said, climbing back onto the trading ship, ‘and I give you leave to spend a night here in peace. But if any of you commit a crime I’ll hold you all in custody!’ He paused and looked towards Seolferwulf’s stern. ‘Who’s that?’

He was staring at Skade, though he must have noticed her earlier. She was again cloaked in black so that her pale face seemed bright in the misted late afternoon. There was gold at her neck. ‘Her name is Edith,’ I said, ‘and she’s a Saxon whore.’

‘Edith,’ he repeated, ‘maybe I’ll buy her from you?’

‘Maybe you will,’ I said, and we looked at each other and neither trusted the other, and then Guthlac gave a careless wave and turned away.

We drew lots to decide who could go ashore that evening. I needed men to stay and guard the boat, and Osferth volunteered to command that group. We put twenty-three dried peas in a bowl with twenty silver coins, then Finan took the bowl and stood with his back to me as I faced the assembled crew. One by one Finan drew either a coin or a pea from the bowl and held it aloft. ‘Who’ll have this one?’ he would ask and I would pick a man from the crew without knowing whether Finan held a pea or a coin. Those who drew peas had to stay with Osferth, the rest were allowed ashore. I could have just chosen which men should stay aboard, but a crew work better when they believe their lord is fair. The children all stayed, but the wives of the shore party accompanied their men. ‘You stay in the tavern,’ I told them. ‘This town isn’t friendly! We stay together!’

The town might have been unfriendly, but the Goose was a good tavern. The ale was pungent, freshly brewed in the great vats in the inn’s yard. The large main room was beamed with keels from broken-up ships, and warmed by a driftwood fire burning in a central hearth. There were tables and benches, but before I let my men loose on the ale I negotiated for smoked herring, flitches of bacon, barrels of ale, bread and smoked eels, and had all those supplies carried to the Seolferwulf. Guthlac had placed guards on the landward end of the pier, and those men were supposed to make certain none of us carried weapons, but I had Wasp-Sting hanging in a scabbard at my back where she was hidden by a cloak, and I did not doubt that most of my crew were similarly armed. I went from table to table and told them they were to start no fights. ‘Not unless you want to fight me,’ I warned them, and they grinned.

The tavern was peaceable enough. A dozen local men drank there, all Saxons and none showing any interest in the Seolferwulf’s crew. Sihtric had drawn a silver shilling in the lottery and I ordered him to make frequent visits to the yard. ‘Look for men with weapons,’ I told him.

‘What do you fear, lord?’ he asked me.

‘Treachery,’ I said. The Seolferwulf was worth a thegn’s annual income from a substantial estate and Guthlac must have realised we carried coin on board. His men would find it hard to capture the ship while Osferth and his band defended the pier’s end, but drunken men in a tavern were easier prey. I feared he could hold us hostage and demand a huge ransom, and so Sihtric slipped constantly through the back door, returning each time with a shake of his head. ‘Your bladder’s too small,’ one of my men mocked him.

I sat with Skade, Finan and his Scottish wife, Ethne, in a corner of the room where I ignored the laughter and songs that were loud at the other tables. I wondered how many men lived in Dumnoc, and why so few were in the Goose. I wondered if weapons were being sharpened. I wondered where all the gold in the world was hidden. ‘So,’ I asked Skade, ‘where is all the gold in the world?’

‘Frisia,’ she said.

‘A large place.’

‘My husband,’ she said, ‘has a stronghold on the sea.’

‘So tell us of your husband.’

‘Skirnir Thorson,’ she said.

‘I know his name.’

‘He calls himself the Sea-Wolf,’ she said, looking at me, but aware that Finan and Ethne were listening.

‘He can call himself what he likes,’ I said, ‘but that doesn’t make it true.’

‘He has a reputation,’ she said, and she told us of Skirnir and what she said made sense. There were nests of pirates on the Frisian coast, where they were protected by treacherous shoal waters and shifting dunes. Finan and I, when we had been enslaved by Sverri, had rowed through those waters, sometimes feeling our oar-blades strike the sand or mud. Sverri, a clever shipmaster, had escaped the pursuing red ship because he knew the channels, and I did not doubt that Skirnir knew the waters intimately. He called himself a jarl, the equivalent of a lord, but in truth he was a savage pirate who preyed on ships. The Frisian Islands had always produced wreckers and pirates, most of them desperate men who died soon enough, but Skade insisted that Skirnir had flourished. He captured ships or else took payment for safe passage and by so doing he had made himself rich and notorious.

‘How many crews does he have?’ I asked Skade.

‘When last I was there,’ she said, ‘sixteen small ships and two large.’

‘When were you last there?’

‘Two summers ago.’

‘Why did you leave?’ Ethne asked.

Skade gave the Scottish woman a speculative look, but Ethne held the gaze. She was a small, red-haired and fiery woman whom we had freed from slavery, and she was fiercely loyal to Finan, by whom she now had a son and a daughter. She could see where this conversation was going, and before her husband went into battle she wanted to know all she could discover.

‘I left,’ Skade said, ‘because Skirnir is a pig.’

‘He’s a man,’ Ethne said, and got a reproving dig in her ribs from Finan.

I watched a servant girl carry logs to the tavern’s hearth. The fire brightened and I wondered again why so few men were drinking in the Goose.

‘Skirnir ruts like a pig,’ Skade said, ‘and he snorts like a pig, and he hits women.’

‘So how did you escape the pig?’ Ethne persisted.

‘Skirnir captured a ship which had a chest of gold coins,’ Skade said, ‘and he took some of the gold to Haithabu to buy new weapons, and he took me with him.’

‘Why?’ I asked.

She looked at me levelly. ‘Because he could not bear to be without me,’ she said.

I smiled at that. ‘But Skirnir must have had men to guard you in Haithabu?’

‘Three crews.’

‘And he let you meet Harald?’

She shook her head. ‘I never met him,’ she said, ‘I just took one look at him and he looked at me.’

‘So?’

‘That night Skirnir was drunk,’ she said, ‘snoring, and his men were drunk, so I walked away. I walked to Harald’s ship and we sailed. I had never even spoken to him.’

‘Stop that!’ I shouted at two of my men who were squabbling over one of the Goose’s whores. The whores earned their living in a loft that was reached by a ladder, and one of the men was trying to pull the other off the rungs. ‘You first,’ I pointed at the more drunken of the two, ‘and you after. Or both of you together, I don’t care! But don’t start a fight over her!’ I watched till they subsided, then turned back to Skade. ‘Skirnir,’ I said simply.

‘He has an island, Zegge, and lives on a terpen.’

‘Terpen?’

‘A hill made by hand,’ she explained, ‘it is the only way men can live on most of the islands. They make a hill with timber and clay, build the houses and wait for the tide to wash it away. Skirnir has a stronghold on Zegge.’

‘And a fleet of ships,’ I said.

‘Some are very small,’ Skade said. Even so I reckoned Skirnir had at least three hundred fighting men, and maybe as many as five hundred. I had forty-three. ‘They don’t all live on Zegge,’ Skade went on, ‘it is too small. Most have homes on nearby islands.’

‘He has a stronghold?’

‘A hall,’ she said, ‘built on a terpen, and ringed with a palisade.’

‘But to reach the hall,’ I said, ‘we have to get past the other islands.’ Any ship going through what would doubtless be a shallow and tide-torn channel would find Skirnir’s men following, and I could imagine landing on Zegge with two crews of enemies close behind me.

‘But in the hall,’ Skade said, lowering her voice, ‘is a hole in the floor, and beneath the floor is a chamber lined with elm, and inside the chamber is gold.’

‘There was gold,’ Finan corrected her.

She shook her head. ‘He cannot bear parting with it. He is generous with his men. He buys weapons, mail, ships, oars, food. He buys slaves. But he keeps what he can. He loves to open the trapdoor and stare at his hoard. He shudders when he watches it. He loves it. He once made a bed of gold coins.’

‘They dug into your back?’ Ethne asked, amused.

Skade ignored that, looking at me. ‘There’s gold and silver in that chamber, lord, enough to light your dreams.’

‘Other men must have tried to take it,’ I said.

‘They have,’ she said, ‘but water, sand and tide are as good a defence as stone walls, lord, and his guard is loyal. He has three brothers, six cousins, and they all serve him.’

‘Sons?’ Ethne asked.

‘No children by me. Many by his slaves.’

‘Why did you marry him?’ Ethne asked.

‘I was sold to him. I was twelve, my mother had no money, and Skirnir wanted me.’

‘He still does,’ I said speculatively, remembering that his offer of a reward for Skade’s return had reached Alfred’s ears.

‘The bastard has a lot of men,’ Finan said dubiously.

‘I can find men,’ I said softly, and then turned because Sihtric had come running from the tavern’s back door.

‘Men,’ he told me, ‘there’s at least thirty out there, lord, and all with weapons.’

So my suspicions were right. Guthlac wanted me, my treasure, my ship and my woman.

And I wanted Skirnir’s gold.

I snatched open the tavern’s front door and saw more men waiting on the quay. They looked startled when I appeared, so startled that most took an involuntary step backwards. There were at least fifty of them, a few armed with spears and swords, but most with axes, sickles or staves, which suggested they were townsfolk roused by Guthlac for a night’s treacherous work, but, far more worryingly, a handful of them carried bows. They had made no attempt to capture Seolferwulf, which was lit at the pier’s end by the dull glow of the herring-driers’ fires that burned above the narrow beach’s high-water line. That small light reflected from the mail which Osferth and his men were wearing, and from the blades of their spears, swords and axes. Osferth had made a shield wall across the pier, and it looked formidable.

I closed the door and dropped its locking bar into place. It seemed clear that Guthlac had no appetite for attacking Osferth’s men, which suggested he wanted to capture us first, then use us as hostages to take the ship.

‘We have a fight on our hands,’ I told our men. I slid Wasp-Sting from her hiding place and watched, amused, as other weapons appeared. They were mostly short-swords like Wasp-Sting, but Rorik, a Dane I had captured in one of the punitive raids on East Anglia and who had sworn an oath to me rather than go back to his old lord, had somehow managed to bring a war axe. ‘There are men that way,’ I told them, pointing to the front door, ‘and that way,’ I pointed towards the brewing house.

‘How many, lord?’ Cerdic asked.

‘Too many,’ I said. I had no doubt that we could fight our way to Seolferwulf because townsfolk armed with sickles and staves would prove easy foes for my trained warriors, but the archers outside the door could give my crew grievous casualties, and I was already short-handed. The bows I had seen were short hunting bows, but their arrows were still lethal against men not wearing mail.

‘If they’re too many, lord,’ Finan suggested, ‘then best to attack them now rather than wait till there are more of them?’

‘Or wait till they get tired,’ I said, and just then a timid knock sounded on the tavern’s back door. I nodded to Sihtric, who unbarred the door and pulled it inwards to reveal a sorry-looking creature, scrawny and frightened, dressed in a threadbare black robe over which hung a wooden cross that he clutched nervously. He bobbed his head at us. I had a glimpse of the armed men in the yard before the man edged into the tavern and Sihtric closed and barred the door behind him. ‘Are you a priest?’ I demanded, and he nodded his head. ‘So Guthlac sends a priest,’ I went on, ‘because he’s too frightened to show his face in here?’

‘The reeve means you no harm, lord,’ the priest said. He was a Dane, and that surprised me. I knew the Danes of East Anglia had converted to Christianity, but I had thought it a cynical conversion, done to appease the threat of Alfred’s Wessex, but some Danes, it seemed, truly had become Christians.

‘What’s your name, priest?’

‘Cuthbert, lord.’

I sneered. ‘You took a Christian name?’

‘We do, lord, upon conversion,’ he said nervously, ‘and Cuthbert, lord, was a most holy man.’

‘I know who he is,’ I said, ‘I’ve even seen his corpse. So if Guthlac means us no harm then we can go back to our ship?’

‘Your men may, lord,’ Father Cuthbert said very timidly, ‘so long as you and the woman stay, lord.’

‘The woman?’ I asked, pretending not to understand him, ‘you mean Guthlac wants me to stay with one of his whores?’

‘His whores?’ Cuthbert asked, confused by my question, then shook his head vigorously. ‘No, he means the woman, lord. Skade, lord.’

So Guthlac knew who Skade was. He had probably known ever since we had landed at Dumnoc, and I cursed the fog that had made our voyage so slow. Alfred must have guessed we would put in to an East Anglian port to resupply, and he had doubtless offered a reward to King Eohric for our capture, and Guthlac had seen a swift, if not easy, way to riches. ‘You want me and Skade?’ I asked the priest.

‘Just the two of you, lord,’ Father Cuthbert said, ‘and if you yield yourselves, lord, then your men may leave on the morning tide.’

‘Let’s start with the woman,’ I said, and held Wasp-Sting out to Skade. She stood as she took the sword, and I stepped aside. ‘You can have her,’ I told the priest.

Father Cuthbert watched as Skade ran a long slow finger up the short-sword’s blade. She smiled at the priest, who shuddered. ‘Lord?’ he asked plaintively.

‘So take her!’ I told him.

Skade held the sword low, its blade pointing upwards, and Father Cuthbert did not need much imagination to envisage that shining steel ripping through his belly. He frowned, embarrassed by the grins on my men’s faces, then he summoned his courage and beckoned to Skade. ‘Put the blade down, woman,’ he said, ‘and come with me.’

‘Lord Uhtred told you to take me, priest,’ she said.

Cuthbert licked his lips. ‘She’ll kill me, lord,’ he complained to me.

I pretended to think about that statement, then nodded. ‘Very likely,’ I said.

‘I shall consult the reeve,’ he said with what little dignity he could muster, and almost ran back to the door. I nodded to Sihtric to let the priest go, then took my sword back from Skade.

‘We could make a dash for the ship, lord?’ Finan suggested. He was peering through a knothole in the tavern’s front door and evidently did not have a great opinion of the men waiting in ambush.

‘You see they’ve got bows?’ I asked.

‘Ah, so they do,’ he said, ‘and that puts a big fat turd in the ale barrel, doesn’t it?’ He straightened from the peep-hole. ‘So we wait for them to get tired, lord?’

‘Or for me to have a better idea,’ I suggested, and just then there was another rap on the back door, louder this time, and again I nodded to Sihtric to unbar.

Guthlac now stood in the doorway. He still wore his mail, but had donned a helmet and carried a shield as added protection. ‘A truce while we talk?’ he suggested.

‘You mean we’re at war?’ I asked.

‘I mean you let me talk, then let me go,’ he said truculently, tugging at one of his long black moustaches.

‘We shall talk,’ I agreed, ‘then you can go.’

He took a cautious step into the room, where he looked somewhat surprised to see how well armed my men were. ‘I’ve sent for my lord’s household troops,’ he said.

‘That was probably wise,’ I said, ‘because your men can’t beat mine.’

He frowned at that. ‘We don’t want a fight!’

‘We do,’ I said enthusiastically, ‘we were hoping for a fight. Nothing finishes an evening in a tavern so well as a fight, don’t you agree?’

‘Maybe a woman?’ Finan suggested, grinning at Ethne.

‘True,’ I agreed. ‘Ale first, next a fight, then a woman. Just like Valhalla. So tell us when you’re ready, Guthlac, and we’ll have the fight.’

‘Yield yourself, lord,’ he said. ‘We were told you might be coming, and it seems Alfred of Wessex wants you. He doesn’t want your life, lord, just your body. Yours and the woman’s.’

‘I don’t want Alfred to have my body,’ I said.

Guthlac sighed. ‘We’re going to stop you leaving, lord,’ he said patiently. ‘I’ve got fourteen hunters with bows waiting for you. You’ll doubtless kill some men, lord, and that will be another crime to add to your offences, but my archers will kill some of your men, and we don’t want to. Your men and your ship are free to leave, but you’re not. Nor is the woman,’ he looked at Skade, ‘Edith.’

I smiled at him. ‘So take me! But remember I’m the man who killed Ubba Lothbrokson beside the sea.’

Guthlac looked at my sword, tugged on his moustache again and took a step backwards. ‘I won’t die on that blade, lord,’ he said, ‘I’ll wait for my lord’s troops. They’ll take you, and kill the rest of you. So I advise that you yield, lord, before they arrive.’

‘You want me to yield now so you get the reward?’

‘And what’s wrong with that?’ he asked belligerently.

‘How much is it?’

‘Enough,’ he said. ‘So do you yield?’

‘Wait outside,’ I told him, ‘and you’ll find out.’

‘What of them?’ he asked, nodding towards the local men who had been trapped inside the Goose with us. None held any value as a hostage and so I sent them away with Guthlac. They ran into the back yard, doubtless relieved they were not to be part of the slaughter they expected to redden the tavern’s floor.

Guthlac was a fool. What he should have done was charge into the tavern and overwhelm us, or, if he merely wanted to trap us until trained troops arrived, he should have barricaded both doors with some of the giant ale barrels from the yard. As it was he had split his troops into two bands. I estimated there were fifty waiting between us and Seolferwulf, and as many again in the back yard. I was thinking that my score of men could fight their way through those fifty on the quay, but I knew we would take casualties reaching the ship. The bows would kill a handful of men and women before we got among the enemy, and none of us wore mail. I wanted to escape without any of my people being killed or wounded.

I ordered Sihtric to keep a watch on the back yard, which was easily done through a gap in the wattle wall. Another man watched the quay. ‘Tell me when they leave,’ I said.

‘Leave?’ Finan asked, grinning, ‘why would they leave, lord?’

‘Always make the enemy do what you want them to do,’ I said, and I climbed the ladder to the whore-loft where three girls clung to each other on one of the straw mattresses. I grinned at them. ‘How are you, ladies?’ I asked. None of the three answered, but just watched as I attacked the underside of the low thatched roof with Wasp-Sting. ‘We’re leaving soon,’ I said to them, speaking English, ‘and you’re welcome to come with us. A lot of my men don’t have a woman. Better to be married to a warrior than whoring for that fat Dane. Is he a good master?’

‘No,’ one of them said in a very low voice.

‘He likes to whip you?’ I guessed. I had ripped out a great bundle of reeds and the smoke from the tavern fire began to drift through the new smoke-hole I had made. Guthlac would doubtless see the fresh hole I had made in his roof, but it was unlikely he would send men to block it. He would need ladders.

‘Finan!’ I called down, ‘bring me fire!’

An arrow thumped into the roof, confirming that Guthlac had indeed seen the hole. He must have thought I was trying to lead my men out of the torn thatch and his archers now shot up at the roof, but they were in the wrong place to send their arrows through the new gap. They could only shoot across the ragged hole, which meant that any man trying to escape would have been hit as soon as he clambered through the thatch, but that was not why I had torn down the mouldering reed. I looked back to the girls. ‘We’ll be leaving very soon,’ I said, ‘if you want to come with us then get dressed, go down the ladder and wait by the front door.’

After that it was simple. I hurled burning scraps of driftwood from the tavern fire as far as I could and watched them fall onto the thatched roofs of the nearby cottages. I burned my hand, but that was a small price to pay as the flames caught the reeds and flared bright. A dozen of my men were passing the fiery brands up the ladder, and I threw each flaming timber as far as I could, trying to set fire to as many houses as I could reach.

No man could watch his town burning. Fire is a huge fear, for thatch and timber burn easily, and a fire in one house will quickly spread to others, and Guthlac’s men, hearing the screams of their women and children, deserted him. They used rakes to pull the burning thatch off the rafters and they carried pails of water from the river, and all we had to do was open the tavern’s front door and go to the ship.

Most of my men and two of the whores did just that, running down the pier and reaching the safety of the ship, where Osferth’s men were armoured and armed, but Finan and I dodged into the alley beside the Goose. The town was lurid with flames now. Men shouted, dogs barked, and woken gulls screamed. The fire was noisy, and panicking folk screamed contrary orders as they desperately tried to save their property. Heaps of burning thatch filled the streets while the sky was red with sparks. Guthlac, intent on saving the Goose, was shouting at men to pull down the house nearest to the tavern, but in the confusion no one was taking any notice of him. Nor did they notice Finan and I as we emerged into the street behind the tavern.

I had armed myself with a log from the tavern, one of those waiting to be put on the fire, and I just swung it hard so that it smashed into the side of Guthlac’s helmet, and he went down like an ox that had been spiked between the eyes. I took hold of his mail coat and used it to haul him back into the alley, then down the pier. He was heavy, so it took three of my men to carry him across the trading ship and throw him onto Seolferwulf, and then, satisfied that all my crew was safe, we loosed the mooring lines. The ship drifted upstream on the incoming tide, and we countered it with oar strokes, backing water as we waited for the ebb to start.

We watched Dumnoc burn. Six or seven houses were alight now, their flames roaring like a furnace and spewing sparks high into the night sky. The fires lit the scene, throwing a raw shaky light across the river. We saw men pull down houses to make a gap over which they hoped the flames would not jump and we saw a chain of folk passing water from the river, and we just watched, amused. Guthlac recovered his senses to find himself sitting on the small prow platform, stripped of his mail and bound hand and foot. I had put the wolf’s head back on the bows. ‘Enjoy the view, Guthlac,’ I said.

He groaned, then remembered the purse at his waist into which he had put the silver I had paid him for our supplies. He felt inside, and found no coins left. He groaned again and looked up at me and this time saw the warrior who had killed Ubba Lothbrokson beside the sea. I was in full war-gear, mailed and helmeted, with Serpent-Breath hanging from my silver-studded belt.

‘I was doing my duty, lord,’ Guthlac said.

I could see mailed men ashore and guessed the household troops of whoever was Guthlac’s lord had arrived, but they could do nothing to hurt us unless they decided to crew one of the moored ships, but they made no attempt to do that. They just watched the town burning, and sometimes turned to gaze at us. ‘They could at least piss on the flames,’ Finan said reprovingly, ‘do something useful!’ He frowned down at Guthlac. ‘What do we do with this one, lord?

‘I was thinking of giving him to Skade,’ I said. Guthlac looked at her, she smiled and he shuddered. ‘When I first met her,’ I told Guthlac, ‘she’d just tortured a thegn. She killed him and it wasn’t pretty.’

‘I wanted to know where his gold was,’ she explained.

‘It wasn’t pretty at all,’ I said. Guthlac flinched.

Seolferwulf hung in the slack tide. It was high-water now and the river looked wide, but that was deceptive because beneath the shivering red-reflecting surface were shoals of mud and sand. The current would help us soon, but I wanted to wait until there was sufficient daylight to see the channel markers, and so my men stirred their oars to keep us lingering off the burning town. ‘What you should have done,’ I told Guthlac, ‘is brought your men right into the tavern while we were drinking. You’d have lost a few, but you’d at least have stood a chance.’

‘You’re going to put me ashore?’ he asked plaintively.

‘Of course I am,’ I said pleasantly, ‘but not yet. Look at that!’ A house had just collapsed into its own flames and the great beams and rafters exploded gouts of flame, smoke and sparks towards the clouds. The roof of the Goose had caught the fire now and, as it flared bright in the sky, my men cheered.

We left unmolested, sliding down the river in the day’s first wan light. We rowed to the channel’s end where the water fretted white and wide on the long shoals, and it was there that I untied Guthlac’s bonds and pushed him to Seolferwulf’s stern. I stood beside him on the steering platform. The tide was taking us further out to sea, and the ship was shuddering and bucking to the wind-driven waves. ‘Last night,’ I said to Guthlac, ‘you told us we were welcome in Dumnoc. You gave us leave to spend the night in peace, remember?’

He just looked at me.

‘You broke your word,’ I said. He still said nothing. ‘You broke your word,’ I said again, and all he could do was shake his head in terror. ‘So you want to go ashore?’

‘Yes, lord,’ he said.

‘Then make your own way,’ I said, and pushed him overboard. He gave a cry, there was a splash as he fell, then Finan rapped the order for the oars to bite.

Later, many days later, Osferth asked me why I had killed Guthlac. ‘He was harmless, surely, lord?’ he asked, ‘just a fool?’

‘Reputation,’ I answered, and saw Osferth’s puzzlement. ‘He challenged me,’ I explained, ‘and if I had let him live then he would have boasted that he challenged Uhtred of Bebbanburg and lived.’

‘So he had to die, lord?’

‘Yes,’ I said, and Guthlac did die. We rowed offshore and I watched the reeve struggle in our wake. For a moment or two he managed to keep his head above water, then he vanished. We hoisted the sail, felt the ship lean to the long wind, and headed north.

We had more fog, more days and nights in empty creeks, but then the winds swung to the east and the air cleared and Seolferwulf leaped northwards. Winter had touched the air.

The last day of the voyage was bright and cold. We had spent the night offshore, and so reached our destination in the morning. The wolf’s head was on the prow, and the sight of it sent small fishing boats scurrying for shelter among the scatter of rocky islands where seals glistened and stubby puffins whirred into the sky. I had taken down the sail and, in the long grey swells, rowed Seolferwulf closer to the sandy beach. ‘Hold her here,’ I ordered Finan. The oars rested and the ship heaved slow. I stood in the prow with Skade and gazed westwards. I was dressed in my war-glory. Mail and helmet and sword and arm rings.

I was remembering a far-off day when I had been on this same beach and had watched, amazed, as three ships came southwards to ride the waves as Seolferwulf now rode them. I had been a child, and that had been my first glimpse of the Danes. I had marvelled at their ships, so lean and beautiful, and at the symmetry of their oar-banks that had risen and fallen like magic wings. I had watched, astonished, as the Danish leader had run the oars in full armour, stepping from shaft to shaft, risking death with every step, and I had listened to my father and my uncle curse the newcomers. Within hours my brother had been killed, and within weeks my father followed him to the grave, and my uncle had stolen Bebbanburg and I had joined the family of the oar-runner, Ragnar the Fearless. I learned Danish, fought for the Danes, forgot Christ and welcomed Odin, and it had all begun here, at Bebbanburg.

‘Your home?’ Skade asked.

‘My home,’ I said, for I am Uhtred of Bebbanburg and I was gazing at that great fortress on its rearing rock above the sea. Men lined the wooden ramparts and stared back. Above them, flying from a staff erected on the seaward gable of the great hall, was the flag of my family, the wolf’s head, and I ordered the same flag hoisted on our mast, though there was hardly enough wind to display it. ‘I’m letting them know that I live,’ I told her, ‘and that so long as I live they should be frightened.’ And then fate put a thought into my head and I knew I would never retake Bebbanburg, would never scale the rock and climb the walls unless I did what Ragnar had done so many years before. The prospect frightened me, but fate is inexorable. The spinners were watching me, waiting, needles poised, and unless I did their bidding then my fate would be failure. I had to run the oars.

‘Hold the oars steady!’ I ordered the twenty rowers on the landward flank. ‘Hold them level and hold them hard!’

‘Lord,’ Skade said warningly, but I saw the excitement in her eyes too.

I had worn my full armour to appear as a warlord to my uncle’s men in Bebbanburg, and now they might watch me die because one slip on the long shafts would send me to the sea’s bed, dragged down by the mail I wore. But the conviction was too strong on me. To gain everything a man must risk everything.

I drew Serpent-Breath. I held her high in the air so that the garrison of the stronghold would see the sun glint on the long steel, then I stepped off the ship’s side.

The trick of walking the oar-bank is to do it fast, but not so fast that it looks like a panicked run. It was twenty steps that had to be taken with a straight back to make it look easy, and I remember the ship rolling and the fear twitching in me, and each oar dipping beneath my tread, yet I made those twenty steps and leaped off the last oar to scramble onto the stern where Sihtric steadied me as my men cheered.

‘You damned fool, lord,’ Finan said fondly.

‘I’m coming!’ I shouted at the fortress, but I doubt the words carried. The waves broke white and sucked back from the beach. The rocks above the beach were white with frost. It was a grey-white fortress. It was home. ‘One day,’ I said to my men, ‘we shall all live there.’ Then we turned the ship, hoisted the sail again, and went south. I watched the ramparts till they vanished.

And that same day we slid into the river mouth I knew so well. I had taken the wolf’s head off the prow because this was friendly land, and I saw the beacon on the hill and the ruined monastery and the beach where the red ship had rescued me, and then, on the height of the tide, I ran Seolferwulf onto the shingle where over thirty other ships were already beached, all guarded by a small fort beside the ruined monastery on the hill. I jumped ashore, stamped my feet in the shingle and watched the horsemen riding from the fort. They came to discover our business and one lowered a spear towards me. ‘Who are you?’ he demanded.

‘Uhtred of Bebbanburg.’

The spear-point lowered and the man smiled. ‘We were told to expect you sooner, lord.’

‘There was fog.’

‘And you are welcome, lord. Whatever you need is yours. Whatever!’

And there was warmth, food, ale, welcome, and next morning horses for Finan, Skade and myself, and we rode southwest, not far, and my crew came with me. An ox-drawn cart carried the treasure chest, our armour and our weapons. Seolferwulf was safe in the river, guarded by the garrison there, but we went to the greater fortress, the place I had known we would be welcomed, and the lord of that greater fortress rode to greet us. He was roaring incoherently, shouting and laughing, and he leaped from his horse, as I did, and we met on the track where we embraced.

Ragnar. Jarl Ragnar, friend and brother. Ragnar of Dunholm, Dane and Viking, lord of the north, and he clasped me, then punched a fist into my shoulder. ‘You look older,’ he said, ‘older and much uglier.’

‘Then I get more like you,’ I said.

He laughed at that. He stepped back and I saw how big his belly had grown in the years since we had last met. He was not fat, just bigger, but he seemed as happy as ever. ‘You’re all welcome,’ he bellowed at my crew. ‘Why didn’t you come sooner?’

‘We were slowed by fog,’ I explained.

‘I thought you might be dead,’ he said, ‘then I thought that the gods don’t want your miserable company yet.’ He paused, remembering suddenly, and his face straightened. He frowned, and could not look into my eyes. ‘I wept when I heard about Gisela.’

‘Thank you.’

He nodded abruptly, then put an arm round my shoulder and walked with me. The shield hand draped round my neck was mangled from the battle at Ethandun, where Alfred had destroyed Guthrum’s great army. I had fought for Alfred that day, and Ragnar, my closest friend, had fought for Guthrum.

Ragnar looked so like his father. He had a broad generous face, bright eyes and the fastest smile of anyone I knew. His hair was fair, like mine, and we had often been taken as brothers. His father had treated me as a son and, if I had a brother, it was Ragnar. ‘You heard what happened in Mercia?’ he asked me.

‘No.’

‘Alfred’s forces assaulted Harald,’ he said.

‘On Torneie?’

‘Wherever he was. What I hear is that Harald was bedridden, his men were starving, they were trapped, they were outnumbered, so the Mercians and West Saxons decided to finish them off.’

‘So Harald’s dead?’

‘Of course he’s not dead!’ Ragnar said happily. ‘Harald’s a Dane! He fought the bastards off, sent them running away,’ he laughed. ‘Alfred, I hear, is not a happy man.’

‘He never was,’ I said. ‘He’s god-haunted.’

Ragnar turned and stole a look at Skade, who was still in her saddle. ‘Is that Harald’s woman?’

‘Yes.’

‘She looks like trouble,’ he said. ‘So do we sell her back to Skirnir?’

‘No.’

He grinned. ‘So she isn’t Harald’s woman now?’

‘No.’

‘Poor woman,’ he said, and laughed.

‘What do you know about Skirnir?’

‘I know he’s offering gold for her return.’

‘And Alfred’s offering gold for my return?’

‘He is indeed!’ Ragnar said cheerfully. ‘I was thinking I could truss you up like a goat and make myself even wealthier.’ He paused because we had come within sight of Dunholm that stood atop its great rock in the loop of the river. His standard of the eagle’s wing flew above the fortress. ‘Welcome home,’ he said warmly.

I had come north and, for the first time in years, felt free.

Brida waited in the fortress. She was an East Anglian and Ragnar’s woman, and she took me in her arms, said nothing, and I just felt her sorrow for Gisela. ‘Fate,’ I said.

She stepped back and ran a finger down my face, looking at me as if wondering what the years had done. ‘Her brother is dying too,’ she said.

‘But he’s still king?’

‘Ragnar rules here,’ she said, ‘and lets Guthred call himself king.’ Guthred, Gisela’s brother, ruled Northumbria from his capital at Eoferwic. He was a good-natured man, but weak, and he held the throne only because Ragnar and the other great northern jarls permitted it. ‘He’s gone mad,’ Brida said bleakly, ‘mad and happy.’

‘Better than mad and sad.’

‘The priests look after him, but he won’t eat. He throws the food at the walls and claims he’s Solomon.’

‘He’s still a Christian then?’

‘He worships every god,’ she said tartly, ‘as a precaution.’

‘Will Ragnar call himself king?’ I asked.

‘He hasn’t said,’ Brida spoke softly.

‘Would you want that?’

‘I want Ragnar to find his fate,’ she said, and there was something ominous in her words.

There was a feast in the hall that night. I sat next to Brida and the roaring fire lit her strong, dark face. She looked something like Skade, only older, and the two women had recognised their similarity and had immediately bridled with hostility. A harpist played at the hall’s side, chanting a song about a raid Ragnar had made on Scotland, but the words were drowned by the sound of voices. One of Ragnar’s men staggered to the door, but threw up before he could reach the open air. Dogs ran to eat the vomit, and the man went back to his table and shouted for more ale. ‘We are too comfortable here,’ Brida said.

‘Is that bad?’

‘Ragnar is happy,’ she said, too softly for her lover to hear. He sat to her right, and Skade was beyond him. ‘He drinks too much,’ Brida said, then sighed. ‘Who would have thought it?’

‘That Ragnar likes ale?’

‘That you would be so feared.’ She inspected me as though she had never seen me before. ‘Ragnar the Elder would be proud of you,’ she said. Brida, like me, had been raised in Ragnar’s house. We had been children together, then lovers, and now were friends. She was wise, unlike Ragnar the Younger, who was impulsive and hot-headed, but sensible enough to trust Brida’s wisdom. Her one great regret was that she was childless, though Ragnar himself had fathered enough bastards.

One of those bastards was helping to serve the feast, and Ragnar took hold of the girl’s elbow. ‘Are you mine?’ he asked.

‘Yours, lord?’

‘Are you my daughter?’

‘Oh yes, lord!’ she said happily.

‘I thought you were,’ he said and slapped her rump. ‘I make pretty daughters, Uhtred!’

‘You do!’

‘And fine sons!’ He smiled happily, then let go a huge belch.

‘He doesn’t see the danger,’ Brida said to me. She alone in the hall was unsmiling, but life had always been a serious business for Brida.

‘What are you telling Uhtred?’ Ragnar demanded.

‘That our barley was diseased this year,’ she said.

‘Then we buy some barley in Eoferwic,’ he said carelessly, and turned back to Skade.

‘What danger?’ I asked.

Brida lowered her voice again. ‘Alfred has made Wessex powerful.’

‘He has.’

‘And he’s ambitious.’

‘He doesn’t have long to live,’ I said, ‘so his ambition doesn’t matter.’

‘Then he’s ambitious for his son,’ she said impatiently. ‘He wants to extend Saxon rule northwards.’

‘True,’ I said.

‘And that threatens us,’ she said fiercely. ‘What does he call himself? King of the Angelcynn?’ I nodded, and she put an urgent hand on my arm. ‘Northumbria has more than enough English speakers. He wants his priests and scholars to rule here.’

‘True,’ I said again.

‘So they must be stopped,’ she said simply. She stared at me, her eyes flicking between mine. ‘He didn’t send you to spy?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘No,’ she agreed. She toyed with a lump of bread, her gaze looking down the long benches of roaring warriors. ‘It’s simple, Uhtred,’ she said bleakly, ‘if we don’t destroy Wessex, then Wessex will destroy us.’

‘It would take years for the West Saxons to reach Northumbria,’ I said dismissively.

‘Does that make the result any better?’ Brida asked bitterly. ‘And no, it won’t take years. Mercia is divided and weak and Wessex will swallow it in the next few years. Then they’ll march on East Anglia, and after that all three kingdoms will be turned on us. And where the West Saxons go, Uhtred,’ her voice was very bitter now, ‘they destroy our gods. They bring their own god with his rules and his anger and his fear.’ Like me, Brida had been raised as a Christian, but had turned pagan. ‘We have to stop them before they begin, which means striking first. And striking soon.’

‘Soon?’

‘Haesten plans to invade Mercia,’ she said, dropping her voice so it was almost a whisper. ‘That will draw Alfred’s forces north of the Temes. What we should do is take a fleet and land on Wessex’s south coast.’ Her hand tightened on my arm. ‘And next year,’ she said, ‘there’ll be no Uhtred of Bebbanburg to protect Alfred’s land.’

‘Are you two still talking of barley?’ Ragnar roared. ‘How’s my sister? Still married to that crippled old priest?’

‘He makes her happy,’ I said.

‘Poor Thyra,’ Ragnar said, and I thought how strange fate was, how weird its threads. Thyra, Ragnar’s sister, had married Beocca, a match so unlikely as to be unimaginable, yet she had found pure happiness. And my thread? That night I felt as though my whole world had been turned upside down. For so many years my oath-sworn duty had been to protect Wessex, and I had done that duty, nowhere better than at Fearnhamme. Now, suddenly, I was hearing Brida’s dreams of destroying Wessex. The Lothbroks had tried and failed to do that, Guthrum had come close before being defeated, and Harald had met disaster. Now Brida would try to persuade Ragnar to conquer Alfred’s kingdom? I looked at my friend, who was singing loudly and thumping the table with an ale horn in time to the song.

‘To conquer Wessex,’ I told Brida, ‘you’ll need five thousand men and five thousand horses, and one thing more. Discipline.’

‘The Danes fight better than the Saxons,’ she said dismissively.

‘But Danes fight only when they want to,’ I said harshly. Danish armies were coalitions of convenience, with jarls lending their crews to an ambitious man, but melting away as soon as easier plunder offered itself. They were like packs of wolves that would attack a flock, but sheer away if enough dogs defended the sheep. Danes and Norsemen were constantly listening for news of some country that offered easy plunder, and a rumour of an undefended monastery might send a score of ships on a scavenging voyage, but in my own lifetime I had seen how easily the Danes were repulsed. Kings had built burhs all across Christendom and the Danes had no appetite for long sieges. They wanted quick plunder, or else they wanted to settle rich land. Yet the days of easy conquest, of facing undefended towns and rabbles of half-trained warriors, were long gone. If Ragnar or any other northman wanted to take Wessex, then he must lead an army of disciplined men prepared to undertake siege warfare. I looked at my friend, lost in the joy of feast and ale, and could not imagine him with the patience to defeat Alfred’s organised defences.

‘But you could,’ Brida said very quietly.

‘Are you reading my thoughts?’

She leaned closer to me, her voice a whisper. ‘Christianity is a disease that spreads like a plague. We have to stop it.’

‘If the gods want it stopped,’ I suggested, ‘they’ll do it themselves.’

‘Our gods prefer feasting. They live, Uhtred. They live and laugh and enjoy, and what does their god do? He broods, he’s vengeful, he scowls, he plots. He’s a dark and lonely god, Uhtred, and our gods ignore him. They’re wrong.’

I half smiled. Brida, alone of all the men or women I knew, would see nothing strange in chiding the gods for their faults, and even try to do their work for them. But she was right, I thought, the Christian god was dark and threatening. He had no appetite for feasting, for laughter in the hall, for ale and mead. He set rules and demanded discipline, but rules and discipline were just what we needed if we were to defeat him.

‘Help me,’ Brida said.

I watched two jugglers toss flaming brands into the smoky air. Gusts of laughter echoed in the great hall and I felt a sudden surge of hatred for Alfred’s pack of black-robed priests, for the whole tribe of life-denying churchmen whose only joy was to disapprove of joy. ‘I need men,’ I told Brida.

‘Ragnar has men.’

‘I need my own,’ I insisted, ‘I have forty-three. I need at least ten times that number.’

‘If men know you’re leading an army against Wessex,’ she said, ‘they’ll follow.’

‘Not without gold,’ I said, glancing at Skade who was watching me suspiciously, curious what secrets Brida whispered in my ear. ‘Gold,’ I went on, ‘gold and silver. I need gold.’

I needed more. I needed to know whether Brida’s dreams of defeating Wessex were known beyond Dunholm. Brida claimed she had told no one except Ragnar, but Ragnar was famously loose-tongued. Give Ragnar a horn of ale and he would share every secret known to man, and if Ragnar had told just one man, then Alfred would learn of the ambition soon enough, which was why I was glad when Offa, his women and his dogs arrived at Dunholm.

Offa was a Saxon, a Mercian who had once been a priest. He was tall, thin, with a lugubrious face that suggested he had seen every folly the world offered. He was old now, old and grey-haired, but he still travelled all across Britain with his two squabbling women and his troupe of performing terriers. He showed the dogs at fairs and at feasts, where the dogs walked on their hind legs, danced together, leaped through hoops, and one even rode a small pony while the others carried leather buckets to collect coins from the spectators. It was not the most spectacular entertainment, but children loved the terriers and Ragnar, of course, was entranced by them.

Offa had left the priesthood, thus incurring the enmity of the bishops, but he had the protection of every ruler in Britain because his real livelihood was not his terriers, but his extraordinary capacity for information. He talked to everyone, he drew conclusions and he sold what he deduced. Alfred had used him for years. The dogs gave Offa an entry into almost every noble hall in Britain, and Offa listened to gossip and carried what he learned from ruler to ruler, eking out his facts coin by coin. ‘You must be rich,’ I told Offa the day he arrived.

‘You are pleased to jest, lord,’ he said. He sat at a table outside Ragnar’s hall, his eight dogs sitting obediently in a semicircle behind his bench. A servant had brought him ale and bread. Ragnar had been delighted at Offa’s unexpected arrival, anticipating the laughter which always accompanied the dogs’ performance.

‘Where do you keep all that money?’ I asked.

‘You really wish me to answer that, lord?’ Offa asked. Offa would answer questions, but his answers always had to be paid for.

‘It’s late for you to be travelling north,’ I said.

‘Yet so far the winter is surprisingly mild. And business brought me north, lord,’ he said, ‘your business.’ He groped in a large leather bag and took out a sealed and folded parchment that he pushed across the table. ‘That is for you, lord.’

I picked up the letter. The seal was a blob of wax which bore no imprint and seemed undisturbed. ‘What does the letter say?’ I asked Offa.

‘Are you suggesting I’ve read it?’ he asked, offended.

‘Of course you did,’ I said, ‘so save me the trouble of reading it.’

He gave a hint of a smile. ‘I suspect you will find it of little importance, lord,’ he said. ‘The writer is your friend, Father Beocca. He says your children are safe in the Lady Æthelflæd’s household and that Alfred is still angry with you, but will not order your death if you return south as, he reminds you, your sworn oath demands. Father Beocca finishes by saying that he prays for your soul daily, and demands that you return to your oath-given duties.’

‘Demands?’

‘Most sternly, lord,’ Offa said with another ghost of a smile.

‘Nothing else?’

‘Nothing, lord.’

‘So I can burn the letter?’

‘A waste of parchment, lord. My women can scrape the skin clean and reuse it.’

I pushed the letter back to him. ‘Let them scrape,’ I said. ‘What happened at Torneie?’

Offa considered the question for a few heartbeats, then decided that the answer would be common knowledge soon enough and so he could tell me without any payment. ‘King Alfred ordered an assault, lord, to end Jarl Harald’s occupation of the island. The Lord Steapa was to bring men upstream in ships while Lord Æthelred and the Ætheling Edward attacked across the shallower branch of the river. Both attacks failed.’

‘Why?’

‘Harald, lord, had placed sharpened stakes in the river bed, and the West Saxon ships struck those stakes and most never reached the island. Lord Æthelred’s assault simply became bogged down. They floundered in the mud and Harald’s warriors shot arrows and threw spears, and no Saxon even reached the thorn palisade. It was a massacre, lord.’

‘Massacre?’

‘The Danes made a sally, lord, and slaughtered many of Lord Æthelred’s men in the river.’

‘Cheer me up,’ I said, ‘and tell me that Lord Æthelred was killed.’

‘He lives, lord,’ Offa said.

‘And Steapa?’

‘He lives too, lord.’

‘So what happens now?’

‘Now that is a question,’ Offa said distantly. He waited until I had placed a coin on the table. ‘There is argument among the king’s counsellors, lord,’ he said, slipping the silver into his pouch, ‘but the cautious advice of Bishop Asser will prevail, I’m sure.’

‘And that advice is?’

‘Oh, to pay Harald silver, of course.’

‘Bribe him to leave?’ I asked, shocked. Why would any man have to bribe a fugitive band of defeated Danes to leave their territory?

‘Silver often achieves what steel cannot,’ Offa said.

‘Ten men and a boy could capture Torneie,’ I said angrily.

‘If you led them, maybe,’ Offa said, ‘but you’re here, lord.’

‘So I am.’

It cost me more silver to learn what Brida had already told me, that Haesten, safe in the high fort at Beamfleot, planned an assault on Mercia. ‘Did you tell that to Alfred?’ I asked Offa.

‘I did,’ he said, ‘but his other spies contradict me, and he believes me wrong.’

‘Are you wrong?’

‘Rarely, lord,’ he said.

‘Is Haesten strong enough to take Mercia?’

‘Not at present. He has been joined by many of Harald’s crews who fled your victory at Fearnhamme, but I don’t doubt he needs more men.’

‘He’ll seek them from Northumbria?’ I asked.

‘It’s a possibility, I suppose,’ Offa said, and that answer told me what I wanted to know, that even Offa, with his uncanny ability to sniff out secrets, was ignorant of Brida’s ambition for Ragnar to lead an army against Wessex. If Offa had known of that ambition he would have hinted that the Northumbrian Danes might have better things to do than assault Mercia, but he had slid past my question without sensing any opportunity to take my silver. ‘But ships still join the Jarl Haesten,’ Offa went on, ‘and he may be strong enough by the spring. I’m sure he’ll seek your help too, lord.’

‘I imagine so,’ I said.

Offa stretched his long thin legs under the table. One of the terriers whined and he snapped his fingers and the dog went instantly still. ‘The Jarl Haesten,’ he said cautiously, ‘will offer you gold to join him.’

I smiled. ‘You didn’t come here as a messenger, Offa. If Alfred wanted a letter sent to me he had cheaper ways of sending it than by satisfying your greed.’ Offa looked offended at the word greed, but made no protest. ‘And it was Alfred who ordered Father Beocca to write, wasn’t it?’ I asked, and Offa nodded slightly. ‘So,’ I said, ‘Alfred sent you to find out what I’m going to do.’

‘There is curiosity in Wessex about that,’ he said distantly.

I laid two silver coins on the table. ‘So tell me,’ I said.

‘Tell you what, lord?’ he asked, gazing at the coins.

‘Tell me what I’m going to do,’ I said.

He smiled at being paid for an answer I surely knew already. ‘Generous, lord,’ he said as his long fingers closed round the coins. ‘Alfred believes you will attack your uncle.’

‘I might.’

‘But for that, lord, you need men, and men need silver.’

‘I have silver.’

‘Not enough, lord,’ Offa said confidently.

‘So perhaps I will join Haesten?’

‘Never, lord, you despise him.’

‘So where will I find the silver?’ I asked.

‘From Skirnir, of course,’ Offa said, his eyes steady on mine.

I tried to betray nothing. ‘Is Skirnir one of the men who pays you?’ I asked.

‘I cannot bear journeying in ships, lord, so avoid them. I have never met Skirnir.’

‘So Skirnir doesn’t know what I plan?’

‘From what I hear, lord, Skirnir believes every man plans to rob him, so, being ready for all, he will be ready for you.’

I shook my head. ‘He’s ready for thieves, Offa, not for a warlord.’

The Mercian just raised an eyebrow, a signal more silver was needed. I put one coin on the table and watched it vanish into that capacious purse. ‘He will be ready for you, lord,’ he said, ‘because your uncle will warn him.’

‘Because you will tell my uncle?’

‘If he pays me, yes.’

‘I should kill you now, Offa.’

‘Yes, lord,’ he said, ‘you should. But you won’t.’ He smiled.

So Skirnir would learn I was coming, and Skirnir had ships and men, but fate is inexorable. I would go to Frisia.

I tried to persuade Ragnar to come with me to Frisia, but he laughed it away. ‘You think I want to get a wet arse at this time of year?’ It was a cold day, the countryside sodden from two days of heavy rain that had crashed in from the sea. The rain had ended, but the land was heavy, the winter colours dark, and the air damp.

We rode across the hills. Thirty of my men and forty of Ragnar’s. We were all in mail, all helmeted, all armed. Shields hung at our sides or on our backs, and there were long scabbarded swords at our waists. ‘I’m going in winter,’ I explained, ‘because Skirnir won’t expect me till spring.’

‘You hope,’ he said, ‘but maybe he’s heard you’re an idiot?’

‘So come,’ I said, ‘and let’s fight together again.’

He smiled, but did not meet my gaze. ‘I’ll give you Rollo,’ he said, naming one of his best fighters, ‘and whoever volunteers to go with him. You remember Rollo?’

‘Of course.’

‘I have duties,’ he said vaguely. ‘I should stay here.’ It was not cowardice that made him refuse my invitation. No one could ever accuse Ragnar of timidity. Instead, I think, it was laziness. He was happy and did not need to disturb that happiness. He curbed his horse on the crest of a rise and gestured at the wide strip of coastland that lay beneath us. ‘There it is,’ he said, ‘the English kingdom.’

‘The what?’ I asked indignantly. I was gazing at the rain-darkened land with its small hills and smaller fields with their familiar stone walls.

‘That’s what everyone calls it,’ Ragnar said. ‘The English kingdom.’

‘It isn’t a kingdom,’ I said sourly.

‘That’s what they call it,’ he said patiently. ‘Your uncle has done well.’ I made a vomiting noise which made Ragnar laugh. ‘Think of it,’ he said, ‘the whole of the north is Danish, all except Bebbanburg’s land.’

‘Because none of you could take the fort,’ I retorted.

‘It probably can’t be taken. My father always said it was too hard.’

‘I shall take it,’ I said.

We rode down from the hills. Trees were losing their last leaves in the sea wind. The pastures were dark, the thatch of the cottages almost black, and the rich smell of the year’s decay thick in our nostrils. I stopped at one farmstead, deserted because the folk had seen us coming and fled to the woods, and I looked inside the granary to find the harvest had been good. ‘He gets richer,’ I said of my uncle, ‘why don’t you tear his land apart?’

‘We do when we’re bored,’ Ragnar said, ‘and then he tears ours apart.’

‘Why don’t you just capture his land?’ I asked, ‘and let him starve in the fortress.’

‘Men have tried that. He either fights or pays them to leave.’

My uncle, who called himself Ælfric of Bernicia, was said to keep over a hundred household warriors in his fortress, and could raise four times that many from the villages scattered across his realm. It was, indeed, a small kingdom. To the north its boundary ran along the Tuede, beyond which lay the land of the Scots who were forever raiding for cattle and crops. To the south of Bebbanburg’s land was the Tinan, where Seolferwulf now lay, and to the west were hills, and all the land beyond the hills and all to the south of the Tinan was in Danish hands. Ragnar ruled south of the river. ‘We sometimes raid your uncle’s land,’ he said, ‘but if we take twenty cows he’ll come back and take twenty of ours. And when the Scots are troublesome?’ he shrugged, leaving the thought unfinished.

‘The Scots are always troublesome,’ I said.

‘His warriors are useful when they raid,’ Ragnar admitted.

So Ælfric of Bernicia could be a good neighbour, cooperating with the Danes to repel and punish the Scots, and in return he asked only to be left in peace. That was how Bebbanburg had survived as a Christian enclave in a country of Danes. Ælfric was my father’s younger brother, and he had always been the clever one in the family. If I had not hated him so much I might have admired him. He knew one thing well, that his survival depended on the great fortress where I had been born and which, all my life, I have thought of as home. There had once been a real kingdom ruled from Bebbanburg. My ancestors had been the kings of Bernicia, ruling deep into what the Scots impudently claim as their land, and south towards Eoferwic, but Bernicia had been swallowed into Northumbria, and Northumbria had fallen to the Danes, yet still the old fortress stood and around it was the remnant of that old English kingdom. ‘Have you met Ælfric?’ I asked Ragnar.

‘Many times.’

‘You didn’t kill him for me?’

‘We meet under a truce.’

‘Tell me about him.’

‘Old, grey, sly, watchful.’

‘His sons?’

‘Young, cautious, sly, watchful.’

‘I heard Ælfric was ill.’

Ragnar shrugged. ‘He’s close to fifty years old, what man isn’t ill who lives that long? But he recovers.’

My uncle’s eldest son was called Uhtred. That name was an affront. For generations the oldest son in our family has been named Uhtred, and if that heir dies then, as had happened to me, the next youngest son takes the name. My uncle, by naming his eldest Uhtred, was proclaiming that his descendants would be the rulers of Bebbanburg, and their greatest enemy was not the Danes, not even the Scots, but me. Ælfric had tried to kill me, and as long as he lived he would go on trying. He had put a reward on my head, but I was a hard man to kill and it had been years since any warrior dared the attempt. Now I rode towards him, my borrowed horse stepping high through the muck of the cattle-track we followed down from the hills. I could smell the sea and, though the waves were not yet visible, the sky to the east had the empty look of air above water. ‘He’ll know we’re coming?’ I suggested to Ragnar.

‘He knows. He never stops watching.’

Horsemen would have sped to Bebbanburg and told of Danes crossing the hills. Even now, I knew, we were being watched. My uncle would not realise I was among the horsemen. His sentinels would have reported Ragnar’s eagle’s-wing banner, but I was not flying my own flag. Not yet.

We had our own scouts riding ahead and to our flanks. For so many years this had been my life. Whenever some restless East Anglian Dane had thought fit to steal a couple of sheep or snatch a cow from some pasture close to Lundene, we would ride in vengeance. This was very different country, though. Near Lundene the ground was flat, while here the small hills hid much of the landscape and so our scouts kept close to us. They saw nothing to alarm them, and they finally stopped on a wooded crest and that was where we joined them.

And beneath me was home.

The fortress was vast. It lay between us and the sea on its great lump of rock, connected to the land by a thin strip of sandy ground. To north and south were the high dunes, but the fortress broke the coast, its crag sheltering a wide shallow pool where a few fishing boats were moored. The village had grown, I saw, but so had the fortress. When I had been a child, a man crossed the sandy spit to reach a wooden palisade with a large gate surmounted by a fighting platform. That entrance, the Low Gate, was still there, and if any enemy fought through that archway he would still have had to climb to a second gate in another wooden palisade that was built on the rock itself, but that second palisade was gone entirely, and in its place was a high stone wall without any gate. So the old main entrance, the High Gate, was gone, and an attacker, if he breached the outer palisade to reach the smithy and the stables, would then have to scale that new stone wall. It was thick, high, and equipped with its own fighting platform, so arrows, spears, boiling water, rocks, and anything else the defenders could find would rain down on an attacking force.

The old gate had been at the fortress’s southern end, but my uncle had made a path along the beach on the seaward side of Bebbanburg, and now a visitor had to follow the path to a new gate at the fort’s northern extremity. The path began in the outer enclosure, so even to reach it, the old wall and its Low Gate had to be taken, then the attackers would have to advance along the new path beneath Bebbanburg’s seaward ramparts, assailed by missiles, and then somehow fight through the new gate, which was also protected by a stone rampart. Even if the attackers somehow got through that new gate, a second wall waited with more defenders, and the attackers would need to capture that inner rampart before they broke through to Bebbanburg’s heart, where two great halls and a church crowned the crag. Tendrils of smoke drifted above the fortress’s roofs.

I swore softly.

‘What are you thinking?’ Ragnar asked.

I was thinking that Bebbanburg was impregnable. ‘I’m wondering who has Smoka now.’ I said.

‘Smoka?’

‘Best horse I ever owned.’

Ragnar chuckled and nodded at the fort. ‘It’s a brute, isn’t it?’ he said.

‘Land ships at the northern end,’ I suggested. If ships came ashore where the new gate was built then the attackers would have no need to fight through the Low Gate.

‘The beach is narrow there,’ Ragnar warned, though I probably knew the waters about Bebbanburg better than he did, ‘and you can’t get ships into the harbour,’ he added, pointing to where the fishing boats were moored. ‘Little ships, yes, but anything bigger than a wash tub? Maybe at a spring high tide, but only for an hour or so, and that channel is a bitch when tide and wind are running. Waves build there. You’d be lucky to make it in one piece.’

And even if I could land a dozen crews close to the new gate, what was to stop the defenders sending a force along the new path to trap the attackers? That would only happen if my uncle had warning of an attack and could assemble enough men to spare a force to make that counterattack. So the answer, I thought, was a surprise attack. But a surprise attack would be difficult. The sentries would see the ships approaching and call the garrison to arms, and the attacking crews would have to clamber ashore in the surf, then carry ladders and weapons over a hundred rocky paces to where the new stone wall barred them. It would hardly be a surprise by then, and the defenders would have plenty of time to assemble at the new gate. So two attacks? That meant starting a formal siege, using three or four hundred men to seal off the strip of land leading to the Low Gate. That would prevent reinforcements reaching the garrison and those besiegers could assault the Low Gate while the ships approached the new. That would split the defenders, but I would need at least as many men to attack the new gate, which meant I was looking for a thousand men, say twenty crews, and they would bring wives, servants, slaves and children, so I would be feeding at least three thousand. ‘It has to be done,’ I said quietly.

‘No one has ever captured Bebbanburg,’ Ragnar said.

‘Ida did.’

‘Ida?’

‘My ancestor. Ida the Flamebearer. One of the first Saxons in Britain.’

‘What kind of fort did he capture?’

I shrugged. ‘Probably a small one.’

‘Maybe nothing but a thorn fence guarded by half-naked savages,’ Ragnar said. ‘The best way to capture that place is to starve the bastards.’

That was a possibility. A small army could seal off the landward approach, and ships could patrol the waters to stop supplies reaching my uncle, but bad weather would drive those ships away, leaving an opportunity for small local vessels to reach the fortress. It would take at least six months to starve Bebbanburg into surrender. Six months of feeding an army and persuading restless Danes to stay and fight. I stared at the Farnea Islands where the sea fretted white on rocks. Gytha, my stepmother, used to tell me tales of how Saint Cuthbert preached to the seals and the puffins on those rocks. He had lived on the islands as a hermit, eating barnacles and fern fronds, scratching his lice, and so the islands were sacred to Christians, but they were of little practical use. I could not shelter a blockading fleet there, for the scatter of islets offered no shelter, nor did Lindisfarena, that lay to the north. That island was much larger. I could see the remnants of the monastery there, but Lindisfarena offered no decent harbour.

I was still gazing at Lindisfarena, remembering how Ragnar the Elder had slaughtered the monks there. I had been a child, and that same day Ragnar the Elder had let me kill Weland, a man sent by my uncle to murder me, and I had hacked at him with my sword, cutting and slicing him, bleeding him to death in writhing agony. I stared at the island, remembering the death of enemies, when Ragnar touched my elbow. ‘They’re curious about us,’ he said.

Horsemen were riding from the Low Gate. I counted them, reckoning there to be around seventy, which suggested my uncle was not looking for a fight. A man with a hundred household warriors does not want to lose ten in some meaningless skirmish, so he was matching our force with just enough men to deter either side from attacking the other. I watched the horsemen climb the hill towards us. They were in mail and helmeted, with shields and weapons, but they stopped a good four hundred paces away, all except three men who kept riding, though they ostentatiously laid aside their swords and shields before leaving their companions. They flew no banner.

‘They want to talk,’ Ragnar said.

‘Is that my uncle?’

‘Yes.’

The three men had curbed their horses halfway between the two armed bands. ‘I could kill the bastard now,’ I said.

‘And his son inherits,’ Ragnar said, ‘and everyone knows you killed an unarmed man who had offered a truce.’

‘Bastard,’ I said of Ælfric. I unbuckled my two swords and tossed them to Finan, then spurred my borrowed horse. Ragnar came with me. I had half hoped my uncle was accompanied by his two sons, and if he had been I might have been tempted to try and kill all three, but instead his companions were two hard-looking warriors, doubtless his best men.

The three waited close to the rotting carcass of a sheep. I assume a wolf had killed the beast, then been driven off by dogs, and the corpse lay there, crawling with maggots, torn by ravens and buzzing with flies. The wind blew the stench towards us, which was probably why Ælfric had chosen to stop there.

My uncle looked distinguished. He was slender and narrow-faced with a high hooked nose and dark, guarded eyes. His hair, the little that showed beneath his helmet’s rim, was white. He watched me calmly, showing no fear as I stopped close. ‘I assume you are Uhtred?’ he greeted me.

‘Uhtred of Bebbanburg,’ I said.

‘Then I should congratulate you,’ he said.

‘Why?’

‘For your victory over Harald. The news of it caused much rejoicing among good Christians.’

‘So you didn’t rejoice?’ I retorted.

‘Jarl Ragnar,’ Ælfric ignored my small insult and nodded gravely to my companion, ‘you do me honour with this visit, lord, but you should have given me warning of your arrival. I would have made a feast for you.’

‘We’re just exercising the horses,’ Ragnar said cheerfully.

‘A long way from your home,’ Ælfric observed.

‘Not from mine,’ I said.

The dark eyes brooded on me. ‘You are always welcome here, Uhtred,’ my uncle said, ‘any time you wish to come home, then just come. Believe me, I shall be glad to see you.’

‘I’ll come,’ I promised him.

There was silence for a moment. My horse stamped a mud-clodded foot. The two lines of mail-clad warriors watched us. I could just hear the gulls at the distant shore. Their sound had been my childhood noise, never-ending like the sea. ‘As a child,’ my uncle broke the awkward silence, ‘you were disobedient, headstrong and foolish. It seems you haven’t changed.’

‘Ask Alfred of Wessex,’ I said, ‘he wouldn’t be king now without my headstrong foolishness.’

‘Alfred knew how to use you,’ my uncle observed. ‘You were his dog. He fed you and held you. But like a fool you’ve slipped his lead. Who will feed you now?’

‘I will,’ Ragnar said happily.

‘But you, lord,’ Ælfric said respectfully, ‘don’t have enough men to watch them die against my walls. Uhtred will have to find his own men.’

‘There are many Danes in Northumbria,’ I said.

‘And Danes seek gold,’ Ælfric said, ‘do you really think there’s enough inside my walls to draw the Danes of Northumbria to Bebbanburg?’ He half smiled. ‘You will have to find your own gold, Uhtred.’ He paused, expecting me to say something, but I kept quiet. A raven, driven away from the sheep’s carcass by our presence, protested from a bare tree. ‘Do you think your aglæcwif will lead you to the gold?’ Ælfric asked.

An aglæcwif was a fiendish woman, a sorceress, and he meant Skade. ‘I have no aglæcwif,’ I said.

‘She tempts you with her husband’s riches,’ Ælfric said.

‘Does she?’

‘What else?’ he asked, ‘but Skirnir knows she does that.’

‘Because you told him?’

My uncle nodded. ‘I saw fit to send him news of his wife. A courtesy, I think, to a neighbour across the sea. Skirnir, no doubt, will greet you in the spring as I would greet you, Uhtred, should you decide to come home.’ He stressed the last word, curdling it on his tongue, then gathered his reins. ‘I have nothing more to say to you.’ He nodded at Ragnar, then at his men, and the three turned away.

‘I’ll kill you!’ I shouted after him, ‘and your cabbage-shitting sons!’

He just waved negligently and kept riding.

I remember thinking he had won that encounter. Ælfric had come from his fastness and he had treated me like a child, and now he rode back to that beautiful place beside the sea where I could not reach him. I did not move.

‘What now?’ Ragnar asked.

‘I’ll hang him with his son’s intestines,’ I said, ‘and piss on his corpse.’

‘And how do you do that?’

‘I need gold.’

‘Skirnir?’

‘Where else?’

Ragnar turned his horse. ‘There’s silver in Scotland,’ he said, ‘and in Ireland.’

‘And hordes of savages protect both,’ I said.

‘Then Wessex?’ he suggested.

I had not moved my horse and Ragnar was forced to turn back to me. ‘Wessex?’ I echoed him.

‘They say Alfred’s churches are rich.’

‘Oh, they are,’ I said. ‘They’re so rich they can afford to send silver to the Pope. They drip with silver. There’s gold on the altars. There’s money in Wessex, my friend, so much money.’

Ragnar beckoned to his men and two of them rode forward with our swords. We buckled the belts around our waists and no longer felt naked. The two men walked their horses away, leaving us alone again. The sea wind brought the smell of home to lessen the smell of the carcass. ‘So will you attack next year?’ I asked my friend.

He thought for a moment, then shrugged. ‘Brida thinks I’ve grown fat and happy,’ he said.

‘You have.’

He smiled briefly. ‘Why do we fight?’ he asked.

‘Because we were born,’ I answered savagely.

‘To find a place we call home,’ Ragnar suggested. ‘A place where we don’t need to fight any more.’

‘Dunholm?’

‘It’s as safe a fortress as Bebbanburg,’ he said, ‘and I love it.’

‘And Brida wants you to leave it?’

He nodded. ‘She’s right,’ he admitted wanly. ‘If we do nothing then Wessex will spread like a plague. There’ll be priests everywhere.’

We seek the future. We stare into its fog and hope to see a landmark that will make sense of fate. All my life I have tried to understand the past because that past was so glorious and we see remnants of that glory all across Britain. We see the great marble halls the Romans made, and we travel the roads they laid and cross the bridges they built, and it is all fading. The marble cracks in the frost and the walls collapse. Alfred and his like believed they were bringing civilisation to a wicked, fallen world, but all he did was make rules. So many rules, but the laws were only ever an expression of hope, because the reality was the burhs, the walls, the spears on the ramparts, the glint of helmets in the dawn, the fear of mailed riders, the thump of hoofbeats and the screams of victims. Alfred was proud of his schools and his monasteries and his silver-rich churches, but those things were protected by blades. And what was Wessex compared to Rome?

It is hard to bring thoughts into order, but I sense, I have always sensed, that we slide from light to darkness, from glory to chaos, and perhaps that is good. My gods tell us that the world will end in chaos, so perhaps we are living the last days and even I might survive long enough to see the hills crack and the sea boil and the heavens burn as the great gods fight. And in the face of that great doom, Alfred built schools. His priests scurried like mice in rotting thatch, imposing their rules as if mere obedience could stop the doom. Thou shalt not kill, they preached, then screamed at us warriors to slaughter the pagans. Thou shalt not steal, they preached, and forged charters to take men’s lands. Thou shalt not commit adultery, they preached, and rutted other men’s wives like besotted hares in springtime.

There is no sense. The past is a ship’s wake etched on a grey sea, but the future has no mark. ‘What are you thinking?’ Ragnar asked, amused.

‘That Brida is right.’

‘I must go to Wessex?’

I nodded, yet I knew he did not want to go where so many had failed. All my life till that moment had been spent, one way or another, in attacking or defending Wessex. Why Wessex? What was Wessex to me? It was the bastion of a dark religion in Britain, it was a place of rules, a Saxon place, and I worshipped the older gods, the gods the Saxons themselves had worshipped before the missionaries came from Rome and gave them their new nonsense. Yet I had fought for Wessex. Time and again the Danes tried to capture Wessex, and time and again Uhtred of Bebbanburg had helped the West Saxons. I had killed Ubba Lothbrokson beside the sea, I had screamed in the shield wall that broke Guthrum’s great army, and I had destroyed Harald. So many Danes had tried, and so many had failed, and I had helped them fail because fate had made me fight for the side with the priests. ‘Do you want to be King of Wessex?’ I asked Ragnar.

He laughed. ‘No! Do you?’

‘I want to be Lord of Bebbanburg.’

‘And I want to be Lord of Dunholm.’ He paused. ‘But.’

‘But if we don’t stop them,’ I finished for him, ‘they’ll come here.’

‘That’s worth fighting for,’ Ragnar said reluctantly, ‘or else our children will be Christians.’

I grimaced, thinking of my own children in Æthelflæd’s household. They would be learning about Christianity. Maybe, by now, they had already been baptised, and that thought gave me a surge of anger and guilt. Should I have stayed in Lundene and meekly accepted the fate Alfred wanted for me? But Alfred had humiliated me once before, forcing me to crawl on my knees to one of his damned altars, and I would not do it again. ‘We’ll go to Wessex,’ I said, ‘and make you king, and I’ll defend you like I defended Alfred.’

‘Next year,’ Ragnar said.

‘But I won’t go naked,’ I said harshly. ‘I need gold, I need men.’

‘You can lead my men,’ Ragnar suggested.

‘They’re sworn to you. I want my own. I need gold.’

He nodded. He understood what I was saying. A man is judged by his deeds, by his reputation, by the number of his oath-men. I was reckoned a warlord, but so long as I only led a handful of men, so long could people like my uncle afford to insult me. I needed men. I needed gold. ‘So you really will make a winter voyage to Frisia?’ Ragnar asked.

‘Why else did the gods send me Skade?’ I retorted, and at that moment it was as if the fog had cleared and I could at last see the way ahead. Fate had sent me Skade, and Skade would lead me to Skirnir, and Skirnir’s gold would let me raise the men who would fight with me through the burhs of Wessex, then I would take the silver of the Christian god and employ it to forge the army that would capture Bebbanburg.

It was all so clear. It even seemed easy.

We turned our horses and rode towards Dunholm.

Seolferwulf’s prow slammed into a wave and the water exploded into white shards that whipped down the deck like ice missiles. Green sea surged over the bows and swilled cold into the bilge. ‘Bail!’ I shouted, and the men not working the oars frantically scooped water over the side as our wolf’s-head prow reared into the sky. ‘Row!’ I bellowed, and the oars bit the water and Seolferwulf fell into a trough of the ocean with a crash that made her timbers tremble. I love the sea.

My forty-three men were on board, though I had allowed none of their women or children to accompany us, and Skade was only on board because she knew Zegge, the sandy island where Skirnir had his treasure hoard. I also had thirty-four of Ragnar’s men, all of them volunteers, and together we sailed eastwards into the teeth of a winter wind. This was no time to be at sea. Winter was when ships were laid up and men stayed in fire-bright halls, but Skirnir would expect me in the spring so I had risked this winter voyage.

‘Wind’s rising!’ Finan shouted at me.

‘It does that!’ I shouted back, and was rewarded with a sceptical look. Finan was never as happy as I was at sea. For months we had shared a rowing bench, and he had endured the discomfort, but he had never revelled in the sea’s threat.

‘Shouldn’t we turn and run?’ he asked.

‘In this little blow? Never!’ I yelled at him over the wind’s howl, then flinched as a slap of cold water hit my face. ‘Row, you bastards,’ I shouted, ‘if you want to live, row!’

We rowed and we lived, reaching the Frisian coast on a morning of cold air, dying winds and sullen seas. The improving weather had released ships from the local harbours and I followed one into the intricate channels that led to the inner sea, a stretch of shallow water that lies between the islands and the mainland. The ship we followed had eight oarsmen and a cargo hidden beneath a great leather cloth, which suggested she carried salt, flour or some other commodity that needed to be protected from the rain. The steersman was terrified by our close approach. He saw a wolf-headed ship crammed with fighting men and he feared he was about to be attacked, but I shouted that we merely needed guidance through the channels. The tide was rising, so even if we had gone aground, we would be safe enough, but the cargo ship led us safely into the deeper water, and it was there we first encountered Skirnir’s reach.

A ship, much smaller than Seolferwulf, lay waiting a half-mile beyond the place where the channel emptied into the inner sea. I reckoned she had a crew of around twenty men and she was plainly watching the channels, ready to pounce on any shipping, though the sight of Seolferwulf made her cautious. I guessed she would normally have intercepted the incoming cargo ship, but instead she stayed motionless, watching us. The cargo ship’s steersman pointed at the waiting boat. ‘I have to pay him, lord.’

‘Skirnir?’ I asked.

‘That’s one of his ships, lord.’

‘So pay him!’ I said. I spoke in English because the language of the Frisian people is so close to our own.

‘He’ll ask me about you, lord,’ he called back, and I understood his terror. The waiting ship would be curious about us, and they would demand answers from the trading ship’s master, and if he had no satisfactory explanation they might well attempt to beat it out of him.

‘Tell him we’re Danes on our way home,’ I said. ‘My name is Lief Thorrson and if he wants money he must come and ask me.’

‘He won’t ask you, lord,’ the man said. ‘A rat doesn’t demand supper from a wolf.’

I smiled at that. ‘You can tell the rat we mean no harm, we’re just going home, and we merely followed you through the channel, nothing more.’ I tossed him a coin, making sure it bore the legend Christiano Religio, which meant it came from Frankia. I did not want to betray that we had come from Britain.

I watched the cargo ship row to Skirnir’s vessel. Skade had been in the small space beneath the steering platform, but now joined me. ‘That’s the Sea-Raven,’ she said, nodding at Skirnir’s ship. ‘Her master is called Haakon. He’s a cousin to my husband.’

‘So he’ll recognise you?’

‘Of course.’

‘Then don’t let him see you,’ I said.

She bridled at that direct order, but did not argue. ‘He won’t come near us,’ she said.

‘No?’

‘Skirnir leaves fighting ships alone, unless he outnumbers them by four or five to one.’

I gazed at the Sea-Raven. ‘You said he had sixteen ships like that?’

‘Two years ago,’ she said, ‘he had sixteen about that size, and two larger boats.’

‘That was two years ago,’ I said grimly. We had come into Skirnir’s lair where we would be grossly outnumbered, but I reckoned he would still be wary of us. He would learn that a Viking ship was in his waters, and he would fear that an attack on us might bring other Vikings to take revenge. Would it cross his mind that Uhtred of Bebbanburg might have risked a winter voyage? Even if not, he would surely be curious about Lief Thorrson, and would not relax till that curiosity had been satisfied.

I ordered the wolf’s head taken from the prow, then turned Seolferwulf towards the mainland shore. The Sea-Raven made no move to intercept us, but she did start to follow us, though when I checked the oars, as if waiting for her to catch up, she veered away. We rowed on and she fell out of sight behind us.

I wanted a place to hide, but there was too much shipping for that to be possible. Wherever we took shelter some local boat would see us, and the report would be passed from ship to ship until it reached Skirnir. If we were indeed a Danish ship on passage, going home for the dark winter nights, he would expect us to be gone from his waters in two or three days, so the longer we lingered, the greater his suspicion. And here, in the treacherous shoal waters of the inner sea, we were the rat and Skirnir the wolf.

We rowed north and east all day. We went slowly. Skirnir would hear that we were doing what he anticipated, making passage, and he would expect us to seek shelter for the night. We found that shelter in a creek on the mainland shore, though the tangle of marsh, sand and inlets hardly deserved to be called a shore. It was a place of waterfowl, reeds and hovels. A small village lay on the creek’s southern bank, merely a dozen cottages and a small wooden church. It was a fishing community, and the folk watched Seolferwulf nervously, fearing we might come ashore to steal what little they possessed. Instead we purchased eel and herring from them, paying with Frankish silver, and we carried a barrel of Dunholm’s ale to the village.

I took six men with me, leaving the remainder on Seolferwulf. All the men I took were Ragnar’s Danes and we boasted of a successful summer cruise in the lands far to the south. ‘Our ship has a belly of gold and silver,’ I crowed, and the villagers just stared at us, trying to imagine the life of men who sailed to steal treasure from far shores. I let the ale-loosened conversation turn to Skirnir, though I learned little enough. He had men, he had ships, he had family, and he ruled the inner sea. He was evidently no fool. He would let fighting ships like Seolferwulf pass unmolested, but any other vessel had to pay to use the safe channels inside the islands where he had his lair. If a shipmaster could not pay, then he forfeited his cargo, his ship and probably his life. ‘So they all pay,’ a man said glumly.

‘Who does Skirnir pay?’ I demanded.

‘Lord?’ he asked, not understanding the question.

‘Who allows him to be here?’ I asked, but they did not know the answer. ‘There must be a lord of this land,’ I explained, gesturing at the darkness beyond the fire, but if there was such a lord who permitted Skirnir to rule the sea then these villagers did not know of him. Even the village priest, a fellow as hairy and dirt-matted as his parishioners, did not know if there was a lord of the marshes. ‘So what does Skirnir want of you?’ I asked him.

‘We have to give him food, lord,’ the priest said.

‘And men,’ one of the villagers added.

‘Men?’

‘The young men go to him, lord. They serve on his ships.’

‘They go willingly?’

‘He pays silver,’ a villager said grudgingly.

‘He takes girls too,’ the priest said.

‘So he pays his men with silver and women?’

‘Yes, lord.’

They did not know how many ships Skirnir possessed, though the priest was certain he only had two the size of Seolferwulf. We heard the same things the next night when we stopped at another village in another creek on that treeless shore. We had rowed all day, the mainland to our right and the islands to our north and west. Skade had pointed to Zegge, but from our distance it looked little different from any other island. Many of them had mounds, the terpen, but we were so far off that we could see no detail. Sometimes only the shimmering dark shape of a terpen showing at the sea’s edge betrayed that there was an island just beyond the horizon.

‘So what do we do?’ Finan asked me that night.

‘I don’t know,’ I admitted.

He grinned. The water lapped at the Seolferwulf’s hull. We slept aboard her and most of the crew had already swathed themselves in cloaks and had lain down between the benches while Skade, Finan, Osferth and Rollo, who was the leader of Ragnar’s men, talked with me on the steering platform.

‘Skirnir has around four hundred men,’ I said.

‘Maybe four hundred and fifty,’ Skade said.

‘So we kill six men apiece,’ Rollo said. He was an easygoing man like Ragnar, with a round and guileless face, though that was deceiving for, though he was young, he had already earned a reputation as a formidable fighter. He was called Rollo the Hairy, not just because he wore his fair hair down to his waist, but because he had woven the locks of hair cut from his dead enemies into a thick sword belt. ‘I wish Saxons would grow their hair longer,’ he had grumbled to me as we crossed the sea.

‘If they did,’ I had said, ‘you’d have ten sword belts.’

‘I already have seven,’ he said, and grinned.

‘How many men on Zegge?’ I now asked Skade.

‘No more than a hundred.’

Osferth spat out a fish bone. ‘You’re thinking of attacking Zegge directly, lord?’

‘It won’t work,’ I said, ‘we won’t find our way through the shoals.’ One thing I had learned from the villagers was that Zegge was surrounded by shallow waters, that the channels shifted with the sand and tide, and that none of the passages was marked.

‘What then?’ Osferth asked.

A star fell. It scratched a flicker of light across the darkness and was gone, and with its fall the answer came to me. I had been thinking that I would attack Skirnir’s ships one by one, destroying the small ships and so weakening him, but within a day or two he would realise what was happening and he would use his larger ships to destroy us. There was no safe way to attack Skirnir. He had found a perfect refuge in the islands, and I would need ten ships like Seolferwulf to challenge him there.

So I had to lure him out of his perfect refuge. I smiled. ‘You’re going to betray me,’ I told Osferth.

‘I am?’

‘Who’s your father?’

‘You know who my father is,’ he said resentfully. He never liked being reminded that he was Alfred’s bastard.

‘And your father is old,’ I said, ‘and his chosen heir is scarcely weaned, and you are a warrior. You want gold.’

‘I do?’

‘You want gold to raise men, because you want to be King of Wessex.’

Osferth snorted at that. ‘I don’t,’ he said.

‘You do now,’ I said, ‘because you’re the bastard son of a king and you have a warrior’s reputation. And tomorrow you betray me.’

I told him how.

Nothing great is done without risk, but there are times I look back on those days and am amazed at the risk we ran in Frisia. It was, in its small way, like luring Harald to Fearnhamme, because again I divided my forces, and again I risked everything on the assumption that my enemy would do exactly what I wished him to do. And once again the lure was Skade.

She was so beautiful. It was a sinuous dark beauty. To look at her was to want her, to know her was to distrust her, but the distrust was ever conquered by that extraordinary beauty. Her face was high-boned, smooth-skinned, large-eyed and full-mouthed. Her black hair was lustrous, her body was languorous. Of course many girls are beautiful, but life is hard on a woman. Childbirth racks her body like storms, and the never-ending work of pounding grains and spinning yarn takes its toll on that early loveliness, yet Skade, even though she had lived longer than twenty years, had kept her fresh beauty. She knew it too, and it mattered to her, for it had carried her from a widow’s poor house to the high tables of long-beamed mead halls. She liked to say that she had been sold to Skirnir, but in truth she had welcomed him, then been disappointed by him because, for all the treasure he amassed, he had no ambitions beyond the Frisian Islands. He had found a plump patch for piracy, and it made no sense to Skirnir to sail far away to seek a plumper patch, and so Skade had found Harald, who promised her Wessex, and now she had found me.

‘She’s using you,’ Brida had told me in Dunholm.

‘I’m using her,’ I had answered.

‘There are a dozen whores here who’ll prove cheaper,’ Brida had retorted scornfully.

So Skade was using me, but for what? She was demanding half her husband’s hoard, but what would she do with it? When I asked her, she shrugged as if the question was unimportant, but late that night, before Osferth’s feigned betrayal, she spoke with me. Why did I want her husband’s money?

‘You know why.’

‘To take your fortress back?’

‘Yes.’

She lay silent for a while. The water made its small noise along Seolferwuf’s strakes. I could hear the snores of my men, the shifting feet of the sentries in the prow and above our heads on the steering platform. ‘And what then?’ she asked.

‘I will be the Lord of Bebbanburg,’ I said.

‘As Skirnir is Lord of Zegge?’

‘There was a time,’ I said, ‘when the Lord of Bebbanburg ruled far into the north and all the way down to the Humbre.’

‘They ruled Northumbria?’

‘Yes.’

I was bewitched by her. My ancestors had never ruled Northumbria, merely the northern part of that kingdom when it was divided between two thrones, but I was laying imaginary tribute at her feet. I was holding out the prospect of her being a queen, for that was what Skade wanted. She wanted to rule, and for that she needed a man who could lead warriors, and for the moment she believed I was that man.

‘Guthred rules Northumbria now?’ she asked.

‘And he’s mad,’ I said, ‘and he’s sick.’

‘And when he dies?’

‘Another man will be king,’ I said.

She slid a long thigh up mine, caressed a hand across my chest and kissed my shoulder. ‘Who?’ she asked.

‘Whoever is strongest,’ I said.

She kissed me again, then she lay still, dreaming. And I dreamed of Bebbanburg, of its windswept halls, its small fields and its tough, dour people. And I thought of the risk we must run in the dawn.

Earlier that night, under the cover of darkness, we had loaded a small boat with mail coats, weapons, helmets and my iron-bound chest. We had carried that precious cargo to the uninhabited northern side of the creek and hidden it among reeds. Two men stayed to guard it, and their orders were to stay concealed.

In the morning, as the fishermen waded to their moored ships, we began the argument. We shouted, we bellowed insults, and then, as the villagers paused in their tasks to watch Seolferwulf, we began to fight. Swords clashed, there was the thump of steel on shield-wood, the screams of injured men, though none was really hurt. Some of my men were laughing at the pretence, but from the creek’s shore it would have all looked real, and slowly a part of the crew was driven to Seolferwulf’s stern where they began to leap to safety. I was one of them. I wore no mail and the only weapon I had was Wasp-Sting and I held onto her as I leaped. Skade jumped with me. Our ship was anchored on the creek’s southern side, away from the deeper water in the channel’s centre, and none of us needed to swim. I floundered for a moment, then my feet found the muddy bottom and I grabbed hold of Skade and dragged her towards the village. The men remaining on Seolferwulf jeered at us, and Osferth hurled a spear that came perilously close to me. ‘Go and die!’ Osferth shouted.

‘And take your whore with you!’ Finan added. Another spear splashed into the creek, and I seized it as we struggled up the shelving beach.

There were thirty-two of us, just under half the crew, while the rest had stayed aboard Seolferwulf. We came ashore soaking wet, none of us in mail and some without even a weapon. The villagers gaped at us. The fishermen had paused to watch the fight, but now some headed out to sea, but not before I made certain they had a good view of Skade. She wore a thin linen shift that clung wetly to her shivering body, and she had gold at her neck and on her wrists. The villagers might not have recognised her, but they would remember her.

A pair of fishing boats still lay at their moorings and I waded out to one and hauled myself aboard. Back on the beach my small band was gathering round a herring-smoking fire to dry themselves. I had Rollo and ten of his men, the rest were my warriors.

We watched as Osferth’s men hauled up the stone anchor, then took Seolferwulf out of the creek. She used ten oars on each side, and she went slowly. I felt a moment of alarm as she turned northeast and her pale hull was hidden from me by the intervening dunes. A ship is a kind of fortress, and I had abandoned her, and I touched Thor’s hammer in a silent plea that the gods would preserve us.

Skirnir, I knew, would hear of the fight. He would learn that Seolferwulf was half-crewed, and he would hear of the tall, black-haired, gold-draped girl. He would know that we had been abandoned without mail and with few weapons. Thus I baited him. I had thrown down the raw meat and now waited for the wolf to come to the trap.

We used the fishing boat to cross the creek and made a driftwood fire on the beach. We stayed all day, like men who had no plan. It began to rain in the late morning, and after a while the rain became harder, crashing down from a low grey sky. We piled wood on the fire, the flames fighting the downpour that hid us as we brought back the weapons and mail we had hidden the night before. I now had thirty-four men, and I sent two of them to explore the creek’s higher reaches. Both men had been raised on the banks of the Temes where it widens into the sea, and the coast there is not unlike the shore where we were stranded. They could both swim, both were at ease in the marshes, and I told them what I wanted and they set off to find it. They came back in the late afternoon, just as the rain was easing.

In the early evening, when the fishing boats returned on an incoming tide, I took six men over the creek and used a handful of silver scraps to buy fish. We all had swords, and the villagers treated us with a cautious respect. ‘What lies that way?’ I asked them, pointing up the creek.

They knew there was a monastery inland, but it was far off, and only three of the men had ever seen the place. ‘It’s a whole day’s journey,’ they said with awe.

‘Well I can’t go to sea,’ I said, ‘or Skirnir will catch us.’

They said nothing to that. The very name of Skirnir was frightening.

‘I hear he’s a rich man,’ I remarked.

One of the old men made the sign of the cross. I had seen wooden idols in the village, but the folk knew of Christianity too, and his quick gesture told me that I had frightened him. ‘His treasure, lord,’ he told me quietly, ‘is in a great mound, and a huge dragon guards it.’

‘A dragon?’

‘A fire dragon, lord, with black wings to shadow the moon.’ He made the sign of the cross again, then, to make certain, tugged a hammer amulet from beneath his filthy shirt and kissed it.

We took the food back to our side of the creek and then, on the last of the flood, we rowed the fishing boat inland. It was crowded and our small boat floated low. The villagers watched until we vanished, and still we rowed, gliding between reed beds and mudbanks until we reached the place that my two scouts had chosen. They had done well. The place was exactly what I wanted, an island of dunes isolated in a tangle of water, and accessible only in two places. We grounded the boat and lit another driftwood fire. The day was ending. The dark clouds had blown westwards so that Skirnir’s sea was in deep shadow, while to the east the land glowed beneath the dying sun. I could see the smoke of three settlements and, far on the horizon, some low hills where the tangle of marsh and sand ended and the higher land began. I assumed the monastery was in those hills, but it was too far away to be seen. Then the sun slid below the rain clouds and everything was in shadow, but a call from Rollo made me turn to see ships approaching the coast in the last of the daylight. Two large ships came first. They came from the direction of the islands, and then a third ship, paler than the first two and travelling much slower because she had fewer oarsmen.

Seolferwulf was the last of the three ships, while the darker pair belonged to Skirnir.

The wolf had come for his bitch.

I had told Finan to play the madman, a thing he could do well. Not mad as in moon-touched, but dangerously mad as though one wrong word could send him into a welter of killing. Finan, if you did not know him well, was frightening. He was small and wiry, his strength tensed in a thin frame, while his face was all bone and scar. To look at Finan was to see a man who had endured battle and slavery and extreme hardship, a man who might have nothing to lose, and I counted on that to persuade Skirnir to treat Seolferwulf’s crew with caution. There was very little to stop Skirnir simply taking Seolferwulf and slaughtering its men, except the possibility that he might lose his own men in the capture. True, he would not lose many, but even twenty or thirty casualties would hurt him. Besides, Osferth and Finan brought him a gift and, as far as Skirnir knew, they were ready to help deliver that gift. I did not doubt that Skirnir would want to take Seolferwulf for his own, but guessed he would wait until he had gained Skade and my death before he made that attempt. So I told Finan to frighten him.

Osferth and Finan, once they left the creek, took Seolferwulf up the coast and then, as if they did not know what to do, rowed to the centre of the inner sea and there let the ship roll on the small waves. ‘We saw the fishing boats racing over the water,’ Finan told me later, ‘and knew they were going to Zegge.’

Skirnir, of course, heard about the fight in the creek and how the Viking ship was now wallowing aimlessly, and curiosity made him send one of his two large ships to investigate, though he did not go himself. His youngest brother talked with Finan and Osferth, and heard how they had mutinied against Uhtred of Bebbanburg, and heard too that Uhtred had Skade, and that now Uhtred, Skade and a small group of men were stranded among the tangle of islands and creeks. ‘I let the brother come aboard,’ Finan told me later, ‘and I showed him the heap of mail and weapons. I said they were all yours.’

‘So he thought we were weaponless?’

‘I told him you had a wee sword,’ Finan said, ‘but just a wee one.’ Grageld, Skirnir’s brother, did not count the heaped coats, nor even the tangle of swords, spears and axes. If he had, he might have suspected Finan’s lies, because there were only enough mail coats and weapons to equip Finan’s shrunken crew. Instead he simply believed what the Irishman told him. ‘So then,’ Finan went on, ‘we spun him our tale.’

That tale began with truth. Finan told Grageld that we had sailed to the Frisian Islands in an attempt to rob Skirnir, but then he decorated the truth with fantasy. ‘I said we learned the gold was too well guarded, so we insisted you sold Skade back to her husband. But you wouldn’t agree to that. I said we all hated the bitch, and he said we were right to hate her.’

‘Grageld didn’t like her?’

‘None of them liked her, lord, but Skirnir was stricken by her. The brother thought she’d cast a spell on Skirnir.’

Finan told me this tale in Skirnir’s hall, and I remember looking across at Skade in the light of the great fire that burned in the central hearth. She was an aglæcwif, I thought, a sorceress. Years ago Father Beocca told me a story from the olden days, from the far-off days when men built in shining marble, the days before the world turned dark and dirty. For once it was not a tale about God or his prophets, but about a queen who ran away from her husband because she fell in love with another man, and the husband took a great fleet of ships to get her back, and in the end a whole city was burned and all its men were killed, and all because of that long-dead aglæcwif. The poets say we fight for glory, for gold, for reputation and for our homes, but in my life I have just as often fought for a woman. They have the power. I frequently heard Ælswith, Alfred’s sour wife who resented that Wessex never granted the title of queen, complain that it was a man’s world. So it may be, but women have power over men. It is for women that the long fleets cross the salt seas, and for women that the proud halls burn, and for women that the sword-warriors are buried.

‘Well, of course, Grageld wanted us to go to Skirnir,’ Finan said, ‘but we said no. He asked what we wanted, and we said we’d come for the reward because we wanted to make Osferth king and needed silver to do that.’

‘He believed that?’

‘Do you need a reason to want silver?’ Finan asked, then shrugged, ‘he believed us, lord, and Osferth was persuasive.’

‘When I told the story,’ Osferth put in wryly, ‘I found myself believing it.’

I laughed at that. ‘You want to be king, Osferth?’

He smiled, and when he smiled he resembled his father so much that it was uncanny. ‘No, lord,’ he said gently.

‘And I’m not really sure Grageld knew who Alfred was,’ Finan went on. ‘He knew the name well enough, and he knew his coins, of course, but he seemed to think Wessex was a way off. So I said it was a country where the silver grew on the ash trees, and that its king was old and tired, and that Osferth would be the new king and he would be a friend to Skirnir.’

‘He believed all this?’

‘He must have done! The brother wanted us to go to Zegge, but I said no. I was not taking Seolferwulf through those channels, lord, for her to be trapped inside, and so we waited outside and Skirnir came out with the second ship and they put the boats either side of us and I could see they were thinking of capturing us.’

Which is what I had feared. I imagined Seolferwulf with her shrunken crew flanked by Skirnir’s two long ships packed with men.

‘But we’d thought about that,’ Finan said happily, ‘and we’d hoisted the anchor stone on the sail yard.’ Our anchor stones are huge round wheels, the size of millstones, with a hole carved in their centre, and Finan had hoisted Seolferwulf’s anchor by using the sail yard as a crane, and the message of that poised boulder was plain enough. If either of Skirnir’s ships attacked, then the stone would be swung over that ship, the line holding it would be cut by an axe, and the stone would fall to crash through the attacking ship’s bilge. Skirnir would gain one ship and lose another, and so, sensibly, he had pulled his ships away and pretended he had never even thought about capturing Seolferwulf.

‘The anchor stone was a good idea,’ I said.

‘Oh it was Osferth who thought of it, lord,’ Finan admitted, ‘and we had the thing ready before they even came out to us.’

‘And Skirnir believed your tale?’

‘He wanted to believe it, lord, so he did! He wanted Skade, lord. He saw nothing but Skade, sir, you could see it in his eyes.’

‘And so you sailed to capture her.’

‘And so we did, lord,’ Finan said with a smile.

The three ships reached the creek as both the day and the tide ebbed. I knew Skirnir would not come till the morning flood had deepened the water in the creek, but I still posted sentries. Nothing disturbed them. We slept, though it seemed we did not. I remember lying awake, thinking I would never sleep, but dreams came all the same. I saw Gisela smiling, then had a waking dream of men with shields and of spears flying from their hands. I lay for a moment in the sand, watching the stars, then I stood, stretching the stiffness from my arms and legs. ‘How many men does he have, lord?’ Cerdic asked me. He was reviving the fire, and the driftwood flamed bright. Cerdic did not lack bravery, but in the night he had been haunted by the memory of those large ships coming to the coast.

‘He has two crews,’ I said. I saw that I had been the last to wake and men now drew towards the fire to listen to me. ‘Two crews,’ I said, ‘so he has at least one hundred men, maybe a hundred and fifty?’

‘Jesus,’ Cerdic said quietly, touching the cross he wore.

‘But they’re pirates,’ Rollo said loudly.

‘Tell them,’ I ordered, pleased that Ragnar’s man understood what we faced.

Rollo stood in the flamelight. ‘Skirnir’s men are like wild dogs,’ he said, ‘and they hunt what is weak, never what is strong. They don’t fight on land and they don’t know the shield wall. We do.’

‘He calls himself the Sea-Wolf,’ I said, ‘but Rollo is right. He’s a dog, not a wolf. We’re the wolves! We’ve faced the best warriors of Denmark and Britain and we’ve sent them to their graves! We are men of the shield wall, and before the sun climbs to its highest Skirnir will be in his grave!’

Not that we saw any sun because the day clouded over with the grey dawn. The clouds ran swift and low towards the sea, shrouding the marshes. The water rose with the tide, flooding the margins of the land where we had our refuge. I climbed to the top of the dune from where I watched the three ships come slowly up the creek. Skirnir was riding the flooding tide, rowing till his beast-headed ship grounded, then waiting for more water to carry him a few oar strokes farther. His two ships led and Seolferwulf followed, and I laughed at that. Skirnir, confident in his numbers and blinded by the prospect of regaining Skade, did not think for a moment that he had enemies behind him.

And what did Skirnir see? He was in the prow of the leading ship and he saw only five men standing on the dune, and none of the five was in mail. He thought he came to capture a bedraggled band of fugitives and so he was confident, and, as he drew closer, I called for Skade to stand beside me. ‘If he captured you,’ I asked her, ‘what would he do?’

‘Humiliate me,’ she said, ‘shame me, then kill me.’

‘And that’s worth silver to him?’ I asked, thinking of the reward he had offered for Skade’s return.

‘Pride is expensive,’ she said.

‘Why wouldn’t he just keep you as a slave?’

‘Because of that pride,’ she said. ‘He once had a slave girl killed because she betrayed him. He gave her to his men first, let them enjoy her, then he tied her to a stake and skinned her alive. He made her mother listen to her screams as she died.’

I remembered Edwulf, skinned alive in his church, but I said nothing of that as I watched Skirnir’s ship come still closer. The creek became too narrow to allow his oar-banks to dip in the water, so now his ship was being poled forward. The tide was rising slowly. As it neared its height it would rise more swiftly, and then Skirnir would know he had run out of water, but the creek, though narrow, was proving to have more than enough depth for his ships. ‘It’s time to dress,’ I said.

I went down the dune’s far side, hidden now from Skirnir, and Oswi, my servant, helped me into my mail. The leather lining stank in my nostrils as I pulled it over my head, but it felt good to have that familiar weight on my shoulders. Oswi put the sword belt around my waist and buckled it. ‘You stand behind me,’ I told him.

‘Yes, lord.’

‘If it all goes wrong, boy,’ I said, ‘you run like a hare. You go inland, find the monastery and ask for shelter.’

‘Yes, lord.’

‘But it won’t go wrong,’ I told him.

‘I know it won’t, lord,’ he said stoutly. He was eleven years old, an orphan who had been found scavenging in the mud beneath the terrace of my Lundene house. One of my men had accused him of theft and brought him to me so I could order a whipping, but I had liked the fire in the boy’s eyes and so I had made him my servant and was now teaching him sword-craft. One day, like my previous servant, Sihtric, Oswi would become a warrior.

I went to the dune’s edge and saw that Skirnir’s ship was passing our beached and abandoned fishing craft. He was near enough to shout insults and he was bellowing at Skade, who now stood alone at the dune’s summit. He was calling her a whore, a turd of the devil, and promising that she would scream her way into hell.

‘Time to show ourselves,’ I said to Rollo, and picked up my linden shield, which had Bebbanburg’s wolf’s head painted around its iron boss.

Rollo carried a war axe and he kissed the wide blade. ‘I’ll feed you soon, my darling,’ he promised the axe.

‘They’re close!’ Skade called from the dune.

The island we had chosen was shaped like a crescent moon with the dune making the moon’s high belly. The horns of the crescent touched the creek, and cradled in its belly was marshland. So the dune could be approached from either horn, while the marsh, about a hundred paces wide and fifty paces at its deepest, was an obstacle. Men could cross that marshland, but it would have been slow work. The horn nearest to the sea was the wider of the two, a natural causeway leading to the sandy island, but ten men could bar that causeway easily, and I led twenty, leaving the remainder under Rollo’s command. Their task was to protect the farther horn, but they were not to show themselves until Skirnir sent men to use that second causeway.

And what did Skirnir see? He saw a shield wall. He saw men in helmets and mail, men with bright weapons, men who were not the desperate fugitives he expected, but warriors dressed for battle, and he must have known that Finan and Osferth had lied to him, but he must have thought it was a small lie, a lie about weapons and mail, and his desperate hopes to regain Skade still persuaded him to believe the larger lie. Maybe he thought they had simply been mistaken? And still he was confident, because we were so few and he had so many, though the sight of a shield wall gave him pause.

Skirnir’s helmsman was nosing the foremost ship into the bank when we appeared, and Skirnir immediately held up his hand to stop the men poling with the long oars. Skirnir had thought he would have little to do on that overcast morning, merely storm ashore and capture a small band of dispirited men, but our shields, weapons and close-linked wall made him reconsider. I saw him turn and shout at the men poling his ship. He pointed up the creek and it was obvious he wanted the ship taken to the farther horn so that he could surround us. But then, to my surprise, he leaped off the bows. He and fifteen men splashed into the creek and waded ashore as the ship poled on. Skirnir and his small band was now about fifty paces away, but they would be swiftly reinforced by the crew of his second ship that was approaching fast. I stayed where I was.

Skirnir did not look back to see Seolferwulf, and would he have been alarmed if he had? She was the last of the three ships and her bows were filled with mailed and helmeted men. I could see Finan’s black shield.

‘Uhtred?’ Skirnir shouted.

‘I am Uhtred!’

‘Give me the whore!’ he bellowed. He was a heavy man with a face as flat as a flounder, small eyes and a long black beard that half covered his mail. ‘Give her to me and I’ll go away! You can live out your miserable life. Just give me the whore!’

‘I haven’t finished with her!’ I called. I glanced left and saw that Skirnir’s own ship had almost reached the second causeway. That crew would start landing in a moment. Meanwhile his second ship had grounded just behind Skirnir and the crew were tumbling over the side. There was not sufficient room on the small beach for more than thirty of them, so the rest, maybe another thirty men, waited on the ship. Seolferwulf crept closer.

‘Oswi?’ I said softly.

‘Lord?’

‘Fetch Rollo now.’

I felt the exultation of victory. I had seventy men, including those on Seolferwulf, and Skirnir had done what I wanted, he had divided his forces. Sixty or seventy of his men were facing us at the first causeway, some still aboard their ship, while the rest had gone to the other landing place and though, once they were ashore, they would be able to attack us from behind, I expected to be master of the island by then. I heard Seolferwulf thump her bows on the grounded boat, then I gave the command. ‘Forward!’

We went as warriors, confident and disciplined. We could have charged as we had at Fearnhamme, but I wanted fear to work its wicked decay on Skirnir’s men, and so we went slowly, the shields of our front rank overlapping, while the men behind beat blades against their shields in time to our steps. ‘Kill the scum!’ I shouted and my men took up the shout. ‘Kill the scum, kill the scum!’ We went step by step, slow and inexorable, and the blades between our shields promised death.

We were just eight men broad, but, as the causeway widened, Rollo brought his men onto our right. Most of the front rank carried spears, while I had Serpent-Breath. She was not the best blade for the close work of shield wall fighting, but I reckoned Skirnir’s men would not stand long because they were not used to this kind of warfare. Their skill was the sudden rush onto a half-defended boat, the wild killing of frightened men, but now they faced sword-warriors and spearmen and behind them was Finan. And Finan now attacked.

He left just two boys on Seolferwulf. The tide was still flooding, so the current was holding Seolferwulf against the second of Skirnir’s skull-prowed ships and Finan led his men over her bows and up between the rowing benches, and they were yelling a high-pitched scream of killing, and maybe for a moment, just for a moment, Skirnir believed they had come to help him. But then Finan began the slaughter.

And we struck at the same moment. ‘Now!’ I shouted, and my shield wall lunged forward, spears seeking foemen, blades driving into flesh, and I slammed Serpent-Breath under a Frisian shield and twisted her long blade in the man’s soft belly. ‘Kill them!’ I bellowed, and Finan echoed the cry.

Spear-blades buried themselves in Frisian flesh. Men then dropped the spears’ long ash shafts and drew swords or took axes from the men behind. Skirnir’s men had not broken because they could not break. They were confined in a small space and my attack pushed them back against their dark ship’s bows, while Finan’s assault on the ship drove the remaining crew towards the prow platform. We pushed forward, giving them no room to fight, and we did the grim work of shield fighting. Cerdic was on my right and he used the blade of his axe like a hook to pull down the rim of the man to his front and, as soon as the shield was down, I lunged Serpent-Breath into the enemy’s throat, and Cerdic drove the axe blade against the man’s face, crushing it, then reached to hook down another shield. Rollo was screaming in Danish. He had dropped his shield and wielded his axe two-handed as he chanted a hymn to Thor. Rorik, one of the Danes who served me, was on his knees behind me, using a spear to rip open the legs of the Frisian pirates, and when they fell we killed them.

It was slaughter in a small space. We had given hours, days, weeks and months to practising this kind of fight. It does not matter how often a man stands in a shield wall, he will only live if he has rehearsed it, drilled it and practised it, and Skirnir’s men had never trained as we did. They were seamen, and some did not even have shields because a great round slab of iron-bossed wood is a cumbersome thing to carry in a fight aboard a ship where the footing is uncertain and the rowing benches are obstacles. They were untrained and ill-equipped and so we killed them. They were in terror. They did not see our faces. Most of our helmets have cheek-pieces and so the enemy saw men of metal, metal-masked, metal-clad, and the steel of our weapons lanced at them, and we went relentlessly forward, metal-clad warriors behind overlapping shields, our blades remorseless until, on that grey morning, blood spread bright in the salt tide creek.

Finan had the harder job, but Finan was a warrior of renown who took joy in hard fighting, and he led his men up the dark boat and screamed as he killed. He sang the song of the sword, keening as he fed his blade, and Rollo, standing thigh-deep in the creek, axe swinging in murderous blows, blocked the enemy’s escape. The Frisians, transported from confidence to bowel-loosening fear, began to drop their weapons. They knelt, they shouted for mercy, and I shouted at my rear rank to turn and be ready to face the men who had taken Skirnir’s own ship higher up the creek to come around our rear.

Those men appeared about the dune just in time to see that the fighting was over. A few had sensibly jumped over the ship’s farther side and struggled into the swamp beyond, but most of Skirnir’s force were dead or prisoners. One of those prisoners was Skirnir himself, who was backed against the grounded strakes of his second ship with a spear-blade held at his beard. Cerdic was pressing the blade just enough to keep the big man still. ‘Shall I kill him, lord?’

‘Not yet,’ I said, distracted. I was watching the newly arrived enemy. ‘Rollo? Keep them at a distance.’

Rollo formed his men into a shield wall. He shouted at the uncertain Frisians, inviting them to come and taste the blood already on his blades, but they did not move.

A man screamed. He was a Frisian lying at the sand’s edge and his legs were thrashing in the shallow, blood-tinged water. He had been wounded, and Skade now knelt beside him and was driving a dagger slowly into one eye and so through to his brain. ‘Stop that!’ I shouted. The man was mewing in a high, pitiable voice, the ooze of his punctured eye spilling down his blood-laced cheek.

She turned to look at me and there was a wildness in her face like the savagery of a cornered beast. ‘I hate them,’ she said, and edged the dagger in again so that the man screamed and lost control of his bowels.

‘Sihtric!’ I snarled, and Sihtric stepped to the man and drove his sword hard into his throat to end his misery.

‘I want to kill them all,’ Skade hissed at me. She was shuddering. ‘And him!’ she pointed to Skirnir, ‘especially him!’

‘She’s crazed,’ Finan said softly. He had jumped down to the beach beside me and now dipped his blade in the water to wash the blood away. ‘Sweet Jesus Christ,’ he said, ‘she’s as crazy as a bitch in heat.’

My men were staring at Skade in horror. It is one thing to kill in battle, but an enemy is a warrior too, and in defeat he deserves respect. I have killed often, and the killing can go on long after the fighting has finished, but that is the blood lust and battle fear that frenzies men who endure the shield wall, and when the lust dies then mercy takes its place. ‘You’re not going to let them live!’ Skade spat at me.

‘Cerdic,’ I said, not turning around to look at him, ‘make it quick!’

I heard, but did not see, Skirnir die. The spear-blade was thrust so hard that it pierced his throat and then drove into the planks of the ship. ‘I wanted to kill him!’ Skade shrieked.

I ignored her. Instead I walked past Rollo to approach the undefeated Frisians. These men were Skirnir’s own crew, maybe sixty in all, who watched me come in silence. I had dropped my shield so they could see the blood spattered on my mail and see the blood streaked across my helmet’s mask and see the blood congealing on Serpent-Breath’s blade. My helmet was surmounted by a silver wolf, my belt had plates of gold, and my arm rings shone through their gloss of blood. They saw a warlord and I walked to within ten paces of them to show that I had no fear of pirates.

‘I am Uhtred of Bebbanburg,’ I said, ‘and I give you a choice. You can live or you can die.’

Rollo, behind me, had started the shield music. His men were beating blades against linden wood in the dark rhythm of death’s promise.

‘We are Danes,’ I told the Frisians, ‘and we are Saxons, and we are warriors who love to fight. In our halls at night we chant the tales of the men we have killed, of the women we have widowed and of the children we have orphaned. So make your choice! Either give me a new song to sing or else lay down your weapons.’

They lay down their weapons. I made them take off their mail, those that possessed it, or else their leather tunics. I took their boots, their belts, their armour and their weapons and we piled that plunder in Seolferwulf, and then we burned both of Skirnir’s long ships. They burned well, great plumes of flame climbing the masts beneath churning black smoke that drifted up into the low clouds.

Skirnir had come with one hundred and thirty-one men. We had killed twenty-three of those, while another sixteen were grievously wounded. One of Rollo’s men had lost an eye to a spear thrust, and Ælric, a Saxon in my service, lay dying. He had fought beside Finan and had tripped on a rower’s bench and had taken an axe blow in the back, and I knelt beside him on the sand and held his hand firm around his sword’s hilt and promised I would give his widow gold and raise his children as though they were my own. He heard me, though he could not speak back, and I held his hand until the noise rattled in his throat and his body quivered as his soul went to the long darkness. We took his corpse away with us and buried him at sea. He was a Christian, and Osferth said a prayer over the dead Ælric before we tipped him into eternity. We took another corpse with us, Skirnir’s, that we stripped naked and hung from our wolf’s-head prow to show that we had conquered.

We poled Seolferwulf back down the creek on the ebbing tide. When the creek widened we turned and rowed her, towing the small fishing craft that I abandoned beside the village. Then we went out to sea and Seolferwulf shuddered to the first small waves. The grey clouds that had covered the place of slaughter were at last shredding, letting a watery sunlight beat down on the choppy sea. ‘You shouldn’t have let them live,’ Skade told me.

‘Skirnir’s men?’ I asked. ‘Why kill them? They were beaten.’

‘They should all be dead,’ she said vengefully, then turned a gaze of utter fury on me. ‘You left two of his brothers alive! They should be dead!’

‘I let them live,’ I said. Without Skirnir and his large boats they were harmless, though Skade did not see it that way.

‘Milksop!’ she spat at me.

I stared at her. ‘Careful, woman,’ I said, and she went sulkily silent.

We had brought just one prisoner with us, the shipmaster from Skirnir’s own vessel. He was an old man, over forty, and years of squinting at the sun-reflecting sea had made his eyes mere crinkled slits in a face beaten dark by salt and weather. He would be our guide. ‘If my ship so much as touches a sandbank,’ I told him, ‘I’ll let Skade kill you in her own way.’

Seolferwulf touched no sandbank as we rowed to Zegge. The channel was intricate, and misleading marks had been planted to lure attackers onto shoals, but the prisoner’s pure terror of Skade made him careful. We arrived in the early evening, feeling our way gently, and led by the corpse hanging at the bows. Spray had washed Skirnir’s carcass clean and gulls, smelling him, screamed as they wheeled in hungry frustration around our prow.

Men and women watched us pass through the crooked channel that twisted between two of the inner islands, and then we glided across sheltered water that reflected the settling sun in shivering gold. The watchers were Skirnir’s followers, but these men had not sailed with their lord in the dawn, and now they saw our proud shields that we had hung from Seolferwulf’s topmost strakes, and they saw the corpse dangling white from the rope, and none wanted to challenge us.

There were fewer people on Zegge than on the outer islands, because it was from Zegge that the two defeated crews had sailed, and where most of the dead, wounded or stranded men had lived. A crowd of women came to the grey wooden pier that jutted out beneath the mound which supported Skirnir’s hall. The women watched our boat approach, then some recognised the body that was our trophy and they all fled, dragging their children by the hands. Eight men, dressed in mail and carrying weapons, came from the hall, but when they saw my crew disembarking they ostentatiously put their weapons down. They knew now their lord was dead, and not one of them was minded to fight for his reputation.

And so, in the twilight of that day, we came to the hall on the mound of Zegge, and I stared up at its black bulk and thought of the dragon sleeping on his hoard of silver and gold. The high-roofed hall had great wooden horns at its eaves, horns that reared into the darkening sky where the first stars pricked the dusk.

I left fifteen men to guard the ship, then climbed the hill, seeing how the mound was made from great baulks of timber planted in a long rectangle that had been filled with sand, and on that first layer another smaller rectangle had been built, and then a third, and at the summit a final layer where a palisade stood, though it offered no defiance now, for its heavy wooden gate stood wide open. There was no fight left in Skirnir’s men. Their lord was dead.

The hall’s door was framed by a pair of vast curved bones that had come from some sea monster. I passed beneath them with a drawn sword with Rollo and Finan flanking me. A fire burned in the central hearth, spitting like a cat as salt-caked driftwood does. Skade came behind us and the waiting servants shivered at the sight of her. Skirnir’s steward, a plump man, bowed low to me. ‘Where’s the treasure?’ I asked harshly.

The steward was too frightened to answer and Skade thrust him aside. ‘Lanterns!’ she called to the servants, and small rushlamps were brought and in their paltry light she led me to a door at the back of the hall which opened onto a small square chamber heaped with sealskins. ‘He slept here,’ she said.

‘Above the dragon?’

‘He was the dragon,’ she said scornfully, ‘he was a pig and a dragon,’ and then she dropped to her knees and scrabbled the stinking skins aside. I called for Skirnir’s plump steward to help her. Finan looked at me, an eyebrow raised in expectation, and I could not resist a smile.

To take Bebbanburg I needed men. To storm that great stone wall and slaughter my uncle’s warriors, I needed men, and to buy men I needed gold. I needed silver. I needed a treasure guarded by a dragon to make that long dream come true, and so I smiled as Skade and the steward pulled away the high pile of pelts that covered the hiding place.

And then, in the light of the smoking lamps, the door was revealed.

It was a trapdoor of dark heavy wood into which an iron ring was set. I remember Father Beocca, years ago, telling me how he had visited a monastery in Sumorsæte and how the abbot had reverently showed him a crystal vial in which was kept milk from the Virgin Mary’s breasts. ‘I shivered, Uhtred,’ Beocca had told me earnestly, ‘I shook like a leaf in the wind. I dared not hold the flask for fear of dropping it! I shook!’

I do not think I shook at that moment, but I felt the same awe, the same sense of being close to something inexplicable. My future lay beneath that trapdoor. My hopes, my sons’ futures, my dreams of freedom beneath a northern sky, all lay so close. ‘Open it,’ I ordered, and my voice was hoarse, ‘open it.’

Rollo and the steward took hold of the ring. The trapdoor was stiff, jammed in its frame, and they needed to tug it hard to move it at all. Then, abruptly, the heavy door came free and the two men staggered as they dragged it aside.

I stepped forward and looked down.

And started laughing.

There was no dragon. I have never seen a dragon, though I am assured they exist and I have heard men describe those awful beasts with their malevolent scarlet eyes, flame-shooting mouths, questing necks and crackling wings the size of ship sails. They are the beasts of nightmare, and though I have sailed into the distant north, sailed to where the ice blanches the sky with its reflections, I have never been far enough north to the frost lands where dragons are said to roost.

There was no dragon in Skirnir’s pit, but there was a skeleton and some rats. The rats looked up startled, their tiny eyes winking back the flames of our inadequate lanterns, then they scuttled into cracks between the elm planks that lined the pit. Two rats were inside the ribcage of the dead man and they were the last to leave, first wriggling between the bones then slithering fast into their hiding place.

And as my eyes adjusted to the gloom I saw the coins and the silver shards. I heard them first, chinking under the feet of the rats, then I saw them, dully gleaming, spilling from the leather sacks that had held them. The rotting sacks had been gnawed by rats. ‘What’s the corpse?’ I asked.

‘A man who tried to steal Lord Skirnir’s treasure, lord,’ the steward answered in a whisper.

‘He was left here to die?’

‘Yes, lord. He was blinded first, then his sinews were cut, and he was put in the pit to die slowly.’

Skade smiled.

‘Bring it all out,’ I ordered Finan, then pushed the steward towards the hall. ‘You feed us tonight,’ I ordered him, ‘all of us.’

I went back into the hall. It had only one table, so that most men would have eaten on the rush-covered floor. It was dark now, the only light coming from the big fire that we fed with logs my men tore from the palisade. I sat at the table and watched as Skirnir’s treasure was laid before me. I had laughed when the pit was first opened, and that laughter had been scornful because, in the feeble light, the treasure had appeared so paltry. What had I expected? A glittering heap of gold, studded with precious stones?

The laughter was sour because Skirnir’s treasure was indeed paltry. He had boasted of his wealth, but the truth was hidden behind those boasts and beneath his stinking bed-skins. He was not poor, true, but his hoard was just what I should have expected from a man who did little except steal scraps of silver from small traders.

My men watched the table. It was important that they saw what they had won so they would know I did not cheat them when I divided the hoard. They mostly saw silver, but there were two pieces of gold, both thin torques made of twisted strands, and I put one in the pile for Rollo and his men, and kept the other for my followers. Then there were coins, mostly Frankish silver, but there were a few Saxon shillings and a handful of those mysterious coins that have curly writing no one can read and which are rumoured to come from some great empire to the east. There were four silver ingots, but the greatest part of the treasure was in silver shards. The northmen have no coinage, other than what they steal, and so they pay for their goods, when they pay at all, with silver scraps. A Viking will steal a silver bracelet, and when he needs to buy something he will hack the bracelet into shards that a merchant will weigh on scales. The steward brought us a scale and we weighed the silver and the coins. There was just over thirty pounds.

That was not to be despised. We would all go home richer. Yet my share of the treasure would hardly raise one crew of men for one season’s fighting. I stared at the divided treasure, the last silver shards still resting in the bowl of the scales, and knew that it would not bring me Bebbanburg. It would not give me an army. It would not buy the fulfilment of my dreams. I felt my spirits sink and thought of Ælfric’s laughter. My uncle would soon enough learn that I had voyaged, captured and been disappointed, and it was while I was thinking of his enjoyment that Skade chose to speak. ‘You said you would give me half,’ she demanded.

My fist crashed on the table so hard that the small piles of silver shuddered. ‘I said no such thing,’ I snarled.

‘You said. …’

I pointed at her, silencing her. ‘You want to go in the hole?’ I asked. ‘You want to live with the rats in the silver vault?’

My men smiled. Since coming to Frisia they had learned to dislike Skade and at that moment she began to hate me. I had begun to hate her earlier, when I saw the cruelty beneath her beauty. She was like a sword haunted by a spirit of greed, like a blade of shining beauty, but with a heart as dark as blood. Later that night she demanded her share again and I reminded her that though she had asked for half her husband’s treasure, I had never promised it. ‘And don’t think to curse me again,’ I told her, ‘because if you do, woman, I shall sell you into slavery, but not before I disfigure you. You want a scarred face? You want me to make you ugly? Then keep your curses to yourself.’

I do not know where she slept that night, nor did I care.

We left Zegge in the dawn. I burned the six smaller ships Skirnir had left in the harbour, but I did not burn the hall. Wind and tide would take care of it. The islands come and go, the channels change from year to year, and the sand shifts to make new islands. Folk live on those islands for a few years, and then the surging tides dissolve the land again. When I next saw the islands, many years later, Zegge was quite gone, as though it had never existed at all.

We went home, and we had fair weather for the crossing. The sun glinted off the sea, the sky was clear and the air cold. It was only as we approached the coast of Britain that the clouds came and the wind rose. It took me some time to find a landmark I knew, and then we had to row hard into a north wind to find the Tinan’s mouth and it was almost dark as we rowed Seolferwulf into the river beneath the ruined monastery. We beached her and next day we went to Dunholm.

I did not know it, but I was never to see Seolferwulf again.

She was a noble ship.

PART THREE

Battle’s Edge

The deep winter came and with it a fever. I have been lucky, rarely being ill, but a week after we reached Dunholm I began to shiver, then sweat, then feel as though a bear were clawing the insides of my skull. Brida made a bed for me in a small house where a fire burned day and night. That winter was cold, but there were moments when I thought my body was on fire, and then there were times when I shivered as if I were bedded in ice even though the fire roared in its stone hearth so fiercely that it scorched the roof beams. I could not eat. I grew weak. I woke in the night, and sometimes I thought of Gisela and of my lost children, and I wept. Ragnar told me I raved in my sleep, but I do not remember that madness, only that I was convinced I would die and so I made Brida tie my hand to Wasp-Sting’s hilt.

Brida brought me infusions of herbs in mead, she spooned honey into my mouth, and she made certain that the small house was guarded against Skade’s malevolence. ‘She hates you,’ she told me one cold night when the wind pulled at the thatch and bellied the leather curtain which served as a door.

‘Because I didn’t give her any silver?’

‘Because of that.’

‘There was no hoard,’ I said, ‘not as she described it.’

‘But she denies cursing you.’

‘What else can have caused this?’

‘We tied her to a post,’ Brida said, ‘and showed her the whip. She swore she had not cursed you.’

‘She would,’ I said bitterly.

‘And she still denied it when her back was bloody.’

I looked at Brida, dark-eyed, her face shadowed by her wild black hair. ‘Who used the whip?’

‘I did,’ she said calmly, ‘and then I took her to the stone.’

‘The stone?’

She nodded eastwards. ‘Across the river, Uhtred, is a hill, and on the hill is a stone. A big one, planted upright. It was put there by the ancient people and it has power. The stone has breasts.’

‘Breasts?’

‘It’s shaped that way,’ she said, momentarily cupping her hands over her own small breasts. ‘It’s tall,’ she went on, ‘even taller than you, and I took her there at night and lit fires to the gods, and put skulls in a ring, and I told her I would summon the demons to turn her skin yellow and her hair white and to make her face wrinkled and her breasts sag and her back humped. She cried.’

‘Could you have done all that?’

‘She believed so,’ Brida said with a sly smile, ‘and she promised me on her life she had not cursed you. She spoke true, I’m sure.’

‘So it’s just a fever?’

‘More than a fever, a sickness. Others have it. Two men died last week.’

A priest came each week and bled me. He was a morose Saxon who preached his gospel in the small town that had appeared just to the south of Ragnar’s fortress. Ragnar had brought prosperity to the local countryside and the town was growing quickly, the smell of newly sawn wood as constant as the stink of sewage flowing downhill to the river. Brida, of course, had objected to the church being constructed, but Ragnar had allowed it. ‘They’ll worship any god they choose,’ he had told me, ‘whatever I might wish. And the Saxons here were Christians before I arrived. A few have gone back to the real gods. The first priest wanted to pull down Brida’s stone and called me an evil heathen bastard when I stopped him, so I drowned him and this new one is a lot more polite.’ The new priest was also reckoned to be a skilled healer, though Brida, who had her own knowledge of herbs, would not let him prescribe any potions for me. He would just open a vein in one of my arms and watch the blood pulse thick and slow into a horn cup. When it was done he was instructed to pour the blood onto the fire, then scour out the cup, which he always did with a scowl because it was a pagan precaution. Brida wanted the blood destroyed so no one could use it to cast a spell on me.

‘I’m surprised Brida permits you to come into the fortress,’ I told the priest one day as my drawn blood hissed and bubbled on the logs.

‘Because she hates Christians, lord?’

‘Yes.’

‘She was sick three winters ago,’ the priest said, ‘and Jarl Ragnar sent for me when all else failed. I cured her, or else God Almighty worked the cure through me. Since then she has endured my presence.’

Brida also endured Skade’s presence. She would have killed her given an excuse, but Skade pleaded with Ragnar that she meant no harm and Ragnar, my friend, had no stomach for slaughtering women, especially good-looking women. He put Skade to work in the hall kitchen. ‘She worked in my kitchen in Lundene,’ I told Brida.

‘From where she slithered her way into your bed,’ Brida said tartly, ‘though I don’t suppose that took much effort on her part.’

‘She’s beautiful.’

‘And you’re still the fool you always were. And now another fool will find her and she’ll make trouble again. I told Ragnar he should have split her from the crotch to the gullet, but he’s as stupid as you.’

I was on my feet by Yule, though I could take no part in the games that so delighted Ragnar. There were races, tests of strength and, his favourite, wrestling. He took part himself, winning his first six bouts, then losing to a giant Saxon slave who was rewarded with a handful of silver. On the afternoon of the great feast the fortress dogs were allowed to attack a bull, an entertainment that reduced Ragnar to tears of laughter. The bull, a wiry and savage creature, dashed around the hilltop between the buildings, attacking when he had a chance and tossing careless dogs into gut-spilled ruin, but eventually he lost too much blood and the hounds converged on him. ‘What happened to Nihtgenga?’ I asked Brida as the roaring bull collapsed in a frantic heap of scrabbling dogs.

‘He died,’ Brida said, ‘long, long ago.’

‘He was a good dog,’ I said.

‘He was,’ she said, watching the hounds tear at the thrashing bull’s belly. Skade was on the far side of the killing ground, but she avoided my gaze.

The Yule feast was lavish because Ragnar, like his father, had always adored the winter celebrations. A great fir tree had been cut and dragged to the hall where it was hung with silver coins and jewellery. Skade was among the servants who brought the beef, pork, venison, bacon, blood sausages, bread and ale. She still avoided my eye. Men noticed her, how could they not? One drunken man tried to seize her and pull her onto his lap, but Ragnar slapped the table so hard that the blow upset a horn of wine and the sound was enough to persuade the man to let Skade go.

There were harpists and skalds. The skalds chanted verses in praise of Ragnar and his family, and Ragnar beamed with delight when his father’s exploits were described. ‘Say that again,’ he would roar when some treasured exploit was recounted. He knew many of the words and chanted along, but then startled the skald by slapping the table again. ‘What did you just sing?’ he demanded.

‘That your father, lord, served the great Ubba.’

‘And who killed Ubba?’

The skald frowned. ‘A Saxon dog, lord.’

‘This Saxon dog,’ Ragnar shouted, lifting my arm. It was while men were still laughing that the messenger arrived. He came from the dark and for a moment no one noticed the tall Dane who, it turned out, had just ridden from Eoferwic. He was clad in mail because there were brigands on the roads, and the skirts of his armour, his boots and the richly-decorated scabbard of his sword were spattered with mud. He must have been tired, but there was a broad smile on his face.

Ragnar noticed the man first. ‘Grimbald!’ he bellowed the name in welcome. ‘You should arrive before a feast, not after! But worry not, there’s food and ale!’

Grimbald bowed to Ragnar. ‘I bring you news, lord.’

‘News that couldn’t wait?’ Ragnar asked good-naturedly. The hall had gone quiet because men wondered what could have brought Grimbald in such haste through the cold, wet darkness.

‘News that will please you, lord,’ Grimbald said, still smiling.

‘The price of virgins has dropped?’

‘Alfred of Wessex, lord,’ Grimbald paused, ‘is dead.’

There was a moment’s silence, then the hall burst into cheers. Men beat the table with their hands and whooped with delight. Ragnar was half drunk, but had enough sense to hold up his hands for silence. ‘How do you know this?’

‘The news was brought to Eoferwic yesterday,’ Grimbald said.

‘By whom?’ I demanded.

‘By a West Saxon priest, lord,’ Grimbald said. The tall messenger was one of mad King Guthred’s household warriors and, though he did not know me, my place of honour beside Ragnar persuaded him to call me lord.

‘So his whelp is the new king?’ Ragnar asked.

‘So it is said, lord.’

‘King Edmund?’ Ragnar enquired, ‘that’ll take some getting used to.’

‘Edward,’ I said.

‘Edmund or Edward, who cares? He’s not long for this life,’ Ragnar said happily. ‘What kind of boy is he?’ he asked me.

‘Nervous.’

‘Not a warrior?’

‘His father was no warrior either,’ I said, ‘yet he defeated every Dane who came to take his throne.’

‘You did that for him,’ Ragnar said cheerfully and slapped my back. The hall was suddenly full of talk as men glimpsed a new future. There was so much excitement, though I remember looking down at one of the tables and saw Osferth frowning in lonely silence. Then Ragnar leaned close to me. ‘You don’t look happy, Uhtred.’

How did I feel at that moment? I was not happy. I had never liked Alfred. He was too pious, too humourless, and too stern. His delight was order. He wanted to reduce the whole world to lists, to organisation, to obedience. He loved to collect books and write laws. He believed that if only every man, woman and child were to obey the law, then we would have a heavenly kingdom on earth, but he forgot the earthly pleasures. He had known them as a young man, Osferth was proof of that, but then he had allowed the nailed Christian god to persuade him that pleasure was sin and so he tried to make laws that would outlaw sin. A man might as well try to shape water into a ball.

So I did not like Alfred, but I had always been aware that I was in the presence of an extraordinary man. He was thoughtful, and he was no fool. His mind had been fast and open to ideas, so long as those ideas did not contradict his religious convictions. He was a king who did not believe that kingship implied omniscience and he was, in his way, a humble man. Above everything, he had been a good man, though never a comfortable one. He had also believed in fate, a thing all religions seem to share, though the difference between Alfred and I had been his conviction that fate was progress. He wanted to improve the world, while I did not believe and never have believed that we can improve the world, just merely survive as it slides into chaos.

‘I respected Alfred,’ I told Ragnar. I was still not certain I believed the news. Rumours fly around like summer gossamer, and so I beckoned Grimbald closer. ‘What exactly did the priest tell you?’

‘That Alfred was in the church at Wintanceaster,’ he said, ‘and that he collapsed during the rituals and was taken to his bed.’

That sounded convincing. ‘And his son is king now?’

‘The priest said so.’

‘Is Harald still trapped in Wessex?’ Ragnar asked.

‘No, lord,’ Grimbald said, ‘Alfred paid him silver to depart.’

Ragnar bellowed for silence and made Grimbald repeat his last words about Harald, and the news that the wounded jarl had been paid to leave Torneie prompted another cheer in the hall. Danes love to hear of Saxons paying silver to rid themselves of Danes. It encourages them to attack Saxon lands in hope of similar bribes.

‘Where did Harald go?’ Ragnar asked, and I saw Skade listening.

‘He joined Haesten, lord.’

‘In Beamfleot?’ I asked, but Grimbald did not know.

The news of Alfred’s death and of the wounded Harald’s enrichment gave the feast an added happiness. For once there were not even any fights as the mead, ale and wine took hold of the tables. Every man in that hall, except perhaps a handful of my Saxon followers, saw a new opportunity to capture and plunder the rich fields, villages and towns of Wessex.

And they were right. Wessex was vulnerable, except for one thing.

The news was a rumour after all.

Alfred lived.

Yet, in the dark of the year, every man in northern Britain believed the rumour, and it energised Brida. ‘It’s a sign from the gods,’ she declared, and persuaded Ragnar to summon the northern jarls. The meeting was set for the early spring, when the winter rains would have ended and the fords made passable again. The prospect of war stirred Dunholm from its winter torpor. In town and fortress the smiths were set to forging spear-blades, and Ragnar let every shipmaster know that he would welcome crews in the spring. Word of that generosity would eventually reach Frisia and far Denmark, and hungry men would come to Northumbria, though for the moment Ragnar spread the rumour that he merely raised troops to invade the land of the Scots. Offa, the Mercian with his trained dogs, heard the rumours and came north despite the weather. He pretended he always struggled through the wet cold rains of Northumbria in the dead days of the year, but it was clear he wanted to learn what Ragnar planned. Ragnar, for once, was reticent, and refused to allow Offa into the high fortress on its river-bound rock. Brida, I think, threatened him with her displeasure, and Brida could always control Ragnar.

I went to meet Offa in a tavern beneath the fortress. I took Finan and Osferth, and I pretended to get drunk. ‘I heard you were sick, lord,’ Offa said, ‘and I’m glad you are recovered.’

‘I hear Alfred of Wessex was also sick?’ Osferth put in.

Offa, as ever, considered his answer, wondering whether he was about to give away information that was better sold, then realised that whatever news he possessed would soon be known anyway. Besides, he was here to dig information from us. ‘He collapsed in church,’ he said, ‘and the physicians were sure he would die. He was very ill! He was given the last rites twice, to my certain knowledge, but God relented.’

‘God loves him,’ I said, slurring my words and thumping the table for more ale.

‘Not enough to give him a full recovery,’ Offa said guardedly. ‘He is still weak.’

‘He was always weak,’ I said. That was true about Alfred’s health, if not his resolve, but I had spoken sourly, as a deliberate insult, and Offa gazed at me, doubtless wondering just how drunk I truly was.

I have often scorned Christian priests because they are forever telling us that the proof of their religion is the magic that Christ performed, but then they claim that such magic disappeared with him. If a priest could cure a cripple or make the blind see, then I would believe in their god, but at that moment, in the smoke-filled tavern beneath Dunholm’s high fortress walls, a miracle did occur. Offa paid for the ale and even ordered more.

I have always been able to drink more than most men, yet even so I could feel the room swirling like the smoke billowing from the tavern hearth. I kept my wits, though. I dropped Offa some gossip about Skade, admitted my disappointment about Skirnir’s hoard, and then complained bitterly that I had neither money nor sufficient men. That last drunken complaint opened the door for Offa. ‘And why, lord, would you need men?’ he asked.

‘We all need men,’ I said.

‘True,’ Finan put in.

‘More men,’ Osferth said.

‘Always more men.’ Finan was also pretending to be drunker than he was.

‘I hear the northern jarls are gathering here?’ Offa asked innocently. He was desperate to know what was being planned. All Britain knew that the Northumbrian lords were invited to Dunholm, but no one was certain why, and Offa could become wealthy on that knowledge.

‘That’s why I want men!’ I said to him in a very earnest voice.

Offa poured me more ale. I noticed he was hardly touching his own horn. ‘The northern jarls have men enough,’ he said, ‘and I hear Jarl Ragnar is offering silver for crews.’

I leaned forward confidingly. ‘How can I talk to them as an equal if all I lead is one crew?’ I paused to belch. ‘And a small crew at that?’

‘You have reputation, lord,’ he said, somehow managing not to recoil from my ale-staled breath.

‘I need men,’ I said, ‘men, men, men.’

‘Good men,’ Osferth said.

‘Spear-Danes, sword-Danes,’ Finan added dreamily.

‘The jarls will have enough men to crush the Scots,’ Offa suggested, dangling the words like a baited hook.

‘The Scots!’ I said scornfully. ‘Why waste a single crew on the Scots?’ Finan touched my elbow warningly, but I pretended to be oblivious of his gesture. ‘What is Scotland?’ I asked belligerently. ‘Wild men in a bare country with scarce a scrap of cloth to cover their cocks. The kingdom of Alba,’ I spat the name of Scotland’s largest kingdom, ‘isn’t worth the produce of one decent Saxon estate. They’re nothing but hairy bastards with frozen cocks. Who wants them?’

‘Yet Jarl Ragnar would conquer them?’ Offa asked.

‘He would,’ Finan said firmly.

‘He would end their nuisance,’ Osferth added, but Offa ignored both of them. He gazed at me, and I looked back into his eyes.

‘Bebbanburg,’ I said confidingly.

‘Bebbanburg, lord?’ he asked innocently.

‘I am Lord of Bebbanburg, am I not?’ I demanded.

‘You are, lord,’ he said.

‘The Scots!’ I said derisively, then let my head fall onto my arms as if I was sleepy.

Within a month all Britain knew why Jarl Ragnar was asking for men. Alfred, lying on his sickbed, knew, as did Æthelred, Lord of Mercia. They probably knew in Frankia, while Offa, I heard, had become wealthy enough to buy a fair house and a pasture in Liccelfeld and was contemplating taking a young girl as a wife. The money for such extravagances, of course, came from my uncle, Ælfric, to whom Offa had hurried as soon as the weather allowed. The news he carried was that Jarl Ragnar was helping his friend, the Lord Uhtred, to regain Bebbanburg and there would be a summer war in Northumbria.

And meanwhile Ragnar sent spies to Wessex.

It might not have been a bad idea to assemble an army to invade the Scots. They were trouble back then, they are trouble now and I daresay they will still be trouble when the world dies. As that winter ended a party of Scots raided Ragnar’s northern lands and killed at least fifteen men. They stole cattle, women and children. Ragnar made a retaliatory raid and I took twenty of my men with his hundred, but it was a frustrating errand. We were not even sure when we crossed into Scottish land because the frontier was an uncertain thing, forever shifting with the power of the lords on either side, but after two days’ riding we came across a poor and deserted village. The folk, warned of our approach, had fled, taking their livestock with them. Their low houses had rough stone walls topped by sod roofs that almost touched the ground, while their dunghills were taller than the hovels. We collapsed the roofs by breaking the rafters, and shovelled horse dung into the small rough-stone church, but there was little other damage we could do. We were being watched by four horsemen on a hill to the north. ‘Bastards,’ Ragnar shouted, though they were much too far away to hear him.

The Scots, like us, used horsemen as scouts, but their riders never wore heavy mail and usually carried no weapon except a spear. They were mounted on nimble, quick horses, and though we might chase them, we could never catch them. ‘I wonder who they serve?’ I said.

‘Domnal, probably,’ Ragnar said, ‘King of Alba.’ He spat the last word. Domnal ruled the greater part of the land north of Northumbria. All that land is called Scotland because it had been largely conquered by the Scots, a wild tribe of Irish, though, like England, the name Scotland meant little. Domnal ruled the largest kingdom, though there were others like Dalriada and Strathclota, and then there were the stormbound islands of the western coast where savage Norse jarls made their own petty kingdoms. Dealing with the Scots, my father had always said, was like trying to geld wildcats with your teeth, but luckily the wildcats spent much of their time fighting each other.

Once the village was ruined we withdrew to higher ground, fearing that the presence of the four scouts might mean the arrival of a larger force, but none appeared. We went west next day, seeking something alive on which we could take revenge, but four days of riding produced nothing except a sick goat and a lame bullock. The scouts never left us. Even when a thick mist draped the hills and we used its concealment to change direction, they found us as soon as the mist lifted. They never came close, just watched us.

We turned for home, following the spine of the great hills that divide Britain. It was still cold and there was snow in the creases of the high land. We had failed to retaliate for the Scottish raid, but our spirits were high because it felt good to be riding in open country with swords by our sides. ‘I’ll beat the bastards bloody when we’ve finished with Wessex,’ Ragnar promised me cheerfully, ‘I’ll give them a raid they won’t forget.’

‘You really want to fight Wessex?’ I asked him. The two of us were alone, riding a hundred paces ahead of our men.

‘Fight Wessex?’ he shrugged. ‘In truth? No. I’m happy up here.’

‘Then why do it?’

‘Because Brida’s right. If we don’t take Wessex then Wessex will take us.’

‘Not in your lifetime,’ I said.

‘But I have sons,’ he said. All his sons were bastards, but Ragnar did not care about their legitimacy. He loved them all and wanted one of them to hold Dunholm after him. ‘I don’t want my sons bowing to some West Saxon king,’ he said. ‘I want them to be free.’

‘So you’ll become King of Wessex?’

He gave a great neigh of a laugh. ‘I don’t want that! I want to be Jarl of Dunholm, my friend. Maybe you should be King of Wessex?’

‘I want to be Jarl of Bebbanburg.’

‘We’ll find someone who wants to be king,’ he said carelessly. ‘Maybe Sigurd or Cnut?’ Sigurd Thorrson and Cnut Ranulfson were, after Ragnar himself, the mightiest lords in Northumbria and, unless they joined their men to ours, we would have no chance of conquering Wessex. ‘We’ll take Wessex,’ Ragnar said confidently, ‘and divide its treasures. You need men to take Bebbanburg? The silver in the Wessex churches will buy you enough to take a dozen fortresses like Bebbanburg.’

‘True.’

‘So be happy! Fate is smiling.’

We were following the crest of a hill. Beneath us scrabbling streams glinted white in deep valleys. I could see for miles, and in all that wide view there was neither a house nor a tree. This was bare land where men scratched a living tending sheep, though our presence meant that the flocks had all been driven away. The Scottish outriders with their long spears were on the hill to our east, while to the south the crest ended suddenly in a long hill that dropped steeply into a deep-walled valley where two streams met. And there, where the streams churned about rocks in their shadowed meeting place, were fourteen horsemen. None was moving. They waited where the two streams became one, and it was obvious that they waited for us, and equally obvious that it had to be a trap. The fourteen men were bait, and that meant other men must be nearby. We stared back the way we had come, but there was no enemy in sight on the long crest, nor were any visible on the nearer hills. The four scouts who had shadowed us were kicking their horses down the heather-covered slope to join the larger group.

Ragnar watched the fourteen men. ‘What do they want us to do?’ he asked.

‘Go down there?’

‘Which we have to do anyway,’ he said slowly, ‘and they must have known that, so why bother to entice us down there?’ He frowned, then looked quickly about the surrounding hills, but still no enemy showed on the slopes. ‘Are they Scots?’ he asked.

Finan had joined us and he had eyes like a hunting hawk. ‘They’re Scots,’ he said.

‘How can you tell?’ I asked.

‘There’s a fellow wearing the symbol of a dove, lord,’ Finan said.

‘A dove?’ Ragnar asked, sounding disgusted. In his view, indeed in mine, a man’s symbol should be warlike; an eagle or a wolf.

‘It’s the sign of Colum Cille, lord,’ Finan explained.

‘Who is he?’

‘Saint Columba, lord. An Irish saint. He came to the land of the Picts and drove away a great monster that lives in a lake here. The Scots revere him, lord.’

‘Useful people, saints,’ Ragnar said distractedly. He looked behind again, still expecting to see an enemy appear on the crest, but the skyline stayed empty.

‘Two of them are prisoners,’ Finan said, gazing down at the men in the valley, ‘and one’s just a wee boy.’

‘Is it a trap?’ Ragnar asked of no one, then decided that only a fool would cede the high ground, and that therefore the fourteen men, who were now eighteen because the scouts had joined them, were not seeking a fight. ‘We’ll go down,’ he decided.

Eighteen of us rode down the steep slope. When we reached the flatter land of the valley’s bed two of the Scots rode to meet us, and Ragnar, copying their example, held up a hand to check his men so that only he and I rode to meet the pair. They were a man and a boy. The man, who was wearing the dove-embroidered jerkin beneath a long blue cloak, was a few years younger than I. He rode straight-backed and had a fine gold chain with a thick gold cross hanging about his neck. He had a handsome, clean-shaven face with bright blue eyes. He was hatless and his brown hair was cut short in Saxon style. The boy, riding a small colt, was only five or six years old and wore the same clothes as the man I assumed was his father. The pair curbed their horses a few paces from us and the man, who wore a jewel-hilted sword, looked from me to Ragnar and then back to me. ‘I am Constantin,’ he said, ‘son of Aed, Prince of Alba, and this is my son, Cellach mac Constantin, and also, despite his size, a Prince of Alba.’ He spoke in Danish, though it was obvious he was not comfortable with the language. He smiled at his son. It is strange how we know immediately whether we like people or not, and though he was a Scot, I liked Constantin at once. ‘I assume one of you is Jarl Ragnar,’ he said, ‘and the other is Jarl Uhtred, but forgive me for not knowing which is which.’

‘I am Ragnar Ragnarson,’ Ragnar said.

‘Greetings,’ Constantin said pleasantly. ‘I hope you’ve enjoyed your travels in our country?’

‘So much,’ Ragnar said, ‘that I intend to come again, only next time I shall bring more men to share the pleasures.’

Constantin laughed at that, then spoke to his son in their own language, making the boy stare at us wide-eyed. ‘I was telling him that you are both great warriors,’ Constantin said, ‘and that one day he must learn how to beat such warriors.’

‘Constantin,’ I said. ‘That isn’t a Scottish name.’

‘It is mine, though,’ he said, ‘and a reminder that I must emulate the great Roman emperor who converted his people to Christianity.’

‘He did them a disservice, then,’ I said.

‘He did it by defeating the pagans,’ Constantin said smiling, though beneath that pleasant expression was a hint of steel.

‘You’re nephew to the King of Alba?’ Ragnar asked.

‘Domnal, yes. He’s old, he won’t live long.’

‘And you will be king?’ Ragnar asked.

‘If God wills it, yes.’ He spoke mildly, but I got the impression that his god’s will would coincide with Constantin’s own wishes.

My borrowed horse snorted and took some nervous sideways steps. I calmed him. Our sixteen men were not far behind, all of them with hands on sword hilts, but the Scots were showing no sign of hostility. I looked up at the hills and saw no enemy.

‘This isn’t a trap, Lord Uhtred,’ Constantin said, ‘but I could not resist this chance to meet you. Your uncle sent envoys to us.’

‘Looking for help?’ I asked scornfully.

‘He will pay us one thousand silver shillings,’ Constantin said, ‘if this summer we bring men to attack you.’

‘And why would you attack me?’

‘Because you will be besieging Bebbanburg,’ he said.

I nodded. ‘So I must kill you as well as Ælfric?’

‘That will certainly add to your renown,’ he said, ‘but I would propose a different arrangement.’

‘Which is?’ Ragnar asked.

‘Your uncle,’ Constantin still spoke to me, ‘is not the most generous of men. A thousand silver shillings would be welcome, of course, but it still seems to me a small payment for a large war.’

I understood then why Constantin had taken such trouble to make this meeting a secret, for if he had sent envoys to Dunholm my uncle would hear of it and suspect treachery. ‘So what is your price?’ I asked.

‘Three thousand shillings,’ Constantin said, ‘will keep Alba’s warriors safe in their homes all summer.’

I did not have nearly that amount, but Ragnar nodded. Constantin plainly believed that we were planning to attack Bebbanburg, and of course we were not, but Ragnar still feared an invasion of his land by the Scots while he was away in Wessex. Such an invasion was always a possibility because Alfred took care to keep the Scottish kings friendly as a threat against the Danes in northern England. ‘Let me suggest,’ Ragnar said carefully, ‘that I pay you three thousand silver shillings and that you vow to keep your warriors out of all Northumbria for one full year.’

Constantin considered that. Ragnar’s suggestion differed hardly at all from what Constantin himself had proposed, but the small difference was important. Constantin glanced at me and I saw the shrewdness in his mind. He understood that maybe Bebbanburg was not our ambition. He nodded. ‘I could accept that,’ he said.

‘And King Domnal?’ I asked, ‘will he accept that?’

‘He will do what I say,’ Constantin said confidently.

‘But how do we know you will keep your word?’ Ragnar demanded.

‘I bring you a gift,’ Constantin said, and beckoned towards his men. The two prisoners were ordered out of their saddles and, with bound hands, fetched across the stream to stand beside Constantin. ‘These two men are brothers,’ Constantin said to Ragnar, ‘and they led the raid on your land. I shall return the women and children they captured, but for the moment I give you these two.’

Ragnar glanced at the two bearded men. ‘Two lives as surety?’ he asked, ‘and when they are dead, what’s to stop you breaking your word?’

‘I give you three lives,’ Constantin said. He touched his son’s shoulder. ‘Cellach is my eldest and he is dear to me. I give him to you as a hostage. If one of my men crosses into Northumbria with a sword then you may kill Cellach.’

I remembered Haesten’s joy at foisting a false son on us as a hostage, but there was no doubt that Cellach was Constantin’s boy. The resemblance was striking. I looked at the boy and felt an instant regret that my eldest son did not have his bold demeanour and firm gaze.

Ragnar thought for a moment, but saw no disadvantage. He kicked his horse forward and held out his hand, and Constantin took it. ‘I shall send the silver,’ Ragnar promised.

‘And it will be exchanged for Cellach,’ Constantin promised. ‘You will permit me to send servants and a tutor with the boy?’

‘They will all be welcome,’ Ragnar said.

Constantin looked pleased. ‘Our business is concluded, I think.’

And so it was. The Scots rode away and we stripped the two prisoners naked, then Ragnar killed both men with his sword. He did it quickly. Mist was flowing soft and silent down the hills and we were in a hurry to leave. The two men were decapitated and their corpses left beside the junction of the streams. Then we mounted and rode on south.

Ragnar rode with the pledge that his northern frontier would be peaceful while he was fighting in Wessex. It was, indeed, a good agreement, but it left me uncomfortable. I had liked Constantin, but there was an intelligence and a calculation in him that promised he would be a difficult and formidable enemy. How had he arranged the secret meeting with Ragnar? By instigating the raid that had prompted our retaliatory attack, of course, and then Constantin had betrayed the men who had done his bidding in the first place. He was clever and he was young. I would have to live with Constantin a long time, and if I had known then what I know now I would have slit both his and his son’s throats.

But, at least for the next twelve months, he kept his word.

Spring came late, but when at last it arrived the land greened swiftly. Lambs were born, the days grew long and warm, and men’s minds turned to war.

The two powerful Northumbrian jarls, Sigurd Thorrson and Cnut Ranulfson, came to Dunholm together, and after them a slew of lesser lords, all of them Danes and even the least of them capable of leading more than a hundred trained warriors into battle. They came with just a handful of warriors, servants and slaves each, but Ragnar’s capacious halls were still insufficient and so some of the lesser jarls were accommodated in the town south of the fortress.

There was feasting and gift-giving and, during the day, talking. The jarls had arrived believing the tale that we gathered men for an assault on Bebbanburg, but Ragnar disabused them on the first day. ‘And Alfred will hear we plan to attack Wessex,’ he warned them, ‘because some of you will tell your men, and they will tell others, and this news will reach Alfred within days.’

‘So keep silent,’ Sigurd Thorrson growled.

Jarl Sigurd was a tall, hard-looking man with a beard plaited into two great ropes which he twisted about his thick neck. He owned land that stretched from southern Northumbria into northern Mercia and had learned his trade by fighting Æthelred’s warriors. His friend, Cnut Ranulfson, was slighter, but had the same wiry strength that Finan possessed. Cnut was reputed to be the finest swordsman in all Britain, and his blade, together with the horde of household warriors his wealth commanded, had given him lands bordering Sigurd’s estates. His hair was bone white, though he was only thirty years old, and he had the palest eyes I have ever seen, which, with his hair, gave him a spectral appearance. He had a quick smile, though, and an infinite store of jests. ‘I had a Saxon slave girl just as pretty as that one,’ he had told me when we first met. He was gazing at one of Ragnar’s slaves who was carrying wooden platters to the great hall. ‘But she died,’ he went on gloomily, ‘died from drinking milk.’

‘The milk was bad?’

‘The cow collapsed on top of her,’ Cnut said and burst into laughter.

Cnut was in a serious mood when Ragnar announced that he wanted to lead an assault on Wessex. Ragnar gave a good speech, explaining that West Saxon power was growing and that West Saxon ambitions were to capture Mercia, then East Anglia and finally to invade Northumbria. ‘King Alfred,’ Ragnar said, ‘calls himself King of the Angelcynn, and English is spoken in my land as it is in all your lands. If we do nothing then the English will take us one by one.’

‘Alfred is dying,’ Cnut objected.

‘But his ambitions will live on,’ Ragnar said. ‘And Wessex knows its best defence is attack, and Wessex has a dream of pushing its boundary to touch the land of the Scots.’

‘Wish the bastards would conquer the Scots,’ a man interjected glumly.

‘If we do nothing,’ Ragnar said, ‘then one day Northumbria will be ruled by Wessex.’

There was an argument about the real power of Wessex. I kept silent, though I knew more than any man there. I let them talk their way to sense and, under Ragnar’s guidance, they at last understood that Wessex was a country that had organised itself for war. Its defence was the burhs, garrisoned by the fyrd, but its offence was the growing number of household warriors who could gather under the king’s banner. The Danes were more feared, man for man, but they had never organised themselves as Alfred had organised Wessex. Every Danish jarl protected his own land, and was reluctant to follow the orders of another jarl. It was possible to unite them, as Harald had done, but at the first setback the crews would scatter to find easier plunder.

‘So,’ Sigurd growled dubiously, ‘we have to capture the burhs?’

‘Harald captured one,’ Ragnar pointed out.

‘I hear it was only half built,’ Sigurd said, looking at me for confirmation. I nodded.

‘If you want Wessex,’ Ragnar said, ‘we must take the burhs.’ He forced a confident smile. ‘We sail to his south coast,’ he went on, ‘in a great fleet! We’ll capture Exanceaster and then march on Wintanceaster. Alfred will be expecting an attack from the north, so we’ll assault from the south.’

‘And his ships will see our fleet,’ Cnut objected, ‘and his warriors will be waiting for us.’

‘His warriors,’ a new voice intervened from the back of the hall, ‘will be fighting against my crews. So you will only have Alfred’s fyrd to fight.’ The speaker stood in the open hall doorway and the sun was so bright that none of us could see him properly. ‘I shall assault Mercia,’ the man said in a loud and confident voice, ‘and Alfred’s forces will march to defend it, and with them gone, Wessex will be ripe for your plucking.’ The man came a few paces forward, followed by a dozen mailed warriors. ‘Greetings, Jarl Ragnar,’ he said, ‘and to you all,’ he swept an expansive hand around the company, ‘greetings!’

It was Haesten. He had not been invited to this council, yet there he was, smiling and glittering with gold chains. It was a mild day, yet he had chosen to wear an otterskin cloak lined with rare yellow silk to show his wealth. There was a moment’s embarrassment following his arrival as though no one was certain whether to treat him as a friend or an interloper, but then Ragnar leaped to his feet and embraced the newcomer.

I will not describe the tedium that followed over the next two days. The men assembled in Dunholm were capable of raising the greatest Danish army ever seen in Britain, yet they were still apprehensive because all knew that Wessex had defeated every assault. Ragnar now had to persuade them that the circumstances were changed. Alfred was sick and could not be expected to behave as a young and energetic leader, his son was inexperienced and, he flattered me, Uhtred of Bebbanburg had deserted Wessex. So it was at last agreed that Wessex was vulnerable, but who would be king? I had expected that argument to last for ever, but Sigurd and Cnut had discussed it privately and agreed that Sigurd would rule Wessex while Cnut would take the throne of Northumbria when the sick, mad and sad Guthred died. Ragnar had no ambition to live in the south, nor did I, and though Haesten doubtless hoped to be offered Wessex’s crown, he accepted that he would be named King of Mercia.

Haesten’s arrival made the whole idea of attacking Wessex appear more feasible. No one really trusted him, but few doubted that he planned an assault on Mercia. He really wanted our troops to join his, and in truth that would have made sense because, united, we would have made a mighty army, but no one could ever have agreed on who commanded that army. And so it was decided that Haesten would lead at least two thousand men westward from his stronghold at Beamfleot and, once the West Saxon troops marched to oppose him, the Northumbrian fleet would assault the south coast. Every man present swore to keep the plans secret, though I doubted that solemn oath was worth a whisker. Alfred would hear soon enough.

‘So I’ll be King of Mercia,’ Haesten told me on the last night, when again the great hall was lit by fire and filled with feasting.

‘Only if you hold off the West Saxons long enough,’ I warned him. He waved a hand as though that task were trivial. ‘Capture a Mercian burh,’ I advised him, ‘and force them to besiege you.’

He bit into a goose leg and the fat ran down into his beard. ‘Who’ll command them?’

‘Edward, probably, but he’ll be advised by Æthelred and Steapa.’

‘They’re not you, my friend,’ he said, jabbing my forearm with the goose bone.

‘My children are in Mercia,’ I told him. ‘Make sure they live.’

Haesten heard the grimness in my voice. ‘I promise you,’ he said earnestly, ‘I swear it on my life. Your children will be safe.’ He touched my arm as if to assure me, then pointed the goose bone at Cellach. ‘Who’s that child?’

‘A hostage from Scotland,’ I said. Cellach had arrived a week before with a small entourage. He had two warriors to guard him, two servants to dress and feed him and a hunchbacked priest to educate him. I liked him. He was a sturdy little boy who had accepted his exile bravely. He had already made friends among the fortress’s children and was forever escaping the hunchback’s lessons to scamper wildly along the ramparts or scramble down the steep slope of Dunholm’s rocks.

‘So no trouble from the Scots?’ Haesten asked.

‘The boy dies if they so much as piss across the border,’ I said.

Haesten grinned. ‘So I’ll be King of Mercia, Sigurd of Wessex, Cnut of Northumbria, but what of you?’

I poured him mead and paused a moment to watch a man juggle with flaming sticks. ‘I shall take West Saxon silver,’ I said, ‘and reclaim Bebbanburg.’

‘You don’t want to be king of somewhere?’ he asked disbelievingly.

‘I want Bebbanburg,’ I said, ‘it’s all I’ve ever wanted. I’ll take my children there, raise them, and never leave.’

Haesten said nothing. I did not think he had even heard me. He was staring in awe, and he stared at Skade. She was in drab servant’s dress, yet even so her beauty shone like a beacon in the dark. I think, at that moment, I could have stolen the chains of gold from around Haesten’s neck and he would have been unaware. He just stared and Skade, sensing his gaze, turned to face him. They locked eyes.

‘Bebbanburg,’ I said again, ‘it’s all I’ve ever wanted.’

‘Yes,’ he said distractedly, ‘I heard you.’ He still stared at Skade. No other folk existed for them in that roaring hall. Brida, sitting further along the high table, had seen their locked gazes and she turned to me and raised an eyebrow. I shrugged.

Brida was happy that night. She had arranged Britain’s future, though her influence had been wielded through Ragnar. Yet it was her ambition that had spurred him, and that ambition was to destroy Wessex and, eventually, the power of the priests who spread their gospel so insidiously. In a year, we all believed, the only Christian king in England would be Eohric of East Anglia, and he would change allegiance when he saw how the wind had turned. Indeed, there would be no England at all, just Daneland. It all seemed so simple, so easy, so straightforward and, on that night of harp music and laughter, of ale and comradeship, none of us could anticipate failure. Mercia was weak, Wessex was vulnerable, and we were the Danes, the feared spear-warriors of the north.

Then, next day, Father Pyrlig came to Dunholm.

A storm came that night. It hurtled sudden from the north, its first signs a violent gust of wind that shuddered across the fortress. Within moments clouds drowned the stars and lightning shivered the sky. The storm woke me in the house where I had sweated and frozen through the sickness, and I heard the first few heavy drops of rain fall plump and hard on the thatch, then it seemed as though a river was emptying itself on Dunholm’s fort. The sky seethed and the rain’s noise was louder than any thunder. I got out of bed and wrapped a blanket of sheepskins around my naked shoulders and went to stand in the doorway where I pulled aside the leather curtain. The girl in my bed whimpered and I told her to join me. She was a Saxon slave, and I lifted the blanket to enfold her and she stood pressed against me, wide-eyed in the lightning flashes as she watched the roaring darkness. She said something, but what it was I could not tell because the wind and the rain drowned her words.

The storm came fast and it went fast. I watched the lightning travel southwards and heard the rain diminish, and then it seemed as though the night held its breath in the silence that followed the thunder. The rain stopped, though water still dripped from the eaves, and some trickled through the thatch to hiss on the remnants of the fire. I threw new wood onto the smouldering embers, added kindling and let the flames leap upwards. The leather curtain was still hooked open and I saw the firelight brighten in other houses and in the two big halls. It was a restless night at Dunholm. The girl lay on the bed again, swathing herself in fleeces and furs, and her fire-bright eyes watched as I drew Serpent-Breath from her scabbard and slid the blade slowly through the newly revived flames. I did it twice, slowly bathing each side of her long blade, then wiping the steel with the sheepskin. ‘Why do you do that, lord?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know,’ I said, nor did I, except that Serpent-Breath, like all swords, had been born in flames and sometimes I liked to bathe her in fire to preserve whatever sorcery had been enchanted into her at the moment of her creation. I kissed the warm steel reverently and slid it back into her scabbard. ‘We can be certain of nothing,’ I said, ‘except our weapons and death.’

‘We can be certain of God, lord,’ she insisted in a small voice.

I smiled, but said nothing. I wondered if my gods cared about us. Perhaps that was the advantage of the Christian god, that he had somehow convinced his followers that he did care, that he watched over them and protected them, yet I did not see that Christian children died any less often than pagan children, or that Christians were spared disease and floods and fire. Yet Christians forever declared their god’s love.

Footsteps sounded wet outside. Someone was running towards my hut and, though I was safe inside Ragnar’s fortress, I instinctively reached for Serpent-Breath, and was still holding the hilt as a burly man ducked inside the open doorway. ‘Dear sweet Jesus,’ he said, ‘but it’s cold out there.’

I let go of the sword as Father Pyrlig crouched on the fire’s far side. ‘You couldn’t sleep?’ I asked.

‘Now who in God’s name could sleep through that storm?’ he demanded. ‘You’d have to be deaf, blind, drunk and stupid to sleep through that. Good morning, lord,’ he grinned at me, ‘naked like a newborn as you are.’ He twisted his head and smiled at the slave. ‘Blessings on you, child,’ he said.

She was nervous of the newcomer and glanced anxiously at me. ‘He’s a kind man,’ I reassured her, ‘and a priest.’ Father Pyrlig was dressed in breeches and jerkin with no sign of any priestly robes. He had arrived the previous evening, earning a chill reception from Brida, but enchanting Ragnar with his exaggerated tales of battle. He had been drunk by the time Ragnar went to bed, so I had found very little chance to talk with my old friend.

I took a cloak from a peg and clasped it around my throat. The wool was damp. ‘Does your god love you?’ I asked Pyrlig.

He laughed at that. ‘My God, what a question, lord! Well, he keeps me miles away from my wife, so he does, and what greater blessing can a man ask? And he fills my belly and he keeps me amused! Did I tell you about the slave girl that died of drinking milk?’

‘The cow collapsed on her,’ I said flatly.

‘He’s a funny man, that Cnut,’ Pyrlig said, ‘I’ll regret it when you kill him.’

‘I kill him?’ I asked. The girl stared at me.

‘You’ll probably have to,’ Pyrlig said.

‘Don’t listen to him,’ I told the girl, ‘he’s raving.’

‘I’m Welsh, my darling,’ he explained to her, then turned back to me, ‘and can you tell me, lord, why a good Welshman should be doing Saxon business?’

‘Because you’re an interfering earsling,’ I said, ‘and god knows what arse you dropped out of, but here you are.’

‘God uses strange instruments for his wondrous purposes,’ Pyrlig said. ‘Why don’t you dress and watch the dawn with me?’

Father Pyrlig, like Bishop Asser, was a Welshman who had found employment in Alfred’s service, though he told me he had not come to Dunholm from Wessex, but rather from Mercia. ‘I was last in Wintanceaster at Christmas,’ he told me, ‘and my God, poor Alfred is sick! He looks like a warmed-up corpse, he does, and not very well warmed-up either.’

‘What were you doing in Mercia?’

‘Smelling the place,’ he said mysteriously, then, just as mysteriously, added, ‘it’s that wife of his.’

‘Whose wife?’

‘Ælswith. Why did Alfred marry her? She should feed the poor man some butter and cream, make him eat some good beef.’

Father Pyrlig had eaten his share of butter and cream. He was big-bellied, broad-shouldered, and eternally cheerful. His hair was a tangled mess, his grin was infectious and his religion was carried lightly, though never shallowly. He stood beside me above Dunholm’s south gate and I told him how Ragnar and I had captured the fortress. Pyrlig, before he became a priest, had been a warrior and he appreciated the tale of how I had sneaked inside Dunholm by a water-gate on the west side, and how we had survived long enough to open the gate above which we now stood, and how Ragnar had led his flame-bearing sword-Danes through the gate and into the fortress where we had fought Kjartan’s men to defeat and death. ‘Ah,’ he said when the tale was finished, ‘I should have been here. It sounds like a rare fight!’

‘So what brings you here now?’

He grinned at me. ‘A man can’t just visit an old friend?’

‘Alfred sent you,’ I said sourly.

‘I told you, I came here from Mercia, not Wessex.’ He leaned on the palisade’s top. ‘Do you remember,’ he asked me, ‘the night before you captured Lundene?’

‘I do remember,’ I said, ‘that you told me you were dressed for prayer that night. You were in mail and carried two swords.’

‘What better time to pray than before a battle?’ he asked. ‘And that was another rare fight, my friend.’

‘It was.’

‘And before it, lord,’ he said, ‘you made an oath.’

My anger rose as swiftly as the river had been swollen by the storm’s sudden rain. ‘Damn Alfred and his oaths,’ I said, ‘damn him to his hell. I gave that bastard the best years of my life! He wouldn’t even sit on the throne of Wessex if I hadn’t fought for him! Harald Bloodhair would be king now, and Alfred would be rotting in his tomb, and does he thank me? Once in a while he’d pat me on the head like a damned dog, but then he lets that turd-brained monk insult Gisela and he expects me to crawl to him for forgiveness after I kill the bastard. Yes,’ I said, turning to look into Pyrlig’s broad face, ‘I took an oath. Then let me tell you I am breaking it. It is broken. The gods can punish me for that and Alfred can rot in hell’s depth for all I care.’

‘I doubt it will be him in hell,’ Pyrlig said mildly.

‘You think I’d want to be in your heaven?’ I demanded. ‘All those priests and monks and dried-up nuns? I’d rather risk hell. No, father, I am not keeping my oath to Alfred. You can ride back and you can tell him that I have no oath to him, no allegiance, no duty, no loyalty, nothing! He’s a scabby, ungrateful, cabbage-farting, squint-eyed bastard!’

‘You know him better than I do,’ Pyrlig said lightly.

‘He can take his oath and shit on it,’ I snarled. ‘Go back to Wessex and give him that answer.’ A shout made me turn, but it was only a servant bellowing at a protesting horse. One of the lords was leaving and evidently making an early start. A group of warriors, helmeted and in mail, were already mounted, while two horses waited with empty saddles. A pair of Ragnar’s men ran to the gate beneath us and I heard the bar being lifted.

‘Alfred didn’t send me,’ Pyrlig said.

‘You mean this is all your idea? To come and remind me of my oath? I don’t need reminding.’

‘To break an oath is a. …’

‘I know!’ I shouted.

‘Yet men break oaths all the time,’ Pyrlig went on calmly, gazing south to where the first grey light of dawn was touching the crests of the hills. ‘Maybe that’s why we hedge oaths with harsh law and strict custom, because we know they will be broken. I think Alfred knows you will not return. He is sad about that. If Wessex is attacked then he will lack his sharpest sword, but even so he didn’t send me. He thinks Wessex is better without you. He wants a godly country and you were a thorn in that ambition.’

‘He might need some thorns if the Danes return to Wessex,’ I snarled.

‘He trusts in God, Lord Uhtred, he trusts in God.’

I laughed at that. Let the Christian god defend Wessex against the Northumbrian Danes when they stormed ashore in the summer. ‘If Alfred doesn’t want me back,’ I said, ‘then why are you wasting my time?’

‘Because of the oath you made on the eve of the battle for Lundene,’ Pyrlig said, ‘and it was the person to whom you made that promise who asked me to come here.’

I stared at him and fancied I heard the laughter of the Norns. The three spinners. The busy-fingered Norns who weave our fate. ‘No,’ I said, but without anger or force.

‘She sent me.’

‘No,’ I said again.

‘She wants your help.’

‘No!’ I protested.

‘And she asked me to remind you that you once swore to serve her.’

I closed my eyes. It was true, all true. Had I forgotten that oath I made in the night before we attacked Lundene? I had not forgotten it, but nor had I ever thought that oath would harness me. ‘No,’ I said again, this time a mere whisper of denial.

‘We are all sinners, lord,’ Pyrlig said gently, ‘but even the church recognises that some sins are worse than others. The oath you made to Alfred was duty and it should have been rewarded with gratitude, land and silver. It is wrong of you to break that oath and I cannot approve, but I understand that Alfred was careless in his duty towards you. But the oath you made to the lady was sworn in love, and that oath you cannot break without destroying your soul.’

‘Love?’ I made the query sound like a challenge.

‘You loved Gisela, I know, and you did not break the oaths you gave to her, but you love the lady who sent me. You always have. I see it in your face, and I see it in hers. You are blind to it, but it dazzles the rest of us.’

‘No,’ I said.

‘She is in trouble,’ Pyrlig said.

‘Trouble?’ I asked dully.

‘Her husband is sick in the mind.’

‘Is he mad?’

‘Not so you’d know.’

Beneath me the hinges squealed as the two great gates were pushed outwards. Ragnar, bare-legged beneath swathing cloaks, was shouting farewell to the horsemen who passed beneath us through Dunholm’s High Gate, the hooves clattering on the stones of the road that led down through the town. One of the riders turned and I saw it was Haesten who raised a hand to salute me, and I raised a hand in return, then froze because the rider next to him also twisted in her saddle. She smiled, but savagely. It was Skade. She must have seen the astonishment on my face because she laughed, then kicked her heels so her horse rode free and fast downhill. ‘Trouble,’ I said, watching her, ‘more trouble than you know.’

‘Because Haesten will attack Mercia?’ Pyrlig asked.

I did not confirm that, though I doubted Haesten would have kept his intentions secret. ‘Because that woman is with him,’ I said.

‘Women brought sin into this world,’ Pyrlig said, ‘and by God they do keep it bubbling. But I can’t imagine a world without them, can you?’

‘She wants me to go to her?’

‘Yes,’ Pyrlig said, ‘and she sent me to fetch you. She also told me to tell you something else. That if you cannot keep the oath then she releases you from it.’

‘So I don’t have to go,’ I said.

‘No.’

‘But I made the oath.’

‘Yes.’

To Æthelflæd. I had escaped Alfred and felt nothing but relief at the freedom I had found, and now his daughter summoned me. And Pyrlig was right. Some oaths are made with love, and those we cannot break.

All winter I had felt like a steersman in a fog, tideswept to nowhere, windblown to no harbour, lost, but now it was as though the fog lifted. The Fates had shown me the landmark I had sought, and if it was not the landmark I had wished for, it still gave my ship direction.

I had indeed sworn an oath to Æthelflæd. Almost every promise I had ever made to her father had been wrung from me, sometimes forced from me, but so was the oath I swore to Æthelflæd. The promise to serve her had been her price for giving me men to help in the desperate assault on Lundene, and I remembered resenting that price, but I had still knelt to her and given her the vow.

I had known Æthelflæd since she was a child, the one child of Alfred’s who had mischief and life and laughter, and I had seen those qualities curdled by the marriage to my cousin. And in the months and years after the oath I had come to love her, not as I loved Gisela who was a friend to Æthelflæd, but as a sparkling girl whose light was being doused by the cruelty of men. And I had served her. I had protected her. And now she asked me to protect her again, and the request filled me with indecision. I busied the next few days with activity, hunting and practising weapons, and Finan, who often sparred sword-to-sword with me, stepped back one day and asked if I was trying to kill him. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

‘It’s the Welsh priest, isn’t it?’ he asked.

‘It’s fate,’ I said.

‘And where’s fate taking us, lord?’ he asked.

‘South,’ I said, ‘south,’ and I hated that word. I was a northerner, Northumbria was my country, yet the spinners were taking me south.

‘To Alfred?’ Finan asked in disbelief.

‘No,’ I said, ‘to Æthelflæd,’ and as I said her name I knew I could delay no longer.

So, a week after Haesten left, I went to Ragnar and I lied to him because I did not want him to see my betrayal. ‘I’m going to protect my children,’ I told him.

‘Haesten surely won’t kill them,’ he tried to reassure me.

‘But Skade will.’

He thought about that, then nodded. ‘True.’

‘Or she’ll sell them into slavery,’ I said bleakly. ‘She hates me.’

‘Then you must go,’ he said. And so I rode from Dunholm, and my men came with me because they were oath-sworn, and their families came too and because of that Ragnar knew I was riding away for good. He had watched my men load packhorses with mail and weapons, and he had gazed at me, hurt and puzzled. ‘Are you going to Wessex?’ he asked.

‘No,’ I promised him, and I spoke truthfully.

Brida knew it. ‘Then where?’ she demanded angrily.

‘To my children.’

‘You’ll bring them back here?’ Ragnar had asked eagerly.

‘There is a friend,’ I avoided answering his question, ‘who has the care of my children, and she is in trouble.’

Brida cut through my evasions. ‘Alfred’s daughter?’ she asked scornfully.

‘Yes.’

‘Who hates the Danes,’ Brida said.

‘She has pleaded for my help,’ I spoke to Ragnar, ‘and I cannot refuse her.’

‘Women weaken you,’ Brida snarled at me. ‘What of your promise to sail with Ragnar?’

‘I made no such promise,’ I snapped back at her.

‘We need you!’ Ragnar pleaded.

‘Me and my half-crew?’

‘If you don’t help destroy Wessex,’ Brida said, ‘you will get no share in Wessex’s wealth, and without that, Uhtred, you have no hopes of Bebbanburg.’

‘I am riding to find my children,’ I said obstinately, and both Ragnar and Brida knew that was a half-truth at best.

‘You were always a Saxon before you were a Dane,’ Brida said derisively. ‘You want to be a Dane, but you don’t have the courage.’

‘You may be right,’ I admitted.

‘We should kill you now,’ Brida said, and she meant it.

Ragnar laid a hand on Brida’s arm to silence her, then embraced me. ‘You are my brother,’ he said. He held me close for an instant. He knew, and I knew, that I was going back to the Saxons, that we would forever be on opposing sides, and all I could do was promise that I would never fight against him.

‘And will you betray our plans to Alfred?’ Brida demanded. Ragnar might make his peace with my departure, but Brida was ever unforgiving.

‘I hate Alfred,’ I said, ‘and wish you joy in toppling his kingdom.’

There, I have written it, and it hurt me to write it because the memory of that parting is so painful. Brida hated me at that moment, and Ragnar was saddened, and I was a coward. I hid behind the fate of my children and betrayed my friendship. All winter Ragnar had sheltered me and fed my men, and now I deserted him. He had been happy with me at his side, and he was unhappy at the prospect of fighting Wessex, but he had thought he and I would wage that war together. Now I left him. He allowed me to leave him. Brida truly would have killed me that day, but Ragnar forgave me. It was a clear spring day. It was the day my life changed. Wyrd bið ful ãræd.

So we rode south and for a long time I could not speak. Father Pyrlig sensed my mood and said nothing till at last I broke the morose silence. ‘You say my cousin’s sick in the mind?’ I asked.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘and no.’

‘Thank you for making it so plain,’ I said.

He half smiled. He rode beside me, eyes narrowed against the day’s sun. ‘He’s not mad as poor Guthred is mad,’ he said after a while, ‘he doesn’t have visions or talk to the angels or chew the rushes. He’s angry that he’s not a king. Æthelred knows that when he dies Mercia will fall to Wessex. That’s what Alfred wants, and what Alfred wants he usually gets.’

‘So why does Æthelflæd send for me?’

‘Your cousin hates his wife,’ Pyrlig said, his voice low so it would not carry to Finan and Sihtric who rode close behind. A dog harried sheep out of our path, obeying the shrill whistle of a shepherd on a farther hill. Pyrlig sighed. ‘Every time he sees Æthelflæd,’ he went on, ‘he feels the chains that Alfred has hung on him. He would be king, and he cannot be king because Alfred will not allow it.’

‘Because Alfred wants to be King of Mercia?’

‘Alfred wants to be King of England,’ Pyrlig said, ‘and if he cannot boast that title, then he would have his son wear that crown. And so there cannot be another Saxon king. A king is God’s anointed, a king is sacred, so there must be no other anointed king to obstruct the path.’

‘And Æthelred resents that,’ I said.

‘He does, and he would punish his wife.’

‘How?’

‘By divorcing her.’

‘Alfred wouldn’t stand for it,’ I said dismissively.

‘Alfred is a sick man. He could die at any moment.’

‘Divorcing her,’ I said, ‘which means. …’ I paused. Æthelflæd, of course, had told me of her husband’s ambitions before, but I still found them scarcely credible. ‘No, he wouldn’t do that!’

‘He tried when we all thought Alfred lay dying,’ Pyrlig said, ‘and Æthelflæd got word of what was to happen and took refuge in a nunnery at Lecelad.’

‘On the border of Wessex?’

Pyrlig nodded. ‘So she can flee to her father if they try again, which they will.’

I swore softly. ‘Aldhelm?’ I asked.

‘The Lord Aldhelm,’ Pyrlig agreed.

‘Æthelred will force her to Aldhelm’s bed?’ I asked, my voice rising with incredulity.

‘That would be the Lord Æthelred’s pleasure,’ Pyrlig said drily, ‘and doubtless Lord Aldhelm’s greater pleasure. And when it is done Æthelred can offer the church proof of adultery, confine her to a nunnery and the marriage is over. Then he’s free to marry again, beget an heir, and as soon as Alfred dies he can call himself king.’

‘So who protects her?’ I asked, ‘and who protects my children?’

‘Nuns.’

‘No man protects her?’

‘Her husband is the giver of gold, not she,’ Pyrlig said. ‘Men love her, but she has no wealth to give them.’

‘She does now,’ I said savagely, and dug my spurs into the horse I had purchased in Dunholm. I did not have much wealth left. I had purchased more than seventy horses to make this journey possible, and the little silver that remained was packed into two saddlebags, but I had Serpent-Breath and I had Wasp-Sting and now, because the three spinners had twisted my life yet again, I had a purpose. I would go to Æthelflæd.

Lecelad was a straggle of hovels built along the northern bank of the Temes where the Lec, a boggy stream, flowed into the river. A watermill stood where the stream emptied itself, and next to it was a wharf where a handful of small, leaking boats was tied. At the eastern end of the village street, which was a collection of mud-coloured puddles, was the convent. It was surrounded by a palisade built, I suspected, to keep the nuns in rather than their enemies out, and over that rain-darkened wall reared a gaunt and ugly church made of timber and wattle. The bell-tower scraped the low clouds as rain seethed from the west. On the far side of the Temes was a wooden landing stage and above it, on the bank, a group of men who sheltered beneath a makeshift awning propped on poles. They were all in mail, their spears stacked against a willow. I stepped onto the wharf, cupped my hands, and shouted at them. ‘Who do you serve?’

‘Lord Æthelnoth!’ one of the men shouted back. He did not recognise me. I was swathed in a dark cloak and had a hood over my fair hair.

‘Why are you there?’ I shouted, but the only reply was a shrug of incomprehension.

That southern bank was West Saxon territory, which was doubtless why Æthelflæd had chosen Lecelad. She could flee into her father’s kingdom at a moment’s notice, though Alfred, who held the bonds of marriage to be sacred, would doubtless be reluctant to offer her refuge for fear of the resultant scandal. Nevertheless I guessed he had ordered Ealdorman Æthelnoth of Sumorsæte to watch the convent, if for no other reason to report any strange happenings on the river’s Mercian bank. They would have something to report now, I thought.

‘Who are you, lord?’ the man called back across the river. He might not have recognised me, but he saw I led a band of horsemen and perhaps the gold of my lavish cloak-brooch glinted in the dull rainy air.

I ignored his question, turning instead to Finan who grinned at me from horseback. ‘Just thirty men, lord,’ he told me. I had sent him to explore the village and find how many men guarded the convent.

‘Is that all?’

‘There are more in a village to the north,’ he said.

‘Who commands the thirty?’

‘Some poor bastard who almost shit himself when he saw us.’

The thirty men were posted in Lecelad itself, presumably on my cousin’s orders and presumably to make sure Æthelflæd stayed immured in the ugly convent. I hauled myself into the wet, slippery saddle and fiddled my right foot into the stirrup. ‘Let’s kick this wasp’s nest,’ I said.

I led my men eastwards past cottages, dunghills and rooting pigs. Some folk watched us from doorways, while at the street’s end, in front of the convent itself, a straggle of men in leather jerkins and rusted helmets waited, but if they had orders to prevent anyone entering the convent they were in no mood to enforce them. They moved sullenly aside as we approached. I ignored them and they neither demanded my name nor tried to stop us.

I kicked the convent’s gate, spattering rain from its upper edge. My horse whinnied, and I kicked the gate a second time. The Mercian troops watched. One ran into an alley and I suspected he was going to fetch help. ‘We’ll be fighting someone before this day’s through,’ I told Finan.

‘I hope so, lord,’ he said gloomily, ‘it’s been much too long.’

A small hatch in the big gate slid open and a woman’s face appeared in the hole. ‘What do you want?’ the face demanded.

‘To get out of this rain,’ I said.

‘The villagers will offer you shelter,’ the woman said and began to slide the hatch shut, but I managed to get my toe into the space.

‘You can open the gate,’ I said, ‘or you can watch us chop it to splinters.’

‘They are friends of the Lady Æthelflæd,’ Father Pyrlig intervened helpfully.

The hatch slid fully open again. ‘Is that you, father?’

‘It is, sister.’

‘Have manners vanished from the surface of God’s earth?’ she asked.

‘He can’t help it, sister,’ Pyrlig said, ‘he’s just a brute.’ He grinned at me.

‘Remove your foot,’ the woman demanded crossly, and when I obeyed she closed the hatch and I heard the locking bar being lifted. Then the gate creaked wide.

I climbed out of the saddle. ‘Wait,’ I told my men, and walked into the nunnery’s courtyard. The gaunt church comprised the whole of the southern part, while the other three sides were edged with low timber buildings, thatched with straw, in which I assumed the nuns slept, ate and spun wool. The nun, who introduced herself as the Abbess Werburgh, bowed to me. ‘You’re truly a friend of the Lady Æthelflæd?’ she asked. She was an elderly woman, so small that she scarcely reached my waist, but she had a fierce face.

‘I am.’

Werburgh twitched with disapproval when she noticed the hammer of Thor hanging at my neck. ‘And your name?’ she demanded, but just then a shriek sounded and a child hurtled out of a doorway and pelted across the puddled courtyard.

It was Stiorra, my daughter, and she threw herself at me, wrapping her arms around my neck and her legs around my waist. I was glad it was raining, or else the nun might have thought the drops on my face were tears. They were. ‘I knew you’d come,’ Stiorra said fiercely, ‘I knew, I knew, I knew.’

‘You’re Lord Uhtred?’ the abbess asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Thank God,’ she said.

Stiorra was telling me of her adventures, and Osbert, my youngest, had run to me and was trying to climb my leg. Uhtred, my eldest son, was nowhere to be seen. I picked up Osbert and shouted for Finan to bring the other men inside. ‘I don’t know how long we’re staying,’ I told the Abbess Werburgh, ‘but the horses need stabling and food.’

‘You think we’re a tavern?’ she demanded.

‘You won’t leave again, will you?’ Stiorra was asking insistently.

‘No,’ I said, ‘no, no, no,’ and then I stopped talking because Æthelflæd had appeared in a doorway, framed there by the darkness behind and even on that drab grey day it seemed to me that, though she was dressed in a cloak and hood of coarse brown weave, she glowed.

And I remembered Iseult’s prophecy made so many years ago, made when Æthelflæd was no older than Stiorra, a prophecy made when Wessex was at its weakest, when the Danes had overrun the country and Alfred was a fugitive in the marshes. Iseult, that strange and lovely woman, dark as shadows, had promised me that Alfred would give me power and that my woman would be a creature of gold.

And I stared at Æthelflæd and she stared back, and I knew the promise I had made to my daughter was one I would keep. I would not leave.

I put my children down, warning them to stay away from the horses’ hooves, and I walked across the puddled courtyard, oblivious of the nuns who had crept out to watch our arrival. I planned to bow to Æthelflæd. She was, after all, a king’s daughter and the wife of Mercia’s ruler, but her face was at once tearful and happy and I did not bow. I held out my arms and she came to me, and I felt her body trembling as I held her close. Maybe she could feel my heart beating, for it seemed to me as loud as a great drumbeat. ‘You’ve come,’ she said.

‘Yes.’

‘I knew you would.’

I pushed back her hood to see her hair, as golden as mine. I smiled. ‘A creature of gold,’ I said.

‘Foolish man,’ she said, smiling.

‘What happens now?’ I asked her.

‘I imagine,’ she said, stepping gently away from me and pulling the hood back over her hair, ‘that my husband will try to kill you.’

‘And he can summon?’ I asked, then paused to think, ‘fifteen hundred trained warriors?’

‘At least that many.’

‘Then I see no difficulty,’ I said lightly, ‘I have at least forty men.’

And that afternoon the first of the Mercian warriors came.

They arrived in groups, ten or twenty at a time, riding from the north and making a loose cordon about the nunnery. I watched them from the bell-tower, counting over a hundred warriors, and still more came. ‘The thirty men in the village,’ I asked Æthelflæd, ‘they were here to keep you from leaving?’

‘They were supposed to stop food reaching the nunnery,’ she said, ‘though they weren’t very effective. Supplies came across the river by boat.’

‘They wanted to starve you?’

‘My husband thought that would make me leave. Then I’d have to go back to him.’

‘Not to your father?’

She grimaced. ‘He would have sent me back to my husband, wouldn’t he?’

‘Would he?’

‘Marriage is a sacrament, Uhtred,’ she said almost wearily, ‘it is sanctified by God, and you know my father won’t offend God.’

‘So why didn’t Æthelred just drag you back?’

‘Invade a nunnery? My father would disapprove of that!’

‘He would,’ I said, watching a larger group of horsemen appear to the north.

‘They thought my father would die at any moment,’ she said, and I knew she spoke of my cousin and his friend, Aldhelm, ‘and they were waiting for that.’

‘But your father lives.’

‘He recovers,’ Æthelflæd said, ‘God be thanked.’

‘And here comes trouble,’ I said, because the new band of horsemen, at least fifty in number, rode beneath a banner, suggesting that whoever commanded the troops guarding the nunnery was coming himself. As the horsemen drew nearer, I saw the banner displayed a cross made of two big-bladed war axes. ‘Whose badge is that?’

‘Aldhelm’s,’ Æthelflæd said flatly.

Two hundred men ringed the convent now, and Aldhelm, riding a tall black stallion, placed himself fifty paces from the nunnery gates. He had a bodyguard of two priests and a dozen warriors. The warriors carried shields that bore their lord’s crossed-axe badge, and those grim men gathered just behind him and, like their lord, gazed in silence at the closed gates. Did Aldhelm know I was inside? He might have suspected, but I doubt he had any certainty. We had ridden fast through Mercia, keeping to the eastern half where the Danes were strongest, so few men in Saxon Mercia would realise I had come south. Yet perhaps Aldhelm suspected I was there, for he made no attempt to enter the nunnery, or else he was under orders not to offend his god by committing sacrilege. Alfred might forgive Æthelred for making Æthelflæd unhappy, but he would never forgive an insult to his god.

I went down to the courtyard. ‘What’s he waiting for?’ Finan asked me.

‘Me,’ I said.

I dressed for war. I dressed in shining mail, sword-belted, booted, with my wolf-crested helmet and my shield with the wolf badge, and I chose to carry a war axe as well as my two scabbarded swords. I ordered one leaf of the convent gate to be opened, then walked out alone. I did not ride because I had not been able to buy a battle-trained stallion.

I walked in silence and Aldhelm’s men watched me. If Aldhelm had possessed a scrap of courage he should have ridden at me and chopped me down with the long sword hanging at his waist, and even without courage he could have ordered his personal guard to cut me down, but instead he just stared at me.

I stopped a dozen paces from him, then leaned the battle-axe on my shoulder. I had pushed open the hinged cheek-plates of my helmet so Aldhelm’s men could see my face. ‘Men of Mercia!’ I shouted so that not only Aldhelm’s men could hear me, but the West Saxon troops across the river. ‘Any day now Jarl Haesten will lead an attack on your country! He comes with thousands of men, hungry men, spear-Danes, sword-Danes, Danes who would rape your wives, enslave your children and steal your lands. They will make a greater army than the horde of warriors you defeated at Fearnhamme! How many of you were at Fearnhamme?’

Men glanced at each other, but none raised a hand or shouted that they had been present at that great victory.

‘You’re ashamed of your triumph?’ I asked them. ‘You made a slaughter that will be remembered so long as men live in Mercia! And you are ashamed of it? How many of you were at Fearnhamme?’

Some found their courage then and lifted their arms, and one man cheered, and suddenly most of them were cheering. They cheered themselves. Aldhelm, confused, raised a hand to call for silence, but they ignored him.

‘And who,’ I bellowed louder, ‘do you want to lead you against the Jarl Haesten who comes here with Vikings and pirates, with killers and slavers, with spears and axes, with murder and fire? It was the Lady Æthelflæd who encouraged you to victory at Fearnhamme, and you want her locked in a nunnery? She begged me to come and fight with you again, and here I am, and you greet me with swords? With spears? So who do you want to lead you against Jarl Haesten and his killers?’ I let that question hang for a few heartbeats, then I levelled the axe so it pointed at Aldhelm. ‘Do you want him?’ I shouted, ‘or me?’

What a fool that man was. At that moment, in the remnants of rain that spat out of the west, he should have killed me fast, or else he should have embraced me. He could have leaped from his saddle and offered me friendship, and so pretended an alliance that would buy him the time during which he could arrange my death by stealth, but instead he showed fear. He was a coward, he had always been a coward, brave only when faced by the weak, and the fear was on his face, it was in his hesitation, and it was not till one of his followers leaned and whispered in his ear that he found his voice. ‘This man,’ he called, pointing at me, ‘is outlawed from Wessex.’

That was news to me, but it was not surprising. I had broken my oath to Alfred, so Alfred would have little choice but to declare me outlaw and thus prey to anyone with the courage to capture me. ‘So I’m an outlaw!’ I shouted, ‘so come and kill me! And who will protect you from Jarl Haesten then?’

Aldhelm came to his senses then and muttered something to the man who had whispered to him, and that man, a big broad-shouldered warrior, spurred his horse forward. His sword was drawn. He knew what he was doing. He did not ride at me frantically, but deliberately. He came to kill me, and I could see his eyes judging me from deep in the shadow of his helmet. His sword was already drawn back, his arm tensed for the sweeping stroke that would crash into my shield with the weight of man and horse behind the blade to throw me off balance. Then the horse would turn into me and the sword would come again from behind me, and he knew that I knew all that, but he was reassured when I raised my shield, for that meant I would do what he expected me to do. I saw his mouth tighten and his heels nudge back and his stallion, a big grey beast, lunged ahead and the sword flashed in the dull air.

All the man’s great strength was in that stroke. It came from my right. My shield was in my left hand, the axe in my right. I did two things.

I dropped onto one knee and lifted the shield over my head so it was almost flat above my helmet, and at the same moment I lunged the axe into the horse’s legs and let go of the haft.

The sword slammed onto my shield, skidded across the wood, clanged against the boss, and just then the horse, the axe tangled in its rear legs, whinnied and stumbled. I saw blood bright on a fetlock, and I was already standing as the horseman slashed again, but he and his horse were off balance and the stroke screeched harmlessly off the iron rim of my shield. Aldhelm shouted at men to help his champion, but Finan, Sihtric and Osferth were already out of the convent’s gate, mounted and armed, and Aldhelm’s men hesitated as I took a pace towards the horseman. He slashed again, still hampered by his horse’s skittishness, and this time I let my shield glance the blow downwards and simply reached out and grasped the horseman’s wrist. He shouted in alarm, and I pulled hard. He fell from the saddle, crashed onto the damp street and, for a heartbeat, looked dazed. His stallion, whinnying, twisted away as the man stood. His shield, looped onto his left arm, was streaked with mud.

I had stepped back. I drew Serpent-Breath, the blade hissing in the scabbard’s tight throat. ‘What’s your name?’ I asked. More of my men were coming from the nunnery, though Finan held them back.

The man rushed at me, hoping to throw me off balance with his shield, but I stepped aside and let him go past me. ‘What’s your name?’ I asked again.

‘Beornoth,’ he told me.

‘Were you at Fearnhamme?’ I asked, and he gave a curt nod. ‘I didn’t come here to kill you, Beornoth,’ I said.

‘I’m sworn to my lord,’ he said.

‘An unworthy lord,’ I told him.

‘You should know,’ he said, ‘you breaker of oaths,’ and with that he attacked again, and I raised my shield to take the stroke and he dropped his arm fast, taking the sword beneath my shield and the blade slammed into my calf, but I have always worn strips of iron sewn into my boots because the stroke beneath the shield is such a danger. Some men wear leg armour, but that display will deter an enemy from the stroke beneath the shield, while hidden strips of iron make the legs look vulnerable and invite the stroke, which opens the enemy to destruction. My strips stopped Beornoth’s sword dead and he looked surprised as I rammed Serpent-Breath’s hilt to hit him in the face with my gloved fist that was closed about the sword’s handle. He staggered back. My left leg was aching from his blow, but he was bleeding from a broken nose and I slammed the shield into him, forcing him back again, then I bullied him again with the shield and this time he fell backwards and I kicked his sword arm aside, put a foot on his belly and placed Serpent-Breath’s tip at his mouth. He stared up at me with hatred. He was wondering if he had time to sweep the sword up at me, but he knew there was no time left. I had but to move my hand and he would be choking on his own blood.

‘Stay still, Beornoth,’ I said softly, then looked at Aldhelm’s men. ‘I didn’t come here to kill Mercians!’ I shouted. ‘I came here to fight Jarl Haesten!’ I stepped away and took my sword from Beornoth’s face. ‘Get up,’ I told him. He stood uncertainly, not sure whether the fight was over or not. The hatred was gone from his eyes, now he was just staring at me with puzzlement. ‘Go,’ I said.

‘I am sworn to kill you,’ he said.

‘Don’t be a fool, Beornoth,’ I said wearily, ‘I just gave you your life. That makes you mine.’ I turned my back on him. ‘The Lord Aldhelm,’ I shouted, ‘sends a brave man to do what he dares not do! Would you be led by a coward?’

There were men here who remembered me, not just from Fearnhamme, but from the attack on Lundene. These were warriors, and all warriors want to be led by a man who brings them success. Aldhelm was no warrior. They knew that, but they were still confused and uncertain. All of these Mercians were sworn to Aldhelm and some had become wealthy from his gifts. Those men kicked their horses close to their lord and I saw their hands reaching for sword hilts.

‘At Fearnhamme,’ a voice called from behind me, ‘the Lord Aldhelm wished to run away. Is he the man to protect us?’ It was Æthelflæd, mounted on my horse and still wearing her drab convent clothes, though with her bright hair uncovered. ‘Who was it that led you to the slaughter?’ she demanded, ‘who protected your homes? Who protected your wives and your children? Who would you rather serve?’

Someone from among the Mercian warriors shouted my name, and a cheer followed. Aldhelm had lost and he knew it. He shouted at Beornoth to kill me, but Beornoth stayed still and so Aldhelm, his voice desperate, ordered his supporters to cut me down.

‘You don’t want to fight each other!’ I shouted, ‘you’ll have real enemies enough soon!’

‘God damn you,’ one of Aldhelm’s men snarled. He drew his sword and spurred his horse, and his action broke the uncertainty. More swords were drawn and it was suddenly chaos.

Men made their decisions, either for or against Aldhelm, and the vast majority were against him. They turned on his guards just as the man attacking me slashed with his sword. I deflected the blow with my shield as the horsemen swirled around me in a clash of blades. Finan took care of my attacker. Osferth, I noted, had put his horse in front of Æthelflæd so he could protect his half-sister, but she was in no danger. It was Aldhelm’s men who were being hacked down, though Aldhelm himself, in pure panic, managed to kick his horse free of the sudden and savage fight. His sword was drawn, but all he wanted was to escape, but there were men all around him and then, seeing me, he realised his advantage, that he was on horseback and I was not, and he drove his spurs back and came to kill me.

He attacked with the despair of a man who did not believe he could win. He did not gauge me, as Beornoth had, but just came as fast as he could and hacked with his sword as strongly as he was able, and I met the massive blow by holding Serpent-Breath upright. I knew that sword, I knew her strength, I had watched as Ealdwulf the Smith had forged the four rods of iron and three of steel into one long blade. I had fought with her, I had killed with her, and I had matched her against the blades of Saxons, Danes, Norsemen and Frisians. I knew her and I trusted her, and when Aldhelm’s sword met her with a clang that must have been heard far across the river, I knew what would happen.

His sword broke. It shattered. The broken end, two thirds of the blade, struck my helmet and fell to the mud, then I was pursuing Aldhelm who, holding a stump of sword, tried to flee, but there was no escape. The fight was over. The men who had supported him were either dead or disarmed, and the warriors who had sided with me formed a circle that ringed the two of us. Aldhelm curbed his stallion and stared at me. He opened his mouth, but could find no words. ‘Down,’ I told him, and when he hesitated, I shouted it again, ‘down!’ I looked at Beornoth who had recovered his horse. ‘Give him your sword,’ I ordered.

Aldhelm was unsteady on his feet. He had a shield and now he had Beornoth’s sword, but there was no fight in him. He was whimpering. There was no pleasure in killing such a man and so I made it quick. One thrust above his crossed-axe shield, which made him lift it and I dropped Serpent-Breath before the blade struck and cut instead into his left ankle with enough force to topple him. He fell to one knee and Serpent-Breath took him on the side of his neck. He wore a mail hood beneath his helmet, and the links did not split, but the blow drove him into a puddle and I struck again, this time breaking the neck-mail so that his blood misted and splashed across the nearest horsemen. He was shaking and crying, and I sawed the blade towards me until the blade’s point was in the ragged wound of blood and mangled mail, then I thrust her down hard into his gullet where I twisted her. He was quivering, bleeding like a pig, and then he was dead.

I threw his banner into the Temes, then cupped my hands and shouted at the men across the river. ‘Tell Alfred that Uhtred of Bebbanburg has returned!’

Only now I was fighting for Mercia.

Æthelflæd insisted that Aldhelm receive a Christian burial. There was a small church in the village, little more than a cattle byre with a cross nailed to its gable, and around it was a graveyard where we dug six graves for the six dead men. The existing graves were badly marked and one of the spades sliced into a corpse, tearing the woollen shroud and spilling stinking fat and ribs. We lay Aldhelm into that grave and, because so many of the Mercians had been his men and I did not want to strain their loyalty any further, I let him be buried in his fine clothes and mail coat. I kept his helmet, a gold chain and his horse. Father Pyrlig prayed above the fresh burials, and then we could leave. My cousin was evidently at his estate near Gleawecestre, and so we rode there. I now led over two hundred men, mostly Mercians and, doubtless, in my cousin’s eyes, rebels. ‘You want me to kill Æthelred?’ I asked Æthelflæd.

‘No!’ She sounded shocked.

‘Why not?’

‘Do you want to be Lord of Mercia?’ she retorted.

‘No.’

‘He is the chief Ealdorman of Mercia,’ Æthelflæd said, ‘and my husband.’ She shrugged. ‘I may not like him, but I am wedded to him.’

‘You can’t be wedded to a dead man,’ I said.

‘Murder is still a sin,’ Æthelflæd said gently.

‘Sin,’ I said scornfully.

‘Some sins are so bad,’ she said, ‘that a lifetime’s penance isn’t enough to redeem them.’

‘Then let me do the sinning,’ I suggested.

‘I know what’s in your heart,’ she said, ‘and if I don’t stop you then I am as guilty as you.’

I growled some retort, then nodded curtly to folk who knelt as we passed through their village that was all thatch, dung and pigs. The villagers had no idea who we were, but they recognised mail and weapons and shields. They would be holding their breath till we had gone, but soon, I thought, the Danes might come this way and the thatch would be burned and the children taken for slaves.

‘When you die,’ Æthelflæd said, ‘you’ll want a sword in your hand.’

‘Of course.’

‘Why?’

‘You know why.’

‘So you’ll go to Valhalla. When I die, Uhtred, I want to go to heaven. Would you deny me that?’

‘Of course not.’

‘Then I cannot commit the awful sin of murder. Æthelred must live. Besides,’ she gave me a smile, ‘my father would never forgive me if I were to murder Æthelred. Or allow you to murder him. And I don’t want to disappoint my father. He’s a dear man.’

I laughed at that. ‘Your father,’ I said, ‘will be angry anyway.’

‘Why?’

‘Because you asked for my help, of course.’

Æthelflæd gave me a curious look. ‘Who do you think suggested that I asked for your help?’

‘What?’ I gaped at her and she laughed. ‘Your father wanted me to come to you?’ I asked in disbelief.

‘Of course!’ she said.

I felt like a fool. I thought I had escaped Alfred, only to discover that he had drawn me south. Pyrlig must have known, but had been very careful not to tell me. ‘But your father hates me!’ I told Æthelflæd.

‘Of course he doesn’t. He just thinks of you as a very wayward hound, one that needs a whipping now and then.’ She gave me a deprecatory smile, then shrugged. ‘He knows Mercia will be attacked, Uhtred, and fears that Wessex won’t be able to help.’

‘Wessex always helps Mercia.’

‘Not if Danes are landing on Wessex’s coast,’ she said, and I almost laughed aloud. We had gone to such trouble in Dunholm to keep our plans secret, yet Alfred was already preparing for those plans. To which end he had used his daughter to draw me south, and I thought first how clever he was, then wondered just what sins that clever man was prepared to tolerate to keep the Danes from destroying Christianity in England.

We left the village to ride through sunlit country. The grass had greened and was growing fast. Cattle, released from their winter imprisonment, were gorging themselves. A hare stood on its hind legs to watch us, then skittered away before standing and staring at us again. The road climbed gently into the soft hills. This was good country, well watered and fertile, the kind of land the Danes craved. I had been to their homeland and seen how men scratched a bare living from small fields, from sand and from rock. No wonder they wanted England.

The sun was sinking as we passed through another village. A girl carrying two yoked pails of milk was so scared by the sight of armed men that she stumbled as she tried to kneel and the precious milk ran into the road’s ruts. She began to cry. I tossed her a silver coin, enough to dry her tears, and asked her if there was a lord living nearby. She pointed us northwards to where, behind a great stand of elm trees, we discovered a fine hall surrounded by a decaying palisade.

The thegn who owned the village was named Ealdhith. He was a stout, red-haired man who looked aghast at the number of horses and riders who came seeking shelter for the night. ‘I can’t feed you all,’ he grumbled, ‘and who are you?’

‘My name is Uhtred,’ I said, ‘and that is the Lady Æthelflæd.’

‘My lady,’ he said, and went onto one knee.

Ealdhith fed us well enough, though he complained next morning that we had emptied all his ale barrels. I consoled him with a gold link I chopped from Aldhelm’s chain. Ealdhith had little news to tell us. He had heard, of course, that Æthelflæd had been a prisoner in the convent at Lecelad. ‘We sent eggs and flour to her, lord,’ he told me.

‘Why?’

‘Because I live a stone’s throw from Wessex,’ he said, ‘and I like West Saxons to be friendly to my folk.’

‘Have you seen any Danes this spring?’

‘Danes, lord? Those bastards don’t come near here!’ Ealdhith was sure of that, which explained why he had allowed his palisade to deteriorate. ‘We just till our land and raise our cattle,’ he said guardedly.

‘And if Lord Æthelred summons you?’ I asked, ‘you go to war?’

‘I pray it doesn’t happen, but yes, lord. I can take six good warriors to serve.’

‘You were at Fearnhamme?’

‘I couldn’t go, lord, I had a broken leg.’ He lifted his smock to show me a twisted calf. ‘I was lucky to live.’

‘Be ready for a summons now,’ I warned him.

He made the sign of the cross. ‘There’s trouble coming?’

‘There’s always trouble coming,’ I said, and hauled myself into the saddle of Aldhelm’s fine stallion. The horse, unused to me, trembled and I patted his neck.

We rode westwards in the cool morning air. My children rode with me. A beggar was coming the other way and he knelt by the ditch to let us pass, holding out one mangled hand. ‘I was wounded in the fight at Lundene,’ he called. There were many such men reduced by war’s injury to beggary. I gave my son Uhtred a silver coin and told him to toss it to the man, which he did, but then added some words. ‘May Christ bless you!’

‘What did you say?’ I demanded.

‘You heard him.’ Æthelflæd, riding on my left, was amused.

‘I offered him a blessing, Father,’ Uhtred said.

‘Don’t tell me you’ve become a Christian!’ I snarled.

He reddened, but before he could say anything in reply Osferth spurred from among the horsemen behind. ‘Lord! Lord!’

‘What is it?’

He did not answer, but just pointed back the way we had come.

I turned to see a thickening plume of smoke on the eastern horizon. How often I have seen those great smoke columns! I have caused many myself, the marks of war.

‘What is it?’ Æthelflæd asked.

‘Haesten,’ I said, my son’s idiocy forgotten. ‘It has to be Haesten.’ I could think of no other explanation.

The war had started.

Seventy of us rode towards the pyre of smoke that now appeared as a dark slow-moving smudge on the hazed horizon. Half the seventy were my men and half were Mercians. I had left my children in the village where Osferth and Beornoth were under orders to wait for our return.

Æthelflæd insisted on riding with us. I tried to stop her, but she would take no orders from me. ‘This is my country,’ she said firmly, ‘and my people, and I need to see what is being done to them.’

‘Probably nothing,’ I said. Fires were frequent. Houses had thatched roofs and open hearths, and sparks and straw go ill together, but I still had a sense of foreboding that had made me dress in mail before we started this return journey. My first response on seeing the smoke had been to suspect Haesten and, though reflection made that explanation seem ever more unlikely, I could not lose the suspicion.

‘There’s no other smoke,’ Finan noted when we had retraced half our steps. Usually, if an army scavenges through a land, it fires every village, yet only the one dark smoke plume drifted skywards. ‘And Lecelad’s a far way from East Anglia,’ he went on, ‘if that fire is in Lecelad.’

‘True enough,’ I grunted. Lecelad was a long way from Haesten’s camp in Beamfleot, indeed so deep in Saxon country that any Danish army marching straight on Lecelad was putting itself in danger. None of it made sense, unless, as both Finan and I wanted to believe, it was simply an errant spark and dry thatch.

The fire was indeed at Lecelad. It took some time to be certain of that for the land was flat and our view was obscured by trees, but we had no doubts once we were close enough to see the heat shimmering amidst the smoke. We were following the river, but now I turned away so that we could approach the village from the north. That, I believed, would be the direction in which any Danes retreated and we might have a chance to intercept them. Reason still said this had to be a simple house fire, but my instincts were also prickling uncomfortably.

We reached the northwards road to see it had been churned by hooves. The weather had been dry, so the hoofprints were not distinct, but even at a glance I could tell they had not been left by Aldhelm’s men who, just the day before, had used this same track to approach Lecelad. There were too many prints, and those that pointed northwards had mostly obliterated the ones going south. That meant whoever had ridden to Lecelad had already ridden away.

‘Been and gone,’ Father Pyrlig said. He was in his priestly robes, but had a big sword strapped at his waist.

‘At least a hundred of them,’ Finan said, looking at the hoofprints that spread either side of the track.

I gazed northwards, but could see nothing. If the raiding horsemen had still been close I would have seen dust hanging in the air, but the country was calm and green. ‘Let’s see what the bastards did,’ I said, and turned southwards.

Whoever had come and gone, and I was certain it was Haesten’s men, they had been swift. I guessed they had arrived at Lecelad at dusk, had done whatever damage they wanted and then left in the dawn. They knew they were dangerously deep in Saxon Mercia and so they had not lingered. They had struck fast, and even now they were hurrying back to safer ground while we rode into the ever thickening smell of wood smoke. Of wood smoke and of burning flesh.

The convent was gone, or rather it had been reduced to a blazing framework of oak beams that, as we approached, finally collapsed with a great crash that made my stallion rear in fright. Embers whirled upwards in a great gout of wind-billowed smoke. ‘Oh, dear God,’ Æthelflaed said, making the sign of the cross. She was gazing in horror at one section of the convent’s palisade that had been spared the fire, and there, on the timbers, pinioned with widespread arms, was a small naked body. ‘No!’ Æthelflæd said and spurred her horse through the hot ash that had spread from the fire.

‘Come back!’ I shouted, but Æthelflæd had thrown herself from her saddle to kneel at the foot of the corpse, a woman. It was Werburgh, the abbess, and she had been crucified on the palisade. Her hands and feet were pierced by great dark nails. Her small weight had torn the flesh, sinews and bones about the great nails so that the wounds were stretched and rivulets of drying blood laced her pitifully thin arms. Æthelflæd was kissing the abbess’s nailed feet and resisted when I tried to pull her away. ‘She was a good woman, Uhtred,’ Æthelflæd protested, and just then Werburgh’s torn right hand ripped itself free of the nail and the corpse lurched and its arm swung down to strike Æthelflæd’s head. Æthelflæd gave a small scream, then seized the ragged bloody hand and kissed it. ‘She blessed me, Uhtred. She was dead, but she blessed me! Did you see?’

‘Come away,’ I said gently.

‘She touched me!’

‘Come away,’ I said again, and this time she let me draw her from the corpse and away from the heat of the fire just beyond.

‘She must be buried properly,’ Æthelflæd insisted and tried to pull from me to return to the corpse.

‘She will be,’ I said, holding her.

‘Don’t let her burn!’ Æthelflæd said through tears, ‘she mustn’t taste the fires of hell, Uhtred! Let me spare her the fire!’

Werburgh was very close to the furnace heat that was scorching the farther side of the palisade that I knew would ignite at any moment. I pushed Æthelflæd away, stepped back to Werburgh and dragged her small body free of the remaining two nails. I draped her over my shoulder just as a gust of wind dipped a thick cloud of dark smoke to envelop me. I felt sudden heat on my back and knew the palisade had burst into flames, but Werburgh’s body was safe. I laid her face down on the river bank and Æthelflæd covered the corpse with a cloak. The West Saxon troops, reinforced now to around forty men, gaped at us from the southern bank.

‘Jesus, Patrick and Joseph,’ Finan said as he approached me. He glanced at Æthelflæd who was kneeling by the abbess’s body and I sensed Finan did not want Æthelflæd to hear whatever he had to say, so I led him down the river towards the mill that was also burning. ‘The bastards dug up Aldhelm’s grave,’ Finan said.

‘I put him there,’ I said, ‘so I should worry what they did?’

‘They mutilated him,’ Finan said angrily. ‘Took all his clothes, his mail, and cut up his corpse. There were pigs eating him when we found him.’ He made the sign of the cross.

I stared at the village. The church, convent and mill had all been fired, but only two of the cottages had been burned, though doubtless all had been ransacked. The raiders had been in a hurry and had fired what was most valuable, but had not had the time to destroy the whole of Lecelad. ‘Haesten’s a nasty creature,’ I said, ‘but mutilating a corpse and crucifying a woman? That isn’t like him.’

‘It was Skade, lord,’ Finan said. He beckoned to a man dressed in a short mail coat and wearing a helmet that had rust on its riveted joints. ‘You! Come here!’ he called.

The man knelt to me and clawed off his helmet. ‘My name’s Cealworth, lord,’ he said, ‘and I serve Ealdorman Æthelnoth.’

‘You’re one of the sentries across the river?’ I asked.

‘Yes, lord.’

‘We brought him across the river in a boat,’ Finan explained. ‘Now tell the Lord Uhtred what you saw.’

‘It was a woman, lord,’ Cealworth said nervously, ‘a tall woman with long black hair. The same woman, lord,’ he stopped, then decided he had nothing more to say.

‘Go on,’ I said.

‘The same woman I saw at Fearnhamme, lord. After the battle.’

‘Stand up,’ I told him. ‘Are any villagers alive?’ I asked Finan.

‘Some,’ he said bleakly.

‘A few swam the river, lord,’ Cealworth said.

‘And the ones that live,’ Finan said, ‘all tell the same tale.’

‘Skade?’ I asked.

The Irishman nodded. ‘It seems she led them, lord.’

‘Haesten wasn’t here?’

‘If he was, lord, then no one noticed him.’

‘The woman gave all the orders, lord,’ Cealworth said.

I stared northwards and wondered what happened in the rest of Mercia. I was looking for the telltale plumes of smoke, but saw none. Æthelflæd came to stand beside me and, without thinking, I put an arm about her shoulder. She did not move.

‘Why did they come here?’ Finan asked.

‘For me,’ Æthelflæd said bitterly.

‘That would make sense, my lady,’ Finan said.

In a way it made sense. I did not doubt that Haesten would have sent spies into Mercia. Those spies would have been merchants or vagabonds, anyone with a reason to travel, and they would have told him Æthelflæd was a prisoner in Lecelad, and Æthelflæd would certainly make a powerful and useful hostage, but why send Skade to capture her? I thought, though I did not speak the thought aloud, that it was much more likely that Skade had come for my children. Haesten’s spies would have learned that the three were with Æthelflæd, and Skade hated me now. And when Skade hated there was no cruelty sufficient to slake her appetite. I knew my suspicion was right and I shuddered. If Skade had come just two days earlier she would have taken my children and had me in her power. I touched Thor’s hammer. ‘We bury the dead,’ I said, ‘then we ride.’ Just then a bee landed on my right hand that was still resting on Æthelflæd’s shoulder. I did not try to brush it off, for I did not want to take my arm away. I felt it first, then saw it crawling dozily towards my thumb. It would fly away, I thought, but then, for no reason, it stung me. I swore at the sudden pain and slapped the insect dead, startling Æthelflæd.

‘Rub an onion on the sting,’ she told me, but I could not be bothered to hunt for an onion, so I left it alone. I knew the sting was an omen, a message from the gods, but I did not want to think about it, for it could surely be no good sign.

We buried the dead. Most of the nuns had been shrunken to small burned corpses scarce bigger than children, and now they shared a grave with their crucified abbess. Father Pyrlig spoke words over their bodies, and then we rode westwards again. By the time we discovered Osferth and Beornoth, their men and my family, my hand was so swollen that I could scarcely fold the puffy fingers around the stallion’s reins. I could certainly not hold a sword with any skill. ‘It’ll be gone in a week,’ Finan said.

‘If we have a week,’ I said gloomily. He looked at me quizzically, and I shrugged. ‘The Danes are on the move,’ I said, ‘and we don’t know what’s happening.’

We were still travelling with my men’s wives and families. They slowed us down, and so I left a score of men to guard them as they followed us, and hurried on towards Gleawecestre. We spent the night in the hills to the west of that city and, in the dawn, saw smears in the sky far to the east and north. There were too many to count and in places they joined together to make darker patches that might have been clouds, though I doubted it. Æthelflæd saw them too and frowned. ‘My poor country,’ she said.

‘Haesten,’ I said.

‘My husband should have marched against them already,’ she said.

‘You think he has?’

She shook her head. ‘He’ll wait for Aldhelm to tell him what to do.’

I laughed at that. We had reached the hills above the valley of the Sæfern and I checked my horse to gaze down at my cousin’s holdings that lay just south of Gleawecestre. Æthelred’s father had been content with a hall half the size that his son had built, and beside that new and magnificent hall were stables, a church, barns and a massive granary raised on stone mushrooms to keep the rats at bay. All the buildings, new and old, were surrounded by a palisade. We cantered down the hill. Guards stood on a timber platform above the gate, but they must have recognised Æthelflæd because they made no attempt to challenge us, but just ordered that the great gates be pushed open.

Æthelred’s steward met us in the wide courtyard. If he was astonished to see Æthelflæd he showed no sign of it, but just bowed deeply and welcomed her graciously. Slaves brought us bowls of water so we could wash our hands, while stable boys took our horses. ‘My lord is in the hall, lady,’ the steward told Æthelflæd, and for the first time sounded nervous.

‘Is he well?’ Æthelflæd asked.

‘God be praised, yes,’ he answered, and his eyes flicked to me and back to her. ‘You’ve come for the council, perhaps?’

‘What council?’ Æthelflæd asked, taking a woollen cloth from a slave to dry her hands.

‘There is trouble from the heathens, lady,’ the steward said cautiously, then glanced at me again.

‘This is the Lord Uhtred of Bebbanburg,’ Æthelflæd said with apparent carelessness, ‘and yes, we’ve come for the council.’

‘I shall tell your husband you are here,’ the steward said. He had looked startled when he heard my name and taken a hasty backwards step.

‘No need for an announcement,’ Æthelflæd said sharply.

‘Your swords?’ the steward asked. ‘If you please, my lords, your swords?’

‘Is anyone else armed in the hall?’ I asked.

‘The ealdorman’s own guards, lord, no one else.’

I hesitated, then gave the steward my two swords. It was usual to wear no weapon in a king’s hall, and Æthelred evidently saw himself as near enough to a king to demand the same courtesy. It was more than a courtesy, it was a precaution against the slaughter that could follow a drunken feast. I half wondered if I should keep Serpent-Breath, but reckoned the long blade would be a provocation.

I took Osferth, Finan, Father Pyrlig and Beornoth. My hand was throbbing and red, the flesh so swollen that I thought the simple touch of a knife’s edge would split it open like bursting fruit. I kept it hidden beneath my cloak as we went from the sunlight into the shadowed darkness of Æthelred’s great hall.

If the steward’s first response to seeing Æthelflæd had been restrained, her husband’s was the very opposite. He looked irritated when we first walked into the hall, plainly offended at the interruption, then hopeful, because he must have thought Aldhelm had arrived, and then he recognised us and, for a gratifying instant, he appeared terrified. He was sitting in a chair, more of a throne than a chair, that was set on the dais where, normally, the high table would be set for feasting. He wore a thin bronze circlet on his red hair, a circlet that fell just short of a crown. He had a thick gold chain over his embroidered jerkin and a fur-trimmed cloak that had been dyed a deep scarlet. Two men with swords and shields stood at the back of the dais, while Æthelred was flanked by a pair of priests who sat facing four benches set on the rush-strewn floor. Eighteen men occupied the benches and they all turned to stare at us. The priest on Æthelred’s right was my old enemy, Bishop Asser, and he was looking at me with wide-open eyes and unconcealed surprise. If Alfred had manipulated me into returning, then he had plainly not told Asser.

It was Asser who broke the silence, and that by itself was interesting. This hall belonged to Æthelred who was the Ealdorman of Mercia, yet the Welsh bishop thought nothing of assuming authority. It was a sign of Alfred’s dominance over Saxon Mercia, a dominance that Æthelred secretly detested. He could not wait for Alfred to die so he could turn the circlet into a proper crown, yet he also needed the assistance that Wessex gave. Bishop Asser, shrewd and waspish, was undoubtedly here to pass on Alfred’s commands, but now he stood and pointed a bony finger at me. ‘You!’ he said. A pair of hounds had rushed to greet Æthelflæd. She soothed them. There was a babble of voices that Bishop Asser overrode. ‘You were declared outlaw,’ he yapped.

I told him to be silent, but of course he went on protesting, becoming ever more indignant until Father Pyrlig spoke to him in Welsh. I had no idea what Pyrlig said, but it silenced Asser who just spluttered and kept pointing at me. I assume Father Pyrlig revealed that Alfred had conspired at my return, but that was small consolation to the bishop, who regarded me as a creature sent by his religion’s demon, the creature they call Satan. Whatever, he stayed silent as Æthelflaed went to the dais and snapped her fingers to a servant who hurried to fetch her a chair. She leaned down to Æthelred and gave him a very public kiss on the cheek, but she also whispered something in his ear and I saw him redden. Then she sat next to him and reached for his hand. ‘Do sit down, bishop,’ she told Asser, then looked gravely at the assembled lords. ‘I bring bad news,’ she said. ‘The Danes have destroyed the convent at Lecelad. Every dear sister there is dead, as is my dear Lord Aldhelm. I pray for their souls.’

‘Amen,’ Father Pyrlig roared.

‘How did the Lord Aldhelm die?’ Bishop Asser asked.

‘There will be a time for sad tales when our more urgent business is decided,’ Æthelflæd said without looking at Asser, ‘for the moment I wish to know how we are to defeat the Jarl Haesten.’

The next few moments were confusing. The truth was that none of the assembled lords knew the extent of Haesten’s invasion. At least a dozen messengers had come overnight to Gleawecestre and they had all brought dire tidings of savage and sudden attacks by Danish horsemen, and as I listened to the various reports I realised that Haesten had set out to confuse the Mercians. He must have led two or three thousand men and he had divided them into smaller groups and sent them to harry, plunder and destroy all across northern Mercia. It was impossible to say where the Danes were because they appeared to be everywhere.

‘What do they want?’ Æthelred asked plaintively.

‘He wants to sit where you’re sitting,’ I answered.

‘You have no authority here,’ Bishop Asser snarled.

‘Bishop,’ Æthelflæd spoke crisply, ‘if you have something useful to say, then please feel free to say it. But if you simply wish to make a nuisance of yourself then go to the church and take your complaints to God.’ That caused an astonished silence. The real authority in the hall belonged to Bishop Asser because he was Alfred’s envoy, yet Æthelflaed had publicly slapped him down. She met his indignant gaze calmly, and kept her eyes on his until he gave way. Then she turned to the lords. ‘The questions we need answered are simple,’ she said. ‘How many Danes are there? What is their aim? How many men can we assemble to oppose them? And where do we take those men?’

Æthelred still seemed stunned by his wife’s return. Every lord in the hall must have known of their estrangement, yet here Æthelflæd was, calmly holding her husband’s hand and no one dared challenge her presence. Æthelred himself was so shaken that he allowed her to dominate the council, and she did it well. There was a soft sweetness in Æthelflæd’s look, but that sweetness disguised a mind as thoughtful as her father’s and a will as strong as her mother’s. ‘Don’t all speak at once,’ she commanded, raising her voice over the confusion. ‘Lord Ælfwold,’ she smiled at a grim-looking man sitting on the bench closest to the dais, ‘your lands have suffered most, it seems, so what is your estimation of the enemy’s numbers?’

‘Between two and three thousand,’ he answered. He shrugged. ‘It could be many more, it’s hard to tell.’

‘Because they ride in small groups?’

‘At least a dozen bands,’ Ælfwold said, ‘maybe as many as twenty.’

‘And how many men can we lead against them?’ she asked the question of her husband, her voice respectful.

‘Fifteen hundred,’ he said surlily.

‘We must have more warriors than that!’ Æthelflæd said.

‘Your father,’ Æthelred said, and he could not resist saying those two words with derision, ‘insists we leave five hundred to protect Lundene.’

‘I thought the Lundene garrison was West Saxon,’ I put in, and I should have known because I had commanded that garrison for five years.

‘Alfred has left three hundred men in Lundene,’ Bishop Asser said, forcing cordiality into his voice, ‘and the rest have gone to Wintanceaster.’

‘Why?’

‘Because Haesten sent us a warning,’ the bishop said bitterly. He paused, and his weasel face twitched uncontrollably, ‘that you and the northern jarls planned an attack on Wessex.’ The hatred in his voice was unmistakable. ‘Is that true?’

I hesitated. I had not betrayed Ragnar’s plans because he was my friend, which meant I had left the discovery of the Northumbrian attack to fate, but Haesten, it seemed, had already sent a warning. He had done it, clearly, to keep West Saxon troops out of Mercia, and it seemed the warning had been successful.

‘Well?’ Æthelred, aware of my discomfort, pressed the attack.

‘The Northumbrian jarls have discussed an attack on Wessex,’ I said weakly.

‘Will it happen?’ Asser wanted to know.

‘Probably,’ I said.

‘Probably,’ Bishop Asser sneered the word, ‘and what is your role, Lord Uhtred?’ The derision with which he spoke my name had an edge as sharp as Serpent-Breath. ‘To mislead us? To betray us? To slaughter more Christians?’ He stood again, sensing his advantage. ‘In Christ’s name,’ he shouted, ‘I demand this man’s arrest!’

No one moved to take hold of me. Æthelred gestured at his two household warriors, but the gesture lacked conviction and neither man moved.

‘The Lord Uhtred is here to protect me,’ Æthelflæd broke the silence.

‘You have a nation’s warriors to protect you,’ Asser said, sweeping his arm to encompass the men sitting on the benches.

‘What need I of a nation’s warriors,’ Æthelflæd asked, ‘when I have Lord Uhtred?’

‘The Lord Uhtred,’ Asser said in his sharp voice, ‘cannot be trusted.’

‘You’d listen to that Welsh piece of gristle,’ I addressed the men on the benches. ‘A Welshman saying a Saxon can’t be trusted? How many men here have lost friends, sons or brothers to Welsh treachery? If the Danes are Mercia’s worst enemy, then the Welsh are the next worst. We’re going to take lessons in loyalty from a Welshman?’

I heard Father Pyrlig mutter behind me, but again he spoke in Welsh. I suspect he was insulting me, but he knew well enough why I had spoken as I did. I was appealing to the deep-seated mistrust that all Mercians felt for the Welsh. Since the beginning of Mercia, deep in the lost times of our ancestors, the Welsh had raided Saxon lands to steal cattle, women and treasure. They called our land their ‘lost land’, and ever in Welsh hearts is a wish to drive the Saxons back across the sea, and so few men in Æthelred’s hall had any love for their ancestral enemies.

‘The Welsh,’ Asser shouted, ‘are Christians! And now is the time for all Christians to unite against the pagan filth that threatens our faith. Look!’ His finger was pointing again. ‘The Lord Uhtred wears the symbol of Thor. He is an idolater, a heathen, an enemy of our dear Lord Jesus Christ!’

‘He is my friend,’ Æthelflæd said, ‘and I trust him with my life.’

‘He is an idolater,’ Asser repeated, evidently thinking that was the worst he could say of me. ‘He betrayed his sworn oath! He killed a saint! He is an enemy of all that we hold most dear, he is the. …’ His voice died away.

He had gone silent because I had climbed the dais and pushed him hard in the chest so that he was forced to sit down. Now I leaned on the chair’s arms and looked into his eyes. ‘You want martyrdom?’ I asked. He took a deep breath to reply, then thought better of saying anything. I smiled into his furious face and patted his sallow cheek before turning back to the benches. ‘I am here to fight for the Lady Æthelflæd, and she is here to fight for Mercia. If any of you believe Mercia will suffer because of my help then I am sure she will relieve me of my oath and I will depart.’

No one seemed to want my departure. The men in the hall were embarrassed, but Ælfwold, who had already suffered from Haesten’s invasion, returned the discussion to its proper place. ‘We don’t have the men to face Haesten,’ he said unhappily, ‘not without West Saxon help.’

‘And that help is not coming,’ I said, ‘isn’t that true, bishop?’ Asser nodded. He was too angry to speak. ‘There will be an attack on Wessex,’ I said, ‘and Alfred will need his army to meet that attack, so we must cope with Haesten on our own.’

‘How?’ Ælfwold asked. ‘Haesten’s men are everywhere and nowhere! We send an army to find them and they’ll just ride around us.’

‘You retreat into your burhs,’ I said. ‘Haesten isn’t equipped to besiege fortified towns. The fyrd protects the burhs, and you take your cattle and silver behind those walls. Let Haesten burn as many villages as he likes, he can’t capture a properly defended burh.’

‘So we just let him ravage Mercia while we cower behind walls?’ Ælfwold asked.

‘Of course not,’ I said.

‘Then what?’ Æthelred asked.

I hesitated again. Haesten, by all reports, had chosen a new strategy. When Harald had invaded Wessex the year before he had brought a great army and with it he had brought an army’s baggage: the women and children and animals and slaves. But Haesten, if the urgent messages spoke true, had brought nothing but horsemen. He had brought his own men, the survivors of Harald’s army, and the Danish warriors of East Anglia to plunder Mercia and they were moving fast, covering miles of ground, burning and stealing as they went. If we marched against them they could slide out of our path or, if we found ourselves in treacherous ground, assemble to attack us. Yet if we did nothing then inevitably Mercia would be weakened so much that men would rather seek Danish protection. So we had to strike a blow that would weaken the Danes before they weakened us. We had to be daring.

‘Well?’ Asser demanded, thinking that my hesitation denoted uncertainty.

And still I hesitated because I did not think it could be done.

Yet I could not think what else we could do.

Everyone in that hall was watching me, some with unconcealed dislike, others with desperate hope. ‘Lord Uhtred?’ Æthelflæd prompted me gently.

So I told them.

Nothing was simple. Æthelred argued that Haesten’s ambition was to capture Gleawecestre. ‘He’ll use it as a base to attack Wessex,’ he argued, and reminded Bishop Asser how, many years before, Guthrum had used Gleawecestre as the place to assemble the Danish army that had come closest to conquering Wessex. Asser agreed with the argument, probably because he wanted the thegns to reject my plan. In the end it was Æthelflæd who cut the argument short. ‘I go with Uhtred,’ she said, ‘and those who wish can come with us.’

Æthelred would not accompany me. He had always disliked me, but now that dislike was pure hatred because I had rescued Æthelflaed from his spite. He wanted to defeat the Danes, but even more he wanted Alfred dead, Æthelflæd put aside, and his chair turned into a real throne. ‘I shall assemble the army in Gleawecestre,’ he declared, ‘and thwart any attack on Wessex. That is my decision.’ He looked at the men on the benches. ‘I expect you all to join me. I demand that you join me. We muster in four days!’

Æthelflæd gave me a quizzical glance. ‘Lundene,’ I mouthed to her.

‘I go to Lundene,’ she said, ‘and those of you who wish to see a Mercia free of the heathens will join me there. In four days.’

If I had been Æthelred I would have scotched Æthelflæd’s defiance there and then. He had armed men in the hall while none of us wore a weapon, and a single command could have left me dead on the floor’s rushes. But he lacked the courage. He knew I had men outside the hall and perhaps he feared their vengeance. He quivered when I approached his chair, then looked up at me with nervous and sullen eyes. ‘Æthelflæd remains your wife,’ I told him quietly, ‘but if she dies mysteriously, or if she sickens, or if I hear rumours of a spell cast against her, then I shall find you, cousin, and I shall suck the eyeballs out of your skull and spit them down your throat so you choke to death.’ I smiled. ‘Send your men to Lundene and keep your country.’

He did not send men to Lundene, nor did most of the Mercian lords. They were frightened of my idea and they looked to Æthelred for patronage. He was the gold-giver in Mercia, while Æthelflæd was almost as poor as I was. So most of Mercia’s warriors went to Gleawecestre and Æthelred kept them there, waiting for an attack from Haesten that never came.

Haesten was plundering all across Mercia. In the next few days, as I waited at Lundene and listened to the reports brought by fugitives, I saw how the Danes were moving with lightning speed. They were capturing anything of value, whether it was an iron spit, a harness or a child, and all that plunder was sent back to Beamfleot where Haesten had his stronghold above the Temes shore. He was amassing a treasure there, a treasure that could be sold in Frankia. His success brought more Danes to his side, men from across the sea who saw Mercia’s impending fall and wanted to share in the land that would be divided when the conquest was done. Haesten captured some towns, those that had not yet been turned into burhs, and the silver from their churches, convents and monasteries flowed back to Beamfleot. Alfred did send men to Gleawecestre, but only a few, because rumours were now rife of a great Northumbrian fleet sailing southwards. It was all chaos.

And I was helpless because, after four days, I led only eighty-three men. They were my own shrunken crew and those few Mercians who had come in response to Æthelflæd’s summons. Beornoth was one, though most of the men who had sided with me at Lecelad had stayed with Æthelred. ‘More would have come, lord,’ Beornoth told me, ‘but they’re frightened of the ealdorman’s displeasure.’

‘What would he do to them?’

‘Take their homes, lord. How do they live, except on his generosity?’

‘Yet you came,’ I said.

‘You gave me my life, lord,’ he said.

My old house was now occupied by the garrison’s new commander, a dour West Saxon called Weohstan who had fought at Fearnhamme. When I had reached Lundene, arriving unexpectedly on a rainswept night, Bishop Erkenwald had ordered Weohstan to arrest me, but Weohstan had doggedly ignored the order. Instead he came to see me in the Mercian royal palace that occupied the old Roman governor’s mansion. ‘Are you here to fight the Danes, lord?’ he asked me.

‘He is,’ Æthelflæd answered for me.

‘Then I’m not sure I have enough men to arrest you,’ Weohstan said.

‘How many do you have?’

‘Three hundred,’ he said with a smile.

‘Not nearly enough,’ I assured him.

I told him what I planned and he looked sceptical. ‘I’ll help you if I can,’ he promised, but there was doubt in his voice. He had lost almost all his teeth so his speech was a hissing slur. He was over thirty years old, bald as an egg, ruddy faced, short in stature, but broad in the shoulders. He had skill with weapons and a hard manner that made him an effective leader, but Weohstan was also cautious. I would have trusted him to defend a wall for ever, but he was not a man to lead a bold attack. ‘You can help me now,’ I told him that first day, and asked to borrow a ship.

He frowned as he considered the request, then decided he was not risking too much in granting it. ‘Bring it back, lord,’ he said.

Bishop Erkenwald tried to stop me taking the ship downriver. He met me at the wharf beside my old house. Weohstan had tactfully found business elsewhere and though Erkenwald had brought his personal guard, those three men were no match for my crew. The bishop confronted me. ‘I govern Lundene,’ he said, which was true, ‘and you must leave.’

‘I am leaving.’ I gestured at the waiting ship.

‘Not in one of our ships!’

‘Then stop me,’ I said.

‘Bishop,’ Æthelflæd was with me and intervened.

‘It is not a woman’s place to speak of men’s business!’ Erkenwald turned on her.

Æthelflæd bridled. ‘I am. …’

‘Your place, lady, is with your husband!’

I took Erkenwald by the shoulders and steered him onto the terrace where Gisela and I had spent so many quiet evenings. Erkenwald, much smaller than me, tried to resist my arm, but he stayed still when I released him. The water foamed through the gaps in the old Roman bridge, forcing me to raise my voice. ‘What do you know of Æthelred and Æthelflæd?’ I asked.

‘It is not for man to interfere in the sacrament of marriage,’ he said dismissively.

‘You’re not a fool, bishop,’ I said.

He glared up at me with his dark eyes. ‘The blessed apostle Paul,’ he said, ‘instructs wives to submit to their husbands. You would have me preach the opposite?’

‘I would have you be sensible,’ I said. ‘The Danes want to eradicate your religion. They see Wessex weakened by Alfred’s sickness. They would destroy Saxon power in Mercia, then move against Wessex. If they have their way, bishop, then within a few weeks some spear-Dane will be skewering your belly and you’ll be a martyr. Æthelflæd wants to stop that and I’m here to help her.’

To his credit Erkenwald did not accuse me of treachery. Instead he bristled. ‘Her husband also wishes to stop the Danes,’ he said firmly.

‘Her husband also wants to separate Mercia from Wessex,’ I said. He did not say anything to that because he knew it was true. ‘So who do you trust to protect you from martyrdom?’ I asked. ‘Æthelred or me?’

‘God will protect me,’ he said stubbornly.

‘I shall only be here a few days,’ I said, ‘and you can help me or hinder me. If you fight me, bishop, you make it more likely that the Danes will win.’

He looked across at Æthelflæd and a tremor showed on his thin face. He was smelling sin in our apparent alliance, but he was also thinking of the vision I had given him, a vision of a mail-coated Dane thrusting a blade into his belly. ‘Bring the ship back,’ he said grudgingly, echoing Weohstan, then abruptly turned and walked away.

The ship was the Haligast that had once been the vessel that carried Alfred up and down the Temes, but it seemed his sickness had caused him to abandon such voyages and so the small Haligast had been brought through the treacherous gap between the bridge piers and was now used as a scouting vessel. Her master was Ralla, an old friend. ‘She’s light-built,’ he said of the Haligast, ‘and she’s quick.’

‘Faster than Seolferwulf?’ I asked. He had known my ship well.

‘Nowhere close, lord,’ he said, ‘but she runs well on the wind, and if the Danes get too close we can use shallower water.’

‘When I was here,’ I said in a mild voice, ‘the Danes would run from us.’

‘Things change,’ Ralla said gloomily.

‘Are the pagans attacking ships?’ Æthelflæd asked.

‘We haven’t seen a trading ship in two weeks,’ Ralla said, ‘so they must be.’

Æthelflæd had insisted on coming with me. I did not want her company because I have never thought women should be exposed to unnecessary danger, but I had learned not to argue with Alfred’s daughter. She wanted to be a part of the campaign against the Danes and I could not dissuade her, and so she stood with Ralla, Finan and I on the steering platform as Ralla’s experienced crew took the Haligast downriver.

How many times had I made this voyage? I watched the glistening mudbanks slide past and it was all so familiar as we turned the river’s extravagant bends. We went with the tide, so our thirty oarsmen needed only make small tugs on their looms to keep the ship headed downriver. Swans beat from our path, while overhead the sky was busy with birds flying south. The marshy banks slowly receded as the river widened and imperceptibly turned into a sea reach, and then we headed slightly northwards to let the Haligast drift along the East Anglian shore.

Again it was all so familiar. I gazed at the drab low land that was called East Sexe. It was edged with wetlands that slowly rose to ploughed fields, then, abruptly, there was the great wooded hill that I knew so well. The crown of the hill had been cleared of trees so that it was a dome of grass where the huge fort dominated the Temes. Beamfleot. Æthelflæd had been imprisoned in that fort and she gazed at it wordlessly, though she reached for my hand and held onto it as she remembered those days when she was supposedly a hostage, but had fallen in love, only to lose the man to his brother’s sword.

Beneath the fort the ground fell steeply to a village, also called Beamfleot, that lay beside the muddy creek of Hothlege. The Hothlege separated Beamfleot from Caninga, a reed-thick island that could be flooded when the tide was high and when the wind blew hard from the east. I could see that the Hothlege was thick with boats, most of them hauled onto the beach beneath the great hill where they were protected by new forts that had been made at the creek’s eastern end. The two forts were a pair of beached and dismasted ships, one on either bank, their seaward planking built up to make high walls. I guessed a chain still ran across the Hothlege to stop enemy vessels entering the narrow channel.

‘Closer,’ I growled to Ralla.

‘You want to run aground?’

‘I want to get closer.’

I would have steered the Haligast myself except my bee-stung hand was still swollen and the skin taut. I let go of Æthelflæd’s hand to scratch the itch. ‘It won’t get better if you keep scratching it,’ she said, taking my hand back.

Finan had shinned up the Haligast’s mast where, with his keen eyesight, he was counting Danish ships. ‘How many?’ I called impatiently.

‘Hundreds,’ he shouted back and then, a moment later, gave a proper estimate. ‘About two hundred!’ It was impossible to make an accurate count for the masts were thick as saplings, and some boats were dismasted and hidden by other hulls.

‘Mary save us,’ Æthelflæd said softly and made the sign of the cross.

‘Nine thousand men?’ Ralla suggested dourly.

‘Not as many as that,’ I said. Many of the boats belonged to the survivors of Harald’s army and those crews had been half slaughtered at Fearnhamme, yet even so I reckoned Haesten had twice as many men as we had estimated at Gleawecestre. Maybe as many as five thousand, and most of them were even now rampaging through Mercia, but enough remained at Beamfleot to form a garrison that watched us from their high wall. The sun’s reflection winked from spear-blades, but as I shaded my eyes and gazed at that formidable rampart on its steep hill it seemed to me that the fort was in disrepair. ‘Finan!’ I shouted after a while, ‘are there gaps in that wall?’

He waited before answering. ‘They’ve built a new fort, lord! Down on the shore!’

I could not see the new fort from the Haligast’s deck, but I trusted Finan, whose eyes were better than mine. He scrambled down the mast after a few moments and explained that Haesten appeared to have abandoned the fort on the hill. ‘He has watchmen up there, lord, but his main force is down on the creek. There’s a big bastard of a wall there.’

‘Why abandon the high ground?’ Æthelflæd asked.

‘It was too far from the ships,’ I said. Haesten knew that better than anyone, for he had fought here before and his men had managed to burn Sigefrid’s ships before the Norseman could bring men down the hill to stop him. Now Haesten had blocked the creek beneath the hill, guarding its seaward end with the beached ships and the landward entrance with a new and formidable fortress. Between those strongholds were his ships. It meant we could probably take the old fort without much trouble, but holding the high ground would not help us because the new stronghold was out of arrow range.

‘I couldn’t see very well,’ Finan said, ‘but it looked to me as if the new fort is on an island.’

‘He’s making it difficult,’ I said mildly.

‘Can it be done?’ Æthelflæd asked, sounding dubious.

‘It has to be done,’ I said.

‘We have no men!’

‘Yet,’ I said stubbornly.

Because my plan was to capture that stronghold. It was crammed with Haesten’s prisoners, all the women and children taken as slaves, and it was in Beamfleot’s new fort that his plunder was being stored. I suspected Haesten’s family was also there, indeed the families of every Dane ravaging Mercia were probably in that place. Their ships were there too, protected by the fort. If we could take the fort we could impoverish Haesten, capture dozens of hostages and destroy a Danish fleet. If we could capture Beamfleot we would win a victory that would dismay the Danes and cheer every Saxon heart. The victory might not win the war, but it would weaken Haesten immeasurably and many of his followers, losing faith, would abandon him, for what kind of a leader was a man who could not protect his men’s families? Æthelred believed Mercia’s salvation was best secured by waiting for Haesten to attack Gleawecestre, but I believed we had to attack Haesten where he least expected an assault. We had to strike at his base, destroy his fleet and take back his plunder.

‘How many men do you have?’ Ralla asked.

‘Eighty-three at the last count.’

He laughed. ‘And how many do you need to capture Beamfleot?’

‘Two thousand.’

‘And you don’t believe in miracles?’ Ralla asked.

Æthelflæd squeezed my hand. ‘The men will come,’ she said, though she sounded far from convinced.

‘Maybe,’ I said. I was staring at the ships in their sheltered creek and thought, in its way, that Beamfleot was as impregnable as Bebbanburg. ‘And if they don’t come?’ I said softly.

‘What will you do?’ Æthelflæd asked.

‘Take you north,’ I said, ‘take my children north, and fight till I have the silver to raise an army that can capture Bebbanburg.’

She turned her face up to mine. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I am Mercian now, Uhtred.’

‘Mercian and Christian,’ I said sourly.

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘Mercian and Christian. And what are you, Lord Uhtred?’

I looked to where reflected sunlight winked from the spear-points of the watchmen on Beamfleot’s high hill. ‘A fool,’ I said bitterly, ‘a fool.’

‘My fool,’ she said, and stood on tiptoe to kiss my cheek.

‘Row!’ Ralla bellowed, ‘row!’ He shoved the steering oar hard over so that the Haligast turned southwards and then west. Two large enemy ships were nosing out of the creek, sliding past the new ship-fortresses, their oar-banks catching the sun as they dipped and rose.

We fled upriver.

And, like the fool I was, I dreamed of capturing Beamfleot.

Next day Ealdorman Ælfwold came to Lundene. His lands lay in the northern parts of Saxon Mercia, which made them the most vulnerable to Danish attacks, and he had only kept his estates by the expense of hiring warriors, by bribing the Danes and by fighting. He was old, a widower, and tired of the struggle. ‘As soon as the harvest is gathered,’ he said, ‘the Danes come. Rats and Danes, they arrive together.’

He brought nearly three hundred men, most of whom were well armed and properly trained. ‘They might as well die with you as rot at Gleawecestre,’ he remarked. He was homeless because his hall had been burned by one of Haesten’s bands. ‘I abandoned it,’ he admitted. ‘I’m used to fighting off a couple of hundred of the bastards, but not thousands.’ He had sent his household servants, his daughters and grandchildren to Wessex in the hope they would be safe there. ‘Are the northern jarls truly planning an attack on Alfred?’ he asked me.

‘Yes.’

‘God help us,’ he said.

Folk were moving into the old city. Lundene is really two cities, the Roman one built on the high ground and, to the west, beyond the River Fleot, the new Saxon city. The first was a place of high stone walls and the faded glory of marble pillars, while the other was a malodorous swamp of thatch and wattle, but folk preferred the swamp because they swore the crumbling Roman buildings were haunted by ghosts. Now, fearing Haesten’s men more than any spectre, they were crossing the Fleot and finding themselves shelter in the older houses. The city stank. The Roman sewers had caved in, the cesspits were not large enough and the streets became fouled. Cattle were penned in the old Roman arena and pigs roamed the streets. Weohstan’s garrison manned the walls, which were high and stout. Most of the battlements were Roman-built, but where time had decayed the stonework there were thick oak palisades.

Finan was leading horsemen north and east every day and brought back news of Danes returning eastwards. ‘They’re taking plunder to Beamfleot,’ he said, ‘plunder and slaves.’

‘Are they staying in Beamfleot?’

He shook his head. ‘They go back to Mercia.’ He was angry because we did not have enough men for him to attack the Danish horsemen. He could only watch.

Ralla, scouting downriver in the Haligast, saw more Danes arriving from across the sea. Rumours had spread that both Wessex and Mercia were in disarray and the crews were hurrying to share the plunder. Haesten, meanwhile, tore destruction across Mercia’s farmlands while Æthelred waited at Gleawecestre for an attack that never came. Then, the day after Ælfwold brought his housecarls to Lundene, came the news I had been expecting. The Northumbrian fleet had landed in Defnascir and had made a camp above the Uisc, which meant Alfred’s West Saxon army marched to protect Exanceaster.

The Saxons seemed doomed. A week after my foray downriver I sat in the palace hall and watched the fire-cast shadows flicker on the high ceiling. I could hear monks chanting from Erkenwald’s cavernous church, which lay next to the Mercian palace. If I had climbed to the roof I would have seen the glow of fires far to the north and west. Mercia was burning.

That was the night Ælfwold abandoned hope. ‘We can’t just wait here, lord,’ he told me at the evening meal, ‘the city has enough men to defend it, and my three hundred are needed elsewhere.’

I ate that evening with my usual companions; Æthelflæd, Finan, Ælfwold, Father Pyrlig and Beornoth. ‘If I had another three hundred,’ I said, and despised myself for saying it. Even if fate brought me another three hundred warriors I would still not have nearly enough men to capture Beamfleot. Æthelred had won. We had challenged him, we had lost.

‘If you were me, lord,’ Ælfwold, a shrewd man, asked quietly, ‘what would you do?’

I gave him an honest answer. ‘Rejoin Æthelred,’ I said, ‘and persuade him to attack the Danes.’

He crumbled a piece of bread, finding a chip of millstone that he rubbed between his fingers. He was not aware of what he did. He was thinking of the Danes, of the battle he knew must be fought, of the battle he feared would be lost. He shook his head. ‘Tomorrow,’ he said quietly, ‘I take my men west.’ He looked up at me. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘You have no choice,’ I said.

I felt like a man who had lost almost everything playing at dice and then, like a fool, had risked all that remained on one last throw. I had failed. What had I thought? That men would come to me because of reputation? Instead they had stayed with their gold-givers. Æthelred did not want me to succeed and so he had opened his chests of silver and offered wealth to men if they joined his army. I needed a thousand men and I could not find them, and without them I could do nothing. I thought bitterly of Iseult’s prophecy made so many years before, that Alfred would give me power, that I would lead a shining horde and have a woman of gold.

That night, in the upper room of the palace where I had a straw mattress, I gazed at the dull glow of distant fires beyond the horizon and I wished I had stayed in Northumbria. I had been drifting, I thought, ever since Gisela’s death. I thought Æthelflæd’s summons had given my life a new purpose, but now I could see no future. I stood at the window, a great stone arch that framed the sky, and I could hear singing from the taverns, the shouts of men arguing, a woman’s laughter, and I thought that Alfred had taken away the power he had given me and the promised shining horde was a half-crew of men who were beginning to doubt my ability to lead them anywhere.

‘So what will you do?’ Æthelflæd asked from behind me.

I had not heard her come. Her bare feet made no sound on the stone floor. ‘I don’t know,’ I admitted.

She came and stood beside me. She touched my hand where it rested on the sill, tracing the ball of my thumb with a gentle finger. ‘The swelling has gone,’ she said.

‘The itch too,’ I said.

‘See?’ she asked, amusement in her voice, ‘the sting was no omen.’

‘It was,’ I said, ‘but I’ve yet to discover what it means.’

She left her hand on mine, her touch light as a feather. ‘Father Pyrlig says I have a choice.’

‘Which is?’

‘To go back to Æthelred or find a nunnery in Wessex.’

I nodded. Monks still chanted in the church, their droning punctuated by laughter and singing from the taverns. Folk were seeking oblivion in ale or else they were praying. They all knew what the fires of the burning sky meant, that the end was coming. ‘Did you turn my eldest son into a Christian?’ I asked.

‘No,’ Æthelflæd said, ‘he found it for himself.’

‘I’ll take him north,’ I said, ‘and beat the nonsense out of him.’ Æthelflæd said nothing to that, just pressed her hand on mine. ‘A nunnery?’ I asked bleakly.

‘I’m married,’ she said, ‘and the church tells me that if I am not with my God-given husband then I must be seen to be virtuous.’ I was still gazing at the fire-smeared horizon where the flames lit the underside of clouds. Above Lundene the sky was clear so that moonlight cast sharp shadows from the edges of the Roman roof tiles. Æthelflæd leaned her head on my shoulder. ‘What are you thinking?’

‘That unless we defeat the Danes there’ll be no convents left.’

‘Then what will I do?’ she asked lightly.

I smiled. ‘Father Beocca liked to talk of the wheel of fortune,’ I said, and wondered why I had spoken of him as if he lay in the past. Did I see the end coming? Would those distant fires creep ever closer till they burned Lundene and seared the last Saxon from Britain? ‘At Fearnhamme,’ I said, ‘I was your father’s warlord. Now I’m a fugitive with not enough men to fill a ship’s benches.’

‘My father calls you his miracle worker,’ Æthelflæd said. ‘True,’ she said when I laughed, ‘that’s what he calls you.’

‘I could work him a miracle,’ I said bitterly, ‘if he gave me men.’ I thought again of Iseult’s prophecy, how Alfred would give me power and my woman would be golden, and that was when I turned at last from the distant fires and looked down at Æthelflæd’s golden hair and took her into my arms.

And next day Ælfwold would leave Lundene and I would be left powerless.

Three horsemen came first. They arrived in the dawn, galloping across the Fleot’s filthy valley and up to the city gates. I heard the horn calling from the ramparts and I threw on clothes, pulled on boots, kissed Æthelflæd and ran down the stairs to the palace’s hall just as the door was thrown open and the three mailed men strode in, their feet splintering the already splintered tiles. Their leader was tall, grim and bearded. He stopped two paces from me. ‘You must have some ale in this shit-stinking city,’ he said. I was staring with disbelief. ‘I need breakfast,’ he demanded, and then could not help himself. He laughed. It was Steapa, and with him were two younger men, both warriors. I shouted for the servants to bring food and ale, still hardly believing that Steapa had come. ‘I’m bringing you twelve hundred men,’ he said briskly.

For a moment I could hardly speak. ‘Twelve hundred?’ I echoed feebly.

‘Alfred’s best,’ Steapa said, ‘and the Ætheling is coming too.’

‘Edward?’ I was too astonished to make any sensible response.

‘Edward and twelve hundred of Alfred’s best men. We rode ahead of them,’ he explained, then turned and bowed as Æthelflæd, swathed in a great cloak, entered the hall. ‘Your father sends his greetings, lady,’ he said.

‘And he sends your brother,’ I said, ‘with twelve hundred men.’

‘God be praised,’ Æthelflæd said.

The hall filled as the news spread. My children were there, and Bishop Erkenwald and Ælfwold and Father Pyrlig, then Finan and Weohstan. ‘The Ætheling Edward will lead the forces,’ Steapa said, ‘but he is to accept Lord Uhtred’s guidance.’

Bishop Erkenwald looked astonished. He was glancing from Æthelflæd to me and I could tell he was scenting sin with the eagerness of a terrier smelling a fox’s earth. ‘The king sent you?’ he asked Steapa.

‘Yes, lord.’

‘But what of the Danes in Defnascir?’

‘They’re just scratching. …’ Steapa said, then reddened because he had almost said something that he thought would offend the bishop, let alone a king’s daughter.

‘Scratching their arses?’ I finished for him.

‘They’re doing nothing, my lady,’ Steapa muttered. He was the son of slaves and, for all his eminence as the commander of Alfred’s bodyguard, he was awed by Æthelflæd’s presence. ‘But the king wants his men back soon, lord,’ Steapa said, looking at me, ‘just in case the Northumbrian Danes do wake up.’

‘So finish your breakfast,’ I said, ‘then ride back to Edward. Tell him he’s not to enter the city.’ I did not want the West Saxon army inside Lundene with its tempting taverns and whores. ‘He’s to march north around the city,’ I ordered, ‘and keep marching east.’

Steapa frowned. ‘He’s expecting to find supplies here.’

I looked at Bishop Erkenwald. ‘You’ll send food and ale to the army. Weohstan’s garrison will provide escorts.’

The bishop, offended by my peremptory tone, hesitated, then nodded. He knew I spoke now with Alfred’s authority. ‘Where do I send the supplies?’ he asked.

‘You remember Thunresleam?’ I asked Steapa.

‘The old hall on the hill, lord?’

‘Edward’s to meet me there. You too.’ I looked back to the bishop. ‘Send the supplies there.’

‘To Thunresleam?’ Bishop Erkenwald asked suspiciously, smelling still more sin because the name reeked of paganism.

‘Thor’s Grove,’ I confirmed, ‘it’s close to Beamfleot.’ The bishop made the sign of the cross, but he dared not protest. ‘You and one hundred of your men are coming with me,’ I told Weohstan.

‘My orders are to defend Lundene,’ Weohstan said uncertainly.

‘If we’re at Beamfleot,’ I said, ‘there’ll be no Danes threatening Lundene. We march in two hours.’

It took nearer four hours, but with Ælfwold’s Mercians, Weohstan’s West Saxons and my own men we numbered over four hundred mounted warriors who clattered through the city’s eastern gate. I left my children in the care of Æthelflæd’s servants. Æthelflæd insisted on riding with us. I argued against that, telling her she should not risk her life, but she refused to stay in Lundene. ‘Didn’t you take an oath to serve me?’ she asked.

‘More fool me, yes.’

‘Then I give the orders,’ she said, smiling.

‘Yes, my duck,’ I said, and earned a thump on the arm. At the beginning of their marriage Æthelred had always called Æthelflæd ‘my duck’, an endearment that annoyed her. So now she rode beneath my banner of the wolf’s head, Weohstan flew the West Saxon dragon while Ælfwold’s Mercians displayed a long flag showing the Christian cross. ‘I want my own banner,’ Æthelflæd told me.

‘Then make one,’ I said.

‘It will show geese,’ she said.

‘Geese! Not ducks?’

She made a face at me. ‘Geese are Saint Werburgh’s symbol,’ she explained. ‘There was a huge flock of geese ravaging a cornfield and she prayed and God sent the geese away. It was a miracle!’

‘The abbess at Lecelad did that?’

‘No, no! The abbess was named after Saint Werburgh. The saint died a long time ago. Maybe I’ll show her on my banner. I know she protects me! I prayed to her last night and see what she did?’ she gestured at the men following us, ‘my prayers were answered!’

I wondered if she had prayed before or after she had come to my room, but decided that was a question best left unasked.

We rode just north of the drab marshes that edged the Temes. This was East Anglian territory, but there were no great estates close to Lundene. There had once been beamed halls and busy villages, but the frequent raids and counter-raids had left the halls in ashes and the villages in terror. The Danish King Eohric of East Anglia was supposedly a Christian and had signed a peace treaty with Alfred, agreeing that his Danes would stay away from both Mercia and Wessex, but the two kings might as well have signed an agreement to stop men drinking ale. The Danes were forever crossing the frontier and the Saxons retaliated, and so we rode past impoverished settlements. The people saw us coming and fled to the marshes or else to the woods on the few small hills. We ignored them.

Beamfleot lay at the southern end of the great line of hills which barred our path. Most of the hills were heavily wooded, though above the village, where the slopes were highest and steepest, we could see the old fort which had been made on the grassy dome above the river. We swerved northwards, climbing a steep track which led to Thunresleam, and we rode cautiously because the Danes would have seen us coming and they could easily have sent a force to attack us as we rode uphill through the thick trees. I expected that attack. I had sent Æthelflæd and her two maidservants to the centre of our column and had ordered every man to ride with his shield looped onto his arms and weapons ready. I listened for the sound of birds fleeing through the leaves, for the clink of harness, for the thud of a hoof on leaf mould, for the sudden shout that would announce a charge of Viking horsemen from the hill above, but the only birds clattering through the leaves were the pigeons we ourselves scared away. The defenders of Beamfleot had evidently yielded the hill to us, and not one Dane tried to stop us.

‘That’s crazy,’ Finan said as we reached the crest. ‘They could have killed a score of us.’

‘They’re confident,’ I said. ‘They must know the walls of their fort will stop us.’

‘Or else they don’t know their business,’ Finan said.

‘When did you last meet a Dane who didn’t know how to fight?’

We sent men to scout the surrounding trees as we approached the old hall at Thunresleam, but still no enemy appeared. We had been to this hall years before, back when we had negotiated with the Norsemen, Sigefrid and Erik, and afterwards we had fought a bitter battle in the creek beneath the fort. Those events seemed so distant now and both Sigefrid and Erik were dead. Haesten had survived that long ago fight, and now I had come to oppose him again, though none of us knew whether Haesten himself had returned to Beamfleot. Rumour said he was still ravaging Mercia, which implied he was confident that Beamfleot’s garrison could protect itself.

The oak-beamed hall at Thunresleam would be at the centre of my camp. It had once been a magnificent building, but it had been abandoned many years before and the pillars were rotting and the thatch was black, damp and sagging. The great beams were thick with bird droppings while the floor was a mass of weeds. Just outside the hall was a stone pillar about the height of a man. There was a hole through the stone that was filled with pebbles and scraps of cloth, the votive offerings left by the local folk who had fled our arrival. Their village was a mile eastwards and I knew it had a church, but the Christians of Thunresleam understood that their high place and old hall were sacred to Thor and so they still came and sent prayers to that older god. Mankind can never be too safe. I might not like the Christian god, but I do not deny his existence and, at hard moments in my life, I have sent prayers to him as well as to my own gods.

‘Shall we make a palisade?’ Weohstan asked me.

‘No.’

He stared at me. ‘No?’

‘Clear out as many trees as you can,’ I ordered him, ‘but no palisade.’

‘But. …’

‘No palisade!’

I was taking a risk, but if I made a palisade I would give my men a place of safety and I knew how reluctant men were to abandon such security. I had often noticed how a bull, brought for entertainment to some feast, will adopt a patch of land as its refuge and defend itself from the attacking dogs with a terrible ferocity so long as it stays in its chosen refuge, but goad the bull out and it loses confidence and the dogs sense the vulnerability and attack with a renewed savagery. I did not want my men to feel safe. I wanted them nervous and alert. I wanted them to know that safety lay not in a fort of their own making, but in capturing the enemy’s fort. And I wanted that capture to be quick.

I ordered Ælfwold’s men to cut trees to the west, clearing the woods back to the hill’s edge and beyond so we could see far across the country towards Lundene. If the Danes brought men back from Mercia I wanted to see them. I put Osferth in charge of our sentries. Their job was to make a screen between us and Beamfleot to warn of any sally by the Danes. Those sentries were in the woods, hidden from the old high fort, and if the Danes came I expected to fight them among the trees. Osferth’s men would slow them until my whole force could be brought against the attackers, and I ordered that every man was to sleep wearing his mail coat and with his weapons close by.

I asked Ælfwold to protect our northern and western flanks. His men would watch for the approach of our supplies and guard against reinforcements coming from Haesten’s men who still smeared the far horizon with smoke. Then, those orders given, I took fifty men to explore the country about our encampment that rang with the sound of axes biting into trees. Finan, Pyrlig and Osferth accompanied me, as did Æthelflæd who ignored all my advice to stay out of danger.

We went first to the village of Thunresleam. It was a straggle of thick-thatched cottages built about the scorched and collapsed ruin of a church. The villagers had fled when we climbed the hill, but a few braver souls now appeared from the woods beyond their small fields where the first shoots of wheat, barley and rye greened the furrows. They were Saxons and the first to approach us were led by a burly peasant with matted brown hair, one eye and work-blackened hands. He looked up at Ælfwold’s banner that showed the Christian cross. I had borrowed the banner to make it clear we were not Danes, and the cross evidently reassured the one-eyed man who knelt to us and beckoned for his companions to kneel. ‘I am Father Heahberht,’ he said.

He told me he was priest to the village and to two other settlements farther east. ‘You don’t look like a priest,’ I said.

‘If I did, lord, I’d be dead,’ he said, ‘the witch in the fort kills priests.’

I glanced southwards, though from here the old fort on the hill was not visible. ‘The witch?’

‘She is called Skade, lord.’

‘I know Skade.’

‘She burned our church, lord.’

‘And she took the girls, lord,’ a woman said tearfully, ‘even the young ones. She took my daughter and she was only ten years old, lord.’

‘Why did she do. …’ Æthelflæd began the question, then abruptly stopped as she realised the answer was obvious.

‘Have they abandoned the old fort?’ I asked. ‘The one on the hill?’

‘No, lord,’ Father Heahberht answered, ‘they use it to keep watch. And we have to take food there, lord.’

‘How many men there?’

‘About fifty, lord. They keep the horses there, too.’

I did not doubt that the priest told the truth, but the Danes had seen us coming and I reckoned the old fort would have been reinforced by now. ‘How many men are in the new fort?’ I asked.

‘They won’t let us near the new fort, lord,’ Father Heahberht said, ‘but I’ve watched it from the hill at Hæthlegh, lord, and I could not count all the men inside.’ He looked up at me nervously. His dead eye was milky white and ulcerated. He was shivering with fear, not because he thought we were an enemy like the Danes, but because we were lords. He forced himself to speak as calmly as he could. ‘They number in their hundreds, lord. Three thousand men rode west, lord, but they left all their wives and children in Beamfleot.’

‘You counted the ones who left?’

‘I tried, lord.’

‘Their wives and children are here?’ Æthelflæd asked.

‘They live on the beached boats, lady,’ Heahberht said.

The priest was an observant man and I rewarded him with a silver coin. ‘So who commands in the new fort?’ I asked him, ‘Haesten himself?’

Father Heahberht shook his head. ‘Skade does, lord.’

‘Skade! She’s in command?’

‘We’re told so, lord.’

‘Haesten hasn’t returned?’ I asked.

‘No, lord,’ Heahberht said, ‘not that we’ve heard.’ He told us how Haesten had started building his new fort as soon as his fleet arrived from Cent. ‘They made us cut oak and elm for them, lord.’

‘I need to see this new fort,’ I said and I gave Heahberht another coin before kicking my horse between two of the cottages and onto a field of growing barley. I was thinking of Skade, of her cruelties, of her desperate lust to be a ruler. She could order men by the pure strength of her will, but did she have the skills to deploy them in battle? Yet Haesten was no fool, he would not have left her in command if he doubted her ability, and I did not doubt that he had also left her sufficient troops and competent advisers. I kicked the horse again, riding south now into the trees. My men followed. I rode recklessly, careless that the Danes might have men in the woods, though we saw none. I sensed that Skade’s garrison was content to stay behind its walls, confident in their ability to resist any attack.

We reached the edge of that high ground where the land dropped steeply to the web of creeks and inlets that threaded the marsh. Beyond that was the wide Temes, its southern shore just visible in the distant haze. Four ships idled in the middle of that great spread of light-reflecting water. They were Danes patrolling for prey and watching for any Saxon warships coming downstream from Lundene.

And to my right I could see Caninga and its creek, and the great fleet of boats beached on Caninga’s shore. The new fort was just visible around the shoulder of the high hill where the old fort stood. What had Father Heahberht said? That only about fifty men guarded the old ramparts. I could see spear-tips glinting by the north-facing gate and there looked to be far more than fifty, and the wall they defended was in good condition. I knew that the southern wall, overlooking the creek, had decayed, but the landward defences had been kept in good repair. ‘Skade saw us coming,’ I said, ‘and reinforced the old fort.’

‘She’s got enough spears there,’ Finan agreed.

‘So we have to capture two forts,’ I said.

‘Why not let this one rot?’ Finan asked, gesturing at the old fort.

‘Because I don’t want those bastards behind our backs when we attack the new fort,’ I said, ‘so we have to kill them first.’

Finan said nothing. No one spoke. The war we had been fighting all our lives had forced rulers to build forts because forts won wars. Alfred protected Wessex with burhs that were nothing but large, well-manned forts. Æthelred of Mercia was building burhs. Haesten, so far as we knew, had not yet dared attack any burh for he knew that his men would die in the ditches and under the high walls. He wanted to weaken Mercia and starve the burh’s defenders before he dared attack those ramparts. The two forts at Beamfleot were not burhs, but their defences were just as formidable. There were walls, ditches with stakes, and doubtless, down on the creek, a moat. And behind the walls were men who knew how to kill, spear-Danes and sword-Danes, and they waited for us not in one fortress, but two.

‘We have to take both forts?’ Æthelflæd asked timidly, breaking the silence.

‘The first will be easy,’ I said.

‘Easy, lord?’ Finan asked with a crooked grin.

‘And quick,’ I said, sounding a good deal more confident than I felt. The old fort was formidable, and it was large, but I doubted the Danes had committed enough men to defend every yard of its ramparts. Once the Ætheling Edward’s troops reached me I reckoned I would have enough troops to assail the old fort in several places at once, and those assaults would thin out the defenders until one of our attacks broke through. It was not much of a plan, but it would work, though I feared it would be expensive in men. Yet I had small choice. I had to do the impossible. I had to take two forts and, if truth be told, I had no idea how to take the second newer fort by the water. I just knew it had to be done.

We rode back to our camp.

Everything became confused next morning. It was as though the Danes woke up to the threat we posed and decided to do what they should have done the previous day.

They knew we were camped around Thunresleam’s old hall. I had placed a large number of sentries in the woods south of the hall, but doubtless some clever Dane had avoided them to spy on the newly cleared space about the hall, and Skade, or whoever advised her, decided an attack at dawn would kill many of us and discourage the rest. Which was a clever enough idea, except that it was obvious, and to prepare for it I had roused every man in the heart of the starlit night. I ordered the sentries back from the trees, made sure we were all awake, then we saddled horses, pulled on mail, and left. The campfires still smouldered, suggesting we were sleeping. Our departure made enough noise to disturb the dead in Thunresleam’s small graveyard, but the Danes were presumably making their own noise and had no idea we had decamped.

‘We can’t do this every morning,’ Ælfwold grumbled.

‘If they’re going to attack us,’ I said, ‘it will be this morning. By tomorrow we’ll be in their high fort.’

‘By tomorrow?’ He sounded surprised.

‘If Edward comes today,’ I said. I planned to assault the old fortress as soon as I possibly could. I just needed enough men to make eight or nine simultaneous attacks.

We rode to the village and we waited there. We were four hundred men ready for battle. I knew it was possible the Danes had detected our move, and so I insisted we stayed in our saddles. The newly woken villagers brought us sour ale and Father Heahberht nervously offered me a cup of mead. It was surprisingly good, and I told him to give some to Æthelflæd and her two maidservants, the only women with our force. ‘If the Danes attack,’ I told her, ‘you’ll be staying here with a bodyguard.’ She looked at me dubiously, but for once did not argue.

It was still dark. The only sounds were the clink of bridles and the thump of restless hooves. Sometimes a man spoke, but most just slumped asleep in their saddles. Smoke drifted from holes in the hovel roofs, an owl called forlorn from the woods, and I felt a chill bleakness descend on my spirit. I could not rouse myself from that bleakness. I touched Thor’s hammer and sent a prayer to the gods to send me a sign, but all I heard was the owl’s mournful cry repeated. How could I take two forts? I feared the gods had forsaken me, and that by coming south from Northumbria I had forfeited their favour. What had I told Alfred? That we were here to amuse our gods, but how could those gods be amused by my betrayals? I thought of Ragnar’s disappointment and that memory gored my soul. I remembered Brida’s scorn and knew it was deserved. I felt worthless that morning as the sky’s edge lightened behind me to a streak of grey, I felt as though my future held nothing, and the feeling was so strong that I was close to despair. I twisted in the saddle, looking for Pyrlig. The Welsh priest was one of the few men I trusted with my soul, and I wanted his counsel, but before I could summon him a man called out a warning. ‘There’s a horseman coming, lord!’

I had left Finan and a handful of men as our only sentries. They were posted at the edge of the fields, halfway between the village and the old hall and Finan had sent one man to warn me that the Danes were moving. ‘They’re in the woods, lord,’ the man told me, ‘by our camp.’

‘How many?’

‘We can’t tell, lord, but it sounds like a horde.’

Which could mean two hundred or two thousand, and prudence suggested I should wait till Finan could estimate the enemy more accurately, but I was in that bleak mood, feeling doomed and desperate for a sign from the gods, and so I turned to Æthelflæd. ‘You wait here with your bodyguard,’ I said, and did not wait for an answer, but just drew Serpent-Breath, taking comfort from the sound of the long steel scraping through the scabbard’s throat. ‘The Danes are at our camp!’ I shouted, ‘and we’re going to kill them!’ I spurred my horse, the same stallion I had taken from Aldhelm. It was a good horse, properly schooled, but I was still unfamiliar with him.

Ælfwold spurred to catch me. ‘How many are there?’ he asked.

‘Enough!’ I called to him. I was feeling reckless, careless and I knew it was foolish. But I reckoned the Danes would attack the encampment and almost immediately realise we had anticipated them, and then they would be wary. I wanted them unaware and so I kicked the stallion into a trot. My whole force, over three hundred men, was streaming along the track behind me. The day’s first shadows were being cast into the furrows and birds were flying up from the woods ahead.

I turned in my saddle to see spears and swords, axes and shields. Saxon warriors, grey-mailed in a grey dawn, grim-faced beneath helmets, and I felt the battle anger rising. I wanted to kill. I was in that bleak mood, assailed by the certainty that I had to throw myself on the mercy of the gods. If they wanted me to live, if the spinners were willing to weave my thread back into the golden weft, then I would live through this morning. Omens and signs, we live by them, and so I rode to discover the will of the gods. It was foolish.

Horsemen appeared on our left, startling me, but it was only Finan and his seven remaining men who galloped to join us. ‘There might be three hundred of them,’ he shouted, ‘or maybe four hundred!’

I just nodded and kicked the horse again. The track to the old hall was wide enough for four or five men to ride abreast. Finan probably expected me to halt our horsemen short of the space we had cleared about the old hall and line the men in the trees, but the carelessness was on me.

Light flared ahead. The daylight was still grey, night shrouding the western horizon, but the sudden new light was red and bright. Fire. The Danes, I guessed, had lit the hall’s thatch, so now let it light their deaths. I could see the edge of the trees, see the fallen trunks we had felled the day before, see the dull glow of dying campfires and the dark shapes of men and horses and the glimmer of reflected fire from helmets, mail and weapons, and I kicked the stallion again and roared a challenge. ‘Kill them!’

We came in a ragged order, bursting from the trees with swords and spears, with hatred and fury, and almost as soon as I entered the clearing I realised we were outnumbered. The Danes had come in force, at least four hundred, and most were still mounted, but they were scattered throughout the encampment and few realised we were approaching until our horses and blades appeared in the dawn. The largest body of the enemy was at the clearing’s western edge, staring across the dark land towards the faint glow of light betraying the fires of Lundene. Maybe they suspected we had given up any hope of capturing the forts and, under the cover of night, had slunk back towards the distant city. Instead we were coming from the east with the growing light behind us, and they turned as they heard the first screams and shouts.

We were lit red by the growing fire of the old hall’s burning thatch. Red fire was flashing from the horses’ bared teeth, from our mail, from our blades, and I was still shouting as I swung my sword at the first man. He was on foot and holding a broad-bladed spear that he tried to level at my horse, but Serpent-Breath caught him on the side of the head and I lifted the sword and lunged it at another man, not bothering to see what damage I did, just spurring on to provoke more fear. We had surprised them, and for a moment we were the lords of slaughter as we spread from the track and cut down dismounted men who searched for plunder around the dying campfires. I saw Osferth hammer a man’s head with the flat of an axe blade, knocking off the man’s helmet and hurling him back into one of the fires. The man must have been in the habit of cleaning his hands after eating by running them through his hair because the grease caught the flames and flared sudden and bright. He screamed and writhed, head like a beacon as he staggered to his feet, then a rush of horsemen overrode him. A hoof threw up a spew of sparks and riderless horses fled in panic.

Finan was with me. Finan and Cerdic and Sihtric, and together we rode for the large group of mounted warriors who had been staring west across the night-shadowed land. I was still shouting as I charged into them, sword swinging at a yellow-bearded man who deflected the blow with his raised shield, then he was struck by a spear below the shield, the blade ripping through mail and into his belly. I felt something strike my shield, but could not look to my left because a gap-toothed man was trying to lunge his sword through my stallion’s neck. I knocked his blade down with Serpent-Breath and cut at his arm, but his mail stopped the blow. We were deep among the enemy now, unable to ride farther, but more of my men were coming to help. I lunged at the gap-toothed man, but he was quick and his shield intercepted the sword, then his horse stumbled. Sihtric slashed with an axe and I had a glimpse of splitting metal and sudden blood.

I was trying to keep my horse moving. There were dismounted Danes among the riders, and a slash across my stallion’s legs could bring me down and a man was never so vulnerable as when he topples from a saddle. A spear slid from my right, sliding across my belly to lodge in the underside of my shield and I just back-swung Serpent-Breath into a bearded face. I felt her shatter teeth and ripped her back to saw her edge deeper. A horse screamed. Ælfwold’s men were deep in the fight now and our charge had split the Danes. Some had retreated down the hill, but most had gone either north or south along the crest and now they reformed and came at us from both directions, bellowing their own war cries. The sun had risen, dazzling and blinding, the hall was an inferno and the air a whirl of sparks in the new brightness.

Chaos. For a moment we had held the advantage of surprise, but the Danes recovered quickly and closed on us. The hill’s edge was a confusion of trampling horses, shouting men, and the raw sound of steel on steel. I had turned northwards and was trying to drive those Danes off the hill, but they were just as determined to slaughter us. I parried a sword blow, watching the man’s gritted teeth as he tried to cut my head off. The clash of swords jarred up my arm, but I had stopped his swing and I punched him in the face with Serpent-Breath’s hilt. He swung again, striking my helmet, filling my head with noise as I punched a second time. I was too close to him to use the sword’s edge, and he hit my sword arm hard with the rim of his shield. ‘Turd,’ he grunted at me. His helmet was decorated with twists of wool dyed yellow. He wore arm rings over his mail, denoting a man who had won treasure in battle. There was fury in his fire-reflecting eyes. He wanted my death so badly. I wore the silver-decorated helmet, had more arm rings than he did and he knew I was a warrior of renown. Perhaps he knew who I was, and he wanted to boast that he had killed Uhtred of Bebbanburg and I saw him grit his teeth again as he tried to slice the sword at my face and then the grimace turned into surprise, and his eyes widened and the red went from them as he made a gurgling sound. He shook his head, desperate to keep hold of his faltering sword as the axe blade cut his spine. Sihtric had swung the axe and the man made a mewing noise and fell from the saddle, and just then my horse screamed and staggered sideways and I saw a dismounted Dane thrusting a spear up into the stallion’s belly. Finan drove the man over with his horse as I kicked my feet out of the stirrups.

The stallion collapsed, twisting and kicking, still screaming, and my right leg was trapped beneath him. Another horse stepped a hair’s breadth from my face. I covered my body with the shield and tried to drag myself free. A blade crashed into the shield. A horse stepped on Serpent-Breath and I almost lost the blade. My world was a thunder of hooves, screams and confusion. I tried to pull free again then something, blade or hoof, struck the back of my helmet and the confused world turned black. I was dazed, and in the darkness I heard someone making pathetic moaning noises. It was me. A man was trying to drag my helmet off and, when he realised I was alive he put a knife at my mouth and I remember thinking of Gisela and desperately checking that Serpent-Breath’s hilt was in my hand, and it was not, and I screamed, knowing I was denied the joys of Valhalla, and then my vision turned red. There was warmth on my face and red before my eyes, and I recovered my senses to realise that the man who would have killed me was dying himself and his blood was pouring onto my face, then Cerdic heaved the dying man away and pulled me from beneath the dead horse. ‘Here!’ Sihtric thrust Serpent-Breath into my hand. Both he and Cerdic were dismounted. A Dane shouted victory and lunged with a thick-hafted spear from his saddle and Cerdic deflected the thrust with a blade-scored shield. I stabbed the horseman’s thigh with Serpent-Breath, but the blow had no force and his spear sliced at me, thumping hard into my shield. The Danes were scenting triumph and they pressed forward and we felt their blows chopping on the linden wood. ‘Kill their horses,’ I shouted, though it came out as a croak, and some of Weohstan’s men arrived on our right and drove their horses at the Danes and I saw a Saxon twist in his saddle, his spear hand hanging from his bloody arm by a scrap of bone or tendon.

‘Jesus! Jesus!’ a man shouted and it was Father Pyrlig who joined us. The Welsh priest was on foot, belly stretching his mail, a spear like a small tree trunk in his hands. He carried no shield and so used the spear two-handed, driving the blade at the enemy’s horses to keep them at a distance.

‘Thank you,’ I said to Cerdic and Sihtric.

‘We should go back, lord,’ Cerdic said.

‘Where’s Finan?’

‘Back!’ Cerdic shouted, and he unceremoniously grabbed my left shoulder and pulled me away from the Danes.

Finan was fighting behind us, hammering an axe at the Danes on the southern part of the crest where he was supported by most of my men and by Ælfwold’s Mercians. ‘I need a horse,’ I snarled.

‘This is a muddle,’ Pyrlig said, and I almost laughed because his tone and his words were so mild. It was more than a muddle, it was a disaster. I had led my men onto the hill’s edge and the Danes had recovered from the attack and now they surrounded us. There were Danes to the east, to the north and to the south, and they were trying to drive us over the crest and pursue us down the steep slope where our bodies would be a smear of blood beneath the rising sun. At least a hundred of my Saxons were dismounted now and we formed a circle inside a desperate shield wall. Too many were dead, some killed by their own side for, in the maelstrom, it was hard to know friend from foe. Many Saxons had a cross on their shield, but not all. There were plenty of Danish corpses too, but their living outnumbered us. They had my small shield wall surrounded, while their horsemen were harrying the still mounted Saxons back into the woods.

Ælfwold had lost his stallion and the Mercian forced his way to my side. ‘You bastard,’ he said, ‘you treacherous bastard.’ He must have thought I had deliberately led his men into a trap, but it was only my stupid carelessness, not treachery, that had led to this disaster. Ælfwold raised his shield as the Danes came and the blows hammered down. I thrust Serpent-Breath into a horse’s chest, twisted and thrust again, and Pyrlig half hoisted a man from the saddle with a tremendous lunge of his heavy spear. But Ælfwold was down, his helmet ripped open, his blood and brains spilling onto his face, but he retained enough consciousness to look at me reproachfully before he started to quiver and spasm and I had to look away to ram the sword at another Dane whose horse tripped on a corpse, and then the enemy pulled back from our shield wall to ready themselves for another attack.

‘Jesu, Jesu,’ Ælfwold said, and then the breath stuttered in his throat and he said no more. Our shield wall was shrunken, our shields splintered and bloodied. The Danes mocked us, snarled at us and promised us agonising deaths. Men moved closer together and I should have encouraged them, but I did not know what to say because this was my fault, my recklessness. I had attacked without first discovering the enemy’s strength. My death, I thought, would be just, but I would go to the afterlife knowing I had taken too many good men with me.

So the only course was to die well, and I pushed past Sihtric’s shield and went towards the enemy. A man accepted the challenge and rode at me. I could not see his face because the rising sun was behind him, blinding me, but I slashed Serpent-Breath across his stallion’s mouth and thrust my shield up to take his sword’s blow. The horse reared, I thrust at its belly and missed as another man swung an axe from my left, and I stepped away and my foot slid in a slippery tangle of guts spilt from a corpse eviscerated by an axe. I went onto one knee, but again my men came to rescue me. The stallion thumped down and I stood, lunging at the rider, sword striking him somewhere, but I was sun-dazzled and could not see where. To my right a stallion, a spear impaled in its chest, was coughing blood. I was shouting, though I do not remember what I shouted, and from my left came a new charge of horsemen. The newcomers were screaming war cries.

Die well. Die well. What else can a man do? His enemies must say of him that he died like a man. I lunged again, driving the horse away and a sword smacked into the top of my shield, splitting the iron rim and driving a splinter of wood into my eye. I rammed the blade again and felt Serpent-Breath scrape on bone as she tore the rider’s thigh. He hacked down. I blinked the splinter away as his sword cracked on my helmet, glanced off and thumped my shoulder. The mail stopped the blow that had been suddenly weakened because Father Pyrlig had speared the rider in his side. The Welshman dragged me back towards the shield wall. ‘God be thanked!’ he was saying over and over.

The newcomers were Saxons. They rode under the banner of Wessex’s dragon, and at their head was Steapa, and he was worth ten other men, and they had come from the north and were slicing into the Danes.

‘A horse!’ I shouted, and someone brought me a stallion. Pyrlig held the nervous beast as I mounted. I pushed my boots into the unfamiliar stirrups and shouted at my dismounted men to find themselves horses. There were too many dead beasts, but enough riderless stallions still lived white-eyed amidst the slaughter.

A huge crash announced the collapse of the burning hall’s roof. The flaming beams fell one by one, each spewing a new thrust of sparks into the smoke-darkened sky. I spurred to the ancient votive stone, leaned from the saddle and touched the stone’s top as I said a prayer to Thor. A spear had lodged itself through the hole in the pillar and I sheathed Serpent-Breath and took the long-hafted weapon. The blade was bloodied. The spearman, a Dane, lay dead beside the stone. A horse had stepped on his face, mangling it and leaving an eyeball dangling over his helmet’s edge. I gripped the ash shaft and spurred the horse towards the remnants of the fight. Steapa and his men had utterly surprised the Danes who were turning to flee back to the safety of the fort, and Steapa was following. I tried to catch him, but he vanished among the trees. All the Saxons were in pursuit now, the thick woods filled with horses and fugitives. Finan somehow discovered me and rode alongside, ducking beneath branches. A wounded and dismounted Dane flinched from us, then fell to his knees, but we ignored him.

‘Sweet Jesus,’ Finan shouted to me, ‘but I thought we were doomed!’

‘Me too!’

‘How did you know Steapa’s men were coming?’ he asked, then spurred after a fleeing Dane who kicked his horse frantically.

‘I didn’t!’ I shouted, though Finan was too intent on his prey to hear me. I caught up and aimed the spear at the small of the Dane’s back. Leaf mould flew up into my face from the hooves of the enemy’s horse, then I lunged and Finan sliced back with his sword and the Dane dropped from the saddle as we galloped past.

‘Ælfwold’s dead!’ Finan called.

‘I saw it! He thought I betrayed him!’

‘He kept his brains in his arse then. Where have the bastards gone?’

The Danes were riding for the fort and our pursuit had taken us slightly eastwards. I remember the green sunlight bright in the leaves, remember thumping past a badger’s earth, remember the sound of all those hooves in the greenwood, the relief of living after what seemed certain death, and then we were at the edge of the trees.

And still there was chaos.

In front of us was a great stretch of grass where sheep and goats normally grazed. The land sloped down to a saddle, then rose more steeply to the gate of the old fort high on its domed hill. The Danes were galloping for the fort, eager to gain the protection of its ditch and ramparts, but Steapa’s men were among the fugitives, slashing and hacking from their saddles.

‘Come on!’ Finan shouted at me, and kicked back with his spurs.

He saw the opportunity before I did. My immediate thought was to stop him and to stop Steapa’s undisciplined charge, but then the recklessness took hold again. I shouted some wordless challenge and spurred after Finan.

I had lost all sense of time. I could not tell how long that fight on the hill’s edge had taken, but the sun was risen now and its light shimmered off the Temes and lit the high grass saddle a glowing green. The stream of horsemen stretched from the woods to the fort. My labouring horse was breathing hard, sweat white on its flanks, but I kicked it on as we converged on that turf-churning horde of pursuers and pursued. And what Finan had understood before me was that the Danes might close the gate too late. He understood that they might be in such panic that they did not even think to close the gate. So long as their own men pounded across the ditch’s causeway and beneath the wooden arch they would leave the gate open, but Steapa’s men were so mixed with the Danes that some might get through, and if enough of us could get inside that wall then we could take the fort.

Later, much later, when the poets told of that day’s fight, they said Steapa and I attacked Thunresleam’s old hall together, and that we drove the Danes in panic and that we assaulted the fort while the enemy was still reeling from that defeat. They got the story wrong, of course, but then, they were poets, not warriors. The truth was that Steapa rescued me from certain defeat, and neither of us assaulted the fort because we did not need to. The first of Steapa’s men were allowed through the gate and it was only when they were inside that the Danes realised the enemy had entered with their own men. Another desperate fight started. Steapa ordered his men to dismount and they made a shield wall at the gate, a wall that faced both into the fort and out towards the sunlit slope, and the Danes trapped outside could not break that shield wall and fled instead. They spurred down the steep westwards-facing slope, riding desperately towards the new fort. And we simply dismounted and walked through the gate to join Steapa’s spreading shield wall inside the old fort.

I saw Skade then. I never discovered whether she had led the horsemen to Thunresleam’s burning hall, but she commanded the men in the old fort and she was screaming at them to attack us. But we were now in overwhelming numbers. There were at least four hundred Saxons in Steapa’s wall, and more kept arriving on horseback. The proud banner of Wessex flew above us, the embroidered dragon spattered with blood, and Skade screamed at us. She was on horseback, in mail, bareheaded, her long black hair lifting in the wind as she brandished a sword. She kicked her horse towards the shield wall, but had enough sense to check as the round shields lifted in unison and the long spears reached towards her.

Weohstan came with more horsemen, and he led them about the right flank of Steapa’s wall and ordered a charge. Steapa shouted at the wall to advance and we marched up the slight slope towards the great halls that crowned the hill. Weohstan’s men swept ahead of us and the Danes, understanding their fate, fled.

And so we took the old fort. The enemy fled downhill, a man dragging Skade’s horse by its bridle. She sat twisted in her saddle, staring at us. We did not follow. We were weary, bloodied, bruised, wounded and amazed. Besides, there was a shield wall of Danes guarding the bridge which led to the new fort. Not all the fugitives were going to that bridge, some were swimming their horses across the deep narrow creek to reach Caninga.

The dragon was flown from the old fort’s walls and, next to it, Ælfwold’s cross. The flags announced a victory, but that victory would mean nothing unless we could capture the new fort, which, for the first time, I saw clearly.

And cursed.

Æthelflæd joined me on the rampart. She said nothing at first, but, careless of who watched, just put her arms round me. I could feel her body trembling. My battered shield was still looped on my left arm and it covered her when I drew her close. ‘I thought you were dead,’ she said after a while.

‘Who told you that?’

‘No one,’ she said. ‘I was watching.’

‘Watching? Where?’

‘From the edge of the encampment,’ she said calmly.

‘Are you mad?’ I asked angrily, and pushed her away so I could look down at her. ‘You wanted the Danes to capture you?’

‘There’s blood all over your face,’ she said, touching my cheek with a finger. ‘It’s dried. Was it bad?’

‘Yes, but that will be far worse,’ I nodded down at the new fort.

The fort was built at the foot of the hill, where the steep grassy drop levelled into a gentler slope that ended as a low ridge snaking into the marsh beside the creek. It was near low tide and I could see the intricate mudbanks where the creek melded into marsh, and I saw how Haesten had built his new fort on that last tongue of firmer ground, but then had dug a broad moat to protect the eastern wall from a frontal assault. He had made the fort into an island, three times as long as it was wide. The southern rampart stretched along the creek and was protected by the deep-water channel, the western and northern walls looked over wide flooded inlets and endless tide-haunted marshes, while the short eastern palisade, which held the main gate and was facing us, was protected by its newly dug moat. A wooden bridge crossed the moat, but now that the last fugitives were safely across, men were dismantling it and carrying the roadway’s wide planks back into the fort. Some of the men were working in the water, which, at the centre of the moat, only came to their waists. So the moat could be crossed at low tide, though that was small consolation because the difference between high and low tide here was at least twice the height of a well-grown man, which meant that when the moat was fordable the farther bank would be a steep slope of glutinous and slick mud.

The interior of the fort was crammed with buildings, some roofed with planks and others with sailcloth, but no thatch, meaning Haesten was guarding against the possibility of fire-arrows setting his stronghold alight. I guessed many of the beams and posts to make the houses had been taken from the village which had been dismantled and burned, its ruins lying to the east of the new fort where the hill’s lower slope was widest. There were scores of Danes inside the long fort, but even more were evidently living aboard their ships. Over two hundred of the high-prowed war vessels were beached high on the creek’s farther bank. Most had been dismasted and some had awnings stretched across their crutch-supported masts. Washed clothes were drying on the awnings, while in the hulls’ shadows children played in the mud or else gaped up at us. I also counted twenty-three moored ships, all of them with their masts in place and with sails furled on their yards. Every one of those moored ships had men aboard, suggesting they could be made ready for sea at a moment’s notice. I had been thinking of bringing vessels downstream from Lundene, but the evident preparedness of the moored ships suggested that any small fleet we deployed would quickly be overwhelmed.

Steapa shambled towards us. His face, so fearsome because of the taut skin and feral eyes, looked suddenly nervous as he knelt to Æthelflæd and pulled off his helmet, leaving his hair tangled. ‘My lady,’ he said, blinking.

‘Get up, Steapa,’ she said.

This was a man who would take on a dozen Danes and whose sword was feared in three kingdoms, but he was in awe of Æthelflæd. She was royalty and he was a slave’s son. ‘The Lady Æthelflæd,’ I said imperiously, ‘wants you to go down the hill, cross the moat, beat down the gates and bring the Danes out.’

For a moment he believed me. He looked alarmed, then he frowned at me, but did not know what to say.

‘Thank you, Steapa,’ Æthelflæd said warmly, saving Steapa from his confusion. ‘You won a magnificent victory! I shall make sure my father knows of your triumph.’

He brightened at that, but still stammered. ‘We were lucky, my lady.’

‘We always seem to be lucky when you fight. How is Hedda?’

‘She’s well, lady!’ He beamed at her, astonished she should condescend to ask such a question. I could never remember the name of Steapa’s wife, a tiny creature, but Æthelflæd knew, and even knew the name of his son.

‘Is my brother near?’ Æthelflæd asked.

‘He was with us in the fight,’ Steapa said, ‘so he must be close, my lady.’

‘I shall find him,’ she announced.

‘Not without a bodyguard,’ I growled. I suspected some fugitive Danes were still in the woods.

‘The Lord Uhtred thinks I’m a baby who needs protecting,’ Æthelflæd told Steapa.

‘He knows best, lady,’ Steapa said loyally.

Æthelflæd’s horse was brought and I cupped my hands to let her mount. I ordered Weohstan and his horsemen to escort her as she rode back towards the smoke of the burning old hall, then I gave Steapa a thump on his back. It was like punching an oak tree. ‘Thank you,’ I said.

‘For what?’

‘For keeping me alive.’

‘You seemed to be doing well enough,’ he muttered.

‘I was just dying slowly,’ I said, ‘till you came along.’

He grunted and turned to stare down at the fort. ‘That be a bastard,’ he said, ‘how do we take it?’

‘I wish I knew.’

‘Has to be done though,’ he said, almost as a question.

‘And quickly,’ I stressed. It had to be quick because we had our hand on the enemy’s throat, but he still had both arms free. Those arms were the savage troops harrying Mercia who had left their families and ships in Beamfleot, and many of those men valued their ships more than their families. The Danes were opportunists. They attacked where they sensed weakness, but as soon as the fighting became too hard they boarded their ships and sailed away to find feebler prey. If I destroyed this huge fleet then the crews would be stranded in Britain and, if Wessex survived, they could be hunted down and slaughtered. Haesten might be confident that Beamfleot’s new fort was impregnable, but his followers would soon be pressing him to raise our siege. In short, once the Danes ravaging Mercia knew we were a real threat and were present in real numbers, they would want to return to protect their ships and families. ‘Very quickly,’ I added.

‘So we have to cross that ditch,’ Steapa said, nodding down at the moat, ‘and put ladders against the wall.’ He made it sound simple.

‘That’s my idea too,’ I said.

‘Jesus,’ he muttered and made the sign of the cross.

Horns sounded to the north and I turned to stare across the saddle of land where the scattered corpses of men and horses still lay and where still more horsemen were appearing from the far woods. One rider was carrying a vast dragon banner, which told me the Ætheling Edward had arrived.

Alfred’s son paused outside the fort, sitting on his horse in the sunlight while servants and packhorses hurried through the gate and up to the larger of the two halls. Both halls were in disrepair. Finan, who had searched them both, joined us on the rampart and said that the halls had been used as stables. ‘It’ll be like living in a cesspit,’ he said.

Edward still waited beyond the gate with Æthelflæd beside him. ‘Why isn’t he coming into the fort?’ I asked.

‘He has to have a throne,’ Finan said, and laughed at the expression on my face. ‘It’s true! They’ve brought him a rug, a throne and god knows what else. An altar too.’

‘He will be the next king,’ Steapa said loyally.

‘Unless I manage to kill the bastard while we’re crossing that wall,’ I said, pointing to the Danish fort. Steapa looked shocked, then cheered up when I asked him how Alfred was faring.

‘He’s as good as ever!’ Steapa said. ‘We thought he was dying! He’s much better now. He can ride again, even walk!’

‘I heard he’d died.’

‘He nearly did. They gave him the last rites, but he recovered. He’s gone to Exanceaster.’

‘What’s happening down there?’

Steapa shrugged. ‘Danes made a camp and are sitting inside it.’

‘They want Alfred to pay them to leave,’ I suggested. I thought of Ragnar, and imagined his unhappiness because Brida would undoubtedly be urging him to assault Exanceaster, but that burh was a hard one to attack. It lay on a hill, the approaches were steep, and Alfred’s trained army was protecting its stout ramparts, which was why, at least by the time Steapa left, the Danes had made no attempt to attack it. ‘Haesten was clever,’ I said.

‘Clever?’ Steapa asked.

‘He persuaded the Northumbrians to attack by saying he’d distract Alfred’s army,’ I explained, ‘and then he warned Alfred of the Northumbrian attack to make sure he didn’t have to fight the West Saxons.’

‘He has to fight us,’ Steapa growled.

‘Because Alfred is just as clever,’ I said. Alfred knew Haesten was the greater threat. If Haesten could be defeated then the Northumbrians would lose heart and, in all likelihood, sail away. Ragnar’s Northumbrians had to be held at bay, which is why so much of the West Saxon army was in Defnascir, but Alfred had sent his son and twelve hundred of his best men to Beamfleot. He wanted me to weaken Haesten, but he wanted much more than that.

He wanted the Ætheling Edward’s reputation to be burnished by the victory. Alfred had not needed to sent the Ætheling. Steapa and his men were indispensable to me, while Edward was a liability, but Alfred knew his own death could not be too distant and he wanted to be certain that his son succeeded him, and for that he needed to give Edward a warrior’s renown. Which is why he had asked me to give Edward my oath and I reflected bitterly that my refusal had not prevented Alfred from manipulating me so that I was here, fighting for the Christians and fighting for Edward.

The ætheling at last entered the fort, his arrival announced by horn blasts. Men knelt as he rode to the hall and I watched him acknowledge the homage with graceful waves of his right hand. He looked young and slight, and I remembered Ragnar asking if I wanted to be King of Wessex and I could not resist a sudden, bitter laugh. Finan glanced at me curiously. ‘He’ll want us in the hall,’ Steapa said.

The big hall stank. The servants had shovelled the horse dung to one side, and raked out most of the stale floor-rushes, but the hall still reeked like a latrine and buzzed with fat flies. I had feasted here once, back when the hall was lit by fire and loud with laughter and the memory made me wonder if all the great high-beamed feasting halls were doomed to decay.

There was no dais, so Edward’s chair was set on a great rug and next to him was a stool on which Æthelflæd sat. Behind the brother and sister was a dark group of priests. I knew none of them, but they evidently knew me because four of the six churchmen made the sign of the cross when I approached the makeshift throne.

Steapa knelt to the Ætheling, Finan bowed and I nodded my head. Edward evidently expected more obeisance from me and waited, but when it was plain that I had offered him all I was prepared to give he forced a smile. ‘You did well,’ he said in his high voice. There was neither warmth nor conviction in the compliment.

I slapped Steapa’s back. ‘Steapa did well, lord.’

‘He is a loyal warrior and a good Christian,’ Edward said, implying that I was neither.

‘He’s also a big ugly brute,’ I said, ‘and he makes Danes shit themselves with fear.’

Edward and the priests all bridled at that. Edward was steeling himself to reprove me when Æthelflæd’s laughter cut across the hall. Edward looked annoyed at the sound, but composed himself. ‘I am sorry that the Lord Ælfwold died,’ he said.

‘I share your sorrow, lord.’

‘My father,’ he said, ‘has sent me to capture this nest of heathen pirates.’ He spoke in the same way that he sat; stiffly. He was horribly conscious of his youth and of his fragile authority, but, like his father, he had intelligent eyes. He was lost in this hall, though. He was frightened of my blood-spattered face, and frightened of most of the older warriors who had been killing Danes when he was still sucking on his wet nurse’s tits. ‘The question,’ he said, ‘is how.’

‘Steapa already has the answer,’ I said.

Edward looked relieved and Steapa looked alarmed. ‘Speak, Steapa,’ Edward said.

Steapa looked at me in fright so I answered for him. ‘We have to cross the moat and climb the wall,’ I said, ‘and we can only do that at low tide, and the Danes know it. They also know we have to do it quickly.’

There was silence. I had stated the obvious and that clearly disappointed Edward, but what did he expect? That I would have some sorcerous scheme born from pagan wiles? Or did he believe angels would fly from the Christian heaven and attack the Danes inside the fort? There were only two ways to capture Beamfleot. One was to starve the Danes, and we did not have the time to do that, and the other was to storm the walls. Sometimes, in war, simple is the only answer. It is also likely to be a blood-soaked answer, and all the men in the hall knew it. Some looked at me reproachfully, imagining the horror of trying to scale a high palisade manned by murderous Danes. ‘So,’ I went on confidently, ‘we need to be busy. Weohstan,’ I turned to him, ‘your men will patrol the marshes to stop messengers leaving the fort. Beornoth, take Lord Ælfwold’s men and threaten the ship-forts at the creek’s end. You, lord,’ I looked at Edward, ‘your men must start making ladders, and you,’ I pointed at the six priests, ‘what are you good for?’

Edward just stared at me in horror and the priests looked offended. ‘They can pray, Lord Uhtred?’ Æthelflæd suggested sweetly.

‘Then pray hard,’ I told them.

There was silence again. Men expected a council of war, and Edward, who was notionally in charge, would have liked the pretence that he was making the decisions, but we did not have time to argue. ‘Ladders,’ Edward finally said in a puzzled voice.

‘We climb them,’ I said savagely, ‘and we need at least forty.’

Edward blinked. I could see he was debating whether to slap me down, but then he must have decided that victory at Beamfleot was preferable to making an enemy. He even managed a smile. ‘They will be made,’ he said graciously.

‘So all we have to do,’ I said, ‘is get them across the moat, then use them to climb the wall.’ Edward’s smile faded.

Because even he knew men would die. Too many men.

But there was no other way.

The first problem was crossing the moat, to which end I rode north the next day. I was worried that Haesten would lead his men back to relieve the siege and we sent strong scouting parties west and north to watch for the coming of that army. In the end it never did come. Haesten, it seemed, was confident of Beamfleot’s strength and of the courage of its garrison, so instead of trying to destroy us he sent his raiding parties ever further into Mercia, attacking unwalled towns and villages that had thought themselves safe because they were close to the West Saxon border. The skies over Mercia were palled with smoke.

I rode to Thunresleam and found the priest, Heahberht. I told him what I wanted, and Osferth, who was leading the eighteen men who accompanied me, gave the priest a spare horse. ‘I’ll fall off, lord,’ Heahberht said nervously, staring with his one eye at the tall stallion.

‘You’ll be safe,’ I said. ‘Just cling on. That horse will look after you.’

I had taken Osferth and his men because we were riding north into East Anglia and that was Danish territory. I did not expect trouble. Any Dane who wished to fight the Saxons would already have ridden with Haesten, so those who had remained on their land probably wanted no part of the war, yet even so it was prudent to ride in force. We were just about to go north from the village when Osferth warned me that more horsemen were approaching, and I turned to see them coming from the woods that screened Beamfleot.

My first thought was that Haesten’s army must have been seen far to the west and these horsemen rode to warn me, but then one rider raised a dragon banner and I saw it was the flag of the Ætheling Edward. Edward himself was with them, accompanied by a score of warriors and a priest. ‘I haven’t seen much East Anglian territory,’ he explained his presence awkwardly, ‘and wish to accompany you.’

‘You’re welcome, lord,’ I said in a voice that made it amply clear he was not.

‘This is Father Coenwulf,’ Edward introduced the priest who gave me a reluctant nod. He was a pale-skinned man, some ten years or so older than Edward. ‘Father Coenwulf was my tutor,’ Edward said with an affectionate tone, ‘and is now my confessor and friend.’

‘What did you teach him?’ I asked Coenwulf, who made no answer, but just stared at me with indignant and very blue eyes.

‘Philosophy,’ Edward said, ‘and the writings of the church fathers.’

‘I learned just one useful lesson as a child,’ I told him. ‘Beware the blow that comes under the shield. This is Father Heahberht,’ I gestured at the one-eyed priest, ‘and this is the Ætheling Edward,’ I said to the village priest who almost fell from his horse in terror of meeting such an exalted prince.

Father Heahberht was our guide. I had asked him where there might be ships, and he had said that he had seen two trading ships being hauled from a river to the north less than a week before. ‘They aren’t far away, lord,’ he had told me. He said the ships belonged to a Danish trader and had been beached for repairs. ‘But they may not be seaworthy, lord,’ he added nervously.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said, ‘just take us there.’

It was a warm, sun-kissed day. We rode through good farmland that Father Heahberht said belonged to a man called Thorstein who had ridden with Haesten into Mercia. Thorstein had done well for himself. His land was well watered, had fine woodlands and healthy orchards. ‘Where’s his hall?’ I asked Heahberht.

‘We’re going there, lord.’

‘Is this Thorstein a Christian?’ Edward wanted to know.

‘He says so, lord,’ Heahberht stammered, blushing. He obviously wanted to say more, but fear meant he could not find the words and he just gazed slack-jawed at the Ætheling. Edward waved the priest ahead of us, but the poor man had no idea how to quicken his horse so Osferth leaned over to take his bridle. They trotted ahead with Heahberht gripping the saddle’s pommel for dear life.

Edward grimaced. ‘A country priest,’ he said dismissively.

‘They do more harm than good,’ Coenwulf said. ‘One of our duties, lord, will be to educate the country clergy.’

‘He wears the short tunic!’ Edward observed knowingly. The Pope himself had ordered priests to wear full-length robes, a command Alfred had enthusiastically endorsed.

‘Father Heahberht,’ I said, ‘is a clever man, and a good one. But he’s frightened of you.’

‘Of me!’ Edward asked, ‘why?’

‘Because he’s a peasant,’ I said, ‘but a peasant who learned to read. Can you even imagine how hard it was for him to become a priest? And all his life he’s been pissed on by thegns. So of course he’s scared of you. And he wears a short robe because he can’t afford a long one, and because he lives in mud and shit, and short robes don’t get as filthy as long ones. So how would you feel if you were a peasant who meets a man who might one day be King of Wessex?’

Edward said nothing, but Father Coenwulf pounced. ‘Might?’ he demanded indignantly.

‘Might indeed,’ I said airily. I was goading them, reminding Edward that he had a cousin, Æthelwold, who had more right to the throne than Edward himself, though Æthelwold, Alfred’s nephew, was a poor excuse of a man.

My words silenced Edward for a while, but Father Coenwulf was made of sterner stuff. ‘I was surprised, lord,’ he broke the silence, ‘to discover the Lady Æthelflæd here.’

‘Surprised?’ I asked, ‘why? She’s an adventurous lady.’

‘Her place,’ Father Coenwulf said, ‘is with her husband. My lord the ætheling will agree with me, is that not so, lord?’

I glanced at Edward and saw him redden. ‘She should not be here,’ he forced himself to say and I almost laughed aloud. I realised now why he had ridden with us. He was not much interested in seeing a few miles of East Anglia, instead he had come to carry out his father’s instructions, and those instructions were to persuade Æthelflæd to her duty. ‘Why tell me?’ I asked the pair.

‘You have influence over the lady,’ Father Coenwulf said grimly.

We had crossed a watershed and were riding down a long and gentle slope. The path was edged with coppiced willows and there were glimpses of water far ahead, silver sheens bright beneath the pale sky. ‘So,’ I ignored Coenwulf and looked at Edward, ‘your father sent you to reprove your sister?’

‘It is a Christian duty to remind her of her responsibilities,’ he answered very stiffly.

‘I hear he is recovered from his illness,’ I said.

‘For which God be praised,’ Coenwulf put in.

‘Amen,’ Edward said.

But Alfred could not live long. He was already an old man, well past forty years, and now he was looking to the future. He was doing what he always did, arranging things, tidying things, trying to impose order on a kingdom beset by enemies. He believed his baleful god would punish Wessex if it were not a godly kingdom, and so he was trying to force Æthelflæd back to her husband, or else, I guessed, to a nunnery. There could be no visible sin in Alfred’s family, and that thought inspired me. I looked at Edward again. ‘Do you know Osferth?’ I asked cheerfully. He blushed at that and Father Coenwulf glared as if warning me to take that subject no further. ‘You haven’t met?’ I asked Edward in pretended innocence, then called to Osferth. ‘Wait for us!’

Father Coenwulf tried to turn Edward’s horse away, but I caught hold of the bridle and forced the Ætheling to catch up with his half-brother. ‘Tell me,’ I said to Osferth, ‘how you would make the Mercians fight.’

Osferth frowned at the question, wondering just what lay behind it. He glanced at Edward, but did not acknowledge his half-brother, though the resemblance between them was startling. They both had Alfred’s long face, hollow cheeks and thin lips. Osferth’s face was harder, but he had lived harder too. His father, ashamed of his own bastard, had tried to make Osferth a priest, but Osferth had turned himself into a warrior, a trade to which he brought his father’s intelligence. ‘The Mercians can fight as well as anyone,’ Osferth said cautiously. He knew I was playing some game and was trying to detect it and so, unseen by either Edward or Coenwulf who both rode on my left, I cupped a hand to indicate a breast and Osferth, despite having inherited his father’s almost complete lack of humour, had to resist an amused smile. ‘They need leadership,’ he said confidently.

‘Then we thank God for the Lord Æthelred,’ Father Coenwulf said, refusing to look directly at Osferth.

‘The Lord Æthelred,’ I said savagely, ‘couldn’t lead a wet whore to a dry bed.’

‘But the Lady Æthelflæd is much loved in Mercia,’ Osferth said, now playing his part to perfection. ‘We saw that at Fearnhamme. It was the Lady Æthelflæd who inspired the Mercians.’

‘You’ll need the Mercians,’ I told Edward. ‘If you become king,’ I went on, stressing the ‘if’ to keep him unbalanced, ‘the Mercians will protect your northern frontier. And the Mercians don’t love Wessex. They may fight for you, but they don’t love you. They were a proud country once, and they don’t like being told what to do by Wessex. But they do love one West Saxon. And you’d shut her up in a convent?’

‘She is a married. …’ Father Coenwulf began.

‘Oh, shut your mouth,’ I snapped at him. ‘Your king used his daughter to bring me south, and here I am, and I’ll stay here so long as Æthelflæd asks. But don’t think I’m here for you, or for your god, or for your king. If you have plans for Æthelflæd then you had better count me as a part of them.’

Edward was too embarrassed to meet my eyes. Father Coenwulf was angry, but dared not speak, while Osferth grinned at me. Father Heahberht had listened to the conversation with a shocked expression, but now found his timid voice. ‘The hall is that way, lords,’ he said, pointing, and we turned down a track rutted by cart wheels and I saw a reed-thatched roof showing between some heavy-leaved elm trees. I kicked ahead of Edward, to see that Thorstein’s home was built on a low ridge above the river. There was a village beyond the hall, its small houses straggling along the bank where dozens of fires smoked. ‘They dry herring here?’ I asked the priest.

‘And they make salt, lord.’

‘Is there a palisade?’

‘Yes, lord.’

The palisade was unmanned and the gates lay open. Thorstein had taken his warriors with Haesten, leaving only a handful of older men to protect his family and lands, and those men knew better than to put up a fight they must lose. Instead a steward welcomed us with a bowl of water. Thorstein’s grey-haired wife watched from the hall door, but when I turned to her she stepped back into the shadows and the door slammed shut.

The palisade enclosed the hall, three barns, a cattle shed and a pair of elm-timbered slipways where the two ships had been hauled high above the tideline. They were trading ships, their fat bellies patched pale where carpenters were nailing new oak strakes. ‘Your master is a shipbuilder?’ I asked the steward.

‘They’ve always built ships here, lord,’ he said humbly, meaning that Thorstein had stolen the shipyard from a Saxon.

I turned on Osferth. ‘Make sure the women aren’t molested,’ I ordered, ‘and find a wagon and draught horses.’ I looked back to the steward. ‘We need ale and food.’

‘Yes, lord.’

There was a long low building beside the slipways and I went to it. Sparrows quarrelled beneath the thatch. Once inside I had to let my eyes adjust to the gloom, but then I saw what I was seeking. Masts and spars and sails. I ordered my men to carry all the spars and sails out to the wagon, then walked to the shed’s open end to watch the river swirl past. The tide was falling, exposing long steep slicks of mud.

‘Why spars and sails?’ Edward asked from behind me. He was alone. ‘The steward brought mead,’ he said awkwardly. He was frightened of me, but he was making a great effort to be friendly.

‘Tell me,’ I said, ‘what happened when you tried to capture Torneie.’

‘Torneie?’ Edward sounded confused.

‘You attacked Harald on his island,’ I said, ‘and you failed. I want to know why.’ I had heard the story from Offa, the dog-man who carried his news between the kingdoms, but I had not asked anyone who was there. All I knew was that the assault on Harald’s fugitives had ended in defeat and with a great loss of men.

He frowned. ‘It was. …’ He stopped, shaking his head, perhaps remembering the men floundering through the mud to Harald’s palisade. ‘We never got close,’ he said bitterly.

‘Why not?’

He frowned. ‘There were stakes in the river. The mud was thick.’

‘You think Beamfleot will be any easier?’ I demanded, and saw the answer on his face. ‘So who led the attack on Torneie?’ I asked.

‘Æthelred and I,’ he said.

‘You led?’ I asked pointedly. ‘You were in front?’

He stared at me, bit his lower lip, then looked embarrassed. ‘No.’

‘Your father made certain you were protected?’ I asked, and he nodded. ‘What about Lord Æthelred?’ I went on, ‘did he lead?’

‘He’s a brave man,’ Edward said defiantly.

‘You haven’t answered me.’

‘He went with his men,’ Edward said evasively, ‘but thank God he escaped the rout.’

‘So why should you be King of Wessex?’ I asked him brutally.

‘I,’ he said, then ran out of words and just looked at me with a pained expression. He had come into the shed trying to be friendly and I was raking him over.

‘Because your father’s the king?’ I suggested. ‘In the past we’ve chosen the best man to be king, not the one who happened to come from between the legs of a king’s wife.’ He frowned, offended and uncertain, voiceless. ‘Tell me why I shouldn’t make Osferth king,’ I said harshly. ‘He’s Alfred’s eldest son.’

‘If there is no rule to the succession,’ he said carefully, ‘then the death of a king will lead to chaos.’

‘Rules,’ I sneered, ‘how you love rules. So because Osferth’s mother was a servant he can’t be king?’

‘No,’ Edward found the courage to answer, ‘he can’t.’

‘Luckily for you,’ I said, ‘he doesn’t want to be king. At least I don’t think he does. But you do?’ I waited and eventually he responded with an almost imperceptible nod. ‘And you have the advantage,’ I went on, ‘of having been born between a pair of royal legs, but you still need to prove you deserve the kingship.’ He stared at me, saying nothing. ‘You want to be king,’ I went on, ‘so you must show you deserve it. You lead. You do what you didn’t do at Torneie, what my cousin didn’t do either. You go first into the attack. You can’t expect men to die for you unless they see you’re willing to die for them.’

He nodded to that. ‘Beamfleot?’ he asked, unable to disguise his fear at the prospect of that assault.

‘You want to be king?’ I asked, ‘then you lead the assault. Now come with me, and I’ll show you how.’

I took him outside and led him to the top of the river bank. The tide was almost out, leaving a slippery slope of gleaming mud at least twelve foot high. ‘How,’ I asked him, ‘do we get up a slope like that?’

He did not answer, but just frowned as though considering the problem and then, to his utter astonishment, I shoved him hard over the edge. He cried aloud as he lost his footing, then he slipped and floundered on his royal arse all the way down to the water where at last he managed to stand unsteadily. He was mud-smeared and indignant. Father Coenwulf evidently thought I was trying to drown the Ætheling, for he rushed to my side where he stared down at the prince. ‘Draw your sword,’ I told Edward, ‘and climb that bank.’

He drew his sword and took some tentative steps, but the slick mud defeated him so that he slithered back every time. ‘Try harder,’ I snarled. ‘Try really hard! There are Danes at the top of the bank and you have to kill them. So climb!’

‘What are you doing?’ Coenwulf demanded of me.

‘Making a king,’ I told him quietly, then looked back to Edward. ‘Climb, you bastard! Get up here!’

He could not do it, cumbered as he was with heavy mail and with his long sword. He tried to crawl up the bank, but still he slid back. ‘That’s what it’s going to be like,’ I told him, ‘climbing out of the moat at Beamfleot!’

He stared up at me, filthy and wet. ‘Do we make bridges?’ he suggested.

‘How do we make a bridge with a hundred farting Danes throwing spears at us?’ I demanded, ‘now come on! Climb!’ He tried again, and again he failed. Then, as his men and mine watched from the top of the bank, Edward gritted his teeth and hurled himself at the greasy mud for one last determined attempt, and this time he managed to stay on the slope. He used his sword as a stick, inching higher and the men cheered. He kept slipping back, but his determination was obvious, and every small step was applauded. The heir to Alfred’s throne was plastered with mud and his precious dignity was gone, but he was suddenly enjoying himself. He was grinning. He kicked his boots into the mud, hauled on the sword, and at last managed to scramble over the bank’s edge. He stood, smiling at the cheers, and even Father Coenwulf was beaming with pride. ‘We have to climb the moat’s bank to reach the fort,’ I told him, ‘and it will be just as steep and slippery as this slope. We’re never going to make it. The Danes will be raining arrows and spears. The bed of the moat will be thick with blood and bodies. We’re all going to die there.’

‘The sails,’ Edward said, understanding.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘the sails.’ I ordered Osferth to unfold one of the three sails we were stealing. It took six men to unwrap the great sheet of stiff, salt-caked cloth. Mice scampered out of the folds, but once it was spread I had men drape the sail down the mudbank. The sail itself offered no footholds because sailcloth is fragile, but ropes are sewn into it and thus every sail is a crisscross of reinforcing ropes, and those latticed lines would be our ladders. I took Edward’s elbow and he and I walked down the sail to the water’s edge. ‘Now,’ I said, ‘try again. Full speed. Race me!’

He won. He ran at the bank and his boots caught on the sail ropes and he reached the top without using his hands once. He grinned with triumph as I came behind, then he had a sudden idea. ‘All of you!’ he called to his bodyguard. ‘Down to the river and climb back up!’

They were suddenly enjoying themselves. All the men, mine as well as Edward’s, wanted to try the network of sail ropes. There were too many men, and eventually the sail slid down the bank, which is why I was taking the spars. I would thread the lattice of ropes onto the spars, then lash the spars into place so that the makeshift rope ladder would be stiffened by the spruce frame and, I hoped, stay in place. On that day we just pegged the sail to the bank and ran races, which Edward, to his evident delight, won repeatedly. He even found the courage to talk briefly with Osferth, though they discussed nothing more important than the weather, which the half-brothers evidently found agreeable. After a while I ordered the men to stop scrambling up the sail, which had to be laboriously refolded, but I had proved it would work as a means of climbing out of the fort’s moat. That would just leave the wall to cross, and those of us who did not die in the moat would almost certainly die on the ledge of land beneath the wall.

The steward brought me a small horn cup of mead. I took it and for some reason, as my hand closed on the cup, the bee sting, which I had thought long vanished, began to itch again. The swelling was entirely gone, but for a moment the itching was back and I stared at my hand. I did not move, I just stared, and Osferth became worried. ‘What is it, lord?’

‘Get me Father Heahberht,’ I said and, when the priest arrived, I asked him who made the mead.

‘He’s a strange man, lord,’ Heahberht said.

‘I don’t care if he’s got a tail and tits, just take me to him.’

The sails and spars were loaded on the wagon and escorted back to the old fort, but I took a half-dozen men and rode with Heahberht to a village he called Hocheleia. It looked a peaceful and half-forgotten place, just a straggle of cottages surrounded by big willow trees. There was a small church, marked by a wooden cross nailed to the eave. ‘Skade didn’t burn this church?’ I asked Father Heahberht.

‘Thorstein protected these folk, lord,’ Heahberht told me.

‘But he didn’t protect Thunresleam?’

‘These are Thorstein’s people, lord. They belong to him. They work his land.’

‘So who’s the Lord of Thunresleam?’

‘Whoever is in the fort,’ he said bitterly. ‘This way, lord.’ He led me past a duck pond and into a thicket of bushes where a small cottage, thatched so deep that it looked more like a pile of straw than a dwelling, stood in the trees’ shadows. ‘The man is called Brun, lord.’

‘Brun?’

‘Just Brun. Some say he’s mad, lord.’

Brun crawled from his cottage. He had to crawl to get beneath the thatch’s edge. He half stood, saw my mail coat and golden arm rings, and fell back to his knees and scrabbled with dirt-crusted hands in the earth. He mumbled something I did not hear. A woman then emerged from beneath the thatch and knelt beside Brun and the two of them made whimpering noises as they bobbed their heads. Their hair was long, matted and tangled. Father Heahberht told them what we wanted and Brun grunted something, then abruptly stood. He was a tiny man, no taller than the dwarves that are said to live underground. His hair was so thick that I could not see his eyes. He pulled his woman to her feet, and she was no taller than him and certainly no prettier, then the pair of them gabbled at Heahberht, but their speech was so garbled that I could hardly understand a word. ‘He says we must go to the back of the house,’ Heahberht said.

‘You can understand them?’

‘Well enough, lord.’

I left my escort in the lane, tied our two horses to a hornbeam, then followed the diminutive couple through thick weeds to where, half hidden by grass, was what I sought. Rows of hives. Bees were busy in the warm air, but they ignored us, going to and from the cone-shaped hives that appeared to be fashioned from baked mud. Brun, a sudden fondness in his voice, was stroking one hive. ‘He says the bees talk to him, lord,’ Heahberht told me, ‘and he talks back.’

Bees crawled up Brun’s bare arms and he muttered to them. ‘What do they tell him?’ I asked.

‘What happens in the world, lord. And he tells them he’s sorry.’

‘For the world’s happenings?’

‘Because to get the honey for the mead, lord, he must break the hives open, and then the bees die. He buries them, he says, and says prayers over their graves.’

Brun was crooning at his bees, singing like a mother to her infants. ‘I’ve only seen straw hives,’ I said, ‘maybe straw hives don’t need to be broken? Maybe the bees can live?’

Brun must have understood what I said for he turned angrily and spoke fast. ‘He doesn’t approve of skeps, lord,’ Heahberht translated, speaking of the woven straw hives. ‘He makes his hives the old-fashioned way, out of plaited hazel twigs and cow dung. He says the honey is sweeter.’

‘Tell him what I want,’ I said, ‘and tell him I’ll pay well.’

And so the bargain was struck and I rode back to the old fort on the hill and thought there was a chance. Just a chance. Because the bees had spoken.

That night, and the following two nights, I sent men down the long hill to the new fort. I led them the first two nights, leaving the old fort after dark. Men carried the sails, which had been cut into two, then each half sewn to a pair of spars so that we had six wide rope ladders. When we attacked in earnest we would have to go into the creek, unfurl the six wide ladders and lay them against the farther bank, then men would have to climb the latticed ropes carrying real ladders that must be laid against the wall.

But for three nights we just feigned attacks. We went close to the moat, we shouted and our archers, of whom we had just over a hundred, shot arrows at the Danes. They, in turn, shot arrows back and hurled spears that thumped into the mud. They also threw firebrands to light the night and, when they saw we were not attempting to cross the moat, I heard men shouting orders to stop throwing the spears.

I learned the walls were well-manned. Haesten had left a large garrison, so many that some Danes were not needed in the fort at all, but instead guarded the ships drawn up on Caninga’s shore.

I did not go down the hill on the third night. I let Steapa lead that feint while I watched from the high fort’s walls. Just after dark my men brought a wagon from Hocheleia and in it were eight hives. Brun had told us that the best time to seal a hive was at dusk, and that evening he had closed up the entrances with plugs of mud mixed with cow dung that now slowly hardened. I put my ear next to one hive and heard a strange humming vibration.

‘The bees will live till tomorrow night?’ Edward asked me.

‘They don’t have to,’ I said, ‘because we’re attacking in tomorrow’s dawn.’

‘Tomorrow!’ he said, unable to hide his surprise, which pleased me. By making feint attacks during the early darkness I wanted to persuade the Danes that we would be launching our real attack shortly after dusk. Instead I would go at them at daybreak next morning, but I hoped that Skade and her men were already convinced, like Edward, that I planned an attack at nightfall.

‘Tomorrow morning,’ I said, ‘and we leave tonight, in the dark.’

‘Tonight?’ Edward asked, still astonished.

‘Tonight.’

He made the sign of the cross. Æthelflæd who, with Steapa, was the only other person I had told of my plans, came to stand beside me and put her hand through my arm. Edward seemed to shiver at the sight of our affection, then forced a smile. ‘Pray for me, sister,’ he said.

‘I always have,’ she replied.

She looked at him steadily and he met her gaze for an instant, then looked at me. He started to speak, but nervousness made the first word an incoherent croak. He tried again. ‘You would not give me your oath, Lord Uhtred,’ he said.

‘No, lord.’

‘But my sister has it?’

Æthelflæd’s arm tightened on mine. ‘She has my sworn loyalty, lord,’ I said.

‘Then I have no need of your oath,’ Edward said with a smile.

That was generous of him and I bowed in acknowledgement. ‘You don’t need my oath, lord,’ I said, ‘but your men need your encouragement tonight. Speak to them. Inspire them.’

There would be little sleep that night. It took men time to prepare for battle. It was a time of fear, a time when the imagination makes the enemy seem ever more fearsome. Some men, a few, fled the fort and sought shelter in the woods, but they were very few. The rest sharpened swords and axes. I would not let men feed the fires, because I did not want the Danes to see anything different about this night, and so most weapons were honed in the dark. Men pulled on boots, mail and helmets. They made poor jokes. Some just sat with bowed heads, but they listened when Edward spoke to them. He went from group to group and I remembered how uninspiring his father’s first speech had been before the great victory at Ethandun. Edward was not much better, but he had an earnestness that was convincing, and men murmured approval when he promised that he would be the first man in the attack.

‘You must keep him alive,’ Father Coenwulf told me sternly.

‘Isn’t that the responsibility of your god?’ I asked.

‘His father will never forgive you if Edward dies.’

‘He has another son,’ I said flippantly.

‘Edward is a good man,’ Coenwulf said angrily, ‘and he’ll make a good king.’

I agreed with that. I had not thought so before, but I had begun to like Edward. He had a willingness about him, and I did not doubt he would prove brave. He feared, of course, like all men fear, but he had kept those fears behind the fence of his teeth. He was determined to prove himself an heir, and that meant going to the place of death. He had not baulked at that idea, and for that I respected him. ‘He’ll make a good king,’ I told Coenwulf, ‘if he proves himself. And you know he must prove himself.’

The priest paused, then nodded. ‘But look after him,’ he pleaded.

‘I’ve told Steapa to look after him,’ I told Coenwulf, ‘and I can’t do better than that.’

Father Pyrlig, dressed in his rusted mail, a sword at his waist and with an axe and a shield slung from his shoulders, came from the dark. ‘My men are ready,’ he said. I had given him thirty men whose job was to carry the hives down the dark hill and across the moat.

I looked eastwards. There was no sign of any new light there, but I sensed the short night was coming to its close. I touched Thor’s hammer. ‘Time to go,’ I said.

Steapa’s men were making a racket at the hill’s foot, a noise to distract the Danes as hundreds of men now left the fort and, in the clouded darkness, went down the steep slope. In front were Edward’s men carrying the ladders. I saw the torches flaring at the moat’s edge and the flicker of arrow feathers whipping up towards the ramparts. The air smelt of salt and shellfish. I thought of Æthelflæd’s farewell kiss, of her sudden and impetuous embrace, and the fears surged in me. It sounded simple. Cross a moat, place the ladders on the small muddy ledge between moat and wall, climb the ladders. Die.

There was no order to our advance. Men found their own way down the hill and their leaders called softly to assemble them where the charred ruins of the village offered some small concealment. We were close enough to hear the Danes jeering as Steapa’s men withdrew. The torches that had been thrown to illuminate the ditch smouldered low. Now, I hoped, the Danes would stand down. Men would go to their beds and to their women, while we waited in the dark where we touched our weapons and our amulets and listened to the ripple of water as the tide drained from the wide marshes. Weohstan was out in the tussocked swamps and I had ordered him to display his men to the fort’s west in hope that some defenders would be drawn that way. I had two hundred other men to the east, ready to attack the beached ships at the creek’s farther end. Those men were commanded by Finan. I did not like losing Finan as my shield-neighbour, but I needed a warrior to seal the Danish escape, and there was no man so fierce in battle, nor so clear-headed, as the Irishman.

But neither Weohstan nor Finan could show themselves till dawn. Nothing could happen till dawn. There was a slight drizzle coming cold on a west wind. Priests were praying. Osferth’s men, carrying the furled sails, crouched among tall nettles at the edge of the village, just a hundred paces from the moat’s nearer bank. I waited with Osferth, a yard or so in front of Edward who spoke not a word, but just clutched the golden cross that hung at his neck. Steapa had found us and waited with the Ætheling. My helmet was cold on my ears and neck, and my mail coat felt clammy.

I heard Danes speaking. They had sent men to collect the spears after each of our feint attacks, and I supposed that was what they were now doing in the small light of the dying torches. Then I saw them, just shadows in shadows, and I knew the dawn was almost upon us as the grey light of death spread behind us like a stain on the world’s rim. I turned to Edward. ‘Now, lord,’ I said to him.

He stood, a young man at battle’s edge. For a heartbeat he could not find his voice, then he drew his long sword. ‘For God and for Wessex,’ he shouted, ‘come with me!’

And so the fight for Beamfleot began.

For a moment everything is as you imagined it, then it changes, and the details stand out so stark. Details of irrelevant things. Perhaps it is the knowledge that these small things may be the last you will ever see in this life that makes them so memorable. I recall a star flickering like a guttering candle between the clouds to the west, the clatter of arrows in the wooden quiver of a running archer, the shine of wolf-light on the Temes to the south, the pale feathers of all the arrows lodged ragged in the fort’s wooden wall, and the loose links of Steapa’s mail jangling and dangling from the hem of his coat as he ran to Edward’s right. I remember a black and white dog running with us, a frayed rope knotted about his neck. It seemed to me we ran in silence, but it could not have been silent. Eight hundred men were running towards the fort as the sun touched the earth’s rim with silver.

‘Archers!’ Beornoth shouted, ‘archers! To me!’

A few Danes were still collecting spears. One watched us in disbelief, his arms clutching a bundle of ash shafts, then he panicked, dropped the weapons and ran. A horn sounded from the ramparts.

We had divided our men into troops, and each one had a purpose and a leader. Beornoth commanded the archers who assembled on our left, immediately in front of the bridge pilings that stood gaunt in the moat. Those archers were to harass the Danes on the ramparts, to pour arrows at them, to force them to duck as they tried to repel us with spears, axes and swords. Osferth commanded the fifty men whose job was to place the sailcloth ladders in the moat, and behind him came Egwin, a veteran West Saxon, whose one hundred men would carry the climbing ladders to the wall. The rest of the troops were to make the assault. As soon as the ladder carriers were across the moat the attacking troops were to follow, climb the ladders and trust in whatever god they had prayed to through the night. I had ordered the men into troops, and Alfred, who loved lists and order, would have approved, but I knew how soon such careful plans collapsed under the shock of reality.

The horn was challenging the dawn and the fort’s defenders were appearing on the ramparts. The men who had been collecting spears climbed the moat’s far side with the help of a rope lashed to a piling by the fort’s entrance, but one of them had the sense to slash through the rope before running into the fort. The great gates closed behind him. Our archers were shooting, but I knew their arrows would do small damage against mail coats and steel helmets. Yet it would force the Danes to use shields. It would cumber them, and then I saw Osferth’s men vanish into the moat and I bellowed at the following troops to wait. ‘Stop and wait!’ The last thing I needed was a mass of men trapped in the moat’s bed, churning about under a hail of spears and impeding Osferth’s men. Better to let those men do their job and Egwin’s after them.

The bottom of the moat had sharpened stakes hidden beneath the low water, but Osferth’s men found them easy enough to haul from the soft mud. The latticed sails were unrolled on the opposite bank and their spars were anchored by spears that were thrust deep into the mud. A bucket of burning charcoal was thrown from the ramparts. I saw the bright fire fall then die in the wet muck below. The fire hurt no one and I suspected a Dane had panicked and emptied the pail too early. The dog was barking at the moat’s edge. ‘Ladders!’ Osferth bellowed, and Egwin’s men charged forward as Osferth’s warriors hurled spears up at the high wall. I watched approvingly as the ladder carriers scaled the steep moat bank, then shouted for the assault troops to follow me to the newly placed ladders.

Except it was not like that. I try to tell folk what a battle is like, and the telling comes out halting and lame. After a battle, when the fear has subsided, we exchange stories and out of all those tales we make a pattern of the fight, but in battle it is all confusion. Yes, we did cross the moat, and the rope netting of the spread sails worked, at least for a while, and the ladders reached the Danish wall, but I have left out so much. The welter of men thrashing in the ebbing tide, the fall of heavy spears, blood dark in dark water, screams, the sense of not knowing what happened, of desperation, of hearing the solid thumps of blades hurled from the parapet, the smaller sounds of arrows striking home, the shouts of men who did not know what was happening, men who feared death, men who bellowed at other men to bring ladders or to haul a spar back up the muddy bank. And then there was the mud as thick as hoof glue and just as sticky. Slick and slippery mud, men covered in mud and streaked with blood and dying in mud and always the Danes shrieking insults from the sky. The screams of men dying. Men calling for help, crying for their mothers, weeping on their way to the grave.

In the end it is the small things that win a battle. You can throw thousands of men against a wall, and most will fail, or they will cower beyond the ditch, or crouch in the water, and it is the few, the brave and the desperate, who fight through their fear. I watched a man carry a ladder and slam it against the wall and climb with a drawn sword, and a Dane poised his heavy spear and waited. I shouted a warning, but then the spear was driven straight down and the blade cut through the helmet and the man shook on the ladder and fell backwards, blood sudden in the dawn and a second man thrust him out of the way, screamed defiance as he climbed and slashed a long-hafted axe at the spearman. At that moment, as the sun flooded the new day, it was all chaos. I had done my best to order the attack, but the troops were now mixed together. Some were standing up to their waists in the moat’s water, and all were helpless because we could not get the ladders to stay against the wall. The Danes, though they were dazzled by the new sun, were knocking the ladders aside with their heavy war axes. Some ladders, their rungs made from green wood, broke, yet still brave men tried to climb the high palisade. One of the sailcloth ladders slid back and I watched men drag it back into place as the spears fell about them. More fire was thrown from the ramparts, the flare of it lighting helmets and blades, but men extinguished the embers by rolling in mud. Spears thudded into shields.

I picked up a fallen ladder and threw it against the wall and climbed, but a man cannot climb a ladder holding sword and shield, so my shield was slung on my back and I had to snatch at the rungs one by one with my left hand while holding Serpent-Breath in my right and a Dane caught hold of her blade with a gloved hand and tried to pull her from my grasp, and I ripped her backwards and lost my balance and fell onto a corpse, and then Edward began to climb the same ladder. He wore a helmet circled with gold and surmounted by a plume of swan’s feathers that made him a target and I could see the Danes waiting to snatch him over the rampart so they could take his fine armour, but then Steapa knocked the ladder sideways so that the Ætheling fell into the mud.

‘Dear God,’ I heard Edward say in a mild voice, as though he had spilt some milk or ale, and that made me laugh. The handle of a thrown axe banged on my helmet. I turned, picked up the weapon and slung it at the faces above me, but it went wide. Father Coenwulf helped Edward to his feet. ‘You shouldn’t be here,’ I snarled at the priest, but he ignored me. He was a brave man for he wore no armour and carried no weapons. Steapa covered Edward with his huge shield as the spears hurtled down. Somehow Father Coenwulf survived the blades. He held a crucifix towards the jeering Danes and shouted a curse at them.

‘Bring ladders here!’ a voice bellowed. ‘Bring them here!’ It was Father Pyrlig. ‘Ladders!’ he shouted again, then he took a hive from one of his men and turned to the wall. ‘Have some honey!’ he roared at the Danes and tossed the hive upwards.

The wall was around ten feet high and it took strength to throw that sealed hive up over the parapet. The Danes cannot have known what the hive was, perhaps they mistook it for a boulder, though they surely knew no man could throw a boulder that far. I saw a sword slash at the hive, then it disappeared over the parapet. ‘Another!’ Pyrlig shouted.

The first hive must have landed on the fighting platform. And it must have broken.

The hives were sealed. Brun had waited till the cool of the evening, when all the bees had returned home, and then he had closed off the entrances with mud and dung. Now the first hive’s shell, which was nothing but dried cow dung braced with hazel twigs, split like an eggshell.

And the bees came out.

Pyrlig threw a second hive and another man hurled a third. One failed to cross the parapet and fell back to the mud where, miraculously, it did not shatter. Two others were floating in the moat, I never did discover what happened to the rest of the hives, but the first two were sufficient.

Bees began to do our work. Thousands and thousands of angry, confused bees spread among the Danish defenders and I heard sudden shouts of startled pain. Men were being stung on their faces and hands, and the small distraction was all we needed. Pyrlig was bellowing at men to get the ladders set. Edward placed a ladder himself and tried to climb it, but Steapa thrust him aside and went first. I climbed another.

I cannot tell you how the fort at Beamfleot was taken, because I can recall nothing but the chaos. Chaos and bee stings. I do know that Steapa reached the top of the ladder and cleared a space by swinging a war axe so wildly that the blade very nearly slashed through my wolf-crested helmet, and then he was over the parapet and using the axe with murderous efficiency. Edward followed. Bees flickered all around him.

‘Shout at your men,’ I told him, ‘tell them to join you!’

He looked wild-eyed at me, then he understood. ‘For Wessex!’ he shouted from the wall.

‘For Mercia!’ I bellowed, and now men were joining us fast. I did not feel the bee stings, though later I discovered I had been stung at least a dozen times, but we had been expecting to be stung, while the Danes were taken by surprise. They recovered fast enough. I heard a woman’s voice screaming at them to kill us, and I knew Skade was close by. A group came along the platform and I faced them with shield and sword, took an axe strike on the shield and gouged Serpent-Breath into the man’s knee, and Cerdic was with me, and Steapa came to my left and we were screaming like demons as we forced our way along the wall’s wooden platform. A spear struck my helmet, knocking it askew. The sun was still showing beneath the clouds, casting a long-shadowed dazzling brilliance, and its light flashed from sword-blade and axe-edge and spear-point, and I was shoving the shield into the Danes, stabbing Serpent-Breath past its edge, and Steapa was howling and using his massive strength to thrust the defenders aside, and everywhere, everywhere, were bees. A Dane tried to kill me with an axe blow that I took on my shield and I remember his open mouth, yellow stumps of teeth and bees crawling on his tongue. Edward, just behind me, killed that Dane with a sword thrust into his mouth so that the bees were washed out by the gush of blood. Someone had fetched the dragon banner of Wessex and was waving it from the captured parapet, and men were cheering as they crossed the moat and climbed the remaining ladders.

I had turned left at the wall’s top and was fighting my way along the narrow platform, and Steapa had understood why, and he did most to clear the defenders in front of us so we could reach the larger platform that stood above the gate. And there we made our shield wall, and there we fought against the Danes as Pyrlig and his men used their axes on the big gate.

I must have shouted at the Danes, though what I cannot tell now. The usual insults. And the Danes fought back with a wild ferocity, but now we had our best warriors on the wall and more were coming all the time, so many that some jumped down into the fort and the fighting began there. One man kicked the shattered remains of a hive down into the fort and more bees swarmed out, but I was above the gate, protected now by the corpses of Danes who had tried to evict us. They still came. Their best weapons were heavy spears that they lunged over the corpse-barrier, but our shields were stout. ‘We need to get down to the gate!’ I shouted at Steapa.

Osferth heard me. It had been Osferth who leaped from the gate’s top when we had defended Lundene, and now he leaped again. There were other Saxons inside the fort, but they were horribly outnumbered and were dying fast. Osferth did not care. He jumped to the ground just inside the gate. He sprawled for a moment, then was on his feet and shouting. ‘Alfred! Alfred! Alfred!’

I thought it was a strange war cry, especially from a man who resented his natural father as much as Osferth, but it worked. Other West Saxons leaped to join Osferth who was fending off two Danes with his shield and hacking his sword at two others.

‘Alfred!’ Another man took up the shout, then Edward gave a great scream and leaped off the rampart to join his half-brother. ‘Alfred!’

‘Protect the Ætheling,’ I shouted.

Steapa, who regarded his first duty as keeping Edward alive, jumped down. I stayed on the rampart with Cerdic because we had to stop the Danes from recapturing the stretch of wall where our ladders were set. My shield was battered with spears. The linden wood was splintering, but the corpses at our feet were an obstacle and more than one Dane stumbled on the bodies to add his own to the pile. Still they came. A man started clearing the bodies away, tipping them down inside the fort, and I lunged Serpent-Breath into his armpit. Another Dane thrust a spear at me. I took the thrust on my shield and sliced Serpent-Breath back at the grimacing face framed by a bright steel helmet, but the man twisted aside. I saw him glance down and knew he was thinking of leaping down to attack my men below and I stepped onto a corpse and stabbed Serpent-Breath under his shield, twisting her as she tore into the flesh of his upper thigh, and he slammed his shield at me, then Cerdic was beside me and his axe chopped into the spearman’s shoulder. My shield was heavy with the weight of two spears that were lodged in the wood. I tried to shake them off, then ducked as a huge Dane, bellowing curses, charged me with an axe that he swung at my helmet. He crashed bodily into my shield, helpfully dislodging the spears, and Sihtric split the man’s helmet with an axe. I remember seeing blood drip from the rim of my shield, then I hurled the dying man off. The man was shaking as he died. I rammed Serpent-Breath over his body and the blade jarred on a Danish shield. Below me I heard the swelling shouts. ‘Alfred!’ they bellowed, then ‘Edward! Edward!’

Steapa was worth any three men and he was killing with his huge strength and his uncanny sword-craft, but he had help now. More and more men leaped down to make a shield wall just inside the closed gate. Osferth and Edward were shield-neighbours. Father Coenwulf, who was determined to stay close to the ætheling, had leaped down and he now turned and lifted the gate’s locking bar. For a moment he could not push the gate open because Pyrlig’s axemen were still chopping at its huge timbers, then they heard Coenwulf’s shouts that they should stop. And so the gates opened and, under the rising sun, and beneath the smoke and amidst the swarming bees, we took death to Beamfleot.

The Danes had been surprised by our attack. They had thought Steapa’s men were withdrawing in the dawn, and instead we had assaulted them, but the surprise had not lessened their resolve, nor had it given us any great advantage. They had recovered fast, they had defended the wall stoutly, and if we had not sent the bees to join the fight they would surely have repulsed us. But a man being stung by a swarm of enraged bees cannot fight properly, and so we had been given that small chance to reach the parapet, and now we had opened the gate and Saxons were scrambling across the moat and charging into the fort, and the Danes, sensing disaster, broke.

I have seen it so often. A man will fight like a hero, he will make widows and orphans, he will give the poets a challenge to find new words to describe his achievements, and then, quite suddenly, the spirit fails. Defiance becomes terror. Danes who, a moment before, would have been dreadful foemen, became desperate seekers for safety. They fled.

There were only two places they could go. Some, the less fortunate, retreated along the fort to the buildings which filled its western end, while most jostled through a gate in the long southern wall which led to a wooden quay built on the creek’s bank. Even at low tide the creek was too deep for a man to cross on foot and there was no bridge; instead a ship was tethered athwart the channel and the Danes were scrambling over its rowing benches to reach Caninga’s shore where a mass of men who had played no part in the fort’s defence waited. I sent Steapa to clear those men away and he led Alfred’s housecarls across the makeshift bridge, but the Danes were in no mood to face him. They fled.

A few Danes, very few, leaped from the southern and western ramparts to wade the ditches, but Weohstan’s horsemen were in the marsh and they gave short and brutal ends to those fugitives. Many more Danes stayed inside the fort, retreating to its farther end behind a ragged shield wall that broke apart under a flail of Saxon blades. Women and children screamed. Dogs howled. Most of the women and children were on Caninga, and they were already demanding that their men take to their ships. A Dane’s ultimate safety is his ship. When all goes wrong a man puts back to sea and lets the Fates take him to another opportunity. But most of the Danish ships were beached because there were simply too many vessels to moor in the narrow channel. The men on Caninga ran from Steapa’s attack. Some waded into the creek to board the floating ships, but it was then that Finan struck. He had waited until the men guarding the channel’s eastern end were distracted by the evident disaster unfolding to the west, and then he had led his West Saxons, all of them from Alfred’s own household troops, across the mudflats. ‘The fools had only raised the ship’s flank on the seaward side,’ he told me later, ‘so we attacked the other. It was easy.’

I doubted that. He lost eighteen men to their graves and another thirty were gravely wounded, but he took the ship. He could not cross the creek, nor block the channel, but he was where I wanted him to be. And we were in the fort.

Howling Saxons were taking revenge for the smoke above Mercia. They were massacring the Danes. Men trying to protect their families shouted that they surrendered and instead were chopped down by axe and sword. Most of the women and children ran to the big hall, and it was there that the vast plunder sent back by Haesten’s men was collected.

I had sailed to Frisia to find a treasure hall and instead I found it in Beamfleot. I found leather sacks bulging with coins, crucifixes of silver, pyxes of gold, heaps of iron, ingots of bronze, piles of pelts, I found a hoard. The hall was dark. A few shafts of sunlight came through the small windows of the eastern gable that was hung with the horns of a bull, but otherwise the only light came from the fire burning in the central hearth and around which the treasure had been heaped. It was on display. It told the Danes of Beamfleot that Haesten, their lord, would be a gift-giver. The men who had given Haesten their allegiance would become rich, and they only had to come into this hall to see the proof. They could stare at that shining hoard and see new ships and new lands. It was the hoard of Mercia, only instead of being guarded by a dragon, it was protected by Skade.

And she was angrier than any dragon. I think at that moment she was possessed by the furies who had given her a madness that was terrible. She was standing on the treasure heap, her black hair unhelmeted and tangled to wild strands. She was screaming challenges. A black cloak hung from her shoulders, beneath which she wore a mail coat, and over which she had draped as many gold chains as she had been able to scoop from the plunder. Behind her, on the high dais where a great table stood, was a huddle of women and children. I saw Haesten’s wife there, and his two sons, but they were as scared of Skade as they were of us.

Skade’s shrieking howls had stopped my men. They were half filling the hall, but her fury had cowed them. They had killed a score of Danes, hacking them down onto the rush-covered floor, which was soaked with fresh blood, but now they just gazed at the woman who cursed them. I pushed through them, Serpent-Breath red in my hand, and Skade saw me and pointed her own sword-blade towards me. ‘The traitor,’ she spat, ‘the oath-breaker!’

I bowed to her. ‘Queen of a marsh,’ I sneered.

‘You promised!’ she screamed at me, then her eyes widened in surprise, a surprise that was instantly overtaken by fury. ‘Is that her?’ she demanded.

Æthelflæd had come to the hall. She had no business there. I had told her to watch and wait at the old high fort, but as soon as she saw our men crossing the ramparts she had insisted on coming down the hill. Now the men parted for her, and for the four Mercian warriors who had been deputed to guard her. She wore a pale blue dress, very simple, its skirt wet from crossing the creek. Over it she had a linen cloak and around her neck was a silver crucifix, yet she looked like a queen. She wore no gold, and her dress and cloak were mud-smeared, yet she glowed, and Skade looked from Æthelflæd to me and screamed like a dying vixen. Then, lithe and sudden, she leaped from the treasure heap and, her mouth a rictus of hate, lunged with the sword at Æthelflæd.

I simply stepped in front of her. Her sword slid from the iron rim of my battered shield and I thrust the iron boss hard forward. The heavy shield crashed into Skade with such force that she let go of the sword and cried aloud as she was thrown back onto the treasures. She lay there, tears now at her eyes, but with the fury of madness still in her voice. ‘I curse you,’ she said, pointing at me, ‘I curse your children, your woman, your life, your grave, the air you breathe, the food you eat, the dreams you have, the ground you tread.’

‘As you cursed me?’ a voice said, and out of the shadows at the hall’s edge there crawled a thing that had once been a man.

It was Harald. Harald who had led the first assault on Wessex, who had promised Skade the queen’s crown of Wessex, who had been wounded so gravely at Fearnhamme and who had found refuge among the thorns. There he had inspired a defence so stout that Alfred had eventually paid him to leave, and he had come here, seeking Haesten’s protection. He was a broken man, crippled. He had watched his woman go to Haesten’s bed and he had a hate in him that was every bit as great as Skade’s.

‘You cursed me,’ he told her, ‘because I did not give you a throne.’ He lurched towards her, his legs helpless, dragging himself along by his strong arms. His yellow hair that had been so thick was straggling now, hanging like string about his pain-lined face. ‘Let me make you a queen,’ he said to Skade, and he took a golden torque from the treasure pile. It was a beautiful thing, three strands of gold twisted together and capped with two bear heads that had eyes of emerald. ‘Be a queen, my love,’ he told her. His beard had grown to his waist. His cheeks were sunken, his eyes dark and his legs twisted. He wore a simple tunic and leggings beneath a rough woollen cloak. Harald Bloodhair, who had once led five thousand men, who had burned Wessex and struck fear into Alfred, pulled himself across the rushes and held the torque towards Skade, who looked at him and just moaned.

She did not take the offered crown and so he lifted the gold and placed it on her hair and it sat there, askew, and she began to cry. Harald dragged himself still closer. ‘My love,’ he said in a strangely affectionate voice.

Æthelflæd had come to my side. I do not think she was aware of it, but she had taken my shield arm and clung to me. She said nothing.

‘My precious one,’ Harald said softly, and he stroked her hair. ‘I loved you,’ he said.

‘I loved you,’ Skade said, and she put her arms around Harald and they clung to each other in the fire’s light and a man beside me started forward with an axe. I stopped him. I had seen Harald’s right hand move. He was stroking Skade’s hair with his left hand, now he fumbled beneath his cloak with his right.

‘My love,’ he said, and he crooned those two words again and again, then his right hand moved fast, and a man who has lost the use of his legs develops great strength in his arms, and he drove the blade of the knife through the links of Skade’s coat, and I saw her first stiffen, then her eyes widened, her mouth opened, and Harald kissed her open mouth as he ripped the blade upwards, ever upwards, dragging the mail coat with the steel that tore through her guts and up to her chest, and still she embraced him as her blood spilled across his withered lap. Then at last she gave a great cry and her grip loosened and her eyes faded and she fell backwards.

‘Finish what you began,’ Harald growled without looking at me. He reached for Skade’s fallen sword, wanting it to be the key to reaching Valhalla, but I remembered how he had murdered the woman at Æscengum. I remembered how her child had cried and so I kicked the sword away and he looked up at me, surprised, and my face was the last thing he ever saw in this world.

We took thirty of their ships and the rest we burned. Three escaped, sliding past Finan’s men as they hurled spears they had discovered stacked in the bilge of the grounded boat that was one of the two forts guarding the entrance. The Danish garrison of the other boat, the one beached on Caninga, released the big chain that blocked the entrance and so the three boats escaped to sea, but the fourth had no such luck. It was almost past Finan when a well thrown spear thumped into the steersman’s chest and he slumped over, the steering oar slewed hard in the water and the ship ran her bows into the bank. The next ship rammed her and she began to take on water through sprung strakes as the incoming tide floated her back up the creek.

It took all day to hunt the survivors down through the tangle of marsh, reeds and inlets of Caninga. We captured hundreds of women and children, and men picked those they wanted as slaves. That was how I met Sigunn, a girl I discovered shivering in a ditch. She was fair, pale and slight, just sixteen, a widow because her husband was dead in the captured fort, and she cringed when I stepped through the reeds. ‘No,’ she said over and over, ‘no, no, no.’ I held out my hand and, after a while, because fate had left her no choice, she took it and I gave her into Sihtric’s care. ‘Look after her,’ I told him in Danish, a language he spoke well, ‘and make sure she’s not hurt.’

We burned the forts. I wanted to hold onto them, to use them as an outlying fortress to protect Lundene, but Edward was emphatic that our fight at Beamfleot was simply a raid into East Anglian territory, and that to hold the forts would break the treaty his father had made with East Anglia’s king. It did not matter that half East Anglia’s Danes were raiding with Haesten, Edward was determined that his father’s treaty should be honoured, and so we pulled down the great walls, piled the timbers in the halls and set fire to them, but first we took away all the treasure and loaded it onto four of the captured ships.

Next day the fires still burned. It was three days before I could step among the embers to find a skull. I think it was Skade’s, though I cannot be certain. I rammed a Danish spear butt-first into the fire-hardened earth, then rammed the skull over the broken blade. The scorched bone face stared sightless towards the creek where the skeletons of almost two hundred ships still smoked. ‘It’s a warning,’ I told Father Heahberht. ‘If another Dane comes here, let them see their fate.’ I gave Father Heahberht a large bag of silver. ‘If you ever need help,’ I told him, ‘come to me.’ Out by the moat, where the fires had not reached, but where so many West Saxons and Mercians had died, the mud was still littered with dead bees. ‘Tell Brun,’ I said, ‘that you said a prayer for his bees.’

We left next morning. Edward rode west, taking his troops with him, though first he had said farewell, and I thought his face had taken on a sterner, harder look. ‘Will you stay in Mercia?’ he asked me.

‘Your father wants that, lord,’ I said.

‘Yes, he does,’ he said. ‘So will you?’

‘You know the answer, lord,’ I said.

He looked at me in silence, then there was the slightest smile. ‘I think,’ he said slowly, ‘that Wessex will need Mercia.’

‘And Mercia needs Æthelflæd,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ he said simply.

Father Coenwulf lingered a moment longer. He leaned down from his saddle and offered me a hand. He said nothing, just shook my hand then spurred after his lord.

I sailed with the captured ships to Lundene. The sea behind me was silvered pink beneath the skeins of smoke that still drifted from Beamfleot. My own crew, helped by a score of clumsy Mercians, rowed the ship that held Haesten’s wife, his two sons and forty other hostages. Finan guarded them, though none showed defiance.

Æthelflaed stood with me at the steering oar. She gazed behind to where the smoke shimmered and I knew she was remembering the last time she had sailed from Beamfleot. There had been smoke then too, and dead men, and such sorrow. She had lost her lover and saw only the bleak dark ahead.

Now she looked at me and, as her brother had done, she smiled. This time she was happy.

The long oars dipped, the river banks closed on us, and in the west the smoke of Lundene veiled the sky.

As I took Æthelflæd home.

Historical Note

In the middle of the nineteenth century a railway line was made from London’s Fenchurch Street to Southend and, when excavating at what is now South Benfleet (Beamfleot), the navvies discovered the charred remnants of burned ships among which were scattered human skeletons. Those remains were over nine hundred years old, and they were what was left of Haesten’s army and fleet.

I grew up in nearby Thundersley (Thunresleam) where, in Saint Peter’s churchyard, was a standing stone pierced by a hole, which local lore claimed was the devil’s stone. If you walked three times around it, counter-clockwise, and whispered into the hole it was said that the devil could hear you and would grant your wishes. It never worked for me, though not for lack of trying. The stone, of course, long predated the coming of Christianity to Britain and, indeed, the arrival of the Saxons who first brought the worship of Thor and so gave the village its name.

Just to the west of our house was a precipitous slope that falls to the plain leading to London. The escarpment is called Bread and Cheese Hill and I was told the name came from Saxon times and meant ‘broad and sharp’, being a description of the weapons used on the hill in a long ago battle between Vikings and Saxons. Maybe. Yet, strangely, I never learned how important Benfleet was to the long story of England’s making.

In the last decade of the ninth century, Alfred’s Wessex was again under determined assault from the Danes. There were three attacks. An unknown leader (whom I have called Harald) led one fleet to Kent, as did Haesten. Meanwhile the Northumbrian Danes were to mount a shipborne assault on Wessex’s south coast.

The two Danish forces in Kent had both been raiding in what is now France and had accepted lavish bribes to leave those lands and assault Wessex instead. Haesten then took more bribes to withdraw from Wessex, and even allowed his wife and two sons to be baptised as Christians. Meanwhile the larger force of Danes advanced westwards from Kent, eventually to be defeated at Farnham in Surrey (Fearnhamme). That battle was one of the greatest victories of the Saxons over the Danes. It shattered the large Danish army, forcing the survivors to carry their wounded leader northwards to find refuge on Torneie (Thorney Island) a site that has now disappeared under the development surrounding Heathrow Airport. The fugitives were besieged there, but the siege failed and the Saxons again used silver to get rid of them. Many of the survivors went to Benfleet (then part of the kingdom of East Anglia) where Haesten had made a fortress.

Haesten, despite his protestations of friendship, now went on the offensive by attacking Mercia. Alfred, who protected Mercia, was distracted by the assault of the Northumbrian Danes, but he sent his son Edward to attack Haesten’s base at Benfleet. That assault was wholly successful and the Saxons were able to burn and capture Haesten’s vast fleet, as well as recapture much of Haesten’s plunder and take countless hostages, including Haesten’s family. It was a magnificent victory, though it by no means ended the war.

Mercia, that ancient kingdom that filled the heart of England, was without a king in this period, and Alfred, I am certain, wished to keep it that way. He had adopted the title ‘King of the Angelcynn’, which described an ambition rather than a reality. Other Saxon kings had claimed to rule the ‘English’, but none had ever succeeded in uniting the English-speaking kingdoms, but Alfred dreamed of it. He would not achieve it, but he did lay the foundations on which his son Edward, his daughter Æthelflæd, and Edward’s son, Æthelstan, succeeded.

The device that saved the Saxons from defeat was the burh, those fortified towns which were the response of rulers all across Christendom to the threat of the Vikings. Viking soldiers, for all their fearsome reputation, were not equipped for sieges, and by fortifying large towns in which folk and their livestock could take shelter, the Christian rulers constantly thwarted Viking ambitions. The Danes could roam across much of Wessex and Mercia, but their enemies were safe in the burhs that were defended by the fyrd, a citizen army. Eventually, as at Fearnhamme, the professional army would face the Danes and, by the end of the ninth century, the Saxons had learned to fight every bit as well as the northmen.

The northmen are usually called Vikings and some historians suggest that, far from being the feared predators of myth, they were peace-loving folk who mostly lived amicably with their Saxon neighbours. This ignores much contemporary evidence, let alone the skeletons that are doubtless still buried beneath the railway at Benfleet. Alfred organised Wessex for war and built hugely expensive defences and he would have done none of that if the Vikings were as peaceably inclined as some revisionists want us to believe. The first Vikings were raiders, looking for slaves and silver, but soon they wanted land as well and so settled in the north and east of England where they added to England’s place names and to the English language. It is true that those settlers eventually assimilated into the Saxon population, but other northmen still lusted after the land to their south and west, and so the wars continued. It was not till William the Conqueror came to England that the long struggle between Scandinavians and Saxons ended, and William, of course, was a Norman; the word denoting ‘northmen’ because the rulers of Normandy were Vikings who had settled on that peninsula. The Norman Conquest was really the last triumph of the northmen, but it came too late to destroy Alfred’s dream, which was the creation of a unified state called England.

I have been (and will be) mightily unfair to Æthelred. There is not a scrap of evidence to suggest that Alfred’s son-in-law was as small-minded and ineffective as I make him out to be, and I recommend, as a corrective, Ian W. Walker’s superb book Mercia and the Making of England (Sutton Publishing, Stroud, 2000). As for Æthelred’s wife, Alfred’s daughter Æthelflæd, she has been strangely forgotten in our history, even at a time when feminist historians have laboured to bring women out from the shadows of patriarchal history. Æthelflæd is a heroine, a woman who was to lead armies against the Danes and do much to push the growing frontiers of England wider and deeper.

Farnham and Benfleet were two body blows against Danish ambitions to destroy Saxon England, yet the struggle of the Angelcynn is far from over. Haesten is still rampaging through the southern midlands, while Danes rule in both East Anglia and Northumbria, so Uhtred, now firmly allied to Æthelflæd, will campaign again.

Copyright

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it, while at times based on historical figures, are the work of the author’s imagination.

Harper

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

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Hammersmith, London W6 8JB

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2009

Copyright © Bernard Cornwell 2009

Map © John Gilkes 2009

Family Tree © Colin Hall 2009

Bernard Cornwell asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Ebook Edition © October 2009 ISBN: 9780007290017

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DEATH OF KINGS

DEATH OF KINGS

BERNARD CORNWELL

DEATH OF KINGS

is for Anne LeClaire,

Novelist and Friend,

who supplied the first line.

CONTENTS

Title Page

Dedication

Map

The Royal Family of Wessex

Place Names

Part One: THE SORCERESS

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Part Two: DEATH OF A KING

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Part Three: ANGELS

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Part Four: DEATH IN WINTER

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Historical Note

Copyright

The Royal Family of Wessex

PLACE NAMES

The spelling of place names in Anglo-Saxon England was an uncertain business, with no consistency and no agreement even about the name itself. Thus London was variously rendered as Lundonia, Lundenberg, Lundenne, Lundene, Lundenwic, Lundenceaster and Lundres. Doubtless some readers will prefer other versions of the names listed below, but I have usually employed whichever spelling is cited in either the Oxford or the Cambridge Dictionary of English Place-Names for the years nearest to AD 900, but even that solution is not foolproof. Hayling Island, in 956, was written as both Heilincigae and Hæglingaiggæ. Nor have I been consistent myself; I should spell England as Englaland, and have preferred the modern form Northumbria to Norðhymbralond to avoid the suggestion that the boundaries of the ancient kingdom coincide with those of the modern county. So this list, like the spellings themselves, is capricious.

Baddan Byrig

Badbury Rings, Dorset

Beamfleot

Benfleet, Essex

Bebbanburg

Bamburgh, Northumberland

Bedanford

Bedford, Bedfordshire

Blaneford

Blandford Forum, Dorset

Buccingahamm

Buckingham, Bucks

Buchestanes

Buxton, Derbyshire

Ceaster

Chester, Cheshire

Cent

County of Kent

Cippanhamm

Chippenham, Wiltshire

Cirrenceastre

Cirencester, Gloucestershire

Contwaraburg

Canterbury, Kent

Cyninges Tun

Kingston upon Thames, Greater London

Cracgelad

Cricklade, Wiltshire

Cumbraland

Cumberland

Cytringan

Kettering, Northants

Dumnoc

Dunwich, Suffolk

Dunholm

Durham, County Durham

Eanulfsbirig

St Neot, Cambridgeshire

Eleg

Ely, Cambridgeshire

Eoferwic

York, Yorkshire (called Jorvik by the Danes)

Exanceaster

Exeter, Devon

Fagranforda

Fairford, Gloucestershire

Fearnhamme

Farnham, Surrey

Fifhidan

Fyfield, Wiltshire

Fughelness

Foulness Island, Essex

Gegnesburh

Gainsborough, Lincolnshire

Gleawecestre

Gloucester, Gloucestershire

Grantaceaster

Cambridge, Cambridgeshire

Hothlege, River

Hadleigh Ray, Essex

Hrofeceastre

Rochester, Kent

Humbre, River

River Humber

Huntandon

Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire

Liccelfeld

Lichfield, Staffordshire

Lindisfarena

Lindisfarne (Holy Island), Northumberland

Lundene

London

Medwæg, River

River Medway, Kent

Natangrafum

Notgrove, Gloucestershire

Oxnaforda

Oxford, Oxfordshire

Ratumacos

Rouen, Normandy, France

Rochecestre

Wroxeter, Shropshire

Sarisberie

Salisbury, Wiltshire

Sæfern

River Severn

Sceaftesburi

Shaftesbury, Dorset

Sceobyrig

Shoebury, Essex

Scrobbesburh

Shrewsbury, Shropshire

Snotengaham

Nottingham, Nottinghamshire

Sumorsæte

Somerset

Temes, River

River Thames

Thornsæta

Dorset

Tofeceaster

Towcester, Northamptonshire

Trente, River

River Trent

Turcandene

Turkdean, Gloucestershire

Tweoxnam

Christchurch, Dorset

Westune

Whitchurch, Shropshire

Wiltunscir

Wiltshire

Wimburnan

Wimborne, Dorset

Wintanceaster

Winchester, Hampshire

Wygraceaster

Worcester, Worcestershire

PART ONE

The Sorceress

One

‘Every day is ordinary,’ Father Willibald said, ‘until it isn’t.’ He smiled happily, as though he had just said something he thought I would find significant, then looked disappointed when I said nothing. ‘Every day,’ he started again.

‘I heard your drivelling,’ I snarled.

‘Until it isn’t,’ he finished weakly. I liked Willibald, even if he was a priest. He had been one of my childhood tutors and now I counted him as a friend. He was gentle, earnest, and if the meek ever do inherit the earth then Willibald will be rich beyond measure.

And every day is ordinary until something changes, and that cold Sunday morning had seemed as ordinary as any until the fools tried to kill me. It was so cold. There had been rain during the week, but on that morning the puddles froze and a hard frost whitened the grass. Father Willibald had arrived soon after sunrise and discovered me in the meadow. ‘We couldn’t find your estate last night,’ he explained his early appearance, shivering, ‘so we stayed at Saint Rumwold’s monastery,’ he gestured vaguely southwards. ‘It was cold there,’ he added.

‘They’re mean bastards, those monks,’ I said. I was supposed to deliver a weekly cartload of firewood to Saint Rumwold’s, but that was a duty I ignored. The monks could cut their own timber. ‘Who was Rumwold?’ I asked Willibald. I knew the answer, but wanted to drag Willibald through the thorns.

‘He was a very pious child, lord,’ he said.

‘A child?’

‘A baby,’ he said, sighing as he saw where the conversation was leading, ‘a mere three days old when he died.’

‘A three-day-old baby is a saint?’

Willibald flapped his hands. ‘Miracles happen, lord,’ he said, ‘they really do. They say little Rumwold sang God’s praises whenever he suckled.’

‘I feel much the same when I get hold of a tit,’ I said, ‘so does that make me a saint?’

Willibald shuddered, then sensibly changed the subject. ‘I’ve brought you a message from the ætheling,’ he said, meaning King Alfred’s eldest son, Edward.

‘So tell me.’

‘He’s the King of Cent now,’ Willibald said happily.

‘He sent you all this way to tell me that?’

‘No, no. I thought perhaps you hadn’t heard.’

‘Of course I heard,’ I said. Alfred, King of Wessex, had made his eldest son King of Cent, which meant Edward could practise being a king without doing too much damage because Cent, after all, was a part of Wessex. ‘Has he ruined Cent yet?’

‘Of course not,’ Willibald said, ‘though…’ he stopped abruptly.

‘Though what?’

‘Oh it’s nothing,’ he said airily and pretended to take an interest in the sheep. ‘How many black sheep do you have?’ he asked.

‘I could hold you by the ankles and shake you till the news drops out,’ I suggested.

‘It’s just that Edward, well,’ he hesitated, then decided he had better tell me in case I did shake him by the ankles, ‘it’s just that he wanted to marry a girl in Cent and his father wouldn’t agree. But really that isn’t important!’

I laughed. So young Edward was not quite the perfect heir after all. ‘Edward’s on the rampage, is he?’

‘No, no! Merely a youthful fancy and it’s all history now. His father’s forgiven him.’

I asked nothing more, though I should have paid much more attention to that sliver of gossip. ‘So what is young Edward’s message?’ I asked. We were standing in the lower meadow of my estate in Buccingahamm, which lay in eastern Mercia. It was really Æthelflaed’s land, but she had granted me the food-rents, and the estate was large enough to support thirty household warriors, most of whom were in church that morning. ‘And why aren’t you at church?’ I asked Willibald before he could answer my first question, ‘it’s a feast day, isn’t it?’

‘Saint Alnoth’s Day,’ he said as though that was a special treat, ‘but I wanted to find you!’ He sounded excited. ‘I have King Edward’s news for you. Every day is ordinary…’

‘Until it isn’t,’ I said brusquely.

‘Yes, lord,’ he said lamely, then frowned in puzzlement, ‘but what are you doing?’

‘I’m looking at sheep,’ I said, and that was true. I was looking at two hundred or more sheep that looked back at me and bleated pathetically.

Willibald turned to stare at the flock again. ‘Fine animals,’ he said as if he knew what he was talking about.

‘Just mutton and wool,’ I said, ‘and I’m choosing which ones live and which ones die.’ It was the killing time of the year, the grey days when our animals are slaughtered. We keep a few alive to breed in the spring, but most have to die because there is not enough fodder to keep whole flocks and herds alive through the winter. ‘Watch their backs,’ I told Willibald, ‘because the frost melts fastest off the fleece of the healthiest beasts. So those are the ones you keep alive.’ I lifted his woollen hat and ruffled his hair, which was going grey. ‘No frost on you,’ I said cheerfully, ‘otherwise I’d have to slit your throat.’ I pointed to a ewe with a broken horn, ‘Keep that one!’

‘Got her, lord,’ the shepherd answered. He was a gnarled little man with a beard that hid half his face. He growled at his two hounds to stay where they were, then ploughed into the flock and used his crook to haul out the ewe, then dragged her to the edge of the field and drove her to join the smaller flock at the meadow’s farther end. One of his hounds, a ragged and pelt-scarred beast, snapped at the ewe’s heels until the shepherd called the dog off. The shepherd did not need my help in selecting which animals should live and which must die. He had culled his flocks since he was a child, but a lord who orders his animals slaughtered owes them the small respect of taking some time with them.

‘The day of judgement,’ Willibald said, pulling his hat over his ears.

‘How many’s that?’ I asked the shepherd.

‘Jiggit and mumph, lord,’ he said.

‘Is that enough?’

‘It’s enough, lord.’

‘Kill the rest then,’ I said.

‘Jiggit and mumph?’ Willibald asked, still shivering.

‘Twenty and five,’ I said. ‘Yain, tain, tether, mether, mumph. It’s how shepherds count. I don’t know why. The world is full of mystery. I’m told some folk even believe that a three-day-old baby is a saint.’

‘God is not mocked, lord,’ Father Willibald said, attempting to be stern.

‘He is by me,’ I said, ‘so what does young Edward want?’

‘Oh, it’s most exciting,’ Willibald began enthusiastically, then checked because I had raised a hand.

The shepherd’s two dogs were growling. Both had flattened themselves and were facing south towards a wood. Sleet had begun to fall. I stared at the trees, but could see nothing threatening among the black winter branches or among the holly bushes. ‘Wolves?’ I asked the shepherd.

‘Haven’t seen a wolf since the year the old bridge fell, lord,’ he said.

The hair on the dogs’ necks bristled. The shepherd quietened them by clicking his tongue, then gave a short sharp whistle and one of the dogs raced away towards the wood. The other whined, wanting to be let loose, but the shepherd made a low noise and the dog went quiet again.

The running dog curved towards the trees. She was a bitch and knew her business. She leaped an ice-skimmed ditch and vanished among the holly, barked suddenly, then reappeared to jump the ditch again. For a moment she stopped, facing the trees, then began running again just as an arrow flitted from the wood’s shadows. The shepherd gave a shrill whistle and the bitch raced back towards us, the arrow falling harmlessly behind her.

‘Outlaws,’ I said.

‘Or men looking for deer,’ the shepherd said.

‘My deer,’ I said. I still gazed at the trees. Why would poachers shoot an arrow at a shepherd’s dog? They would have done better to run away. So maybe they were really stupid poachers?

The sleet was coming harder now, blown by a cold east wind. I wore a thick fur cloak, high boots and a fox-fur hat, so did not notice the cold, but Willibald, in priestly black, was shivering despite his woollen cape and hat. ‘I must get you back to the hall,’ I said. ‘At your age you shouldn’t be outdoors in winter.’

‘I wasn’t expecting rain,’ Willibald said. He sounded miserable.

‘It’ll be snow by midday,’ the shepherd said.

‘You have a hut near here?’ I asked him.

He pointed north. ‘Just beyond the copse,’ he said. He was pointing at a thick stand of trees through which a path led.

‘Does it have a fire?’

‘Yes, lord.’

‘Take us there,’ I said. I would leave Willibald beside the fire and fetch him a proper cloak and a docile horse to get him back to the hall.

We walked north and the dogs growled again. I turned to look south and suddenly there were men at the wood’s edge. A ragged line of men who were staring at us. ‘You know them?’ I asked the shepherd.

‘They’re not from around here, lord, and eddera-a-dix,’ he said, meaning there were thirteen of them, ‘that’s unlucky, lord.’ He made the sign of the cross.

‘What…’ Father Willibald began.

‘Quiet,’ I said. The shepherd’s two dogs were snarling now. ‘Outlaws,’ I guessed, still looking at the men.

‘Saint Alnoth was murdered by outlaws,’ Willibald said worriedly.

‘So not everything outlaws do is bad,’ I said, ‘but these ones are idiots.’

‘Idiots?’

‘To attack us,’ I said. ‘They’ll be hunted down and ripped apart.’

‘If we are not killed first,’ Willibald said.

‘Just go!’ I pushed him towards the northern trees and touched a hand to my sword hilt before following him. I was not wearing Serpent-Breath, my great war sword, but a lesser, lighter blade that I had taken from a Dane I had killed earlier that year in Beamfleot. It was a good sword, but at that moment I wished I had Serpent-Breath strapped around my waist. I glanced back. The thirteen men were crossing the ditch to follow us. Two had bows. The rest seemed to be armed with axes, knives or spears. Willibald was slow, already panting. ‘What is it?’ he gasped.

‘Bandits?’ I suggested. ‘Vagrants? I don’t know. Run!’ I pushed him into the trees, then slid the sword from its scabbard and turned to face my pursuers, one of whom took an arrow from the bag strapped at his waist. That persuaded me to follow Willibald into the copse. The arrow slid past me and ripped through the undergrowth. I wore no mail, only the thick fur cloak that offered no protection from a hunter’s arrow. ‘Keep going,’ I shouted at Willibald, then limped up the path. I had been wounded in the right thigh at the battle of Ethandun and though I could walk and could even run slowly, I knew I would not be able to outpace the men who were now within easy bowshot behind me. I hurried up the path as a second arrow was deflected by a branch and tumbled noisily through the trees. Every day is ordinary, I thought, until it gets interesting. My pursuers could not see me among the dark trunks and thick holly bushes, but they assumed I had followed Willibald and so kept to the path while I crouched in the thick undergrowth, concealed by the glossy leaves of a holly bush and by my cloak that I had pulled over my fair hair and face. The pursuers went past my hiding place without a glance. The two archers were in front.

I let them get well ahead, then followed. I had heard them speak as they passed and knew they were Saxons and, by their accents, probably from Mercia. Robbers, I assumed. A Roman road passed through deep woods nearby and masterless men haunted the woods to ambush travellers who, to protect themselves, went in large groups. I had twice led my warriors on hunts for such bandits and thought I had persuaded them to make their living far from my estate, but I could not think who else these men could be. Yet it was not like such vagrants to invade an estate. The hair at the back of my neck still prickled.

I moved cautiously as I approached the edge of the trees, then saw the men beside the shepherd’s hut that resembled a heap of grass. He had made the hovel with branches covered by turf, leaving a hole in the centre for the smoke of his fire to escape. There was no sign of the shepherd himself, but Willibald had been captured, though so far he was unhurt, protected, perhaps, by his status as a priest. One man held him. The others must have realised I was still in the trees, because they were staring towards the copse that hid me.

Then, suddenly, the shepherd’s two dogs appeared from my left and ran howling towards the thirteen men. The dogs ran fast and lithe, circling the group and sometimes leaping towards them and snapping their teeth before sheering away. Only one man had a sword, but he was clumsy with the blade, swinging it at the bitch as she came close and missing her by an arm’s length. One of the two bowmen put a string on his cord. He hauled the arrow back, then suddenly fell backwards as if struck by an invisible hammer. He sprawled on the turf as his arrow flitted into the sky and fell harmlessly into the trees behind me. The dogs, down on their front paws now, bared their teeth and growled. The fallen archer stirred, but evidently could not stand. The other men looked scared.

The second archer raised his stave, then recoiled, dropping the bow to clap his hands to his face and I saw a spark of blood there, blood bright as the holly berries. The splash of colour showed in the winter morning, then it was gone and the man was clutching his face and bending over in pain. The hounds barked, then loped back into the trees. The sleet was falling harder, loud as it struck the bare branches. Two of the men moved towards the shepherd’s cottage, but were called back by their leader. He was younger than the others and looked more prosperous, or at least less poor. He had a thin face, darting eyes and a short fair beard. He wore a scarred leather jerkin, but beneath it I could see a mail coat. So he had either been a warrior or else had stolen the mail. ‘Lord Uhtred!’ he called.

I did not answer. I was hidden well enough, at least for the moment, but knew I would have to move if they searched the copse, but whatever had drawn blood was making them nervous. What was it? It had to be the gods, I thought, or perhaps the Christian saint. Alnoth must hate outlaws if he had been murdered by them, and I did not doubt that these men were outlaws who had been sent to kill me. That was not surprising because in those days I had plenty of enemies. I still have enemies, though now I live behind the strongest palisade in northern England, but in that far-off time, in the winter of 898, there was no England. There was Northumbria and East Anglia, Mercia and Wessex, and the first two were ruled by the Danes, Wessex was Saxon while Mercia was a mess, part Danish and part Saxon. And I was like Mercia because I had been born a Saxon, but raised as a Dane. I still worshipped the Danish gods, but fate had doomed me to be a shield of the Christian Saxons against the ever-present threat of the pagan Danes. So any number of Danes might want me dead, but I could not imagine any Danish enemy hiring Mercian outlaws to ambush me. There were also Saxons who would love to see my corpse put in its long home. My cousin Æthelred, Lord of Mercia, would have paid well to watch my grave filled, but surely he would have sent warriors, not bandits? Yet he seemed the likeliest man. He was married to Æthelflaed, Alfred of Wessex’s daughter, but I had planted the cuckold’s horns on Æthelred’s head and I reckoned he had returned the favour by sending thirteen outlaws.

‘Lord Uhtred!’ the young man called again, but the only answer was a sudden panicked bleating.

The sheep were streaming down the path through the copse, harried by the two dogs that snapped at their ankles to drive them fast towards the thirteen men and, once the sheep had reached the men, the dogs raced around, still snapping, herding the animals into a tight circle that enclosed the outlaws. I was laughing. I was Uhtred of Bebbanburg, the man who had killed Ubba beside the sea and who had destroyed Haesten’s army at Beamfleot, but on this cold Sunday morning it was the shepherd who was proving to be the better warlord. His panicked flock were tightly packed around the outlaws, who could hardly move. The dogs were howling, the sheep bleating and the thirteen men despairing.

I stepped out of the wood. ‘You wanted me?’ I called.

The young man’s response was to push towards me, but the tightly packed sheep obstructed him. He kicked at them, then hacked down with his sword, but the more he struggled the more scared the sheep became, and all the while the dogs herded them inwards. The young man cursed, then snatched at Willibald. ‘Let us go or we kill him,’ he said.

‘He’s a Christian,’ I said, showing him Thor’s hammer that hung about my neck, ‘so why should I care if you kill him?’

Willibald stared at me aghast, and then turned as one of the men shouted in pain. There had again been a sudden flash of holly-red blood in the sleet, and this time I saw what had caused it. It was neither the gods nor the murdered saint, but the shepherd who had come from the trees and was holding a sling. He took a stone from a pouch, placed it in the leather cup, and whirled the sling again. It made a whirring noise, he let go one cord and another stone hurtled in to strike a man.

They turned away in pure panic and I gestured at the shepherd to let them go. He whistled to call the dogs off and both men and sheep scattered. The men were running, all but the first archer who was still on the ground, stunned by the stone that had struck his head. The young man, braver than the others, came towards me, perhaps thinking his companions would help him, then realised he was alone. A look of pure fright crossed his face, he turned, and just then the bitch leaped at him, sinking her teeth in his sword arm. He shouted, then tried to shake her off as the dog hurtled in to join his mate. He was still shouting when I hit him across the back of the skull with the flat of my sword-blade. ‘You can call the dogs off now,’ I told the shepherd.

The first archer was still alive, but there was a patch of blood-matted hair above his right ear. I kicked him hard in the ribs and he groaned, but he was insensible. I gave his bow and arrow-bag to the shepherd. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Egbert, lord.’

‘You’re a rich man now, Egbert,’ I told him. I wished that were true. I would reward Egbert well for this morning’s work, but I was no longer rich. I had spent my money on the men, mail and weapons that had been needed to defeat Haesten and I was desperately poor that winter.

The other outlaws had vanished, gone back northwards. Willibald was shaking. ‘They were searching for you, lord,’ he said through chattering teeth, ‘they’ve been paid to kill you.’

I stooped by the archer. The shepherd’s stone had shattered his skull and I could see a ragged, splintered piece of bone among the blood-matted hair. One of the shepherd’s dogs came to sniff the wounded man and I patted its thick wiry pelt. ‘They’re good dogs,’ I told Egbert.

‘Wolf-killers, lord,’ he said, then hefted the sling, ‘though this is better.’

‘You’re good with it,’ I said. That was mild, the man was lethal.

‘Been practising these twenty-five years, lord. Nothing like a stone to drive a wolf away.’

‘They’d been paid to kill me?’ I asked Willibald.

‘That’s what they said. They were paid to kill you.’

‘Go into the hut,’ I said, ‘get warm.’ I turned on the younger man who was being guarded by the larger dog. ‘What’s your name?’

He hesitated, then spoke grudgingly, ‘Wærfurth, lord.’

‘And who paid you to kill me?’

‘I don’t know, lord.’

Nor did he, it seemed. Wærfurth and his men came from near Tofeceaster, a settlement not far to the north, and Wærfurth told me how a man had promised to pay my weight in silver in return for my death. The man had suggested a Sunday morning, knowing that much of my household would be in church, and Wærfurth had recruited a dozen vagrants to do the job. He must have known it was a huge gamble, for I was not without reputation, but the reward was immense. ‘Was the man a Dane or a Saxon?’ I asked.

‘A Saxon, lord.’

‘And you don’t know him?’

‘No, lord.’

I questioned him more, but all he could tell me was that the man was thin, bald and had lost an eye. The description meant little to me. A one-eyed, bald man? Could be almost anyone. I asked questions till I had wrung Wærfurth dry of unhelpful answers, then hanged both him and the archer.

And Willibald showed me the magic fish.

A delegation waited at my hall. Sixteen men had come from Alfred’s capital at Wintanceaster and among them were no less than five priests. Two, like Willibald, came from Wessex, and the other pair were Mercians who had apparently settled in East Anglia. I knew them both, though I had not recognised them at first. They were twins, Ceolnoth and Ceolberht who, some thirty years before, had been hostages with me in Mercia. We had been children captured by the Danes, a fate I had welcomed and the twins had hated. They were close to forty years old now, two identical priests with stocky builds, round faces and greying beards. ‘We have watched your progress,’ one of them said.

‘With admiration,’ the other finished. I had not been able to tell them apart when they were children, and still could not. They finished each other’s sentences.

‘Reluctant,’ one said.

‘Admiration,’ his twin said.

‘Reluctant?’ I asked in an unfriendly tone.

‘It is known that Alfred is disappointed,’

‘That you eschew the true faith, but…’

‘We pray for you daily!’

The remaining pair of priests, both West Saxons, were Alfred’s men. They had helped compile his code of laws and it appeared they had come to advise me. The remaining eleven men were warriors, five from East Anglia and six from Wessex, who had guarded the priests on their travels.

And they had brought the magic fish.

‘King Eohric,’ Ceolnoth or Ceolberht said.

‘Wishes an alliance with Wessex,’ the other twin finished.

‘And with Mercia!’

‘The Christian kingdoms, you understand.’

‘And King Alfred and King Edward,’ Willibald took up the tale, ‘have sent a gift for King Eohric.’

‘Alfred still lives?’ I asked.

‘Pray God, yes,’ Willibald said, ‘though he’s sick.’

‘Very close to death,’ one of the West Saxon priests intervened.

‘He was born close to death,’ I said, ‘and ever since I’ve known him he’s been dying. He’ll live ten years yet.’

‘Pray God he does,’ Willibald said and made the sign of the cross. ‘But he’s fifty years old, and he’s failing. He’s truly dying.’

‘Which is why he seeks this alliance,’ the West Saxon priest went on, ‘and why the Lord Edward makes this request of you.’

‘King Edward,’ Willibald corrected his fellow priest.

‘So who’s requesting me?’ I asked, ‘Alfred of Wessex or Edward of Cent?’

‘Edward,’ Willibald said.

‘Eohric,’ Ceolnoth and Ceolberht said together.

‘Alfred,’ the West Saxon priest said.

‘All of them,’ Willibald added. ‘It’s important to all of them, lord!’

Edward or Alfred or both wanted me to go to King Eohric of East Anglia. Eohric was a Dane, but he had converted to Christianity, and he had sent the twins to Alfred and proposed that a great alliance should be made between the Christian parts of Britain. ‘King Eohric suggested that you should negotiate the treaty,’ Ceolnoth or Ceolberht said.

‘With our advice,’ one of the West Saxon priests put in hastily.

‘Why me?’ I asked the twins.

Willibald answered for them. ‘Who knows Mercia and Wessex as well as you?’

‘Many men,’ I answered.

‘And where you lead,’ Willibald said, ‘those other men will follow.’

We were at a table on which was ale, bread, cheese, pottage and apples. The central hearth was ablaze with a great fire that flickered its light on the smoke-blackened beams. The shepherd had been right and the sleet had turned to snow and some flakes sifted through the smoke-hole in the roof. Outside, beyond the palisade, Wærfurth and the archer were hanging from the bare branch of an elm, their bodies food for the hungry birds. Most of my men were in the hall, listening to our conversation. ‘It’s a strange time of year to be making treaties,’ I said.

‘Alfred has little time left,’ Willibald said, ‘and he wishes this alliance, lord. If all the Christians of Britain are united, lord, then young Edward’s throne will be protected when he inherits the crown.’

That made sense, but why would Eohric want the alliance? Eohric of East Anglia had been perched on the fence between Christians and pagans, Danes and Saxons, for as long as I could remember, yet now he wanted to proclaim his allegiance to the Christian Saxons?

‘Because of Cnut Ranulfson,’ one of the twins explained when I asked the question.

‘He’s brought men south,’ the other twin said.

‘To Sigurd Thorrson’s lands,’ I said. ‘I know, I sent that news to Alfred. And Eohric fears Cnut and Sigurd?’

‘He does,’ Ceolnoth or Ceolberht said.

‘Cnut and Sigurd won’t attack now,’ I said, ‘but in the spring, maybe.’ Cnut and Sigurd were Danes from Northumbria and, like all the Danes, their abiding dream was to capture all the lands where English was spoken. The invaders had tried again and again, and again and again they had failed, yet another attempt was inevitable because the heart of Wessex, which was the great bastion of Saxon Christendom, was failing. Alfred was dying, and his death would surely bring pagan swords and heathen fire to Mercia and to Wessex. ‘But why would Cnut or Sigurd attack Eohric?’ I asked. ‘They don’t want East Anglia, they want Mercia and Wessex.’

‘They want everything,’ Ceolnoth or Ceolberht answered.

‘And the true faith will be scourged from Britain unless we defend it,’ the older of the two West Saxon priests said.

‘Which is why we beg you to forge the alliance,’ Willibald said.

‘At the Christmas feast,’ one of the twins added.

‘And Alfred sent a gift for Eohric,’ Willibald went on enthusiastically, ‘Alfred and Edward! They have been most generous, lord!’

The gift was encased in a box of silver studded with precious stones. The lid of the box showed a figure of Christ with uplifted arms, around which was written ‘Edward mec heht Gewyrcan’, meaning that Edward had ordered the reliquary made, or more likely his father had ordered the gift and then ascribed the generosity to his son. Willibald lifted the lid reverently, revealing an interior lined with red-dyed cloth. A small cushion, the width and breadth of a man’s hand, fitted snugly inside, and on the cushion was a fish skeleton. It was the whole fish skeleton, except for the head, just a long white spine with a comb of ribs on either side. ‘There,’ Willibald said, breathing the word as if speaking too loud might disturb the bones.

‘A dead herring?’ I asked incredulously, ‘that’s Alfred’s gift?’

The priests all crossed themselves.

‘How many more fish bones do you want?’ I asked. I looked at Finan, my closest friend and the commander of my household warriors. ‘We can provide dead fish, can’t we?’

‘By the barrelful, lord,’ he said.

‘Lord Uhtred!’ Willibald, as ever, rose to my taunting. ‘That fish,’ he pointed a quivering finger at the bones, ‘was one of the two fishes our Lord used to feed the five thousand!’

‘The other one must have been a damned big fish,’ I said, ‘what was it? A whale?’

The older West Saxon priest scowled at me. ‘I advised King Edward against employing you for this duty,’ he said, ‘I told him to send a Christian.’

‘So use someone else,’ I retorted. ‘I’d rather spend Yule in my own hall.’

‘He wishes you to go,’ the priest said sharply.

‘Alfred also wishes it,’ Willibald put in, then smiled, ‘he thinks you’ll frighten Eohric.’

‘Why does he want Eohric frightened?’ I asked. ‘I thought this was an alliance?’

‘King Eohric allows his ships to prey on our trade,’ the priest said, ‘and must pay reparations before we promise him protection. The king believes you will be persuasive.’

‘We don’t need to leave for at least ten days,’ I said, looking gloomily at the priests, ‘am I supposed to feed you all till then?’

‘Yes, lord,’ Willibald said happily.

Fate is strange. I had rejected Christianity, preferring the gods of the Danes, but I loved Æthelflaed, Alfred’s daughter, and she was a Christian and that meant I carried my sword on the side of the cross.

And because of that it seemed I would spend Yule in East Anglia.

Osferth came to Buccingahamm, bringing another twenty of my household warriors. I had summoned them, wanting a large band to accompany me to East Anglia. King Eohric might have suggested the treaty, and he might be amenable to whatever demands Alfred made, but treaties are best negotiated from a position of strength and I was determined to arrive in East Anglia with an impressive escort. Osferth and his men had been watching Ceaster, a Roman camp on Mercia’s far north-western frontier where Haesten had taken refuge after his forces had been destroyed at Beamfleot. Osferth greeted me solemnly, as was his manner. He rarely smiled, and his customary expression suggested disapproval of whatever he saw, but I think he was glad to be reunited with the rest of us. He was Alfred’s son, born to a servant girl before Alfred discovered the dubious joys of Christian obedience. Alfred had wanted his bastard son trained as a priest, but Osferth had preferred the way of the warrior. It had been a strange choice, for he did not take great joy from a fight or yearn for the savage moments when anger and a blade make the rest of the world seem dull, yet Osferth brought his father’s qualities to a fight. He was serious, thoughtful and methodical. Where Finan and I could be rashly headstrong, Osferth used cleverness, and that was no bad thing in a warrior.

‘Haesten is still licking his wounds,’ he told me.

‘We should have killed him,’ I grumbled. Haesten had retreated to Ceaster after I had destroyed his fleet and army at Beamfleot. My instinct had been to follow him there and finish his nonsense once and for all, but Alfred had wanted his household troops back in Wessex and I did not have enough men to besiege the walls of the Roman fort at Ceaster, and so Haesten still lived. We watched him, looking for evidence that he was recruiting more men, but Osferth reckoned Haesten was getting weaker rather than stronger.

‘He’ll be forced to swallow his pride and swear loyalty to someone else,’ he suggested.

‘To Sigurd or Cnut,’ I said. Sigurd and Cnut were now the most powerful Danes in Britain, though neither was a king. They had land, wealth, flocks, herds, silver, ships, men and ambition. ‘Why would they want East Anglia?’ I wondered aloud.

‘Why not?’ Finan asked. He was my closest companion, the man I trusted most in a fight.

‘Because they want Wessex,’ I said.

‘They want all of Britain,’ Finan said.

‘They’re waiting,’ Osferth said.

‘For what?’

‘Alfred’s death,’ he said. He hardly ever called Alfred ‘my father’, as though he, like the king, was ashamed of his birth.

‘Oh there’ll be chaos when that happens,’ Finan said with relish.

‘Edward will make a good king,’ Osferth said reprovingly.

‘He’ll have to fight for it,’ I said. ‘The Danes will test him.’

‘And will you fight for him?’ Osferth asked.

‘I like Edward,’ I said non-committally. I did like him. I had pitied him as a child because his father placed him under the control of fierce priests whose duty was to make Edward the perfect heir for Alfred’s Christian kingdom. When I met him again, just before the fight at Beamfleot, he had struck me as a pompous and intolerant young man, but he had enjoyed the company of warriors and the pomposity vanished. He had fought well at Beamfleot and now, if Willibald’s gossip was to be believed, he had learned a little about sin as well.

‘His sister would want you to support him,’ Osferth said pointedly, making Finan laugh. Everyone knew Æthelflaed was my lover, as they knew Æthelflaed’s father was also Osferth’s father, but most people politely pretended not to know, and Osferth’s pointed remark was as close as he dared refer to my relationship with his half-sister. I would much rather have been with Æthelflaed for the Christmas feast, but Osferth told me she had been summoned to Wintanceaster and I knew I was not welcome at Alfred’s table. Besides, I now had the duty of delivering the magic fish to Eohric and I was worried that Sigurd and Cnut would raid my lands while I was in East Anglia.

Sigurd and Cnut had sailed south the previous summer, taking their ships to Wessex’s southern coast while Haesten’s army ravaged Mercia. The two Northumbrian Danes had thought to distract Alfred’s army while Haesten ran wild on Wessex’s northern border, but Alfred had sent me his troops anyway, Haesten had been stripped of his power, and Sigurd and Cnut had discovered they were powerless to capture any of Alfred’s burhs, the fortified towns that were scattered all across the Saxon lands, and so had returned to their ships. I knew they would not rest. They were Danes, which meant they were planning mischief.

So next day, in the melting snow, I took Finan, Osferth and thirty men north to Ealdorman Beornnoth’s land. I liked Beornnoth. He was old, grizzled, lame and fiery. His lands were at the very edge of Saxon Mercia and everything to the north of him belonged to the Danes, which meant that in the last few years he had been forced to defend his fields and villages against the attacks of Sigurd Thorrson’s men. ‘God Almighty,’ he greeted me, ‘don’t say you’re hoping for the Christmas feast in my hall?’

‘I prefer good food,’ I said.

‘And I prefer good-looking guests,’ he retorted, then shouted for his servants to take our horses. He lived a little north and east of Tofeceaster in a great hall surrounded by barns and stables that were protected by a stout palisade. The space between the hall and his largest barn was now being blood-soaked by the slaughter of cattle. Men were hamstringing the frightened beasts to buckle them to the ground and so keep them still while other men killed them with an axe blow to the forehead. The twitching carcasses were dragged to one side where women and children used long knives to skin and butcher the corpses. Dogs watched or else fought over the scraps of offal thrown their way. The air stank of blood and dung. ‘It was a good year,’ Beornnoth told me, ‘twice as many animals as last year. The Danes left me alone.’

‘No cattle raids?’

‘One or two,’ he shrugged. Since last I saw him he had lost the use of his legs and needed to be carried everywhere in a chair. ‘It’s old age,’ he told me. ‘I’m dying from the ground up. I suppose you want ale?’

We exchanged news in his hall. He bellowed with laughter when I told him of the attempt on my life. ‘You use sheep to defend yourself these days?’ He saw his son enter the hall and shouted at him. ‘Come and hear how the Lord Uhtred won the battle of the sheep!’

The son was called Beortsig and, like his father, was broad-shouldered and heavy-bearded. He laughed at the tale, but the laughter seemed forced. ‘You say the rogues came from Tofeceaster?’ he asked.

‘That’s what the bastard said.’

‘That’s our land,’ Beortsig said.

‘Outlaws,’ Beornnoth said dismissively.

‘And fools,’ Beortsig added.

‘A thin, bald, one-eyed man recruited them,’ I said. ‘Do you know anyone who looks like that?’

‘Sounds like our priest,’ Beornnoth said, amused. Beortsig said nothing. ‘So what brings you here?’ Beornnoth asked, ‘other than the need to drain my ale barrels?’

I told him of Alfred’s request that I seal a treaty with Eohric, and how Eohric’s envoys had explained their king’s request because of his fear of Sigurd and Cnut. Beornnoth looked sceptical. ‘Sigurd and Cnut aren’t interested in East Anglia,’ he said.

‘Eohric thinks they are.’

‘The man’s a fool,’ Beornnoth said, ‘and always was. Sigurd and Cnut want Mercia and Wessex.’

‘And once they possess those kingdoms, lord,’ Osferth spoke softly to our host, ‘they’ll want East Anglia.’

‘True, I suppose,’ Beornnoth allowed.

‘So why not take East Anglia first?’ Osferth suggested, ‘and add its men to their war-bands?’

‘Nothing will happen till Alfred dies,’ Beornnoth suggested. He made the sign of the cross, ‘and I pray he still lives.’

‘Amen,’ Osferth said.

‘So you want to disturb Sigurd’s peace?’ Beornnoth asked me.

‘I want to know what he’s doing,’ I said.

‘He’s preparing for Yule,’ Beortsig said dismissively.

‘Which means he’ll be drunk for the next month,’ the father added.

‘He’s left us in peace all year,’ the son said.

‘And I don’t want you poking his wasps out of their nest,’ Beornnoth said. He spoke lightly enough, but his meaning was heavy. If I rode on north then I might provoke Sigurd, then Beornnoth’s land would be thudded by Danish hooves and reddened by Danish blades.

‘I have to go to East Anglia,’ I explained, ‘and Sigurd’s not going to like the thought of an alliance between Eohric and Alfred. He might send men south to make his displeasure known.’

Beornnoth frowned. ‘Or he might not.’

‘Which is what I want to find out,’ I said.

Beornnoth grunted at that. ‘You’re bored, Lord Uhtred?’ he asked. ‘You want to kill a few Danes?’

‘I just want to smell them,’ I said.

‘Smell?’

‘Half Britain will already know of this treaty with Eohric,’ I said, ‘and who has the most interest in preventing it?’

‘Sigurd,’ Beornnoth admitted after a pause.

I sometimes thought of Britain as a mill. At the base, heavy and dependable was the millstone of Wessex, while at the top, just as heavy, was the grindstone of the Danes, and Mercia was crushed between them. Mercia was where Saxon and Dane fought most often. Alfred had cleverly extended his authority over much of the kingdom’s south, but the Danes were lords of its north, and till now the struggle had been fairly evenly divided, which meant both sides sought allies. The Danes had offered enticements to the Welsh kings, but though the Welsh nursed an undying hatred of all Saxons, they feared the wrath of their Christian God more than they feared the Danes, and so most of the Welsh kept an uneasy peace with Wessex. To the east, though, lay the unpredictable kingdom of East Anglia, which was ruled by Danes, but was ostensibly Christian. East Anglia could tip the scales. If Eohric sent men to fight against Wessex then the Danes would win, but if he allied himself with the Christians then the Danes would face defeat.

Sigurd, I thought, would want to prevent the treaty ever happening, and he had two weeks to do that. Had he sent the thirteen men to kill me? As I sat by Beornnoth’s fire, that seemed the best answer. And if he had, then what would he do next?

‘You want to smell him, eh?’ Beornnoth asked.

‘Not provoke him,’ I promised.

‘No deaths? No robbery?’

‘I won’t start anything,’ I promised.

‘God knows what you’ll discover without slaughtering a few of the bastards,’ Beornnoth said, ‘but yes. Go and sniff. Beortsig will go with you.’ He was sending his son and a dozen household warriors to make sure we kept our word. Beornnoth feared we planned to lay waste a few Danish steadings and bring back cattle, silver and slaves, and his men would be there to prevent that, but in truth I only wanted to smell the land.

I did not trust Sigurd or his ally, Cnut. I liked both of them, but knew they would kill me as casually as we kill our winter cattle. Sigurd was the wealthier of the two men, while Cnut the more dangerous. He was young still, and in his few years he had gained a reputation as a sword-Dane, a man whose blade was to be respected and feared. Such a man attracted others. They came from across the sea, rowing to Britain to follow a leader who promised them wealth. And in the spring, I thought, the Danes would surely come again, or perhaps they would wait till Alfred died, knowing that the death of a king brings uncertainty, and in uncertainty lies opportunity.

Beortsig was thinking the same. ‘Is Alfred really dying?’ he asked me as we rode north.

‘So everyone says.’

‘They’ve said it before.’

‘Many times,’ I agreed.

‘You believe it?’

‘I haven’t seen him for myself,’ I said, and I knew I would not be welcome in his palace even if I wanted to see him. I had been told Æthelflaed had gone to Wintanceaster for the Christmas feast, but more likely she had been summoned for the death-watch rather than for the dubious delights of her father’s table.

‘And Edward will inherit?’ Beortsig asked.

‘That’s what Alfred wants.’

‘And who becomes king in Mercia?’ he asked.

‘There is no king in Mercia,’ I said.

‘There should be,’ he said bitterly, ‘and not a West Saxon either! We’re Mercians, not West Saxons.’ I said nothing in response. There had once been kings in Mercia, but now it was subservient to Wessex. Alfred had managed that. His daughter was married to the most powerful of the Mercian ealdormen, and most Saxons in Mercia seemed content that they were effectively under Alfred’s protection, but not all Mercians liked that West Saxon dominance. When Alfred died the powerful Mercians would start eyeing their empty throne, and Beortsig, I supposed, was one such man. ‘Our forefathers were kings here,’ he told me.

‘My forefathers were kings in Northumbria,’ I retorted, ‘but I don’t want the throne.’

‘Mercia should be ruled by a Mercian,’ he said. He seemed uncomfortable in my company, or perhaps he was uneasy because we rode deep into the lands that Sigurd claimed.

We rode directly north, the low winter sun throwing our shadows far ahead of us. The first steadings we passed were nothing but burned out ruins, then after midday we came to a village. The people had seen us coming, and so I took my horsemen into the nearby woods until we had rousted a couple out of their hiding place. They were Saxons, a slave and his wife, and they said their lord was a Dane. ‘Is he in his hall?’ I asked.

‘No, lord.’ The man was kneeling, shaking, unable to lift his eyes to meet my gaze.

‘What’s his name?’

‘Jarl Jorven, lord.’

I looked at Beortsig, who shrugged. ‘Jorven is one of Sigurd’s men,’ he said, ‘and not really a jarl. Maybe he leads thirty or forty warriors?’

‘Is his wife in the hall?’ I asked the kneeling man.

‘She’s there, lord, and some warriors, but not many. The rest have gone, lord.’

‘Gone where?’

‘I don’t know, lord.’

I tossed him a silver coin. I could scarcely afford it, but a lord is a lord.

‘Yule is coming,’ Beortsig said dismissively, ‘and Jorven has probably gone to Cytringan.’

‘Cytringan?’

‘We hear Sigurd and Cnut are celebrating Yule there,’ he said.

We rode away from the wood, back into a damp pasture. Clouds were hiding the sun now, and I thought it would begin to rain before long. ‘Tell me about Jorven,’ I said to Beortsig.

He shrugged. ‘A Dane, of course. He arrived two summers ago and Sigurd gave him this land.’

‘Is he kin to Sigurd?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘His age?’

Another shrug. ‘Young.’

And why would a man go to a feast without his wife? I almost asked the question aloud, then thought that Beortsig’s opinion would be worthless and so I kept silent. Instead I kicked my horse on until I reached a place where I could see Jorven’s hall. It was a fine enough building with a steep roof and a bull’s skull attached to the high gable. The thatch was new enough to have no moss. A palisade surrounded the hall and I could see two men watching us. ‘This would be a good time to attack Jorven,’ I said lightly.

‘They’ve left us in peace,’ Beortsig said.

‘And you think that will last?’

‘I think we should turn back,’ he said, and then, when I said nothing, he added, ‘if we want to make home by nightfall.’

Instead I headed farther north, ignoring Beortsig’s complaints. We left Jorven’s hall unmolested and crossed a low ridge to see a wide valley. Small smoke trails showed where villages or steadings stood, and glimmers of dull light betrayed a river. A fine place, I thought, fertile and well-watered, exactly the sort of land that the Danes craved. ‘You say Jorven has thirty or forty warriors?’ I asked Beortsig.

‘No more.’

‘One crew, then,’ I said. So Jorven and his followers had crossed the sea in a single ship and sworn loyalty to Sigurd, who in return had given him frontier land. If the Saxons attacked, Jorven would likely die, but that was the risk he ran, and the rewards could be much greater if Sigurd decided to attack southwards. ‘When Haesten was here, last summer,’ I asked Beortsig as I urged my horse forward, ‘did he give you trouble?’

‘He left us alone,’ he said. ‘He did his damage farther west.’

I nodded. Beortsig’s father, I thought, had become tired of fighting the Danes and he was paying tribute to Sigurd. There could be no other reason for the apparent peace that had prevailed on Beornnoth’s land, and Haesten, I assumed, had left Beornnoth alone on Sigurd’s orders. Haesten would never have dared to offend Sigurd, so doubtless he had avoided the lands of those Saxons who paid for peace. That had left him most of southern Mercia to ravage, and he had burned, raped and pillaged until I took away most of his strength at Beamfleot. Then, in fear, he had fled to Ceaster.

‘Something worries you?’ Finan asked me. We were riding down towards the distant river. A thin rain was blowing from our backs. Finan and I had spurred ahead, out of earshot of Beortsig and his men.

‘Why would a man go to the Yule feast without his wife?’ I asked Finan.

He shrugged. ‘Maybe she’s ugly. Maybe he keeps something younger and prettier for feast days?’

‘Maybe,’ I grunted.

‘Or maybe he’s been summoned,’ Finan said.

‘And why would Sigurd summon warriors in midwinter?’

‘Because he knows about Eohric?’

‘That’s what’s worrying me,’ I said.

The rain was coming harder, gusting on a sharp wind. The day was closing in, dark and damp and cold. Remnants of snow lay white in frozen ditches. Beortsig tried to insist that we turn back, but I kept riding north, deliberately going close to two large halls. Whoever guarded those places must have seen us, yet no one rode out to challenge us. Over forty armed men, carrying shields and spears and swords, were riding through their country and they did not bother to discover who we were or what we did? That told me that the halls were lightly guarded. Whoever saw us pass was content to let us go in the hope that we would ignore them.

And then, ahead of us, was the scar on the land. I checked my horse at its edge. The scar ran across our path, gouged into the water meadows on the southern bank of the river, which was being dimpled by raindrops. I turned my horse then, pretending no interest in the trampled ground and deep hoof-prints. ‘We’ll go back,’ I told Beortsig.

The scar had been made by horses. Finan, as he rode into the cold rain, edged his stallion close to mine. ‘Eighty men,’ he said.

I nodded. I trusted his judgement. Two crews of men had ridden from west to east and the hooves of their horses had trampled that scar into the waterlogged ground. Two crews were following the river to where? I slowed my horse, letting Beortsig catch us. ‘Where did you say Sigurd was celebrating Yule?’ I asked.

‘Cytringan,’ he said.

‘And where’s Cytringan?’

He pointed north. ‘A good day’s journey, probably two. He keeps a feasting hall there.’

Cytringan lay to the north, but the hoof-prints had been going east.

Someone was lying.

Two

I had not realised quite how important the proposed treaty was to Alfred until I returned to Buccingahamm and found sixteen monks eating my food and drinking my ale. The youngest of them were still unshaven striplings, while the oldest, their leader, was a corpulent man of about my own age. He was called Brother John, and was so fat that he had trouble offering me a bow. ‘He is from Frankia,’ Willibald said proudly.

‘What’s he doing here?’

‘He is the king’s songmaster! He leads the choir.’

‘A choir?’ I asked.

‘We sing,’ Brother John said in a voice that seemed to rumble from somewhere inside his capacious belly. He waved a peremptory hand at his monks and shouted at them, ‘The Soli Deo Gloria. Stand up! Breathe deep! Upon my word! A one! A two!’ They began chanting. ‘Mouths open!’ Brother John bellowed at them, ‘Mouths wide! Mouths wide as little birdies! From the stomach! Let me hear you!’

‘Enough!’ I shouted before they had finished their first line. I tossed my sheathed sword to Oswi, my servant, then went to warm myself by the hall’s central hearth. ‘Why,’ I asked Willibald, ‘must I feed singing monks?’

‘It’s important we make an impressive display,’ he answered, casting a dubious eye on my mud-spattered mail. ‘We represent Wessex, lord, and we must demonstrate the glory of Alfred’s court.’

Alfred had sent banners with the monks. One showed the dragon of Wessex, while others were embroidered with saints or holy images. ‘We’re taking those rags as well?’ I asked.

‘Of course,’ Willibald said.

‘I can take a banner showing Thor, perhaps? Or Woden?’

Willibald sighed. ‘Please lord, no.’

‘Why can’t we have a banner showing one of the women saints?’ I asked.

‘I’m sure we can,’ Willibald said, pleased at the suggestion, ‘if that’s what you’d like.’

‘One of those women who were stripped naked before they were killed,’ I added, and Father Willibald sighed again.

Sigunn brought me a horn of mulled ale and I gave her a kiss. ‘All well here?’ I asked her.

She looked at the monks and shrugged. I could see Willibald was curious about her, especially when I put an arm around her and drew her close. ‘She’s my woman,’ I explained.

‘But,’ he began and finished abruptly. He was thinking about Æthelflaed, but did not have the courage to name her.

I smiled at him. ‘You have a question, father?’

‘No, no,’ he said hurriedly.

I looked at the largest banner, a great gaudy square of cream linen emblazoned with an embroidery of the crucifixion. It was so large that it would need two men to parade it, and even more if the wind was blowing anything above a gentle breeze. ‘Does Eohric know we’re bringing an army?’ I asked Willibald.

‘He has been told to expect up to one hundred people.’

‘And does he expect Sigurd and Cnut too?’ I enquired acidly, and Willibald just stared at me with a vacant expression. ‘The Danes know about this treaty,’ I told him, ‘and they’ll try to prevent it.’

‘Prevent it? How?’

‘How do you think?’ I asked.

Willibald looked paler than ever. ‘King Eohric is sending men to escort us,’ he said.

‘He’s sending them here?’ I spoke angrily, thinking that I would be expected to feed even more men.

‘To Huntandon,’ Willibald said, ‘and from there they take us to Eleg.’

‘Why are we going to East Anglia?’ I asked.

‘To make the treaty, of course,’ Willibald said, puzzled by the question.

‘So why isn’t Eohric sending men to Wessex?’ I demanded.

‘Eohric did send men, lord! He sent Ceolberht and Ceolnoth. The treaty was King Eohric’s suggestion.’

‘Then why isn’t it being sealed and signed in Wessex?’ I persisted.

Willibald shrugged. ‘Does it matter, lord?’ he asked with a trace of impatience. ‘And we’re supposed to meet at Huntandon in three days,’ he went on, ‘and if the weather turns bad,’ he let his voice fade away.

I had heard of Huntandon, though I had never been there, and all I knew was that it lay somewhere beyond the vague frontier between Mercia and East Anglia. I gestured to the twins, Ceolberht and Ceolnoth, and they hurried over from the table where they had been sitting with the two priests sent with Willibald from Wessex. ‘If I were to ride straight to Eleg from here,’ I asked the twins, ‘what way would I go?’

They muttered together for a few seconds, then one of them suggested that the quickest route lay through Grantaceaster. ‘From there,’ the other one continued, ‘there’s a Roman road straight to the island.’

‘Island?’

‘Eleg is an island,’ a twin said.

‘In a marsh,’ the other added.

‘With a convent!’

‘Which was burned by the pagans.’

‘Though the church is now restored.’

‘Thanks be to God.’

‘The holy Æthelreda built the convent.’

‘And she was married to a Northumbrian,’ Ceolnoth or Ceolberht said, thinking to please me because I am a Northumbrian. I am the Lord of Bebbanburg, though in those days my vicious uncle lived in that great ocean fortress. He had stolen it from me and I planned to take it back.

‘And Huntandon,’ I asked, ‘lies on the road to Grantaceaster?’

The twins looked surprised at my ignorance. ‘Oh no, lord,’ one of them said, ‘Huntandon lies farther north.’

‘So why are we going there?’

‘King Eohric, lord,’ the other twin began, then faltered. It was plain that neither he nor his brother had thought about that question.

‘It’s as good a route as any,’ his brother said stoutly.

‘Better than Grantaceaster?’ I demanded.

‘Very nearly as good, lord,’ one of the twins said.

There are times when a man feels like a wild boar trapped in woodland, hearing the hunters, listening to the hounds baying, feeling the heart beat harder and wondering which way to flee, and not knowing because the sounds come from everywhere and nowhere. None of it was right. None of it. I summoned Sihtric who had once been my servant, but was now a house-warrior. ‘Find someone,’ I told him, ‘anyone, who knows Huntandon. Bring him here. I want him here by tomorrow.’

‘Where do I look?’ Sihtric asked.

‘How do I know? Go to the town. Talk to people in taverns.’

Sihtric, thin and sharp-faced, looked at me resentfully. ‘I’m to find someone in a tavern?’ he asked, as if the task were impossible.

‘A merchant,’ I shouted at him. ‘Find me someone who travels! And don’t get drunk. Find someone and bring them to me.’ Sihtric still looked sullen, perhaps because he was unwilling to go back into the cold outside. For a moment he looked like his father, Kjartan the Cruel, who had whelped Sihtric on a Saxon slave, but then, controlling his anger, he turned and walked away. Finan, who had noticed Sihtric’s truculence, relaxed. ‘Find me someone who knows how to get to Huntandon and to Grantaceaster and to Eleg,’ I called after Sihtric, but he gave me no answer, and walked out of the hall.

I knew Wessex well enough, and I was learning parts of Mercia. I knew the land around Bebbanburg and about Lundene, but much of the rest of Britain was a mystery. I needed someone who knew East Anglia as well as I knew Wessex. ‘We know all those places, lord,’ one of the twins said.

I ignored the comment because the twins would never have understood my fears. Ceolberht and Ceolnoth had devoted their lives to the conversion of the Danes, and they saw the proposed treaty with Eohric as proof that their god was winning the struggle against the heathen deities and they would be dubious allies for an idea that was tempting me. ‘And Eohric,’ I asked the twins, ‘is sending men to meet us at Huntandon?’

‘An escort, lord, yes. It will probably be led by Jarl Oscytel.’

I had heard of Oscytel. He was the commander of Eohric’s housecarls and thus the warrior-in-chief of East Anglia. ‘And how many men will he bring?’ I asked.

The twins shrugged. ‘Maybe a hundred?’ one said.

‘Or two?’ the other said.

‘And together we shall all go to Eleg,’ the first twin said happily.

‘Singing joyfully,’ Brother John put in, ‘like little birdies.’

So I was expected to march to East Anglia carrying half a dozen gaudy banners and accompanied by a pack of singing monks? Sigurd would like that, I thought. It was in his best interest to stop the treaty ever happening, and the best way to do that was to ambush me before I ever reached Huntandon. I was not certain that was what he planned, I was simply guessing. For all I knew, Sigurd really was about to celebrate Yule and had no intention of fighting a swift winter campaign to prevent the treaty between Wessex, Mercia and East Anglia, but no one survives long by assuming his enemy is sleeping. I gave Sigunn a light slap on the rump. ‘You’d like to spend Yule in Eleg?’ I asked her.

‘Christmas,’ one of the twins could not resist muttering the correction, then blanched at the look I gave him.

‘I’d rather have Yule here,’ Sigunn said.

‘We’re going to Eleg,’ I told her, ‘and you’re to wear the gold chains I gave you. It’s important we make an impressive display,’ I added, then looked at Willibald, ‘isn’t that right, father?’

‘You can’t take her!’ Willibald hissed at me.

‘I can’t?’

He flapped his hands. He wanted to say that the glory of Alfred’s court would be contaminated by the presence of a pagan Danish beauty, but he did not have the courage to say the words aloud. He just stared at Sigunn, who was the widow of one of the Danish warriors we had killed at Beamfleot. She was about seventeen years old, a lithe, slight girl with fair skin, pale blue eyes and hair like shining gold. She was clothed in finery; a dress of pale yellow linen edged with an intricate blue border of embroidered dragons that writhed about the hem, neckline and sleeves. Gold hung at her throat and showed at her wrists, symbols that she was privileged, the possession of a lord. She was mine, but for most of her life she had only known the company of Haesten’s men, and Haesten was on the other side of Britain, in Ceaster.

And that was why I would take Sigunn towards Eleg.

It was Yule, 898, and someone was trying to kill me.

I would kill them instead.

Sihtric had appeared strangely reluctant to obey my orders, but the man he brought me was a good choice. He was a young man, scarce more than twenty, and claimed to be a magician, which meant he was really a rogue who travelled from town to town, selling talismans and charms. He called himself Ludda, though I doubted that was his real name, and he was accompanied by a small, dark girl called Teg, who scowled at me from beneath thick black eyebrows and a bird’s nest of tangled hair. She seemed to be muttering under her breath as she looked up at me. ‘Is she casting spells?’ I asked.

‘She can, lord,’ Ludda said.

‘Is she?’

‘Oh no, lord,’ Ludda reassured me hurriedly. He, like the girl, was kneeling. He had a misleadingly open face, with wide blue eyes, a generous mouth and a quick smile. He also had a sack strapped to his back, which proved to contain his charms, most of which were elfstones or shining pebbles, along with a bundle of small leather bags, each of which contained one or two rusty scraps of iron.

‘What are those?’ I asked, nudging the bags with my foot.

‘Ah,’ he said, and gave a sheepish grin.

‘Men who cheat the folk who live on my land are punished,’ I said.

‘Cheat, lord?’ He gazed up innocently.

‘I drown them,’ I said, ‘or else I hang them. You saw the bodies outside?’ The corpses of the two men who had tried to kill me still hung from the elm.

‘It’s hard to miss them, lord,’ Ludda said.

I picked up one of the small leather bags and opened it, spilling two rusty clench-nails onto my palm. ‘You tell folk that if they sleep with this bag beneath their pillow and say a prayer then the iron will turn to silver?’

The wide blue eyes became wider. ‘Now why would I say such a thing, lord?’

‘To make yourself rich by selling iron scraps for a hundred times their real value,’ I said.

‘But if they pray hard enough, lord, then Almighty God might hear their prayer, mightn’t He? And it would be unchristian of me to deny simple folk the chance of a miracle, lord.’

‘I should hang you,’ I said.

‘Hang her instead, lord,’ Ludda said quickly, nodding towards his girl, ‘she’s Welsh.’

I had to laugh. The girl scowled, and I gave Ludda a friendly cuff around the ears. I had bought one of those miracle bags years before, believing somehow that prayer would turn rust to gold, and I had bought it from just such a rogue as Ludda. I told him to stand and had the servants bring both he and his girl ale and food. ‘If I were travelling to Huntandon from here,’ I asked him, ‘how would I go?’

He considered the question for a few heartbeats, looking to see if there was some trap in it, then shrugged. ‘It’s not a hard journey, lord. Go east to Bedanford and from there you’ll find a good road to a place called Eanulfsbirig. You cross the river there, lord, and keep on north and east to Huntandon.’

‘What river?’

‘The Use, lord,’ he hesitated. ‘The pagans have been known to row their ships up the Use, lord, as far as Eanulfsbirig. There’s a bridge there. There’s another at Huntandon, too, which you cross to get to the settlement.’

‘So I cross the river twice?’

‘Three times, lord. You’ll cross at Bedanford too, but that’s a ford, of course.’

‘So I have to cross and recross the river?’ I asked.

‘You can follow the northern bank if you wish, lord, then you don’t have to use the bridges beyond, but it’s a much longer journey, and there’s no good road on that bank.’

‘Can the river be forded anywhere else?’

‘Not downstream of Bedanford, lord, not easily, not after all this rain. It will have flooded.’

I nodded. I was toying with some silver coins, and neither Ludda nor Teg could take their eyes from the money. ‘Tell me,’ I said, ‘if you wanted to cheat the folk of Eleg, how would you travel there?’

‘Oh, through Grantaceaster,’ he said immediately. ‘It’s by far the quickest route and they’re mighty gullible folk in Grantaceaster, lord.’ He grinned.

‘And the distance from Eanulfsbirig to Huntandon?’

‘A morning’s walk, lord. No distance at all.’

I tumbled the coins in my palm. ‘And the bridges?’ I asked. ‘Are they wood or stone?’

‘Both wooden, lord,’ he said, ‘they used to be stone, but the Roman arches collapsed.’ He told me about the other settlements in the valley of the Use, and how the valley was still more Saxon than Dane, though the farms there all paid tribute to Danish lords. I let him talk, but I was thinking about the river that would have to be crossed. If Sigurd planned an ambush, I thought, then he would place it at Eanulfsbirig, knowing we must cross the bridge there. He would surely not pick Huntandon because the East Anglian forces would be waiting on the higher ground just north of the river.

Or maybe he planned nothing at all.

Maybe I saw danger where there was none.

‘Have you been to Cytringan?’ I asked Ludda.

He looked surprised, perhaps because Cytringan was very far from the other places I had asked him about. ‘Yes, lord,’ he said.

‘What’s there?’

‘The Jarl Sigurd has a feasting-hall there, lord. He uses it when he hunts in the woods there.’

‘It has a palisade?’

‘No, lord. It’s a great hall, but it’s empty much of the time.’

‘I hear Sigurd is spending Yule there.’

‘That could be, lord.’

I nodded, then put the coins back in my pouch and saw the look of disappointment on Ludda’s face. ‘I’ll pay you,’ I promised him, ‘when we come back.’

‘We?’ he asked nervously.

‘You’re coming with me, Ludda,’ I said, ‘any warrior would be glad of a magician for company, and a magician should be mighty glad of warriors for an escort.’

‘Yes, lord,’ he said, trying to sound happy.

We left next morning. The monks were all on foot, which slowed us, but I was in no great hurry. I took almost all my men, leaving only a handful to guard the hall. There were over a hundred of us, but only fifty were warriors, the rest were churchmen and servants, while Sigunn was the only woman. My men wore their finest mail. Twenty of them led us and almost all the rest formed a rearguard, while the monks, priests and servants walked or rode in the centre. Six of my men were out on the flanks, riding ahead as scouts. I expected no trouble between Buccingahamm and Bedanford, and nor did we find any. I had not visited Bedanford before, and discovered a sad, half-deserted town that had shrunk to a frightened village. There had once been a great church north of the river, and King Offa, the tyrant of Mercia, was supposedly buried there, but the Danes had burned the church and dug up the king’s grave to seek whatever treasure might have been interred with his corpse. We spent a cold, uncomfortable night in a barn, though I spent part of the darkness with the sentries, who shivered in their fur cloaks. The dawn brought mist across a wet, drab, flat land through which the river twisted in great lazy bends.

We crossed the river in the morning mist. I sent Finan and twenty men across first and he scouted the road ahead and came back to say there was no enemy in sight. ‘Enemy?’ Willibald asked me. ‘Why would you expect enemies?’

‘We’re warriors,’ I told him, ‘and we always assume there are enemies.’

He shook his head. ‘That’s Eohric’s land. It’s friendly, lord.’

The ford was running deep with bitterly cold water and I let the monks cross by using a great raft, which was tethered to the southern bank and was evidently left there for just such a purpose. Once across the river we followed the remnants of a Roman road that ran through wide waterlogged meadows. The mist melted away to leave a sunlit, cold and bright day. I was tense. Sometimes, when a wolf pack is both troublesome and elusive, we lay a trap for the beasts. A few sheep are penned in an open place while wolfhounds are concealed downwind, and then we wait in hope that the wolves will come. If they do, then horsemen and hounds are released and the pack is hunted across the wild land till it is nothing but bloody pelts and ripped meat. But we were now the sheep. We were walking north with banners aloft, proclaiming our presence, and the wolves were watching us. I was sure of it.

I took Finan, Sigunn, Ludda, Sihtric and four other men and broke away from the road, leaving Osferth with orders to keep going until he reached Eanulfsbirig, but not to cross the river there.

While we scouted. There is an art to scouting land. Normally I would have two pairs of horsemen working either side of the road. One pair, watched by another, would go forward to investigate hills or woodlands, and only when they were certain that no enemy was in sight would they signal their comrades who, in turn, would investigate the next stretch of country, but I had no time for such caution. Instead we rode hard. I had given Ludda a mail coat, a helmet and a sword, while Sigunn, who rode a horse as well as any man, was in a great cloak of otter fur.

We passed Eanulfsbirig late in the morning. We went well to the west of the small settlement and I paused in dark winter trees to stare at the glint of river, the bridge and the tiny thatched houses that leaked a small smoke into the clear sky. ‘No one there,’ Finan said after a while. I trusted his eyes better than mine. ‘At least no one to worry about.’

‘Unless they’re in the houses,’ I suggested.

‘They wouldn’t take their horses inside,’ Finan said, ‘but you want me to find out?’ I shook my head. I doubted the Danes were there. Maybe they were nowhere. My suspicion was that they watched Eanulfsbirig, though perhaps from the river’s far bank. There were trees beyond the far river meadows and an army could have been hidden in their undergrowth. I assumed that Sigurd would want us to cross the river before he attacked, so that our backs were to the stream, but he would also want to secure the bridge to prevent our escape. Or perhaps, even now, Sigurd was in his hall drinking mead and I was just imagining the danger. ‘Keep going north,’ I said, and we pushed the horses across the furrows of a field planted with winter wheat.

‘What are you expecting, lord?’ Ludda asked me.

‘For you to keep your mouth shut if we meet any Danes,’ I said.

‘I think I’d want to do that,’ he said fervently.

‘And pray we haven’t passed the bastards,’ I said. I worried that Osferth might be walking into ambush, yet my instincts told me we still had not found the enemy. If there was an enemy. It seemed to me that the bridge at Eanulfsbirig was the ideal place for Sigurd to ambush us, but as far as I could see there were no men on this side of the Use, and he would surely want them on both banks.

We rode more cautiously now, staying among trees as we probed northwards. We were beyond the route that Sigurd would expect me to take and if he did have men waiting to cut off our retreat then I expected to find them, yet the winter countryside was cold and silent and empty. I was beginning to think that my fears were misplaced, that no danger threatened us, and then, quite suddenly, there was something strange.

We had gone perhaps three miles beyond Eanulfsbirig and were among waterlogged fields and small coppiced woods with the river a half-mile to our right. A smear of smoke rose from a copse on the river’s far bank and I gave it no thought, assuming it was a cottage hidden among the trees, but Finan saw something more. ‘Lord?’ he said, and I curbed the horse and saw where he pointed. The river here made a great swirling bend to the east and, at the bend’s farthest point, beneath the bare branches of willows, were the unmistakable shapes of two ship prows. Beast-heads. I had not seen them until Finan pointed to them, and the Irishman had the sharpest eyes of any man I ever met. ‘Two ships,’ he said.

The two ships had no masts, presumably because they had been rowed beneath the bridge at Huntandon. Were they East Anglian? I stared, and could see no men, but the hulls were hidden beneath the thick growth of the river bank. Yet the rearing prows told me two ships were in a place where I had expected none. Behind me Ludda was again saying how Danish raiders had once rowed all the way to Eanulfsbirig. ‘Be quiet,’ I told him.

‘Yes, lord.’

‘Maybe they’re wintering the ships there?’ Finan suggested.

I shook my head. ‘They’d drag them out of the water for the winter. And why are they showing their beast-heads?’ We only put the dragon or wolf heads on our ships when we are in enemy waters, which suggested these two ships were not East Anglian. I twisted in the saddle to look at Ludda. ‘Remember to keep your mouth closed.’

‘Yes, lord,’ he said, though his eyes were bright. Our magician was enjoying being a warrior.

‘And the rest of you,’ I said, ‘make sure your crosses are hidden.’ Most of my men were Christians and wore a cross just as I wore a hammer. I watched as they hid their talismans. I left my hammer showing.

We kicked the horses out of the wood and crossed the meadow. We had not gone halfway before one of the prow-mounted beasts moved. The two ships were moored against the farther bank, but one of them now came across the river and three men scrambled up from its bows. They were in mail. I held my hands high to show I was not holding a weapon, and let my tired horse walk slowly towards them. ‘Who are you?’ one of them challenged me. He shouted in Danish, but what puzzled me was the cross he wore over his mail. It was a wooden cross with a small silver figure of Christ pinned to the crossbar. Maybe it was plunder? I could not imagine any of Sigurd’s men being Christians, yet the ships were surely Danish. Beyond him I could now see more men, maybe forty altogether, waiting in the two ships.

I stopped to let the man look at me. He saw a lord in expensive war gear with silver trappings on his harness, arm rings glinting in the sun, and a hammer of Thor prominent about my neck. ‘Who are you, lord?’ he asked respectfully.

‘I am Haakon Haakonson,’ I invented the name, ‘and I serve the Jarl Haesten.’ That was my story, that I was one of Haesten’s men. I had to assume that none of Sigurd’s followers would be familiar with Haesten’s troops and so would not question me too closely, and if they did then Sigunn, who had once been part of Haesten’s company, would provide the answers. That was why I had brought her.

‘Ivann Ivarrson,’ the man named himself. He was reassured that I spoke Danish, but he was still wary. ‘Your business?’ he asked, though still in a respectful voice.

‘We seek Jarl Jorven,’ I said, choosing the name of the man whose homestead we had skirted with Beortsig.

‘Jorven?’

‘He serves Jarl Sigurd,’ I said.

‘And is with him?’ Ivann asked, and did not seem in the least surprised that I sought one of Sigurd’s men so far from Sigurd’s territory, and that was my first confirmation that Sigurd was indeed nearby. He had left his lands and he was on Eohric’s country where he had no business except to prevent the treaty from being signed.

‘That’s what I was told,’ I said airily.

‘Then he’s across the river,’ Ivann said, then hesitated. ‘Lord?’ His voice was full of caution now. ‘Might I ask you a question?’

‘You can ask,’ I said grandly.

‘You mean Jorven harm, lord?’

I laughed at that. ‘I do him a service,’ I said, then twisted in the saddle and pulled the cloak-hood from Sigunn’s head. ‘She ran away from him,’ I explained, ‘and Jarl Haesten thinks he would like her back.’

Ivann’s eyes widened. Sigunn was a beauty, pale and fragile looking, and she had the sense to look frightened as Ivann and his men examined her. ‘Any man would want her back,’ Ivann said.

‘Jorven will doubtless punish the bitch,’ I said carelessly, ‘but maybe he’ll let you use her first?’ I pulled the hood back, shadowing her face again. ‘You serve Jarl Sigurd?’ I asked Ivann.

‘We serve King Eohric,’ he said.

There is a story in the Christian scriptures, though I forget who the story is about and I am not going to summon one of my wife’s priests to tell me because the priest would then see it as his duty to inform me that I am going to hell unless I grovel to his nailed god, but the story was about some man who was travelling somewhere when a great light dazzled him and he suddenly saw everything clearly. That was how I felt at that moment.

Eohric had cause to hate me. I had burned Dumnoc, a town on the East Anglian coast, and though I had had good reasons to turn that fine port into a charred ruin, Eohric would not have forgotten the fire. I had thought he might have excused the insult in his eagerness to make an alliance with Wessex and Mercia, but now I saw his treachery. He wanted me dead. So did Sigurd, though Sigurd’s reasons were far more practical. He wanted to lead the Danes south to attack Mercia and Wessex and he knew who would lead the armies that opposed him. Uhtred of Bebbanburg. I am not immodest. I had reputation. Men feared me. If I were dead then the conquest of Mercia and Wessex would be easier.

And I saw, at that moment, in that damp riverside meadow, just how the trap had been set. Eohric, playing the good Christian, had suggested I negotiate Alfred’s treaty, and that was to lure me to a place where Sigurd could ambush me. Sigurd, I had no doubt, would do the killing, and that way Eohric would be absolved of blame.

‘Lord?’ Ivann asked, puzzled by my silence, and I realised I was staring at him.

‘Sigurd has invaded Eohric’s land?’ I asked, pretending to stupidity.

‘It’s no invasion, lord,’ Ivann said, and saw me gazing across the river, though there was nothing to see on the farther bank except more fields and trees. ‘The Jarl Sigurd is hunting, lord,’ Ivann said, though slyly.

‘Is that why you left your dragon-heads on the ships?’ I asked. The beasts we place at the prows of our ships are meant to frighten enemy spirits and we usually dismount them when the boats are in friendly waters.

‘They’re not dragons,’ Ivann said, ‘they’re Christian lions. King Eohric insists we leave them on the prows.’

‘What are lions?’

He shrugged. ‘The king says they’re lions, lord,’ he said, plainly not knowing the answer.

‘Well, it’s a great day for a hunt,’ I said. ‘Why aren’t you in the chase?’

‘We’re here to bring the hunters across the river,’ he said, ‘in case the prey crosses.’

I pretended to look pleased. ‘So you can take us across?’

‘The horses can swim?’

‘They’ll have to,’ I said. It was easier to make horses swim than try to coax them on board a ship. ‘We’ll fetch the others,’ I said, turning my horse.

‘The others?’ Ivann was immediately suspicious again.

‘Her maids,’ I said, jerking a thumb at Sigunn, ‘two of my servants and some packhorses. We left them at a steading.’ I waved vaguely westward and indicated that my companions should follow me.

‘You could leave the girl here!’ Ivann suggested hopefully, but I pretended not to hear him and rode back to the trees.

‘The bastards,’ I said to Finan when we were safely hidden again.

‘Bastards?’

‘Eohric lured us here so Sigurd could slaughter us,’ I explained. ‘But Sigurd doesn’t know which bank of the river we’ll use, so those boats are there to bring his men over if we stay on this side.’ I was thinking hard. Maybe the ambush was not at Eanulfsbirig at all, but farther east, at Huntandon. Sigurd would let me cross the river and not attack until I was at the next bridge, where Eohric’s forces would provide an anvil for his hammer. ‘You,’ I pointed at Sihtric, who gave me a surly nod. ‘Take Ludda,’ I said, ‘and find Osferth. Tell him to come here with every warrior he has. The monks and priests are to stop on the road. They’re not to take a step farther, understand? And when you come back here, make damned sure those men in the boats don’t see you. Now go!’

‘What do I tell Father Willibald?’ Sihtric asked.

‘That he’s a damned fool and that I’m saving his worthless life. Now go! Hurry!’

Finan and I had dismounted and I gave Sigunn the reins of the horses. ‘Take them to the far side of the wood,’ I said, ‘and wait.’ Finan and I lay at the wood’s edge. Ivann was clearly worried about us because he stared towards our hiding place for some minutes, and then finally walked back to the moored ship.

‘So what are we doing?’ Finan asked.

‘Destroying those two ships,’ I said. I would have liked to have done more. I would have liked to ram Serpent-Breath down King Eohric’s fat throat, but we were the prey here, and I did not doubt that Sigurd and Eohric had more than enough men to crush us with ease. They would know precisely how many men I had. Doubtless Sigurd had placed scouts near Bedanford, and those men would have told him exactly how many horsemen rode towards his trap. Yet he would not want us to see those scouts. He wanted us to cross the bridge at Eanulfsbirig, and then get behind us so that we would be caught between his forces and King Eohric’s men. It would have been a raw slaughter on a winter’s day if that had happened. And if, by chance, we had taken the river’s northern bank, then Ivann’s ships would have ferried Sigurd’s men across the Use so that they could get behind us once we had passed. He had made no attempt to hide the ships. Why should he? He would assume I would see nothing threatening in the presence of two East Anglian ships on an East Anglian river. I would have marched into his trap on either bank and news of the slaughter would have reached Wessex in a few days, but Eohric would have sworn that he knew nothing of the massacre. He would blame it all on the pagan Sigurd.

Instead I would hurt Eohric and taunt Sigurd, then spend Yule at Buccingahamm.

My men came in the middle of the afternoon. The sun was already low in the west where it would be dazzling Ivann’s men. I spent some moments with Osferth, telling him what he must do and then sending him with six men to rejoin the monks and the priests. I gave him time to reach them, and then, as the sun sank even lower in the winter sky, I sprang my own trap.

I took Finan, Sigunn and seven men. Sigunn rode, while the rest of us walked, leading our horses. Ivann expected to see a small group, so that is what I showed him. He had taken his ship back across the river, but his oarsmen now rowed the long hull back to our bank. ‘He had twenty men in the ship,’ I said to Finan, thinking how many we might have to kill.

‘Twenty in each ship, lord,’ he said, ‘but there’s smoke in that copse,’ he nodded across the river, ‘so he could have more just warming themselves.’

‘They won’t cross the river to be killed,’ I said. The ground was soft underfoot, squelching with each step. There was no wind. Beyond the river a few elms still had pale yellow leaves. Fieldfares flew from the meadow there. ‘When we start killing,’ I told Sigunn, ‘you take our horses’ reins and ride back to the wood.’

She nodded. I had brought her because Ivann expected to see her and because she was beautiful and that meant he would watch her rather than look towards the trees where my horsemen now waited. I hoped they were hidden, but I dared not look back.

Ivann had clambered up the bank and tethered the ship’s bows to a poplar’s trunk. The current swept the hull downstream, which meant the men aboard could leap ashore easily enough. They were twenty of them, and we were only eight, and Ivann watched us, and I had told him we were bringing maidservants and he could not see them, but men see what they want to see and he only had eyes for Sigunn. He waited unsuspectingly. I smiled at him. ‘You serve Eohric?’ I called as we drew near.

‘I do, lord, as I told you.’

‘And he would kill Uhtred?’ I asked.

The first flicker of doubt crossed his face, but I was still smiling. ‘You know about…’ He began a question, but never finished it because I had drawn Serpent-Breath, and that was the signal for the rest of my men to spur their horses from the trees. A line of horsemen, hooves throwing water and clods of earth, horsemen holding spears and axes and shields, death’s threat in a winter afternoon, and I swung my blade at Ivann, just wanting to drive him away from the boat’s mooring line, and he stumbled to fall between the ship and the bank.

And it was over.

The bank was suddenly milling with horsemen, their breath smoky in the cold bright light, and Ivann was shouting for mercy while his crew, taken by surprise, made no attempt to draw their weapons. They had been cold, bored and off-guard, and the appearance of my men, helmed and carrying shields, their blades sharp as the frost that still lingered in shadowed places, had terrified them.

The crew of the second ship watched the first surrender, and they had no fight either. They were Eohric’s men, Christians mostly, some Saxon and some Dane, and they were not filled with the same ambition as Sigurd’s hungry warriors. Those Danish warriors, I knew, were somewhere to the east, waiting for monks and horsemen to cross the river, but these men on the ships had been reluctant participants. Their job had been to wait in case they were needed, and all of them would rather have been in the hall by the fire. When I offered them life in exchange for surrender they were pathetically grateful, and the crew of the far ship shouted that they would not fight. We rowed Ivann’s boat across the river, and so captured both vessels without killing a soul. We stripped Eohric’s men of their mail, their weapons and their helmets, and I took that plunder back across the river. We left the shivering men on the far bank, all but for Ivann, who I took prisoner, and we burned the two ships. The crews had lit a fire in the trees, a place to warm themselves, and we used those flames to destroy Eohric’s ships. I waited just long enough to see the fire catch properly, to watch the flames eat at the rowers’ benches and the smoke begin to thicken in the still air, and then we rode hard south.

The smoke was a signal, an unmistakable indication to Sigurd that his careful ambush had gone wrong. He would soon hear that from Eohric’s crews, but by now his scouts would have seen the monks and priests at Eanulfsbirig’s bridge. I had told Osferth to keep them on our bank, and to make sure they attracted attention. There was a risk, of course, that Sigurd’s Danes would attack the nearly defenceless churchmen, but I thought he would wait until he was certain I was there. And so he did.

We arrived at Eanulfsbirig to find the choir singing. Osferth had ordered them to chant, and they were standing, miserable and singing, beneath their great banners. ‘Sing louder, you bastards!’ I shouted as we cantered up to the bridge. ‘Sing like loud little birdies!’

‘Lord Uhtred!’ Father Willibald came running towards me. ‘What’s happening? What’s happening?’

‘I decided to start a war, father,’ I said cheerfully, ‘it’s so much more interesting than peace.’

He stared at me aghast. I slid from the saddle and saw that Osferth had obeyed me by piling kindling on the bridge’s wooden walkway. ‘It’s thatch,’ he told me, ‘and it’s damp.’

‘So long as it burns,’ I said. The thatch was piled across the bridge, hiding lengths of timber that made a low barricade. Downriver the smoke from the burning ships had thickened to make a great pillar in the sky. The sun was very low now, casting long shadows towards the east where Sigurd must have heard from the two ships’ crews that I was close by.

‘You started a war?’ Willibald caught up with me.

‘Shield wall!’ I shouted. ‘Right here!’ I would make a shield wall on the bridge itself. It did not matter how many men Sigurd brought now because only a few could face us in the narrow space between the heavy timber parapets.

‘We came in peace!’ Willibald protested to me. The twins, Ceolberht and Ceolnoth, were making similar protests as Finan arrayed our warriors. The bridge was wide enough for six men to stand abreast, their shields overlapping. I had four ranks of men there now, men with axes and swords and big round shields.

‘We came,’ I turned on Willibald, ‘because Eohric betrayed you. This was never about peace. This was about making war easier. Ask him,’ I gestured at Ivann. ‘Go on, talk to him and leave me in peace! And tell those monks to stop their damned caterwauling.’

Then, from the far trees, across the damp fields, the Danes appeared. A host of Danes, maybe two hundred of them, and they came on horses led by Sigurd who rode a great white stallion beneath his banner of a flying raven. He saw we were waiting for him and that to attack us he must send his men across the narrow bridge and so he curbed his horse some fifty paces away, dismounted, and walked towards us. A younger man accompanied him, yet it was Sigurd who drew attention. He was a big man, broad-shouldered and with a scarred face half hidden by his beard that was long enough to be plaited into two thick ropes that he wore twisted around his neck. His helmet reflected the reddening sunlight. He was not bothering to carry a shield or draw a sword, but he was still a Danish lord in his war-splendour. His helmet was touched with gold, a chain of gold was buried among the plaits of his beard, his arms were thick with golden rings and the throat of his sword’s scabbard, like the weapon’s hilt, glinted with more gold. The younger man had a chain of silver, and a silver ring surrounding his helmet’s crown. He had an insolent face, petulant and hostile.

I stepped over the piled thatch and went to meet the two men. ‘Lord Uhtred,’ Sigurd greeted me sarcastically.

‘Jarl Sigurd,’ I answered in the same tone.

‘I told them you weren’t a fool,’ he said. The sun was now so low above the south-western horizon that he was forced to half close his eyes to see me properly. He spat onto the grass. ‘Ten of your men against eight of mine,’ he suggested, ‘right here,’ he stamped his foot on the wet grass. He wanted to draw my men off the bridge, and he knew I would not accept.

‘Let me fight him,’ the younger man said.

I gave the young man a dismissive glance. ‘I like my enemies to be old enough to shave before I kill them,’ I said, then looked back to Sigurd. ‘You against me,’ I told him, ‘right here,’ I stamped my foot on the road’s frost-hardened mud.

He half smiled, showing yellowed teeth. ‘I would kill you, Uhtred,’ he said mildly, ‘and so rid the world of a worthless piece of rat shit, but that pleasure must wait.’ He pulled up his right sleeve to show a splint on his forearm. The splint was two slivers of wood bound tight with linen bands. I also saw a curious scar on his palm, a pair of slashes that formed a cross. Sigurd was no coward, but nor was he fool enough to fight me while the broken bone of his sword arm was mending.

‘You were fighting women again?’ I asked, nodding at the strange scar.

He stared at me. I thought my insult had gone deep, but he was evidently thinking.

‘Let me fight him!’ the young man said again.

‘Be quiet,’ Sigurd growled.

I looked at the youngster. He was perhaps eighteen or nineteen, nearly coming into his full strength, and had all the swagger of a confident young man. His mail was fine, probably Frankish, and his arms thick with the rings Danes like to wear, but I suspected the wealth had been given to him, not earned on a battlefield. ‘My son,’ Sigurd introduced him, ‘Sigurd Sigurdson.’ I nodded to him, while Sigurd the Younger just stared at me with hostile eyes. He so wanted to prove himself, but his father would have none of it. ‘My only son,’ he said.

‘It seems he has a death wish,’ I said, ‘and if he wants a fight, I’ll oblige him.’

‘It isn’t his time,’ Sigurd said, ‘I know, because I talked to Ælfadell,’ he said.

‘Ælfadell?’

‘She knows the future, Uhtred,’ he said, and his voice was serious without any trace of mockery, ‘she tells the future.’

I had heard rumours of Ælfadell, rumours as vague as smoke, rumours that drifted across Britain and said a northern sorceress could speak with the gods. Her name, that sounded so like our word for nightmare, made Christians cross themselves.

I shrugged as if I did not care about Ælfadell. ‘And what does the old woman say?’

Sigurd grimaced. ‘She says no son of Alfred will ever rule in Britain.’

‘You believe her?’ I asked even though I could see he did because he spoke simply and plainly, as if telling me the price of oxen.

‘You would believe her too,’ he said, ‘except you won’t live to meet her.’

‘She told you that?’

‘If you and I met, she says, then your leader will die.’

‘My leader?’ I pretended to be amused.

‘You,’ Sigurd said grimly.

I spat onto the grass. ‘I trust Eohric is paying you well for this wasted time.’

‘He will pay,’ Sigurd said harshly, then he turned, plucked his son’s elbow, and walked away.

I had sounded defiant, but in truth my soul was crawling with fear. Suppose Ælfadell the Enchantress had told the truth? The gods do speak to us, though rarely in plain speech. Was I doomed to die here on this river’s bank? Sigurd believed it, and he was gathering his men for an attack, which, if its result had not been foretold, he would never have attempted. No men, however battle-skilled, could hope to break a shield wall that was as strong as the one I had placed between the bridge’s sturdy parapets, but men inspired by prophecy will attempt any foolishness in the knowledge that the fates have ordained their victory. I touched Serpent-Breath’s hilt, then the hammer of Thor, and went back to the bridge. ‘Light the fire,’ I told Osferth.

It was time to burn the bridge and retreat, and Sigurd, if he was wise, would have let us go. He had lost his chance to ambush us and our position on the bridge was dauntingly formidable, but he had the prophecy of some strange woman ringing in his head and so he began haranguing his men. I heard their shouted responses, heard the blades beating on the shields and watched as Danes dismounted and formed a line. Osferth brought a flaming torch and thrust it deep into the piled thatch, and smoke thickened instantly. The Danes were howling as I elbowed my way into the centre of our shield wall.

‘He must want you dead very badly, lord,’ Finan said with some amusement.

‘He’s a fool,’ I said. I did not tell Finan that a sorceress had foretold my death. Finan might be a Christian, yet he believed in every ghost and every spirit, he believed that elves scuttled through the undergrowth and wraiths twisted in the night clouds, and if I had told him about Ælfadell the Sorceress he would have felt the same fear that shivered my heart. If Sigurd attacked I must fight because I needed to hold the bridge until the fire caught, and Osferth was right about the thatch. It was reed, not wheat straw, and it was damp, and the fire burned sullenly. It smoked, but there was no fierce heat to bite into the bridge’s thick timbers that Osferth had weakened and splintered with war axes.

Sigurd’s men were anything but sullen. They were clattering swords and axes against their heavy shields, and jostling for the honour of leading the attack. They would be half blinded by the sun and choked by the smoke, yet they were still eager. Reputation is everything and is the only thing that survives our journey to Valhalla, and the man who cut me down would gain reputation. And so, in the day’s dying light, they steeled themselves to attack us.

‘Father Willibald!’ I shouted.

‘Lord?’ a nervous voice called from the bank.

‘Bring that big banner! Have two of your monks hold it over us!’

‘Yes, lord,’ he said, sounding surprised and pleased, and a pair of monks brought the vast linen banner embroidered with its picture of Christ crucified. I told them to stand close behind my rearmost rank and had two of my men stand there with them. If there had been the slightest wind the great square of linen would have been unmanageable, but now it was blazoned above us, all green and gold and brown and blue, with a dark streak of red where the soldier’s spear had broken Christ’s body. Willibald thought I was using the magic of his religion to support my men’s swords and axes, and I let him think that.

‘It will shade their eyes, lord,’ Finan warned me, meaning that we would lose the advantage of the low sun’s blinding dazzle once the Danes advanced within the great shadow cast by the banner.

‘Only for a while,’ I said. ‘Stand firm!’ I called to the two monks holding the stout staffs that supported the great linen square. And just then, perhaps goaded by the flaunted banner, the Danes charged in a howling rush.

And as they came I remembered my very first shield wall. I had been so young, so frightened, standing on a bridge no wider than this one with Tatwine and his Mercians as we were attacked by a group of Welsh cattle thieves. They had rained arrows on us first, then charged, and on that distant bridge I had learned the seethe of battle-joy.

Now, on another bridge, I drew Wasp-Sting. My great sword was called Serpent-Breath, but her little sister was Wasp-Sting, a brief and brutal blade that could be lethal in the tight embrace of the shield wall. When men are close as lovers, when their shields are pressing on each other, when you smell their breath and see the rot in their teeth and the fleas in their beards, and when there is no room to swing a war axe or a long-sword, then Wasp-Sting could stab up from beneath. She was a gut-piercing sword, a horror.

And that was a horror-slaughter on a winter’s day. The Danes had seen our piled kindling and assumed there was nothing but reeds smoking damply on the bridge, yet beneath the reeds Osferth had stacked roof timbers and when the leading Danes tried to kick the reeds off the bridge’s roadway they kicked those heavy timbers instead and stumbled.

Some had hurled spears first. Those spears thumped into our shields, making them unwieldy, but it hardly mattered. The leading Danes tripped on the hidden timbers and the men behind pushed the falling men forward. I kicked one in the face, feeling my iron-reinforced boot crush bone. Danes were sprawling at our feet while others tried to get past their fallen comrades to reach our line, and we were killing. Two men succeeded in reaching us, despite the smoking barricade, and one of those two fell to Wasp-Sting coming up from beneath his shield rim. He had been swinging an axe that the man behind me caught on his shield and the Dane was still holding the war axe’s shaft as I saw his eyes widen, saw the snarl of his mouth turn to agony as I twisted the blade, ripping it upwards and as Cerdic, beside me, chopped his own axe down. The man with the crushed face was holding my ankle and I stabbed at him as the blood spray from Cerdic’s axe blinded me. The whimpering man at my feet tried to crawl away, but Finan stabbed his sword into his thigh, then stabbed again. A Dane had hooked his axe over the top rim of my shield and hauled it down to expose my body to a spear-thrust, but the axe rolled off the circular shield and the spear was deflected upwards and I slammed Wasp-Sting forward again, felt her bite, twisted her, and Finan was keening his mad Irish song as he added his own blade to the slaughter. ‘Keep the shields touching!’ I shouted at my men.

This is what we practised every day. If the shield wall breaks then death rules, but if the shield wall holds then it is the enemy who dies, and those first Danes came at us in a wild rush, inspired by a sorceress’s prophecy, and their assault had been defeated by the barricade that had tripped them and so made them easy prey for our blades. They had stood no chance of breaking our shield wall, they were too undisciplined, too confused, and now three of them lay dead among the scattered reeds that still burned feebly, while the smoking beams remained as a low obstacle. The survivors of those first attackers did not stay to be killed, but ran back to Sigurd’s bank where a second group readied to break us. There may have been twenty of them, big men, spear-Danes, coming to kill, and they were not wild like the first group, but deliberate. These were men who had killed in the shield wall, who knew their business, whose shields overlapped and whose weapons glittered in the dying sun. They would not rush and stumble. They would come slowly and use their long spears to break our wall and so let their swordsmen and axemen into our ranks.

‘God, fight for us!’ Willibald called as the Danes reached the bridge. The newcomers stepped carefully, not tripping, their eyes watching us. Some called insults, yet I hardly heard them. I was watching them. There was blood on my face and in the links of my mail coat. My shield was heavy with a Danish spear, and Wasp-Sting’s blade was reddened. ‘Slaughter them, O Lord!’ Willibald was praying. ‘Cut down the heathen! Smite them, Lord, in thy great mercy!’ The monks had started their chanting again. The Danes pulled dead or dying men backwards to make room for their attack. They were close now, very close, but not yet in reach of our blades. I watched their shields touch each other again, saw the spear-blades come up, and heard the word of command.

And I also heard Willibald’s shrill voice over the confusion. ‘Christ is our leader, fight for Christ, we cannot fail.’

And I laughed as the Danes came. ‘Now!’ I shouted at the two men standing with the monks. ‘Now!’

The great banner fell forward. It had taken the women of Alfred’s court months of work, months of making tiny stitches with expensively dyed wool, months of dedication and prayer and love and skill, and now the figure of Christ fell forward onto the leading Danes. The vast linen and wool panel fell like a fisherman’s net to drape itself over their first rank to blind them, and as it engulfed them I gave the order and we charged.

It is easy to pass a spear-blade if the man holding it cannot see you. I shouted at our second rank to grab the weapons and haul them clear while we killed the spearmen. Cerdic’s axe sliced down through linen, wool, iron, bone and brain. We were screaming, slaughtering, and making a new barricade of Danes. Some slashed at the banner, which shrouded and blinded them. Finan was sawing his sharp blade at the wrists holding spears, the Danes were desperately trying to escape their entanglement and we were hacking, cutting and lunging, while all around us and between us the smoke of the scattered reeds thickened. I felt heat on one ankle. The fire was at last catching. Sihtric, his teeth bared in a grimace, was chopping a long-hafted axe again and again, driving the blade down into trapped Danes.

I hurled Wasp-Sting back to our bank and snatched up a fallen axe. I have never liked fighting with an axe. The weapon is clumsy. If the first stroke fails then it takes too long to recover and an enemy can use that pause to strike, but this enemy was already beaten. The ripped banner was red with real blood now, soaked with it, and I struck the axe down again and again, beating the wide blade through mail into bone and flesh, and the smoke was choking me, and a Dane was screaming, and my men were shouting and the sun was a ball of fire in the west and the whole flat wet land was shimmering red.

We pulled back from the horror. I saw Christ’s surprisingly cheerful face being consumed by fire as the linen caught the flames. Linen burns easily, and the black stain spread across the layers of cloth. Osferth had brought still more reeds and timbers from the cottage he had pulled down and we threw them onto the small flames and watched as the fire at last found strength. Sigurd’s men had taken enough. They too pulled back and stood on the river’s far bank and watched as the fire took its grip on the bridge. We dragged four enemy corpses to our side of the bridge and we stripped them of silver chains, arm rings and enamelled belts. Sigurd had mounted his white horse and just stared at me. His sullen son, who had been kept from the fight, spat towards us. Sigurd himself said nothing.

‘Ælfadell was wrong,’ I called, but she had not been wrong. Our leader had died, maybe a second death, and the charred linen showed where he had been and where he had been consumed by fire.

I waited. It was dark before the roadway collapsed into the river, sending a sudden seethe of steam into the flame-lit air. The stone pilings that the Romans had made were scorched and still usable, but it would take hours of work to make a new roadway and, as the charred timbers floated downstream, we left.

That was a cold night.

We walked. I let the monks and priests ride because they were shivering and weary and weak, while the rest of us led the horses. Everyone wanted to rest, but I made them walk through the night, knowing that Sigurd would follow us just as soon as he could put men across the river. We walked under the bright cold stars, walked all the way past Bedanford, and only when I found a wooded hill that could serve as a place to defend did I let them stop. No fires that night. I watched the country, waiting for the Danes, but they did not come.

And next day we were home.

Three

Yule came, Yule went, and storms followed, bellowing from the North Sea to drift snow across the dead land. Father Willibald, the West Saxon priests, the Mercian twins and the singing monks were forced to stay at Buccingahamm until the weather cleared, then I gave them Cerdic and twenty spearmen to escort them safe home. They took the magic fish with them, and also Ivann, the prisoner. Alfred, if he still lived, would want to hear of Eohric’s treachery. I gave a letter for Æthelflaed with Cerdic, and on his return he promised me he had given it to one of her trusted maidservants, but he brought back no answer. ‘I wasn’t allowed to see the lady,’ Cerdic told me, ‘they’ve got her mewed up tight.’

‘Mewed up?’

‘In the palace, lord. They’re all weeping and wailing.’

‘But Alfred lived when you left?’

‘He still lived, lord, but the priests said it was only prayer keeping him alive.’

‘They would say that.’

‘And Lord Edward is betrothed.’

‘Betrothed?’

‘I went to the ceremony, lord. He’s going to marry the Lady Ælflæd.’

‘The ealdorman’s daughter?’

‘Yes, lord. She was the king’s choice.’

‘Poor Edward,’ I said, remembering Father Willibald’s gossip that Alfred’s heir had wanted to marry a girl from Cent. Ælflæd was daughter to Æthelhelm, Ealdorman of Sumorsæte, and presumably Alfred had wanted the marriage to tie Edward to the most powerful of Wessex’s noble families. I wondered what had happened to the girl from Cent.

Sigurd had gone back to his lands from where, in petulance, he sent raiders into Saxon Mercia to burn, kill, enslave and steal. It was border war, no different from the perpetual fighting between the Scots and the Northumbrians. None of his raiders touched my estates, but my fields lay south of Beornnoth’s wide lands and Sigurd concentrated his anger on Ealdorman Ælfwold, the son of the man who had died fighting beside me at Beamfleot, and he left Beornnoth’s territory unscathed, and that I thought was interesting. So in March, when stitchwort was whitening the hedgerows, I took fifteen men north to Beornnoth’s hall with a new year’s gift of cheese, ale and salted mutton. I found the old man wrapped in a fur cloak and slumped in his chair. His face was sunken, his eyes watery, and his lower lip trembled uncontrollably. He was dying. Beortsig, his son, watched me sullenly.

‘It’s time,’ I said, ‘to teach Sigurd a lesson.’

Beornnoth scowled. ‘Stop pacing around,’ he ordered me, ‘you make me feel old.’

‘You are old,’ I said.

He grimaced at that. ‘I’m like Alfred,’ he said, ‘I’m going to meet my god. I’m going to the judgement seat to find out who lives and who burns. They’ll let him into heaven, won’t they?’

‘They’ll welcome Alfred,’ I agreed, ‘and you?’

‘At least it will be warm in hell,’ he said, then feebly wiped some spittle from his beard. ‘So you want to fight Sigurd?’

‘I want to kill the bastard.’

‘You had your chance before Christmas,’ Beortsig said. I ignored him.

‘He’s waiting,’ Beornnoth said, ‘waiting for Alfred to die. He won’t attack till Alfred’s dead.’

‘He’s attacking now,’ I said.

Beornnoth shook his head. ‘Just raiding,’ he said dismissively, ‘and he’s pulled his fleet ashore at Snotengaham.’

‘Snotengaham?’ I asked, surprised. That was about as far inland as any seagoing ship could travel in Britain.

‘That tells you he’s not planning anything other than raids.’

‘It tells me he’s not planning seaborne raids,’ I said, ‘but what’s to stop him marching overland?’

‘Perhaps he will,’ Beornnoth allowed, ‘when Alfred dies. For now, he’s only stealing a few cattle.’

‘Then I want to steal a few of his cattle,’ I said.

Beortsig scowled and his father shrugged. ‘Why prod the devil when he’s dozing?’ the old man asked.

‘Ælfwold doesn’t think he’s dozing,’ I said.

Beornnoth laughed. ‘Ælfwold’s young,’ he said dismissively, ‘and he’s ambitious, he asks for trouble.’

You could divide the Saxon lords of Mercia into two camps, those who resented the West Saxon dominance of their land and those who welcomed it. Ælfwold’s father had supported Alfred, while Beornnoth harked back to earlier times when Mercia had its own king and, like others of his mind, he had refused to send troops to help me fight Haesten. He had preferred his men to be under Æthelred’s command, which meant they had garrisoned Gleawecestre against an attack that had never come. There had been bitterness between the two camps ever since, but Beornnoth was a decent enough man, or perhaps he was so close to death that he did not want to prolong old enmities. He invited us to stay for the night. ‘Tell me stories,’ he said, ‘I like stories. Tell me about Beamfleot.’ That was a generous invitation, an implicit admission that his men had been in the wrong place the previous summer.

I did not tell the whole story. Instead, in his hall, when the great fire lit the beams red and the ale had made men boisterous, I told how the elder Ælfwold had died. How he had charged with me and how we had scattered the Danish camp, and how we rampaged among the frightened men at the hill’s edge, and then how the Danish reinforcements had counter-charged and the fighting had become bitter. Men listened intently. Almost every man in the hall had stood in the shield wall, and they knew the fear of that moment. I told how my horse had been killed, and how we made a circle of our shields and fought against the screaming Danes who had so suddenly outnumbered us, and I described a death that Ælfwold would have wanted, telling how he killed his enemies, how he sent the pagan foemen to their graves, and how he defeated man after man until, at last, an axe blow split his helmet and felled him. I did not describe how he had looked at me so reproachfully, or the hatred in his dying words because he believed, falsely, that I had betrayed him. He died beside me, and at that moment I had been ready for death, knowing that the Danes must surely kill us all in that blood-reeking dawn, but then Steapa had come with the West Saxon troops and defeat had turned into sudden, unexpected triumph. Beornnoth’s followers hammered the tables in appreciation of the tale. Men like a battle-tale, which is why we employ poets to entertain us at night with tales of warriors and swords and shields and axes.

‘A good story,’ Beornnoth said.

‘Ælfwold’s death was your fault,’ a voice spoke from the hall.

For a moment I thought I had misheard, or that the comment was not spoken to me. There was silence as every man wondered the same.

‘We should never have fought!’ It was Sihtric speaking. He stood to shout at me and I saw he was drunk. ‘You never scouted the woods!’ he snarled. ‘And how many men died because you didn’t scout the woods?’ I know I looked too shocked to speak. Sihtric had been my servant, I had saved his life, I had taken him as a boy and made him a man and a warrior, I had given him gold, I had rewarded him as a lord is supposed to reward his followers, and now he was staring at me with pure loathing. Beortsig, of course, was enjoying the moment, his eyes flicking between me and Sihtric. Rypere, who was sitting on the same bench as his friend Sihtric, laid a hand on the standing man’s arm, but Sihtric shook it off. ‘How many men did you kill that day through carelessness?’ he shouted at me.

‘You’re drunk,’ I said harshly, ‘and tomorrow you will grovel to me, and perhaps I will forgive you.’

‘Lord Ælfwold would be alive if you had a scrap of sense,’ he yelled at me.

Some of my men tried to shout him down, but I shouted louder. ‘Come here, kneel to me!’

Instead, he spat towards me. The hall was in uproar now. Beornnoth’s men were encouraging Sihtric, while my men were looking horrified. ‘Give them swords!’ someone called.

Sihtric held out his hand. ‘Give me a blade!’ he shouted.

I started towards him, but Beornnoth lunged and caught my sleeve in a feeble grip. ‘Not in my hall, Lord Uhtred,’ he said, ‘not in my hall.’ I stopped, and Beornnoth struggled to his feet. He had to grip the table’s edge with one hand to stay upright, while his other hand pointed shakily towards Sihtric. ‘Take him away!’ he ordered.

‘And you stay away from me!’ I shouted at him. ‘And that whore wife of yours!’

Sihtric tried to break away from the men holding him, but they had too tight a grip and he was too drunk. They dragged him from the hall to the jeers of Beornnoth’s followers. Beortsig had enjoyed my discomfiture and was laughing. His father frowned at him, then sat heavily. ‘I am sorry,’ he grunted.

‘He’ll be sorry,’ I said vengefully.

There was no sign of Sihtric next morning and I did not ask where Beornnoth had him hidden. We readied ourselves to leave, and Beornnoth was helped out to the courtyard by two of his men. ‘I fear,’ he said, ‘that I’ll die before Alfred.’

‘I hope you live many years,’ I said dutifully.

‘There’ll be pain in Britain when Alfred goes,’ he said. ‘All the certainties will die with him.’ His voice faded. He was still embarrassed by the previous night’s argument in his hall. He had watched one of my own men insult me, and he had prevented me from giving punishment, and the incident lay between us like a burning coal. Yet both of us pretended it had not happened.

‘Alfred’s son is a good man,’ I said.

‘Edward’s young,’ Beornnoth said scornfully, ‘and who knows what he’ll be?’ He sighed. ‘Life is a story without an end,’ he said, ‘but I’d like to hear a few more verses before I die.’ He shook his head. ‘Edward won’t rule.’

I smiled. ‘He may have other ideas.’

‘The prophecy has spoken, Lord Uhtred,’ he said solemnly.

I was momentarily taken aback. ‘The prophecy?’

‘There’s a sorceress,’ he said, ‘and she sees the future.’

‘Ælfadell?’ I asked. ‘You saw her?’

‘Beortsig did,’ he said, looking at his son who, hearing Ælfadell’s name, made the sign of the cross.

‘What did she say?’ I asked the sullen Beortsig.

‘Nothing good,’ he said curtly, and would say no more.

I climbed into my saddle. I glanced around the yard for any evidence of Sihtric, but he was still concealed and so I left him there and we rode home. Finan was puzzled by Sihtric’s behaviour. ‘He must have been drunk beyond drunkenness,’ he said in wonder. I answered nothing. In many ways what Sihtric had said was right, Ælfwold had died because of my carelessness, but that did not give Sihtric the right to accuse me in open hall. ‘He’s always been a good man,’ Finan went on, still puzzled, ‘but lately he’s been surly. I don’t understand it.’

‘He’s becoming like his father,’ I said.

‘Kjartan the Cruel?’

‘I should never have saved Sihtric’s life.’

Finan nodded. ‘You want me to arrange his death?’

‘No,’ I said firmly, ‘only one man kills him, and that’s me. You understand? He’s mine, and until I rip his guts open I never want to hear his name again.’

Once home I expelled Ealhswith, Sihtric’s wife, and her two sons from my hall. There were tears and pleas from her friends, but I was unmoved. She went.

And next day I rode to lay my trap for Sigurd.

There was a tremulousness to those days. All Britain waited to hear of Alfred’s death, in the certain knowledge that his passing would scatter the runesticks. A new pattern would foretell a new fortune for Britain, but what that fortune was, no one knew, unless the nightmare sorceress did have the answers. In Wessex they would want another strong king to protect them, in Mercia some would want the same, while other Mercians would want their own king back, while everywhere to the north, where the Danes held the land, they dreamed of conquering Wessex. Yet all that spring and summer Alfred lived and men waited and dreamed and the new crops grew and I took forty-six men east and north to where Haesten had found his lair.

I would have liked three hundred men. I had been told many years before that one day I would lead armies across Britain, but to have an army a man must have land and the land I held was only large enough to keep a single crew of men fed and armed. I collected food-rents and I took customs dues from the merchants who used the Roman road that passed Æthelflaed’s estate, but that was scarcely a sufficient income and I could only lead forty-six men to Ceaster.

That was a bleak place. To the west were the Welsh, while to the east and north were Danish lords who recognised no man as king unless it were themselves. The Romans had built a fort at Ceaster, and it was in the remnants of that stronghold that Haesten had taken refuge. There had been a time when Haesten’s name struck fear into every Saxon, but he was a shadow now, reduced to fewer than two hundred men, and even they were of dubious loyalty. He had begun the winter with over three hundred followers, but men expect their lord to provide more than food and ale. They want silver, they want gold, they want slaves, and so Haesten’s men had trickled away in search of other lords. They went to Sigurd or to Cnut, to the men who were gold-givers.

Ceaster lay on the wild edge of Mercia and I found Æthelred’s troops some three miles to the south of Haesten’s fort. There were just over one hundred and fifty men whose job was to watch Haesten and keep him weak by harassing his foragers. They were commanded by a youngster called Merewalh, who seemed pleased by my arrival. ‘Have you come to kill the sorry bastard, lord?’ he asked me.

‘Only to look at him,’ I said.

In truth I was there to be looked at, though I dared not tell anyone my whole purpose. I wanted the Danes to know I was at Ceaster, and so I paraded my men south of the old Roman fort and flaunted my wolf’s head banner. I rode in my best mail, polished to a high shine by my servant Oswi, and I went close enough to the old walls for one of Haesten’s men to try his luck with a hunting arrow. I saw the feather flickering in the air and watched as the small shaft thumped into the turf a few paces from my horse’s hooves.

‘He can’t defend all those walls,’ Merewalh said wistfully.

He was right. The Roman fort at Ceaster was a vast place, almost a town in itself, and Haesten’s few men could never garrison the whole stretch of its decrepit ramparts. Merewalh and I might have combined our forces and attacked at night and maybe we would have found an undefended stretch of wall and then fought a bitter battle in the streets, but our numbers were too equal with Haesten’s to risk such an assault. We would have lost men in defeating an enemy who was already defeated, and so I contented myself with letting Haesten know I had come to taunt him. He had to hate me. Just a year before he had been the greatest power among all the Northmen, now he was cowering like a beaten fox in his den and I had reduced him to that plight. But he was a cunning fox and I knew he would be thinking how he might regain his power.

The old fort was built inside a great curve of the River Dee. Immediately outside its southern walls were the ruins of an immense stone building that had once been an arena where, so Merewalh’s priest told me, Christians had been fed to wild beasts. Some things are just too good to be true and so I was not sure I believed him. The remnants of the arena would have made a splendid stronghold for a force as small as Haesten’s, but instead he had chosen to concentrate his men at the northern end of the fort where the river lay closest to the walls. He had two small ships there, nothing more than old trading boats, which, because they were obviously leaky, were half pulled onto the bank. If he were attacked and cut off from the bridge then those ships were his escape across the Dee and into the wild lands beyond.

Merewalh was puzzled by my behaviour. ‘Are you trying to tempt him into a fight?’ he asked me the third day that I rode close to the old ramparts.

‘He won’t want a fight,’ I said, ‘but I want him to come out and meet us. And he will, he won’t be able to resist.’ I had paused on the Roman road that ran straight as a spear shaft to the double-arched gate that led into the fort. That gate was now blocked with vast baulks of timber. ‘You know I saved his life once?’

‘I didn’t know.’

‘There are times,’ I said, ‘when I think I’m a fool. I should have killed him the first time I saw him.’

‘Kill him now, lord,’ Merewalh suggested, because Haesten had just appeared from the fort’s western gate and now came slowly towards us. He had three men with him, all mounted. They paused at the fort’s south-western corner, between the walls and the ruined arena, then Haesten held out both hands to show he only wanted to talk. I turned my horse and spurred towards him, but took care to stop well out of bowshot of the ramparts. I took only Merewalh with me, leaving the rest of our troops to watch from a distance.

Haesten came grinning as though this meeting was a rare delight. He had not changed much, except he now had a beard that was grey, though his thick hair was still fair. His face was misleadingly open, full of charm, with amused bright eyes. He wore a dozen arm rings and, though the spring day was warm, a cloak of sealskin. Haesten always liked to look prosperous. Men will not follow a poor lord, let alone an ungenerous one, and so long as he had hopes of recovering his wealth he had to appear confident. He also appeared overjoyed to meet me. ‘Lord Uhtred!’ he exclaimed.

‘Jarl Haesten,’ I said, making the title as sour as I could, ‘weren’t you supposed to be King of Wessex by now?’

‘The pleasure of that throne is delayed,’ he said, ‘but for now let me welcome you to my present kingdom.’

I laughed at that, as he had meant me to. ‘Your kingdom?’

He swept an arm around the bleak low valley of the Dee. ‘No other man calls himself king here, so why not me?’

‘This is Lord Æthelred’s land,’ I said.

‘And Lord Æthelred is so generous with his possessions,’ Haesten said, ‘even, I hear, with his wife’s favours.’

Merewalh stirred beside me and I held up a cautionary hand. ‘The Jarl Haesten jests,’ I said.

‘Of course I jest,’ Haesten said, not smiling.

‘This is Merewalh,’ I said, introducing my one companion, ‘and he serves the Lord Æthelred. He might find favour with my cousin by killing you.’

‘He’d gain a great deal more favour by killing you,’ Haesten said shrewdly.

‘True,’ I allowed, and looked at Merewalh. ‘You want to kill me?’

‘Lord!’ he said, shocked.

‘My Lord Æthelred,’ I said to Haesten, ‘wishes you to leave his land. He has enough dung without you.’

‘Lord Æthelred,’ Haesten said, ‘is most welcome to come and drive me away.’

This was all as meaningless as it was expected. Haesten had not left the fort to listen to a string of threats, but because he wanted to know what my presence meant. ‘Perhaps,’ I said, ‘the Lord Æthelred has sent me to drive you away?’

‘And when did you last do his bidding?’ Haesten asked.

‘Perhaps his wife wants you driven away,’ I said.

‘She’d rather I were dead, I think.’

‘Also true,’ I said.

Haesten smiled. ‘You came, Lord Uhtred, with one crew of men. We fear you, of course, because who doesn’t fear Uhtred of Bebbanburg?’ He bowed in his saddle as he uttered that piece of flattery. ‘But one crew of men is not sufficient to give the Lady Æthelflaed her wish.’ He waited for my response, but I said nothing. ‘Shall I tell you what mystifies me?’ he asked.

‘Tell me,’ I said.

‘For years now, Lord Uhtred, you have done Alfred’s work. You have killed his enemies, led his armies, made his kingdom safe, yet in return for all that service you have only one crew of warriors. Other men have land, they have great halls, they have treasure piled in strongrooms, their women’s necks are ringed with gold and they can lead hundreds of oath-men into battle, yet the man who made them safe goes unrewarded. Why do you stay loyal to such an ungenerous lord?’

‘I saved your life,’ I said, ‘and you are mystified by ingratitude?’

He laughed delightedly at that. ‘He starves you because he fears you. Have they made a Christian of you yet?’

‘No.’

‘Then join me. You and I, Lord Uhtred. We’ll tip Æthelred out of his hall and divide Mercia between us.’

‘I’ll offer you land in Mercia,’ I said.

He smiled. ‘An estate two paces long and one pace wide?’ he asked.

‘And all of two paces deep,’ I said.

‘I am a hard man to kill,’ he said. ‘The gods apparently love me, as they love you. I hear Sigurd has cursed you since Yule.’

‘What else do you hear?’

‘That the sun rises and sets.’

‘Watch it well,’ I said, ‘because you may not see many more such risings and settings.’ I suddenly kicked my horse hard forward, forcing Haesten’s stallion to back away. ‘Listen,’ I said, making my voice harsh, ‘you have two weeks to leave this place. Do you understand me, you ungrateful dog-turd? If you’re still here in fourteen days I’ll do to you what I did to your men at Beamfleot.’ I looked at his two companions, then back to Haesten. ‘Two weeks,’ I said, ‘and then the West Saxon troops come and I’ll turn your skull into a drinking pot.’

I lied of course, at least about the West Saxon troops coming, but Haesten knew it had been those troops who gave me the numbers to gain the victory at Beamfleot and so the lie was believable. He began to say something, but I turned and spurred away, beckoning Merewalh to follow me. ‘I’m leaving you Finan and twenty men,’ I told the Mercian when we were well out of Haesten’s earshot, ‘and before the two weeks are up you must expect an attack.’

‘From Haesten?’ Merewalh asked, sounding dubious.

‘No, from Sigurd. He’ll bring at least three hundred men. Haesten needs help, and he’s going to look for favour with Sigurd by sending a message that I’m here, and Sigurd will come because he wants me dead.’ Of course I could not be certain that any of that would happen, but I did not think Sigurd could resist the bait I was dangling. ‘When he comes,’ I went on, ‘you’re going to retreat. Go into the woods, keep ahead of him, and trust Finan. Let Sigurd waste his men on empty land. Don’t even try to fight him, just stay ahead of him.’

Merewalh did not argue. Instead, after a few moments’ thought, he looked at me quizzically. ‘Lord,’ he asked, ‘why hasn’t Alfred rewarded you?’

‘Because he doesn’t trust me,’ I said, and my honesty shocked Merewalh, who stared at me wide-eyed, ‘and if you have any loyalty to your lord,’ I went on, ‘you will tell him that Haesten offered me an alliance.’

‘And I shall tell him you refused it.’

‘You can tell him I was tempted,’ I said, shocking him again. I spurred on.

Sigurd and Eohric had laid an elaborate trap for me, one that had very nearly worked, and now I would lay a trap for Sigurd. I could not hope to kill him, not yet, but I wanted him to regret his attempt to kill me. But first I wanted to discover the future. It was time to go north.

I gave Cerdic my good mail, my helmet, my cloak and my horse. Cerdic was not as tall as I was, but he was big enough, and, dressed in my finery and with the cheek-plates of my helmet hiding his face, he would resemble me. I gave him my shield, painted with the wolf’s head, and told him to show himself every day. ‘Don’t go too close to his walls,’ I said, ‘just let him think I’m watching him.’

I left my wolf’s head banner with Finan and next day, with twenty-six men, I rode east.

We rode before dawn so that none of Haesten’s scouts would see us depart, and we rode into the rising sun. Once there was light in the sky we kept to wooded places, but always going east. Ludda was still with us. He was a trickster, a rogue, and I liked him. Best of all he had an extraordinary knowledge of Britain. ‘I’m always moving, lord,’ he explained to me, ‘that’s why I know my way.’

‘Always moving?’

‘If you sell a man two rusted iron nails for a lump of silver, then you don’t want to be in arm’s reach of him next morning, lord, do you? You move on, lord.’

I laughed. Ludda was our guide and he led us east on a Roman road until we saw a settlement where smoke rose into the sky and then we made a wide loop southwards to avoid being seen. There was no road beyond the settlement, only cattle paths that led up into the hills.

‘Where’s he taking us?’ Osferth asked me.

‘Buchestanes,’ I said.

‘What’s there?’

‘The land belongs to Jarl Cnut,’ I said, ‘and you won’t like what’s there so I’m not going to tell you.’ I would rather have had Finan for company, but I trusted the Irishman to keep Cerdic and Merewalh out of trouble. I liked Osferth well enough, but there were times when his caution was a hindrance rather than an asset. If I had left Osferth at Ceaster he would have retreated from Sigurd’s approach too hastily. He would have kept Merewalh far from trouble by withdrawing deep into the border forests between Mercia and Wales, and Sigurd might well have abandoned the hunt. I needed Sigurd to be taunted and tempted, and I trusted Finan to do that well.

It began to rain. Not a gentle summer rain, but a torrential downpour that was carried on a sharp east wind. It made our journey slow, miserable and safer. Safer because few men wanted to be out in such weather. When we did meet strangers I claimed to be a lord of Cumbraland travelling to pay my respects to the Jarl Sigurd. Cumbraland was a wild place where little lords squabbled. I had spent time there once and knew enough to answer any questions, but no one we met cared enough to ask them.

So we climbed into the hills and after three days came to Buchestanes. It lay in a hollow of the hills and was a town of some size built about a cluster of Roman buildings that retained their stone walls, though their roofs had long been replaced by thatch. There was no defensive palisade, but we were met at the town’s edge by three men in mail who came from a hovel to confront us. ‘You must pay to enter the town,’ one said.

‘Who are you?’ a second asked.

‘Kjartan,’ I said. That was the name I was using in Buchestanes, the name of Sihtric’s evil father, a name from my past.

‘Where are you from?’ the man asked. He carried a long spear with a rusted head.

‘Cumbraland,’ I said.

They all sneered at that. ‘From Cumbraland, eh?’ the first man said, ‘well you can’t pay in sheep dung here.’ He laughed, amused at his own joke.

‘Who do you serve?’ I asked him.

‘The Jarl Cnut Ranulfson,’ the second man answered, ‘and even in Cumbraland you must have heard of him.’

‘He’s famous,’ I said, pretending to be awed, then paid them with the silver shards of a chopped-up arm ring. I haggled with them first, but not too strongly because I wanted to visit this town without arousing suspicion, and so I paid silver I could scarce afford and we were allowed into the muddy streets. We found shelter in a spacious farm on the eastern side. The owner was a widow who had long abandoned raising sheep and instead made a livelihood from travellers seeking the hot springs that were reputed to have healing powers, though now, she told us, they were guarded by monks who demanded silver before anyone could enter the old Roman bathhouse. ‘Monks?’ I asked her, ‘I thought this was Cnut Ranulfson’s land?’

‘Why would he care?’ she demanded. ‘So long as he gets his silver he doesn’t mind what god they worship.’ She was a Saxon, as were most of the folk in the small town, but she spoke of Cnut with evident respect. No wonder. He was rich, he was dangerous and he was said to be the finest sword fighter in all Britain. His sword was said to be the longest and most lethal blade in the land, which gave him the name Cnut Longsword, but Cnut was also a fervent ally of Sigurd. If Cnut Ranulfson knew that I was on his land then Buchestanes would be swarming with Danes seeking my life. ‘So are you here for the hot springs?’ the widow asked me.

‘I seek the sorceress,’ I said.

She made the sign of the cross. ‘God preserve us,’ she said.

‘And to see her,’ I asked, ‘what do I do?’

‘Pay the monks, of course.’

Christians are so strange. They claim the pagan gods have no power and that the old magic is as fraudulent as Ludda’s bags of iron, yet when they are ill, or when their harvest fails, or when they want children, they will go to the galdricge, the sorceress, and every district has one. A priest will preach against such women, declaring them heretic and evil, yet a day later he will pay silver to a galdricge to hear his future or have the warts removed from his face. The monks of Buchestanes were no different. They guarded the Roman bathhouse, they chanted in their chapel and they took silver and gold to arrange a meeting with the aglæcwif. An aglæcwif is a she-monster, and that is how I thought of Ælfadell. I feared her and I wanted to hear her, and so I sent Ludda and Rypere to make the arrangements, and they returned saying the enchantress demanded gold. Not silver, gold.

I had brought money on this journey, almost all the money I had left in the world. I had been forced to take the gold chains from Sigunn, and I used two of those to pay the monks, swearing that one day I would return to retrieve the precious links. Then, at dusk on our second day in Buchestanes, I walked south and west to a hill that loomed above the town and was dominated by one of the old people’s graves, a green mound on a drenched hill. Those graves have vengeful ghosts and, as I followed the path into a wood of ash, beech and elm, I felt a chill. I had been instructed to go alone and told that if I disobeyed then the sorceress would not appear to me, but now I fervently wished I had a companion to watch my back. I stopped, hearing nothing except the sigh of wind in the leaves and the drip of water and the rush of a nearby stream. The widow had told me that some men were forced to wait days to consult Ælfadell, and some, she said, paid their silver or gold, came to the wood, and found nothing. ‘She can vanish into air,’ the widow told me, making the sign of the cross. Once, she said, Cnut himself had come and Ælfadell had refused to appear.

‘And Jarl Sigurd?’ I had asked her. ‘He came too?’

‘He came last year,’ she said, ‘and he was generous. A Saxon lord was with him.’

‘Who?’

‘How would I know? They didn’t rest their bones in my house. They stayed with the monks.’

‘Tell me what you remember,’ I asked her.

‘He was young,’ she said, ‘he had long hair like you, but he was still a Saxon.’ Most Saxons cut their hair, while the Danes prefer to let it grow long. ‘The monks called him the Saxon, lord,’ the widow went on, ‘but who he was? I don’t know.’

‘And he was a lord?’

‘He dressed like one, lord.’

I was dressed in mail and leather. I heard nothing dangerous in the wood and so went onward, stooping beneath wet leaves until I saw that the path ended at a limestone crag that was slashed by a great crevice. Water dripped down the cliff face, and the stream gushed from the crevice’s base, churning itself white about fallen rocks before sluicing into the woods. I looked about and saw no one, heard no one. It seemed to me that no birds sang, though that was surely my apprehension. The stream’s noise was loud. I could see footprints in the shingle and stone that edged the stream, though none looked fresh, and so I took a deep breath, clambered over the fallen stones and stepped into the cave’s slit-like mouth that was edged by ferns.

I remember the fear of that cave, a greater fear than I had felt at Cynuit when Ubba’s men had made the shield wall and come to kill us. I touched Thor’s hammer that hung at my neck and I said a prayer to Hoder, the son of Odin and blind god of the night, and then I groped my way forward, ducking under a rock arch beyond which the grey evening light faded fast. I let my eyes grow used to the gloom and moved on, trying to stay above the stream that scoured through the bank of pebbles and sand that grated beneath my boots. I inched my way forward through a narrow, low passage. It grew colder. I wore a helmet and it touched rock more than once. I gripped the hammer that hung about my neck. This cave was surely one of the entrances to the netherworld, to where Yggdrasil has its roots and the three fates decide our destiny. It was a place for dwarves and elves, for the shadow creatures who haunt our lives and mock our hopes. I was frightened.

I slipped on sand and blundered forward and sensed that the passage had ended and that I was now in a great echoing space. I saw a glimmer of light and wondered if my eyes played tricks. I touched the hammer again, and then put my hand on the hilt of Serpent-Breath. I was standing still, hearing the drip of water and the rush of the stream, and listening for the sound of a person. I was gripping my sword’s hilt now, praying to blind Hoder to guide me in the blind darkness.

And then there was light.

Sudden light. It was only a bundle of rushlights, but they had been concealed behind screens that were abruptly lifted and their small, smoky flames seemed dazzlingly bright in the utter darkness.

The rushlights were standing on a rock that had a smooth surface like a table. A knife, a cup and a bowl lay beside the lights, which lit a chamber as high as any hall. The cave’s roof hung with pale stone that looked as if it had been frozen in mid-flow. Liquid stone, touched with blue and grey, and all that I saw in an instant, then I stared at the creature who watched me from behind the rock table. She was a dark cloak in the darkness, a shape in the shadows, a bent thing, the aglæcwif, but as my eyes became used to the light I saw that she was a tiny thing, frail as a bird, old as time and with a face so dark and deep-lined that it looked like leather. Her black woollen cloak was filthy and its hood half covered her hair that was grey-streaked black. She was ugliness in human guise, the galdricge, the aglæcwif, Ælfadell.

I did not move and she did not speak. She just gazed at me, unblinkingly, and I felt the fear crawl in me, and then she beckoned to me with one claw-like hand and touched the empty bowl. ‘Fill it,’ she said. Her voice was like wind on gravel.

‘Fill it?’

‘Gold,’ she said, ‘or silver. But fill it.’

‘You want more?’ I asked angrily.

‘You want everything, Kjartan of Cumbraland,’ she said, and she had paused for the space of an eye-blink before saying that name, as if she suspected it was false, ‘so yes. I want more.’

I almost refused, but I confess I was frightened of her power, and so I took all the silver from my pouch, fifteen coins, and put them in the wooden bowl. She smirked as the coins clinked. ‘What do you want to know?’ she asked.

‘Everything.’

‘There will be a harvest,’ she said dismissively, ‘and then winter, and after winter the time of sowing, and then another harvest and then another winter until time ends, and men will be born and men will die, and that is everything.’

‘Then tell me what I want to know,’ I said.

She hesitated, then gave an almost imperceptible nod. ‘Put your hand on the rock,’ she said, but when I put my left hand flat on the cold stone she shook her head. ‘Your sword hand,’ she said and I obediently laid my right hand there instead. ‘Turn it over,’ she snarled, and I turned the hand palm upwards. She picked up the knife, watching my eyes. She was half smiling, daring me to withdraw my hand, and when I did not move she suddenly scored the knife across my palm. She scored it once from the ball of my thumb to the base of my small finger, then did it again, crosswise, and I watched the fresh blood well from the two cuts and I remembered the crosswise scar on Sigurd’s hand. ‘Now,’ she said, putting the knife down, ‘slap the stone hard.’ She pointed with a finger to the smooth centre of the stone. ‘Slap it there.’

I slapped the stone hard and the blow left a spatter of blood drops radiating from a crude daub of a hand-print defaced by the red cross.

‘Now be silent,’ Ælfadell said, and shrugged off her cloak.

She was naked. Thin, pale, ugly, old, shrivelled and naked. Her breasts were flaps of skin, her skin wrinkled and spotted, and her arms scrawny. She reached up and released her hair that had been twisted at the nape of her neck so that the grey-black strands fell about her shoulders in the fashion of a young unmarried girl. She was a parody of a woman, she was the galdricge, and I shuddered to look at her. She seemed unaware of my gaze, but stared at the blood, which gleamed under the flames. She touched the blood with a finger as crooked as any claw, smearing it across the smooth stone. ‘Who are you?’ she asked, and there seemed genuine curiosity in her voice.

‘You know who I am,’ I said.

‘Kjartan of Cumbraland,’ she said. She made a noise in her throat that might have been laughter, then moved the bloodstained claw to touch the cup. ‘Drink that, Kjartan of Cumbraland,’ she said, saying the name with sour mockery, ‘drink all of it!’

I lifted the cup and drank. It tasted foul. Bitter and rank. It was throat-curdling and I drank it all.

And Ælfadell laughed.

I remember little of that night, and much of what I do remember I wish I could forget.

I woke naked, cold and tied. My ankles and my wrists were strapped with leather thongs that had been knotted together to drag my hands down to my ankles. A faint grey light seeped through the crevice and tunnel to illuminate the big cave. The floor was pale with bat shit and my skin was smeared with my own vomit. Ælfadell, crooked and dark in her black cloak, was crouched over my mail, my two swords, my helmet, my hammer and my clothes. ‘You’re awake, Uhtred of Bebbanburg,’ she said. She pawed through my possessions. ‘And you are thinking,’ she went on, ‘that I would be easy to kill.’

‘I’m thinking you would be easy to kill, woman,’ I said. My voice was a dry-mouthed croak. I pulled at the leather bindings, but only managed to hurt my wrists.

‘I can tie knots, Uhtred of Bebbanburg,’ she said. She picked up the hammer of Thor and swung it on its leather thong. ‘A cheap amulet for a great lord.’ She cackled. She was bent, stooped and disgusting. Her claw-like hand tugged Serpent-Breath from its scabbard and she carried the blade towards me. ‘I should kill you, Uhtred of Bebbanburg,’ she said. She scarcely had the strength to lift the great blade, which she rested on one of my bent knees.

‘Why don’t you?’ I asked.

She peered at me. ‘Are you wiser now?’ she asked. I said nothing. ‘You came for wisdom,’ she went on, ‘so did you find it?’

Somewhere far beyond the cave a cock crowed. I tugged at the bonds again, and again could not loosen them. ‘Cut the bindings,’ I said.

She laughed at that. ‘I am not a fool, Uhtred of Bebbanburg.’

‘You haven’t killed me,’ I said, ‘and that might be foolish.’

‘True,’ she agreed. She slid the sword forward so its tip touched my breast. ‘Did you find wisdom in your night, Uhtred?’ she asked, then smiled with her rotted teeth. ‘Your night of pleasure?’ I tried to throw the sword off by rolling on my side, but she kept it on my skin, drawing blood with the tip. She was amused. I was on my side now and she rested the blade on my hip. ‘You moaned in the dark, Uhtred. You moaned with pleasure, or have you forgotten?’

I remembered the girl coming to me in the night. A dark girl, black-haired, slender and beautiful, lithe as a willow-wand, a girl who had smiled as she rode above me, her light hands touching my face and chest, a girl who had bent herself backwards as my hands caressed her breasts. I remembered her thighs pressing on my hips, the touch of her fingers on my cheeks. ‘I remember a dream,’ I said surlily.

Ælfadell rocked on her heels, rocked back and forth in an obscene reminder of what the dark girl had done in the night. The flat of the sword slid on my hip bone. ‘It was no dream,’ she said, mocking me.

I wanted to kill her then, and she knew it and the knowledge made her laugh. ‘Others have tried to kill me,’ she said. ‘The priests came for me once. There was a score of them, led by the old abbot with a flaming torch. They were praying aloud, calling me a heathen witch, and their bones are still rotting in the valley. I have sons, you see. It is good for a mother to have sons because there is no love like a mother has for her sons. Have you forgotten that love, Uhtred of Bebbanburg?’

‘Another dream,’ I said.

‘No dream,’ Ælfadell said, and I remembered my mother cradling me in the night, rocking me, giving me her breast to suck, and I could remember the pleasure of that moment, and the tears when I knew it had to be a dream for my mother had died giving birth to me and I had never known her.

Ælfadell smiled. ‘From now on, Uhtred of Bebbanburg,’ she said, ‘I shall think of you as a son.’ I wanted to kill her again and she knew it and she mocked me with laughter. ‘Last night,’ she said, ‘the goddess came to you. She showed you all your life, and all your future, and all the wide world of men and what will happen to it. Have you forgotten already?’

‘The goddess came?’ I asked. I remembered talking incessantly, and I remembered the sadness when my mother left me, and I remembered the dark girl saddling me, and I remembered feeling sick and drunk, and I remembered a dream in which I had flown above the world by riding the winds as a long-hulled ship rides the waves of the sea, but I remembered no goddess. ‘Which goddess?’ I asked.

‘Erce, of course,’ she said as though the question were foolish. ‘You know of Erce? She knows you.’

Erce was one of the ancient goddesses who had been in Britain when our people came from across the sea. I knew she was worshipped still in country places, an earth-mother, a giver of life, a goddess. ‘I know of Erce,’ I said.

‘You know there are gods,’ Ælfadell said, ‘and in that you are not so foolish. The Christians think one god will serve all men and women, and how can that be? Could one shepherd protect every sheep in all the world?’

‘The old abbot tried to kill you?’ I asked. I had twisted onto my right side so my tied hands were hidden from her and I was grinding the leather bonds against a ridge of stone, hoping they would part. I could only make the smallest of movements in case she noticed, and I had to keep her talking. ‘The old abbot tried to kill you?’ I asked again. ‘Yet now the monks protect you?’

‘The new abbot is no fool,’ she said. ‘He knows Jarl Cnut would flay him alive if he touched me, so instead he serves me.’

‘He doesn’t mind you’re not a Christian?’ I asked.

‘He likes the money Erce brings him,’ she sneered, ‘and he knows Erce lives in this cave and that she protects me. And now Erce waits for your answer. Are you wiser?’

I said nothing again, puzzled by the question, and it angered her.

‘Do I mumble?’ she snarled. ‘Has stupidity furred your ears and stuffed your brain with pus?’

‘I remember nothing,’ I said untruthfully.

That made her laugh. She squatted on her haunches, the sword still resting on my hip, and started to rock backwards and forwards again. ‘Seven kings will die, Uhtred of Bebbanburg, seven kings and the women you love. That is your fate. And Alfred’s son will not rule and Wessex will die and the Saxon will kill what he loves and the Danes will gain everything, and all will change and all will be the same as ever it was and ever will be. There, you see, you are wiser.’

‘Who is the Saxon?’ I asked. I was still dragging my bound wrists on the stone, but nothing seemed to be fraying or loosening.

‘The Saxon is the king who will destroy what he rules. Erce knows all, Erce sees all.’

A scuffle of feet in the entrance passage gave me a moment’s hope, but instead of my men appearing it was three monks who ducked into the cave’s gloom. Their leader was an elderly man with wild white hair and sunken cheeks, who stared at me, then at Ælfadell, then back to me. ‘It’s really him?’ he asked.

‘It’s Uhtred of Bebbanburg, it’s my son,’ Ælfadell said, then laughed.

‘Good God,’ the monk said. For a moment he looked frightened, and that was why I still lived. Both Ælfadell and the monk knew I was Cnut’s enemy, but they did not know what Cnut wanted of me and they feared that to kill me would offend their lord. The white-haired monk came towards me, gingerly, frightened of what I might do. ‘Are you Uhtred?’ he asked.

‘I am Kjartan of Cumbraland,’ I said.

Ælfadell cackled. ‘He is Uhtred,’ she said. ‘Erce’s drink does not lie. He babbled like a baby in the night.’

The monk was frightened of me because my life and death were beyond his comprehension. ‘Why did you come here?’ he asked.

‘To discover the future,’ I said. I could feel blood between my hands. My rubbing had opened the scabs on the cuts Ælfadell had inflicted on my palm.

‘He learned the future,’ Ælfadell said, ‘the future of dead kings.’

‘Did it tell of my death?’ I asked her, and for the first time saw doubt on that wrinkled-hag face.

‘We must send to Jarl Cnut,’ the monk said.

‘Kill him,’ one of the younger monks said. He was a tall, strongly-built man with a hard long face, a hook of a nose and cruel unforgiving eyes. ‘The jarl will want him dead.’

The older monk was uncertain. ‘We don’t know the jarl’s will, Brother Hearberht.’

‘Kill him! He’ll reward you. Reward us all.’ Brother Hearberht was right, but the gods had filled the others with doubt.

‘The jarl must decide,’ the older monk said.

‘It will take three days to fetch an answer,’ Hearberht said caustically, ‘and what do you do with him for three days? He has his men in the town. Too many men.’

‘We take him to the jarl?’ the older monk suggested. He was desperate for an answer, flailing at any solution that might spare him from making a decision.

‘For the sake of God,’ Hearberht snapped. He strode to the pile of my possessions, stooped, and straightened with Wasp-Sting in his hand. The short blade caught the wan light. ‘What do you do with a cornered wolf?’ he demanded, and came towards me.

And I used all my strength, all that strength that years of sword and shield practice had put into my bones and muscle, the years of war and readying for war, and I thrust my bent legs and pulled my arms, and I felt the bonds loosening and I was rolling back, throwing the blade off my hip, and I started to shout, a great war shout of a warrior and reached for Serpent-Breath’s hilt.

Ælfadell tried to pull the sword away, but she was old and slow, and I was bellowing to fill the cave with echoes and I seized the hilt and swung the blade to drive her back, and Hearberht checked as I rose to my feet. I half stumbled, the bonds still wrapped about my ankles, and Hearberht saw his opening and came in fast, the short blade held low ready to rip up into my naked belly and I swatted it aside and fell on him. He went backwards and I stood again and he hacked the blade at my bare legs, but I parried him and then stabbed down with Serpent-Breath, my sword, my lover, my blade, my war companion, and she gutted that monk like a fish under a razor-edged knife, and his blood spread on his black robe and turned the bat shit black, and I went on ripping her, unaware that I was still shouting to fill the cave with rage.

Hearberht was squealing and shaking and dying, and the other two monks were fleeing. I ripped the bonds off my ankles and pursued them. Serpent-Breath’s hilt was slippery with my blood, and she was hungry.

I caught them in the woods, not fifty paces from the cave’s mouth, and I felled the younger monk with a blow to the back of his head, then caught the older by his robe. I turned him to face me and smelt the fear that fouled his robe. ‘I am Uhtred of Bebbanburg,’ I said, ‘and who are you?’

‘Abbot Deorlaf, lord,’ he said, falling to his knees and holding his clasped hands towards me, and I held him by the throat and buried Serpent-Breath in his belly, and I sawed her there, opening him up, and he mewed like an animal and wept like a child and called on Jesus the Redeemer as he died in his own dung. I cut the younger monk’s throat, then went back to the cave where I washed Serpent-Breath’s blade in the stream.

‘Erce did not foretell your death,’ Ælfadell said. She had screamed when I tore the bonds off my wrists and seized the sword from her, yet now she was oddly calm. She just watched me and was apparently unafraid.

‘Is that why you didn’t kill me?’

‘She didn’t foretell my death either,’ she said.

‘Then maybe she was wrong,’ I said, and fetched Wasp-Sting from Hearberht’s dead hand.

And that was when I saw her.

From a deeper cave, from a passage that led into the netherworld, Erce came. She was a girl of such beauty that the breath stopped in my lungs. The dark-haired girl who had ridden me in the night, the long-haired girl, slender and pale, so beautiful and calm and as naked as the blade in my hand and all I could do was stare at her. I could not move, and she gazed back at me with grave, large eyes and she said nothing and I said nothing until the breath caught in me again. ‘Who are you?’ I asked.

‘Dress yourself,’ Ælfadell said, whether to me or the girl I could not tell.

‘Who are you?’ I asked the girl, but she was still and silent.

‘Dress yourself, Lord Uhtred!’ Ælfadell ordered, and I obeyed her. I pulled on my jerkin, my boots, my mail and strapped my swords at my waist, and still the girl gazed at me with her quiet, dark eyes. She was as beautiful as the summer dawn and as silent as the winter night. She did not smile, her face showed nothing. I walked towards her and sensed something strange. The Christians say we have a soul, whatever that is, and it seemed to me this girl had no soul. There was an emptiness in her dark eyes. It was frightening, making me approach her slowly.

‘No!’ Ælfadell called. ‘You cannot touch her! You have seen Erce in the daylight. No other man has.’

‘Erce?’

‘Go,’ she said, ‘go.’ She dared to stand in front of me. ‘You dreamed last night,’ she said, ‘and in your dream you found truth. Be content with that, and go.’

‘Speak to me,’ I said to the girl, but she was unmoving and silent and empty, yet I could not take my eyes from her. I would have looked on her for all the rest of my life. The Christians talk of miracles, of men walking on water and raising the dead, and they say those miracles are proofs of their religion, though none of them can do a miracle or show us a miracle, yet here, in this damp cave beneath the hilltop grave, I saw a miracle. I saw Erce.

‘Go,’ Ælfadell said, and though she spoke to me it was the goddess who turned and vanished into the underworld.

I did not kill the old woman. I went. I dragged the dead monks into some brambles where perhaps the wild beasts would feast on them, and then I stooped to the stream and drank like a dog.

‘What did the witch tell you?’ Osferth asked me when I reached the widow’s farm.

‘I don’t know,’ I said, and my tone discouraged further questions, all except one. ‘Where are we going, lord?’ Osferth asked.

‘We’re going south,’ I said, still in a daze.

And so we rode towards Sigurd’s land.

Four

I had told Ælfadell my name, and what else? Had I told her my idea for revenge on Sigurd? And why had I talked so much? Ludda gave me an answer as we rode south. ‘There are herbs and mushrooms, lord, and there’s the blight you find on ears of rye, all kinds of things can give men dreams. My mother used them.’

‘She was a sorceress?’

He shrugged. ‘A wise-woman, anyway. She told fortunes and made potions.’

‘And the potion Ælfadell gave me, that made me speak my name?’

‘Maybe it was rye-blight? You’re lucky to be alive if it was. Get it wrong and you kill the dreamer, but if she knew how to make it then you’ll have gabbled like an old woman, lord.’

And who knows what else I had revealed to the aglæcwif? I felt like a fool. ‘Does she really speak to the gods?’ I had told Ludda about Ælfadell, but not about Erce. I wanted to hold that secret close, a memory to haunt me.

‘Some folk claim to talk to the gods,’ Ludda said uncertainly.

‘And see the future?’

He shifted in his saddle. Ludda was not accustomed to riding a horse, and the journey had given him a sore arse and aching thighs. ‘If she really saw the future, lord, would she be in a cave? She’d have a palace. Kings would crawl to her feet.’

‘Maybe the gods only talk to her in the cave,’ I suggested.

Ludda heard the anxiety in my voice. ‘Lord,’ he said earnestly, ‘if you roll the dice often enough you always get the numbers you want. If I tell you the sun will shine tomorrow and that it will rain and there will be snow and that clouds will cover the sky and that the wind will blow and that it will be a calm day and that the thunder will deafen us then one of those things will turn out to be true and you’ll forget the rest because you want to believe that I really can tell the future.’ He gave me a swift smile. ‘Folk don’t buy rusty iron because I’m persuasive, lord, but because they desperately want to believe it will turn to silver.’

And I desperately wanted to believe his doubts about Ælfadell. She had said Wessex was doomed and that seven kings would die, but what did that mean? What kings? Alfred of Wessex, Edward of Cent, Eohric of East Anglia? Who else? And who was the Saxon? ‘She knew who I was,’ I said to Ludda.

‘Because you had drunk her potion, lord. It was as if you were drunk and saying anything that came into your mind.’

‘And she tied me up,’ I told him, ‘but didn’t kill me.’

‘God be praised,’ Ludda said dutifully. I doubted he was a Christian, at least not a good one, but he was too clever to fall foul of the priests. He frowned in puzzlement. ‘I wonder why she didn’t kill you.’

‘She was frightened to,’ I said, ‘and so was the abbot.’

‘She tied you up, lord,’ Ludda said, ‘because someone had told her you were Jarl Cnut’s enemy. So she knew that much, but she didn’t know what Jarl Cnut wanted done with you. So she sent for the monks to find out. And they were too scared to order your death, too. It’s no small thing to kill a lord, especially if his men are close by.’

‘One of them wasn’t scared.’

‘And he’s regretting that now,’ Ludda said happily, ‘but it’s strange, lord, very strange.’

‘What is?’

‘She can talk to the gods. And the gods didn’t tell her to kill you.’

‘Ah,’ I said, seeing what he meant and not knowing what else to say.

‘The gods would have known what to do with you and they would have told her what to do, yet they didn’t. That tells me she’s not taking commands from the gods, lord, but from Jarl Cnut. She’s telling men what he wants them to hear.’ He shifted in the saddle again, trying to relieve the pain in his arse. ‘There’s the road, lord,’ he said, pointing. He was leading us south and east and had been looking for a Roman road that crossed the hills. ‘It goes to some old lead mines,’ he had told me, ‘but once past the mines there’s no road.’ I had told Ludda to take us to Cytringan where Sigurd had a feasting-hall, though I had not said what I planned to do there.

Why had I gone to find Ælfadell? To find a road, of course. The three Norns sit at the roots of Yggdrasil where they weave our fates, and at some time they will take the shears and cut our thread. We all want to know where that thread will end. We want to know the future. We want to know, as Beornnoth had said to me, how the story ends, and that was why I had gone to see Ælfadell. Alfred must die soon, maybe he was already dead, and everything would change, and I was not such a fool as to think that my part in that change would be small. I am Uhtred of Bebbanburg. Men feared me. In those days I was no great lord in terms of land or wealth or men, but Alfred had known that if he wanted victory he must lend me men, and that was how we had broken Haesten’s power at Beamfleot. His son, Edward, seemed to trust me, and I knew Alfred wanted me to swear loyalty to Edward, but I had gone to Ælfadell to catch a glimpse of the future. Why ally myself to a man destined to fail? Was Edward the man whom Ælfadell called the Saxon and who was doomed to destroy Wessex? What was the safe road? Edward’s sister, Æthelflaed, would never forgive me if I betrayed her brother, but perhaps she was doomed too. All my women would die. There was no great truth in that, we all die, yet why had Ælfadell said those words? Was she warning me against Alfred’s children? Against Æthelflaed and Edward? We live in a world fading to darkness and I had sought a light to shine on a sure road and I had found none, except a vision of Erce, a vision that would not leave my memory, a vision to haunt me. ‘Wyrd bið ful āræd,’ I said aloud.

Fate is inexorable.

And under the influence of Ælfadell’s bitter drink I had babbled my name, and what else? I had told none of my men what my plan was, but had I told Ælfadell? And Ælfadell lived on Cnut’s land and under his protection. She had told me that Wessex would be destroyed and that the Danes would win everything, and of course she would say that because that was what Cnut Longsword wanted men to hear. Jarl Cnut wanted every Danish leader to visit the cave and hear that victory would be theirs because men inspired to battle by a foreknowledge of victory fought with a passion that gives them victory. Sigurd’s men, attacking me on the bridge, had really believed they would win and that had encouraged them into a trap.

Now I led a few men towards what could be our deaths. Had I told Ælfadell I was planning to attack Cytringan? Because if I had blurted out that idea then she would surely be sending a message to Cnut, and Cnut would move fast to protect his friend Sigurd. I had been planning to ride home by way of Cytringan, Sigurd’s feasting-hall, and had hoped to find it empty and unprotected. I had thought to burn it to the ground, then ride on fast to Buccingahamm. Sigurd had tried to kill me and I wanted him to regret that and so I had gone to Ceaster to lure him away from his heartland, and if my deceit had worked then Sigurd was going there now, thinking to trap and kill me, while I planned to burn his hall. But his friend Cnut might be sending men to Cytringan and turning that feasting-hall into a trap for me.

So I must do something different. ‘Forget Cytringan,’ I told Ludda, ‘take me to the valley of the Trente instead. To Snotengaham.’

So we rode south beneath the wild flying clouds and after two days and nights came to the valley that brought back so many memories. The very first time I was ever in a warship I had come to this place, rowing up the Humbre and then the Trente, and it was in this valley that I had first seen Alfred. I had been a boy and he had been a young man and I had spied on him, hearing his anguish about the sin that had brought Osferth into the world. It was on the banks of the Trente that I had first encountered Ubba who was known as Ubba the Horrible, and I had been awed and terrified by him. Later, beside a distant sea, I was to kill him. I had been a boy when I was last on the banks of this river, but now I was a man and other men feared me as I had once feared Ubba. Uhtredærwe, some men called me, Uhtred the Wicked. They called me that because I was not a Christian, but I liked the name, and one day, I thought, I would take the wickedness too far and men would die because I was a fool.

Maybe here, maybe now, for I had abandoned the idea of destroying Cytringan’s feasting-hall and instead would attempt a foolish thing, but one that would have my name spoken all across Britain. Reputation. We would rather have reputation than gold, and so I left my men in a steading and rode down the river’s southern bank with just Osferth for company, and I said nothing until we came to the edge of a coppiced wood from where we could see the town across the wide river’s swirls. ‘Snotengaham,’ I said. ‘It was here I first met your father.’

He grunted at that. The town lay on the river’s northern bank and it had grown since I had last seen it. There were buildings outside the ramparts and the air above the roofs was thick with smoke from the kitchen fires. ‘Sigurd’s possession?’ Osferth asked.

I nodded, remembering what Beornnoth had told me, that Sigurd had laid up his war-fleet in Snotengaham. I also remembered Ragnar the Elder’s words that he had spoken to me when I was a child, that Snotengaham would be Danish for ever, yet most of the folk who lived inside the walls were Saxons. This was a Mercian town, right on the northern edge of that kingdom, yet for nearly all my life it had been ruled by the Danes and now its merchants and churchmen, its whores and its tavern-keepers paid silver to Sigurd. He had built a hall on a great rock outcrop in the town’s centre. It was not his main dwelling, which lay far to the south, but Snotengaham was one of Sigurd’s strongholds, a place he felt safe.

To reach Snotengaham from the sea a boat went up the great Humbre, then followed the Trente. That was the voyage I had made as a child in Ragnar’s Wind-Viper and, from the coppice on the southern bank, I could see there were forty or fifty boats drawn onto the far bank. Those were the ships Sigurd had taken south to Wessex the previous year, though in the end he had achieved nothing except to lay waste a few farmsteads outside of Exanceaster. Their presence suggested he did not plan another seaborne invasion. His next attack would be overland, a lunge into Mercia and then Wessex to take the Saxon land.

Yet a man’s pride is not just his land. We measure a lord by the number of crews he leads, and those ships told me Sigurd commanded a horde. I commanded one crew. I dare say I was as famous as Sigurd, yet all my fame had not translated into wealth. I should, I thought, be called Uhtred the Foolish. I had served Alfred all these years, and to show for it I had a borrowed estate, a single crew of men and a reputation. Sigurd owned towns, whole estates and led an army.

It was time to taunt him.

I talked with each of my men. I told them they could become rich by betraying me, that if just one of them told some whore in the town that I was Uhtred then I would probably die, and that most of them would die with me. I did not remind them of the oath they had taken to me because not one of them would need reminding, nor did I think any of them would betray me. I had four Danes and three Frisians in that group, yet they were my men, tied to me as much by friendship as by oath. ‘What we’re about to do,’ I told them, ‘will have men talking all over Britain. It will not make us rich, but I promise you reputation.’

My name, I told them, was Kjartan. It was the name I had used with Ælfadell, a name from my past, a name I did not like, the name of Sihtric’s foul father, but it would suffice for the next few days, and I would only survive those days if none of my men revealed the truth and if no one in Snotengaham recognised me. I had only met Sigurd twice, and both times briefly, but some of the men who had accompanied him to those meetings might be in Snotengaham and that was a risk I had to take. I had let my beard grow, I was wearing old mail, which I had allowed to rust, and I looked, as I wished to look, like a man on the edge of failure.

I found a tavern outside the town. It had no name. It was a miserable place with sour ale, mouldy bread and worm-riddled cheese, but it had sufficient room for my men to sleep on its filthy straw, and the tavern’s owner, a surly Saxon, was satisfied by the small amount of silver I gave him. ‘Why are you here?’ he wanted to know.

‘To buy a ship,’ I said, then told him we had been part of Haesten’s army and that we had become tired of starving in Ceaster and only wanted to go home. ‘We’re going back to Frisia,’ I said, and that was my tale and no one in Snotengaham thought it strange. The Danes follow leaders who bring them riches, and when a leader fails, his crews melt away like frost in the sun. Nor did anyone think it strange that a Frisian would lead Saxons. The crews of the Viking ships are Danish, Norse, Frisian and Saxon. Any masterless man could go Viking, and a shipmaster did not care what language a man spoke if he could wield a sword, thrust a spear and pull an oar.

So my tale was not questioned and, the day after we reached Snotengaham, a full-bellied Dane called Frithof came to find me. He had no left arm beneath the elbow. ‘Some Saxon bastard cut it off,’ he said cheerfully, ‘but I sliced off his head so it was a fair exchange.’ Frithof was what a Saxon would call the Reeve of Snotengaham, the man responsible for keeping the peace and serving his lord’s interests in the town. ‘I look after Jarl Sigurd,’ Frithof told me, ‘and he looks after me.’

‘A good lord?’

‘The very best,’ Frithof said enthusiastically, ‘generous and loyal. Why don’t you swear to him?’

‘I want to go home,’ I said.

‘Frisia?’ he asked, ‘you sound Danish, not Frisian.’

‘I served Skirnir Thorson,’ I explained. Skirnir had been a pirate on the Frisian coast and I had served him by luring him to his death.

‘He was a bastard,’ Frithof said, ‘but had a pretty wife, I hear. What was his island called?’ The question had no suspicion in it. Frithof was an easy, hospitable man.

‘Zegge,’ I said.

‘That was it! Nothing but sand and fish shit. So you went from Skirnir to Haesten, eh?’ he laughed, his question implying that I had chosen my lords badly. ‘You could do a lot worse than serve the Jarl Sigurd,’ Frithof assured me. ‘He looks after his men and there’ll be land and silver soon.’

‘Soon?’

‘When Alfred dies,’ Frithof said, ‘Wessex will fall into pieces. All we have to do is wait and then pick them up.’

‘I have land in Frisia,’ I said, ‘and a wife.’

Frithof grinned. ‘There are plenty of women here,’ he said, ‘but if you really want to go home?’

‘I want to go home.’

‘Then you need a ship,’ he said, ‘unless you plan to swim. So let’s go for a walk.’

Forty-seven ships had been pulled from the river and were now propped by oak shafts on a meadow close to a small shelving cove that made launching and recovering easy. Six other ships were floating. Four of those were trading boats, and two were long, sleek war boats with high prows and sterns. ‘Bright-Flyer,’ Frithof pointed to one of the two fighting ships afloat in the river, ‘she’s Jarl Sigurd’s own craft.’

Bright-Flyer was a beauty with a flat sleek belly and a high prow and stern. A man was squatting on the wharf and painting a white line along her topmost strake, a line that would accentuate her sinuously threatening shape. Frithof led me down to the timber wharf and stepped over the boat’s low midships. I followed him, feeling the small shiver in Bright-Flyer as she responded to our weight. I noted her mast was not on board, there were no oars or tholes, and the presence of two small saws, an adze and a box of chisels showed that men were working on her. She was afloat, but she was not ready for any voyage. ‘I brought her here from Denmark,’ Frithof said wistfully.

‘You’re a shipmaster?’ I asked.

‘I was, maybe I will be again. I miss the sea.’ He ran his hand along the smooth wood of her top strake. ‘Isn’t she lovely?’

‘She’s beautiful,’ I said.

‘Jarl Sigurd had her built,’ he said, ‘and only the best for him!’ He rapped the hull. ‘Green oak from Frisia. Too big for you, though.’

‘She’s for sale?’

‘Never! Jarl Sigurd would rather sell his only son into slavery! Besides, how many oars do you want? Twenty?’

‘No more,’ I said.

‘She needs fifty rowers,’ Frithof said, rapping the Bright-Flyer’s planks again. He sighed, remembering her at sea.

I looked at the carpenter’s tools. ‘You’re readying her for sea?’ I asked.

‘The jarl hasn’t said, but I hate to see ships out of the water for too long. The timbers dry and shrink. I want to float that one next,’ he pointed to the head of the cove where another beauty was propped on thick oak shafts. ‘Sea-Slaughterer,’ Frithof said, ‘Jarl Cnut’s ship.’

‘He keeps his ships here?’

‘Just the two,’ he said, ‘Sea-Slaughterer and Cloud-Chaser.’ Men were caulking the Sea-Slaughterer, stuffing the plank joints with a mix of wool and pine-tar. Small boys helped, or else played on the river bank. The tar braziers smoked, drifting their pungent smell across the slow river. Frithof stepped back onto the wharf and patted the head of the man who was painting the white line onto the strake. Frithof was obviously popular. Men grinned and called out respectful greetings, and Frithof responded with generous pleasure. He had a pouch at his waist filled with scraps of smoked beef that he handed to the children, all of whose names he knew. ‘This is Kjartan,’ he introduced me to the men caulking the Sea-Slaughterer, ‘and he wants to take a boat off our hands. He’s going back to Frisia because his wife is there.’

‘Bring the woman here!’ a man called to me.

‘He’s got more sense than letting you scum ogle her,’ Frithof retorted, then led me further down the bank past a huge heap of ballast stones. Frithof had Sigurd’s authority to buy or sell ships, but only a half-dozen were for sale, and of those only two would suit me. One was a trading ship, broad in the beam and well made, but she was short, her length only about four times her beam, and that would make her slow. The other ship was older and much used, but she was at least seven times longer than her beam, and her sleek lines were sweet. ‘She belonged to a Norseman,’ Frithof told me, ‘who got himself killed in Wessex.’

‘Made of pine?’ I asked, rapping the hull.

‘She’s all spruce,’ Frithof said.

‘I’d prefer oak,’ I said grudgingly.

‘Give me gold and I’ll have a ship built for you out of the best Frisian oak,’ Frithof said, ‘but if you want to cross the sea this summer you’ll do it in pine. She was well made, and she has a mast, sail and rigging.’

‘Oars?’

‘We’ve plenty of good ash oars.’ He ran his one hand down the stem-post. ‘She needs a little work,’ he admitted, ‘but she was a sweetheart in her day. Tyr’s Daughter.’

‘That’s her name?’

Frithof smiled. ‘It is.’ He smiled because Tyr is the god of the warriors who fight in single combat and, like Frithof, Tyr is one-handed, having lost his right hand to the sharp fangs of Fenrir, the crazed wolf. ‘Her owner liked Tyr,’ Frithof said, still stroking the stem-post.

‘She has a beast-head?’

‘I can find you something.’

We haggled, though good-naturedly. I offered what little silver I had left, along with all our horses, saddles and bridles, and Frithof at first demanded a sum at least double the worth of those things, though in truth he was glad to be rid of Tyr’s Daughter. She might have been a fine ship once, but she was old and she was small. A ship needs fifty or sixty men to be safe, and Tyr’s Daughter would have been crowded by thirty men, but she was perfect for my purpose. If I had not bought her I suspect she would have been broken up for firewood and, in truth, I got her cheap. ‘She’ll get you to Frisia,’ Frithof assured me.

We spat on our palms, shook hands, and so I became the owner of Tyr’s Daughter. I had to buy pine-tar to caulk her, and we spent two days on the river bank forcing a thick mix of hot tar, horsehair, moss and fleece into the planking. Her mast, sails and hemp rigging were brought from storage to the meadow where the boats were grounded, and I insisted my men leave the filthy tavern and sleep with the ship. We rigged the sail as a tent over her and slept either in or beneath her hull.

Frithof seemed to like us, or else he just approved of the notion that one of his ships was going back into the water. He would bring ale to the meadow, which lay some four or five hundred paces from the nearest part of Snotengaham’s ramparts, and he would drink with us and tell old stories of long ago fights, and in return I told him of the voyages I had made. ‘I miss the sea,’ he said wistfully.

‘Come with us,’ I invited him.

He shook his head ruefully. ‘Jarl Sigurd’s a good lord, he looks after me.’

‘Will I see him before I leave?’ I asked.

‘I doubt it,’ Frithof said, ‘he and his son have gone to help your old friend.’

‘Haesten?’

Frithof nodded. ‘You stayed with him through the winter?’

‘He kept promising us other men would join him,’ I invented, ‘he said they’d come from Ireland, but no one did.’

‘He did well enough last summer,’ Frithof said.

‘Until the Saxons took his fleet,’ I commented sourly.

‘Uhtred of Bebbanburg,’ Frithof spoke just as sourly, then touched the hammer he wore about his neck. ‘Uhtred is besieging him now. Is that why you left?’

‘I don’t want to die in Britain. So, yes, that’s why we left.’

Frithof smiled. ‘Uhtred will die in Britain, my friend. Jarl Sigurd has gone to kill the bastard.’

I touched my hammer. ‘May the gods give the jarl victory,’ I said piously.

‘Kill Uhtred,’ Frithof said, ‘and Mercia falls, and when Alfred dies, Wessex falls.’ He smiled. ‘Why would a man want to be in Frisia when all that happens?’

‘I miss home,’ I said.

‘Make your home here!’ Frithof said enthusiastically. ‘Join Jarl Sigurd and you can choose your own estate in Wessex, you can take a dozen Saxon wives and live like a king!’

‘But I have to kill Uhtred first?’ I asked lightly.

Frithof touched his amulet again. ‘He’ll die,’ he said, and his voice was anything but light.

‘Many men have tried to kill him,’ I said. ‘Ubba tried!’

‘Uhtred has never faced Jarl Sigurd in battle,’ Frithof said, ‘nor the Jarl Cnut, and Jarl Cnut’s sword is swift as the snake’s tongue. Uhtred will die.’

‘All men die.’

‘His death is foretold,’ Frithof said, and, when he saw my interest, he touched the hammer again. ‘There’s a sorceress,’ he explained, ‘and she has seen his death.’

‘Where? When?’

‘Who knows?’ he asked. ‘She knows, I suppose, and that’s what she promised the jarl.’

I felt a sudden, strange pang of jealousy. Had Erce straddled Sigurd in the night as she had straddled me? Then I thought Ælfadell had forecast my death to Sigurd, but had denied it to me, and that meant she either lied to one of us or that Erce, despite her loveliness, was no goddess.

‘Jarl Sigurd and Jarl Cnut are doomed to fight Uhtred,’ Frithof went on, ‘and the prophecy says the jarls will win, Uhtred will die and Wessex will fall. And that means you’re missing an opportunity, my friend.’

‘Maybe I’ll come back,’ I said, and I thought maybe I would return to Snotengaham one day because if Alfred’s dream of uniting all the lands where the English tongue was spoken were to come true then the Danes must be driven from this and every other town between Wessex and the wild Scottish frontier.

At night, when the singing had faded from Snotengaham’s taverns and the dogs had gone quiet, the sentries who watched over the ships would come to our fires and accept our food and ale. That happened for three nights, and then, in the next dawn, my men chanted as they rolled Tyr’s Daughter down a ramp of logs and so into the Trente.

She floated. It took a day to ballast her and another half-day to distribute the stones so that she floated true, just a little down at the stern. I knew she would leak, all ships leak, but by nightfall of the second day there was no evidence of water above the newly placed ballast stones. Frithof had kept his word and brought us oars, and my men rowed the ship upstream for a few miles, then turned her and brought her back. We stowed the mast on a pair of cradles, lashed the furled sail to the mast, and stacked what meagre possessions we owned beneath the small half-deck at the stern. I spent what few silver coins I had left on a barrel of ale, two of dried fish, some twice-baked bread, a flitch of bacon and a great rock-hard cheese wrapped in canvas. At dusk Frithof brought us a sea eagle’s head, carved from oak, that would fit over the prow. ‘It’s a gift,’ he told me.

‘You’re a good man,’ I said, and I meant it.

He watched as his slaves carried the carved head on board my ship. ‘May Tyr’s Daughter serve you well,’ he said, touching the hammer at his neck, ‘and may the wind never fail you and may the sea carry you safe home.’

I told the slaves to stow the head in the prow. ‘You’ve been helpful,’ I told Frithof warmly, ‘and I wish I could thank you properly.’ I offered him a silver arm ring, but he shook his head.

‘I’ve no need of it,’ he said, ‘and you might need silver in Frisia. You leave in the morning?’

‘Before midday,’ I said.

‘I’ll come and say farewell,’ he promised.

‘How long to the sea?’ I asked.

‘You’ll make it in two days,’ he said, ‘and once out of the Humbre, head a little north. Avoid the East Anglian coast.’

‘Trouble there?’

He shrugged. ‘A few ships looking for easy prey. Eohric encourages them. Just head straight out to sea and keep going.’ He cocked his head at the sky that was clear of clouds. ‘If this fine weather lasts you’ll be home in four days. Five, maybe.’

‘Any news from Ceaster?’ I asked. I was worried that Sigurd would have learned that he had been deceived and would be returning to his heartland, but Frithof had heard nothing and I assumed that Finan was still leading the jarl a dance through the hills and woods south of the old Roman fort.

There was a full moon that night, and the watchmen again came to the wharf where Tyr’s Daughter was tethered to Bright-Flyer by hemp ropes. The moon glossed the river’s swirls. We gave the watchmen ale, regaled them with songs and stories, and waited. A barn owl flew low, wings white as smoke, and I took the bird’s swift passage as a good omen.

When the night’s heart came and the dogs were silent I sent Osferth and a dozen men to a hayrick that lay halfway to the town. ‘Bring back as much hay as you can carry,’ I said.

‘Hay?’ one of the watchmen asked me.

‘Bedding,’ I explained, and told Ludda to fill the man’s ale-horn. The watchmen did not seem to notice that none of my men was drinking, or sense the apprehension among my crew. They drank, and I climbed aboard Bright-Flyer and crossed to Tyr’s Daughter, where I pulled my mail coat over my head and strapped Serpent-Breath to my waist. One by one my men came to the boat and dressed for war, while Osferth returned with great armfuls of hay, and only then did one of the four watchmen decide that our behaviour was strange.

‘What are you doing?’ he asked.

‘Burning your ships,’ I said cheerfully.

He gaped at me. ‘You’re what?’

I drew Serpent-Breath and held her blade’s tip just beneath his nose. ‘My name is Uhtred of Bebbanburg,’ I said, and watched his eyes widen. ‘Your lord tried to kill me,’ I went on, ‘and I’m reminding him that he failed.’

I left three men to watch the prisoners on the wharf, while the rest set to work on the beached ships. We used axes to splinter rowers’ benches, then piled hay and tinder in the hulls’ wide bellies. I made the biggest heap in Sea-Slaughterer, Cnut’s prized ship, for she was in the centre of the stranded craft. Osferth and his half-dozen men watched the town, but no one stirred from the gates, which I assumed were barred shut. Even when we used ropes to haul away the props on some of the outer ships so that they crashed over, the noise did not carry to Snotengaham.

The town lay in the north of Sigurd’s land, protected from the rest of Mercia by his large estates, while to the north was the friendly territory controlled by Cnut. Maybe no town in all Britain felt farther from trouble, which was why the boats had been brought here and why Frithof had only placed four old and half-lame men to watch them. The guards were not there to repel an attack, for no one expected Snotengaham to be assaulted, but to stop petty thieving of timbers or of the charcoal used in the braziers. That charcoal was now spread across the beached ships and I heaved one of the still smoking braziers into Sea Slaughterer’s belly.

We put fire into the other ships, then went back to the wharf.

Flames burst bright, faded, then burst again. Smoke thickened quickly. So far it was only the tinder and charcoal burning, the oak of the ships’ timbers took longer to catch, but at last I saw the heavier flames grow and spread. The wind was light and fitful, sometimes blowing the smoke down into the fire and swirling it low before releasing it to the night air. The flames bit and spread, the heat was scorching, melting tar dripped, sparks flew high, and the noise of the fire grew.

Osferth came running, leading his men down the bank between the fire-glossed river and the flames. A boat collapsed, its burning timbers crashing onto the ground and spraying fire beneath the bellies of the neighbouring craft. ‘Men coming!’ Osferth shouted.

‘How many?’

‘Six? Seven?’

I took ten men up the bank while Osferth put fire into the ships that were still floating. The noise of the fire was a roar punctured by the cracks of splitting timbers. Sea-Slaughterer was a ship of flames now, her belly a cauldron, and her long keel broke as we passed her and she sagged with a great crash and the sparks flew outwards and the flames leaped higher to show me a ragged group of men running from the town. They were not many, perhaps eight or nine, and they were not dressed, but had just pulled cloaks over their jerkins. None had a weapon and they checked when they saw me, and no wonder, for I was in mail, helmeted, with Serpent-Breath in my hand. The fire reflected from her blade. I did not speak. I had my back to the fire, which roared in the night, so my face was shadowed. The men saw a line of fire-outlined warriors ready for war and they turned back towards the town to fetch help. That help was already coming. More men were crossing the meadow and, in the fire’s bright light, I saw the glint of reflected blades. ‘Back to the wharf,’ I told my men.

We retreated to the wharf, which was being scorched by the nearby flames. ‘Osferth! Are they all burned?’ I was asking about the ships that floated, all except Tyr’s Daughter and Bright-Flyer.

‘They’re burning,’ he called back.

‘On board!’ I shouted.

I counted my men on board Tyr’s Daughter then, as the watchmen scuttled away from the wharf, I used an axe to sever the mooring lines that held Bright-Flyer to the wharf. The men from the town thought I was stealing Sigurd’s boat and those with weapons came to rescue her. I jumped on board Bright-Flyer and chopped the axe to cut the last mooring line that held her bows to the bank. She was swinging outwards, held by that last line, and my blow only half cut the hemp rope. A man took a flying leap and sprawled on the benches. He swung his sword at me and the blade struck my mail and I kicked him in the face as two more men leaped from the wharf. One missed and fell between the ship and the bank, though he managed to get one hand on the topmost strake and clung on, while the other man landed beside me and rammed a short-sword at my belly. Osferth had climbed back onto Bright-Flyer and was coming to help me as I parried the sword with the axe. The first man hacked at me again, slicing his sword at my legs, but the blade was stopped by the strips of iron sewn into the leather of my boots. That man had hurt himself when he jumped, maybe his ankle was broken because he seemed unable to stand. He twisted around to face Osferth who swatted the sword aside, then lunged with his own. The second man panicked, and I pushed him and he fell back into the water. I slashed the axe at the taut mooring line again and it snapped and I almost lost my footing as Bright-Flyer surged away from the bank. The man clinging to the strake let go. Osferth’s man was dying, his blood draining into the ballast stones.

‘Thank you,’ I said to Osferth. The river’s current was carrying Bright-Flyer and Tyr’s Daughter downstream away from the fire that was brighter and fiercer than ever, its smoke filling the sky and obscuring the stars. We had put tinder, charcoal and the last brazier into the Bright-Flyer’s hull and I tipped the brazier over, paused long enough to see the smouldering charcoal burst into flame, then climbed onto Tyr’s Daughter. We cut Bright-Flyer free. A dozen of my men already had oars and they pulled the smaller ship away from the larger. I dropped the steering oar into the slot at the stern and leaned on it to guide Tyr’s Daughter into the river’s centre, and just then an axe, its blade flashing reflected firelight, flew from the bank to splash harmlessly behind us.

‘Put up the eagle’s head!’ I shouted to my men.

‘Kjartan!’ Frithof, mounted on a tall black stallion, was cantering down the bank, keeping pace with us. It was one of his men who had thrown the axe, and now another launched a spear that plunged into the river. ‘Kjartan!’

‘My name is Uhtred,’ I called back. ‘Uhtred of Bebbanburg!’

‘What?’ he called back.

‘Uhtred of Bebbanburg! Give my greeting to Jarl Sigurd!’

‘You bastard!’

‘Tell that slime-eater you call a lord not to try to kill me again!’

Frithof and his men had to rein in because a tributary cut across their path. He cursed me, but his voice faded as we rowed on.

The sky behind us glowed with the fire of Sigurd’s fleet burning. Not every ship had caught fire, and I did not doubt that Frithof’s men would rescue one or two, maybe more, from the inferno that lit the night. They would also want to pursue us, which was why Bright-Flyer burned as she drifted behind us. She turned on the current, the flames cradled in her sleekly beautiful belly. She would sink eventually and the steam would replace the smoke and the wreck, I hoped, would obstruct the channel. I waved to Frithof and then laughed. Sigurd would be furious when he realised that he had been duped. Not just duped, but made into a fool. His precious fleet was ashes.

The river behind us was shimmering red, while in front of us it was moon-silvered. The current carried us swiftly and I only needed a half-dozen oars to keep us straight. I steered around the outside of the river’s bends where the water was deepest, always alert for the ominous sound of our keel grinding on mud, but the gods were with us and Tyr’s Daughter slid swiftly away from that great glow of fire that marked Snotengaham. We were travelling faster than any horse, which is why I had purchased a boat to make our escape, and we had a huge lead over any ship that might try to follow us. For a time Bright-Flyer drifted close behind, and then after an hour or so she stopped, though the glow of her flames still flickered above the river bends. Then that too faded and I supposed she had sunk and I hoped that her wreckage obstructed the river’s channel. We journeyed on.

‘What did we achieve, lord?’ Osferth asked. He had come to stand beside me on the small deck at the stern of Tyr’s Daughter.

‘We made Sigurd look like a fool,’ I said.

‘But he isn’t a fool.’

I knew Osferth disapproved. He was no coward, but he thought, like his father, that war would yield to intelligence and that a man could reason his way to victory. Yet war, as often as not, is about emotion. ‘I want the Danes to fear us,’ I said.

‘They already did.’

‘Now they fear us more,’ I said. ‘No Dane can attack Mercia or Wessex in the knowledge that his home is safe. We’ve shown we can reach deep into their land.’

‘Or we’ve stirred them to revenge,’ he suggested.

‘Revenge?’ I asked. ‘You think the Danes planned to leave us in peace?’

‘I fear attacks on Mercia,’ he said, ‘revenge attacks.’

‘Buccingahamm will be burned,’ I said, ‘but I told them all to leave the hall and go to Lundene.’

‘You did?’ he sounded surprised, then frowned. ‘Then Beornnoth’s hall will be burned too.’

I laughed at that, then touched the silver chain Osferth wore about his neck. ‘You want to wager that chain?’ I asked.

‘Why wouldn’t Sigurd burn Beornnoth’s hall?’ he asked.

‘Because Beornnoth and his son are Sigurd’s men,’ I said.

‘Beornnoth and Beortsig?’

I nodded. I had no proof, only suspicion, but Beornnoth’s lands, so close to Danish Mercia, had been left unmolested and that suggested an agreement. Beornnoth, I suspected, was too old for the troubles of continual war and so had made his peace, while his son was a bitter man and full of hatred for the West Saxons, who, in his view, had taken away Mercia’s independence. ‘I can’t prove that,’ I told Osferth, ‘but I will.’

‘Even so, lord,’ he said carefully, ‘what did we achieve?’ He gestured towards the fading glow in the sky.

‘Other than annoying Sigurd?’ I asked. I leaned on the steering oar, pushing Tyr’s Daughter to the outside of a long curve in the river. The eastern sky was luminous now, small clouds stretching bright in front of the still hidden sun. Cattle watched us pass. ‘Your father,’ I said, knowing those two words would irritate him, ‘has held the Danes at bay for my whole lifetime. Wessex is a fortress. But you know what your father wants.’

‘All the lands of the English.’

‘And you don’t get that by building a fortress. You don’t defeat the Danes by defending against them. You must attack. And your father has never attacked.’

‘He sent ships to East Anglia,’ Osferth said chidingly.

Alfred had indeed once sent an expedition to East Anglia to punish Eohric’s Danes who had raided Wessex, but Alfred’s ships had accomplished little. The West Saxons had built large ships and their keels were too deep to penetrate the rivers and Eohric’s men had simply withdrawn into shallow water, and so Alfred’s fleet had threatened and then rowed away, though the threat had been sufficient to convince Eohric to keep to the treaty between Wessex and his kingdom. ‘If we’re to unite the Saxons,’ I said, ‘it won’t be with ships. It will be with shield walls and spears and swords and slaughter.’

‘And God’s help,’ Osferth said.

‘Even with that,’ I said, ‘and your brother knows that, and your sister knows that, and they will look for someone to lead that shield wall.’

‘You.’

‘Us. That’s why we burned Sigurd’s fleet, to show Wessex and Mercia who can lead them.’ I slapped Osferth’s shoulder and grinned at him. ‘I’m tired of being called the shield of Mercia. I want to be the sword of the Saxons.’

Alfred, if he yet lived, was dying. And I had just made his ambition my own.

We took down the eagle’s head so we would not appear hostile and, under the rising sun, slid on through England.

I had been to the land of the Danes and had seen a place of sand and thin soil and though I do not doubt that the Danes have better land than any I saw, I doubt there was any better than that through which Tyr’s Daughter made her silent voyage. The river carried us past rich fields and deep woods. The current drew the trailing willow fronds downstream. Otters twisted in the water, sinuous as they fled the shadow of our hull. Warblers were loud on the banks where the first martins gathered mud for their nests. A swan hissed at us, wings spread, and my men all hissed back and found it funny. The trees were in their new green, spreading above meadows yellowed by cowslips, while bluebells hazed the passing woods. This was what brought the Danes here, not silver, not slaves, not even reputation, but earth; deep, rich, fertile earth where crops grew and a man could raise a family without fear of starvation. Small children weeded the fields and stopped to wave at us. I saw halls and villages and herds and flocks and knew this was the real wealth that drew men across the sea.

We looked for pursuers, but saw none. We rowed, though I was reserving my men’s strength, only using a half-dozen oars on each side to keep the ship moving sleekly downriver. The mayflies were thick, and fish rose to feed, and the long weeds waved underwater and Tyr’s Daughter passed Gegnesburh and I remembered Ragnar killing the monk there. This was the town where Alfred’s wife had been raised, long before the Danes came and captured it. The town had a wall and palisade, but both were in poor repair. Much of the palisade had been torn down, presumably so men could build with the oak logs, and the earth wall had eroded into the ditch, beyond which were new houses. The Danes did not care. They felt safe here. No enemy had come in a lifetime and, as far as they were concerned, no enemy would ever come. Men called greetings to us. The only ships at Gegnesburh’s wharf were traders, wide-bellied and slow. I wondered if the town had a new Danish name. This was Mercia, yet it was being turned into a kingdom of Danes.

All day we rowed until, by evening, we were in the widening Humbre and the sea was spread before us, darkening as the sun sank behind us. We stepped the mast, a job that took all my men’s strength to achieve, and we tightened the hemp rigging on the boat’s flanks and hauled the yard and sail up. The wool and linen bellied to the south-west wind, the rigging stretched and creaked, the ship heeled and I felt the kick of the first waves, felt Tyr’s Daughter shiver to that first caress, and we manned all the oars and pulled hard, fighting an incoming tide as we ran east into the shadowing night. We needed oars and sail to keep her moving against the tide, but gradually its grip weakened and we ran into the widening sea that was white flecked in the dusk as the waves fought the river, and on we went and I saw no pursuing ships as we passed the mudbanks and felt our hull lifting to the wild sea waves.

Most ships go to the coast at dusk. The shipmaster will find a creek and stay there through the dark, but we rowed eastwards and, once the night fell, we shipped the oars and I let the little boat be driven by the wind. She ran well. I turned her southwards sometime in the darkness, then slept when the dawn came. If we were pursued I knew nothing of it, and the ships of East Anglia did not see us as we ran southwards.

I knew these waters. In the new day, under a hard bright sun, we ventured closer to the coast until I recognised a landmark. We saw two other ships, but they ignored us, and we sailed on, past the great mudflats, around Fughelness and so into the Temes. The gods loved us, the days and nights of our voyage had been undisturbed, and so we came to Lundene.

I took Tyr’s Daughter to the dock that lay beside the house I had used in Lundene. It was a house I had never thought to see again, for it was there that Gisela had died. I thought of Ælfadell and her grim prophecy that all my women would die, then consoled myself that the sorceress had not known that Sigurd’s fleet would burn, so how could she have known what would happen to my women?

I had warned my folk at Buccingahamm to expect an attack and ordered them to travel south to the safety of Lundene’s defences, and I had thought to be greeted at the house by Sigunn or even by Finan who, his decoy work done at Ceaster, was also to meet me in the city, but the house appeared empty as we pulled the last oar strokes and nosed into the dock. Men leaped ashore with mooring lines. The oars clattered as they were laid on the thwarts, and just then the house door opened and a priest came onto the terrace. ‘You can’t leave that boat here!’ he called to me.

‘Who are you?’ I asked.

‘This is a private house,’ he ignored my question. He was a lean, middle-aged man with a stern face marked by pox scars. His long black robe was spotless, woven from the finest wool. His hair was neatly trimmed. He was no ordinary priest, his clothes and demeanour both spoke of privilege. ‘There’s wharfage downstream,’ he said, pointing eastwards.

‘Who are you?’ I asked again.

‘The man telling you to find another place to put this boat,’ he said irritably, and held his stance as I pulled myself onto the wharf and confronted him. ‘I’ll have the boat removed,’ he threatened, ‘and you’ll need to pay to recover it.’

‘I’m tired,’ I said, ‘and I’m not moving the boat.’ I smelt Lundene’s familiar stench, the mix of smoke and sewage, and thought of Gisela strewing lavender on the tiled floors. The thought of her gave me the usual pang of loss and waste. She had become fond of this house that had been built by the Romans, with its rooms edging a large courtyard and its great chamber facing the river.

‘You can’t go in there!’ the priest said sternly as I walked past him, ‘it belongs to Plegmund.’

‘Plegmund?’ I asked, ‘does he command the garrison here?’ The house was given to whoever commanded Lundene’s garrison, a job that a West Saxon called Weohstan had inherited from me, but Weohstan was a friend and I knew he would welcome me beneath his roof.

‘The house was granted to the archbishop,’ the priest said, ‘by Alfred.’

‘Archbishop?’ I asked, astonished. Plegmund was the new Archbishop of Contwaraburg, a Mercian, famously pious, a friend of Alfred’s and now the evident possessor of one of Lundene’s finer houses. ‘Did a young girl come here?’ I asked. ‘Or an Irishman? A warrior?’

The priest blanched then. He must have remembered either Sigunn or Finan coming to the house, and that recollection told him who I was. ‘You’re Uhtred?’ he asked.

‘I’m Uhtred,’ I said and pushed the house door open. The long room, which had been so welcoming when Gisela lived here, was now a place where monks copied manuscripts. There were six tall desks on which ink pots, quills and parchments lay. Two of the desks were occupied by clerks. One was writing, copying a manuscript, while the other was using a ruler and a needle to prick lines on an empty parchment. The pricked lines were a guide to keep the writing straight. The two men glanced at me nervously, then went back to their copying. ‘So did a girl come here?’ I asked the priest. ‘A Danish girl. Slight and pretty. She’d have had a half-dozen warriors escorting her.’

‘She did,’ he said, uncertain now.

‘And?’

‘She went to a tavern,’ he said stiffly, meaning he had rudely turned her away from the door.

‘And Weohstan?’ I asked. ‘Where’s he?’

‘He has quarters by the high church.’

‘Is Plegmund here in Lundene?’ I asked.

‘The archbishop is in Contwaraburg.’

‘And how many boats does he own?’ I asked.

‘None,’ the priest said.

‘Then he doesn’t need this damned dock, does he? So my boat stays there till I sell it, and if you touch it, priest, if you so much as lay one damned finger on it, if you have it moved, if you even think about moving it, I’ll take you to sea and teach you to be Christ-like.’

‘To be Christ-like?’ he asked.

‘He walked on water, didn’t he?’

That trivial confrontation left me dispirited because it was a reminder of how the church had placed its clammy grip on Alfred’s Wessex. It seemed that the king had granted Plegmund and Werferth, who was the Bishop of Wygraceaster, half of Lundene’s wharfage. Alfred wanted the church to be rich and its bishops to be powerful men because he relied on them to spread and enforce his laws and, if I helped spread Wessex’s grip northwards, so those bishops and priests and monks and nuns would follow to impose their joyless rules. Yet I was committed now, committed because of Æthelflaed, who was now in Wintanceaster. Weohstan told me that. ‘The king asked his family to gather,’ he said gloomily, ‘ready for his death.’ Weohstan was a stolid, bald, half-toothless West Saxon who commanded Lundene’s garrison. Lundene was supposedly Mercian, but Alfred had ensured that every man of power in the city held allegiance to Wessex, and Weohstan was a good man, unimaginative but diligent. ‘Except I need money to repair the walls,’ he grumbled to me, ‘and they won’t give it to me. They send coin to Rome to keep the pope in ale, yet they won’t pay for my wall.’

‘Steal it,’ I suggested.

‘Not that we’ve seen a Dane in months,’ he said.

‘Except for Sigunn,’ I said.

‘She’s a pretty thing,’ he said, offering me one of his half-toothed smiles. He had offered her shelter while she waited for me. She had no news from Buccingahamm, but I suspected the hall there, with its barns and storehouses, would be a smouldering ruin as soon as Sigurd returned from his foray to Ceaster.

Finan arrived two days later, grinning happily and full of news. ‘We led Sigurd a dance,’ he told me, ‘and danced him straight into the Welsh.’

‘And Haesten?’

‘God knows.’

Finan told how he and Merewalh had retreated southwards into the deep woods, and how Sigurd had followed them. ‘Jesus, he was eager. He sent horsemen after us on a dozen paths and we ambushed one group.’ He gave me a bag of silver, the spoils of the dead who had been cut down beneath the oaks. Sigurd, enraged, had become even less cautious and tried to encircle his elusive prey by sending men to the west and south, but all he had achieved was to stir up the Welsh who never need much stirring, and a band of wild Welsh warriors came from the hills to kill the Northmen. Sigurd had held the attackers off with his shield wall, then suddenly retreated northwards.

‘He must have heard about his ships,’ I said.

‘He’ll be an unhappy man,’ Finan said happily.

‘And I’m a poor one,’ I said. Buccingahamm was probably burned and there were no rents being paid. My men’s families were all in Lundene, and Tyr’s Daughter was sold for a pittance, and Æthelflaed was in no position to help. She was in Wintanceaster, close to her ailing father, and her husband was there too. She sent me a letter, but it was bland, even unfriendly, which made me suppose that she knew her correspondence was being read, but I had told her of my poverty and the letter suggested I go to one of her estates in the Temes valley. The steward there was a man who had fought alongside me at Beamfleot and he, at least, was pleased to see me. He had been crippled in that fight, though he could walk with a crutch and ride a horse well enough. He lent me money. Ludda stayed with me. I told him I would pay him for his services when I was wealthy again, and that he was free to go, but he wanted to stay. He was learning to use the sword and shield, and I was glad of his company. Two of my Frisians left, deciding that they could do better with another lord, and I let them go. I was in the same plight as Haesten, my men wondering whether they had sworn their oaths to the wrong man.

Then, as the summer waned, Sihtric returned.

Five

It was a summer of hunting and patrolling. Idle men are unhappy men and so I purchased horses with the silver I had borrowed and we rode north to explore the borders of Sigurd’s land. If Sigurd knew I was there he did not respond, perhaps fearing another trick like the one that had led his men into a pointless fight with the savage Welsh, but we were not looking for a fight. I did not have enough men to face Sigurd. I flaunted my banner, yet in truth it was all a bluff.

Haesten was still in Ceaster, though now that garrison was five times the size that it had been in the spring. The newcomers were not Haesten’s warriors, but oath-men of Sigurd and his ally Cnut Longsword, and they had come in sufficient numbers to guard the whole circuit of the old fort’s walls. They had hung their shields from the palisade and put their banners on the southern gatehouse. Sigurd’s badge of the flying raven was displayed next to Cnut’s flag, which showed an axe and a shattered cross. There was no flag for Haesten, which told me he had submitted to one of the two greater lords.

Merewalh reckoned there were now a thousand men in the fort. ‘They try and provoke us,’ he told me. ‘They want a fight.’

‘You’re not giving them one?’

He shook his head. He had only a hundred and fifty warriors and so he retreated whenever Ceaster’s garrison made a sally. ‘I’m not sure how long we can stay here,’ he admitted.

‘Have you asked Lord Æthelred for help?’

‘I asked,’ he said bleakly.

‘And?’

‘He says we should just watch them,’ Merewalh said, sounding disgusted. Æthelred had enough men to provoke war, he could have taken Ceaster whenever he wished, but instead he did nothing.

I announced my presence by riding close to the walls with my wolf’s head banner and, just as before, Haesten could not resist the lure. He brought a dozen men this time, but approached me on his own, hands spread wide. He was still grinning. ‘That was clever, my friend,’ he greeted me.

‘Clever?’

‘Jarl Sigurd was not pleased. He came to rescue me and you burned his fleet! He’s not happy.’

‘I didn’t want his happiness.’

‘And he’s sworn you’ll die.’

‘I think you once swore the same.’

‘I fulfil my oaths,’ he said.

‘You break oaths like a clumsy child breaks eggs,’ I said scornfully. ‘So who did you bow the knee to? Sigurd?’

‘To Sigurd,’ he admitted, ‘and in return he sent me his son and seven hundred men.’ He gestured towards the horsemen who had accompanied him and I saw the sullen young face of Sigurd Sigurdson scowling at me.

‘So who commands here?’ I asked. ‘You or the boy?’

‘I do,’ Haesten said. ‘My job is to teach him sense.’

‘Sigurd expects you to do that?’ I asked, and Haesten had the grace to laugh. He was looking beyond me, at the tree line, trying to determine how many men I might have brought to reinforce Merewalh. ‘Enough to destroy you,’ I answered his unspoken question.

‘I doubt that,’ he said, ‘or else you wouldn’t be talking, you’d be fighting.’

That was true enough. ‘So what did Sigurd promise you in return for your oath?’ I asked.

‘Mercia,’ came the reply.

It was my turn to laugh. ‘You get Mercia? Who rules Wessex?’

‘Whoever Sigurd and Cnut decide,’ he said airily, then smiled. ‘Maybe you? I think if you grovel, Lord Uhtred, the Jarl Sigurd will forgive you. He’d rather you fought with him than against him.’

‘Tell him I’d rather kill him,’ I said. I gathered my stallion’s reins. ‘How is your wife?’

‘Brunna is well,’ he said, looking surprised that I had asked.

‘Is she still a Christian?’ I asked. Brunna had been baptised, but I suspected the whole ceremony had been a cynical exercise by Haesten to allay Alfred’s suspicions.

‘She believes in the Christian god,’ Haesten said, sounding disgusted. ‘She’s forever wailing to him.’

‘I pray she has a comfortable widowhood,’ I said.

I turned away, but just then a man shouted and I twisted back to see Sigurd Sigurdson spurring towards me. ‘Uhtred!’ he shouted.

I curbed the horse, turned, waited.

‘Fight me,’ he said, dropping from the saddle and drawing his sword.

‘Sigurd!’ Haesten said in warning.

‘I am Sigurd Sigurdson!’ the pup shouted. He was glaring up at me, sword ready.

‘Not now,’ Haesten said.

‘Listen to your nursemaid,’ I told the boy, and that provoked him to swing the blade at me. I parried it with my right foot so that the sword struck the metal of the stirrup.

‘No!’ Haesten shouted.

Sigurd spat towards me. ‘You’re old, you’re frightened.’ He spat again, then raised his voice. ‘Let men say that Uhtred ran away from Sigurd Sigurdson!’

He was eager, he was young, he was a fool. He was a big enough lad, and his sword was a fine blade, but his ambition outstripped his ability. He wanted to make a reputation and I remembered how I had wanted the same at his age, and how the gods had loved me. Did they love Sigurd Sigurdson? I said nothing, but kicked my feet from the stirrups and swung myself down from the saddle. I drew Serpent-Breath slowly, smiling at the boy and seeing the first shadow of doubt in his belligerent face.

‘Please, no!’ Haesten called. His men had closed up, and so had mine.

I held my arms wide, inviting Sigurd to attack. He hesitated, but he had made the challenge and if he did not fight now then he would look a coward and that thought was unbearable and so he leaped towards me, his blade snake fast, and I parried it, surprised at his speed, then pushed him with my free hand so that he staggered back. He slashed again, a wild stroke, and I parried it again. I was letting him attack, doing nothing except defend myself, and that passivity drove him to a greater fury. He had been taught sword-craft, but he forgot that teaching in his rage. He swung wildly, the blows easy to block, and I heard Haesten’s men calling advice. ‘Use the point!’

‘Fight me!’ he shouted, and swung again.

‘Puppy,’ I said to him, and he was almost weeping in frustration. He sliced the sword at my head, the blade hissing in the summer air and I just leaned back and the point whipped past my eyes and I stepped forward, thrust with my free hand again, only this time I hooked a boot behind his left ankle and he went down like a hamstrung bullock and I thrust Serpent-Breath onto his neck. ‘Grow up before you fight me,’ I told him. He twisted, then went very still as he felt my sword’s point digging into his neck. ‘Today isn’t your day to die, Sigurd Sigurdson,’ I said. ‘Now let go of your sword.’

He made a mewing noise.

‘Let go of your sword,’ I snarled, and this time he obeyed me. ‘Was it your father’s gift?’ I asked him. He said nothing. ‘It isn’t your day to die,’ I told him again, ‘but it is a day I want you to remember. The day you challenged Uhtred of Bebbanburg.’ I held his gaze for a few heartbeats, then slashed Serpent-Breath fast, using my wrist rather than my arm, so that the tip of her blade sliced into his sword hand. He flinched as the blood spurted, then I stepped away, stooped and picked up his sword. ‘Tell his father I spared the pup’s life,’ I told Haesten. I wiped Serpent-Breath’s point on the hem of my cloak, tossed the boy’s sword to Oswi, my servant, than hauled myself back into the saddle. Sigurd Sigurdson was clutching his mangled hand. ‘Give my greetings to your father,’ I told him, then spurred away. I could almost hear Haesten’s sigh of relief that the boy still lived.

Why did I let him live? Because he was not worth killing. I wanted to provoke his father, and the boy’s death would certainly have achieved that, but I did not have the men to fight a war against Sigurd. To do that I needed West Saxon troops. I had to wait until I was ready, until Wessex and Mercia united their forces, and so Sigurd Sigurdson lived.

We did not stay at Ceaster. We did not have enough force to capture the old fort, and the longer we stayed the more likely it was that Sigurd would arrive with overwhelming numbers, and so we left Merewalh to screen the fortress and we went back to Æthelflaed’s estate in the valley of the Temes from where I sent a messenger to Alfred telling him that Haesten had sworn allegiance to Sigurd and that Ceaster was now fully garrisoned. I knew Alfred would be too sick to take much note of that news, but I assumed that Edward, or perhaps the Witan, would want to know. I received no answer. Summer slid into autumn and the silence from Wintanceaster was worrying me. We learned from travellers that the king was weaker than ever, that he scarcely left his bed these days and that his family was in constant attendance. I heard nothing at all from Æthelflaed.

‘He could at least have thanked you for thwarting Eohric,’ Finan grumbled to me one night. He meant Alfred, of course.

‘He was probably disappointed,’ I said.

‘That you lived?’

I smiled at that. ‘That the treaty never happened.’

Finan stared moodily down the hall. The fire in the central hearth was unlit because the evening was warm. My men were quiet at their tables, the dogs sprawled on the rushes. ‘We need silver,’ Finan said bleakly.

‘I know.’

How had I become so poor? I had spent most of my money on that foray north to Ælfadell and Snotengaham. I still had some silver, but nowhere near enough for my ambition, which was to retake Bebbanburg, that great fortress by the sea, and to take it I would need men, ships, weapons, food and time. I needed a fortune, and I was living on borrowed money in a shabby hall on Mercia’s southern edge. I was living on Æthelflaed’s charity, and that seemed to be turning cold because I received no letter from her. I supposed she was under the baleful influence of her family and their busy priests who were ever ready to tell us how to behave. ‘Alfred doesn’t deserve you,’ Finan said.

‘He has other things on his mind,’ I said, ‘like his death.’

‘He wouldn’t be alive now if it wasn’t for you.’

‘For us,’ I said.

‘And what has he done for us?’ Finan demanded. ‘Jesus and his saints, we destroy Alfred’s enemies and he treats us like dog shit.’

I said nothing. A harpist was playing in the hall’s corner, but his music was soft and plangent to match my mood. The light was fading and two servant girls brought rushlights for the table. I watched Ludda slide his hand up a skirt and wondered that he had remained with me, though when I had asked him he had said that fortunes rise and fortunes fall and he sensed mine would rise again. I hoped he was right. ‘What happened to that Welsh girl of yours?’ I called to Ludda. ‘What was her name?’

‘Teg, lord. She turned into a bat and flew away.’ He grinned, though I noted how many men made the sign of the cross.

‘Maybe we should all turn into bats,’ I said unhappily.

Finan scowled at the table top. ‘If Alfred doesn’t want you,’ he said uneasily, ‘then you should join Alfred’s enemies.’

‘I swore an oath to Æthelflaed.’

‘And she swore one to her husband,’ he said savagely.

‘I won’t fight against her,’ I said.

‘And I won’t leave you,’ Finan said, and I knew he meant it, ‘but not every man here will stay through a hungry winter.’

‘I know,’ I said.

‘So let’s steal a ship,’ he urged, ‘and go Viking.’

‘It’s late in the year for that,’ I said.

‘God knows how we survive a winter,’ he grumbled. ‘We have to do something. Kill someone rich.’

And just then the guards on the hall door challenged a visitor. The man arrived in mail, helmeted, and with a sheathed sword at his waist. Behind him, dim in the fast gathering darkness, was a woman and two children. ‘I demand entry!’ he shouted.

‘God alive,’ Finan said, recognising Sihtric’s voice.

One of the guards tried to take the sword, but Sihtric angrily slapped the man aside. ‘Let the bastard keep his sword,’ I said, standing, ‘and let him come in.’ Sihtric’s wife and two sons were behind him, but they stayed at the door as Sihtric paced up the hall. There was silence.

Finan stood to confront him, but I pushed the Irishman down. ‘It’s my duty,’ I told Finan quietly, then walked around the high table’s end and jumped down to the rush-covered floor. Sihtric stopped when he saw me approaching. I had no sword. We did not carry weapons in hall because weapons and ale mix badly and there was a gasp as Sihtric drew his long blade. Some of my men stood to intervene, but I waved them down and kept walking towards the naked steel. I stopped just two paces from him. ‘Well?’ I demanded harshly.

Sihtric grinned and I laughed. I embraced him, and he returned the embrace, then held the hilt of his sword to me. ‘Yours, lord,’ he said, ‘as it always was.’

‘Ale!’ I shouted to the steward. ‘Ale and food!’

Finan was gaping as I walked Sihtric to the high table with my arm about his shoulder. Men were cheering. They had liked Sihtric and had been puzzled by his behaviour, but it had all been planned between us. Even the insults had been rehearsed. I had wanted Beortsig to recruit him, and Beortsig had snapped up Sihtric like a pike attacking a duckling. And I had ordered Sihtric to stay in Beortsig’s employment until he had learned what I needed to know, and now he had come back. ‘I didn’t know where to find you, lord,’ he said, ‘so I went to Lundene first and Weohstan said to come here.’

Beornnoth was dead, he told me. The old man had died in the early summer, just before Sigurd’s men crossed his estates to burn Buccingahamm. ‘They stayed the night at the hall, lord,’ he told me.

‘Sigurd’s men?’

‘And Sigurd himself, lord. Beortsig fed them.’

‘He’s in Sigurd’s pay?’

‘Yes, lord,’ he said, and that was no surprise, ‘and not only Beortsig, lord. There was a Saxon with Sigurd, lord, a man Sigurd treated with honour. A long-haired man called Sigebriht.’

‘Sigebriht?’ I asked. The name was familiar, lurking at the back of my memory, but I could not place him, though I remembered the widow in Buchestanes saying that a long-haired Saxon had visited Ælfadell.

‘Sigebriht of Cent, lord,’ Sihtric said.

‘Ah!’ I poured Sihtric ale. ‘Sigebriht’s father is Ealdorman of Cent, isn’t he?’

‘Ealdorman Sigelf, lord, yes.’

‘So Sigebriht is unhappy that Edward was named King of Cent?’ I guessed.

‘Sigebriht hates Edward, lord,’ Sihtric told me. He was grinning, pleased with himself. I had planted him as a spy in Beortsig’s household and he knew he had done his work well, ‘and it isn’t just because Edward is King of Cent, lord, it’s because of a girl. The Lady Ecgwynn.’

‘He told you all this?’ I asked, astonished.

‘He told a slave girl, lord. He rutted her and he has a loose tongue when he’s rutting, and he told her and she told Ealhswith.’ Ealhswith was Sihtric’s wife. She was sitting in the hall now, eating with her two sons. She had been a whore and I had advised Sihtric not to marry her, but I had been wrong. She had proved to be a good wife.

‘So who is the Lady Ecgwynn?’ I asked.

‘She’s Bishop Swithwulf’s daughter, lord,’ Sihtric explained. Swithwulf was Bishop of Hrofeceastre in Cent, that much I knew, but I had not met the man, nor his daughter. ‘And she preferred Edward to Sigebriht,’ Sihtric went on.

So the bishop’s daughter was the girl who Edward had wanted to marry? The girl he had been ordered to abandon because his father disapproved. ‘I heard that Edward was forced to give the girl up,’ I said.

‘But she ran away with him,’ Sihtric told me, ‘that’s what Sigebriht said.’

‘Ran away!’ I grinned. ‘So where is she now?’

‘No one knows.’

‘And Edward,’ I said, ‘is betrothed to Ælflæd.’ There must have been some harsh words spoken between father and son, I thought. Edward had always been presented as the ideal heir to Alfred, the son without sin, the prince educated and groomed to be the next King of Wessex, but a smile from a bishop’s daughter had evidently undone a lifetime’s preaching from his father’s priests. ‘So Sigebriht hates Edward,’ I said.

‘He does, lord.’

‘Because he took the bishop’s daughter away. But would that be enough to make him swear loyalty to Sigurd?’

‘No, lord.’ Sihtric was grinning. He had kept his biggest news back. ‘He’s not sworn to Sigurd, lord, but to Æthelwold.’

And that was why Sihtric had returned to me, because he had discovered who the Saxon was, the Saxon whom Ælfadell had told me would destroy Wessex, and I wondered why I had not thought of it before. I had considered Beortsig because he wanted to be King of Mercia, but he was insignificant, and Sigebriht probably wanted to be King of Cent one day, but I could not imagine Sigebriht having the power to ruin Wessex, yet the answer was obvious. It had been there all along and I had never thought of it because Æthelwold was such a weak fool. Yet weak fools have ambition and cunning and resolve.

‘Æthelwold!’ I repeated the name.

‘Sigebriht is sworn to him, lord, and Sigebriht is Æthelwold’s messenger to Sigurd. There’s something else, lord. Beortsig’s priest is one-eyed, thin as a straw, and bald.’

I was thinking about Æthelwold, so it took a moment for me to remember that far-off day when the fools had tried to kill me and the shepherd had saved me with his sling and his flock. ‘Beortsig wanted me dead,’ I said.

‘Or his father,’ Sihtric suggested.

‘Because Sigurd ordered it,’ I guessed, ‘or perhaps Æthelwold.’ And it suddenly seemed so obvious. And I knew what I had to do. I did not want to do it. I had once sworn I would never return to Alfred’s court, but next day I rode to Wintanceaster.

To see the king.

Æthelwold. I should have guessed. I had known Æthelwold all my life and had despised him all that time. He was Alfred’s nephew, and he was aggrieved. Alfred, of course, should have killed Æthelwold years before, but some feeling, perhaps affection for his brother’s son or, more likely, the guilt that earnest Christians love to feel, had stayed his hand.

Æthelwold’s father had been Alfred’s brother, King Æthelred. Æthelwold, as eldest son of Æthelred, expected to be King of Wessex, but he was still a child when his father died and the Witan, the king’s council of leading men, had put his uncle, Alfred, onto the throne instead. Alfred had wanted that and had worked for it, and there were men who still whispered that he was a usurper. Æthelwold had resented the usurpation ever since, but Alfred, instead of murdering his nephew as I had often recommended, indulged him. He let him keep some of his father’s estates, he forgave his constant treachery, and doubtless prayed for him. Æthelwold needed a lot of prayer. He was unhappy, frequently drunk, and perhaps that was why Alfred tolerated him. It was hard to see a drunken fool as a danger to the kingdom.

But Æthelwold was now talking with Sigurd. Æthelwold wanted to be king instead of Edward, and to make himself king he had plainly sought the alliance of Sigurd, and Sigurd, of course, would like nothing better than a tame Saxon whose claim to the throne of Wessex was every bit as good as Edward’s, indeed better, which meant Sigurd’s invasion of Wessex would have the spurious gloss of legitimacy.

Six of us rode south through Wessex. I took Osferth, Sihtric, Rypere, Eadric and Ludda. I left Finan in command of the rest of my men, and with a promise. ‘If there’s no gratitude in Wintanceaster,’ I said, ‘then we go north.’

‘We must do something,’ Finan said.

‘I promise,’ I told him. ‘We’ll go Viking. We’ll thrive. But I must give Alfred one last chance.’

Finan did not much care which side we fought for, so long as we were fighting profitably, and I understood how he felt. If my ambition was to one day retake Bebbanburg, his was to return to Ireland to take revenge on the man who had destroyed his wealth and family, and for that he needed silver as much as I did. Finan, of course, was a Christian, though he never allowed that to interfere with his pleasures, and he would have happily used his sword to attack Wessex if, at the end of the fighting, there was money enough to equip an expedition back to Ireland. I knew he believed my journey to Wintanceaster was a waste of time. Alfred did not like me, Æthelflaed appeared to have distanced herself from me, and Finan believed I was going to beg from folk who should have shown gratitude from the start.

And there were times on that journey when I thought Finan was right. I had fought to help Wessex survive for so many years now, and I had put so many of her enemies beneath the ground, and to show for it I had nothing but an empty purse. Yet I also had a reluctant allegiance. I have broken oaths, I have changed sides, I have scrambled through the thorns of loyalty, yet I had meant it when I told Osferth that I wanted to be the sword of the Saxons instead of the shield of Mercia, and so I would make one last visit to the heart of Saxon Britain to discover whether they wanted my sword or not. And if not? I had friends in the north. There was Ragnar, closer than a friend, a man I loved as a brother, and he would help me, and if the price I had to pay was eternal enmity for Wessex, then so be it. I rode, not as the beggar that Finan thought I was, but vengefully.

It rained as we neared Wintanceaster, a soft rain on a soft land, on fields rich with good earth, on villages that showed prosperity and had new churches and thick thatch and no gaunt skeletons of burned house-beams. The halls grew larger, because men like to have their land near power.

There were two powers in Wessex, king and church, and the churches, like the halls, grew larger as we neared the city. No wonder the Northmen wanted this land, who would not? The cattle were plump, the barns full and the girls were pretty. ‘It’s time you got married,’ I told Osferth as we passed an open-doored barn where two fair-haired girls winnowed grain on a threshing floor.

‘I’ve thought of it,’ he said gloomily.

‘Just thought?’

He half smiled. ‘You believe in destiny, lord,’ he said.

‘And you don’t?’ I asked. Osferth and I were riding a few paces ahead of the others. ‘And what does destiny have to do with a girl in your bed?’

‘Non ingredietur mamzer hoc est de scorto natus in ecclesiam Domini,’ he said, then gave me a very sombre look, ‘usque ad decimam generationem.’

‘Both Father Beocca and Father Willibald tried to teach me Latin,’ I said, ‘and they both failed.’

‘It comes from the scriptures, lord,’ he said, ‘from the book of Deuteronomy, and it means a bastard isn’t allowed into the church and it warns that the curse will last for ten generations.’

I stared at him in disbelief. ‘You were training to be a priest when I met you!’

‘And I left my training,’ he said. ‘I had to. How could I be a priest when God bans me from his congregation?’

‘So you can’t be a priest,’ I said, ‘but you can be married!’

‘Usque ad decimam generationem,’ he said. ‘My children would be cursed, and their children too, and every child for ten generations.’

‘So every bastard is doomed?’

‘God tells us that, lord.’

‘Then he’s a bloody-minded god,’ I said savagely, then saw that his distress was real. ‘It wasn’t your fault that Alfred played piggyback with a servant girl.’

‘True, lord.’

‘So how can his sin affect you?’

‘God is not always fair, lord, but he is just within his rules.’

‘Just! So if I can’t catch a thief I should whip his children instead and you’d call me just?’

‘God abhors sin, lord, and what better way to avert sin than threaten it with the direst punishment?’ He edged his horse to the left side of the road to allow a string of packhorses to pass by. They were travelling northwards, carrying sheepskins. ‘If God didn’t punish us severely,’ Osferth went on, ‘then what is to stop sin spreading?’

‘I like sin,’ I said and nodded to the horseman whose servants led the packhorses. ‘Does Alfred live?’ I asked him.

‘Scarcely,’ the man said. He made the sign of the cross and nodded thanks when I wished him a safe journey.

Osferth frowned at me. ‘Why did you bring me here, lord?’ he asked.

‘Why not?’

‘You could have brought Finan, but you chose me.’

‘You don’t want to see your father?’

He said nothing for a while, then turned to me and I saw there were tears in his eyes. ‘Yes, lord.’

‘That’s why I brought you,’ I said, and just then we turned a bend in the road and Wintanceaster was beneath us, its new church rearing high above the huddle of roofs.

Wintanceaster was, of course, the chief of Alfred’s burhs, those towns fortified against the Danes. It was surrounded by a deep ditch, flooded in places, beyond which was a high earthen bank topped by a palisade of oak trunks. There are few things worse than assaulting such a place. The defenders, like Haesten’s men at Beamfleot, hold all the advantage and can rain weapons and stones on the attackers, who have to struggle through obstacles and try to climb ladders that are being hacked apart by axes. Alfred’s burhs were what had made Wessex safe. The Danes could still ravage the countryside, but everything of value would be pulled inside the burh walls and the Danes could only ride around those walls and make empty threats. The surest way to capture a burh was to starve its garrison into submission, but that could take weeks or months, and for all that time the besiegers would be vulnerable to troops coming from other fortresses. The alternative was to throw men at the walls and watch them die in the ditch and the Danes were never profligate with men. The burhs were strongholds, too strong for the Danes, and Bebbanburg, I thought, was tougher than any burh.

The northern gateway to Wintanceaster was now made of stone and guarded by a dozen men who barred the open arch. Their leader was a small grizzled man with fierce eyes who waved his troops away when he saw me. ‘It’s Grimric, lord,’ he said, obviously expecting to be recognised.

‘You were at Beamfleot,’ I guessed.

‘I was, lord!’ he said, pleased that I remembered.

‘Where you did great slaughter,’ I said, hoping it was true.

‘We showed the bastards how Saxons fight, lord, didn’t we?’ he said, grinning. ‘I keep telling these lily boys that you know how to give a man a real fight!’ he jerked a thumb at his men, all of whom were youngsters pulled away from their farms or shops to serve their term of weeks in the burh’s garrison. ‘They’re still wet with mama’s milk, lord,’ Grimric said.

I gave him a coin I could scarce afford to give, but such things are expected of a lord. ‘Buy them ale,’ I told Grimric.

‘That I shall, lord,’ he said, ‘and I knew you’d come! I have to tell them you’re here, of course, but I knew everything would be all right.’

‘All right?’ I asked, puzzled by his words.

‘I knew it would be, lord!’ he grinned, then waved us on. I went to the Two Cranes where the owner knew me. He shouted at his servants to look after our horses, brought us ale and gave us a large chamber at the back of the tavern where the straw was clean.

The landlord was a one-armed man with a beard so long that he tucked its lower end into a wide leather belt. He was named Cynric, had lost his lower left arm fighting for Alfred, and had owned the Two Cranes for over twenty years, and there was not much that went on in Wintanceaster that he did not know about. ‘The churchmen rule,’ he told me.

‘Not Alfred?’

‘Poor bastard’s sick as a drunken dog. It’s a miracle he still lives.’

‘And Edward’s under the thumb of the clergy?’ I asked.

‘The clergy,’ Cynric said, ‘his mother, and the Witan. But he’s not nearly as pious as they think. You heard about the Lady Ecgwynn?’

‘The bishop’s daughter?’

‘That’s the one, and she was a lovely thing, God knows. Just a little girl she was, but so beautiful.’

‘She’s dead?’

‘Died giving birth.’

I stared at him, the implications tumbling in my head. ‘Are you sure?’

‘God’s teeth, I know the woman who midwifed her! Ecgwynn produced twins, a boy called Æthelstan and a girl called Eadgyth, but the poor mother died that same night.’

‘Edward was the father?’ I asked and Cynric nodded. ‘Twin royal bastards,’ I said softly.

Cynric shook his head. ‘But are they bastards?’ He kept his voice low. ‘Edward claims he married her, his father says it wasn’t legal, and his father wins that argument. And they kept the whole thing quiet! God knows they paid the midwife well enough.’

‘The children lived?’

‘They’re in Saint Hedda’s nunnery, with the Lady Æthelflaed.’

I stared into the fire. So the perfect heir had proved as sinful as the next man. And Alfred was sweeping away the fruits of that sin, tucking them into a nunnery in hope no one would notice them. ‘Poor Edward,’ I said.

‘He’s marrying Ælflæd now,’ Cynric said, ‘which pleases Alfred.’

‘And he already has two children,’ I said in wonderment. ‘That’s a royal mess. You say Æthelflaed is in Saint Hedda’s?’

‘Locked away there,’ Cynric said. He knew of my attachment to Æthelflaed, and his tone suggested she had been locked away to keep her from me.

‘Her husband’s here?’

‘In Alfred’s palace. The whole family is here, even Æthelwold.’

‘Æthelwold!’

‘Came here two weeks back, weeping and wailing for his uncle.’

Æthelwold was braver than I thought. He had made his alliance with the Danes, yet was brazen enough to come to his dying uncle’s court. ‘Is he still drunk?’ I asked.

‘Not that I know of. He hasn’t been in here. They say he spends his time praying,’ he spoke scornfully, and I laughed. ‘We’re all praying,’ he finished glumly, meaning that everyone worried about what happened when Alfred died.

‘And Saint Hedda’s?’ I asked. ‘Is it still Abbess Hildegyth?’

‘She’s a saint herself, lord, yes she’s still there.’

I took Osferth to Saint Hedda’s. The rain was spitting, making the streets greasy. The convent lay on the northern edge of the town, close by the earthen bank with its high palisade. The only door to the nunnery lay at the end of a long, muddy alley that, just like the last time I had visited, was crowded with beggars who were waiting for the alms and food that the nuns distributed morning and evening. The beggars shuffled out of our way. They were nervous because Osferth and I were both in mail and both carrying swords. Some held out hands or wooden bowls, but I ignored them, puzzled by the presence of three soldiers at the nunnery door. The three wore helmets and carried spears, swords and shields, and as we approached they stepped away from the door to bar our path. ‘You can’t go inside, lord,’ one of them said.

‘You know who I am?’

‘You’re the Lord Uhtred,’ the man said respectfully, ‘and you can’t go inside.’

‘The abbess is an old friend,’ I said, and that was true. Hild was a friend, a saint, and a woman I had loved, but it seemed I was not allowed to visit her. The leader of the three soldiers was a well-set man, not young, but with broad shoulders and a confident face. His sword was sheathed, and I did not doubt he would draw it if I tried to force my way past him, but nor did I doubt that I could beat him down into the mud. Yet there were three of them, and I knew Osferth would not fight against West Saxon soldiers who guarded a convent. I shrugged. ‘You can give the Abbess Hild a message?’ I asked.

‘I can do that, lord.’

‘Tell her Uhtred came to visit her.’

He nodded, and I heard the beggars gasp behind me and turned to see even more soldiers filing up the alley. I recognised their commander, a man called Godric who had served under Weohstan. He led seven helmeted men who, like those guarding the convent, had shields and spears. They were ready for battle. ‘I’m asked to take you to the palace, lord,’ Godric greeted me.

‘You need spears to do that?’

Godric ignored the question, gesturing back down the alley instead. ‘You’ll come?’

‘With pleasure,’ I said, and followed him back through the town. The people in the streets watched us pass in silence. Osferth and I had kept our swords, but we still looked as though we were prisoners under escort and, when we reached the palace gate, a steward insisted we give up those weapons. That was normal. Only the king’s bodyguards were allowed to carry weapons inside the palace precincts and so I handed Serpent-Breath to the stewards, then followed Godric past Alfred’s private chapel to a small low thatched building.

‘You’re asked to wait inside, lord,’ he said, indicating the door.

We waited in a windowless room that was furnished with two benches, a reading desk and a crucifix. Godric’s men stayed outside and, when I tried to leave, spears barred my way. ‘We want food,’ I said, ‘and ale. And a bucket to piss in.’

‘Are we under arrest?’ Osferth asked me after the food and bucket had been brought.

‘It looks that way.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. I ate the bread and hard cheese and then, though the room’s earth floor was damp, I lay down and tried to sleep.

It was dusk before Godric returned. He was still courteous. ‘You’ll come with me, lord,’ he said, and Osferth and I followed him through familiar courtyards to one of the smaller halls where a fire burned bright in the hearth. There were painted leather hangings on the wall, each showing a different West Saxon saint, while at the hall’s high end, at a table spread with a blue-dyed cloth, sat five churchmen. Three were strangers to me, but I recognised the other two and neither was a friend. Bishop Asser, the poisonous Welsh priest who was Alfred’s closest confidant was one, while Bishop Erkenwald was the other. They flanked a thin-shouldered man whose tonsured hair was white above a face as lean as a starving weasel’s. He had a blade for a nose, intelligent eyes and pinched, narrow lips that could not hide his crooked teeth. The two priests at either end of the table were much younger and each had a quill, an ink pot and a sheet of parchment. They were there, it seemed, to take notes.

‘Bishop Erkenwald,’ I greeted him, then looked at Asser, ‘I don’t think I know you.’

‘Take that hammer from his neck,’ Asser said to Godric.

‘Touch that hammer,’ I told Godric, ‘and I’ll dump your arse in the fire.’

‘Enough!’ the starving weasel slapped the table. The ink pots jumped. The two clerk-priests were scratching away. ‘I am Plegmund,’ the man told me.

‘High sorcerer of Contwaraburg?’ I asked.

He stared at me with obvious dislike, then drew a sheet of parchment towards him. ‘You have some explaining to do,’ he said.

‘And no lies this time!’ Asser spat. Years before, in this same hall, I had been tried by the Witan for offences of which, in truth, I was wholly guilty. The chief witness of my crimes had been Asser, but I had lied my way out and he had known I had lied and he had despised me ever since.

I frowned at him. ‘What is your name?’ I asked. ‘You remind me of someone. He was a Welsh earsling, a rat-like little shit, but I killed him, so you can’t be the same man.’

‘Lord Uhtred,’ Bishop Erkenwald said tiredly, ‘please do not insult us.’

Erkenwald and I were not fond of each other, but in his time as Bishop of Lundene he had proved an efficient ruler and he had not stood in my way before Beamfleot, indeed his skills as an organiser had contributed mightily to that victory. ‘What do you want explained?’ I asked.

Archbishop Plegmund pulled a candle across the table to illuminate the parchment. ‘We have been told of your activities this summer,’ he said.

‘And you want to thank me,’ I said.

The cold, sharp eyes stared at me. Plegmund had become famous as a man who denied himself every pleasure, whether it was food, women or luxury. He served his god by being uncomfortable, by praying in lonely places, and by being a hermit priest. Why folk think that admirable, I do not know, but he was held in awe by the Christians, who were all delighted when he abandoned his hermit’s discomfort to become archbishop. ‘In the spring,’ he said in a thin, precise voice, ‘you had a meeting with the man who calls himself Jarl Haesten, following which meeting you rode north into the country possessed by Cnut Ranulfson where you consulted the witch, Ælfadell. From there you went to Snotengaham, presently occupied by Sigurd Thorrson, and thereafter to the Jarl Haesten again.’

‘All true,’ I said easily, ‘only you’ve left some things out.’

‘Here come the lies,’ Asser sneered.

I frowned at him. ‘Was your mother straining at stool when you were born?’

Plegmund slapped the table again. ‘What have we left out?’

‘The small truth that I burned Sigurd’s fleet.’

Osferth had been looking increasingly alarmed at the hostility in the room and now, without a word to me, and without any demurral from the clerics at the linen-covered table, he edged back to the door. They let him go. It was me they wanted.

‘The fleet was burned, we know,’ Plegmund said, ‘and we know the reason.’

‘Tell me.’

‘It was a sign to the Danes that there can be no retreat across the water. Sigurd Thorrson is telling his followers that their fate is to capture Wessex, and as proof of that fate he burned his own ships to demonstrate that there can be no withdrawal.’

‘You believe that?’ I asked.

‘It is the truth,’ Asser snapped.

‘You wouldn’t know the truth if it was rammed down your throat with an axe-handle,’ I said, ‘and no northern lord will burn his ships. They cost gold. I burned them, and Sigurd’s men tried to kill me when I did.’

‘Oh, no one doubts that you were there when they were burned,’ Erkenwald said.

‘And you do not deny consulting the witch Ælfadell?’ Plegmund asked.

‘No,’ I said, ‘nor do I deny destroying the Danish armies at Fearnhamme and at Beamfleot last year.’

‘No one denies that you have done past service,’ Plegmund said.

‘When it suited you,’ Asser added acidly.

‘And do you deny slaying the Abbot Deorlaf of Buchestanes?’ Plegmund asked.

‘I gutted him like a plump fish,’ I said.

‘You don’t deny it?’ Asser sounded astonished.

‘I’m proud of it,’ I said, ‘and of the other two monks I killed.’

‘Note that!’ Asser hissed at the clerk-priests who hardly needed his encouragement. They were scribbling away.

‘Last year,’ Bishop Erkenwald said, ‘you refused to give an oath of loyalty to the ætheling Edward.’

‘True.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I’m tired of Wessex,’ I said, ‘tired of priests, tired of being told what your god’s will is, tired of being told that I’m a sinner, tired of your endless damned nonsense, tired of that nailed tyrant you call god who only wants us to be miserable. And I refused to give the oath because my ambition is to go back north, to Bebbanburg, and to kill the men who hold it, and I cannot do that if I am sworn to Edward and he wants something different of me.’

That might not have been the most tactful speech, but I was not feeling tactful. Someone, I assumed Æthelred, had done their best to destroy me and had deployed the power of the church to do that and I was determined to fight the miserable bastards. It seemed I was succeeding, at least in making them even more miserable. Plegmund was grimacing, Asser making the sign of the cross, and Erkenwald’s eyes were closed. The two young priests were writing faster than ever. ‘Nailed tyrant,’ one of them repeated slowly as his quill scratched on the parchment.

‘And who had the clever idea to send me to East Anglia so Sigurd could kill me?’ I demanded.

‘King Eohric assures us that Sigurd went without his invitation, and that had he known he would have launched an attack on those forces,’ Plegmund said.

‘Eohric is an earsling,’ I said, ‘and in case you didn’t know, archbishop, an earsling is a thing like Bishop Asser that is squirted out of an arse.’

‘You will be respectful!’ Plegmund snarled, glaring at me.

‘Why?’ I demanded.

He blinked at that. Asser was whispering in his ear, the sibilance urgent and demanding, while Bishop Erkenwald tried to discover something useful from me. ‘What did the witch Ælfadell tell you?’ he asked.

‘That the Saxon would destroy Wessex,’ I said, ‘and that the Danes would win and Wessex would be no more.’

All three were checked by that. They might have been Christians, and important Christians at that, but they were not immune to the real gods and their magic. They were scared, though none made the sign of the cross because to have done so would have been an admission that the pagan prophetess might have some access to the truth, a thing they would want to deny to each other. ‘And who is the Saxon?’ Asser hissed the question.

‘That,’ I said, ‘is what I came to Wintanceaster to tell the king.’

‘So tell us,’ Plegmund demanded.

‘I’ll tell the king,’ I said.

‘You snake,’ Asser said, ‘you thief in the night! The Saxon who will destroy Wessex is you!’

I spat to show my derision, but the spittle did not reach the table.

‘You came here,’ Erkenwald said wearily, ‘because of a woman.’

‘Adulterer!’ Asser snapped.

‘That is the only explanation for your presence here,’ Erkenwald said, then looked at the archbishop, ‘sicut canis qui revertitur ad vomitum suum.’

‘Sic inprudens qui iterat stultitiam suam,’ the archbishop intoned.

I thought for a moment they were cursing me, but little Bishop Asser could not resist demonstrating his learning by providing me with a translation. ‘As the dog returns to its vomit, so the fool returns to his filth.’

‘The words of God,’ Erkenwald said.

‘And we must decide what to do with you,’ Plegmund said, and at those words Godric’s men moved closer. I was aware of their spears behind me. A log cracked in the fire, shooting sparks onto the rushes that began to smoke. Normally a servant, or one of the soldiers, would have rushed forward to stamp out the tiny fire, but no one moved. They wanted me dead. ‘It has been demonstrated to us,’ Plegmund broke the silence, ‘that you have been consorting with our king’s enemies, that you have conspired with them, that you have eaten their bread and taken their salt. Worse, you have admitted to slaying the holy Abbot Deorlaf and two of his brethren and…’

‘The holy Abbot Deorlaf,’ I interrupted him, ‘was in league with the witch Ælfadell, and the holy Abbot Deorlaf wished to kill me. What was I supposed to do? Turn the other cheek?’

‘You will be silent!’ Plegmund said.

I took two steps forward and ground out the burning rushes with my boot. One of Godric’s soldiers, thinking I was about to attack the clergymen, had drawn back his spear and I turned and looked at him. Just looked. He reddened and, very slowly, the spear went down. ‘I have fought your king’s enemies,’ I said, still gazing at the spearman, but then turning towards Plegmund, ‘as Bishop Erkenwald well knows. While other men cowered behind burh walls I was leading your king’s army. I stood in the shield wall. I cut down foemen, I reddened the soil with the blood of your enemies, I burned ships, I took the fort at Beamfleot.’

‘And you wear the hammer!’ Asser’s voice was shrill. He was pointing at my amulet with a shaking finger, ‘it is the symbol of our enemies, the very sign of those who would torture Christ again, and you wear it even in the court of our king!’

‘What did your mother do?’ I asked. ‘Fart like a mare? And there you were?’

‘Enough,’ Plegmund said tiredly.

It was not hard to guess who had dripped poison in their ears; my cousin Æthelred. He was the titular Lord of Mercia, the closest thing that country had to a king, yet every man knew that he was a puppy on a West Saxon leash. He wanted that leash cut, and when Alfred died he would doubtless look for a crown. And for a new wife, the old being Æthelflaed who had added horns to his leash. A leashed and horned puppy who wanted revenge, and wanted me dead because he knew there were too many men in Mercia who would follow me rather than him.

‘It is our duty to decide your fate,’ Plegmund said.

‘The Norns do that,’ I said, ‘at Yggdrasil’s root.’

‘Heathen,’ Asser hissed.

‘The kingdom must be protected,’ the archbishop went on, ignoring both of us, ‘it must have the shield of faith and the sword of righteousness, and there is no place in God’s kingdom for a man of no faith, a man who could turn against us at any moment. Uhtred of Bebbanburg, I must tell you…’

But whatever he was about to tell me went untold because the door at the hall’s end creaked open. ‘The king wants to see him,’ a familiar voice said.

I turned to see Steapa standing there. Good Steapa, commander of Alfred’s household troops, a peasant slave who had risen to become a great warrior, a man daft as a barrel of loam and strong as an ox, a friend, a man as true as any I have known. ‘The king,’ he said in his stolid voice.

‘But…’ Plegmund began.

‘The king wants me, you snaggle-toothed bastard,’ I told him, then looked at the spearman who had threatened me. ‘If you ever point a blade at me again,’ I promised him, ‘I’ll rip your belly open and feed your entrails to my dogs.’

The Norns were probably laughing, and I went to see the king.

PART TWO

Death of a King

Six

Alfred lay swathed in woollen blankets and propped against a great cushion. Osferth sat on the bed, his hand held by his father. The king’s other hand lay on a bejewelled book, I assumed a gospel book. Just outside the room, in a long passageway, Brother John and four members of his choir were singing a doleful chant. The room stank, despite the herbs scattered on the floor and the great candles that burned in tall wooden sticks. Some of them were Alfred’s prized candle clocks, their bands marking the hours as the king’s life leaked away. Two priests stood against one wall of Alfred’s chamber, while opposite them was a great panel of leather on which the crucifixion was painted.

Steapa pushed me into the room and shut the door on me.

Alfred looked dead already. Indeed, I might have thought him a corpse if he had not pulled his hand away from Osferth, who was in tears. The king’s long face was pale as fleece, with sunken eyes, sunken cheeks and dark shadows. His hair had thinned and gone white. His gums had pulled back from his remaining teeth, his unshaven chin was stained with spittle, while the hand on the book was mere skin-covered bones on which a great ruby shone, the ring too big now for his skeletal finger. His breath was shallow, though his voice was remarkably strong. ‘Behold the sword of the Saxons,’ he greeted me.

‘I see your son has a loose tongue, lord King,’ I said. I went onto one knee until he feebly gestured for me to stand.

He looked at me from his pillow and I looked at him and the monks chanted beyond the door and a candle guttered to spew a thick twist of smoke. ‘I’m dying, Lord Uhtred,’ Alfred said.

‘Yes, lord.’

‘And you look healthy as a bullock,’ he said with a grimace that was meant to be a smile. ‘You always had the capacity to irritate me, didn’t you? It isn’t tactful to look healthy in front of a dying king, but I rejoice for you.’ His left hand stroked the gospel book. ‘Tell me what will happen when I’m dead,’ he commanded me.

‘Your son Edward will rule, lord.’

He gazed at me and I saw the intelligence in those sunken eyes. ‘Don’t tell me what you think I want to hear,’ he said with a touch of his old asperity, ‘but what you believe.’

‘Your son Edward will rule, lord,’ I repeated.

He nodded slowly, believing me. ‘He’s a good son,’ Alfred said, almost as if he were trying to persuade himself of that.

‘He fought well at Beamfleot. You would have been proud of him, lord.’

Alfred nodded tiredly. ‘So much is expected of a king,’ he said. ‘He must be brave in battle, wise in council, just in judgement.’

‘You have been all those things, lord,’ I said, not flattering him, but telling the truth.

‘I tried,’ he said, ‘God knows I did try.’ He closed his eyes and was silent for so long that I wondered if he had fallen asleep and whether I should leave, but then his eyes opened and he gazed at the smoke-darkened ceiling. Somewhere deep in the palace a hound barked shrilly, then suddenly stopped. Alfred frowned in thought, then turned his head to look at me. ‘You spent time with Edward last summer,’ he said.

‘I did, lord.’

‘Is he wise?’

‘He’s clever, lord,’ I said.

‘Many folk are clever, Lord Uhtred, but very few are wise.’

‘Men learn wisdom through experience, lord,’ I said.

‘Some do,’ Alfred said tartly, ‘but will Edward learn?’ I shrugged because it was not a question I could answer. ‘I worry,’ Alfred said, ‘that his passions will rule him.’

I glanced at Osferth. ‘As yours ruled you, lord, once.’

‘Omnes enim peccaverunt,’ Alfred said softly.

‘All have sinned,’ Osferth translated and received a smile from his father.

‘I worry that he is headstrong,’ Alfred said, talking of Edward again. I was surprised that he talked so openly of his heir, but of course it was the one thing that preyed on his mind in those last days. Alfred had dedicated his life to the preservation of Wessex, and he desperately wanted reassurance that all his achievements would not be thrown away by his successor, and so deep was that worry that he could not let the subject alone. He wanted that reassurance so badly.

‘You leave him with good counsel, lord,’ I said, not because I believed it, but because he wanted to hear it. Many men of the Witan were indeed good counsellors, but there were too many churchmen like Plegmund, whose advice I would never trust.

‘And a king can reject all counsel,’ Alfred said, ‘because in the end it is always the king’s decision, it is the king’s responsibility, it is the king who is wise or foolish. And if the king is foolish, what will happen to the kingdom?’

‘You worry, lord,’ I said, ‘because Edward did what all young men do.’

‘He is not like other young men,’ Alfred said sternly, ‘but born to privilege and duty.’

‘And a girl’s smile,’ I said, ‘can erode duty faster than flame melts frost.’

He stared at me. ‘So you know?’ he said, after a long while.

‘Yes, lord, I know.’

Alfred sighed. ‘He said it was passion, that it was love. Kings don’t marry for love, Lord Uhtred, they marry to make their kingdom safe. And she wasn’t right,’ he said firmly, ‘she was brazen! She was shameless!’

‘Then I wish I’d known her, lord,’ I said, and Alfred laughed, though the effort hurt him and the laugh turned to a groan. Osferth had no idea what we talked about and I gave him the slightest shake of my head to show that he should not ask, and then I thought of the words that would give Alfred the reassurance he wanted. ‘At Beamfleot, lord,’ I said, ‘I stood beside Edward in a shield wall and a man cannot hide his character in a shield wall, and I learned that your son is a good man. I promise you, he is a man to be proud of,’ I hesitated, then nodded at Osferth, ‘as are all your sons.’

I saw the king’s hand tighten on Osferth’s fingers. ‘Osferth is a good man,’ Alfred said, ‘and I am proud of him.’ Alfred patted his bastard son’s hand and looked back to me. ‘And what else will happen?’ he asked.

‘Æthelwold will make an attempt to take the throne,’ I said.

‘He swears not.’

‘He swears easily, lord. You should have cut his throat twenty years ago.’

‘People said the same about you, Lord Uhtred.’

‘Maybe you should have taken their advice, lord?’

His mouth showed the ghost of a smile. ‘Æthelwold is a sorry creature,’ he said, ‘without discipline or sense. He’s not a danger, just a reminder of our fallibility.’

‘He’s talked to Sigurd,’ I said, ‘and he has disaffected allies in both Cent and Mercia. That’s why I came to Wintanceaster, lord, to warn you of this.’

Alfred gazed at me for a long time, then sighed. ‘He’s always dreamed of being king,’ he said.

‘Time to kill him and his dream, lord,’ I said firmly. ‘Give me the word and I’ll rid you of him.’

Alfred shook his head. ‘He’s my brother’s son,’ Alfred said, ‘and a weak man. I don’t want my family’s blood on my hands when I stand before God at the judgement seat.’

‘So you let him live?’

‘He’s too weak to be dangerous. No one in Wessex will support him.’

‘Very few will, lord,’ I said, ‘so he’ll go back to Sigurd and Cnut. They will invade Mercia and then Wessex. There will be battles.’ I hesitated. ‘And in those battles, lord, Cnut, Sigurd and Æthelwold will die, but Edward and Wessex will be safe.’

He considered that glib statement for a moment, then sighed. ‘And Mercia? Not every man in Mercia loves Wessex.’

‘The Mercian lords must choose sides, lord,’ I said. ‘Those who support Wessex will be on the winning side, the others will be dead. Mercia will be ruled by Edward.’

I had told him what he wanted to hear, but also what I believed. Strange, that. I had been left confused by Ælfadell’s predictions, yet when I was asked to foretell the future I had no hesitation.

‘How can you be so sure?’ Alfred asked. ‘Did the witch Ælfadell tell you all that?’

‘No, lord. She told me the very opposite, but she was only telling me what Jarl Cnut wanted her to say.’

‘The gift of prophecy,’ Alfred said sternly, ‘would not be given to a pagan.’

‘Yet you ask me to tell the future, lord?’ I asked mischievously, and was rewarded by another grimace that was intended as a smile.

‘So how can you be sure?’ Alfred asked.

‘We’ve learned how to fight the Northmen, lord,’ I said, ‘but they haven’t learned how to fight us. When you have burhs, then the defender has all the advantages. They will attack, we will defend, they will lose, we shall win.’

‘You make it sound simple,’ Alfred said.

‘Battle is simple, lord, maybe that’s why I’m good at it.’

‘I have been wrong about you, Lord Uhtred.’

‘No, lord.’

‘No?’

‘I love the Danes, lord.’

‘But you are the sword of the Saxons?’

‘Wyrd bið ful āræd, lord,’ I said.

He closed his eyes momentarily. He lay so still that for a few heartbeats I feared he was dying, but then he opened his eyes again and frowned towards the smoke-blackened rafters. He tried to suppress a moan, but it escaped anyway and I saw the pain pass across his face. ‘That is so hard,’ he said.

‘There are potions that help with pain, lord,’ I said helplessly.

He shook his head slowly. ‘Not pain, Lord Uhtred. We are born to pain. No, fate is difficult. Is all ordained? Foreknowledge is not fate, and we may choose our paths, yet fate says we may not choose them. So if fate is real, do we have choice?’ I said nothing, letting him puzzle that unanswerable question for himself. He looked at me. ‘What would you have your fate be?’ he asked.

‘I would recapture Bebbanburg, lord, and when I find myself on my deathbed I want it to be in Bebbanburg’s high hall with the sound of her sea filling my ears.’

‘And I have Brother John filling my ears,’ Alfred said, amused. ‘He tells them they must open their mouths like hungry little birds, and they do.’ He put his right hand back on Osferth’s hand. ‘They want me to be a hungry little bird. They feed me thin gruel, Lord Uhtred, and insist that I eat, but I don’t want to eat.’ He sighed. ‘My son,’ he meant Osferth, ‘tells me you are a poor man. Why? Did you not capture a fortune at Dunholm?’

‘I did, lord.’

‘You wasted it?’

‘I wasted it in your service, lord, on men, mail and weapons. On guarding the frontier of Mercia. On equipping an army to defeat Haesten.’

‘Nervi bellorum pecuniae,’ Alfred said.

‘Your scriptures, lord?’

‘A wise Roman, Lord Uhtred, who said that money is the sinews of war.’

‘He knew what he was talking about, lord.’

Alfred closed his eyes and I could see the pain cross his face again. His mouth tightened as he suppressed a groan. The smell in the room grew ranker. ‘There is a lump in my belly,’ he said, ‘like a stone.’ He paused and again tried to stifle a groan. A single tear escaped. ‘I watch the candle clocks,’ he said, ‘and wonder how many bands will burn before,’ he hesitated. ‘I measure my life by inches. You will come back tomorrow, Lord Uhtred.’

‘Yes, lord.’

‘I have given my,’ he paused, then patted Osferth’s hand, ‘my son,’ he said, ‘a charge.’ He opened his eyes and looked at me. ‘My son is charged with converting you to the true faith.’

‘Yes, lord,’ I said, not knowing what else to say. I saw the tears on Osferth’s face.

Alfred looked at the great leather panel that showed the crucifixion. ‘Do you notice anything strange about that painting?’ he asked me.

I stared at it. Jesus hung from the cross, blood streaked, the sinews in his arms stretching against the dark sky behind. ‘No, lord,’ I said.

‘He’s dying,’ Alfred said. That seemed obvious and so I said nothing. ‘In every other depiction I have seen of our Lord’s death,’ the king went on, ‘he is smiling on the cross, but not in this one. In this painting his head is hanging, he is in pain.’

‘Yes, lord.’

‘Archbishop Plegmund reproved the painter,’ Alfred said, ‘because he believes our Lord conquered pain and so would have smiled to the end, but I like the painting. It reminds me that my pain is as nothing compared to his.’

‘I would you had no pain, lord,’ I said awkwardly.

He ignored that. He still gazed at the agonised Christ, then grimaced. ‘He wore a crown of thorns,’ he said in a tone of wonderment. ‘Men want to be king,’ he went on, ‘but every crown has thorns. I told Edward that wearing the crown is hard, so hard. One last thing,’ he turned his head from the painting and raised his left hand, and I saw what an effort it took to lift that pathetic hand from the gospel book. ‘I would have you swear an oath of loyalty to Edward. That way I can die in the knowledge that you will fight for us.’

‘I will fight for Wessex,’ I said.

‘The oath,’ he said sternly.

‘And I will give an oath,’ I said. His shrewd eyes stared at me.

‘To my daughter?’ he asked, and I saw Osferth stiffen.

‘To your daughter, lord,’ I agreed.

He seemed to shudder. ‘In my laws, Lord Uhtred, adultery is not just a sin, but a crime.’

‘You would make criminals of all mankind, lord.’

He half smiled at that. ‘I love Æthelflaed,’ he said, ‘she was always the liveliest of my children, but not the most obedient.’ His hand dropped back onto the gospel book. ‘Leave me now, Lord Uhtred. Come back tomorrow.’

If he was still alive, I thought. I knelt to him, then Osferth and I left. We walked in silence to a cloistered courtyard where the last roses of summer had dropped their petals on the damp grass. We sat on a stone bench and listened to the mournful chants echoing from the passageway. ‘The archbishop wanted me dead,’ I said.

‘I know,’ Osferth said, ‘so I went to my father.’

‘I’m surprised they let you see him.’

‘I had to argue with the priests who guard him,’ he said with a half-smile, ‘but he heard the argument.’

‘And called you to see him?’

‘He sent a priest to summon me.’

‘And you told him what was happening to me?’

‘Yes, lord.’

‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘And you made your peace with Alfred?’

Osferth gazed unseeing into the dark. ‘He said he was sorry, lord, that I am what I am, and that it was his fault, and that he would intervene for me in heaven.’

‘I’m glad,’ I said, not sure how else to respond to such nonsense.

‘And I told him, lord, that if Edward were to rule, then Edward needed you.’

‘Edward will rule,’ I said, then I told him about the Lady Ecgwynn and the twin babies hidden away in the nunnery. ‘Edward was only doing what his father did,’ I said, ‘but it will cause problems.’

‘Problems?’

‘Are the babies legitimate?’ I asked. ‘Alfred says not, but once Alfred dies then Edward can declare otherwise.’

‘Oh, God,’ Osferth said, seeing the difficulties so far in the future.

‘What they should do, of course,’ I said, ‘is strangle the little bastards.’

‘Lord!’ Osferth said, shocked.

‘But they won’t. Your family was never ruthless enough.’

It had begun to rain harder, the drops beating on the tile and thatch of the palace roofs. There was no moon, no stars, only clouds in darkness and the hard rain teeming and the wind sighing about the scaffolded tower of Alfred’s great new church. I went to Saint Hedda’s. The guards were gone, the alleyway dark, and I beat on the convent door till someone answered.

Next day the king and his bed had been moved to the larger hall where Plegmund and his colleagues had thought to condemn me. The crown was on the bed, its bright emeralds reflecting the fire that filled the high chamber with smoke and heat. The room was crowded, stinking of men and the king’s decay. Bishop Asser was there, as was Erkenwald, though the archbishop had evidently found other business to keep him from the king’s presence. A score of West Saxon lords were there. One of them was Æthelhelm whose daughter was to marry Edward. I liked Æthelhelm, who now stood close behind Ælswith, Alfred’s wife, who did not know which she resented more, my existence or the strange truth that Wessex did not recognise the rank of queen. She watched me balefully. Her children flanked her. Æthelflaed, at twenty-nine, was the eldest, then came her brother, Edward, then Æthelgifu and lastly Æthelweard who was just sixteen. Ælfthryth, Alfred’s third daughter, was not there because she had been married to a king across the water in Frankia. Steapa was there, looming above my dear old friend, Father Beocca, who was now stooped and white-haired. Brother John and his monks sang softly. Not all of the choir were monks, some were small boys robed in pale linen and, with a shock, I recognised my son Uhtred as one of them.

I have been, I confess, a bad father. I loved my two youngest children, but my eldest who, in the tradition of my family, had taken my name, was a mystery. Instead of wishing to learn sword-craft and spear-skill, he had become a Christian. A Christian! And now, with the other boys of the cathedral choir, he sang like a little bird. I glared at him, but he resolutely avoided my gaze.

I joined the ealdormen who stood at one side of the hall. They, with the senior clerics, formed the king’s council, the Witan, and they had business to discuss, though none did it with any enthusiasm. A grant of land was given to a monastery, and payment authorised for the masons who were working on Alfred’s new church. A man who had failed to pay his fine for the crime of manslaughter was pardoned because he had done good service with Weohstan’s forces at Beamfleot. Some men looked at me when that victory was mentioned, but no one asked if I remembered the man. The king took little part, except to raise a weary hand to signify his assent.

All this while a clerk was standing behind a desk where he wrote a manuscript. I thought at first he was making a record of the proceedings, but two other clerks were clearly doing that, while the man at the desk was mainly copying from another document. He seemed very conscious of everyone’s gaze and was red in the face, though perhaps that was the heat from the great fire. Bishop Asser was scowling, Ælswith looked ready to kill me with anger, but Father Beocca was smiling. He bobbed his head to me and I winked at him. Æthelflaed caught my eye and smiled so mischievously that I hoped her father had not seen it. Her husband was standing not far away from her and, like my son, he studiously avoided my gaze. Then, to my astonishment, I saw Æthelwold standing at the back of the hall. He looked at me defiantly, but could not hold my stare and stooped instead to talk with a companion I did not recognise.

A man complained that his neighbour, Ealdorman Æthelnoth, had taken fields that did not belong to him. The king interrupted the complaint, whispering to Bishop Asser who gave the king’s judgement. ‘Will you accept the arbitration of Abbot Osburh?’ he asked the man.

‘I will.’

‘And you, Lord Æthelnoth?’

‘Gladly.’

‘Then the abbot is charged with discovering the boundaries according to the proper writs,’ Asser said, and the clerks scratched his words, and the council moved on to discuss other matters and I saw Alfred look wearily towards the man copying the document at the desk. The man had finished, because he sanded the parchment, waited a few heartbeats and then blew the sand into the fire. He folded the parchment and wrote something on the folded side, then sanded and blew again. A second clerk brought a candle, wax and a seal. The finished document was then carried to the king’s bed, and Alfred, with great effort, signed his name and then beckoned that Bishop Erkenwald and Father Beocca should add their signatures as witnesses to whatever it was he had signed.

The council fell silent as this was done. I assumed the document was the king’s will, but once the wax had been impressed with the great seal, the king beckoned to me.

I went to his bedside and knelt. ‘I have been granting small gifts as remembrances,’ Alfred said.

‘You were ever generous, lord King,’ I lied, but what else does one say to a dying man?

‘This is for you,’ he said, and I heard Ælswith’s sharp intake of breath as I took the newly written parchment from her husband’s feeble hand. ‘Read it,’ he said, ‘you can still read?’

‘Father Beocca taught me well,’ I said.

‘Father Beocca does all things well,’ the king said, then moaned with pain, which caused a monk to go to his side and offer him a cup.

The king sipped, and I read. It was a charter. The clerk had copied much of it, for one charter is much like another, but this one took my breath away. It granted me land, and the grant was not conditional, like that which Alfred had once used to give me an estate at Fifhidan. Instead it conveyed the land freely to me and to my heirs or to whoever else I chose to grant that land, and the charter laboriously described the boundaries of the land, and the length of that description told me that the estate was wide and deep. There was a river and orchards and meadows and villages, and a hall at a place called Fagranforda, and all of it in Mercia. ‘The land belonged to my father,’ Alfred said.

I did not know what to say, except to utter thanks.

The feeble hand stretched towards me and I took it. I kissed the ruby. ‘You know what I want,’ Alfred said. I kept my head bowed over his hand. ‘The land is given freely,’ he said, ‘and it will give you wealth, much wealth.’

‘Lord King,’ I said, and my voice faltered.

His feeble fingers tightened on my hand. ‘Give something back to me, Uhtred,’ he said, ‘give me peace before I die.’

And so I did what he wanted, and what I did not wish to do, but he was dying, and he had been generous at the end, and how can you slap a man who is in his last days of life? And so I went to Edward and I knelt to him, and I put my hands between his and I swore the oath of loyalty. And some in the hall applauded while some stayed resolutely silent. Æthelhelm, the chief adviser in the Witan, smiled, for he knew I would now fight for Wessex. My cousin Æthelred shuddered, for he knew he would never call himself king in Mercia so long as I did Edward’s will, while Æthelwold must have wondered if he would ever take Alfred’s throne if he had to fight his way past Serpent-Breath. Edward pulled me to my feet and embraced me. ‘Thank you,’ he whispered. That was Wednesday, Woden’s Day, in October, the eighth month of the year, which was 899.

The next day belonged to Thor. The rain did not stop, coming in huge swathes that swept across Wintanceaster. ‘Heaven itself is weeping,’ Beocca told me. He was crying himself. ‘The king asked me to give him the last rites,’ he said, ‘and I did, but my hands were shaking.’ It seemed Alfred received the last rites at intervals through the day, so intent was he on making a good end, and the priests and bishops vied with each other for the honour of anointing the king and placing a piece of dry bread between his lips. ‘Bishop Asser was ready to give the viaticum,’ Beocca said, ‘but Alfred asked for me.’

‘He loves you,’ I said, ‘and you’ve served him well.’

‘I have served God and the king,’ Beocca said, then let me guide him to a seat beside the fire in the great room of the Two Cranes. ‘He took some curds this morning,’ Beocca told me earnestly, ‘but not many. Two spoonfuls.’

‘He doesn’t want to eat,’ I said.

‘He must,’ Beocca said. Poor dear Beocca. He had been my father’s priest and clerk, and my childhood tutor, though he had abandoned Bebbanburg when my uncle usurped its lordship. He was low-born and ill-born, with a pathetic squint, a misshapen nose, a palsied left hand and a club foot. It was my grandfather who saw the boy’s cleverness and had him educated by the monks at Lindisfarena, and Beocca became a priest and then, following my uncle’s treachery, an exile. His cleverness and his devotion had attracted Alfred, whom Beocca had served ever since. He was old now, almost as old as the king, and his straggly red hair had turned white, his back was bent, yet he still had a keen mind and a strong will. He also had a Danish wife, a true beauty, who was the sister of my dearest friend, Ragnar.

‘How is Thyra?’ I asked him.

‘She is well, thanks be to God, and the boys! We’re blessed.’

‘You’ll be blessed and dead if you insist on walking the streets in this rain,’ I said. ‘No fool like an old fool.’

He chuckled at that, then made a small impotent protest when I insisted on taking his sopping wet cloak and placing a dry one around his shoulders. ‘The king asked me to come to you,’ he said.

‘Then the king should have told me to go to you,’ I said.

‘Such a wet season!’ Beocca said. ‘I haven’t seen rain like this since the year Archbishop Æthelred died. The king doesn’t know it’s raining. Poor man. He strives against the pain. He can’t last long now.’

‘And he sent you,’ I reminded him.

‘He asks a favour of you,’ Beocca said, with a touch of his old sternness.

‘Go on.’

‘Fagranforda is a great estate,’ Beocca said, ‘the king was generous.’

‘I have been generous to him,’ I said.

Beocca waved his crippled left hand as if to dismiss my remark. ‘There are presently four churches and a monastery on the estate,’ he went on crisply, ‘and the king has asked for your assurance that you will maintain them as they should be maintained, as their charters demand, and as is your duty.’

I smiled at that. ‘And if I refuse?’

‘Oh please, Uhtred,’ he said wearily. ‘I have struggled with you my whole life!’

‘I will tell the steward to do all that is necessary,’ I promised.

He looked at me with his one good eye as if judging my sincerity, but seemed pleased with what he saw. ‘The king will be grateful,’ he said.

‘I thought you were going to ask me to abandon Æthelflaed,’ I said mischievously. There were few people I would ever talk to about Æthelflaed, but Beocca, who had known me since I was a stripling, was one.

He shuddered at my words. ‘Adultery is a grievous sin,’ he said, though without much passion.

‘A crime too,’ I said, amused. ‘Have you told that to Edward?’

He flinched. ‘That was a young man’s foolishness,’ he said, ‘and God punished the girl. She died.’

‘Your god is so good,’ I said caustically, ‘but why didn’t he think to kill her royal bastards as well?’

‘They have been put away,’ he said.

‘With Æthelflaed.’

He nodded. ‘They kept her from you,’ he said, ‘you know that?’

‘I know that.’

‘Locked her away in Saint Hedda’s,’ he said.

‘I found the key,’ I said.

‘God preserve us from wickedness,’ Beocca said, making the sign of the cross.

‘Æthelflaed,’ I said, ‘is loved in Mercia. Her husband is not.’

‘This is known,’ he said distantly.

‘When Edward becomes king,’ I said, ‘he will look to Mercia.’

‘Look to Mercia?’

‘The Danes will come, father,’ I said, ‘and they’ll begin with Mercia. You want the Mercian lords fighting for Wessex? You want the Mercian fyrd fighting for Wessex? The one person who can inspire them is Æthelflaed.’

‘You can,’ he said loyally.

I gave that statement the scorn it deserved. ‘You and I are Northumbrians, father. They think we’re barbarians who eat our children for breakfast. But they love Æthelflaed.’

‘I know,’ he said.

‘So let her be a sinner, father, if that is what makes Wessex safe.’

‘Am I supposed to tell the king that?’

I laughed. ‘You’re supposed to tell Edward that. And tell him more. Tell him to kill Æthelwold. No mercy, no family sentimentality, no Christian guilt. Just give me the order and he’s dead.’

Beocca shook his head. ‘Æthelwold is a fool,’ he said accurately, ‘and most of the time a drunken fool. He flirted with the Danes, we cannot deny it, but he has confessed all his sins to the king and been forgiven.’

‘Forgiven?’

‘Last night,’ Beocca said, ‘he shed tears at the king’s bedside and swore allegiance to the king’s heir.’

I had to laugh. Alfred’s response to my warning had been to summon Æthelwold and believe the fool’s lies. ‘Æthelwold will try to take the throne,’ I said.

‘He swore the opposite,’ Beocca said earnestly, ‘he swore on Noah’s feather and on the glove of Saint Cedd.’

The feather had supposedly belonged to a dove that Noah had released from the ark back in the days when it rained as heavily as the downpour that now drummed on the roof of the Two Cranes. The feather and the saint’s glove were two of Alfred’s most precious relics, and doubtless he would believe anything that was sworn in their presence. ‘Don’t believe him,’ I said, ‘kill him. Or else he’ll make trouble.’

‘He has sworn his oath,’ Beocca said, ‘and the king believes him.’

‘Æthelwold is a treacherous earsling,’ I said.

‘He’s just a fool,’ Beocca said dismissively.

‘But an ambitious fool, and a fool with a legitimate claim to the throne, and men will use that claim.’

‘He has relented, he has made confession, he has been absolved, and he is penitent.’

What fools we all are. I see the same mistakes being made, time after time, generation after generation, yet still we go on believing what we wish to believe. That night, in the wet darkness, I repeated Beocca’s words. ‘He has relented,’ I said, ‘he has made confession, he has been absolved, and he is penitent.’

‘And they believe him?’ Æthelflaed asked bleakly.

‘Christians are fools,’ I said, ‘ready to believe anything.’

She prodded me hard in the ribs, and I chuckled. The rain fell on Saint Hedda’s roof. I should not have been there, of course, but the abbess, dear Hild, pretended not to know. I was not in that part of the nunnery where the sisters lived in seclusion, but in a range of buildings about the outer courtyard where lay folk were permitted. There were kitchens where food was prepared for the poor, there was a hospital where the indigent could die, and there was this attic room, which had been Æthelflaed’s prison. It was not uncomfortable, though small. She was attended by maidservants, but this night they had been told to make themselves beds in the storerooms beneath. ‘They told me you were negotiating with the Danes,’ Æthelflaed said.

‘I was. I was using Serpent-Breath.’

‘And negotiating with Sigunn too?’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘and she’s well.’

‘God knows why I love you.’

‘God knows everything.’

She said nothing to that, but just stirred beside me and pulled the fleece higher about her head and shoulders. The rain beat on. Her hair was golden in my face. She was Alfred’s eldest child and I had watched her grow to become a woman, had watched the joy in her face fade to bitterness when she was given as wife to my cousin, and I had seen the joy return. Her blue eyes were flecked with brown, her nose was small and upturned. It was a face I loved, but a face that now had lines of worry. ‘You should talk to your son,’ she said, her voice muffled by the fleece bedcover.

‘Uhtred spouts pious nonsense to me,’ I said, ‘so I’d rather talk to my daughter.’

‘She’s safe, and your other son too, in Cippanhamm.’

‘Why is Uhtred here?’ I asked.

‘The king wanted him here.’

‘They’re turning him into a priest,’ I said angrily.

‘And they want to turn me into a nun,’ she said just as angrily.

‘They do?’

‘Bishop Erkenwald administered the oath to me, I spat at him.’

I pulled her head out from under the fleece. ‘They really tried?’

‘Bishop Erkenwald and my mother.’

‘What happened?’

‘They came here,’ she said in a very matter-of-fact voice, ‘and insisted I went to the chapel, and Bishop Erkenwald said a great deal of angry Latin, then held a book to me and told me to put my hand on it and swear to keep the oath he’d just said.’

‘And you did?’

‘I told you what I did. I spat at him.’

I lay in silence for a while. ‘Æthelred must have persuaded them,’ I said.

‘Well I’m sure he’d like to put me away, but Mother said it was Father’s wish I took the vows.’

‘I doubt that,’ I said.

‘So then they went back to the palace and announced I had taken the vow.’

‘And put guards on the gate,’ I said.

‘I think that was to keep you out,’ Æthelflaed said, ‘but you say the guards are gone?’

‘They’re gone.’

‘So I can leave?’

‘You left yesterday.’

‘Steapa’s men escorted me to the palace,’ she said, ‘then brought me back here.’

‘There are no guards now.’

She frowned in thought. ‘I should have been born a man.’

‘I’m glad you weren’t.’

‘And I would be king,’ she said.

‘Edward will be a good king.’

‘He will,’ she agreed, ‘but he can be indecisive. I would have made a better king.’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘you would.’

‘Poor Edward,’ she said.

‘Poor? He’ll be king soon.’

‘He lost his love,’ she said.

‘And the babies live.’

‘The babies live,’ she agreed.

I think I loved Gisela best of all the women in my life. I mourn her still. But of all those women, Æthelflaed was always the closest. She thought like me. I would sometimes start to say something and she would finish the sentence. In time we just looked at each other and knew what the other was thinking. Of all the friends I have made in my life, I loved Æthelflaed the best.

Sometime in that wet darkness, Thor’s Day turned into Freya’s Day. Freya was Woden’s wife, the goddess of love, and for all of her day the rain continued to fall. A wind rose in the afternoon, a high wind that tore at Wintanceaster’s thatch and drove the rain in malevolent spite, and that same night King Alfred, who had ruled in Wessex for twenty-eight years and was in the fiftieth year of his life, died.

The next morning there was no rain and little wind. Wintanceaster was silent, except for the pigs rooting in the streets, the cockerels crowing, the dogs howling or barking and the thud of the sentries’ boots on the waterlogged planks of the ramparts. Folk seemed dazed. A bell began to toll in mid-morning, just a single bell struck again and again, and the sound faded down the river valley where floods sheeted the meadows, then came again with brutal force. The king is dead, long live the king.

Æthelflaed wanted to pray in the nuns’ chapel, and I left her in Saint Hedda’s and walked through the silent streets to the palace where I surrendered my sword at the gatehouse and saw Steapa sitting alone in the outer courtyard. His grim, skin-stretched face that had terrified so many of Alfred’s enemies was wet with tears. I sat on the bench beside him, but said nothing. A woman hurried past carrying a stack of folded linens. The king dies, yet still sheets must be washed, rooms swept, ashes thrown out, wood stacked, grain milled. A score of horses had been saddled and were waiting at the courtyard’s farther end. I supposed they were for messengers who would carry the news of the king’s death to every corner of his kingdom, but instead a troop of men, all in mail and all helmeted, appeared from a doorway and were helped up into their saddles. ‘Your men?’ I asked Steapa.

He gave them a sour glance. ‘Not mine.’

They were Æthelwold’s men. Æthelwold himself was the last to appear and, like his followers, he was dressed for war in a helmet and mail. Three servants had brought the troops’ swords from the gatehouse and men milled about in search of their own blade, then strapped the swords and belts about their waists. Æthelwold took his own long-sword, let a servant buckle the belt, then was helped up onto his horse, a big black stallion. He saw me then. He kicked the horse towards me and pulled the blade out of its scabbard. I did not move, and he curbed the stallion a few paces away. The horse flailed a hoof at the cobblestones, striking a spark. ‘A sad day, Lord Uhtred,’ Æthelwold said. The bare sword was at his side, pointing down. He wanted to use it and he dared not use it. He had ambition and he was weak.

I looked up into his long face, once so handsome, now ravaged by drink and anger and disappointment. There was grey at his temples. ‘A sad day, my prince,’ I agreed.

He was measuring me, measuring the distance his sword needed to travel, measuring the chance he would have to escape through the gate arch after striking the blow. He glanced around the courtyard to see how many of the royal bodyguard were in sight. There were only two. He could have struck me, let his followers take care of the two men, and be gone, all in a moment, but still he hesitated. One of his followers pushed his horse close. The man wore a helmet with closed cheek-plates, so all I could see of his face were his eyes. A shield was slung on his back and on it was painted the head of a bull with bloodied horns. His horse was nervous and he slapped its neck hard. I saw the scars on the beast’s flanks where he had used his spurs deep and hard. He leaned close to Æthelwold and said something under his breath, but was interrupted by Steapa, who simply stood up. He was a huge man, frighteningly tall and broad and, as commander of the royal bodyguard, permitted to wear his sword throughout the palace. He grasped his sword’s hilt and Æthelwold immediately pushed his own blade halfway back into its scabbard. ‘I was worried,’ he said, ‘that the damp weather would have rusted the sword. It seems not.’

‘You put fleece-grease on the blade?’ I asked.

‘My servant must,’ he said airily. He pushed the blade home. The man with the bloodied bull’s horns on his shield stared at me from the shadows of his helmet.

‘You’ll return for the funeral?’ I asked Æthelwold.

‘And for the coronation too,’ he said slyly, ‘but till then I have business at Tweoxnam.’ He offered me an unfriendly smile. ‘My estate there is not so large as yours at Fagranforda, Lord Uhtred, but large enough to need my attention in these sad days.’ He gathered the reins and rammed back his spurs so that the stallion leaped forward. His men followed, their horses’ hooves loud on the stone.

‘Who shows a bull’s head on his shield?’ I asked Steapa.

‘Sigebriht of Cent,’ Steapa said, watching the men disappear through the arch. ‘A young rich fool.’

‘Were they his followers? Or Æthelwold’s?’

‘Æthelwold has men,’ Steapa said. ‘He can afford them. He owns his father’s estates at Tweoxnam and Wimburnan, and that makes him wealthy.’

‘He should be dead.’

‘It’s family business,’ Steapa said, ‘nothing to do with you and me.’

‘It’s you and me who’ll be doing the killing for the family,’ I said.

‘I’m getting too old for it,’ he grumbled.

‘How old are you?’

‘No idea,’ he said, ‘forty?’

He led me through a small gate in the palace wall, then across a patch of waterlogged grass towards Alfred’s old church that stood beside the new minster. Scaffolding spider-webbed the sky where the great stone tower was unfinished. Townsfolk stood by the old church door. They did not speak, but stood and looked bereft, shuffling aside as Steapa and I approached. Some bowed. The door was guarded today by six of Steapa’s men, who pulled their spears aside when they saw us.

Steapa made the sign of the cross as we entered the old church. It was cold inside. The stone walls were painted with scenes from the Christian scriptures, while gold, silver and crystal glinted from the altars. A Dane’s dream, I thought, because there was enough treasure here to buy a fleet and fill it with swords. ‘He thought this church was too small,’ Steapa said in wonderment as he gazed up at the high roof beams. Birds flew there. ‘A falcon nested up there last year,’ he said.

The king had already been brought to the church and laid in front of the high altar. A harpist played and Brother John’s choir sang from the shadows. I wondered if my son was among them, but did not look. Priests muttered in front of side-altars or knelt beside the coffin where the king lay. Alfred’s eyes were closed and his face tied with a white cloth that compressed his lips between which I could just see a crust, presumably because a priest had placed a piece of the Christian’s holy bread in the dead man’s mouth. He was dressed in a penitent’s white robe, like the one he had once forced me to wear. That had been years before, when Æthelwold and I had been commanded to abase ourselves before an altar, and I had been given no choice but to agree, but Æthelwold had turned the whole miserable ceremony into farce. He had pretended to be full of remorse, and shouted that remorse to the sky, ‘No more tits, God! No more tits! Keep me from tits!’ and I remembered how Alfred had turned away in frustrated disgust.

‘Exanceaster,’ Steapa said.

‘You were remembering the same day,’ I said.

‘It was raining,’ he said, ‘and you had to crawl to the altar in the field. I remember.’

That had been the very first time I had seen Steapa, so baleful and frightening, and later we had fought and then become friends, and it was all such a long time ago, and I stood beside Alfred’s coffin and thought how life slipped by, and how, for nearly all my life, Alfred had been there like a great landmark. I had not liked him. I had struggled against him and for him, I had cursed him and thanked him, despised him and admired him. I hated his religion and its cold disapproving gaze, its malevolence that cloaked itself in pretended kindness, and its allegiance to a god who would drain the joy from the world by naming it sin, but Alfred’s religion had made him a good man and a good king.

And Alfred’s joyless soul had proved a rock against which the Danes had broken themselves. Time and again they had attacked, and time and again Alfred had out-thought them, and Wessex grew ever stronger and richer and all that was because of Alfred. We think of kings as privileged men who rule over us and have the freedom to make, break and flaunt the law, but Alfred was never above the law he loved to make. He saw his life as a duty to his god and to the people of Wessex and I have never seen a better king, and I doubt my sons, grandsons and their children’s children will ever see a better one. I never liked him, but I have never stopped admiring him. He was my king and all that I now have I owe to him. The food that I eat, the hall where I live and the swords of my men, all started with Alfred, who hated me at times, loved me at times, and was generous with me. He was a gold-giver.

Steapa had tears on his cheeks. Some of the priests kneeling about the coffin were openly weeping. ‘They’ll make a grave for him tonight,’ Steapa said, pointing towards the high altar that was heaped with the glittering reliquaries that Alfred had loved.

‘They’re burying him in here?’ I asked.

‘There’s a vault,’ he said, ‘but it has to be opened. Once the new church is finished he’ll be taken there.’

‘And the funeral is tomorrow?’

‘Maybe a week. They need time so folk can travel here.’

We stayed a long time in the church, greeting men who came to mourn, and at midday the new king arrived with a group of nobles. Edward was tall, long-faced, thin-lipped and had very black hair that he wore brushed back. He looked so young to me. He wore a blue robe that was belted with a gold-panelled strip of leather, and over it a black cape that hung to the floor. He wore no crown, for he was not yet crowned, but had a bronze circlet about his skull.

I recognised most of the ealdormen who accompanied him, Æthelnoth, Wilfrith and, of course, Edward’s future father-in-law, Æthelhelm, who walked beside Father Coenwulf who was Edward’s confessor and guardian. There was a half-dozen younger men I did not know, and then I saw my cousin, Æthelred, and he saw me at the same moment and checked. Edward, walking towards his father’s coffin, beckoned him on. Steapa and I both went down on one knee and stayed there as Edward knelt at the foot of his father’s coffin and put his hands together in prayer. His guard all knelt. No one spoke. The choir was chanting interminably as incense smoke drifted in the sun-shafted air.

Æthelred’s eyes were closed in pretend prayer. The look on his face was bitter and strangely aged, perhaps because he had been ill and was, as Alfred his father-in-law had been, prone to bouts of sickness. I watched him, wondering. He must have hoped that Alfred’s death would loosen the leash that tied Mercia to Wessex. He must have been hoping that there would be two coronations, one in Wessex and another in Mercia, and he must have known that Edward knew all that. What stood in his way was his wife, who was beloved in Mercia, and who he had tried to make powerless by immuring her in Saint Hedda’s convent, and the other obstacle was his wife’s lover.

‘Lord Uhtred,’ Edward had opened his eyes, though his hands were still clasped in prayer.

‘Lord?’ I asked.

‘You will stay for the burial?’

‘If you wish, lord.’

‘I do wish,’ he said.

‘And then you must go to your estate in Fagranforda,’ he went on. ‘I am sure you have much to do there.’

‘Yes, lord.’

‘The Lord Æthelred,’ Edward spoke firmly and loudly, ‘will stay to counsel me for a few weeks. I have need of wise counsel and I can think of none more able to deliver it.’

That was a lie. A spavined idiot could give better counsel than Æthelred, but of course Edward did not want my cousin’s advice. He wanted Æthelred where he could see him, where it would be difficult for Æthelred to foment unrest, and he was sending me to Mercia because he trusted me to keep Mercia on the West Saxon leash. And because he knew that if I went to Mercia so would his sister. I kept a very straight face.

A sparrow flew in the high church roof and its dropping, wet and white, fell on Alfred’s dead face, spattering messily from his nose to his left cheek.

An omen so bad, so terrible, that every man about the coffin held his breath.

And just then one of Steapa’s guards came into the church and hurried up the long nave, but did not kneel. Instead he looked from Edward to Æthelred, and from Æthelred to me, and he seemed not to know what to say until Steapa growled at him to speak.

‘The Lady Æthelflaed,’ the man said.

‘What of her?’ Edward asked.

‘The Lord Æthelwold took her by force, lord, from the convent. Took her, lord. And they’ve gone.’

So the struggle for Wessex had begun.

Seven

Æthelred laughed. Perhaps it was a nervous reaction, but in that old church the sound echoed mockingly from the lower walls that were made of stone. When the sound died away all I could hear was water dripping onto the floor from the rain-soaked thatch.

Edward looked at me, then at Æthelred, finally at Æthelhelm. He appeared confused.

‘Where did Lord Æthelwold go?’ Steapa asked usefully.

‘The nuns said he was going to Tweoxnam,’ the messenger said.

‘But he gave me his oath!’ Edward protested.

‘He was always a lying bastard,’ I said. I looked at the man who had brought the news. ‘He told the nuns he was going to Tweoxnam?’

‘Yes, lord.’

‘He said the same to me,’ I said.

Edward gathered himself. ‘I want every man armed and mounted,’ he told Steapa, ‘and ready to ride to Tweoxnam.’

‘Is that his only estate, lord King?’ I asked.

‘He owns Wimburnan,’ Edward said, ‘why?’

‘Isn’t his father buried at Wimburnan?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then that’s where he’s gone,’ I said. ‘He told us Tweoxnam because he wants to confuse us. If you abduct someone you don’t tell your pursuers where you’re taking them.’

‘Why abduct Æthelflaed?’ Edward was looking lost again.

‘Because he wants Mercia on his side,’ I said. ‘Is she friendly to him?’

‘Friendly? We all tried to be,’ Edward said. ‘He’s our cousin.’

‘He thinks he can persuade her to bring Mercia to his cause,’ I suggested, and did not add that it would not just be Mercia. If Æthelflaed declared for her cousin then many in Wessex would be persuaded to support him.

‘We go to Tweoxnam?’ Steapa asked uncertainly.

Edward hesitated, then shook his head and looked to me. ‘The two places are very close,’ he said, still hesitant, but then remembered he was a king and made up his mind. ‘We ride to Wimburnan,’ he said.

‘And I go with you, lord King,’ I said.

‘Why?’ Æthelred blurted the question before he had the sense or time to think what he was asking. The king and the ealdormen looked embarrassed.

I let the question hang till its echo had faded, then smiled. ‘To protect the honour of the king’s sister, of course,’ I said, and I was still laughing when we rode out.

It took time, it always takes time. Horses had to be saddled, mail donned and banners fetched, and while the royal housecarls readied themselves I went with Osferth to Saint Hedda’s where Abbess Hildegyth was in tears. ‘He said she was wanted at the church,’ she explained to me, ‘that the family was praying together for her father’s soul.’

‘You did nothing wrong,’ I told her.

‘But he’s taken her!’

‘He won’t hurt her,’ I reassured her.

‘But…’ her voice faded, and I knew she was remembering the shame of being raped by the Danes so many years before.

‘She’s Alfred’s daughter,’ I said, ‘and he wants her help, not her enmity. Her support gives him legitimacy.’

‘She’s still a hostage,’ Hild said.

‘Yes, but we’ll get her back.’

‘How?’

I touched Serpent-Breath’s hilt, showing Hild the silver cross embedded in the pommel, a cross she had given me so long ago. ‘With this,’ I said, meaning the sword, not the cross.

‘You shouldn’t wear a sword in a nunnery,’ she said with mock sternness.

‘There are many things I shouldn’t do in a nunnery,’ I told her, ‘but I did most of them anyway.’

She sighed. ‘What does Æthelwold hope to gain?’

Osferth answered. ‘He hopes to persuade her that he should be the king. And he hopes she will persuade Lord Uhtred to support him.’ He glanced at me and, at that moment, looked astonishingly like his father. ‘I’ve no doubt,’ he went on drily, ‘he’ll offer to make it possible for the Lord Uhtred and the Lady Æthelflaed to marry, and will probably hold out the throne of Mercia as an enticement. He doesn’t just want the Lady Æthelflaed’s support, he wants Lord Uhtred’s too.’

I had not thought of that and it took me by surprise. There had been a time when Æthelwold and I had been friends, but that was long ago when we were both young and a shared resentment of Alfred had brought us together. Æthelwold’s resentment had soured into hatred, while mine had turned into reluctant admiration, and so we were friends no longer. ‘He’s a fool,’ I said, ‘and he always was a fool.’

‘A desperate fool,’ Osferth added, ‘but a fool who knows this is his last chance to gain the throne.’

‘He’ll not have my help,’ I promised Hild.

‘Just bring her back,’ Hild said, and we rode to do just that.

A small army went westwards. At its heart was Steapa and the king’s bodyguard, and every warrior in Wintanceaster who possessed a horse joined in. It was a bright day, the sky clearing of the clouds that had brought so much rain. Our route took us across the wild lands of southern Wessex where the deer and wild ponies ranged across forest and moor and where the hoof-prints of Æthelwold’s band were easy to follow because the ground was so damp. Edward rode a little behind the vanguard, and with him was a standard-bearer flying the white dragon banner. Edward’s priest, Father Coenwulf, his black skirts draped on his horse’s rump, kept pace with the king, as did two ealdormen, Æthelnoth and Æthelhelm. Æthelred came too, he could hardly avoid an expedition to rescue his wife, but he and his followers stayed with the rearguard, well away from where Edward and I rode, and I remember thinking that we were too many, that a half-dozen men were enough to cope with a fool like Æthelwold.

Other men joined us, leaving their halls to follow the king’s standard, and by the time we left the moorland we must have numbered over three hundred horsemen. Steapa had sent scouts ahead, but they sent no news back, which suggested Æthelwold was waiting behind his hall’s palisade. At one point I spurred my horse off the road and up a low hill to look ahead and Edward pointedly joined me, leaving his guard behind. ‘My father,’ he said, ‘told me I can trust you.’

‘Do you doubt his word, lord King?’ I asked.

‘While my mother says you can’t be trusted.’

I laughed at that. Ælswith, Alfred’s wife, had always hated me, and it was a mutual feeling. ‘Your mother has never approved of me,’ I said mildly.

‘And Beocca tells me you want to kill my children,’ he spoke resentfully.

‘That isn’t my decision, lord King,’ I said, and he looked surprised. ‘Your father,’ I explained, ‘should have slit Æthelwold’s throat twenty years ago, but he didn’t. Your worst enemies, lord King, aren’t the Danes. They’re the men closest to you who want your crown. Your illegitimate children will be a problem for your legitimate sons, but it isn’t my problem. It’s yours.’

He shook his head. This was our first moment alone together since his father’s death. I knew he liked me, but he was also nervous of me. He had only ever known me as a warrior and, unlike his sister, he had never been close to me as a child. He said nothing for a while, but watched the small army file westwards beneath us, its banners bright in the sun. The land gleamed from all the rain. ‘They’re not illegitimate,’ he finally spoke softly. ‘I married Ecgwynn. I married her in a church, before God.’

‘Your father disagreed,’ I said.

Edward shuddered, ‘He was angry. So was my mother.’

‘And Ealdorman Æthelhelm, lord King?’ I asked. ‘He can’t be happy that his daughter’s children won’t be the eldest.’

His jaw tightened. ‘He was assured I didn’t marry,’ he said distantly.

So Edward had surrendered to his parents’ anger. He had agreed to the fiction that his children by Lady Ecgwynn were bastards, but it was apparent that he was unhappy with that surrender. ‘Lord,’ I said, ‘you’re king now. You can raise the twins as your legitimate children. You’re king.’

‘I offend Æthelhelm,’ he asked plaintively, ‘and how long do I stay king?’ Æthelhelm was the wealthiest of Wessex’s nobles, the most powerful voice in the Witan, and a man much liked in the kingdom. ‘My father always insisted that the Witan could make or unmake a king,’ Edward said, ‘and my mother insists I listen to their advice.’

‘You’re the eldest son,’ I said, ‘so you’re king.’

‘Not if Æthelhelm and Plegmund refuse to support me,’ Edward said.

‘True,’ I agreed grudgingly.

‘So the twins must be treated as though they’re illegitimate,’ he said, still unhappy, ‘and stay bastards until I have the power to decree otherwise. And till then they must be kept safe, so they’re going to my sister’s care.’

‘To my care,’ I said flatly.

‘Yes,’ he said. He looked at me searchingly. ‘So long as you promise not to kill them.’

I laughed. ‘I don’t kill babies, lord King. I wait till they grow up.’

‘They must grow up,’ he said, then frowned. ‘You don’t condemn me for sin, do you?’

‘Me! I’m your pagan, lord,’ I said, ‘what do I care about sin?’

‘Then care for my children,’ he said.

‘I will, lord King,’ I promised.

‘And tell me what I do about Æthelred,’ he said.

I stared down at my cousin’s troops, who rode together as the rearguard. ‘He wants to be King of Mercia,’ I said, ‘but he knows he needs Wessex’s support if he’s to survive, so he won’t take the throne without your permission, and you won’t give that.’

‘I won’t,’ Edward said. ‘But my mother insists I need his support too.’

That wretched woman, I thought. She had always liked Æthelred and disapproved of her daughter. Yet what she said was partly true. Æthelred could bring at least a thousand men to a battlefield, and if Wessex were ever to strike against the powerful Danish lords to the north, then those men would be invaluable, but as I had told Alfred a hundred times, it was always best to reckon that Æthelred would find a thousand excuses to keep his warriors at home. ‘So what is Æthelred asking of you?’

Edward did not answer directly. Instead he looked up at the sky, then westwards again. ‘He hates you.’

‘And your sister,’ I said flatly.

He nodded. ‘He wants Æthelflaed returned to…’ he began, but then stopped speaking because a horn sounded.

‘He wants Æthelflaed in his hall or else locked away in a convent,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ Edward said, ‘that’s what he wants.’ He stared down at the road from where the horn had sounded a second time. ‘But they want me,’ he said, looking to where Father Coenwulf waved towards us. I could see a couple of Steapa’s men galloping towards the vanguard. Edward dug in his spurs and we cantered to the head of the column where we discovered the two scouts had brought in a priest who half fell from his saddle to kneel before the king.

‘Lord, lord King!’ the priest gasped. He was out of breath.

‘Who are you?’ Edward asked.

‘Father Edmund, lord.’

He had come from Wimburnan where he was the priest and he told how Æthelwold had raised his banner in the town and declared himself King of Wessex.

‘He did what?’ Edward asked.

‘He made me read a proclamation, lord, outside Saint Cuthberga’s.’

‘He’s calling himself king?’

‘He says he’s King of Wessex, lord. He’s demanding that men come and swear allegiance to him.’

‘How many men were there when you left?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know, lord,’ Father Edmund said.

‘Did you see a woman?’ Edward asked. ‘My sister?’

‘The Lady Æthelflaed? Yes, lord, she was with him.’

‘Does he have twenty men?’ I asked. ‘Or two hundred?’

‘I don’t know, lord. A lot.’

‘He sent messengers to other lords?’ I asked.

‘To his thegns, lord. He sent me. I’m supposed to bring him men.’

‘And you found me instead,’ Edward said warmly.

‘He’s raising an army,’ I said.

‘The fyrd,’ Steapa said scornfully.

Æthelwold was doing what he thought wise, but he had no wisdom. He had inherited wide estates from his father, and Alfred had been foolish enough to leave those estates untouched, and now Æthelwold was demanding that his tenants come with weapons to make an army that he presumably believed would march on Wintanceaster. But the army would be the fyrd, the citizen army, the labourers and carpenters and thatchers and ploughmen, while Edward had his royal bodyguard, who were all trained warriors. The fyrd was good for defending a burh, or for impressing an enemy with numbers, but to fight, to face a sword-Dane or a raving Northman, a warrior was needed. What Æthelwold should have done was stay in Wintanceaster, murder all Alfred’s children, and then raise his standard, but like a fool he had gone to his own home and now we rode there with warriors.

The day was dying as we neared Wimburnan, the sun was low in the west and the shadows long on the rich slopes where Æthelwold’s sheep and cattle had their grazing. We came from the east and no one tried to prevent us reaching the small town that lay cradled between two rivers that joined close to where a stone church loomed above the shadowed thatch of the roofs. King Æthelred, Alfred’s brother and Æthelwold’s father, lay buried in that church, and beyond it, and surrounded by a tall palisade, was Æthelwold’s hall where a great flag flew. It showed a prancing white stag with fierce eyes and two Christian crosses for antlers, and the low sun was catching the linen that was spread by a small wind and the banner’s dark red field seemed to smoulder like boiling blood in the late daylight.

We rode north around the town, crossing the smaller river and then climbing a shallow slope that led to one of those forts that the ancient people had built all across Britain. This fort had been hacked out of a chalk hilltop, and Father Edmund told me it was called Baddan Byrig and that the local people believed the devil danced there on winter nights. It had three walls of heaped chalk, all overgrown with grass, and two intricate entrances where sheep grazed, and it overlooked the road that Æthelwold must take if he wanted to go north to his Danish friends. Edward’s first instinct had been to block the road to Wintanceaster, but that town was protected by its walls and garrison and I persuaded him that the greater danger was that Æthelwold would escape Wessex altogether.

Our army spread along the skyline beneath its royal banners. Wimburnan lay just a couple of miles south and east of us and we must have looked formidable to anyone watching from the town. We were sunlit by the low rays that reflected the glint of our mail and weapons and that made the bare chalk patches of Baddan Byrig’s walls glow white. That low sun made it difficult to see what was happening in the small town, but I glimpsed men and horses by Æthelwold’s hall and could see people gathered in the streets, yet there was no shield wall defending the road that led to that great hall. ‘How many men does he have?’ Edward asked. He had asked that question a dozen times since we had met Father Edmund, and a dozen times he had been told we did not know, that no one knew, and that it might be forty men or it might be four hundred.

‘Not enough men, lord,’ I said now.

‘What…’ he began, then abruptly checked. He had been about to ask what we should do, then had remembered that he was the king, and was supposed to supply the answer himself.

‘Do you want him dead or alive?’ I asked.

He looked at me. He knew he must make decisions, but did not know what decision to make. Father Coenwulf, who had been his tutor, began to offer advice, but Edward cut him short with a wave of his hand. ‘I want him to stand trial,’ he said.

‘Remember what I told you,’ I said. ‘Your father could have saved us a lot of trouble by just killing Æthelwold, so why don’t you let me go and slaughter the bastard?’

‘Or let me, lord,’ Steapa volunteered.

‘He must stand trial before the Witan,’ Edward decided. ‘I do not wish to begin my reign with slaughter.’

‘Amen and God be praised,’ Father Coenwulf said.

I gazed into the valley. If Æthelwold had raised any kind of army, it was not in evidence. All I could see was a handful of horses and an undisciplined rabble. ‘Just let me kill him, lord,’ I said, ‘and the problem will be solved by sundown.’

‘Let me talk to him,’ Father Coenwulf urged.

‘Reason with him,’ Edward said to the priest.

‘Do you reason with a cornered rat?’ I demanded.

Edward ignored that. ‘Tell him he must surrender to our mercy,’ he told Father Coenwulf.

‘And suppose he decides to kill Father Coenwulf instead, lord King?’ I asked.

‘I am in God’s hands,’ Coenwulf said.

‘You’d be better in Lord Uhtred’s hands,’ Steapa growled.

The sun was just above the horizon now, a dazzling red globe suspended in the autumn sky. Edward looked confused, but still wanted to appear decisive. ‘The three of you will go,’ he announced firmly, ‘and Father Coenwulf will do the talking.’

Father Coenwulf lectured me as we rode downhill. I was not to threaten anyone, I was not to speak unless spoken to, I was not to touch my sword, and the Lady Æthelflaed, he insisted, was to be escorted back to her husband’s protection. Father Coenwulf was pale-skinned and stern, one of those rigid men that Alfred had loved to appoint as tutors or counsellors. He was clever, of course, all Alfred’s favoured priests were sharp-witted, but all too ready to condemn sin or, indeed, to define it, which meant he disapproved of me and of Æthelflaed. ‘Do you understand me?’ he demanded as we reached the road, which was little more than a rutted track between untrimmed hedges. Wagtails flocked in the fields and far off, beyond the town, a great cloud of starlings wheeled and faded in the sky.

‘I’m not to threaten anyone,’ I said cheerfully, ‘not to speak to anyone and not to touch my sword. Wouldn’t it be easier if I just stopped breathing?’

‘And we shall restore the Lady Æthelflaed to her proper place,’ Coenwulf said firmly.

‘What is her proper place?’ I asked.

‘Her husband will decide that.’

‘But he wants her in a nunnery,’ I pointed out.

‘If that is her husband’s decision, Lord Uhtred,’ Coenwulf said, ‘then that is her fate.’

‘I think you’ll learn,’ I said mildly, ‘that the lady has a mind of her own. She might not do what any man wants.’

‘She will obey her husband,’ Coenwulf insisted and I just laughed at him, which annoyed him. Poor Steapa looked confused.

There were half a dozen armed men at the outskirts of the town, but they made no attempt to stop us. There was no wall, this was no burh, and we plunged straight into a street that smelt of dung and woodsmoke. The folk in the town were worried, and silent. They watched us, and some made the sign of the cross as we passed. The sun had gone now, it was twilight. We skirted a comfortable-looking tavern, and a man sitting with a horn of ale raised it to us as we rode past. I noted that few men had weapons. If Æthelwold could not raise the fyrd in his own home town, then how could he hope to raise the county against Edward? The gate to Saint Cuthberga’s nunnery opened a crack as we came near and I saw a woman peer out, and then the gate slammed shut. There were more guards at the door to the church, but again they made no effort to stop us. They just watched us pass, their faces sullen. ‘He’s already lost,’ I said.

‘He has,’ Steapa agreed.

‘Lost?’ Father Coenwulf asked.

‘This is his stronghold,’ I said, ‘and no one wants to defy us.’

At least no one wanted to defy us until we reached the entrance to Æthelwold’s hall. The gate was decorated with his flag and guarded by seven spearmen and blocked by a pathetic barricade of barrels on which two logs had been placed. One of the spearmen strode towards us and levelled his weapon. ‘No further,’ he announced.

‘Just take away the barrels,’ I said, ‘and open the gate.’

‘State your names,’ he said. He was a middle-aged man, solidly built, grey-bearded and dutiful.

‘That’s Matthew,’ I said, pointing at Father Coenwulf, ‘I’m Mark, he’s Luke and the other fellow got drunk and stayed behind. You know damn well who we are, so open the gate.’

‘Let us in,’ Father Coenwulf said sternly, after giving me a foul look.

‘No weapons,’ the man said.

I looked at Steapa. He had his long-sword at his left side, his short-sword on the right, and a war axe looped across his back. ‘Steapa,’ I asked him, ‘just how many men have you killed in battle?’

He was puzzled by the question, but thought about his answer. In the end he had to shake his head. ‘I lost count,’ he said.

‘Me too,’ I said, and looked back to the man who faced us. ‘You can take the weapons from us,’ I told him, ‘or you can live and let us through the gate.’

He decided he wanted to live and so ordered his men to remove the barrels and logs, then pull the gates wide, and we rode into the courtyard where torches had just been lit and their wild flames cast fluttering shadows from saddled horses that waited for riders. I counted about thirty men, some in mail and all armed, waiting with the horses, but not one challenged us. Instead they looked nervous. ‘He’s getting ready to flee,’ I said.

‘You are not to talk here,’ Father Coenwulf said testily.

‘Be quiet, you dull priest,’ I told him.

Servants came to take our horses and, as I expected, a steward demanded that Steapa and I give up our swords before we went into the great hall. ‘No,’ I said.

‘My sword stays,’ Steapa said menacingly.

The steward looked flustered, but Father Coenwulf just pushed past the man and we followed him into the great hall that was lit by a blazing fire and by candles arrayed on two tables between which was a throne. There was no other word to do justice to that great chair, which reared high above the massed candles and in which Æthelwold sat, though the moment we appeared he jumped to his feet and strode to the edge of the dais on which the throne had pride of place. There was a second chair on the dais, much smaller and pushed to one side, and Æthelflaed sat there, flanked by two men carrying spears. She saw me, smiled wryly and raised a hand to indicate that she was unharmed.

Over fifty men were in the hall. Most were armed, despite the steward’s efforts, but again no one threatened us. Our appearance seemed to have caused a sudden silence. These men, like those in the courtyard, were nervous. I knew a few of them and sensed that the hall was in two minds. The youngest men closest to the dais were Æthelwold’s supporters, while the older men were his thegns, and they were the ones who were plainly unhappy at what was unfolding. Even the dogs in the hall looked whipped. One whined as we entered, then slunk to the hall’s edge, where he then lay shivering. Æthelwold was standing at the dais’s edge with folded arms, trying to look regal, but to me he seemed as nervous as the dogs, though a fair-haired young man beside him was full of energy. ‘Take them prisoner, lord,’ the young man urged Æthelwold.

There is no cause so hopeless, no creed so mad, no idea so ludicrous that it will not attract some believers, and the fair-haired youngster had plainly adopted Æthelwold’s cause as his own. He was a handsome brute, bright-eyed, strong-jawed and strongly built. He wore his hair long and tied behind his neck with a leather ribbon. A second ribbon was around his neck like a thin scarf and it looked oddly feminine because it was pink and made of the precious and delicate silk that is brought to Britain by traders from some far-off land. The tails of the silk ribbon hung over his mail, which was finely wrought, probably made by the expensive smiths in Frankia. His belt was panelled with gold squares and the hilt of his sword was decorated by a crystal pommel. He was rich, he was confident and he faced us belligerently. ‘Who are you?’ Father Coenwulf demanded of the youngster.

‘My name is Sigebriht,’ the young man said proudly, ‘Lord Sigebriht to you, priest.’ So that was the young man who had carried messages between Æthelwold and the Danes, Sigebriht of Cent, who had loved the Lady Ecgwynn and lost her to Edward. ‘Don’t let them talk,’ Sigebriht urged his patron, ‘kill them!’

Æthelwold did not know what to do. ‘Lord Uhtred,’ he greeted me, for want of anything else to say. He should have ordered his men to chop us to pieces, then led his forces out to attack Edward, but he was not man enough, and he probably knew that only a handful of the men in the hall would follow him.

‘Lord Æthelwold,’ Father Coenwulf spoke sternly, ‘we are here to summon you to the court of King Edward.’

‘There is no such king,’ Sigebriht yapped.

‘You will be accorded the dignity of your rank,’ Father Coenwulf ignored Sigebriht and spoke directly to Æthelwold, ‘but you have disturbed the king’s peace and for that you must answer to the king and his Witan.’

‘I am king here,’ Æthelwold said. He drew himself up in an attempt to look regal. ‘I am king,’ he said, ‘and I shall live or die here in my kingdom!’

For a moment I almost felt sorry for him. He had indeed been cheated of the throne of Wessex, thrust aside by his uncle Alfred and forced to watch as Alfred made Wessex into the most powerful kingdom of Britain. Æthelwold had found consolation in ale, mead and wine, and in his cups he could be good company, yet always there had been that ambition to right what he saw was the great wrong done to him in childhood. Now he tried so hard to be kingly, yet even his own followers were not prepared to follow him, all but for a handful of young fools like Sigebriht.

‘You are not king, lord,’ Father Coenwulf said simply.

‘He is king!’ Sigebriht insisted and stepped towards Father Coenwulf as if he would beat the priest down, and Steapa took one pace forward.

I have seen many formidable men in my life, and Steapa was the most frightening. In truth he was a gentle soul, kind and endlessly considerate, but he was a head taller than most men and blessed with a bony face over which the skin seemed to be stretched into a permanently bleak expression that suggested ferocity without pity. At one time men had called him Steapa Snotor, which meant Steapa the Stupid, but it was years since I had heard that jibe. Steapa had been born a slave, but had risen to become the head of the royal bodyguard, and though he was not swift of thought, he was loyal, painstaking and thorough. He was also the most feared warrior of all Wessex and now, as he put one hand on the hilt of his enormous sword, Sigebriht just stopped and I saw the sudden fear on that arrogant young face.

I also saw Æthelflaed smile.

Æthelwold knew he had lost, but he still tried to hold on to his dignity. ‘Father Coenwulf, isn’t it?’ he asked.

‘Yes, lord.’

‘Your counsel will be wise, I am sure. Perhaps you would give it to me?’

‘That is why I am here,’ Coenwulf said.

‘And say a prayer in my chapel?’ Æthelwold gestured to a door behind him.

‘It would be a privilege,’ Coenwulf said.

‘You too, my dear,’ Æthelwold said to Æthelflaed. He sounded resigned. He beckoned a half-dozen others, his closest companions, who included the abashed Sigebriht, and they all went through the small door at the back of the dais. Æthelflaed looked quizzically at me and I nodded because I had every intention of going to the chapel with her and so she followed Sigebriht, but as soon as we started towards the dais Æthelwold raised a hand. ‘Just Father Coenwulf,’ he said.

‘Where he goes, we go,’ I said.

‘You want to pray?’ Father Coenwulf asked me sarcastically.

‘I want you safe,’ I said, ‘though only your god knows why.’

Coenwulf looked at Æthelwold. ‘I have your word that I am safe in your chapel, lord?’

‘You are my safety, father,’ Æthelwold said with surprising humility, ‘and I want your counsel, I want your prayers, and yes, you have my word that you are safe.’

‘Then wait here,’ Coenwulf snapped at me, ‘both of you.’

‘You trust the bastard?’ I asked, loud enough for Æthelwold to hear.

‘I trust in Almighty God,’ Coenwulf said grandly, and climbed nimbly onto the dais and followed Æthelwold out of the hall.

Steapa put his hand on my arm. ‘Let him go,’ he said, and so he and I waited. Two of the older men came to us and said this had not been their idea and that they had believed Æthelwold when he had assured them that the Witan of Wessex had agreed to his assumption of the throne, and I told them they had nothing to fear so long as they had not raised a weapon against their rightful king. That king, so far as I knew, was still waiting on the old chalk-walled fort to the north of the town, waiting as the long night fell and the stars appeared. And we waited too. ‘How long does a prayer take?’ I asked.

‘I’ve known them to last two hours,’ Steapa said gloomily, ‘and the sermons can take even longer.’

I turned to the steward who had tried to take our swords. ‘Where is the chapel?’ I asked him.

The man looked terrified, then stammered, ‘There is no chapel, lord.’

I swore, hurried to the door at the rear of the hall and pushed it open to see a sleeping chamber. There were fur rugs, woollen blankets, a wooden bucket and a tall unlit candle in a silver holder, beyond which was a second door that led to a smaller courtyard. It was an empty courtyard with an open gate guarded by a lone spearman. ‘Which way did they go?’ I shouted at the guard who answered by pointing west down the street outside.

We ran back to the larger courtyard where our horses were waiting. ‘Go to Edward,’ I suggested to Steapa, ‘tell him the bastard’s running.’

‘And you?’ he asked, hauling himself into the saddle.

‘I’ll go west.’

‘Not on your own,’ he said chidingly.

‘Just go,’ I said.

Steapa was right, of course. There was really little sense in riding alone into the night’s chaos, but I did not want to return to the chalk slopes of Baddan Byrig where, inevitably, the next two hours would be spent discussing what to do. I wondered what had happened to Father Coenwulf, and hoped he was alive, then I was through the gate and scattering the people in the torch-lit street as I spurred the horse down a lane that led eastwards.

Æthelwold had lost his pitiable attempt to be acknowledged King of Wessex, but he had not given up. The folk of his own county had failed to support him, he had only the smallest band of supporters, and so he was fleeing to where he could find swords, shields and spears. He wanted to go north to the Danes, and he had only two choices that I could see. He could ride overland, hoping to circle around the small army that Edward had brought to Wimburnan, or he could go south to where a boat might be waiting for him. I dismissed that last thought. The Danes had not known when Alfred would die, and no Danish boat dared linger in West Saxon waters, which made it more than unlikely that any ship was waiting to rescue Æthelwold. He was on his own for now, and that meant he was trying to ride across country.

And I pursued him, or rather I groped my way into the darkness. There was a moon that night, but the shadows it cast were black on the road and neither I nor the horse could see well and so we went slowly. In places I thought I could detect the fresh hoof-prints, but I could not be sure. The road itself was mud and grass, wide between hedges and tall trees, a drover’s road that followed the river valley as it curved northwards. Sometime in the night I came to a village where light showed in a blacksmith’s hut. A boy was feeding the furnace. That was his job, to keep the fire alight through the darkness, and he cowered when he saw me in my war splendour, my helmet, mail and scabbard lit by the flames that brightened the muddy street.

I stopped the horse and gazed at the boy. ‘When I was your age,’ I spoke from behind my helmet’s cheek-plates, ‘I used to watch a charcoal fire. My job was to stuff the holes with moss and wet earth if any smoke escaped. I watched all night. It can be lonely.’

He nodded, still too terrified to say anything.

‘But I had a girl who used to watch with me,’ I said, remembering Brida in the darkness. ‘You don’t have a girl?’

‘No, lord,’ he said, on his knees now.

‘Girls are the best company on lonely nights,’ I said, ‘even if they do talk too much. Look at me, boy.’ He had lowered his head, perhaps out of awe. ‘Now tell me something,’ I went on, ‘did some men ride through here? They would have had a woman with them.’ The boy said nothing, just stared at me. My horse did not like the heat of the furnace, or perhaps its pungent smell upset him, and so I patted his neck to quieten him. ‘The men told you to keep silent,’ I said to the boy, ‘they said you must keep a secret. Did they threaten you?’

‘He said he was the king, lord,’ the boy almost whispered those words.

‘The real king is close by,’ I said. ‘What’s the name of this place?’

‘Blaneford, lord.’

‘It looks a good place to live. So they rode north?’

‘Yes, lord.’

‘How long ago?’

‘Not long, lord.’

‘And this road goes to Sceaftesburi?’ I asked, trying to remember these heartlands of rich Wessex.

‘Yes, lord.’

‘How many men were there?’ I asked.

‘Dick and mimp, lord,’ he said, and I realised that was his way of counting, different to the ways I was used to, and he was smart enough to realise it too and held up all his fingers once and then just one hand. Fifteen.

‘Was there a priest?’

‘No, lord.’

‘You’re a good lad,’ I said, and he was, because he had possessed the wit to count. I tossed him a scrap of silver. ‘In the morning,’ I said, ‘tell your father that you met Uhtred of Bebbanburg and that you did your duty to your new king.’

He gazed at me with very wide eyes as I turned and rode into the ford where I let the horse drink very little, then spurred uphill.

I remember thinking I could have died that night. Æthelwold had fourteen companions, not counting Æthelflaed, and he must have known he would be pursued. I assume he thought all of Edward’s army would blunder through the night, but if he had known it was a single horseman he would surely have set an ambush and I would have been beaten down by the blades and so hacked to death in the moonlight. A better death, I thought, than Alfred’s. Better than lying in a stinking room with the pain conquering the body, with a lump in the belly like a stone, with dribble and tears and shit and stench. But then comes the relief of the afterlife, the rebirth into joy. The Christians call it heaven and try to scare us into its marble halls with tales of a hell hotter than the blacksmith’s furnace in Blaneford, but I will go with a burst of light in the arms of a Valkyrie to the great hall of Valhalla, where my friends will wait for me, and not only my friends but my enemies too, the men I have killed in battle, and there will be feasting and drinking and fighting and women. That is our fate, unless we die badly, when we live for ever in the frigid halls of the goddess Hel.

I thought that was strange as I followed Æthelwold through the night. The Christians say that our punishment is hell and the Danes say that those who die badly go to Hel where the goddess of the same name rules. Hell and Hel sound the same, yet they are not the same. Hel is not hell. Hel does not burn people, they just live in misery. Die with a sword in your hand and you will never see Hel’s decaying body or feel hunger in her vast cold caverns, but there is no punishment about Hel’s domain of Hel. It is just ordinary life for ever. The Christians promise punishment or reward as if we are small children, but in truth what comes after is just what went before. All will change, as Ælfadell had told me, and all will be the same as ever it was and ever shall be. And remembering Ælfadell made me think of Erce, of that slim body undulating on mine, of the guttural sounds she had made, of the memory of joy.

Dawn brought the sound of stags roaring. This was the rutting season when starlings blacken the sky and the leaves begin to fall. I paused my tired horse at a rise in the road and looked about me, but saw no one. I seemed to be alone in a misted dawn, suspended in a gold and yellow world that was silent except for the roar of the stags, and even that sound vanished as I looked eastwards and southwards for any sign of Edward’s men, but still saw nothing. I kicked the horse on north towards the smoke-smear in the sky that betrayed the town of Sceaftesburi beyond the hills.

Sceaftesburi was one of Alfred’s burhs, a fortress town that protected both a royal mint and a nunnery that had been beloved of Alfred. Æthelwold would never dare demand entrance to such a town, or risk waiting for its gates to open so that he could ride through the streets. The burh’s commander, whoever he was, would be too curious, which meant Æthelwold must have circled Sceaftesburi. But which way? I searched for tracks and saw nothing obvious. I was tempted to abandon the pursuit, which had been a foolish idea in the first place. I wanted to find a tavern in the burh and eat a meal and find a bed and pay a whore to warm it, but then a hare ran across my path, east to west, and that was surely a sign from the gods. I turned west off the road.

And moments later the mist cleared and I saw the horses on a chalk hill. Between me and the hill was a wide, thickly wooded valley and I spurred into it even as I saw the horsemen had noticed me. They were in a group, staring my way and I saw one point at me, then they turned and went on northwards. I counted only nine men, yet surely it had to be Æthelwold, but once I dropped into the trees I could not look for the remaining horse-men because the mist thickened here and I had to go slowly because the branches dipped low and I needed to duck. Ferns grew thick. A small stream tumbled across my path. A dead tree was layered with fungi and moss. Brambles, ivy and holly choked the undergrowth either side of the path, a path pocked with fresh hoof-prints. It was silent among the trees and in the silence I felt the fear, the prickling, the knowledge born of nothing but experience that danger was close.

I dismounted and tied the horse’s reins to an oak. What I should do, I thought, was remount the horse and ride straight to Sceaftesburi and raise the alarm. I should requisition a fresh horse and lead the garrison’s men in pursuit of Æthelwold, but to do that was to turn my back on whatever threatened me. I drew Serpent-Breath. There was comfort in the feel of her familiar hilt.

I walked on, slowly.

Had the horsemen on the hill seen me before I saw them? That seemed likely. I had been lost in thought as I followed the road, half dreaming, half thinking. Suppose they had seen me? They knew I was alone, they probably knew who I was, and I had only seen nine men, which suggested the others had been left in the wood to ambush me. So go back, I told myself, go back and rouse the burh’s garrison, and just as I had decided that was both my duty and the prudent thing to do, two horsemen burst out of cover fifty paces away and charged up the path towards me. One carried a spear, the other a sword. Both had helmets with face-plates, both were in mail, both had shields, and both were fools.

A man cannot fight on horseback in a deep, old wood. There are too many obstacles. They could not ride abreast because the path was too narrow and the undergrowth too thick on either side, and so the spearman led and he, like his companion, was right-handed, which meant the spear was on the right side of his tired horse and to my left. I let them come, wondering why only two were attacking, but put that mystery to one side as they got close and I could see the man’s eyes in the slit of his helmet, and I simply stepped to my right, into brambles and behind an oak’s trunk and the spearman galloped past helplessly and I stepped back out and swung Serpent-Breath with all my strength so that she slammed the second horse in the mouth, splintering teeth and scattering blood and the beast screamed and swerved and the rider was falling, tangled in the reins and stirrups as the first man tried to turn.

‘No!’ a voice shouted from deeper in the trees. ‘No!’

Was he talking to me? Not that it mattered. The swordsman was on his back now, struggling to rise, while the spearman was struggling to turn his horse on the narrow path. The swordsman’s shield was looped to his left forearm so I simply stood on the willow boards, trapping him, and plunged Serpent-Breath down. Hard down. Once.

And there was blood in the leaf-mould and a choking sound and a body shaking beneath me and a dying man’s sword arm going limp as the spearman kicked his horse back towards me. He lunged with the spear, but it was simple to avoid by swaying to one side and I seized the ash shaft and tugged hard and the man had to let go or else be pulled from the saddle, and his horse was backing away as the rider tried to draw his sword and he was still trying when I slid Serpent-Breath up his right thigh, beneath his mail, opening his skin and muscle with her point and edge and then finding the bone of his hip and thrusting harder and shouting with all my breath to scare him and to give the lunge force. The sword was in his body and I was grinding it, turning it, pushing it, and the voice from deep in the wood shouted again, ‘No!’

But yes. The man had half drawn his sword, but the blood was dripping from his boot and stirrup and I simply caught his right elbow with my left hand and pulled so that he came off his horse. ‘Idiot,’ I snarled at him, and killed him as I had killed his companion, then turned fast towards the place from where the voice had sounded.

Nothing.

Somewhere far off a horn sounded, then was answered by another. The sounds came from the south and told me Edward’s forces were coming. A bell began to toll, presumably from Sceaftesburi’s convent or church. The wounded horse whinnied. The second man died and I pulled Serpent-Breath’s tip from his throat. My boots were dark with new blood. I was tired. I wanted that meal and bed and whore, but instead I walked down the path towards the place where the two fools had come from.

The path turned where thick foliage screened the view, then it opened into a glade around a wide stream. The day’s first sunlight flickered through leaves to make the grass very green. There were daisies in the grass and Sigebriht was there with three men and with Æthelflaed, all of them mounted. It was one of these men who had shouted at his two dead companions, but which man, or why, I could not tell.

I walked out of the shadow. The helmet’s face-plates were closed, my mail and boots were blood-spattered, Serpent-Breath was reddened. ‘Who’s next?’ I asked.

Æthelflaed laughed. A kingfisher, all red and blue and bright, darted down the stream behind her and vanished in the shadows. ‘Lord Uhtred,’ she said, and kicked her heels so that her horse came towards me.

‘You’re unhurt?’ I asked.

‘They were all very polite,’ she said, looking back at Sigebriht with a mocking expression.

‘There’s only four of them,’ I said, ‘so which one do you want me to kill first?’

Sigebriht drew his crystal-pommelled sword. I was ready to step back among the trees where the trunks would give me an advantage against a mounted man, but to my surprise he threw the sword so that it landed heavily in the dewy grass a few paces from me. ‘I yield to your mercy,’ Sigebriht said. His three men followed his example and threw their swords onto the ground.

‘Off your horses,’ I said, ‘all of you.’ I watched them dismount. ‘Now kneel.’ They knelt. ‘Give me one reason not to kill you,’ I said as I walked towards them.

‘We have yielded to you, lord,’ Sigebriht said, head lowered.

‘You yielded,’ I said, ‘because your two fools failed to kill me.’

‘They were not my fools, lord,’ Sigebriht said humbly, ‘they were Æthelwold’s men. These three are my men.’

‘Did he order those two idiots to attack me?’ I called back to Æthelflaed.

‘No,’ she said.

‘They wanted glory, lord,’ Sigebriht said, ‘they wanted to be known as the slayers of Uhtred.’

I touched the bloodied tip of Serpent-Breath to his cheek. ‘And what do you want, Sigebriht of Cent?’

‘To make my peace with the king, lord.’

‘Which king?’

‘There is only one king in Wessex, lord. King Edward.’

I let Serpent-Breath’s tip lift the long tail of fair hair tied with leather. The blade, I thought, would cut through his neck so easily. ‘Why do you seek peace with Edward?’

‘I was wrong, lord,’ Sigebriht said humbly.

‘Lady?’ I called, not taking my eyes from him.

‘They saw you following,’ Æthelflaed explained, ‘and this man,’ she pointed at Sigebriht, ‘offered to bring me back to you. He told Æthelwold that I would persuade you to join him.’

‘Did he believe that?’

‘I told him I would try and persuade you,’ she said, ‘and he believed me.’

‘He’s a fool,’ I said.

‘And instead I told Sigebriht to make his peace,’ Æthelflaed went on, ‘and that his best hope of living beyond today’s dusk was to abandon Æthelwold and swear allegiance to Edward.’

I put the sword under Sigebriht’s clean-shaven chin and tilted his face up towards me. He was so handsome, so bright-eyed, and in those eyes I could see no guile, only the eyes of a frightened man. Yet I knew I should kill him. I touched the sword-blade to the silk ribbon around his neck. ‘Tell me why I shouldn’t cut through your miserable neck,’ I ordered him.

‘I’ve yielded, lord,’ he said, ‘I beg mercy.’

‘What’s the ribbon?’ I asked, flicking the pink silk with Serpent-Breath’s tip and leaving a smear of blood.

‘It was a gift from a girl,’ he said.

‘The Lady Ecgwynn?’

He gazed up at me. ‘She was beautiful,’ he said wistfully, ‘she was like an angel, she drove men to madness.’

‘And she preferred Edward,’ I said.

‘And she’s dead, lord,’ Sigebriht said, ‘and I think King Edward regrets that as much as I do.’

‘Fight for someone who lives,’ Æthelflaed said, ‘not for the dead.’

‘I was wrong, lord,’ Sigebriht said, and I was not sure I believed him, and so I pressed the sword against his neck and saw the fear in his blue eyes.

‘It is my brother’s decision,’ Æthelflaed said gently, knowing what was in my mind.

I let him live.

That night, so we heard later, Æthelwold crossed the border into Mercia and kept riding north until he reached the safety of Sigurd’s hall. He had escaped.

Eight

Alfred was buried.

The burial took five hours of praying, chanting, weeping and preaching. The old king had been placed in an elm coffin painted with scenes from the lives of the saints, while the lid depicted a surprised-looking Christ ascending into heaven. A splinter of the true cross was placed in the dead king’s hands and his head was pillowed by a gospel book. The elm coffin was sheathed in a lead box, which in turn was enclosed by a third casket, this one of cedar and carved with pictures of saints defying death. One saint was being burned, though the flames could not touch her, a second was being tortured yet was smiling forgiveness on her hapless tormentors, while a third was being pierced by spears and still was preaching. The whole cumbersome coffin was carried down to the crypt of the old church where it was sealed in a stone chamber where Alfred rested until the new church was finished, and then he was carried to the vault where he still lies. I remember Steapa weeping like a child. Beocca was in tears. Even Plegmund, that stern archbishop, was crying as he preached. He talked of Jacob’s ladder, which appeared in a dream described in the Christian scriptures, and Jacob, as he lay on his stony pillow beneath the ladder heard the voice of God. ‘The land on which you lie shall be given to your children and to their children’s children,’ Plegmund’s voice broke as he read the words, ‘and your children shall be like the dust of the earth and they shall spread abroad to the west and to the east and to the north and to the south, and by you and your children shall all the families of the world bless themselves.’

‘Jacob’s dream was Alfred’s dream,’ Plegmund’s voice was hoarse by this point in his long sermon, ‘and Alfred now lies here, in this place, and this land shall be given to his children and to his children’s children till the day of judgement itself! And not just this land! Alfred dreamed that we Saxons should spread the light of the gospel through all Britain, and all other lands, until every voice on earth is lifted in praise of God Almighty.’

I remember smiling to myself. I stood at the back of the old church, watching the smoke from the incense burners swirl around the gilded rafters, and it amused me that Plegmund believed that we Saxons should spread like the dust of the earth to the north, south, east and west. We would be lucky if we kept what land we had, let alone spread, but the congregation was moved by Plegmund’s words. ‘The pagans press upon us,’ Plegmund declared, ‘they persecute us! Yet we shall preach to them and we shall pray for them, and we shall see them bow their knee to Almighty God and then Alfred’s dream will come true and there shall be rejoicing in heaven! God will preserve us!’

I should have listened more carefully to that sermon, but I was thinking of Æthelflaed and Fagranforda. I had asked Edward’s permission to go to Mercia, and his reply was to send Beocca to the Two Cranes. My old friend sat by the hearth and chided me for ignoring my eldest son. ‘I don’t ignore him,’ I said. ‘I’d like him to come to Fagranforda as well.’

‘And what will he do there?’

‘What he should do,’ I said, ‘train as a warrior.’

‘He wants to be a priest,’ Beocca said.

‘Then he’s no son of mine.’

Beocca sighed. ‘He’s a good boy! A very good boy.’

‘Tell him to change his name,’ I said. ‘If he becomes a priest he’s not worthy to be called Uhtred.’

‘You’re so like your father,’ he said, which surprised me because I had been frightened of my father. ‘And Uhtred is so like you!’ Beocca went on. ‘He looks like you, and he has your stubbornness,’ he chuckled, ‘you were a most stubborn child.’

I am often accused of being Uhtredærwe, the wicked enemy of Christianity, yet so many I have loved and admired have been Christians, and Beocca was chief among them. Beocca and his wife, Thyra, Hild, Æthelflaed, dear Father Pyrlig, Osferth, Willibald, even Alfred, the list is endless, and I suppose they were all good people because their religion insists they must behave in a certain way, which mine does not. Thor and Woden demand nothing of me except respect and some sacrifice, but they would never be so foolish as to insist that I love my enemy or turn the other cheek. Yet the best Christians, like Beocca, struggle daily to be good. I have never tried to be good, though nor do I think I am wicked. I am just me, Uhtred of Bebbanburg. ‘Uhtred,’ I said to Beocca, talking of my eldest son, ‘will be Lord of Bebbanburg after me. He can’t hold that fortress by prayer. He needs to learn how to fight.’

Beocca stared into the fire. ‘I always hoped I would see Bebbanburg again,’ he said wistfully, ‘but I doubt that will happen now. The king says you may go to Fagranforda.’

‘Good,’ I said.

‘Alfred was generous to you,’ Beocca said sternly.

‘I don’t deny it.’

‘And I had some influence there,’ Beocca said with a little pride.

‘Thank you.’

‘You know why he agreed?’

‘Because Alfred owed me,’ I said, ‘because without Serpent-Breath he wouldn’t have remained king for twenty-eight years.’

‘Because Wessex needs a strong man in Mercia,’ Beocca said, ignoring my boasting.

‘Æthelred?’ I suggested mischievously.

‘He’s a good man, and you’ve wronged him,’ Beocca said fiercely.

‘Maybe,’ I said, avoiding a quarrel.

‘Æthelred is Lord of Mercia,’ Beocca said, ‘and the man with the best claim to the throne of that land, yet he has not tried to take that crown.’

‘Because he’s frightened of Wessex,’ I said.

‘He has been loyal to Wessex,’ Beocca corrected me, ‘but he cannot appear too subservient or the Mercian lords who crave their own country will turn against him.’

‘Æthelred rules in Mercia,’ I said, ‘because he’s the richest man in the country, and whenever a lord loses cattle, slaves or a hall to the Danes he knows that Æthelred will reimburse him. He pays for his lordship, but what he should be doing is crushing the Danes.’

‘He watches the Welsh frontier,’ Beocca said, as if dealing with the Welsh was an adequate excuse for being somnolent with the Danes, ‘but it is appreciated,’ he hesitated over the word, as if it had been carefully selected, ‘appreciated that he is not a natural warrior. He is a superb ruler,’ he hurried on after those words to stifle any laugh he suspected I would give, ‘and his administration is admirable, but he has no talent for warfare.’

‘And I do,’ I said.

Beocca smiled. ‘Yes, Uhtred, you do, but you have no talent for respect. The king expects you to treat Lord Æthelred with respect.’

‘All the respect he deserves,’ I promised.

‘And his wife will be permitted to return to Mercia,’ Beocca said, ‘upon the understanding that she endows, indeed that she builds, a nunnery.’

‘She’s to be a nun?’ I asked, angry.

‘Endows and builds!’ Beocca said. ‘And she will be free to choose wherever she so wishes to endow and to build the nunnery.’

I had to laugh. ‘I’m to live next door to a nunnery?’

Beocca frowned. ‘We cannot know where she will choose.’

‘No,’ I said, ‘of course not.’

So the Christians had swallowed the sin. I assumed that Edward had learned a new tolerance for sin, which was no bad thing and it meant Æthelflaed was free to live more or less as she wished, though the nunnery would serve as an excuse for Æthelred to claim that his wife had chosen a life of holy contemplation. In truth Edward and his council knew they needed Æthelflaed in Mercia, and they needed me too. We were the shield of Wessex, but it seemed we were not to be the sword of the Saxons because Beocca gave me a stern warning before he left the tavern. ‘The king expressly wishes that the Danes be left in peace,’ he said. ‘They are not to be provoked! That is his command.’

‘And if they attack us?’ I asked, annoyed.

‘Of course you may defend yourself, but the king does not wish to start a war. Not before he is crowned.’

I growled acceptance of the policy. I supposed it made sense that Edward wanted to be left in peace while he established his authority over his new kingdom, but I doubted the Danes would oblige him. I was certain they wanted war, and would want it before Edward’s coronation.

That ceremony would not take place until the new year, giving time for honoured guests to arrange their travel and so, as the autumn mists turned colder and the days shrank, I went at last to Fagranforda.

That was a blessed place of sweet low hills, slow rivers and rich earth. Alfred had indeed been generous. The steward was a morose Mercian named Fulk who did not welcome a new lord, and no wonder, for he had lived well off the estate’s income, helped in that by the priest who kept the accounts. That priest, Father Cynric, tried to persuade me that the harvests had been poor of late, and that the stumps in the woodland were there because the trees had died of disease rather than been felled for the value of their timber. He laid out the documents that matched the receipts I had brought from the treasury in Wintanceaster, and Father Cynric smiled happily at that coincidence. ‘As I told you, lord,’ he said, ‘we held the estate in sacred trust, as it were, for King Alfred.’ He beamed at me. He was a plump man, full-faced, with a quick smile.

‘And no one ever came from Wessex to examine your accounts?’

‘What need was there?’ he asked, sounding surprised and amused at such a thought. ‘The church teaches us to be honest labourers in the Lord’s vineyard.’

I took all the documents and put them on the hall fire. Father Cynric and Fulk watched in speechless surprise as the parchments scorched, curled, cracked and burned. ‘You’ve been cheating,’ I said, ‘and now it stops.’ Father Cynric opened his mouth to protest, but then thought better of it. ‘Or do I have to hang one of you?’ I asked. ‘Maybe both?’

Finan searched both Fulk’s and Father Cynric’s houses and found some of their hoarded silver, which I used to buy timber and to pay back the steward who had lent me money. I have always loved to build, and Fagranforda needed a new hall, new storehouses and a palisade, all projects for the winter. I sent Finan north to patrol the lands between the Saxons and the Danes, and he took new men with him, men who came to me because they heard I was wealthy and gave silver. Finan sent messages every few days, and they all said that the Danes were surprisingly quiet. I had been certain that Alfred’s death would provoke an attack, but none came. Sigurd, it seemed, was sick, and Cnut had no desire to attack southwards without his friend. I thought it an opportunity for us to attack northwards and said so in a message to Edward, but the suggestion went unanswered. We heard rumours that Æthelwold had gone to Eoferwic.

Gisela’s brother had died and been succeeded as king in Northumbria by a Dane who ruled only because Cnut allowed it. Cnut, for whatever reason, had no wish to be king, but his man occupied the throne and Æthelwold was sent to Eoferwic presumably because it was so far from Wessex and so deep inside Danish land, and was thus a safe place. Cnut must have believed that Edward might send a force to destroy Æthelwold, and so hid his prize behind Eoferwic’s formidable Roman walls.

So Æthelwold cowered, Cnut waited and I built. I made a hall as high as a church with stout beams and a tall palisade. I nailed wolf skulls to the gable, which faced the rising sun, and I hired men to make tables and benches. I had a new steward, a man called Herric who had been wounded in the hip at Beamfleot and could no longer fight, but Herric was energetic and mostly honest. He suggested we build a mill on the stream, a good suggestion.

It was while I was searching for a good place to make the mill that the priest arrived. It was a cold day, as cold as the day on which Father Willibald had found me in Buccingahamm, and the edges of the stream were crackling with thin ice. A wind came cold from the northern uplands, while from the south came a priest. He rode a mule, but scrambled out of the saddle when he came close to me. He was young and even taller than I was. He was skeletally thin, his black robe was filthy and its hems caked with dried mud. His face was long, his nose like a beak, his eyes bright and very green, his fair hair straggly and his chin nonexistent. He had the wispiest, most pathetic beard, which dangled halfway down a long, thin neck around which he wore a large silver cross which was missing one of its arms. ‘You are the great Lord Uhtred?’ he enquired earnestly.

‘I am,’ I said.

‘And I am Father Cuthbert,’ he introduced himself, ‘and so very pleased to meet you. Do I bow?’

‘Grovel, if you like.’

To my surprise he went down on his knees. He bowed his head almost to the frost-whitened grass, then unfolded and stood. ‘There,’ he said, ‘I grovelled. Greetings, lord, from your new chaplain.’

‘My what?’

‘Your chaplain, your own priest,’ he said brightly. ‘It’s my punishment.’

‘I don’t need a chaplain.’

‘I’m sure you don’t, lord. I’m unnecessary, I know. I am not needed, I am a mere blight on the eternal church. Cuthbert the Unnecessary.’ He smiled suddenly as an idea struck him. ‘If I’m ever made into a saint,’ he said, ‘I shall be Saint Cuthbert the Unnecessary! It would distinguish me from the other Saint Cuthbert, would it not? It would, indeed it would!’ He capered a few steps of gangling dance. ‘Saint Cuthbert the Unnecessary!’ he chanted. ‘Patron saint of all useless things. Nevertheless, lord,’ he composed his face into a serious expression, ‘I am your chaplain, a burden upon your purse, and I require food, silver, ale and especially cheese. I’m very fond of cheese. You say you don’t need me, lord, but I am here nonetheless, and at your humble service.’ He bowed again. ‘You wish to say confession? You want me to welcome you back into the bosom of Mother Church?’

‘Who says you’re my chaplain?’ I asked.

‘King Edward. I’m his gift to you.’ He smiled beatifically, then made a sign of the cross towards me. ‘Blessings on you, lord.’

‘Why did Edward send you?’ I asked.

‘I suspect, lord, because he has a sense of humour. Or,’ he frowned, thinking, ‘perhaps because he dislikes me. Except I don’t think he does, in fact he doesn’t dislike me at all, he’s very fond of me, though he believes I need to learn discretion.’

‘You’re indiscreet?’

‘Oh, lord, I am so many things! A scholar, a priest, an eater of cheese, and now I am chaplain to Lord Uhtred, the pagan who slaughters priests. That’s what they tell me. I’d be eternally grateful if you refrained from slaughtering me. May I have a servant, please?’

‘A servant?’

‘To wash things? To do things? To look after me? A maid would be a blessing. Something young with nice breasts?’

I was grinning by then. It was impossible not to like Saint Cuthbert the Unnecessary. ‘Nice breasts?’ I asked sternly.

‘If it pleases you, lord. I was warned you were more likely to slaughter me, to make me into a martyr, but I would much prefer breasts.’

‘Are you really a priest?’ I asked him.

‘Oh indeed, lord, I am. You can ask Bishop Swithwulf! He made me a priest! He laid his hands on me and said all the proper prayers.’

‘Swithwulf of Hrofeceastre?’ I asked.

‘The very same. He’s my father and he hates me!’

‘Your father?’

‘My spiritual father, yes, not my real father. My real father was a stonemason, bless his little hammer, but Bishop Swithwulf educated me and raised me, God bless him, and now he detests me.’

‘Why?’ I asked, already suspecting the answer.

‘I’m not allowed to say, lord.’

‘Say it anyway, you’re indiscreet.’

‘I married King Edward to Bishop Swithwulf’s daughter, lord.’

So the twins who were now in Æthelflaed’s care were legitimate, a fact that would upset Ealdorman Æthelhelm. Edward was pretending otherwise in case the Witan of Wessex decided to offer the throne elsewhere, and the evidence of his first marriage had been sent to my care.

‘God, you’re a fool,’ I said.

‘So the bishop tells me. Saint Cuthbert the Foolish? But I was a friend of Edward, and he begged me, and she was a delightful little thing. So pretty,’ he sighed.

‘She had nice breasts?’ I asked sarcastically.

‘They were like two young fawns, lord,’ he said earnestly.

I’m sure I gaped at him. ‘Two young fawns?’

‘The holy scriptures describe perfect breasts as being like two young fawns, lord. I have to say I’ve researched the matter thoroughly,’ he paused to consider what he had just said, then nodded approval, ‘very thoroughly! Yet still the similarity escapes me, and who am I to question the holy scriptures?’

‘And now,’ I said, ‘everyone is saying the marriage never happened.’

‘Which is why I can’t tell you that it did,’ Cuthbert said.

‘But it did,’ I said, and he nodded. ‘So the twin babies are legitimate,’ I went on, and he nodded again. ‘Didn’t you know Alfred would disapprove?’ I asked.

‘Edward wanted the marriage,’ he said simply and seriously.

‘And you’re sworn to silence?’

‘They threatened to send me to Frankia,’ he said, ‘to a monastery, but King Edward preferred I came to you.’

‘In hope that I’d kill you?’

‘In hope, lord, that you would protect me.’

‘Then for God’s sake don’t go around telling people that Edward was married.’

‘I shall keep silence,’ he promised, ‘I shall be Saint Cuthbert the Silent.’

The twins were with Æthelflaed, who was building her convent in Cirrenceastre, a town not far from my new estate. Cirrenceastre had been a great place when the Romans ruled in Britain and Æthelflaed lived in one of their houses, a fine building with large rooms enclosing a pillared courtyard. The house had once belonged to the older Æthelred, Ealdorman of Mercia and husband to my father’s sister, and I had known it as a child when I fled south from my other uncle’s usurpation of Bebbanburg. The older Æthelred had expanded it so that Saxon thatch was joined to Roman tile, but it was a comfortable house and well protected by Cirrenceastre’s walls. Æthelflaed had men pulling down some ruined Roman houses and was using the stone to make her convent. ‘Why bother?’ I asked her.

‘Because it was my father’s wish,’ she said, ‘and because I promised to do it. It will be dedicated to Saint Werburgh.’

‘She’s the woman who frightened the geese?’

‘Yes.’

Æthelflaed’s household was loud with children. There was her own daughter, Ælfwynn, and my two youngest, Stiorra and Osbert. My oldest, Uhtred, was still at school in Wintanceaster from where he wrote me dutiful letters that I did not bother to read because I knew they were filled with tedious pieties. The youngest children at Cirrenceastre were Edward’s twins who were just babies. I remember looking at Æthelstan in his swaddling clothes and thinking that so many problems could be solved with one plunge of Serpent-Breath. I was right in that, but wrong too, and little Æthelstan would grow into a young man I loved. ‘You know he’s legitimate?’ I asked Æthelflaed.

‘Not according to Edward,’ she said tartly.

‘I have the priest who married them in my household,’ I told her.

‘Then tell him to keep his mouth shut,’ she said, ‘or he’ll be buried with it open.’

We were in Cirrenceastre, which lay not that far from Gleawecestre where Æthelred had his hall. He hated Æthelflaed, and I worried he would send men to capture her, then either simply kill her or immure her in a nunnery. She no longer had the protection of her father, and I doubted Edward frightened Æthelred nearly as much as Alfred had, but Æthelflaed dismissed my fears. ‘He might not be worried by Edward,’ she said, ‘but he’s terrified of you.’

‘Will he make himself King of Mercia?’ I asked.

She watched a mason chip at a Roman statue of an eagle. The poor man was attempting to make it look like a goose, and so far had only managed to make it resemble an indignant chicken. ‘He won’t,’ Æthelflaed said.

‘Why not?’

‘Too many powerful men in southern Mercia want Wessex’s protection,’ she said, ‘and Æthelred really is not interested in power.’

‘He’s not?’

‘Not now. He used to be. But he falls ill every few months and he fears death. He wants to fill what time he has with women.’ She gave me a very tart look. ‘He’s like you in some ways.’

‘Nonsense, woman,’ I said, ‘Sigunn is my housekeeper.’

‘Housekeeper,’ Æthelflaed said scornfully.

‘And terrified of you.’

She liked that and laughed, then she sighed as an unwise blow of the mason’s mallet knocked off the sad chicken’s beak. ‘All I asked for,’ she said, ‘was a statue of Werburgh and one goose.’

‘You want too much,’ I teased her.

‘I want what my father wanted,’ she said quietly, ‘England.’

In those days I was always surprised when I heard that name. I knew Mercia and Wessex, and I had been to East Anglia and reckoned Northumbria was my homeland, but England? It was a dream back then, a dream of Alfred’s, and now, after his death, that dream was as vague and faraway as ever. It seemed likely that if ever the four kingdoms were to be joined then they would be called Daneland rather than England, yet Æthelflaed and I shared Alfred’s dream. ‘Are we English?’ I asked her.

‘What else?’

‘I’m Northumbrian.’

‘You’re English,’ she said firmly, ‘and have a Danish bedwarmer.’ She prodded me hard in the ribs. ‘Tell Sigunn I wish her a good Christmas.’

I celebrated Yule with a feast at Fagranforda. We made a great wheel from timber, more than ten paces wide, and we wrapped it in straw and mounted it horizontally on an oak pillar and greased the spindle with fleece-oil so that the wheel could revolve. Then, after dark, we set fire to it. Men used rakes or spears to turn the wheel, which whirled about spewing sparks. My two youngest children were with me, and Stiorra held my hand and gazed wide-eyed at the huge burning wheel. ‘Why did you set fire to it?’ she asked.

‘It’s a sign to the gods,’ I said, ‘it tells them that we remember them, and it begs them to bring new life to the year.’

‘It’s a sign to Jesus?’ she asked, not quite comprehending.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘and to the other gods.’

There was a cheer when the wheel collapsed and then men and women competed to jump over the flames. I held my two children in my arms and leaped with them, flying through the smoke and sparks. I watched those sparks fly into the cold night and I wondered how many other wheels were burning in the north where the Danes dreamed of Wessex.

Yet if they dreamed they did nothing about those dreams. That, of itself, was surprising. Alfred’s death, it seemed to me, should have been a signal to attack, but the Danes had no one leader to unite them. Sigurd was still sick, we heard Cnut was busy beating the Scots into submission, and Eohric did not know whether his loyalties were to the Christian south or to the Danish north and so did nothing. Haesten still lurked in Ceaster, but he was weak. Æthelwold remained in Eoferwic, but he was helpless to attack Wessex until Cnut allowed it and so we were left in peace, though I was sure that could not last.

I was tempted, so tempted, to go north and consult Ælfadell again, yet I knew that was stupid, and I knew it was not Ælfadell I wished to see, but Erce, that strange, silent beauty. I did not go, but I had news when Offa came to Fagranforda and I sat him in my new hall and piled the fire high to warm his old bones.

Offa was a Mercian who had once been a priest, but whose faith had weakened. He abandoned the priesthood and instead walked about Britain with a pack of trained terriers who amused folk at fairs by walking on their hind legs and dancing. The few coins those dogs collected would never have paid for Offa’s fine house in Liccelfeld, but his real talent, the skill that had made him wealthy, was his ability to learn about men’s hopes, dreams and intentions. His ludicrous dogs were welcome in every great hall, whether Dane or Saxon, and Offa was sharp-eared and sharp-minded, and he listened, he questioned, and then he sold what he had learned. Alfred had used him, but so did Sigurd and Cnut. It was Offa who told me what happened in the north. ‘Sigurd’s sickness doesn’t seem fatal,’ he told me, ‘just weakening. He has fevers, he recovers, then they come back.’

‘Cnut?’

‘He won’t attack south till he knows Sigurd will join him.’

‘Eohric?’

‘Pisses himself with worry.’

‘Æthelwold?’

‘Drinks and humps servant girls.’

‘Haesten?’

‘Hates you, smiles, dreams of revenge.’

‘Ælfadell?’

‘Ah,’ he said, and smiled. Offa was a lugubrious man who rarely smiled. His long, deep-lined face was guarded and shrewd. He cut a slice of the cheese made in my dairy. ‘I hear you’re building a mill?’

‘I am.’

‘Sensible, lord. A good place for a mill. Why pay a miller when you can grind your own wheat?’

‘Ælfadell?’ I asked again, placing a silver coin on the table.

‘I hear you visited her?’

‘You hear too much,’ I said.

‘You compliment me,’ Offa said, scooping up the coin. ‘So you met her granddaughter?’

‘Erce.’

‘So Ælfadell calls her,’ he said, ‘and I envy you.’

‘I thought you had a new young wife?’

‘I do,’ he said, ‘but old men shouldn’t take young wives.’

I laughed. ‘You’re tired?’

‘I’m getting too old to keep straying the roads of Britain.’

‘Then stay home in Liccelfeld,’ I said, ‘you don’t need the silver.’

‘I have a young wife,’ he said, amused, ‘so I need the peace of constant travel.’

‘Ælfadell?’ I asked yet again.

‘She was a whore in Eoferwic,’ he said, ‘years ago. That’s where Cnut found her. She told fortunes as well as whoring, and she must have told Cnut something that turned out to be true because he took her under his shield.’

‘He gave her the cave at Buchestanes?’

‘It’s his land, so yes.’

‘And she tells folk what he wants them to hear?’

Offa hesitated, always a sign that whatever answer was required needed a little more money. I sighed and placed another coin on the table. ‘She speaks his words,’ Offa confirmed.

‘So what’s she saying now?’ I asked, and he hesitated again. ‘Listen,’ I went on, ‘you wizened piece of goat gristle, I’ve paid enough. So tell me.’

‘She’s saying that a new king of the south will arise in the north.’

‘Æthelwold?’

‘They’ll use him,’ Offa said bleakly. ‘He is, after all, the rightful King of Wessex.’

‘He’s a drunken idiot.’

‘When did that make a man unfit to be king?’

‘So the Danes will use him to placate the Saxons,’ I said, ‘then kill him.’

‘Of course.’

‘Then why wait?’

‘Because Sigurd is sick, because the Scots are threatening Cnut’s land, because the stars aren’t aligned propitiously.’

‘So Ælfadell can only tell men to wait for the stars?’

‘She’s saying that Eohric will be King of the Sea, that Æthelwold will be King of Wessex, and that all the great lands of the south will be given to the Danes.’

‘King of the Sea?’

‘Just a fancy way of saying that Sigurd and Cnut won’t take Eohric’s throne. They worry that he’ll ally himself with Wessex.’

‘And Erce?’

‘Is she as beautiful as men say?’ he asked.

‘You haven’t seen her?’

‘Not in her cave.’

‘Where she’s naked,’ I said and Offa sighed. ‘She is more than beautiful,’ I said.

‘So I hear. But she’s a mute. She can’t speak. Her mind is touched. I don’t know if she’s mad, but she is like a child. A beautiful, dumb, half-mad child who drives men wholly mad.’

I thought about that. I could hear the sound of blades on blades outside the hall, the sound of steel hammering linden-wood shields. My men were practising. All day, every day, men rehearse warfare, using sword and shield, axe and shield, spear and shield, readying themselves for the day when they must face Danes who practise just as much. That day, it seemed, was being delayed by Sigurd’s bad health. We should attack instead, I thought, but to invade northern Mercia I needed troops from Wessex, and Edward had been advised by the Witan to keep Britain’s fragile peace.

‘Ælfadell is dangerous,’ Offa interrupted my thoughts.

‘An old woman babbling her master’s words?’

‘And men believe her,’ he said, ‘and men who believe they know fate do not fear risk.’

I thought of Sigurd’s foolhardy attack on the bridge at Eanulfsbirig and knew Offa was right. The Danes might be waiting to attack, but all the time they were hearing magical prophecies that told them they would win. And rumours of those prophecies were spreading through the Saxon lands. Wyrd bið ful āræd. I had an idea, and opened my mouth to speak, then thought better of it. If a man wants to keep a secret then Offa was the last man to tell because he made his living betraying other men’s secrets. ‘You were about to speak, lord?’ he asked.

‘What do you hear about the Lady Ecgwynn?’ I asked.

He looked surprised. ‘I thought you knew more about her than I do.’

‘I know she died,’ I said.

‘She was frivolous,’ Offa said disapprovingly, ‘but very lovely. Elfin.’

‘And married?’

He shrugged. ‘I hear a priest performed a ceremony, but there was no contract between Edward and her father. Bishop Swithwulf’s no fool! He refused to allow it. So was the marriage legal?’

‘If a priest performed it.’

‘Marriage requires a contract,’ Offa said sternly. ‘They weren’t two peasants humping like pigs in a mud-floored hut, but a king and a bishop’s daughter. Of course there must be a contract, and a bride-price! Without those? It’s just a royal rut.’

‘So the children are illegitimate?’

‘That’s what the Witan of Wessex says, so it must be true.’

I smiled. ‘They’re sickly children,’ I lied, ‘and most unlikely to live.’

Offa could not hide his interest. ‘Truly?’

‘Æthelflaed can’t persuade the boy to suckle his wet nurse,’ I lied again, ‘and the girl is frail. Not that it matters if they die, they’re illegitimate.’

‘Their deaths would solve many problems,’ Offa said.

So I had done Edward one small service by spreading a rumour that would please Æthelhelm, his father-in-law. In truth the twins were healthy, squalling babies, and problems in the making, but problems that could wait, just as Cnut had decided that his invasion of southern Mercia and Wessex must wait.

There are seasons of our lives when nothing seems to be happening, when no smoke betrays a burned town or homestead and few tears are shed for the newly dead. I have learned not to trust those times, because if the world is at peace then it means someone is planning war.

Spring came and with it Edward’s coronation at Cyninges Tun, the King’s town, which lay just west of Lundene. I thought it a strange choice. Wintanceaster was the main town of Wessex where Alfred had built his great new church and where the largest royal palace stood, but Edward had chosen Cyninges Tun. It was true that it was a great royal estate, but of late it had been ignored because it was too close to Lundene and, before I captured that city from the Danes, Cyninges Tun had been plundered again and again. ‘The archbishop says it’s where some of the old monarchs were crowned,’ Edward explained to me, ‘and there’s a stone here.’

‘A stone, lord?’

He nodded. ‘It’s a royal stone. The old kings either stood on it or sat on it, I’m not sure which.’ He shrugged, evidently confused by the stone’s purpose. ‘Plegmund thinks it’s important.’

I had been summoned to the royal estate a week before the ceremonies and ordered to bring as many household warriors as I could muster. I had seventy-four men, all mounted, all well-equipped, and Edward added a hundred of his own men and asked that we protect Cyninges Tun during his crowning. He feared that the Danes would attack and I gladly agreed to keep guard. I would much rather have been on horseback under the open skies than sitting and standing through hours of Christian ceremony, and so I rode the empty countryside while Edward sat or stood on the royal stone and had his head anointed with holy oil and then crowned with his father’s emerald-studded crown.

No Danes attacked. I had been so sure that Alfred’s death would mean war, but it brought one of those strange periods during which swords rested in their scabbards, and Edward was crowned in peace and afterwards he went to Lundene and summoned me there to a great council. The streets of the old Roman city were hung with banners, all in celebration of Edward’s coronation, while the formidable ramparts were thick with troops. None of that was surprising, but what was astonishing was to find Eohric there.

King Eohric of East Anglia, who had conspired to kill me, was in Lundene by invitation of Archbishop Plegmund who had sent two of his own nephews as hostages to guarantee the king’s safety. Eohric and his followers had come up the Temes in three lion-prowed boats and were now quartered in the great Mercian palace that crowned the hill at the centre of the old Roman city. Eohric was a big man, bellied like a pregnant sow, strong as a bullock, with a suspicious, small-eyed face. I first saw him on the ramparts where he was walking with a group of his men along the old Roman defences. He had three wolfhounds on leashes and their presence on the ramparts was provoking the dogs in the city beneath to howl. Weohstan, the commander of the garrison, was Eohric’s guide, presumably because Edward had ordered him to show the East Anglian king whatever he wanted to see.

I was with Finan. We climbed to the ramparts up a Roman stair built into one tower of the gate that men called the Bishop’s Gate. It was morning, and the sun was warming the old stone. It stank because the ditch outside the wall was filling with refuse and offal. Children were scavenging there.

A dozen West Saxon soldiers were clearing the way for Eohric’s men, but they let me alone and Finan and I just waited as the East Anglians approached us. Weohstan looked alarmed, perhaps because Finan and I were both wearing swords, though neither of us had mail or helmets or shields. I bowed to the king. ‘You’ve met the Lord Uhtred?’ Weohstan asked Eohric.

The small eyes stared at me. One of the wolfhounds snarled and was quietened. ‘The burner of boats,’ Eohric said, clearly amused.

‘He burns towns too,’ Finan could not resist saying, reminding Eohric that I had burned his fine port at Dumnoc.

Eohric’s mouth tightened, but he did not rise to the bait. Instead he glanced south at the city. ‘A fine place, Lord Uhtred.’

‘May I ask what brings you here, lord King?’ I asked respectfully.

‘I am a Christian,’ Eohric said. His voice was a rumble, impressive and deep, ‘and the Holy Father in Rome tells me that Plegmund is my spiritual father. The archbishop invited me, I came.’

‘We’re honoured,’ I said, because what else do you say to a king?

‘Weohstan tells me you captured the city,’ Eohric said. He sounded bored, like a man who knows he must make conversation, but is not interested in what is being said.

‘I did, lord.’

‘At the gate over there?’ he gestured west towards Ludd’s Gate.

‘Yes, lord King.’

‘You must tell me the tale,’ he said, though he was only being polite. We were both being polite. This was a man who had tried to kill me and neither of us acknowledged that, but instead made stilted conversation. I knew what he was thinking. He was thinking that the wall beside the Bishop’s Gate was the most vulnerable place in the whole three miles of Roman ramparts. It offered the easiest approach, though the rubbish-stinking ditch was a formidable obstacle, but east of the gate the wall’s ragstone had crumbled in places and been replaced with a palisade of oak trunks. A whole stretch of wall between the Bishop’s Gate and the Old Gate was derelict. When I had commanded the garrison I had made the palisade, but it needed repair and if Lundene could be captured then this was the easiest place to attack, and Eohric was thinking the same thing. He gestured to a man beside him. ‘This is the Jarl Oscytel,’ he said.

Oscytel was the commander of Eohric’s household troops. He was what I expected, big and brutal, and I nodded to him and he nodded back. ‘You’ve come to pray too?’ I asked him.

‘I come because my king ordered me to come,’ Oscytel said.

And why, I thought angrily, had Edward allowed this nonsense? Eohric and Oscytel could well become Wessex’s enemies, yet here they were being welcomed to Lundene and treated as honoured guests. There was a great feast that night and one of Edward’s harpists chanted a great poem in praise of Eohric, celebrating his heroism, though in truth Eohric had never made any great reputation in battle. He was a sly, clever man, who ruled by force, who avoided battle, who survived because his kingdom lay at the edge of Britain and so no armies needed to cross his land to reach their enemies.

Yet Eohric was not negligible. He could lead at least two thousand well-equipped warriors to war and if the Danes were ever to make a wholehearted assault on Wessex then Eohric’s men would be a valuable addition. Equally, if the Christians were ever to make an assault on the northern pagans they would welcome those two thousand troops. Both sides tried to seduce Eohric and Eohric received the gifts, made promises and did nothing.

Eohric did nothing, but he was the key to Plegmund’s grand idea to unite all Britain. The archbishop claimed it had come to him in a dream after Alfred’s funeral, and he had persuaded Edward that the dream was from God. Britain would be united by Christ, not by the sword, and there was something propitious in the year, 900. Plegmund believed, and convinced Edward, that Christ would return in the year 1000, and that it was the divine will that the last hundred years of the Christian millennium should be spent converting the Danes in readiness for the second coming. ‘War has failed,’ Plegmund thundered from his pulpit, ‘so we must put our faith in peace!’ He believed the time had come to convert the pagans and he wanted Eohric’s Christian Danes to be his missionaries to Sigurd and Cnut.

‘He wants what?’ I asked Edward. I had been summoned to the king’s presence on the morning after the great feast and had listened as Edward explained the archbishop’s hopes.

‘He wants the conversion of the heathen,’ Edward said stiffly.

‘And they want Wessex, lord.’

‘Christian will not fight Christian,’ Edward said.

‘Tell that to the Welsh, lord King.’

‘They keep the peace,’ he said, ‘mostly.’

He was married by then. His bride, Ælflæd, was little more than a child, perhaps thirteen or fourteen, already pregnant, and she was playing with her companions and a kitten in the small garden where I had so often met Æthelflaed. The window in the king’s chamber looked down on that small garden and Edward saw where I was looking. He sighed. ‘The Witan believes Eohric will prove an ally.’

‘Your father-in-law believes that?’

Edward nodded. ‘We’ve had war for three generations,’ he said sternly, ‘and still it has not brought peace. Plegmund says we must try prayer and preaching. My mother agrees.’

I laughed at that. So we were to defeat our enemies with prayer? Cnut and Sigurd, I thought, would welcome that tactic. ‘And what does Eohric want from us?’ I asked.

‘Nothing!’ Edward seemed surprised by the question.

‘He wants nothing, lord?’

‘He wants the archbishop’s blessing.’

Edward, in those first years of his reign, was under the influence of his mother, his father-in-law, and the archbishop, and all three resented the cost of war. Building the burhs and equipping the fyrd had taken huge sums of silver, while to put an army into the field cost even more, and that money came from the church and from the ealdormen. They wanted to keep their silver. War is expensive, but prayer is free. I scoffed at the idea, and Edward cut me off with an abrupt gesture. ‘Tell me about the twins,’ he said.

‘They thrive,’ I said.

‘My sister said the same, but I heard Æthelstan won’t suckle?’ he sounded anguished.

‘Æthelstan sucks like a bull calf,’ I said. ‘I started a rumour that he’s weak. It’s what your mother and your father-in-law want to hear.’

‘Ah,’ Edward said, and smiled. ‘I’m forced to deny their legitimacy,’ he went on, ‘but they are dear to me.’

‘They’re safe and well, lord,’ I assured him.

He touched my forearm. ‘Keep them that way! And Lord Uhtred,’ his hand tightened on my forearm to emphasise his next words, ‘I don’t want the Danes provoked! You understand me?’

‘Yes, lord King.’

He suddenly realised he was gripping my arm and pulled his hand away. He was awkward with me, I assumed because he was embarrassed that he had made me nursemaid to his royal bastards, or perhaps because I was his sister’s lover, or perhaps because he had ordered me to keep the peace when he knew I believed that peace was fraudulent. But the Danes were not to be provoked, and I was sworn to obey Edward.

So I set out to provoke the Danes.

PART THREE

Angels

Nine

‘Edward’s under the thumb of the priests,’ I grumbled to Ludda, ‘and his damned mother is worse. Stupid bitch.’ We had returned to Fagranforda and I had taken him northwards to the edge of the hills from where a man can stare across the wide Sæfern into the hills of Wales. It was raining in that far west, but a watery sun reflected like beaten silver from the river in the valley beneath us. ‘They think they can avoid war by praying,’ I went on, ‘and all because of that fool Plegmund. He thinks God will geld the Danes.’

‘Prayer might work, lord,’ Ludda said cheerfully.

‘Of course it won’t work,’ I snarled, ‘if your god wanted it to work then why didn’t he do it twenty years ago?’

Ludda was too sensible to offer an answer. There were just the two of us. I was seeking something, and I did not want folk to know what I sought, and so Ludda and I rode the crestline alone. We were searching, talking to slaves in the fields and to thegns in their halls, and on the third day I found what I sought. It was not perfect. It was too near to Fagranforda for my liking and not close enough to Danish land.

‘But there’s nothing like this to the north,’ Ludda said, ‘not that I know of. There are plenty of weird stones up north, but not any buried stones.’

Weird stones are strange circles of great boulders placed by the old people, presumably in honour of their gods. Usually, when we find such a place, we dig at the base of the stones and I have found treasure at one or two. The buried stones are in mounds, some of which are round heaps and some like long ridges, and both are the old people’s graves. We dig into them too, though some folk believe the skeletons inside are protected by spirits or even by dragons with fiery breath, but I once uncovered a jar filled with jet, amber and golden ornaments inside just such a grave. The mound we discovered that day was on a high ridge with views stretching all around. Looking north we could see into the far-off Danish land, though that was a long way off, too far-off, but nevertheless I thought this ancient tomb would suit us.

The place was called Natangrafum and it belonged to a Mercian thegn named Ælwold, who was happy that I should dig into his mound. ‘I’ll lend you slaves to do the work,’ he told me, ‘bastards don’t have enough to do until the harvest.’

‘I’ll use my own,’ I said.

Ælwold was immediately suspicious, but I was Uhtred and he did not want to antagonise me. ‘You’ll share anything you find?’ he asked anxiously.

‘I will,’ I said, then put gold on his table. ‘That gold,’ I said, ‘is for your silence. No one knows I’m here and you tell no one. If I find you break that silence I’ll come back and I’ll bury you in that mound.’

‘I’ll say nothing, lord,’ he promised. He was older than I, with pendulous jowls and long grey hair. ‘God knows I don’t want trouble,’ he went on, ‘last year’s harvest was bad, the Danes aren’t that far away, and I just pray for a quiet life.’ He took the gold. ‘But you’ll find nothing in that mound, lord. My father dug it out years ago and there’s nothing there but skeletons. Not even a bead.’

There were two graves on the ridge top, one built upon the other. A circular mound lay in the centre and athwart it and beneath it, running east and west, was a long mound some ten feet high and over sixty paces long. Much of that long mound was just that, a mound of earth and chalk, but at its eastern end were man-made caves that were entered through a boulder-clad doorway that faced towards the rising sun.

I sent Ludda to fetch a dozen slaves from Fagranforda and they moved the boulder, and cleared the entrance of earth so that we were able to stoop into the long, stone-lined passageway. Four chambers, two on either side, opened from that tunnel. We lit the tomb with pitch-soaked torches and pulled down the heavy rocks that blocked the chamber entrances and found, as Ælwold had said, nothing but skeletons.

‘Will it do?’ I asked Ludda.

He did not answer at first. He was staring at the skeletons and there was fear on his face. ‘They’ll come back to haunt us, lord,’ he said softly.

‘No,’ I said, yet felt a cold shiver in my blood. ‘No,’ I said again, though I did not believe it.

‘Don’t touch them, lord,’ he pleaded.

‘Ælwold said his father disturbed them,’ I said, trying to convince myself, ‘so we should be safe.’

‘He disturbed them, lord, and that means he woke them. Now they’re waiting to take revenge.’ The skeletons lay in untidy heaps, adults and children together. Their skulls grinned at us. One bony head had a great gash in its left side and there were vestiges of hair on another. A child lay curled in a skeleton’s lap. Another corpse reached a bony arm towards us, its finger bones spread on the stony floor. ‘Their spirits are here,’ Ludda whispered, ‘I can feel them, lord.’

I felt the cold shiver again. ‘Ride back to Fagranforda,’ I told Ludda, ‘and bring Father Cuthbert and my best hound.’

‘Your best hound?’

‘Lightning, bring him. I’ll expect you tomorrow.’

We crept back out of the passage and the slaves put back the great boulder that sealed the dead from the living, and that night the sky was lit with great curtains of pale blue and glowing white that shivered high to hide the stars. I have seen those lights before, usually in the depths of winter and always in the northern sky, but it was surely no coincidence that they shimmered the heavens on the day I had let light fall on the dead beneath the earth.

I had rented a house from Ælwold. It was a Roman house, mostly in ruins, which lay a small distance from a village called Turcandene, which was a short ride south of the tomb. Brambles choked most of the house and ivy wriggled up its broken walls, but the two largest rooms, from where the Romans had once lorded the nearby countryside, had been used as a cattle shed and were protected by crude rafters and stinking thatch. We cleared those rooms and I slept under the thatch that night and next morning went back to the tomb. A mist hovered about the long mound. I waited there with the slaves squatting a few paces away. Ludda returned about midday and the mist still lingered. He had Lightning, my good deerhound, on a leash, and with him was Father Cuthbert. I took Lightning’s leash from Ludda. The hound whimpered and I ruffled his ears. ‘What you have to do now,’ I told Cuthbert, ‘is make certain that the spirits in this grave don’t interfere with us.’

‘May I ask, lord, what it is you do here?’

‘What did Ludda tell you?’

‘Just that you needed me, and to bring the doggy.’

‘Then that’s all you need to know. And make sure you drive those spirits away.’

We took the great entrance stone away and Cuthbert went into the grave where he chanted prayers, sprinkled water and planted a cross he made from tree branches. ‘We must wait till the night’s heart, lord,’ he told me, ‘to make sure the prayers have worked.’ He looked distraught and waved his hands in gestures that suggested hopelessness. He had the hugest hands and never seemed to know quite what to do with them. ‘Will the spirits obey me?’ he asked, ‘I don’t know! They sleep during the day and should wake to find themselves chained and helpless, but perhaps they’re stronger than we know? We’ll discover tonight.’

‘Why tonight? Why not now?’

‘They sleep in the daytime, lord, then they’ll wake tonight and scream like souls in torment. If they break the chains?’ He shuddered. ‘But I shall stay through the night and summon angels.’

‘Angels?’

He nodded seriously. ‘Yes, lord, angels.’ He saw my puzzlement and smiled. ‘Oh don’t think of angels as pretty girls, lord. Simple folk believe angels are lovely bright things with wonderful,’ he paused, his huge hands fluttering over his chest, ‘fawns,’ he finally said, ‘but in truth they’re the shield-warriors of God. Fiercely formidable creatures!’ He flapped his hands, to suggest wings, then went very still as he became aware of my gaze. I stared at him so long that he became nervous. ‘Lord?’ he asked tremulously.

‘You’re clever, Cuthbert,’ I said.

He looked pleased and bashful. ‘I am indeed, lord.’

‘Saint Cuthbert the Clever,’ I said in admiration. ‘A fool,’ I went on, ‘but such a clever fool!’

‘Thank you, lord, you’re so kind.’

That night Cuthbert and I stayed in the tomb’s entrance and watched the stars grow bright. Lightning lay with his head on my lap as I stroked him. He was a great hound, full of running, fierce as a warrior, and fearless. A quarter moon climbed above the hills. The night was filled with noises, the rustle of creatures in nearby woods, the haunting call of a hunting owl, the cry of a vixen far away. When the moon had climbed to its height Father Cuthbert faced the tomb, went to his knees, and began to pray silently, his lips moving and his hands clasping the broken cross. If angels came, I did not see them, but perhaps they were there; the bright-winged and beautiful shield-warriors of the Christian god.

I let Cuthbert pray as I took Lightning to the top of the mound where I knelt and cuddled the hound. I told him how good he was, how loyal and how brave. I stroked his coarse pelt and I buried my head in his fur and I told him he was the greatest hound I had ever known, and I was still cuddling him as I cut his throat with one hard tug of a knife I had sharpened that afternoon. I felt his huge body struggle and lurch, the sudden howl fading fast, the blood soaking my mail and knees, and I was crying because of his death, and I held his shivering body and I told Thor I had made the sacrifice. I did not want to, but it is the sacrifice of things dear to us that touches the minds of the gods, and I held Lightning until he died. It was mercifully swift. I begged Thor to accept the sacrifice and in return to keep the dead silent in their grave.

I carried Lightning’s body to some nearby trees and I used the knife and a shard of stone to make a grave. I laid the hound inside, put the knife beside him, then wished him happy hunting in the next world. I filled in the grave and heaped rocks over it to preserve his body from the carrion-eaters. It was almost dawn by the time I had finished and I was dirty, blood-soaked and miserable.

‘Dear God, what happened?’ Father Cuthbert stared aghast at me.

‘I prayed to Thor,’ I said curtly.

‘The dog?’ he whispered the question.

‘Is hunting in the next world,’ I said.

He shuddered. Some priests would have chided me for sacrificing to false gods, but Cuthbert just made the sign of the cross. ‘The spirits have been quiet,’ he told me.

‘So one of the prayers worked,’ I said, ‘either yours or mine.’

‘Or both, lord,’ he said.

And when the sun rose the slaves came and I had them open the tomb and then move the dead from one of the two deeper chambers. They piled the bones in the opposite chamber, and then we sealed that corpse-crowded space with a slab of rock. We put skulls in the two cavities nearest the entrance, so that any visitor, stooping into the passageway, would be greeted by the grinning dead. The hardest work was disguising the entrance of the northernmost chamber, the one we had cleared of bones, because Ludda needed to be able to get in and out of that artificial cave. Father Cuthbert found the solution. His father had taught him the stonemason’s trade, and Cuthbert clumsily chipped away at a limestone slab until it resembled a thin shield. It took him two days, but he managed it and we balanced the thin slab on a flat rock and Ludda found he could tip it easily enough. He could pull it outwards, crawl past it into the chamber and then another man could push it back upright so that Ludda was hidden behind the shield-like slab. When he spoke from behind the slab his voice was muffled, but audible.

We sealed the grave again, piling earth over the entrance boulder and then went back to Fagranforda. ‘Now we go to Lundene,’ I told Ludda. ‘You, me and Finan.’

‘Lundene!’ He liked that. ‘Why are we going, lord?’

‘To find two whores, of course.’

‘Of course,’ he said.

‘I can help!’ Father Cuthbert said eagerly.

‘I thought I’d make you responsible for collecting the goose feathers,’ I told Cuthbert.

‘Goose feathers?’ He stared at me, appalled. ‘Oh, lord, please!’

Whores and goose feathers. Plegmund was praying for peace and I was planning for war.

I took thirty men to Lundene, not because I needed them, but because a lord should travel in style. We found quarters for men and horses in the Roman fort that guarded the old city’s north-western corner, then I walked with Finan and Weohstan along the remnants of the Roman wall. ‘When you commanded here,’ Weohstan asked, ‘did they starve you of money?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘I have to beg for every coin,’ he grumbled. ‘They’re building churches, but I can’t persuade them to repair the wall.’

And the wall needed repair more than ever. A great stretch of the Roman battlements between the Bishop’s Gate and the Old Gate had fallen into the stinking ditch beyond. It was not a new problem. Back when I had been commander of the garrison, I had filled the gap with a massive oak palisade, but those trunks were dark now and some of them were rotting. King Eohric had seen this decayed stretch and I did not doubt he had noted it, and after his visit to Lundene I had suggested that repairs be made urgently, but nothing had been done. ‘Just look,’ Weohstan said, and scrambled awkwardly down the slope of rubble that marked the ruined wall’s end. He pushed on an oak trunk and I saw it move like a dead tooth. ‘They won’t pay to replace them,’ Weohstan said gloomily. He kicked the base of the trunk and soft dark lumps of fungus-ridden wood exploded from his boot.

‘We’re at peace,’ I said sarcastically, ‘hadn’t you heard?’

‘Tell that to Eohric,’ Weohstan said, climbing back to join me. All the land to the north-east was Eohric’s land, and Weohstan told of Danish patrols coming close to the city. ‘They’re watching us,’ he said, ‘and all I’m allowed to do is wave at them.’

‘They don’t need to come close,’ I said, ‘their traders will have told them everything they want to know.’ Lundene was always busy with traders, Danish, Saxon, Frankish and Frisian, and such merchants carried news back to their homelands. Eohric, I was certain, knew just how vulnerable Lundene’s defences were, indeed he had seen them for himself. ‘But Eohric’s a cautious bastard,’ I said.

‘Sigurd isn’t.’

‘He’s still sick.’

‘Pray God he dies,’ Weohstan said savagely.

I learned more news in the city’s taverns. There were shipmasters from the whole coast of Britain who, for the price of an ale, offered rumours, some of them true. And not one rumour spoke of war. Æthelwold was still sheltered in Eoferwic, and still claimed to be King of Wessex, but he had no power until the Danes gave him an army. Why were they so quiet? It puzzled me. I had been so confident they would attack at the news of Alfred’s death, but instead they did nothing. Bishop Erkenwald knew the answer. ‘It’s God’s will,’ he told me. We had met by chance in a street. ‘God commanded us to love our enemies,’ he explained, ‘and by love we shall make them Christian and peaceable.’

I remember staring at him. ‘Do you really believe that?’ I asked.

‘We must have faith,’ he said fiercely. He made the sign of the cross towards a woman who had curtseyed to him. ‘So,’ he asked me, ‘what brings you to Lundene?’

‘We’re looking for whores,’ I said. He blinked. ‘Do you know any good ones, bishop?’ I asked.

‘Oh, dear God,’ he hissed, and went on his way.

In truth I had decided against finding whores in Lundene’s taverns because there was always a chance that the girls might be recognised, and so I led Finan, Ludda and Father Cuthbert down to the slave dock that lay upriver of the old Roman bridge. Lundene had never possessed a thriving slave market, but there was always some small trade in young folk captured from Ireland or Wales or Scotland. The Danes kept more slaves than the Saxons, and those that we did possess were usually farm labourers. A man who cannot afford an ox could harness a pair of slaves to a plough, though the furrow would never be as deep as that made by an ox-drawn blade. Oxen were less trouble too, though in the old days a man could kill a slave who proved a nuisance, and face no penalty. Alfred’s laws changed that. And many men liked to release their slaves, believing it earned them God’s approval, and so there was no great demand in Lundene, though there were usually a few slaves for sale at the dock beside the Temes. The traders came from Ratumacos, a town in Frankia, and almost all those traders were Northmen because the Viking crews had conquered all the region about that town. They came to buy the young folk captured in our border skirmishes, and some also brought slaves to sell, knowing that the wealthy men of Wessex and Mercia appreciated an exotic girl. The church frowned on that trade, but it thrived anyway.

The wharf lay not far beyond the river wall and the slaves were kept in dank wooden huts inside the wall. There were four traders in Lundene that day and their guards saw us coming and warned their masters that rich men were approaching. The traders came into the street and bowed low. ‘Wine, my lords?’ one asked. ‘Ale, perhaps? Or whatever your lordships desire.’

‘Women,’ Father Cuthbert said.

‘Be quiet,’ I growled at him.

‘Jesus and Joseph,’ Finan said under his breath and I knew he was remembering the long months he and I had spent as slaves, chained to Sverri’s oars, our arms branded with the S of slavery. Sverri had died, as had his henchman, Hakka, both slaughtered by Finan, but the Irishman had never lost his hatred of slavers.

‘You’re looking for women?’ one of the traders asked. ‘Or for girls? Something young and tender? I have just what you need. Unspoilt goods! Juicy and precious! Gentlemen?’ He bowed, gesturing us towards a crude door inserted into a Roman arch.

I looked at Father Cuthbert. ‘Take the grin off your face,’ I snarled at him, then lowered my voice, ‘and go and find Weohstan. Tell him to bring ten or a dozen men. Quickly.’

‘But, lord…’ he began, wanting to stay.

‘Go!’ I shouted.

He fled. ‘Always wise to lose the priests, lord,’ the trader said, assuming I had sent Cuthbert away because the church frowned on his business. I tried to make a friendly response, but the same anger that was seething in Finan was now curdling my belly. I remembered the humiliation of slavery, the misery. Finan and I had once been chained in a dank building exactly like this. The scar on my upper arm seemed to smart as I followed the trader through the low door. ‘I brought a half-dozen girls across the water,’ he said, ‘and I assume you’re not wanting dairymaids or kitchen drabs?’

‘We want angels,’ Finan said tightly.

‘That’s what I supply!’ the man said cheerfully.

‘What’s your name?’ I asked.

‘Halfdan,’ he said. He was in his thirties, I guessed, burly and tall with a head as bald as an egg, and a beard that reached to his waist where a silver-hilted sword was strapped. The room we entered had four guards, two armed with cudgels and two with swords. They watched a score of slaves who sat chained in the floor’s sewage-stinking sludge. The back wall of the hut was the city-side of the river rampart, its stones green and black in the small light that came through chinks in the rotting thatch roof. The slaves watched us sullenly. ‘They’re mostly Welsh,’ Halfdan said carelessly, ‘but there’s a couple from Ireland.’

‘You’ll take them to Frankia?’ Finan asked.

‘Unless you want them,’ Halfdan said. He unbolted another door, then rapped on its dark wood and I heard a second bolt being drawn on the further side. The door was pulled open to reveal another man waiting there, this one with a sword. He guarded Halfdan’s most valuable merchandise, the girls. The man grinned a welcome as we stooped through the doorway.

It was difficult to see what the girls looked like in the gloom. They huddled in a corner, and one appeared to be sick. I could see that one girl was very dark-skinned while the others were fair. ‘Six of them,’ I said.

‘You can count, lord,’ Halfdan said in jest. He bolted the door that led back into the larger room where the men slaves were kept.

Finan knew what I meant. Two of us and six slavers, and we were angry, and we had not been given a chance to fight anyone for too long, and we were restless. ‘Six is nothing,’ Finan said. Ludda sensed an undertone and looked nervous.

‘You want more than six?’ Halfdan asked. He banged open a recalcitrant shutter to let in some light from the street and the girls blinked, half dazzled. ‘Six beauties,’ Halfdan said proudly.

The six beauties were thin, bedraggled and terrified. The dark-skinned girl turned her face away, but not before I saw that she was indeed beautiful. Two of the others were very fair-haired. ‘Where are they from?’

‘Mostly from north of Frankia,’ Halfdan said, ‘but that one?’ He pointed to the cringing girl, ‘she’s from the ends of the earth. The gods alone know where she sprang from. Could have dropped from the moon for all I know. I bought her off a trader from the south. She speaks some weird tongue, but she’s a pretty enough thing if you like your meat dark.’

‘Who doesn’t?’ Finan asked.

‘I was going to keep her,’ Halfdan said, ‘but the bitch won’t stop crying and I can’t abide a weepy bitch.’

‘They were whores?’ I asked.

‘They’re not virgins,’ Halfdan said, amused. ‘I won’t lie to you, lord, if that’s what you want then I can find some for you, but it might take a month or two? But not these girls. The dark one and the Frisian were put to work in a tavern for a time, but they weren’t overused, just broken in. They’re still pretty. Let me show you.’ He reached down with a massive hand and pulled the dark girl out of the huddle. She screamed as he pulled, and he slapped her hard around the head. ‘Stop crying, you silly bitch,’ he snapped. He turned her face towards me. ‘What do you think, lord? She’s a weird colour, but a lovely girl.’

‘She is,’ I agreed.

‘Same colour all over,’ he said, grinning, and to prove it he yanked her dress down to reveal her breasts. ‘Stop whimpering, bitch,’ he said, slapping her again. He lifted one of her breasts. ‘See, lord? Brown tits.’

‘Let me,’ I said. I had drawn my knife and Halfdan assumed I was going to cut off the remains of the girl’s dress and so he stepped away.

‘Have a good look, lord,’ he said.

‘I will,’ I promised, and the girl was still whimpering as I turned and drove the blade up into Halfdan’s belly, but there was metal beneath his tunic and the blade was stopped dead. I could hear the whisper of Ludda’s sword sliding from the scabbard as Halfdan tried to head bang me, but I already had hold of his beard with my left hand and I pulled it down hard. I had turned the knife upright and I pulled Halfdan’s head down onto the point. The girls were screaming and one of the guards in the other room was hammering the bolted door. Halfdan was bellowing and then the bellow turned to a gurgle as the blade tore into his lower jaw and throat. There was blood brightening the room. Finan’s man was already dead, killed by the Irishman’s lightning speed, and then Finan slashed the blade across the back of Halfdan’s legs, hamstringing him, and the big man went to his knees and I finished the job properly by slitting his throat. His big beard soaked up most of the blood.

‘You took your time,’ Finan said, amused.

‘I’m out of practice,’ I said. ‘Ludda, tell the girls to be quiet.’

‘Four more,’ Finan said.

I sheathed the knife, wiped the blood from my hand on Halfdan’s tunic, and drew Serpent-Breath. Finan unbolted the door and it burst open. A guard ducked inside, saw the blade waiting for him and tried to back away, but Finan pulled him inside and I drove the sword deep into his belly, then brought a knee into his face as he buckled. He went down on the blood-soaked floor. ‘Finish him off, Ludda,’ I ordered.

‘Jesus,’ he murmured.

The other three guards were more cautious. They waited at the long room’s farther end and they had already called for help from the other slavers. It was in the traders’ interest to help each other, and their appeal brought still more men into the room. Four more, then five, all armed, and all eager for a fight. ‘Osferth always says we don’t think enough before we start a fight,’ Finan said.

‘He’s right, isn’t he?’ I said, but then there was a huge shout from the street. Weohstan had arrived with some of his garrison troops. Those troops forced their way into the shack and herded the slavers out into the street, where two traders were complaining to Weohstan that we were murderers. Weohstan bellowed for quiet, then explored the shack. He wrinkled his nose at the stench in the large room, then ducked into the smaller room and looked at the two corpses. ‘What happened?’

‘These two had an argument,’ I said, pointing to Halfdan and the guard Finan had slaughtered so quickly, ‘and they killed each other.’

‘And that one?’ Weohstan nodded at the third man who was curled on the floor and whimpering.

‘I told you to finish him,’ I said to Ludda, then did the job myself. ‘He was overcome with grief at their deaths,’ I explained to Weohstan, ‘so tried to kill himself.’

Two of the other slave traders had followed us into the shed and they protested fiercely that we were liars and murderers. They pointed out that their trade was legal and that they had been promised the protection of the laws. They demanded that I stand trial for manslaughter and that I pay a huge price in silver for the lives I had taken. Weohstan listened to them patiently. ‘You’d swear an oath at his trial?’ he asked the two men.

‘We will!’ one of the traders said.

‘You’ll tell what happened and swear to it on oath?’

‘He must compensate us!’

‘Lord Uhtred,’ Weohstan turned to me, ‘you’ll bring oath-givers to contest the evidence?’

‘I will,’ I said, but the mention of my name had been enough to drain the belligerence from the two men. They stared at me for an eyeblink, then one of them muttered that Halfdan had always been an argumentative fool.

‘So you won’t swear in court?’ Weohstan asked, but the two men were already backing away. They fled.

Weohstan grinned. ‘What I’m supposed to do,’ he said, ‘is arrest you for manslaughter.’

‘I didn’t do anything,’ I said.

He looked at Serpent-Breath’s reddened blade. ‘I can see that, lord,’ he said.

I stooped to Halfdan’s body and slit his tunic open to find a mail coat, but also, as I expected, a pouch at his waist. It was the pouch that had stopped my first knife thrust and it was crammed with coins, many of them gold.

‘What do we do with the slaves?’ Weohstan wondered aloud.

‘They’re mine,’ I said, ‘I just bought them.’ I handed him the pouch after taking a few coins for myself. ‘That should buy oak trunks for a palisade.’

He counted the coins and looked delighted. ‘You’re an answer to prayer, lord,’ he said.

We took the slaves to a tavern in the new city, the Saxon settlement that lay to the west of Roman Lundene. The coins I had taken from Halfdan’s purse paid for food, ale and clothing. Finan talked to the men and reckoned a half-dozen would make good warriors. ‘If we ever need warriors again,’ he grumbled.

‘I hate peace,’ I said, and Finan laughed.

‘What do we do with the others?’ he asked.

‘Let the men go,’ I said, ‘they’re young, they’ll survive.’

Ludda and I spoke with the girls while Father Cuthbert just stared at them wide-eyed. He was entranced by the dark-skinned girl, whose name appeared to be Mehrasa. She looked the oldest of the six, she was perhaps sixteen or seventeen while the others were all three or four years younger. Once they realised they were safe, or at least not in any immediate danger, they began to smile. Two were Saxon girls, taken from the coast of Cent by Frankish raiders, and two were Franks. Then there was the mysterious Mehrasa, and the sick girl who was a Frisian. ‘The Centish girls can go home,’ I said, ‘but you take the others to Fagranforda.’ I was speaking to Ludda and Father Cuthbert. ‘Choose a pair of them. Teach them what they need to know. The other two can work in the dairy or kitchens.’

‘A pleasure, lord,’ Father Cuthbert said.

I looked at him. ‘If you mistreat them,’ I said, ‘I’ll hurt you.’

‘Yes, lord,’ he said humbly.

‘Now go.’

I sent Rypere and a dozen men to protect the girls on their journey, but Finan and I stayed in Lundene. I have always liked that city and there was nowhere better to discover what happened in the rest of Britain. I talked to traders and travellers and even listened to one of Erkenwald’s interminable sermons, not because I needed his advice, but to hear what the church was telling its people. The bishop preached well and his message was exactly what Archbishop Plegmund wanted. It was a plea for peace, to give the church time to enlighten the heathen. ‘We have been oppressed by war,’ Erkenwald said, ‘and we have been soaked by the tears of widows and of mothers. Every man who kills another man breaks a mother’s heart.’ He knew I was in the church and was staring into the shadows where I stood, then he pointed at a fresh painting on the wall that showed Mary, Christ’s mother, weeping at the foot of the cross. ‘What guilt those Romans had to bear, and what guilt we bear when we kill! We are the children of God, not lambs to be slaughtered.’

There had been a time when Erkenwald preached slaughter, urging us to ravage the pagan Danes, but the coming of the year 900 had somehow persuaded the church to enjoin peace on us, and it seemed their prayers were being answered. There were cattle raids on the borderlands, yet no Danish armies came to conquer. Later that summer Finan and I went aboard one of Weohstan’s ships and were rowed downriver to the wide estuary where I had spent so much time. We went close to Beamfleot and I saw that no Danes had tried to rebuild the burned forts and no ships lay in the Hothlege Creek, though we could see the blackened ribs of the vessels we had burned there. We went further east to where the Temes widened into the great sea and we nosed the boat across the shallows at Sceobyrig, another place where Danish crews liked to wait in ambush for trading ships travelling to and from Lundene, but the anchorage was empty. It was the same on the estuary’s southern bank. Nothing but wild birds and wet mud.

We rowed up the curving River Medwæg to the burh at Hrofeceastre where I saw that the timber palisade atop the mighty earth bank was rotting like the one in Lundene, but a great heap of newly felled oak trunks suggested that someone here was ready to repair the defences. Finan and I went ashore at the wharf by the Roman bridge and walked to the bishop’s house beside the great church. The steward bowed to us and, when he heard my name, did not dare ask for my sword. Instead he took us to a comfortable room and had servants bring us ale and food.

Bishop Swithwulf and his wife arrived an hour later. The bishop was a worried-looking man, grey-haired, with a long face and twitching hands, while his wife was small and nervous. She must have bowed to me ten times before sitting. ‘What brings you here, lord?’ Swithwulf asked.

‘Curiosity,’ I said.

‘Curiosity?’

‘I’m wondering why the Danes are so quiet,’ I said.

‘God’s will,’ the bishop’s wife said timidly.

‘Because they’re planning something,’ Swithwulf said. ‘Never trust a Dane when he’s silent.’ He looked at his wife. ‘Don’t the cooks need your advice?’

‘The cooks? Oh!’ She stood, fluttered for a moment, then fled.

‘Why are the Danes quiet?’ Swithwulf asked me.

‘Sigurd’s ill,’ I suggested, ‘Cnut’s busy on his northern border.’

‘And Æthelwold?’

‘Getting drunk in Eoferwic,’ I said.

‘Alfred should have strangled him,’ Swithwulf growled.

I was warming to the bishop. ‘You’re not preaching peace like the rest?’ I asked.

‘Oh, I preach what I’m told to preach,’ he said, ‘but I’m also deepening the ditch and rebuilding the wall.’

‘And Ealdorman Sigelf?’ I asked. Sigelf was the ealdorman of Cent, the county’s military leader and its most prominent noble.

The bishop looked at me suspiciously. ‘What of him?’

‘He wants to be King of Cent, I hear.’

Swithwulf was taken aback by that statement. He frowned. ‘His son had that idea,’ he said cautiously, ‘I’m not sure if Sigelf thinks the same way.’

‘And Sigebriht was talking to the Danes,’ I said. Sigebriht, who had surrendered to me outside Sceaftesburi, was Sigelf’s son.

‘You know that?’

‘I know that,’ I said. The bishop sat silent. ‘What’s going on in Cent?’ I asked, and still he was silent. ‘You’re the bishop,’ I said, ‘you hear things from your priests. So tell me.’

He still hesitated, but then, like a millpond’s dam bursting, he told me of the unhappiness in Cent. ‘We were our own kingdom once,’ he said. ‘Now Wessex treats us as runts of the litter. Look what happened when Haesten and Harald landed! Were we protected? No!’

Haesten had landed on Cent’s northern coast while Jarl Harald Bloodhair had brought more than two hundred ships to the southern shore where he had stormed a half-built burh and slaughtered the men inside, then spread across the county in an orgy of burning, killing, enslaving and robbing. Wessex had sent an army led by Æthelred and Edward to oppose the invaders, but the army had done nothing. Æthelred and Edward had placed their men on the great wooded ridge at the centre of Cent and then argued whether to strike north towards Haesten or south towards Harald, and all the while Harald had burned and killed.

‘I killed Harald,’ I said.

‘You did,’ the bishop allowed, ‘but not till after he’d ravaged the county!’

‘So men want Cent to be its own kingdom again?’ I asked.

He hesitated a long time before answering, and even then he was evasive. ‘No one wanted that while Alfred lived,’ he said, ‘but now?’

I stood and walked to a window from where I could stare down at the wharves. Gulls screamed and wheeled in the summer sky. There were two cranes on the wharf and they were lifting horses into a wide-bellied trading ship. The ship’s hold had been divided into stalls where the frightened beasts were being tethered. ‘Where are the horses going?’ I asked.

‘Horses?’ Swithwulf asked, puzzled, then realised why I had asked the unexpected question. ‘They send them to market in Frankia. We breed good horses here.’

‘You do?’

‘Ealdorman Sigelf does,’ he said.

‘And Sigelf rules here,’ I said, ‘and his son talks to the Danes.’

The bishop shuddered. ‘So you say,’ he said cautiously.

I turned to him. ‘And his son was in love with your daughter,’ I said, ‘and for that reason hates Edward.’

‘Dear God,’ Swithwulf said quietly and made the sign of the cross. There were tears in his eyes. ‘She was a silly girl, a silly girl, but joyous.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

He blinked away the tears. ‘And you look after my grandchildren?’

‘They’re in my care, yes.’

‘I hear the boy is sickly,’ he sounded anxious.

‘That’s just a rumour,’ I reassured him. ‘They’re both healthy, but it’s better for their health if Ealdorman Æthelhelm believes the contrary.’

‘Æthelhelm’s not a bad man,’ the bishop said grudgingly.

‘But he’d still cut your grandchildren’s throats if he had the chance.’

Swithwulf nodded. ‘What colour do they have?’

‘The boy’s dark like his father, the girl is fair.’

‘Like my daughter,’ he said in a whisper.

‘Who married the ætheling of Wessex,’ I said, ‘who now denies it. And Sigebriht, her rejected lover, went to the Danes out of hatred for Edward.’

‘Yes,’ the bishop said quietly.

‘But then swore an oath to Edward when Æthelwold fled north.’

Swithwulf nodded. ‘I heard.’

‘Can he be trusted?’

The directness of the question unsettled Swithwulf. He frowned and shifted uncomfortably, then gazed through a window to where crows where loud on the grass. ‘I would not trust him,’ he said softly.

‘I couldn’t hear you, bishop.’

‘I would not trust him,’ he said more loudly.

‘But his father is ealdorman here, not Sigebriht.’

‘Sigelf is a difficult man,’ the bishop said, his voice low again, ‘but not a fool.’ He looked at me with unhappy appeal. ‘I’ll deny this conversation,’ he said.

‘Have you heard us having a conversation?’ I asked Finan.

‘Not a word,’ he said.

We stayed that night in Hrofeceastre and next day went back to Lundene on the flooding tide. There was a chill on the water, the first taste of autumn coming, and I rousted my men from the new town’s taverns and saddled horses. I was deliberately staying away from Fagranforda because it was so close to Natangrafum and so I took my small troop south and west along familiar roads until we reached Wintanceaster.

Edward was surprised and pleased to see me. He knew I had not been in Fagranforda for most of the summer so did not ask me about the twins, instead telling me that his sister had sent news of them. ‘They’re well,’ he said. He invited me to a feast. ‘We don’t serve my father’s food,’ he assured me.

‘That’s a blessing, lord,’ I said. Alfred had ever served insipid meals of weak broths and limp vegetables, while Edward, at least, knew the virtues of meat. His new wife was there, plump and pregnant, while her father, Ealdorman Æthelhelm, was plainly Edward’s most trusted counsellor. There were fewer priests than in Alfred’s day, but at least a dozen were at the feast, including my old friend Willibald.

Æthelhelm greeted me jovially. ‘We feared you’d be provoking the Danes,’ he said.

‘Who? Me?’

‘They’re quiet,’ Æthelhelm said, ‘and best not to wake them.’

Edward looked at me. ‘Would you wake them?’ he asked.

‘What I would do, lord,’ I told him, ‘is send a hundred of your best warriors to Cent. Then I’d send another two or three hundred to Mercia and build burhs there.’

‘Cent?’ Æthelhelm asked.

‘Cent is restless,’ I said.

‘They’ve always been troublesome,’ Æthelhelm said dismissively, ‘but they hate the Danes as much as the rest of us.’

‘The Centish fyrd must protect Cent,’ Edward said.

‘And Lord Æthelred can build burhs,’ Æthelhelm declared. ‘If the Danes come we’ll be ready for them, but there’s no point in poking them with a sharp stick. Father Willibald!’

‘Lord?’ Willibald half stood at one of the lower tables.

‘Have we heard from our missionaries?’

‘We will, lord!’ Willibald said, ‘I’m sure we will.’

‘Missionaries?’ I asked.

‘Among the Danes,’ Edward said. ‘We will convert them.’

‘We shall beat Danish swords into ploughshares,’ Willibald said, and it was just after those hopeful words were said that a messenger arrived. He was a mud-spattered priest who had come from Mercia, and he had been sent to Wessex by Werferth, who was the Bishop of Wygraceaster. The man had plainly ridden hard and there was a hush in the hall as we waited to hear his news. Edward raised a hand and the harpist lifted his fingers from the strings.

‘Lord,’ the priest went on his knees before the dais on which the high table was bright with candles, ‘great news, lord King.’

‘Æthelwold’s dead?’ Edward asked.

‘God is great!’ the priest said. ‘The age of miracles is not over!’

‘Miracles?’ I asked.

‘It seems there is an ancient tomb, lord,’ the priest explained, looking up at Edward, ‘a tomb in Mercia, and angels have appeared there to foretell the future. Britain will be Christian! You will rule from sea to sea, lord! There are angels! And they have brought the prophecy from heaven!’

There was a sudden spate of questions that Edward silenced. Instead he and Æthelhelm questioned the man, learning that Bishop Werferth had sent trusted priests to the ancient tomb and they had confirmed the heavenly visitation. The messenger could not contain his joy. ‘The angels say the Danes will turn to Christ, lord, and you shall rule one kingdom of all the Angelcynn!’

‘You see?’ Father Coenwulf, who had survived being locked in a stable on the night he had gone to pray with Æthelwold, could not resist the temptation to be triumphant. He was looking at me. ‘You see, Lord Uhtred! The age of miracles is not over!’

‘Glory be to God!’ Edward said.

Goose feathers and tavern whores. Glory be to God.

Natangrafum became a place of pilgrimage. Hundreds of people went there, and most were disappointed because the angels did not appear every night, indeed whole weeks went by with no lights showing at the tomb and no strange singing sounding from its stony depths, but then the angels would come again and the valley beneath Natangrafum’s sepulchre would echo with the prayers of folk seeking help.

Only a few were permitted into the tomb, and those were chosen by Father Cuthbert, who led them past the armed men who protected the ancient mound. Those men were mine, led by Rypere, but the banner planted on the hill’s top, close to the tomb’s entrance, was Æthelflaed’s flag, which showed a rather ungainly goose that was somehow holding a cross in one webbed foot and a sword in the other. Æthelflaed was convinced Saint Werburgh protected her, just as the saint had once protected a wheatfield by driving out a flock of hungry geese. That was supposed to be a miracle, in which case I am a miracle worker too, but I was also too sensible to tell that to Æthelflaed. The goose banner suggested that the guards belonged to Æthelflaed, and anyone invited into the tomb would assume that it was under Æthelflaed’s protection, and that was believable because no one would credit Uhtred the Wicked with guarding a place of Christian pilgrimage. The visitor, led past the guards, would come to the tomb entrance, which, at night, was lit by dim rushlights that showed two heaps of skulls, one on each side of the low, cave-like opening. Cuthbert would kneel with them, pray with them, then command them to take off their weapons and mail. ‘No one can go into the angelic presence with war gear,’ he would say sternly and, once they had obeyed him, he offered them a potion in a silver cup. ‘Drink it all down,’ he would order them.

I never tried that liquid, which was cooked up by Ludda. My memory of Ælfadell’s drink was more than sufficient. ‘It gives them dreams, lord,’ Ludda explained when I made one of my rare visits to Turcandene.

Æthelflaed had come with me and insisted on sniffing the potion. ‘Dreams?’ she asked.

‘One or two vomit as well, lady,’ Ludda said, ‘but yes, dreams.’

Not that they needed dreams for, once they had drunk, and when Cuthbert saw the vagueness in their eyes, he let them crawl into the tomb’s long passage. Inside they saw the stone walls, floor and ceiling, and on either side the chambers heaped with bones, all lit by rushlights, but ahead of them were the angels. Three angels, not two, huddled together at the passage’s end, where they were surrounded by the glorious feathers of their wings. ‘I chose three, as three is a sacred number, lord,’ Cuthbert explained, ‘an angel for each member of the Trinity.’

The goose feathers were glued to the rock. They formed fans, which, in the dim light, could easily be mistaken for wings. It had taken Ludda a whole day to place the feathers, then the three girls had to be coached in their duties, which had taken the best part of a month. They sang softly when a visitor came. Cuthbert had taught them the music, which was soft and dreamlike, not much above a hum and with no words, just sounds that echoed in that small stone space.

Mehrasa was the central angel. Her dark skin, black hair and jet eyes made her mysterious, and Ludda had added to the mystery by pasting some raven feathers among the white. All three girls were simply robed in white linen, while the dark Mehrasa had a chain of gold about her neck. Men gazed in awe, and no wonder, for the three girls were beautiful. The two Franks were both very fair-haired with wide blue eyes. They were visions in that dark tomb, though both, Ludda told me, were prone to bouts of giggling when they should have been at their most solemn.

The visitor probably never noticed the giggles. A strange voice, Ludda’s, seemed to come from the solid rock. Ludda chanted that the visitor had come before the angel of death and the two angels of life, and that they should address their questions to all three and wait for an answer.

Those questions were all important because they told us what men wanted to know, and most of that, of course, was trivial. Would they inherit from a relative? What was the prospect of the harvest? Some were heartbreaking pleas for the life of a child or a wife, some were prayers to be helped in a law suit or in a quarrel with a neighbour, and all those Ludda dealt with as best he could while the three girls crooned their soft, low and plangent melody. Then came the more interesting questions. Who would rule Mercia? Would there be war? Would the Danes come south and take the land of the Saxons? The whores, the feathers and the tomb were a net and we caught some interesting fish there. Beortsig, whose father had paid money to Sigurd, had come to the tomb and wanted to know if the Danes would take over Mercia and place a tame Mercian on the throne and then, more interesting still, Sigebriht of Cent had crawled up the dim stone passage that was pungent with the smell of burning incense, and had asked about Æthelwold’s fate.

‘And what did you tell him?’ I asked Ludda.

‘What you ordered me to tell him, lord, that all his hopes and dreams would come true.’

‘And did they come true that night?’

‘Seffa did her duty,’ Ludda said with a straight face. Seffa was one of the two Franks.

Æthelflaed glanced over at the girl. Ludda, Father Cuthbert and the three angels were living in the Roman house at Turcandene. ‘I like this house,’ Father Cuthbert had greeted me, ‘I think I should live in a large house.’

‘Saint Cuthbert the Comfortable?’

‘Saint Cuthbert the Content,’ he said.

‘And Mehrasa?’

He gave her an adoring look. ‘She really is an angel, lord.’

‘She looks happy,’ I said, and so she did. I doubted she fully understood the strange things she was asked to do, but she was learning English fast and she was a clever girl. ‘I could find her a wealthy husband,’ I teased Cuthbert.

‘Lord!’ He looked hurt, then frowned. ‘If I have your permission, lord, I would take her as my wife.’

‘Is that what she wants?’

He giggled, he really giggled, then nodded. ‘Yes, lord.’

‘So she’s not as clever as she looks,’ I said sourly. ‘But she must finish here first. And if she gets pregnant I’ll seal you up with the other bones.’

The tomb was doing exactly what I had wished it to do. The questions men asked told us what was on their minds, thus Sigebriht’s anxious enquiries about Æthelwold confirmed that he had not abandoned his hopes of becoming King of Cent if Æthelwold were to topple Edward from the throne. The angel’s second task was to fight the rumours that came south from Ælfadell’s prophecies that the Danes would gain the overlordship of all Britain. Those rumours had dispirited men in both Mercia and Wessex, but now they heard a different prophecy, that the Saxons would be the victors, and that message, I knew, would encourage the Saxons, just as it would intrigue and irritate the Danes. I wanted to goad them. I wanted to defeat them.

I suppose that one day, long after I am dead, the Danes will find a leader who can unite them, and then the world will be consumed by flames and the halls of Valhalla will fill with the feasting dead, but so long as I have known, loved and fought the Danes they have been quarrelsome and divided. My present wife’s priest, an idiot, says that is because God has sown dissension among them, but I have always thought it was because the Danes are a stubborn, proud and independent people, unwilling to bend their knees to a man simply because he wears a crown. They will follow a man with a sword, but as soon as he fails they drift away to find another leader, and so their armies come together, fall apart, and then reform. I have known Danes who almost succeeded in keeping a mighty army together and leading it to complete triumph, there was Ubba, Guthrum, even Haesten, all of them tried, yet in the end they all failed. The Danes did not fight for a cause or even for a country and certainly not for a creed, but only for themselves, and when they suffered a defeat their armies vanished as men went to find another lord who might lead them to silver, women and land.

And my angels were a lure to persuade them that there was reputation to be made in war. ‘Have any Danes visited the tomb?’ I asked Ludda.

‘Two, lord,’ he said, ‘both merchants.’

‘And you told them?’

Ludda hesitated, glanced at Æthelflaed, then back to me. ‘I told them what you ordered me to tell them, lord.’

‘You did?’

He nodded, then made the sign of the cross. ‘I told them you would die, lord, and that a Dane would earn great renown by slaying Uhtred of Bebbanburg.’

Æthelflaed drew in a sharp breath and then, like Ludda, made the sign of the cross. ‘You told them what?’ she asked.

‘What Lord Uhtred told me to tell them, lady,’ Ludda said nervously.

‘You’re risking fate,’ Æthelflaed told me.

‘I want the Danes to come,’ I said, ‘and I need to offer them a bait.’

Because Plegmund was wrong, and Æthelhelm was wrong, and Edward was wrong. Peace is a fine thing, but we only have peace when our enemies are too scared to make war. The Danes were not quiet because the Christian god had silenced them, but because they were distracted by other things. Edward wanted to believe they had abandoned their dreams of conquering Wessex, yet I knew they would come. Æthelwold had not abandoned his dream either. He would come, and with him would come a savage horde of sword-Danes and spear-Danes, and I wanted them to come. I wanted to get it over. I wanted to be the sword of the Saxons.

And still they did not come.

I never did understand why it took the Danes so long to take advantage of Alfred’s death. I suppose if Æthelwold had been a more inspirational leader instead of being a weak man then they might have come sooner, but they waited so long that all Wessex was convinced that their god had answered their prayers and made the Danes peaceable. And all the while my angels sang their two songs, one to the Saxons and one to the Danes, and perhaps they made a difference. There were plenty of Danes who wanted to nail my skull to their gable, and the song of the tomb was an invitation.

Yet they hesitated.

Archbishop Plegmund was triumphant. Two years after Edward’s coronation I was summoned to Wintanceaster and had to endure a sermon in the new great church. Plegmund, stern and fierce, claimed that God had conquered when all the swords of man had failed. ‘We are in the last days,’ he said, ‘and we see the dawning of Christ’s kingdom.’

I remember that visit because it was the last time I saw Ælswith, Alfred’s widow. She was retiring to a convent, driven there, I heard, by Plegmund’s insistence. It was Offa who told me that. ‘She supports the archbishop,’ Offa said, ‘but he can’t stand her! She nags.’

‘I pity the nuns,’ I said.

‘Oh Lord alive, she’ll have them hopping,’ Offa said with a smile. He was old. He still had his dogs, but he trained no new ones. ‘They’re companions now,’ he told me, stroking the ears of a terrier, ‘and we’re growing old together.’ He sat with me in the Two Cranes tavern. ‘I’m in pain, lord,’ he said.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘God will take me soon,’ he said, and in that he was right.

‘Have you travelled this summer?’

‘It was hard,’ he said, ‘but yes, I went north and I went east. Now I’m going home.’

I put money on the table. ‘Tell me what’s happening.’

‘They’re going to attack,’ he said.

‘I know that.’

‘Jarl Sigurd is recovered,’ Offa said, ‘and boats are coming across the sea.’

‘Boats are always crossing the sea,’ I said.

‘Sigurd has let it be known there will be land to possess.’

‘Wessex.’

He nodded. ‘And so the crews are coming, lord.’

‘Where?’

‘They’re assembling at Eoferwic,’ Offa said. I had already heard that news from traders who had been in Northumbria. New ships had come, filled with ambitious and hungry warriors, but the traders all claimed that the army was being assembled to attack the Scots. ‘That’s what they want you to think,’ Offa said. He touched one of the silver coins on the table, tracing his finger over the outline of Alfred’s head. ‘It’s a clever thing you’re doing at Natangrafum,’ he said slyly.

I said nothing for a moment. A flock of geese was driven past the tavern and there were angry shouts as a dog barked at them. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ I said, a feeble response.

‘I’ve told no one,’ Offa said.

‘You’re dreaming, Offa,’ I said.

He looked at me and made the sign of the cross on his skinny chest. ‘I promise you, lord, I told no one. But it was clever, I salute you. It annoyed Jarl Sigurd!’ He chuckled, then used the bone handle of a knife to crack open a hazelnut. ‘What did one of your angels say? That Sigurd was a small man, badly endowed.’ He chuckled again and shook his head. ‘It annoyed him a lot, lord. And maybe that is why Sigurd is giving Eohric money, a great deal of money. Eohric will join the other Danes.’

‘Edward says he has a pledge of peace from Eohric,’ I pointed out.

‘And you know what Eohric’s pledges are worth,’ Offa retorted. ‘They’re going to do what they should have done twenty years ago, lord. They’re going to unite against Wessex. All the Danes, and all the Saxons who hate Edward, all of them.’

‘Ragnar?’ I asked. Ragnar was my old dear friend, a man I thought of as a brother, a man I had not seen in years.

‘He’s not well,’ Offa said gently, ‘not well enough to march.’

That saddened me. I poured ale and one of the tavern girls hurried over to see if the jug was empty, but I waved her away. ‘And what about Cent?’ I asked Offa.

‘What about Cent, lord?’

‘Sigebriht hates Edward,’ I said, ‘and he wants his own kingdom.’

Offa shook his head. ‘Sigebriht is a young fool, lord, but his father has reined him in. The whip has been used and Cent will stay loyal.’ He sounded very certain.

‘Sigebriht isn’t talking to the Danes?’ I asked.

‘If he is, I haven’t heard a whisper,’ Offa said. ‘No, lord, Cent is loyal. Sigelf knows he can’t hold Cent by himself, and Wessex is a better ally for him than the Danes.’

‘Have you told Edward all this?’

‘I told Father Coenwulf,’ he said. Coenwulf was now Edward’s closest adviser and constant companion. ‘I even told him where the attack will come from.’

‘Which is?’

He looked at my coins on the table and said nothing. I sighed and added two more. Offa drew the coins to his side of the table and made a neat line of them. ‘They’ll want you to believe their attack will come from East Anglia,’ he said, ‘but it won’t. The real attack will be from Ceaster.’

‘How can you possibly know that?’ I asked.

‘Brunna,’ he said.

‘Haesten’s wife?’

‘She’s a real Christian,’ he said.

‘Truly?’ I asked. I had always believed the baptism of Haesten’s wife was a cynical ploy to deceive Alfred.

‘She has seen the light,’ Offa said in a mocking tone. ‘Yes, lord, truly, and she confided in me.’ He looked at me with his sad eyes. ‘I was a priest once and perhaps you never really stop being a priest and she wanted to make confession and receive the sacraments and so, God help me, I gave her what she wanted, and now, God help me, I have betrayed the secrets she told me.’

‘The Danes will make an army in East Anglia?’

‘You’ll see that happening, I’m sure, but you won’t see the army gathering behind Ceaster, and that’s the army that will march south.’

‘When?’

‘After the harvest,’ Offa spoke confidently, his voice so low that only I could hear. ‘Sigurd and Cnut want the biggest army seen in Britain. They say it’s time to end the war for ever. They will come when they have the harvest to feed their horde. They want the largest army ever to invade Wessex.’

‘You believe Brunna?’

‘She resents her husband, so yes, I believe her.’

‘What is Ælfadell saying these days?’ I asked.

‘She’s saying what Cnut tells her to say, that the attack will come from the east and that Wessex will fall.’ He sighed. ‘I wish I could live long enough to see the end of this, lord.’

‘You’re good for another ten years, Offa,’ I told him.

He shook his head. ‘I feel the angel of death close behind me, lord.’ He hesitated. ‘You’ve always been good to me, lord.’ He bowed his head. ‘I owe you for your kindness.’

‘You owe me nothing.’

‘I do, lord.’ He looked up at me and, to my surprise, there were tears in his eyes. ‘Not everyone has been kind to me, lord,’ he said, ‘but you have always been generous.’

I was embarrassed. ‘You’ve been very useful,’ I muttered.

‘So in respect for you, lord, and in gratitude to you, I give you my last advice.’ He paused and to my surprise pushed the coins back towards me.

‘No,’ I said.

‘Give me the pleasure, lord,’ he said. ‘I want to thank you.’ He pushed the coins still closer to me. A tear rolled down his cheek and he cuffed it away. ‘Trust no one, lord,’ he said softly, ‘and beware Haesten, lord, beware the army in the west.’ He looked up at me and dared touch my hand with a long finger. ‘Beware the army at Ceaster, and don’t let the pagans destroy us, lord.’

He died that summer.

Then the harvest came, and it was good.

And after it the pagans came.

Ten

I worked it out later, though the knowledge was small consolation. A war-band rode to Natangrafum and because so many of the warriors were Saxons no one thought their presence strange. They arrived on an evening when the tomb was empty, because by then the peace had lasted so long that the angels rarely appeared, but the raiders knew exactly where to go. They rode directly to the Roman house outside Turcandene where they took the handful of guards by surprise and then killed fast and efficiently. When I arrived the next day I saw blood, a lot of blood.

Ludda was dead. I assumed he had tried to defend the house, and his eviscerated body lay sprawled across the doorway. His face was a grimace of pain. Eight others of my men were dead, their bodies stripped of mail, arm rings and anything else of value. On one wall, where the Roman plaster still clung to the bricks, a man had used blood to make a crude drawing of a flying raven. The drips had run down the wall and I could see the print of the man’s hand beneath the raven’s savagely hooked beak. ‘Sigurd,’ I said bitterly.

‘His symbol, lord?’ Sihtric asked me.

‘Yes.’

None of the three girls was there. I supposed the attackers must have taken them, but they had failed to find Mehrasa, the dark girl. She and Father Cuthbert had hidden in some nearby woods and only emerged when they were certain it was my men who now ringed the slaughterhouse. Cuthbert was crying. ‘Lord, lord,’ was all he could say to me at first. He fell to his knees in front of me and wrung his big hands. Mehrasa was steadier, though she refused to cross the house’s blood-reeking threshold where the flies buzzed around Ludda’s opened gut.

‘What happened?’ I asked Cuthbert.

‘Oh God, lord,’ he said, his voice quavery.

I slapped him hard around the face. ‘What happened?’

‘They came at dusk, lord,’ he said, his hands shaking as he tried to clasp them, ‘there were a lot of them! I counted twenty-four men,’ he had to pause, he was shaking so much and when he next tried to speak he just made a mewing noise. Then he saw the anger on my face and took a deep breath. ‘They hunted us, lord.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘They searched around the house, lord. In the old orchard, down by the pond.’

‘You were hidden.’

‘Yes, lord.’ He was crying and his voice was scarce above a whisper. ‘Saint Cuthbert the Cowardly, lord.’

‘Don’t be a fool,’ I snarled, ‘what could you do against so many?’

‘They took the girls, lord, and killed everyone else. And I liked Ludda.’

‘I liked Ludda too,’ I said, ‘but now we bury him.’ I did like Ludda. He was a clever rogue and he had served me well, and worse, he had trusted me and now he was cut from the groin to the ribs and the flies were thick about his entrails. ‘So what were you doing while he died?’ I asked Cuthbert.

‘We were watching the sunset from the hill, lord.’

I laughed without mirth. ‘Watching the sunset!’

‘We were, lord!’ Cuthbert said, hurt.

‘And you’ve been hiding ever since?’

He looked around at the red mess and his body shook with a sudden spasm. He vomited.

By now, I thought, the two angels would have confessed the whole deception and the Danes were laughing at us. I looked north and east for smoke in the sky, the sure sign that a war had broken out, but I saw none. The temptation was to assume that the killers had been a small raiding party who, their revenge taken, had headed back to safer land, but was the raid just that? A revenge for the ships of Snotengaham? And if it were such a revenge, how did the raiders know the angels were my idea? Or was Plegmund’s peace breaking into a thousand bloody pieces? The raiders had not fired the Roman building, suggesting they did not want to draw attention to their presence. ‘You say there were Saxons among the war-band?’ I asked Cuthbert.

‘I heard them talking, lord,’ he said, ‘and yes, there were Saxons.’

Æthelwold’s men? If it was Æthelwold’s followers then it was surely war, and that meant an attack from Ceaster if Offa was right. ‘Dig graves,’ I told my men. We would begin by burying our dead, but I sent Sihtric and three men back to Fagranforda. They carried orders that my whole household should retreat into Cirrenceastre, and to take the livestock with them. ‘Tell the Lady Æthelflaed she’s to go south into Wessex,’ I said, ‘and tell her to pass the news to Æthelred and to her brother. Make sure King Edward knows! Tell her I need men, and that I’ve gone north towards Ceaster. Have Finan bring every man here.’

It took a day to assemble my men. We buried Ludda and the others in Turcandene’s churchyard and Cuthbert said prayers over the fresh mounds. I still watched the sky and saw no great plumes of smoke. It was high summer, the sky a clear blue in which lazy clouds drifted, and as we rode north I did not know whether we rode to war or not.

I only led a hundred and forty-three men, and if the Danes were coming then I could expect thousands of them. We rode first to Wygraceaster, the northernmost burh in Saxon Mercia, and the bishop’s steward was surprised by our arrival. ‘I’ve heard no news of a Danish attack, lord,’ he told me. The street outside the bishop’s large house was busy with a market, though the bishop himself was in Wessex.

‘Make sure your storehouses are full,’ I told the steward, who bowed, but I could see he was unconvinced. ‘Who commands the garrison here?’ I asked.

It was a man called Wlenca, one of Æthelred’s followers, and he bridled when I told him to assume the war had started. He looked north from the burh’s ramparts and saw no smoke. ‘We’d have heard if there was war,’ he said in a surly tone, and I noted he did not call me ‘lord’.

‘I don’t know if it has started or not,’ I confessed, ‘but assume it has.’

‘Lord Æthelred would send me notice if the Danes attacked,’ he insisted loftily.

‘Æthelred’s scratching his arse in Gleawecestre,’ I said angrily. ‘Is that what you did when Haesten invaded last?’ He looked at me angrily, but said nothing. ‘How do I reach Ceaster from here?’ I asked him.

‘Follow the Roman road,’ he said, pointing.

‘Follow the Roman road, lord,’ I said.

He hesitated, plainly wanting to defy me, but good sense won. ‘Yes, lord,’ he said.

‘And tell me a good defensive place a day’s ride away.’

He shrugged. ‘You can try Scrobbesburh, lord?’

‘Rouse the fyrd,’ I told him, ‘and make sure the walls are manned.’

‘I know my duty, lord,’ he said, yet it was plain from his truculence that he had no intention of reinforcing the men who lazed on the ramparts. That empty, innocent sky persuaded him that there was no danger, and doubtless the moment I left he sent a messenger to Æthelred saying I was panicking unnecessarily.

And perhaps I was panicking. The only evidence of war was the slaughter at Turcandene and the sixth sense of a warrior. War had to come, it had been hiding away for too long, and I was convinced the raid that had killed Ludda was the first spark of a great fire.

We rode on north, following the Roman road that led through the valley of the Sæfern. I missed Ludda and his astonishing knowledge of Britain’s pathways. We had to ask our way, and most folk we questioned could only give us guidance to the next village or town. Scrobbesburh lay to the west of what seemed the quickest way north and so I did not go there, instead we spent a night amidst towering Roman ruins at a place called Rochecestre, a village that astonished me. It had been a vast Roman town, almost as large as Lundene, but now it was a ruin of ghosts, crumbling walls, broken pavements, fallen pillars and shattered marble. A few folk lived there, their wattle and straw huts propped against the Roman stone and their sheep and goats grazing amidst the broken glory. A scrawny priest was the only man who made sense, and he nodded dumbly when I told him I feared the Danes were coming. ‘Where would you go if they came?’ I asked him.

‘I’d go to Scrobbesburh, lord.’

‘Then go there now,’ I ordered him, ‘and tell the rest of the village to go. Is there a garrison there?’

‘Just whoever lives there, lord. There’s no thegn. The Welsh killed the last one.’

‘And if I want to reach Ceaster from here? What road do I take?’

‘Don’t know, lord.’

Places like Rochecestre fill me with despair. I love to build, yet I look at what the Romans did and know we cannot construct anything half so beautiful. We build sturdy halls of oak, we make stone walls, we bring masons from Frankia who raise churches or feast-halls with crude pillars of ill-dressed stone, yet the Romans built like gods. All across Britain their houses, bridges, halls and temples still stand, and they were made hundreds of years ago! Their roofs have fallen and the plaster is flaked, but still they stand, and I wonder how people who were able to make such marvels could have been defeated. The Christians tell us we move inexorably towards better times, towards their god’s kingdom on earth, but my gods only promise the chaos of the world’s ending, and a man only has to look around him to see that everything is crumbling, decaying, proof that the chaos is coming. We are not climbing Jacob’s ladder to some heavenly perfection, but stumbling downhill towards Ragnarok.

The next day brought heavier clouds that shadowed the land as we climbed the small hills and left the Sæfern’s valley behind. If there was smoke we saw none except the tendrils from cooking fires in small villages. Off to our west the peaks of the Welsh hills vanished in the clouds. If there had been an attack, I thought, we would surely have heard by now. We would have met messengers riding away from the carnage or refugees fleeing the invaders. Instead we rode through peaceful villages, past fields where the first harvesters swung their sickles, and always following the Roman road with its mile-marked stones. The land sloped down to the north now, towards the Dee. It began to rain as the day wore on and we found shelter that evening in a hall close to the road. The hall was a poor place, its oak walls scorched by a fire that had evidently failed to burn the place down. ‘They tried,’ the owner, a widow whose husband had been killed by Haesten’s men, told us, ‘but God sent rain and they failed. Didn’t keep me from harm, though.’ The Danes, she said, were never far away. ‘And if it’s not the Danes it’s the Welsh,’ she said bitterly.

‘Then why stay here?’ Finan asked her.

‘And where do I go? I’ve lived here more than forty years, so where do I start again? You’ll buy this land from me?’

Rain dripped through the thatch all night, but the dawn brought a chill clearing wind. We were hungry because the widow could not spare food for all my men, not unless she killed the cockerels that were crowing and the pigs that were being driven to the nearby beech wood as we threw saddles over our horses’ backs. Oswi, my servant, was tightening my stallion’s girth strap as I wandered to the ditch on the north side of the hall. I gazed ahead as I pissed. The clouds were low and dark, but was there a darker smudge there? ‘Finan,’ I called, ‘is that smoke?’

‘God knows, lord. Let’s hope so.’

I laughed. ‘Hope so?’

‘If peace lasts much longer I’ll go mad.’

‘If it lasts into the autumn we’ll go to Ireland,’ I promised him, ‘and break some of your enemies’ heads.’

‘Not to Bebbanburg?’ he asked.

‘I need at least a thousand more men for that, and to get a thousand men I need the profits of a war.’

‘We all suffer from dreams,’ he said wistfully. He stared northwards. ‘I’m thinking that is smoke, lord.’ He frowned. ‘Or maybe just a thundercloud.’

And then the horsemen came.

There were three of them, riding hard from the north and when they saw us they slewed off the road and spurred their mud-spattered, tired horses towards the hall. They were Merewalh’s men, sent south to warn Æthelred that the Danes had attacked. ‘Thousands of them, lord,’ one told me excitedly.

‘Thousands?’

‘Couldn’t count them, lord.’

‘Where are they?’

‘Westune, lord.’

The name meant nothing to me. ‘Where’s that?’

‘Not far.’

‘Two hours’ ride, lord,’ another man said more helpfully.

‘And Merewalh?’

‘Retreating, lord.’

They told me the message Merewalh was sending to Æthelred, which was simply that an army of Danes had streamed out of Ceaster, far too many for Merewalh’s small force to contain or even face. The Danes were coming south, and Merewalh, remembering the tactics I had used against Sigurd, was retreating down the Welsh border in hopes that the savage tribesmen would come from the hills to attack the invaders. ‘When did they attack?’ I asked.

‘Last night, lord. At twilight.’

A strange time, I thought, yet on the other hand it had probably been intended to take Merewalh’s force off-guard, and if so it had failed. Merewalh had been alert, his scouts had warned him, and so far he had escaped. ‘How many men does he have now?’ I asked.

‘Eighty-three, lord.’

‘And who’s leading the Danes? What banners did you see?’

‘A raven, lord, another with an axe breaking a cross, and a skull.’

‘There were dragons as well,’ the second man put in.

‘And two with wolves,’ the third man added.

‘And a stag with crosses on its head,’ the first man said. He struck me as intelligent and thoughtful, and he had told me what I needed to know. ‘A flying raven?’ I asked him.

‘Yes, lord.’

‘That’s Sigurd,’ I said, ‘the axe is Cnut and the skull is Haesten.’

‘And the stag, lord?’ he asked.

‘Æthelwold,’ I said bitterly. So it seemed Offa had been right and the Danes were attacking from Ceaster, and that surely meant they were heading southwards, ostensibly led by Æthelwold. I gazed northwards, thinking that the Danes could not be far away. ‘Lord Æthelred,’ I spoke to the first man, ‘will probably send you to King Edward.’

‘Probably, lord.’

‘Because you’ve seen the Danes,’ I said. ‘So tell King Edward I need men. Tell him,’ I paused, trying to make a decision that would not be destroyed by the passage of time. ‘Tell him they should meet me at Wygraceaster. And if Wygraceaster is under siege, tell them to look for me at Cirrenceastre.’ I already knew we would have to retreat and by the time Edward responded and sent men, if he sent any at all, I could well have been pushed south of the Temes.

The three men rode on south and we probed cautiously north, our scouts ahead and to the flanks. And I saw that the darkness in the morning sky was not a thundercloud, it was the smoke of burning thatch.

How often I have seen the war-smoke smearing the sky, dark and roiling, rising from beyond trees or from some valley, and knowing that another steading or village or hall was being reduced to ashes. We rode slowly north and I saw for myself that Plegmund’s peace was ended and I thought how it had been the peace that passeth understanding. That is a phrase from the Christian’s holy book, and certainly Plegmund’s peace passed all understanding. The Danes had been quiet for so long and that had led Plegmund to believe his god had gelded his enemies, but now they had broken the incomprehensible peace, and the villages and farms and ricks and mills were burning.

It was an hour before we saw the Danes. Scouts rode back to tell us where the enemy was, though the smoke in the sky was indication enough and already the road was crowded by folk trying to escape the invaders. We rode to the crest of a low wooded hill and watched the steadings burn. Immediately beneath us was a hall with barns and storehouses. It swarmed with men. A wagon stood by the hall, and I watched the newly gathered harvest being piled onto the wagon’s bed. ‘How many?’ I asked Finan.

‘There’s three hundred men there,’ he said, ‘at least three hundred.’

And more men were in the wide vale beyond. Bands of Danes crossed the meadows, looking for fugitives or more places to ravage. I could see a small huddle of women and children who had been spared and who were being guarded by sword-Danes and doubtless they were on their way to the slave market across the sea. A second wagon, piled with cooking pots, spits, a loom, rakes, hoes and anything else that could be useful, was whipped northwards. The captured women and children, along with a great herd of livestock, followed, and a man tossed a burning brand up onto the hall’s thatch. A horn sounded from somewhere in the valley and gradually the Danes obeyed its insistent call and the horsemen moved towards the road. ‘Jesus,’ Finan said, ‘but there are hundreds of the bastards.’

‘See the skull,’ I said. I could see a human skull held aloft on a pole.

‘Haesten,’ Finan said.

I looked for Haesten himself, but there were too many horsemen. I did not see any other banners, at least none that I recognised. For a few moments I was tempted to take my men to the east and gallop down the hill to cut off a few of the enemy stragglers, but I resisted the temptation. Those stragglers were not far from the larger bands, and we would be pursued immediately and overwhelmed by numbers. The Danes were not moving fast, their horses were rested and well-fed, and my task now was to stay ahead of them to watch what they did and where they went.

We went back down the road. All day we retreated, and all day the Danes came on behind us. I watched the widow’s hall burn, saw the smoke rise to east and west, and the great plumes in the sky suggested there were three war-bands harrying the country. The Danes were not even bothering to use scouts, they knew their numbers were sufficient to crush any enemy, while my scouts were forever being pushed back. In truth I was blind. I had no real idea how many Danes we faced, I just knew there were hundreds of them and that the smoke was rising and I was angry, so angry that most of my men avoided my gaze. Finan did not care. ‘We need a prisoner,’ he said, but the Danes were being careful. They stayed in large troops, always too many for my few men. ‘They’re in no hurry,’ Finan observed in a puzzled tone, ‘and that’s strange. No hurry at all.’

We were on another low hill, still watching. We had left the road because the Danes were following it and too many folk were using it to escape southwards, and those folk wanted to stay close to us, but their presence only made us more vulnerable. I told those fugitives to keep going south and we watched the Danes from the hills east of the road and as the day wore on I became ever more baffled. As Finan had said, the Danes were in no hurry. They were scavenging like rats in a bare granary, exploring every hovel, hall and farm, taking anything useful, yet this was country that had been harried before, part of the dangerous land between Saxon and Danish Mercia, and the pickings had to be slight. The real plunder lay southwards, so why were they not hurrying? The smoke was warning the countryside of their coming and folk had time to bury their valuables or else carry them away. It made small sense. The Danes were picking up scraps while the feast lay unguarded, so what were they doing?

They knew we were watching them. It is impossible to hide a hundred and forty-three men in half-wooded country and they must have glimpsed us in the distance, though they could not have known who we were because I deliberately did not fly my banner. If they had known Uhtred of Bebbanburg was so close and so outnumbered they might have made a greater effort, but it was not until late in the afternoon that they tried to lure us into battle and even then it was a half-hearted effort. Seven Danish horsemen headed south on the now empty road. They were ambling, but I could see them glancing nervously towards the woods that hid us. Sihtric grinned. ‘They’re lost.’

‘They’re not lost,’ Finan said wryly.

‘Bait,’ I said. It was too obvious. They wanted us to attack and as soon as we did they would turn and gallop north to lead us into an ambush.

‘Ignore them,’ I ordered, and we went south again, crossing the watershed so that ahead of us in the deceptively peaceful evening shadows I could see a glint of the Sæfern. I was hurrying a little, wanting to find a place where we could spend the night in relative safety and far from the Danes. Then I saw another glint, a glimmer, a mere flash amidst the long shadows, and it was away to our left and I stared a long time and wondered if I had imagined it, then saw the prick of light again. ‘Bastards,’ I said, because I knew why the Danes had been so sluggish in their pursuit of us. They had sent men looping around our eastern flank, a war party to cut us off, but the low sun had reflected from a helmet or a spear-point, and now I could see them, far far off, mailed men among the trees. ‘Ride!’ I called to my men.

Spurs and fear. A mad gallop down the long slope, hooves thudding, shield banging against my back, Serpent-Breath’s scabbard flapping against the saddle, and off to my left I saw the Danes come from the trees, far too many Danes. They were spurring their horses into a reckless gallop, hoping to cut us off. I could have swerved west away from them, but I reckoned a second Danish party might have gone that way and we could have ridden straight into their swords, so the only hope was to go south, hard and fast, riding to escape the jaws that I sensed were closing on us.

I was riding towards the river. We could not ride faster than our slowest horses, not without sacrificing men, and the Danes were spurring hard, but if I could reach the Sæfern then there was a chance. Drive the horses straight into the water and make them swim, then defend the farther bank if we survived the mad crossing, and so I told Finan to head towards the last place we had seen a sliver of reflected sunlight from water while I rode at the back of my men, where I was pelted by clods of damp earth slung up by the heavy hooves.

Then Finan shouted a warning and I saw horsemen ahead of us. I cursed, but kept riding. I drew Serpent-Breath. ‘Just charge them!’ I shouted. There could be nothing clever to do. We were trapped, and our only hope was to fight through the men ahead and I reckoned we outnumbered them. ‘Kill and keep going!’ I shouted at my men and spurred the horse so I could lead the charge. We were close to a road now, its muddy surface pitted by hooves and wheel ruts. There were cottages, small plots of vegetables, manure heaps and pig pens. ‘Straight down the road,’ I called as I reached the head of our small column, ‘kill them and keep going!’

‘They’re ours!’ Finan called urgently. ‘Lord, they’re ours! They’re ours!’

It was Merewalh who spurred to meet us. ‘That way, lord,’ he shouted at me, pointing down the road, and his men joined mine, hooves thudding on the turf either side of the Roman road’s broken stones. I looked over my left shoulder and saw Danes not far behind, but ahead of us was a low hill and at the top of the hill was a palisade. A fort. It was old, it was in ruins, but it was there and I swerved towards it, then glanced behind again and saw that a half-dozen Danes had far outstripped their companions.

‘Finan!’ I shouted, hauled on a rein and turned the stallion. A dozen of my men saw what I was doing and their horses also slewed around, throwing up gobbets of mud. I kicked the horse and slapped its rump with the flat of Serpent-Breath and to my astonishment the six Danes turned almost as fast. One of their horses slipped and fell in a great flail of hooves and the man sprawled onto the road, scrambled up, seized one of his companions’ stirrups and ran alongside the horse as they rode away. ‘Stop!’ I shouted, not to the Danes, but to my own men because the greater body of Danes was now in sight and coming fast. ‘Back!’ I called. ‘Back and up the hill!’

The hill, with its dilapidated fort, stood on a neck of land made by a great loop of the Sæfern. There was a village inside the loop with a church and a huddle of houses, though most of the land was scrub or marsh. Fugitives had come here, and their cattle, pigs, geese and sheep crowded about the small thatched houses. ‘Where are we?’ I called to Merewalh.

‘It’s called Scrobbesburh, lord,’ he called back.

It was made for defence. The neck was about three hundred paces wide and to defend it I had my one hundred and forty-three men, now joined by Merewalh’s, but a good number of the fugitives were men who served in the fyrd and they had axes, spears, hunting bows and even a few swords. Merewalh had already lined them across the neck. ‘How many men do you have?’ I asked him.

‘Three hundred, lord, besides my eighty-three warriors.’

The Danes were watching. There were perhaps a hundred and fifty of them now, and many more were coming from the north. ‘Put a hundred fyrd in the fort,’ I told Merewalh. The fort lay on the southern side of the neck, leaving the long northern stretch to be defended. Close to the river the land was marshy and I doubted any Dane could cross that land, so I made my shield wall between the fort’s low hill and the marsh’s edge. The sun was sinking. The Danes, I thought, should attack now, but though they arrived in ever greater numbers they did not try. Our deaths, it seemed, must wait till morning.

There was little sleep. I lit fires across the neck so that we could see if the Danes made an attack in the night, and we watched the Danish campfires spread to the north as more men arrived and more fires were lit until the sky was a glow of flame reflected from low clouds. I ordered Rypere to explore the village and find whatever food he could. There were at least eight hundred people trapped in Scrobbesburh and I had no idea how long we would be there, but I doubted we would find provisions for more than a few days, even after we had slaughtered the livestock. Finan had a dozen men dismantling the houses so their timbers could be used to make a barrier across the neck. ‘The sensible thing,’ Merewalh said to me sometime during that long nervous night, ‘would be to swim the horses across the river and keep going south.’

‘So why don’t you do that?’

He smiled and nodded towards some children sleeping on the ground. ‘And leave them to the Danes, lord?’

‘I don’t know how long we can hold here,’ I warned him.

‘Lord Æthelred will send an army,’ Merewalh answered.

‘You believe that?’

He half smiled. ‘Or maybe King Edward?’

‘Maybe,’ I said, ‘but it will take two or three days for your messengers to reach Wessex and they’ll talk for another two or three days, and by then we’ll be dead.’ Merewalh flinched at that brutal truth, but unless help was already on the way we were doomed. The fort was a pathetic thing, a remnant from some ancient war against the Welsh who were forever harrying Mercia’s western lands. It had a ditch that would not have stopped a cripple, and the palisade was so rotten that it could be pushed over with one hand. The barrier we made was risible, just a straggling line of roof timbers that might trip a man, but would never stop a determined assault. I knew Merewalh was right, that our duty was to cross the Sæfern and keep riding south until we reached a place where an army could assemble, but to do that would be to abandon all the folk who had taken refuge in the river’s great loop.

And the Danes would probably be over the river already. There were fords to the west and they would want to surround Scrobbesburh to stop reinforcements reaching us. In truth, I thought, our best hope was that the Danes would want to keep their invasion moving and so, rather than lose men defeating us, they would ride on south. It was a thin and unconvincing hope, and in the late night, just before the grey of dawn stained the eastern sky, I felt the despair of the doomed. The three Norns had given me no choice except to plant my banner and die with Serpent-Breath in my hand. I thought of Stiorra, my daughter, and wished I could see her one more time, and then the grey light came, and with it a mist, and the clouds were low again and brought a small rain spitting from the west.

Through the mist I could see the Danish banners. At their centre was Haesten’s symbol, the skull on its long pole. The wind was too light to flaunt the flags and so I could not see whether they showed eagles, ravens or boars. I counted the banners. I could see at least thirty, and the mist hid some, and beneath those damp flags the Danes were making a shield wall.

We had two banners. Merewalh was showing Æthelred’s flag of a prancing white horse, which he had placed in the fort. It hung limp from its long pole. My banner of the wolf’s head was in the lower land to the north and I ordered Oswi, my servant, to cut down a sapling to make a second pole so that I could spread the flag and show the Danes who it was they faced. ‘That’s just an invitation, lord,’ Finan said. He stamped his feet in the wet ground. ‘Remember the angels said you’d die. They all want your skull nailed to their gable.’

‘I’m not going to hide from them,’ I said.

Finan made the sign of the cross and stared bleakly at the enemy ranks. ‘At least it will be quick, lord,’ he said.

The mist slowly lifted, though the small rain drizzled on. The Danes had formed a line between two copses a half-mile away. The line, thick with painted shields, filled the space between the trees and I had the impression the line continued on into the woods. That was strange, I thought, but then nothing about this sudden war had been predictable. ‘Seven hundred men?’ I guessed.

‘About that,’ Finan said, ‘plenty enough of them. And there’s more in the trees.’

‘Why?’

‘Maybe the bastards want us to attack them?’ Finan suggested. ‘Then close on us from either side?’

‘They know we won’t attack,’ I said. We were fewer in number and most of our men were not trained warriors. The Danes would know that, simply because the fyrd was rarely equipped with shields. They would see my shield wall at the centre of our line, but on either side, that shield wall was flanked by men carrying no protection. Easy meat, I thought, and I did not doubt the fyrd would break like a twig when the Danes advanced.

Except they stayed between the trees as the mist vanished and the rain thickened. At times the Danes beat swords against shields to make the war-thunder, and I half heard men shouting, though they were too far away to hear the words. ‘Why don’t they come?’ Finan asked plaintively.

I could not answer because I had no idea what the Danes were doing. They had us at their mercy and they were standing instead of charging. They had advanced so slowly the previous day, now they were immobile, and this was their great invasion? I remember staring at them, wondering, and two swans flew overhead, wings beating the rain. A sign, but what did it mean? ‘If they kill us to the last man,’ I asked Finan, ‘how many of them will die?’

‘Two hundred?’ he guessed.

‘That’s why they’re not attacking,’ I suggested and Finan looked at me, puzzled. ‘They’re hiding men in the trees,’ I said, ‘not in hope we attack, but so we don’t know how many they are,’ I paused, sensing an idea taking shape in my mind, ‘or more accurately,’ I went on, ‘how few they are.’

‘Few?’ Finan asked.

‘This isn’t their great army,’ I said, suddenly sure of it. ‘This is a feint. Sigurd’s not there, nor is Cnut.’ I was guessing, but it was the only explanation I could find. Whoever commanded these Danes had fewer than a thousand men and did not want to lose two or three hundred in a fight that was not part of the main invasion. His job was to hold us here and draw other Saxon troops to the valley of the Sæfern, while the real invasion came. From where? From the sea?

‘I thought Offa told you…’ Finan began.

‘That bastard was crying,’ I said savagely, ‘he was weeping to convince me that he spoke the truth. He told me he was repaying my kindness, but I was never kind to him. I paid him, just like everyone else. And the Danes must have paid him more to tell me a pack of lies.’ Again I did not know whether that was true, but why were these Danes not coming to slaughter us?

Then there was movement in the centre of their line and the shields parted to let three horsemen through. One carried a leafy branch, a sign that they wanted to talk, while another wore a high, silver-crested helmet from which trailed a plume of raven feathers. I called to Merewalh, then walked with him and Finan past our feeble barrier and across the wet grassland towards the approaching Danes.

Haesten was the man in the raven-plumed helmet. It was a magnificent piece of workmanship, decorated by the Midgard serpent that twisted around the crown, its tail protecting the nape of his neck while the mouth formed the crest that held the raven plumes. The cheek-pieces were incised with dragons, between which Haesten’s face grinned at me. ‘The Lord Uhtred,’ he said happily.

‘You’re wearing your wife’s bonnet,’ I said.

‘It was a gift from the Jarl Cnut,’ he said, ‘who will be here by nightfall.’

‘I wondered why you were waiting,’ I said, ‘now I know. You need help.’

Haesten smiled as if he indulged my insults. The man with the green branch was a few paces behind him, while next to him was a warrior wearing another ornate helmet, this one with its cheek-pieces laced together so I could not see his face. His mail was expensive, his saddle and belt decorated with silver, and his arms thick with precious rings. His horse was nervous and he struck it hard on the neck, which only made it sidestep in the soft ground. Haesten leaned over and stroked the skittery stallion. ‘Jarl Cnut is bringing Ice-Spite,’ he said to me.

‘Ice-Spite?’

‘His sword,’ Haesten explained. ‘You and he, Lord Uhtred, will fight in the hazel branches. That’s my gift to him.’

Cnut Ranulfson was reputed to be the greatest swordsman among all the sword-Danes, a magician with a blade, a man who smiled as he killed and was proud of his reputation. I confess I felt a tremor of fear at Haesten’s words. A fight contained in a space marked by hazel branches was a formal fight, and always to the death. It would be a demonstration of skill by Cnut. ‘It will be a pleasure killing him,’ I said.

‘But didn’t your angels say you were to die?’ Haesten asked, amused.

‘My angels?’

‘A clever idea,’ Haesten said, ‘young Sigurd here brought them back to us. Two such pretty girls! He enjoyed them! So did most of our men.’

So the horseman with Haesten was Sigurd’s son, the puppy who had wanted to fight me at Ceaster, and the raid on Turcandene had been his doing, his initiation as a leader, though I did not doubt his father had sent older and wiser men to make sure his son made no fatal errors. I remembered the flies around Ludda’s body and the crudely drawn raven on the Roman plaster. ‘When you die, puppy,’ I told him, ‘I’ll make sure you have no sword in your hand. I’ll send you to Hel’s rotten flesh instead. See how you enjoy that, you dribble of bat shit.’

Sigurd Sigurdson drew his sword, he drew it very slowly as if to demonstrate that he was not issuing an immediate challenge. ‘She is called Fire-Dragon,’ he said, holding the blade upright.

‘A puppy’s blade,’ I scoffed.

‘I want you to know the name of the sword that will kill you,’ he said, then wrenched his stallion’s head around as if to drive the beast into me, but the horse half reared and young Sigurd had to cling to the mane to stay in the saddle. Haesten again leaned over and took hold of the stallion’s bridle.

‘Put the sword away, lord,’ he told the boy, then smiled at me. ‘You have till evening to surrender,’ he said, ‘and if you do not surrender,’ his voice was harder now, riding over the comment I had been about to make, ‘then every one of you will die. But if you yield, Lord Uhtred, we shall spare your men. Till evening!’ He turned his horse, dragging young Sigurd with him. ‘Till evening!’ he called again as he rode away.

This was the war that passeth understanding, I thought. Why wait? Unless Haesten so feared losing a quarter or a third of his force. But if this truly was the vanguard of a great Danish army then it had no business loitering at Scrobbesburh. They should be pushing fast and hard into the soft underbelly of Saxon Mercia, then crossing the Temes to ravage Wessex. Every day that the Danes waited now was a day to assemble the fyrd and bring house-warriors from the Saxon shires, unless my suspicion was right and this Danish thrust was intended to deceive because the real attack was taking place somewhere else.

There were more Danes nearby. Late in the morning, as the rain at last ended and a watery sun showed weak through the clouds, we saw more smoke in the eastern sky. The smoke was thin at first, but thickened fast, and within an hour two more plumes appeared. So the Danes were harrying the nearby villages, and another band had crossed the river and were patrolling the great loop that trapped us. Osferth had found two boats, just skins stretched over willow frames, and had wanted to make a big raft like the one we had found to cross the Use, but the presence of the Danish horsemen ended that idea. I ordered my men to stiffen the barricade across the neck, raising it with beams and rafters to protect the men of the fyrd and channel any attack into my shield wall. I had small hope of surviving a determined assault, but men must be kept busy and so they pulled down six of the cottages and carried the timbers to the neck where the barrier slowly became more formidable. A priest who had taken refuge in Scrobbesburh walked along my defensive line giving men small scraps of bread. They knelt before him, he placed the crumbs on their lips, then added a pinch of soil. ‘Why’s he doing that?’ I asked Osferth.

‘We come from the earth, lord, and that’s where we’ll go.’

‘We’ll go nowhere unless Haesten attacks,’ I said.

‘He fears us?’

I shook my head. ‘It’s a trap,’ I said, and there had been so many traps, from the moment the men tried to kill me on Saint Alnoth’s day and the summons to seal a treaty with Eohric, and my burning of Sigurd’s ships, and the creation of the angels, but now I suspected the Danes had sprung the largest trap and it had worked because in the afternoon there was a sudden flurry of panic on the river’s far bank as the patrolling Danes spurred their horses westwards. Something had frightened them, and a few moments later a much larger band of horsemen appeared and these men were flaunting two banners, one with a cross and the other a dragon. They were West Saxons. Haesten was drawing men to Scrobbesburh, and I was convinced we were all needed in some place far away where the real Danish attack must be unfolding.

Steapa led the newcomers. He dismounted and clambered down the river bank to a small shelf of mud where he cupped his hands. ‘Where can we cross?’

‘To the west,’ I shouted back, ‘how many are you?’

‘Two hundred and twenty!’

‘We’ve got seven hundred Danes here,’ I called, ‘but I don’t think this is their great army!’

‘More of our people are coming!’ he called, ignoring my last words and I watched him clamber back up the bank.

He went west, vanishing in the trees as he sought a ford or bridge. I went back to the neck and saw the Danes still sitting in their line. They had to be bored, but they made no effort to provoke us, even when evening came and went. Haesten must have known I would not meekly surrender, yet he made no move to enforce his morning threat. We watched the Danish campfires spring up again, we watched westwards for the arrival of Steapa, we watched and we waited. Night fell.

And in the dawn the Danes were gone.

Æthelflaed arrived an hour after the sun rose, bringing almost one hundred and fifty warriors. Like Steapa she had to ride west to find a ford and it was midday before we were all together. ‘I thought you were going south,’ I greeted her.

‘Someone has to fight them,’ she retorted.

‘Except they’ve gone,’ I said. The land to the north of the neck was still dotted with smouldering campfires, but there were no Danes, only hoof tracks going eastwards. We now had an army, but no one to fight. ‘Haesten never meant to fight me,’ I said, ‘he just wanted to draw men here.’

Steapa looked at me with a puzzled expression, but Æthelflaed understood what I was saying. ‘So where are they?’

‘We’re in the west,’ I said, ‘so they must be in the east.’

‘And Haesten’s gone to join them?’

‘I’d think so,’ I said. We knew nothing for certain, of course, except that Haesten’s men had attacked south from Ceaster and then, mysteriously, ridden eastwards. Edward, like Æthelflaed, had responded to my very first warnings, sending men north to discover whether there was an invasion or not. Steapa was supposed to confirm or deny my first message, then ride back to Wintanceaster. Æthelflaed had ignored my orders to shelter in Cirrenceastre and instead brought her own house-warriors north. Other Mercian troops, she said, had been summoned to Gleawecestre. ‘That’s a surprise,’ I said sarcastically. Æthelred, just as he had the last time Haesten invaded Mercia, would protect his own lands and let the rest of the country fend for itself.

‘I should go back to the king,’ Steapa said.

‘What are your orders?’ I asked him. ‘To find the Danish invasion?’

‘Yes, lord.’

‘Have you found it?’

He shook his head. ‘No.’

‘Then you and your men come with me,’ I said, ‘and you,’ I pointed to Æthelflaed, ‘should go to Cirrenceastre or else join your brother.’

‘And you,’ she said, pointing back at me, ‘do not command me, so I’ll do what I wish.’ She stared at me challengingly, but I said nothing. ‘Why don’t we destroy Haesten?’ she asked.

‘Because we don’t have enough men,’ I said patiently, ‘and because we don’t know where the rest of the Danes are. You want to start a battle with Haesten and then discover three thousand mead-crazed Danes are in your rear?’

‘Then what do we do?’ she asked.

‘What I tell you to do,’ I said, and so we went eastwards, following Haesten’s hoof-prints, and it was noticeable that no more steadings had been burned and no villages sacked. That meant Haesten had been travelling fast, ignoring the chances for enrichment because, I assumed, he was under orders to join the Danish great army, wherever that was.

We hurried too, but on the second day we were close to Liccelfeld and I had business there. We rode into the small town that had no walls, but boasted a great church, two mills, a monastery and an imposing hall, which was the bishop’s house. Many of the folk had fled southwards, seeking the shelter of a burh, and our arrival caused panic. We saw folk running towards the nearest woods, assuming we were Danes.

We watered the horses in the two streams that ran through the town and I sent Osferth and Finan to buy food while Æthelflaed and I took thirty men to the town’s second largest hall, a magnificent and new building that stood at Liccelfeld’s northern edge. The widow who lived there had not fled from our arrival. Instead she waited in her hall, accompanied by a dozen servants.

Her name was Edith. She was young, she was pretty and she was hard, though she looked soft. Her face was round, her curly red hair was springy and her figure plump. She wore a gown of linen dyed gold and around her neck was a looped golden chain. ‘You’re Offa’s widow,’ I said, and she nodded without speaking. ‘Where are his dogs?’

‘I drowned them,’ she said.

‘How much did Jarl Sigurd pay your husband to lie to us?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she said.

I turned to Sihtric. ‘Search the place,’ I told him, ‘take all the food you need.’

‘You can’t…’ Edith began.

‘I can do what I want!’ I snarled at her. ‘Your husband sold Wessex and Mercia to the Danes.’

She was stubborn, admitting nothing, yet there was too much evident wealth in the newly built hall. She screamed at us, clawed at me when I took the gold from around her neck, and spat curses when we left. I did not leave the town straightaway, instead I went to the graveyard by the cathedral where my men dug Offa’s body from its grave. He had paid silver to the priests so that he could be buried close to the relics of Saint Chad, believing that proximity would hasten his ascent into heaven on the day of Christ’s return to earth, but I did my best to consign his filthy soul to the Christian hell. We carried his rotting body, still in its discoloured winding sheet, to the edge of town and there threw it into a stream.

Then we rode on eastwards to discover whether his treachery had doomed Wessex.

PART FOUR

Death in Winter

Eleven

The village was no more. The houses were smouldering piles of charred timbers and ash, the corpses of four hacked dogs lay in the muddy street, and the stink of roasted flesh was mingling with the sullen smoke. A woman’s body, naked and swollen, floated in a pond. Ravens were perched on her shoulders, tearing at the bloated flesh. Blood had dried black in the grooves of the flat washing-stone beside the water. A great elm tree towered above the village, but its southern side had been set alight by flames from the church roof and had burned so that the tree appeared lightning-blasted, one half in full green leaf, the other half black, shrivelled and brittle. The ruins of the church still burned and there was not one person alive to tell us the name of the place, though a dozen smears of smoke told us that this was not the only village to be reduced to charred ruin.

We had ridden eastwards, again following the tracks of Haesten’s band, then those hoof-prints had turned south to join a larger burned and beaten path. That path had been made by hundreds of horses, probably thousands, and the smoke trails in the sky suggested that the Danes were journeying south towards the valley of the Temes and the rich pickings of Wessex beyond.

‘There are corpses in the church,’ Osferth told me. His voice was calm, yet I could tell he was angry. ‘Many corpses,’ he said. ‘They must have locked them inside and burned the church around them.’

‘Like a hall-burning,’ I said, remembering Ragnar the Elder’s hall blazing in the night and the screams of the people trapped inside.

‘There are children there,’ Osferth said, sounding angrier. ‘Their bodies shrivelled to the size of babies!’

‘Their souls are with God,’ Æthelflaed tried to comfort him.

‘There’s no pity any more,’ Osferth said, looking at the sky, which was a mix of grey cloud and dark smoke.

Steapa also glanced at the sky. ‘They’re going south,’ he said. He was thinking of his orders to return to Wessex and worrying that I was keeping him in Mercia while a Danish horde threatened his homeland.

‘Or maybe to Lundene?’ Æthelflaed suggested. ‘Maybe south to the Temes, then downriver to Lundene?’ She was thinking the same thoughts as me. I remembered the city’s decayed wall, and Eohric’s scouts watching that wall. Alfred had known the importance of Lundene, which is why he had asked me to capture it, but did the Danes know? Whoever garrisoned Lundene controlled the Temes, and the Temes led deep into Mercia and Wessex. So much trade went through Lundene and so many roads led there and whoever held Lundene held the key to southern Britain. I looked southwards where the great plumes of smoke drifted. A Danish army had passed this way, probably only a day before, but was it their only army? Was another besieging Lundene? Had another already captured the city? I was tempted to ride straight for Lundene to ensure that it would be well defended, but that would mean abandoning the burning trail of the great army.

Æthelflaed was watching me, waiting for an answer, but I said nothing. Six of us sat on our horses in the centre of that burned village while my men watered their horses in the pond where the swollen corpse floated. Æthelflaed, Steapa, Finan, Merewalh and Osferth were all looking to me, and I was trying to place myself in the mind of whoever commanded the Danes. Cnut? Sigurd? Eohric? We did not even know that.

‘We’ll follow these Danes,’ I finally decided, nodding towards the smoke in the southern sky.

‘I should join my lord,’ Merewalh said unhappily.

Æthelflaed smiled. ‘Let me tell you what my husband will do,’ she said, and the scorn in the word husband was as pungent as the stench from the burning church. ‘He will keep his forces in Gleawecestre,’ she went on, ‘just as he did when the Danes last invaded.’ She saw the struggle on Merewalh’s face. He was a good man, and like all good men he wanted to do his oath-duty, which was to be at his lord’s side, but he knew Æthelflaed spoke the truth. She straightened in her saddle. ‘My husband,’ she said, though this time without any scorn, ‘gave me permission to give orders to any of his followers that I encountered. So now I order you to stay with me.’

Merewalh knew she was lying. He looked at her for an instant, then nodded. ‘Then I shall, lady.’

‘What about the dead?’ Osferth asked, staring at the church.

Æthelflaed leaned over and gently touched her half-brother’s arm. ‘The dead must bury their dead,’ she said.

Osferth knew there was no time to give the dead a Christian burial. They must be left here, but the anger was tight in him and he slid from his saddle and walked to the smoking church where small flames licked from the burning timbers. He pulled two charred lengths of wood from the ruin. One was about five feet long, the other much shorter, and he scavenged among the ruined cottages until he found a strip of leather, perhaps a belt, and he used the leather to lash the two pieces of timber together. He made a cross. ‘With your permission, lord,’ he told me, ‘I want my own standard.’

‘The son of a king should have a banner,’ I said.

He rammed the butt of the cross on the ground so that it shed ash, and the crosspiece tilted crookedly. It would have been funny if he had not been so bitterly enraged. ‘This is my standard,’ he said, and called for his servant, a deaf-mute named Hwit, to carry the cross.

We followed the hoof tracks south through more burned villages, past a great hall that was now ashes and blackened rafters, and by fields where cattle lowed miserably because they needed milking. If the Danes had left cows behind then they must already have a vast herd, too big to manage, and they must have collected women and children for the slave markets as well. They were encumbered by now. Instead of being a fast, dangerous, well-mounted army of savage raiders they had become a lumbering procession of captives, wagons, herds and flocks. They would still be spewing out vicious raid parties, but each of those would bring back further plunder to slow the main army even more.

They had crossed the Temes. We discovered that next day when we reached Cracgelad where I had killed Aldhelm, Æthelred’s man. The small town was now a burh, and its walls were of stone, not earth and wood. The fortifications were Æthelflaed’s doing, and she had ordered the work done, not only because the small town guarded a crossing of the Temes, but because she had witnessed a small miracle there; touched, she believed, by a dead saint’s hand. So Cracgelad was now a formidable fortress, with a flooded ditch fronting the new stone wall and it was hardly surprising that the Danes had ignored the garrison and instead had headed for the causeway that led across the marshes on the north bank of the Temes to the Roman bridge, which had been repaired at the same time that Cracgelad’s walls had been rebuilt. We also followed the causeway and stood our horses on the northern bank of the Temes and watched the skies burn above Wessex. So Edward’s kingdom was being ravaged.

Æthelflaed might have made Cracgelad into a burh, but the town still flew her husband’s banner of the white horse above its southern gate rather than her flag of the cross-grasping goose. A dozen men now appeared at that gate and walked to join us. One was a priest, Father Kynhelm, and he gave us our first reliable news. Æthelwold, he said, was with the Danes. ‘He came to the gate, lord, and demanded we surrender.’

‘You recognised him?’

‘I’ve never seen him before, lord, but he announced himself and I assume he told the truth. He came with Saxons.’

‘Not Danes?’

Father Kynhelm shook his head. ‘The Danes stayed away. We could see them, but as far as I could tell the men at the gate were all Saxons. A lot of them shouted at us to surrender. I counted two hundred and twenty.’

‘And one woman,’ a man added.

I ignored that. ‘How many Danes?’ I asked Father Kynhelm.

He shrugged. ‘Hundreds, lord, they blackened the fields.’

‘Æthelwold’s banner is a stag,’ I said, ‘with crosses for antlers. Was that the only flag?’

‘They showed a black cross as well, lord, and a boar flag.’

‘A boar?’ I said.

‘A tusked boar, lord.’

So Beortsig had joined his masters, which meant that the army plundering Wessex was part Saxon. ‘What answer did you give Æthelwold?’ I asked Father Kynhelm.

‘That we served Lord Æthelred, lord.’

‘You have news of Lord Æthelred?’

‘No, lord.’

‘You have food?’

‘Enough for the winter, lord. The harvest was adequate, God be praised.’

‘What forces do you have?’

‘The fyrd, lord, and twenty-two warriors.’

‘How many fyrd?’

‘Four hundred and twenty, lord.’

‘Keep them here,’ I said, ‘because the Danes will probably be back.’ When Alfred was on his deathbed I had told him that the Northmen had not learned how to fight us, but we had learned how to fight them, and that was true. They had made no attempt to capture Cracgelad, except for a feeble summons for the town to surrender, and if thousands of Danes could not capture one small burh, however formidable its walls, then they had no chance against Wessex’s larger garrisons, and if they could not capture the large burhs and so destroy Edward’s forces inside, then eventually they must retreat. ‘What Danish banners did you see?’ I asked Father Kynhelm.

‘None plainly, lord.’

‘What is Eohric’s banner?’ I asked everyone in earshot.

‘A lion and a cross,’ Osferth said.

‘Whatever a lion is,’ I said. I wanted to know if Eohric’s East Anglians had joined the Danish horde, but Father Kynhelm did not have the answer.

Next morning it was raining again, the drops pitting the Temes as it slid past the burh’s walls. The low cloud made it hard to distinguish the smoke plumes, but my impression was that the fires were not far south of the river. Æthelflaed went to Saint Werburgh’s convent and prayed, Osferth found a carpenter in the town who jointed his cross properly and fixed it with nails, while I summoned two of Merewalh’s men and two of Steapa’s troops. I sent the Mercians to Gleawecestre with a message for Æthelred. I knew that if the message came from me he would ignore it utterly, and so I ordered them to say it was a request from King Edward that he bring his troops, all his troops, to Cracgelad. The great army, I explained, had crossed the Temes at the burh and would almost certainly withdraw the same way. They could, of course, choose another ford or bridge, but men have a habit of using the roads and tracks they already know. If Mercia assembled its army on the northern bank of the Temes then Edward could bring the West Saxons from the south and we would trap them between us. Steapa’s men carried the same message to Edward, except that message came from me and was merely a strong suggestion that as the Danes withdrew he should concentrate his army and follow them, but not attack until they were already crossing the Temes.

It was around mid morning that I gave the order to saddle the horses and be ready to ride, though I did not say to where, then just as we were about to depart two messengers arrived from Bishop Erkenwald in Lundene.

I never liked Erkenwald, while Æthelflaed had hated him ever since he had preached a sermon on adultery and stared at her throughout, but the bishop knew his business. He had sent messengers along every Roman road from Lundene with orders to seek out Mercian or West Saxon forces. ‘He said to keep a watchful eye for you, lord,’ one of the two men said. He was from Weohstan’s garrison and told us that the Danes were outside Lundene’s walls, but not in any great force. ‘If we threaten them, lord, they retreat.’

‘Whose men are they?’

‘King Eohric’s, lord, and a few follow Sigurd’s banner too.’

So Eohric had joined the Danes and not the Christians. Erkenwald’s messengers said they had heard that the Danes had assembled at Eoferwic, and from there they had taken ship to East Anglia, and while I had been lured to Ceaster, that great army, reinforced by Eohric’s warriors, had launched themselves across the Use and started their path of fire and death. ‘What are Eohric’s men doing at Lundene?’ I asked.

‘They just watch, lord. There aren’t enough of them to make an assault.’

‘But enough to keep troops inside the walls,’ I said. ‘So what does Bishop Erkenwald want?’

‘He hoped you would go to Lundene, lord.’

‘Tell him to send me half of Weohstan’s men instead,’ I said.

Bishop Erkenwald’s request, I suspected it had been couched as an order that the messengers had softened into a suggestion, made small sense to me. True, Lundene needed to be defended, but the army that threatened that city was here, south of the Temes, and if we moved fast we could trap it here. The enemy force at Lundene was probably only there to keep the city’s large garrison from sallying out to confront the great army. My expectation was that the Danes would plunder and burn, but eventually they would either have to besiege a burh or else be fought in the open country by a West Saxon army, and it was more important to know where they were and what they intended than to gather in far Lundene. To defeat the Danes we had to meet them in open battle. There could be no escape from the horrors of the shield wall. The burhs might stave off defeat, but victory came in face-to-face combat, and my thought was to force a battle when the Danes were recrossing the Temes. The one thing I did know was that we had to choose the battlefield, and Cracgelad, with its river, causeway and bridge was as good a place as any, as good as the bridge at Fearnhamme where we had slaughtered the army of Harald Bloodhair after trapping it when only half his troops were across the river.

I gave Erkenwald’s messengers fresh horses and sent them back to Lundene, though without much hope that the bishop would despatch reinforcements unless he received a direct order from Edward, then I led most of our force across the river. Merewalh stayed in Cracgelad, and I had told Æthelflaed to remain with him, but she ignored the order and rode beside me. ‘Fighting,’ I growled at her, ‘is not women’s business.’

‘What is women’s business, Lord Uhtred?’ she asked with mock sweetness. ‘Oh, please, please! Tell me!’

I looked for the trap hidden in the question. There obviously was a trap, though I could not see it. ‘A woman’s business,’ I said stiffly, ‘is to look after the household.’

‘To clean? To sweep? To spin? To cook?’

‘To supervise the servants, yes.’

‘And to raise the children?’

‘That too,’ I agreed.

‘In other words,’ she said tartly, ‘women are supposed to do all that a man can’t do. And right now it seems men can’t fight, so I’d better do that too.’ She smiled triumphantly, then laughed when I scowled. In truth I was glad of her company. It was not just that I loved her, but Æthelflaed’s presence always inspired men. The Mercians adored her. She might have been a West Saxon, but her mother was a Mercian, and Æthelflaed had adopted that country as her own. Her generosity was famous, there was hardly a convent in Mercia that did not depend on the income from the wide estates Æthelflaed had inherited to help their widows and orphans.

Once across the Temes we were in Wessex. The same hoof-scarred path showed where the great army had spread out as they went southwards, and the first villages we passed were burned, their ashes now turned to a grey sludge by the night’s rain. I sent Finan and fifty men ahead to act as scouts, warning them that the smoke trails in the sky were much closer than I had expected. ‘What did you expect?’ Æthelflaed asked me.

‘That the Danes would go straight to Wintanceaster,’ I said.

‘And attack it?’

‘They should,’ I said, ‘or ravage the country around the city and hope they can lure Edward out for a fight.’

‘If Edward’s there,’ she said uncertainly.

But instead of attacking Wintanceaster, the Danes seemed to be scouring the land just south of the Temes. It was good land with plump farms and rich villages, though much of its wealth would have been driven or carried into the closest burhs. ‘They have to besiege a burh or leave,’ I said, ‘and they don’t usually have the patience for a siege.’

‘Then why come in the first place?’

I shrugged. ‘Maybe Æthelwold thought folk would support him? Maybe they hope Edward will lead an army against them and they can defeat him?’

‘Will he?’

‘Not till he has enough strength,’ I said, hoping that was true. ‘But right now,’ I said, ‘the Danes are being slowed by captives and by plunder and they’ll send some of that back to East Anglia.’ That was what Haesten had done during his great ravaging of Mercia. His forces had moved swiftly, but he had constantly detached bands of men to escort his captive slaves and loaded pack mules back to Beamfleot. If my suspicion was right, the Danes would be sending men back along the route they had come, and that was why I rode south, looking for one of those Danish bands taking plunder back to East Anglia.

‘It would make more sense for them to use another route,’ Æthelflaed observed.

‘They have to know the country to do that. Following your own tracks home is much easier.’

We did not need to ride far from the bridge because the Danes were surprisingly close, indeed they were very close. Within an hour Finan had returned to me with news that large bands of Danes were spread all across the nearer country. The land rose gradually towards the south and the fires of destruction were burning on the far skyline while men brought captives, livestock and plunder to the lower ground. ‘There’s a village on the road ahead,’ Finan told me, ‘or rather there was a village, and they’re collecting the plunder there, and there’s not more than three hundred of the bastards.’

I worried that the Danes had not guarded the bridge at Cracgelad, but the only answer to that worry was to assume they had no fear of any attack from Mercia. I had sent scouts along the river bank to east and west, but none reported any news of a Danish presence. It seemed the enemy was intent on amassing plunder and was not watching for an attack from across the Temes. That was either carelessness, or else a careful trap.

We numbered almost six hundred men. If it was a trap then we would be a hard beast to kill, and I decided to lay a trap of our own. I was beginning to think the Danes were being careless, over-confident of their overwhelming numbers, and we were in their rear and we had a safe route of escape, and the opportunity was simply too good.

‘Can those trees hide us?’ I asked Finan, nodding towards some thick woodland to the south.

‘You could hide a thousand men in there,’ he said.

‘We’ll wait in the trees,’ I said. ‘You’re going to lead all our men,’ I told him, meaning the men sworn to me, ‘and attack the bastards. Then you lead them back towards the rest of us.’

It was a simple ambush, so simple I did not really believe it could work, but this was still the war that passed understanding. First, it was happening three years too late and now, after attempting to lure me to Ceaster, the Danes seemed to have forgotten all about me. ‘They have too many leaders,’ Æthelflaed suggested as we walked our horses south along the Roman road that led from the bridge, ‘and they’re all men, so not one of them will give in. They’re arguing among themselves.’

‘Let’s hope they go on arguing,’ I said. Once among the trees we spread out. Æthelflaed’s men were on the right, and I sent Osferth to keep her safe. Steapa’s men went to the left, while I stayed in the centre. I dismounted, giving my horse’s reins to Oswi, and walked with Finan to the wood’s southern edge. Our arrival in the trees had sent pigeons clattering through the branches, but no Danes took any notice. The nearest were some two or three hundred paces away, close to a mixed herd of sheep and goats. Beyond them was a steading, still unburned, and I could see a crowd of people there.

‘Captives,’ Finan said, ‘women and children.’

There were Danes there too, their presence betrayed by a large herd of saddled horses in a hedged paddock. It was hard to tell how many horses, but it was at least a hundred. The steading was a small hall beside a pair of newly thatched barns, their roofs bright in the sun. There were more Danes beyond the hall, out in fields, where I assumed they were collecting livestock. ‘I’d suggest riding for the hall,’ I said, ‘kill as many as you can, bring me a captive and take their horses.’

‘About time we had a fight,’ Finan said wolfishly.

‘Lead them onto us,’ I said, ‘and we’ll kill every last mother’s son.’ He turned to go, but I put a hand on his mailed arm. I was still staring south. ‘It isn’t a trap, is it?’

Finan gazed south. ‘They reached this far without a fight,’ he said, ‘and they think no one dares face them.’

I felt a moment’s frustration. If I had Mercia’s army at Cracgelad, and Edward could bring the men of Wessex from the south, we could have crushed this careless army, but so far as I knew we were the only Saxon troops anywhere near the Danes. ‘I want to keep them here,’ I said.

‘Keep them here?’ Finan asked.

‘Near the bridge, so King Edward can bring men to crush them.’ We had more than enough men to hold the bridge against as many attacks as the Danes could make. We did not even need Æthelred’s Mercians to make this trap work. This, then, was the battleground I wanted. ‘Sihtric!’

The choice of this place as the ground to destroy the Danes was so obvious, so tempting and so advantageous that I did not want to wait before Edward knew of my certainty. ‘I’m sorry you’ll miss the fight,’ I told Sihtric, ‘but this is urgent.’ I was sending him with three other men to ride westwards and then south. They were to follow my first messengers and tell the king where the Danes were, and how they could be beaten. ‘Tell him the enemy is just waiting to be killed. Tell him this can be his first great victory, tell him the poets will sing of it for generations, and above all tell him to hurry!’ I waited until Sihtric was gone, then looked back to the enemy. ‘Bring me as many horses as you can,’ I told Finan.

Finan led my men southwards, keeping to some woods east of the road, while I brought up all the remaining horsemen. I rode along our line, ducking under the low branches, and told men they should not only kill the enemy, but wound them. Wounded men slow an army. If Sigurd, Cnut, and Eohric had badly wounded troops then they could not ride fast and loose. I wanted to slow this army, to trap it, to keep it in place till the forces of Wessex could come from the south to kill it.

I watched the birds fly from the trees where Finan was leading my men. Not one Dane noticed, or took any interest if he did see the birds. I waited beside Æthelflaed and felt a sudden exhilaration. The Danes were trapped. They did not know it, but they were doomed. Bishop Erkenwald’s sermon was right, of course, and war is a dreadful thing, but it could also be so enjoyable, and there was no part more enjoyable than forcing an enemy to do your bidding. This enemy was where I wanted him, and where he would die, and I remember laughing aloud and Æthelflaed looked at me curiously. ‘What’s funny?’ she asked, but I did not answer because just then Finan’s men broke cover.

They charged from the east. They went fast and for a moment the Danes seemed stunned by their sudden appearance. Hoof-thrown clods of earth flecked the air behind my men, I could see the light reflected from their blades, and I watched Danes running towards the hall, and then Finan’s men were among them, riding them down, horsemen overtaking fugitives, blades falling, blood colouring the day, men falling, bleeding, panicking and Finan drove them on, aiming for the field where the Danish horses were penned.

I heard a horn call. Men were gathering at the hall, men snatching up shields, but Finan ignored them. A hurdle lay across the hedge opening and I saw Cerdic lean down and pull it away. The Danish horses surged through the opened gap to follow my men. More Danes were galloping from the south, called by the urgent horn, while Finan led a wild charge of riderless horses towards our trees. The path where he had galloped was strewn with bodies, I counted twenty-three, and not all dead. Some were wounded, writhing on the ground as their lifeblood stained the grass. Panicked sheep milled, a second horn joined its summons to the first, the noise harsh in the afternoon air. The Danes were gathering, but they had still not seen the rest of us among the trees. They saw a herd of their horses being driven northwards and they must have assumed Finan was from Cracgelad’s garrison and that the horses were being taken across the Temes into the safety of those stone walls, and some Danes set off in pursuit. They spurred their horses as Finan vanished among the trees. I drew Serpent-Breath and my stallion’s ears pricked back as he heard the hiss of the blade through the scabbard’s fleece-lined throat. He was trembling, pawing the ground with one heavy hoof. He was called Broga, and he was excited by the horses crashing through the trees. He whinnied and I loosened the reins to let him go forward.

‘Kill and wound!’ I shouted. ‘Kill and wound!’

Broga, the name meant terror, leaped forward. All along the wood’s edge the horsemen appeared, blades gleaming, and we charged at the scattered Danes, shouting, and the world was the drumbeat of hooves.

Most Danes turned to flee. The sensible ones kept charging towards us, knowing that their best chance of survival lay in crashing through our ranks and escaping behind us. My shield banged on my back, Serpent-Breath was raised, and I swerved towards a man on a grey horse and saw him ready to swing his sword at me, but one of Æthelflaed’s men speared him first, and he twisted in the saddle, sword falling, and I left him behind and caught up with a Dane fleeing on foot and slammed Serpent-Breath across his shoulders, drew her back along his neck, saw him stagger, left him, swung the sword at a running man and laid his scalp open so that his long hair was suddenly wet with blood.

The dismounted Danes by the hall had made a shield wall, perhaps forty or fifty men who faced us with their round shields overlapping, but Finan had turned and brought his men back, savaging his way up the road and leaving bodies behind him and he now brought his men behind the shield wall. He screamed his Irish challenge, words that meant nothing to any of us, but curdled the blood all the same, and the shield wall, seeing horsemen in front and behind, broke apart. Their captives were cowering in the yard, all women and children, and I shouted at them to head north towards the river. ‘Go, go!’ Broga had charged two men. One swung his sword at Broga’s mouth, but he was trained well and reared up, hooves flailing, and the man ducked away. I clung to him, waited till he came down and brought Serpent-Breath hard down onto the second man’s head, splitting helmet and skull. I heard a scream and saw that Broga had bitten off the first man’s face. I spurred on. Dogs were howling, children screaming, and Serpent-Breath was feeding. A naked woman stumbled from the hall, her hair unbound, her face smeared with blood. ‘Go that way!’ I shouted at her, pointing my red blade north.

‘My children!’

‘Find them! Go!’

A Dane came from the hall, sword in hand, stared in horror and turned back, but Rypere had seen him and galloped by him, seized him by his long hair and dragged him away. Two spears gouged his belly and a stallion trampled him and he writhed, bloody and moaning and we left him there.

‘Oswi!’ I shouted for my servant. ‘Horn!’

More Danes were showing in the south now, many more Danes, and it was time to go. We had hurt the enemy badly, but this was no place to fight against an outnumbering horde. I just wanted the Danes to stay here, trapped by the river, so that Edward could bring the army of Wessex against them and drive them like cattle onto my swords. Oswi kept sounding the horn, the noise frantic.

‘Back!’ I shouted. ‘All of you! Back!’

We went back slowly enough. Our wild charge had killed and wounded at least a hundred men so that the small fields were dotted with bodies. The injured lay in ditches or by hedges, and we left them there. Steapa was grinning, a fearsome sight, his big teeth bared and his sword reddened. ‘Your men are the rearguard,’ I told him, and he nodded. I looked for Æthelflaed and was relieved to see her unharmed. ‘Look after the fugitives,’ I told her. The escaped captives had to be shepherded back. I saw the naked woman dragging two small children by their hands.

I formed my men at the edge of the trees where our charge had started. We waited there, shields on our arms now, swords bright with enemy blood, and we dared the Danes to come at us, but they were disorganised and they were hurt, and they would not risk a charge until they had more men, and once I saw that the fugitives were safely gone north I shouted at my men to follow them.

We had lost five men; two Mercians and three West Saxons, but we had savaged the enemy. Finan had two captives, and I sent them ahead with the fugitives. The bridge was crowded with horses and fleeing people, and I stayed with Steapa, guarding the southern end until I was certain the last of our people was across the river.

We barricaded the northern end of the bridge, heaping logs across the road and inviting the Danes to come and be killed between the Roman parapets. But none did. They watched us work, they gathered in ever greater numbers on the West Saxon side of the river, but they did not come for their revenge. I left Steapa and his men to guard the barricade, certain that no Dane would cross while he was there.

Then I went to question the captives.

The two Danes were being guarded by six of Æthelflaed’s Mercians, who protected them from the fury of a crowd that had gathered in the space before Saint Werburgh’s convent. The crowd fell silent when I arrived, cowed perhaps by Broga whose mouth was still stained with blood. I slid from the saddle and let Oswi take the reins. I still carried Serpent-Breath in my hand, her blade unwashed.

There was a tavern hung with the sign of a goose next to the convent and I had the two men taken into its yard. Their names were Leif and Hakon, both were young, both were frightened and both were trying not to show it. I had the yard gates closed and barred. The two stood in the yard’s centre, surrounded by six of us. Leif, who did not look a day over sixteen, could not take his eyes from Serpent-Breath’s blood-caked blade. ‘You have a choice,’ I told the pair. ‘You can answer my questions and you’ll die with swords in your hands, or you can be obstinate and I’ll strip you both naked and throw you to the folk outside. First, who is your lord?’

‘I serve Jarl Cnut,’ Leif said.

‘And I serve King Eohric,’ Hakon said, his voice so low I almost could not hear him. He was a sturdy, long-faced boy with straw-coloured hair. He wore an old mail coat, ripped at the elbows and too big for him and I suspected it had been his father’s. He also wore a cross about his neck, while Leif had a hammer.

‘Who commands your army?’ I asked them.

They both hesitated. ‘King Eohric?’ Hakon suggested, but he did not sound sure.

‘Jarl Sigurd and Jarl Cnut,’ Leif said, just as uncertainly and almost at the same moment.

And that explained a great deal, I thought. ‘Not Æthelwold?’ I asked.

‘Him too, lord,’ Leif said. He was trembling.

‘Is Beortsig with the army?’

‘Yes, lord, but he serves Jarl Sigurd.’

‘And Jarl Haesten serves Jarl Cnut?’

‘He does, lord,’ Hakon said.

Æthelflaed was right, I thought. Too many masters, and no one man in command. Eohric was weak, but he was proud, and he would not be subservient to Sigurd or Cnut, while those two probably despised Eohric, yet had to treat him as a king if they were to have his troops. ‘And how big is the army?’ I asked.

Neither of them knew. Leif thought it was ten thousand strong, which was ludicrous, while Hakon just said they had been assured it was the largest army ever to attack the Saxons. ‘And where is it going?’ I asked.

Again neither knew. They had been told that they would make Æthelwold the King of Wessex and Beortsig the King of Mercia, and those two monarchs would reward them with land, but when I asked if they were going to Wintanceaster they both looked blank and I realised neither had even heard of that city.

I let Finan kill Leif. He died bravely and swiftly, a sword in his hand, but Hakon begged to see a priest before he died. ‘You’re a Dane,’ I told him.

‘And a Christian, lord.’

‘Does no one worship Odin in East Anglia?’

‘Some, lord, but not many.’

That was worrying. Some Danes, I knew, converted because it was convenient. Haesten had insisted his wife and daughters were baptised, but that was only because it yielded better terms from Alfred, though if Offa had not lied about everything before he died then Haesten’s wife was a true believer. These days, as I face my own death and my old age dims the glories of this world, I see nothing but Christians. Perhaps in the far north where the ice grips the summer land there are some folk left who sacrifice to Thor, Odin and Freya, but I know of none in Britain. We slide into darkness, towards the final chaos of Ragnarok, when the seas will burn in turmoil and the land will break and even the gods will die. Hakon did not care whether he held a sword or not, he just wanted to say his prayers, and when they were said we took his head from his shoulders.

I sent more messengers to Edward, only this time I sent Finan because I knew the king would listen to the Irishman, and I sent him with seven other men. They were to ride west before crossing the Temes, then go fast towards Wintanceaster or to wherever else the king might be, and they carried a letter I wrote myself. Men are always surprised that I can read and write, but Beocca taught me when I was a child and I have never lost the skills. Alfred, of course, insisted that all his lords should learn to read, mainly so that he could write his chiding letters to us, but since his death not many bother to learn, yet I still have the skills. I wrote that the Danes were cursed with too many leaders, that they were lingering too long just south of the Temes, that I had slowed them by taking horses and leaving them with a mass of wounded men. Come towards Cracgelad, I urged the king. Collect every warrior, I urged him, call the fyrd, and advance on the Danes from the south and I would be the anvil against which he could beat the enemy into blood, bones and raven-food. If the Danes moved, I said, I would shadow them on the northern bank of the Temes to block their escape, but I doubted they would move far. ‘We have them in our hand, lord King,’ I wrote, ‘and now you must close the fist.’

And then I waited. The Danes did not move. We saw the smoke pyres in the distant southern sky that told us they were scouring a wider area of Wessex, but their main encampment was still not far south of Cracgelad’s bridge, which we now had made into a fortress. No one could cross the bridge unless we allowed it. I went over each day, taking fifty or sixty men to patrol a short distance on the southern bank to make certain the Danes were not moving, and each day I returned to Cracgelad astonished that the enemy was making it so easy for us. At night we could see the glow of their campfires lighting the southern sky and by day we watched the smoke, and in four days nothing changed except the weather. Rain came and went, the wind stirred the river and an early autumn mist obscured the ramparts one morning, and when the mist lifted the Danes were still there.

‘Why aren’t they moving?’ Æthelflaed asked me.

‘Because they can’t agree where to go.’

‘And if you led them,’ she asked, ‘where would they go?’

‘To Wintanceaster,’ I said.

‘And besiege it?’

‘Capture it,’ I said, and that was their difficulty. They knew men would die in the burh’s ditch and on its high wall, but that was no reason not to try. Alfred’s burhs had given the enemy a riddle they could not solve, and I would have to find a solution if I was to retake Bebbanburg, a fortress that was more formidable than any burh. ‘I’d go to Wintanceaster,’ I told her, ‘and I’d hurl men at the wall until it fell, and then I’d make Æthelwold king there and demand that West Saxons follow me, and then we’d march on Lundene.’

Yet the Danes did nothing. They argued instead. We heard later that Eohric wanted the army to march on Lundene, while Æthelwold reckoned it should assault Wintanceaster, and Cnut and Sigurd were all for recrossing the Temes to capture Gleawecestre. So Eohric wanted to bring Lundene into his kingdom’s boundaries, Æthelwold wanted what he believed was his birthright, while Cnut and Sigurd simply wanted to extend their lands southwards to the Temes, and their arguments left the great army drifting in indecision, and I imagined Edward’s messengers riding between the burhs, gathering the warriors, bringing together a Saxon army that could destroy the Danish power in Britain for ever.

Then Finan returned with all the messengers I had sent to Wintanceaster. They crossed the Temes well to the west, looping about the Danes, and came to Cracgelad on horses that were sweat-whitened and dust-covered. They brought a letter from the king. A priestly clerk had written it, but Edward had signed it and the letter bore his seal. It greeted me in the name of the Christian god, thanked me effusively for my messages, and then ordered me to leave Cracgelad immediately and to take all the forces under my command to meet the king in Lundene. I read it in disbelief. ‘Did you tell the king we have the Danes trapped on the river?’ I asked Finan.

Finan nodded, ‘I told him, lord, but he wants us in Lundene.’

‘Doesn’t he understand the opportunity?’

‘He’s going to Lundene, lord, and he wants us to join him there,’ Finan said flatly.

‘Why?’ And that was a question no one could answer.

I could do no good on my own. I had men, true, but not nearly enough. I needed two or three thousand warriors to come from the south, and that was not going to happen. Edward, it seemed, was taking his army to Lundene, going by a route that kept him well clear of any Danish outriders. I swore, but I had sworn an oath to obey King Edward and my oath-lord had given me an order.

So we unlocked the trap, let the Danes live and rode to Lundene.

King Edward was already in Lundene and the streets were filled with warriors, every courtyard was being used as a stable, even the old Roman amphitheatre was crammed with horses.

Edward was in the old Mercian royal palace. Lundene was properly in Mercia, though it had been under West Saxon rule ever since I had captured it for Alfred. I found Edward in the big Roman chamber with its pillars, dome, cracked plaster and shattered tile floor. A council was in session, and the king was flanked by Archbishop Plegmund and by Bishop Erkenwald, while facing them, in a semicircle of benches and chairs, sat more churchmen and a dozen ealdormen. The banners of Wessex were propped at the back of the chamber. A lively discussion was under way as I entered, and the voices fell silent as my feet sounded loud on the broken floor. Scraps of tile skittered away. There had been a picture made with the tiles, but it had vanished by now.

‘Lord Uhtred,’ Edward greeted me warmly, though I noted a slight nervousness in his voice.

I knelt to him. ‘Lord King.’

‘Welcome,’ he said, ‘and join us.’

I had not cleaned my mail. There was blood in the gaps between the tight rings and men noticed it. Ealdorman Æthelhelm ordered a chair brought next to him and invited me to sit there. ‘How many men do you bring us, Lord Uhtred?’ Edward asked.

‘Steapa is with me,’ I said, ‘and counting his men we have five hundred and sixty-three.’ I had lost some in the fighting at Cracgelad, and others had fallen behind because of lamed horses as we rode to Lundene.

‘Which makes a total of?’ Edward asked a priest seated at a table to the side of the chamber.

‘Three thousand, four hundred and twenty-three men, lord King.’

He obviously meant household warriors, not the fyrd, and it was a respectable army. ‘And the enemy?’ Edward asked.

‘Four to five thousand men, lord, as best we may judge.’

The stilted conversation was plainly meant for my ears. Archbishop Plegmund, face as sour as a shrivelled crab apple, watched me closely. ‘So you see, Lord Uhtred,’ Edward turned back to me, ‘we did not have enough men to force an encounter on the banks of the Temes.’

‘The men of Mercia would have joined you, lord King,’ I said. ‘Gleawecestre is not so far away.’

‘Sigismund has landed from Ireland,’ Archbishop Plegmund took up the tale, ‘and has occupied Ceaster. The Lord Æthelred needs to watch over him.’

‘From Gleawecestre?’ I asked.

‘From wherever he decides,’ Plegmund said testily.

‘Sigismund,’ I said, ‘is a Norseman who’s been run out of Ireland by the native savages, and he’s hardly a threat to Mercia.’ I had never heard of Sigismund before and had no idea why he had chosen to occupy Ceaster, but it seemed a likely explanation.

‘He has brought crews of pagans,’ Plegmund said, ‘a host!’

‘He is not our business,’ Edward intervened, obviously unhappy at the sharp tone of the last few statements. ‘Our business is to defeat my cousin Æthelwold. Now,’ he looked at me, ‘you will agree our burhs are well defended?’

‘I hope so, lord.’

‘And it is our belief,’ Edward went on, ‘that the enemy will be frustrated by the burhs and so will withdraw soon.’

‘And we shall fight them as they withdraw,’ Plegmund said.

‘So why not fight them south of Cracgelad?’ I asked.

‘Because the men of Cent could not have reached that place in a timely fashion,’ Plegmund said, sounding irritated by my question, ‘and Ealdorman Sigelf has promised us seven hundred warriors. Once they have joined us,’ he went on, ‘we shall be ready to confront the enemy.’

Edward looked at me expectantly, plainly wanting my agreement. ‘It’s surely sensible,’ he finally spoke after I had made no comment, ‘to wait until we have the men of Cent? Their numbers will make our army truly formidable.’

‘I have a suggestion, lord King,’ I said respectfully.

‘All your suggestions are welcome, Lord Uhtred,’ he said.

‘I think that instead of bread and wine the church should serve ale and old cheese,’ I said, ‘and I propose that the sermon should be at the beginning of the service instead of at the end, and I think priests should be naked during the ceremonies, and…’

‘Silence!’ Plegmund shouted.

‘If your priests are going to conduct your wars, lord King,’ I said, ‘then why shouldn’t your warriors run the church?’ There was some nervous laughter at that, but as the council went on it was clear that we were as leaderless as the Danes. The Christians talk about the blind leading the blind, and now the blind were fighting the blind. Alfred would have dominated such a council, but Edward deferred to his advisers, and men like Æthelhelm were cautious. They preferred to wait until Sigelf’s Centish troops had joined us.

‘Why aren’t the men of Cent here now?’ I asked. Cent was close to Lundene and in the time it had taken my men to cross and recross half of Saxon Britain the men of Cent had failed to complete a two-day march.

‘They will be here,’ Edward said, ‘I have Ealdorman Sigelf’s word.’

‘But why has he delayed?’ I insisted.

‘The enemy went to East Anglia in ships,’ Archbishop Plegmund supplied the answer, ‘and we feared they might use those ships to descend on the coast of Cent. Ealdorman Sigelf preferred to wait until he was sure that the threat was not real.’

‘And who commands our army?’ I asked, and that question caused embarrassment.

There was silence for a few heartbeats, then Archbishop Plegmund scowled. ‘Our lord King commands the army, of course,’ he said.

And who commands the king, I wondered, but said nothing. That evening Edward sent for me. It was dark when I joined him. He dismissed his servants so we were alone. ‘Archbishop Plegmund is not in charge,’ he chided me, obviously remembering my final question in the council, ‘but I find his advice is good.’

‘To do nothing, lord King?’

‘To gather all our forces before we fight. And the council agrees.’ We were in the large upper room where a great bed stood between two candle-lanterns. Edward was standing in the large window that overlooked the old city, the window where Æthelflaed and I had stood so often. It looked west towards the new city where soft firelight glimmered. Farther west it was dark, a black land. ‘The twins are safe?’ Edward asked me.

‘They’re in Cirrenceastre, lord King,’ I said, ‘so yes, they’re safe.’ The twins, Æthelstan and Eadgyth, were with my daughter and younger son, all in good hands inside Cirrenceastre, a burh that was as well defended as Cracgelad. Fagranforda had been burned as I had expected, but my people were all safe inside Cirrenceastre.

‘And the boy is in good health?’ Edward asked anxiously.

‘Æthelstan’s a lusty baby,’ I said.

‘I wish I could see them,’ he said.

‘Father Cuthbert and his wife are looking after them,’ I said.

‘Cuthbert’s married?’ Edward asked, surprised.

‘To a very pretty girl,’ I said.

‘Poor woman,’ Edward said, ‘she’ll be riddled to death by him.’ He smiled, and looked unhappy when I did not return the smile. ‘And my sister’s here?’

‘Yes, lord King.’

‘She should be looking after the children,’ he said sternly.

‘You tell her, lord King,’ I said, ‘and she’s brought you almost a hundred and fifty Mercian warriors,’ I went on. ‘Why hasn’t Æthelred sent any?’

‘He’s worried about the Irish Norsemen,’ he said, then shrugged when I made a dismissive noise. ‘Why didn’t Æthelwold go deeper into Wessex?’ he asked me.

‘Because they’re leaderless,’ I said, ‘and because no one came to his banner.’ Edward looked puzzled. ‘I think their plan was to reach Wessex, proclaim Æthelwold king, and wait for men to join them, but no one did.’

‘So what will they do?’

‘If they can’t take a burh,’ I said, ‘they’ll go back where they came from.’

Edward turned to the window. Bats flitted in the darkness, sometimes showing briefly in the light of the lanterns that lit the high room. ‘There are too many of them, Lord Uhtred,’ he said, talking of the Danes, ‘just too many. We must be sure before we attack.’

‘If you wait for certainty in war, lord King,’ I said, ‘you’ll die waiting.’

‘My father advised me to hold on to Lundene,’ he said. ‘He told me we should never relinquish the city.’

‘And let Æthelwold have the rest?’ I asked sourly.

‘He will die, but we need Ealdorman Sigelf’s men.’

‘He’s bringing seven hundred?’

‘So he promised,’ Edward said, ‘which will give us over four thousand men.’ He took comfort in that number. ‘And, of course,’ he went on, ‘we now have your men and the Mercians too. We should be strong enough.’

‘And who commands us?’ I asked in a gruff voice.

Edward looked surprised at the question. ‘I do, of course.’

‘Not Archbishop Plegmund?’

Edward stiffened. ‘I have advisers, Lord Uhtred,’ he said, ‘and it’s a foolish king who doesn’t listen to his advisers.’

‘It’s a foolish king,’ I retorted, ‘who doesn’t know which advisers to trust. And the archbishop has advised you to mistrust me. He thinks I’m sympathetic to the Danes.’

Edward hesitated, then nodded. ‘He worries about that, yes.’

‘Yet so far, lord King, I’m the only one of your men who has killed any of the bastards. For a man who can’t be trusted that’s strange behaviour, is it not?’

Edward just looked at me, then flinched as a large moth fluttered close to his face. He called for servants to close the big shutters. Somewhere in the dark I could hear men singing. A servant took the robe from Edward’s shoulders, then lifted the gold chain from around his neck. Beyond the arch, where the door stood open, I could see a girl waiting in the dark shadows. It was not Edward’s wife. ‘Thank you for coming,’ he said, dismissing me.

I bowed to him, then went.

And next day Sigelf arrived.

Twelve

The fight began in the street below the big church next to the old Mercian palace where Edward and his entourage were quartered. The men of Cent had arrived that morning, streaming across the Roman bridge and beneath the broken arch that led through Lundene’s river wall. Six hundred and eighty-six men, led by their ealdorman, Sigelf, and his son, Sigebriht, rode beneath banners showing Sigelf’s crossed swords and Sigebriht’s bloody-horned bull’s head. They had dozens of other flags, most with crosses or saints, and the horsemen were accompanied by monks, priests and wagons loaded with supplies. Not all Sigelf’s warriors were mounted, at least one hundred came without horses, and those men straggled into the city for a long while after the horsemen had arrived.

Edward ordered the Centishmen to find quarters in the eastern part of the city, but of course the newcomers wanted to explore Lundene and the fight started when a dozen of Sigelf’s men demanded ale in a tavern called the Red Pig, which was popular with Ealdorman Æthelhelm’s men. The fight began over a whore and soon spilled from the tavern door and spread down the hill. Mercians, West Saxons and Centishmen were brawling in the street and within minutes swords and knives were drawn.

‘What’s happening?’ Edward, his council interrupted, stared aghast from a palace window. He could hear shouts, blades clashing and see dead and wounded men on the stone-paved hill. ‘Is it the Danes?’ he asked, appalled.

I ignored the king. ‘Steapa!’ I called, then ran down the steps and shouted at the steward to bring me Serpent-Breath. Steapa was calling his men together. ‘You!’ I grabbed one of the king’s bodyguard. ‘Find a rope. A long one.’

‘A rope, lord?’

‘There are masons repairing the palace roof. They have rope! Fetch it! Now! And find someone who can blow a horn!’

A dozen of us strode into the street, but there were at least a hundred men fighting there, and twice that many watching and calling encouragement. I slammed a man across the head with the flat of Serpent-Breath, kicked another one down, bellowed for men to stop, but they were oblivious. One man even ran at me, screaming, his sword lifted, then seemed to realise his mistake and curved away.

The man I had sent to find a rope brought one with a heavy wooden bucket attached, and I used the pail as a weight to hurl the rope over the projecting inn sign of the Red Pig. ‘Find me a man, any man, one who’s fighting,’ I told Steapa.

He stomped off while I made a noose. A wounded man, guts hanging, crawled down the hill. A woman was screaming. The gutter was running with ale-diluted blood. One of the king’s men arrived with a horn. ‘Sound it,’ I said, ‘and keep blowing it.’

Steapa dragged a man to me, we had no idea whether he was from Wessex or Mercia, but it did not matter. I tightened the noose around his neck, slapped him when he begged for mercy, and hauled him into the air where he hanged, legs kicking. The horn blew on, insistent, unignorable. I handed the rope’s end to Oswi, my servant. ‘Tie it to something,’ I said, then turned and bellowed at the street. ‘Anyone else want to die?’

The sight of a man dancing on a rope while he chokes to death has a calming influence on a crowd. The street went quiet. The king and a dozen men had appeared at the palace door and men bowed or knelt in homage.

‘One more fight,’ I shouted, ‘and you’ll all die!’ I looked for one of my men. ‘Pull on the bastard’s ankles,’ I said, pointing at the hanged man.

‘You just killed one of my men,’ a voice said, and I turned to see a slight man with a sharp fox-like face and long red plaited moustaches. He was an older man, perhaps close to fifty, and his red hair was greying at the temples. ‘You killed him without trial!’ he accused me.

I towered over him, but he faced me pugnaciously. ‘I’ll hang a dozen more of your men if they fight in the street,’ I said, ‘and who are you?’

‘Ealdorman Sigelf,’ he said, ‘and you call me lord.’

‘I’m Uhtred of Bebbanburg,’ I said and was rewarded by a blink of surprise, ‘and you can call me lord.’

Sigelf evidently decided he did not want to fight me. ‘They shouldn’t have been fighting,’ he acknowledged grudgingly. He frowned. ‘You met my son, I believe?’

‘I met your son,’ I said.

‘He was a fool,’ Sigelf said in a voice as sharp as his face, ‘a young fool. He’s learned his lesson.’

‘The lesson of loyalty?’ I asked, looking across the street to where Sigebriht was bowing low to the king.

‘So they both liked the same bitch,’ Sigelf said, ‘but Edward was a prince and princes get what they want.’

‘So do kings,’ I said mildly.

Sigelf caught my meaning and gave me a very hard glance. ‘Cent doesn’t need a king,’ he said, clearly trying to scotch the rumour that he wanted the throne for himself.

‘Cent has a king,’ I said.

‘So we hear,’ he spoke sarcastically, ‘but Wessex needs to take more care of us. Every damned Northman who gets his arse kicked in Frankia comes to our shores, and what does Wessex do? It scratches its own arse then sniffs its fingers while we suffer.’ He watched his son bow a second time and spat, though whether that was because of his son’s obeisance or because of Wessex it was hard to tell. ‘Look what happened when Harald and Haesten came!’ he demanded.

‘I defeated both of them,’ I said.

‘But not before they’d raped half of Cent and burned fifty or more villages. We need more defences.’ He glared at me. ‘We need some help!’

‘At least you’re here,’ I said emolliently.

‘We’ll help Wessex,’ Sigelf said, ‘even if Wessex doesn’t help us.’

I had thought that the arrival of the Centishmen would provoke some action from Edward, but instead he waited. There was a council of war every day, but it decided nothing except to wait and see what the enemy would do. Scouts were watching the Danes and sent reports back every day and those reports said the Danes were still not moving. I urged the king to attack them, but I might as well have begged him to fly to the moon. I begged him to let me lead my own men to scout the enemy, but he refused.

‘He thinks you’ll attack them,’ Æthelflaed told me.

‘Why doesn’t he attack?’ I asked, frustrated.

‘Because he’s frightened,’ she said, ‘because there are too many men giving him advice, because he’s scared of doing the wrong thing, because he only has to lose one battle and he’s no longer king.’

We were on the top floor of a Roman house, one of those astonishing buildings that had stairs climbing to floor after floor. The moon shone through a window, and through the holes in the roof where the slates had fallen. It was cold and we were wrapped in fleeces. ‘A king shouldn’t be frightened,’ I said.

‘Edward knows men compare him to his father. He wonders what Father would have done now.’

‘Alfred would have called for me,’ I said, ‘preached to me for ten minutes, then given me the army.’

She lay silent in my arms. She was gazing at the moon-speckled roof. ‘Do you think,’ she asked, ‘that we’ll ever have peace?’

‘No.’

‘I dream of a day when we can live in a great hall, go hunting, listen to songs, walk by the river and never fear an enemy.’

‘You and me?’

‘Just you and me,’ she said. She turned her head so that her hair hid her eyes. ‘Just you and me.’

Next morning Edward ordered Æthelflaed to return to Cirrenceastre, an order she pointedly ignored. ‘I told him to give you the army,’ she said.

‘And he said?’

‘That he was king and he would lead the army.’

Her husband had also ordered Merewalh back to Gleawecestre, but Æthelflaed persuaded the Mercian to stay. ‘We need every good man,’ she told him, and so we did, but not to rot inside Lundene. We had a whole army there, over four thousand five hundred men, and all it did was guard the walls and gaze out at the unchanging countryside beyond.

We did nothing and the Danes ravaged the Wessex countryside, but made no attempt to storm a burh. The autumn days shrank and still we remained indecisive in Lundene. Archbishop Plegmund returned to Contwaraburg and I thought his departure might embolden Edward, but Bishop Erkenwald stayed with the king and counselled caution. So did Father Coenwulf, Edward’s mass priest and closest adviser. ‘It’s not like the Danes to be supine,’ he told Edward, ‘so I fear a trap. Let them make the first move, lord King. They surely cannot stay for ever.’ In that, at least, he was right, for as the autumn slid cold into winter the Danes at last moved.

They had been as indecisive as us, and now they simply recrossed the river at Cracgelad and went back the way they had come. Steapa’s scouts told us of their retreat, and day by day the reports came that they were heading back towards East Anglia, taking slaves, livestock and plunder. ‘And once they’re back there,’ I told the council, ‘the Northumbrian Danes will go home in their ships. They’ve achieved nothing, except taking a lot of slaves and cattle, but we’ve done nothing either.’

‘King Eohric has broken his treaty,’ Bishop Erkenwald pointed out indignantly, though what use that observation was escaped me.

‘He promised to be at peace with us,’ Edward said.

‘He must be punished, lord King,’ Erkenwald insisted. ‘The treaty was solemnised by the church!’

Edward glanced at me. ‘And if the Northumbrians go home,’ he said, ‘Eohric will be vulnerable.’

‘When they go home, lord King,’ I pointed out. ‘They might wait till spring.’

‘Eohric can’t feed that many,’ Ealdorman Æthelhelm pointed out. ‘They’ll leave his kingdom quickly! Look at the problems we have in feeding an army.’

‘So you’ll invade in winter?’ I asked scornfully. ‘When the rivers are flooding, the rain is falling and we’re wading in freezing mud?’

‘God is on our side!’ Erkenwald declared.

The army had been in Lundene for almost three months now, and the food supplies of the city were running low. There was no enemy at the gates, so more food was constantly being carted into the storehouses, but that took an immense number of wagons, oxen, horses and men. And the warriors themselves were bored. Some blamed the men of Cent for delaying their arrival and, despite my having hanged a man, there were frequent fights in which dozens of men died. Edward’s army was querulous, underemployed and hungry, but Bishop Erkenwald’s indignation at Eohric’s betrayal of a sacred trust somehow invigorated the council and persuaded the king to make a decision. For weeks we had the Danes at our mercy and granted them mercy, but now they had left Wessex the council suddenly discovered courage. ‘We shall follow the enemy,’ Edward announced, ‘take back what they have stolen from us, and revenge ourselves on King Eohric.’

‘If we’re following them,’ I said, looking at Sigelf, ‘we all need horses.’

‘We have horses,’ Edward pointed out.

‘Not all the men of Cent do,’ I said.

Sigelf bridled at that. He was a man, it seemed to me, ready to take offence at the slightest suggestion of criticism, but he knew I was right. The Danes always moved on horseback, and an army slowed by foot soldiers would never catch them or be able to react quickly to an enemy move. Sigelf scowled at me, but resisted the temptation to snap at me, instead he looked to the king. ‘You could lend us horses?’ he asked Edward. ‘What about the horses of the garrison here?’

‘Weohstan won’t like that,’ Edward said unhappily. A man’s horse was one of his most valuable possessions, and not one that was casually lent to a stranger going to war.

No one spoke for a moment, then Sigelf shrugged. ‘Then let a hundred of my men stay here as garrison troops and your, what was his name, Weohstan? He can send a hundred horsemen to replace them.’

And that was how it was decided. Lundene’s garrison would give the army a hundred horsemen and Sigelf’s men would replace them on the walls, and then at last we could march and so next morning the army left Lundene by the Bishop’s Gate and by the Old Gate. We followed the Roman roads north and east, but it could hardly be called a pursuit. Some of the army, those with experience, travelled light, but too many contingents had brought wagons, servants, and too many spare horses, and we were lucky to travel three miles in an hour. Steapa led half the king’s warriors as a vanguard with orders to stay within sight of the army, and he grumbled that he was forced to travel so slowly. Edward had ordered me to stay with the rearguard, but I disobeyed and went far ahead of Steapa’s men. Æthelflaed and her Mercians came with me. ‘I thought your brother insisted you stayed in Lundene?’ I told her.

‘No,’ she said, ‘he ordered me to go to Cirrenceastre.’

‘So why aren’t you obeying him?’

‘I am obeying him,’ she said, ‘but he didn’t tell me which road to take.’ She smiled at me, daring me to send her away.

‘Just stay alive, woman,’ I growled.

‘Yes, lord,’ she said with mocking humility.

I sent my scouts far ahead, but all they discovered were the hoof-prints of the Danish retreat. Nothing, I thought, made sense. The Danes had assembled an army that probably numbered over five thousand men, they had crossed Britain, invaded Wessex, and then done nothing except take plunder. Now they were retreating, but it could hardly have been a profitable summer for them. Alfred’s burhs had done their work by protecting much of Wessex’s wealth, but staving off the Danes was not the same as defeating them. ‘So why didn’t they attack Wintanceaster?’ Æthelflaed asked me.

‘It’s too strong.’

‘So they just walk away?’

‘Too many leaders,’ I said. ‘They’re probably having councils of war just like us. Everyone has a different idea, they talk, and now they’re going home because they can’t make a decision.’

Lundene lies on the border of East Anglia so on our second day we were deep inside Eohric’s territory and Edward released the army to take its revenge. The troops spread out, plundering farmsteads, rounding up cattle and burning villages. Our progress slowed to a crawl, our presence signified by the great pillars of smoke from burning houses. The Danes did nothing. They had retreated far beyond the frontier and we followed them, dropping from the low hills into the wide East Anglian plain. This was a country of damp fields, wide marshes, long dykes and slow rivers, of reeds and wildfowl, of morning mists and eternal mud, of rain and bitter cold winds from the sea. Roads were few and tracks were treacherous. I told Edward time and again to keep the army closed up, but he was eager to ravage Eohric’s land and so the troops spread wider, and my men, still acting as scouts, had a hard time staying in touch with the farthest flung men. The days were shortening, the nights became colder and there were never enough trees to make all the campfires we needed, so instead men used the timber and thatch from captured buildings and at night those fires spread across a great swathe of land, yet the Danes still did nothing to take advantage of our dispersal. We went ever farther into their realm of water and mud, and still we saw no Danes. We skirted Grantaceaster, heading towards Eleg, and on the higher patches of land we found huge, great-raftered feast-halls, thick thatched with reed that burned with a hard, bright crackle, but the inhabitants of the halls had retreated ever further from us.

On the fourth day I realised where we were. We had been following the remnants of a Roman road that ran straight as a spear across the low land, and I scouted westwards and found the bridge at Eanulfsbirig. It had been repaired with great lengths of rough-cut timber laid across the fire-blackened stonework of the Roman piers. I was on the Use’s western bank, where Sigurd had challenged me, and the road from the bridge ran towards Huntandon. I remembered Ludda telling me there was higher ground on the far side of the river there, and that was where Eohric’s men had planned to ambush me and it seemed likely that Eohric would have the same thought now and so I sent Finan and fifty men to scout that farther bridge. They returned in the middle of the afternoon. ‘Hundreds of Danes,’ Finan said laconically, ‘a fleet of ships. They’re waiting for us.’

‘Hundreds?’

‘Can’t cross the river to count them properly,’ he said, ‘not without getting killed, but I saw a hundred and forty-three ships.’

‘So thousands of Danes,’ I said.

‘Just waiting for us, lord.’

I found Edward in a convent to the south. Ealdorman Æthelhelm and Ealdorman Sigelf were with him, as were Bishop Erkenwald and Father Coenwulf, and I interrupted their supper to give them the news. It was a cold night, and a wet wind was rattling the shutters of the convent’s hall.

‘They want battle?’ Edward asked.

‘What they want, lord,’ I said, ‘is for us to be stupid enough to offer them battle.’

He looked puzzled at that. ‘But if we’ve found them,’ he began.

‘We must destroy them,’ Bishop Erkenwald declared.

‘They’re on the far side of a river we cannot cross,’ I explained, ‘except by the bridge that they are defending. They will slaughter us one by one until we withdraw, and then they’ll follow us like wolves behind a flock. That’s what they want, lord King. They’ve chosen the battlefield and we’re fools to accept their choice.’

‘Lord Uhtred is right,’ Ealdorman Sigelf snapped. I was so surprised that I said nothing.

‘He is,’ Æthelhelm agreed.

Edward plainly wanted to ask what we should do, but he knew the question would make him look weak. I could see him working out the alternatives and was pleased that he chose the right one. ‘The bridge you spoke of,’ he said, ‘Eanulfsbirig?’

‘Yes, lord King.’

‘We can cross it?’

‘Yes, lord King.’

‘So if we cross it we can destroy it?’

‘I would cross it, lord King,’ I said, ‘and march on Bedanford. Invite the Danes to attack us there. That way we choose the battlefield, not them.’

‘That makes sense,’ Edward said hesitantly, looking towards Bishop Erkenwald and Father Coenwulf for support. They both nodded. ‘Then that’s what we’ll do,’ Edward said more confidently.

‘I ask a favour of you, lord King,’ Sigelf said, sounding unnaturally humble.

‘Whatever you wish,’ Edward said graciously.

‘Allow my men to be the rearguard, lord King? If the Danes attack, let my shields take their assault and let the men of Cent defend the army.’

Edward looked surprised and pleased at the request. ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘and thank you, Lord Sigelf.’

And so the orders were sent to all the scattered troops, summoning them to the bridge at Eanulfsbirig. They were to march at first light, and at the same time Sigelf’s Centishmen would advance up the road to confront the Danes just south of Huntandon. We were doing exactly what the Danes had done. We had invaded, destroyed, and now we would withdraw, only we withdrew in chaos.

The dawn brought a bitter cold. Hoar frost touched the fields and the ditches had a skin of ice. I remember that day so well because half the sky was a bright, glittering blue and the other half, all to the east, was grey clouds. It was as though the gods had half dragged a blanket across the world, dividing the sky, and the edge of the clouds was as straight as a blade. That edge was silvered by the sun and beneath it the land was dark, and it was across that land that Edward’s troops straggled westwards. Many had plunder and wanted to use the Roman road, the same road up which Sigelf’s men were advancing. I saw a broken wagon loaded with a millstone. A man was shouting at his warriors to mend the wagon and at the same time was whipping the two helpless oxen. I was with Rollo and twenty-two men and we simply cut the two oxen out of their harness, then pushed the broken wagon with its immense burden into the ditch, shattering the thin ice. ‘That’s my stone,’ the angry man yelled.

‘And this is my sword,’ I snarled back, ‘now get your men west.’

Finan had most of my men close to Huntandon, while I had ordered Osferth to take twenty horsemen and to escort Æthelflaed west of the river. She had obeyed me meekly, which surprised me. I remembered Ludda telling me that there was another road that ran from Huntandon to Eanulfsbirig outside of the great river bend, and so I had warned Edward of that route and then sent Merewalh and his Mercians to guard it. ‘The Danes could try to cut off our retreat,’ I told Edward. ‘They could send ships upriver or use the smaller road, but Merewalh’s scouts should see them if they try either of those things.’

He had nodded. I was not sure he entirely understood what I was saying, but he was now so grateful for my advice that he would probably have nodded if I had told him to send men to guard the dark half of the moon.

‘I can’t be certain they’ll try to cut our retreat,’ I told the king, ‘but as your army crosses the bridge just keep them there. No one marches on Bedanford till we’re all across the river! Draw them up for battle. Once we have every man safe across we can march on Bedanford together. What we don’t do is string the army out along the road.’

We should have had everyone across the river by midday, but chaos ruled. Some troops were lost, others were so laden with plunder that they could only move at a snail’s pace, and Sigelf’s men became entangled with those coming the other way. The Danes should have crossed the river and attacked, but instead they stayed at Huntandon, and Finan watched them from the south. Sigelf did not reach Finan till mid afternoon, and then he arrayed his men across the road about half a mile south of the river. It was a well-chosen position. A straggly stand of trees hid some of his men who were protected on either flank by stretches of marsh, and in front by a flooded ditch. If the Danes crossed the bridge they could draw up their shield wall, but to attack Sigelf they must cross the deep, flooded ditch behind which the Centish shields, swords, axes and spears were waiting.

‘They might try to go around the marshes to attack you from behind,’ I told Sigelf.

‘I’ve fought before,’ he snapped at me.

I did not care if I was offending him. ‘So don’t stay here if they do cross the bridge,’ I told him, ‘just back away. And if they don’t cross I’ll send word when you should rejoin us.’

‘Are you in command?’ he demanded. ‘Or Edward?’

‘I am,’ I said, and he looked startled.

His son, Sigebriht, had listened to the exchange and now accompanied me as I rode north to look at the Danes. ‘Will they attack, lord?’ he asked me.

‘I understand nothing about this war,’ I told him, ‘nothing. The bastards should have attacked us weeks ago.’

‘Perhaps they’re frightened of us,’ he said, then laughed, which I thought curious, but ascribed to youthful foolishness. He was indeed foolish, yet such a handsome fool. He still wore his hair long, tied at the nape of his neck with a leather strip, and around his neck was the pink silk ribbon that still had the faint bloodstain from that morning outside Sceaftesburi. His expensive mail was polished, his gold-panelled belt shone, and his crystal-pommelled sword was sheathed in a scabbard decorated with writhing dragons made from finely-twisted gold wire. His face was strong-boned, bright-eyed, and his skin reddened by the cold. ‘So they should have attacked us,’ he said, ‘but what should we have done?’

‘Attacked them at Cracgelad,’ I said.

‘Why didn’t we?’

‘Because Edward was frightened of losing Lundene,’ I said, ‘and he was waiting for your father.’

‘He needs us,’ Sigebriht said with evident satisfaction.

‘What he needed,’ I said, ‘was an assurance of Cent’s loyalty.’

‘He doesn’t trust us?’ Sigebriht asked disingenuously.

‘Why should he?’ I asked savagely. ‘You supported Æthelwold and sent messengers to Sigurd. Of course he didn’t trust you.’

‘I submitted to Edward, lord,’ Sigebriht said humbly. He glanced at me and decided he needed to say more. ‘I admit all you say, lord, but there is a madness in youth, is there not?’

‘Madness?’

‘My father says young men are bewitched to madness.’ He fell silent a moment. ‘I loved Ecgwynn,’ he said wistfully. ‘Did you ever meet her?’

‘No.’

‘She was small, lord, like an elf, and as beautiful as the dawn. She could turn a man’s blood to fire.’

‘Madness,’ I said.

‘But she chose Edward,’ he said, ‘and it maddened me.’

‘And now?’ I asked.

‘The heart mends,’ he said feelingly, ‘it leaves a scar, but I’m not foolish-mad. Edward is king and he’s been good to me.’

‘And there are other women,’ I said.

‘Thank God, yes,’ he said and laughed again.

I liked him at that moment. I had never trusted him, but he was surely right that there are women who drive us to madness and to foolishness, and the heart does mend, even if the scar remains, and then we ended the conversation because Finan was galloping towards us and the river was before us and the Danes were in sight.

The Use was wide here. The clouds had slowly covered the windless sky so that the river was grey and flat. A dozen swans moved slow on the slow-moving water. It seemed to me that the world was still, even the Danes were quiet and they were there in their hundreds, their thousands, their banners bright beneath the darkening cloud. ‘How many?’ I asked Finan.

‘Too many, lord,’ he said, an answer I deserved because it was impossible to count the enemy who were hidden by the houses of the small town. More were spread along the river banks either side of the town. I could see Sigurd’s flying raven banner on the higher ground at the town’s centre, and Cnut’s flag of the axe and broken cross at the far side of the bridge. There were Saxons there too, because Beortsig’s symbol of the boar was displayed alongside Æthelwold’s stag. Downriver of the bridge was a fleet of Danish ships moored thick along the farther bank, but only seven had been dismasted and brought beneath the bridge, which suggested the Danes had no thought of using their boats to advance upriver to Eanulfsbirig.

‘So why aren’t they attacking?’ I asked.

None had crossed the bridge, which, of course, had been made by the Romans. I sometimes think that if the Romans had never invaded Britain we would never have managed to cross a river. On the southern bank, close to where we stood our horses, was a dilapidated Roman house and a huddle of thatched cottages. It would have been a fine place for the Danish vanguard, but for some reason they seemed content to wait on the far northern bank.

It began to rain. It was a thin, sharp rain, and it brought a gust of wind that rippled the river about the swans. The sun was low in the west, the sky there still free of cloud, so that it seemed to me that the land across the river and the bright-shielded Danes glowed in a world of grey shadow. I could see a smoke plume much farther north, and that was strange because whatever burned was in Eohric’s territory and we had no men that far north. Perhaps, I thought, it was just a trick of the clouds or an accidental fire. ‘Does your father listen to you?’ I asked Sigebriht.

‘Yes, lord.’

‘Tell him we’ll send a messenger when he can begin to withdraw.’

‘Till then we stay?’

‘Unless the Danes attack, yes,’ I said, ‘and one other thing. Watch those bastards.’ I pointed to the Danes who were furthest west. ‘There’s a road that goes outside the river bend and if you see the enemy using that road, send us a message.’

He frowned in thought. ‘Because they might try to block our retreat?’

‘Exactly,’ I said, pleased he had understood, ‘and if they manage to cut the road to Bedanford then we’ll have to fight them back and front.’

‘And that’s where we’re going?’ he asked. ‘To Bedanford?’

‘Yes.’

‘And that’s to the west?’ he asked.

‘To the west,’ I told Sigebriht, ‘but you won’t have to find your own way there. You’ll be back with the army this evening.’ What I did not tell him was that I was leaving most of my men not far behind the Centish troops. Sigebriht’s father Sigelf was such a proud man and so difficult to deal with that he would have immediately accused me of not trusting him if he had known my men were close. In truth I wanted my own eyes close to Huntandon, and Finan had the keenest eyes of anyone I knew.

I left Finan on the road a half-mile south of Sigelf, then took a dozen men back to Eanulfsbirig. It was dusk as I arrived and the chaos was at last subsiding. Bishop Erkenwald had ridden back up the road and ordered the slowest, heaviest wagons abandoned, and Edward’s army was now gathering in the fields across the river. If the Danes did attack they would be forced to cross the bridge into an army, or else march around by the bad road that skirted the outside of the river bend. ‘Is Merewalh still guarding that road, lord King?’ I asked Edward.

‘He is, he says there’s no sign of the enemy.’

‘Good. Where’s your sister?’

‘I sent her back to Bedanford.’

‘And she went?’

He smiled, ‘She did!’

It was now plain that the whole army, except for my men and Sigelf’s rearguard, would be safe across the Use before nightfall and so I sent Sihtric back up the road with a message for both forces to retire as fast as possible. ‘Tell them to come to the bridge and cross it.’ Once that was done, and so long as no Danes tried to outflank us, then we would have escaped the Danish choice of battlefield. ‘And tell Finan to let Sigelf’s men go first,’ I told Sihtric. I wanted Finan as the real rearguard, because no other warrior in the army was so reliable.

‘You look tired, lord,’ Edward said sympathetically.

‘I am tired, lord King.’

‘It’ll be at least an hour before Ealdorman Sigelf reaches us,’ Edward said, ‘so rest.’

I made sure my dozen men and horses were resting, then ate a poor meal of hard bread and pounded beans. The rain was falling harder now, and an east wind made the evening cruelly cold. The king had his quarters in one of the cottages we had half destroyed to burn the bridge, but somehow his servants had found a piece of sailcloth with which to make a roof. A fire burned in the hearth, swirling smoke under the makeshift canopy. Two priests were arguing quietly as I settled close to the fire. Against the far wall was a pile of precious boxes, silver, gold and crystal, which held the relics that the king would take on campaign to ensure his god’s favour. The priests were disagreeing over whether one of the reliquaries contained a splinter from Noah’s ark or a toenail of Saint Patrick, and I ignored them.

I half dozed, and I was thinking how strange it was that all the people who had affected my life over the last three years were suddenly in one place, or close to one place. Sigurd, Beortsig, Edward, Cnut, Æthelwold, Æthelflaed, Sigebriht, all of them gathered in this cold, wet corner of East Anglia and surely, I thought, that was significant. The three Norns were weaving the threads close together, and that had to be for a purpose. I looked for a pattern in the weave, but saw none, and my thoughts drifted as I half fell asleep. I woke when Edward stooped through the low door. It was dark outside now, black dark. ‘Sigelf isn’t retreating,’ he spoke to the two priests, his tone querulous.

‘Lord King?’ one of them asked.

‘Sigelf is being stubborn,’ the king said, holding his hands to the fire. ‘He’s staying where he is! I’ve told him to retreat, but he won’t.’

‘He’s what?’ I asked, suddenly fully awake.

Edward seemed startled to see me. ‘It’s Sigelf,’ he said, ‘he’s ignoring my messengers! You sent a man to him, didn’t you? And I’ve sent five more! Five! But they come back telling me he’s refusing to retreat! He says it’s too dark and he’s waiting for the dawn, but God knows he’s risking his men. The Danes will be awake at first light.’ He sighed. ‘I’ve just sent another man with orders that they must retreat.’ He paused, frowning. ‘I’m right, aren’t I?’ he asked me, needing reassurance.

I did not answer. I stayed silent because at last I saw what the Norns were doing. I saw the pattern in the weave of all our lives and I understood, finally, the war that passed all understanding. My face must have looked shocked because Edward was staring at me. ‘Lord King,’ I said, ‘order the army to march back across the bridge, then join Sigelf. Do you understand?’

‘You want me to…’ he began, confused.

‘The whole army!’ I shouted. ‘Every man! March them to Sigelf now!’ I shouted at him as though he were my underling and not my king, because if he disobeyed me now he would not be a king much longer. Maybe it was already too late, but there was no time to explain it to him. There was a kingdom to be saved. ‘March them now,’ I snarled at him, ‘back the way we came, back to Sigelf, and hurry!’

And I ran for my horse.

I took my twelve men. We led the horses over the bridge, then mounted and followed the road towards Huntandon. It was a black night, black and cold, rain spitting into our faces and we could not ride fast. I remember being assailed by doubt. Suppose I was wrong? If I was wrong then I was leading Edward’s army back into the battleground the Danes had chosen. I was stranding them in the river loop, perhaps with Danes on every side, but I resisted the doubt. Nothing had made sense, and now it all made sense, all except for the fires that burned far to the north. There had been one smoke plume in the afternoon, now I could see three huge blazes, betrayed by their reflected glow on the low clouds. Why would the Danes be burning halls or villages in King Eohric’s land? It was another mystery, but not one I worried about because the fires were far off, a long way beyond Huntandon.

It was an hour before a sentry challenged us. It was one of my men and he led us to where Finan had the remainder in a patch of woodland. ‘I didn’t retreat,’ Finan explained, ‘because Sigelf isn’t moving. God knows why.’

‘You remember when we were in Hrofeceastre,’ I asked him, ‘talking to Bishop Swithwulf?’

‘I remember.’

‘What were they loading onto the ships?’

There was a moment’s pause as Finan realised what I was saying. ‘Horses,’ he said quietly.

‘Horses for Frankia,’ I said, ‘and Sigelf comes to Lundene and claims he doesn’t have enough horses for his men.’

‘So now a hundred of his men are part of Lundene’s garrison,’ Finan said.

‘And ready to open the gates when the Danes arrive,’ I continued, ‘because Sigelf is sworn to Æthelwold or to Sigurd or to whoever has promised him the throne of Cent.’

‘Jesus and Joseph,’ Finan said.

‘And the Danes haven’t been indecisive,’ I said, ‘they were waiting for Sigelf to declare his loyalty. Now they have it, and the Centish bastard isn’t retreating because he expects the Danes to join him, and maybe they already have, and they think we’re going west and they’ll march fast southwards and Sigelf’s men in Lundene will open the gates and the city will fall while we’re still waiting for the earslings in Bedanford.’

‘So what do we do?’ Finan asked.

‘Stop them, of course.’

‘How?’

‘By changing sides, of course,’ I said.

How else?

Thirteen

Doubt weakens the will. Suppose I was wrong? Suppose Sigelf was simply a stubborn and stupid old man who really did think it was too dark to retreat? But though the doubts assailed me I kept on, leading my men east around the marshland that anchored the right of Sigelf’s line.

The wind was sharp, the night was freezing, the rain malevolent and the darkness absolute, and if it had not been for the Centish campfires we would surely have been lost. A slew of fires marked Sigelf’s position, and there were still more just to the north, which told me that at least some Danes had now crossed the river and were sheltering from the weather in the hovels around the old Roman house. Those mysterious great fires, the big glow of burning halls, also showed much farther north, and those three I could not explain.

So much, and not just those distant fires, defied understanding. Some Danes had crossed the river, but the glow of fires on the northern bank told me that most still remained in Huntandon, which was strange if they intended to move southwards. Sigelf’s men had not moved from where I had left them, which meant there was a gap between his men and the nearest Danes, and that gap was my opportunity.

I had left our horses behind, all of them tethered in woodland, and my men were on foot and carrying shields and weapons. The fires guided us, but for a long time we were so far from the nearest blaze that we could not see the ground and so we stumbled, fell, struggled, waded, and forced our way through the marsh. At least once I was up to my waist in water, the mud was clinging to my boots and the tussocks were tripping me, while startled birds screamed as they flew into the night, and that noise, I thought, must surely warn our enemies that we were on their flank, yet they seemed oblivious.

I sometimes lie awake in the long nights of old age and I think of the mad things I have done, the risks, the dice throws that challenged the gods. I remember assaulting the fort at Beamfleot, or facing Ubba, or creeping up the hill at Dunholm, yet almost none of those lunacies rivalled that cold, wet night in East Anglia. I led one hundred and thirty-four men through the winter darkness, and we were attacking between two enemy forces that together numbered at least four thousand. If we were caught, if we were challenged, if we were defeated then we would have nowhere to run and no place to hide except in our graves.

I had ordered all my Danes to be the vanguard. Men like Sihtric and Rollo, whose native tongue was Danish, men who had come to serve me after losing their lords, men who were sworn to me even though we fought against other Danes. I had seventeen such men, and to them I added my dozen Frisians. ‘When we attack,’ I had told them, ‘you shout Sigurd.’

‘Sigurd,’ one of them said.

‘Sigurd!’ I repeated. ‘Sigelf’s men must think we’re Danes.’ I gave the same instruction to my Saxons. ‘You shout Sigurd! That’s your war cry till the horn sounds. You shout and you kill, but be ready to pull back when the horn sounds.’

This was going to be a dance with death. For some reason I thought of poor Ludda, slaughtered in my service, and how he had told me that all magic is making someone think one thing while, in truth, another is happening. ‘You make them watch your right hand, lord,’ he told me once, ‘while your left is picking their purse.’

So now I would make the men of Cent believe they had been betrayed by their allies, and if the trick worked I hoped to turn them back into good men of Wessex. And if it failed then Ælfadell’s prophecy would come true and Uhtred of Bebbanburg would die in this miserable winter swamp and I would kill most of my men alongside me. And how I loved those men! On that miserable cold night as we advanced to a desperate fight they were full of enthusiasm. They trusted me as I trusted them. Together we would make reputation, we would have men in halls across Britain telling the story of our exploit. Or of our deaths. They were friends, they were oath-men, they were young, they were warriors, and with such men it might be possible to storm the gates of Asgard itself.

It seemed to take for ever to make that short journey through the marshland. I kept glancing anxiously eastwards, hoping the dawn would not break, then looking north-wards, hoping the Danes would not join Sigelf’s men. As we drew closer I saw two horsemen on the road, and that took away my doubts. Messengers were travelling between the two forces. The Danes, I supposed, were waiting for the first light before they left the shelter of Huntandon’s houses and moved south, but once they did move they would march swiftly on Lundene unless we stopped them.

And then, at last, we were close to Sigelf’s fires. His men were sleeping or just sitting close to the flames. I had forgotten the ditch that protected them and slid into it, my shield clattering as I fell. Ice cracked as I slithered into the water. A dog barked from the Centish lines, and a man glanced in our direction, but saw nothing to worry him. Another man hit the dog and someone laughed.

I hissed at four of my men to join me in the ditch. They stood there, making a line across it, and those four guided the rest down the treacherously slippery bank, through the water and up the farther side. My boots squelched as I climbed the far bank. I crouched there as my men came over the ditch and as they spread into a battle line. ‘Shield wall!’ I hissed the order at my vanguard of Danes and Frisians. ‘Osferth?’

‘Lord?’

‘You know what to do.’

‘Yes, lord.’

‘Then do it.’

I had given Osferth almost half my men and careful instructions. He hesitated. ‘I’ve prayed for you, lord,’ he said.

‘Then let’s hope the damned prayers work,’ I whispered, and touched the hammer around my neck.

My men were forming the shield wall. Any moment, I thought, someone would see us, and the enemy, because for the moment Sigelf’s men were our enemy, would make their own shield wall and would outnumber us by four or five to one, but victory does not come to men who listen to their fears. My shield touched Rollo’s and I drew Serpent-Breath. Her long blade sighed through the scabbard’s throat. ‘Sigurd!’ I hissed. Then louder, ‘Forward!’

We charged. We bellowed our enemy’s name as we ran, ‘Sigurd!’ we shouted, ‘Sigurd! Sigurd!’

‘And kill!’ I shouted in Danish. ‘Kill!’

We killed. We were killing Saxons, men of Wessex, though this night they had been betrayed by their ealdorman into serving the Danes, yet we killed them and ever since there have been rumours of what we did that night. I deny them, of course, but few believe my denials. At first the killing was easy. The Centishmen were half asleep, off-guard, their sentries looking towards the south instead of guarding against an attack from the north, and we sliced and hacked our way deep into their encampment. ‘Sigurd!’ I shouted, and stabbed Serpent-Breath into a waking man, then kicked him into the campfire and heard him scream as I backswung the blade against a youngster, and we were not taking the time to finish off the men we attacked, but leaving that to the rank behind us. We crippled the men of Cent, wounded them, downed them, and the men who followed stabbed down with sword or spear and I heard men shouting for mercy, shouting that they were on our side, and I bellowed our war cry even louder. ‘Sigurd! Sigurd!’

That first charge took us a third of the way into their encampment. Men fled from us. I heard a man bellowing to form a shield wall, but panic had spread through Sigelf’s men. I watched a man trying to find his own shield from a pile, desperately tugging at the arm straps and watching us with terrified eyes. He abandoned the shields and ran. A spear arced through the firelight, vanishing over my shoulder. Our shield wall had lost its cohesion, but it did not need to be tight because the enemy was scattering, though it would only be moments before they realised how ridiculously small my attacking force was, but then the gods proved they were on our side because Ealdorman Sigelf himself galloped towards us on horseback. ‘We’re with you!’ he shouted. ‘For God’s sake, you damned fools, we’re with you!’

My helmet cheek-pieces were closed. We carried no banner, because that had gone with Osferth. Sigelf had no idea who I was, though he undoubtedly saw the richness of my helmet and the finely-forged links of my mud-spattered mail. I held up my sword, checking my men.

Sigelf was shaking with fury. ‘You damned fools,’ he snarled, ‘who are you?’

‘You’re on our side?’ I asked.

‘We’re allied with Jarl Sigurd, you damned fool, and I’ll have your head for this!’

I smiled, though he did not see my smile behind the glinting steel of the cheek-pieces. ‘Lord,’ I said humbly, then backswung Serpent-Breath into his horse’s mouth and the beast reared up, screaming, blood frothing in the night, and Sigelf fell backwards from the saddle. I hauled him down to the mud, slapped the horse’s rump to send it charging into the ealdorman’s scattered men, then kicked Sigelf in the face as he tried to get up. I put my right boot on his skinny chest and pinned him to the ground. ‘I’m Uhtred,’ I said, but only loud enough for Sigelf himself to hear me. ‘You hear me, traitor? I’m Uhtred,’ and I saw his eyes widen before I rammed the sword hard down into his scrawny throat and his scream turned to a gurgle and the blood spilled wide onto the damp ground and he was twisting and shaking as he died.

‘Horn!’ I called to Oswi. ‘Now!’

The horn sounded. My men knew what to do. They turned back towards the marsh, retreating into the dark beyond the fires, and as they went a second horn sounded and I saw Osferth leading a shield wall from the trees. My banner of the wolf’s head and Osferth’s charred cross showed above the advancing wall. ‘Men of Cent!’ Osferth shouted. ‘Men of Cent, your king is coming to save you! To me! To me! Form on me!’

Osferth was the son of a king, and all his ancient lineage was in his voice. In a night of cold and chaos and death, he sounded confident and certain. Men who had seen their ealdorman cut down, who had seen his blood splash colour into the firelit dark, went towards Osferth and joined his shield wall because he promised safety. My men were retreating into the shadows, then going southwards to join Osferth’s right flank. I pulled off my helmet and tossed it to Oswi, then strode along the face of the growing shield wall. ‘Edward sent us to save you!’ I shouted at the Centishmen. ‘The Danes betrayed you! The king is coming with all his army! Form the wall! Shields up!’

There was a grey edge to the eastern sky. The rain was still spitting, but dawn was close. I glanced north and saw horsemen. The Danes must have wondered why the sound of battle and the bray of horns had disturbed the night’s ending, and some were riding down the road to see for themselves and what they saw was a growing shield wall. They saw my banner of the wolf’s head, they saw Osferth’s blackened cross, and they saw men lying amidst the wreckage of the fires. Sigelf’s leaderless men were still in chaos, with no more idea than the Danes what was happening, but our shield wall offered safety and they were picking up their own shields, their helmets and weapons and running to join the ranks. Finan and Osferth were pushing men into position. A tall man, helmetless, but carrying a bare sword ran to me. ‘What’s happening?’

‘Who are you?’

‘Wulferth,’ he said.

‘And who is Wulferth?’ I asked, sounding calm. He was a thegn, one of Sigelf’s richer followers, who had brought forty-three men to East Anglia. ‘Your lord is dead,’ I said, ‘and the Danes will attack us very soon.’

‘Who are you?’

‘Uhtred of Bebbanburg,’ I said, ‘and Edward is coming. We have to hold the Danes till the king reaches us.’ I plucked Wulferth’s elbow and walked him towards the western marsh on the left of our defensive position. ‘Form your men here,’ I said, ‘and fight for your country, for Cent, for Wessex.’

‘For God!’ Osferth shouted from close by.

‘Even for God,’ I said.

‘But…’ Wulferth began, still confused by the night’s events.

I looked him in the eye. ‘Who do you want to fight for? Wessex or the Danes?’

He hesitated, not because he was unsure of the answer, but because everything was changing and he was still trying to understand what was happening. He had expected to march south towards Lundene, and instead he was being asked to fight.

‘Well?’ I prompted him.

‘Wessex, lord.’

‘Then fight well,’ I said, ‘and you’re in charge of this flank. Form your men, tell them the king is coming.’

I had seen no sign of Sigebriht, but as the weak grey daylight suffused the east I saw him approaching from the north. He had been with the Danes, doubtless sleeping in whatever warmth and comfort Huntandon had to offer, while now he was on horseback and behind him a man carried the standard of the bull’s head. ‘Oswi!’ I shouted. ‘Find me a horse! Finan! Six men, six horses! Wulferth!’ I turned back on the thegn.

‘Lord?’

‘Find Sigelf’s banner, have a man raise it next to mine.’

There were plenty of Centish horses tethered in the woods behind our position. Oswi brought me one, ready saddled, and I hauled myself up and kicked the animal towards Sigebriht who had stopped some fifty or sixty paces away. He and his standard-bearer were with five other men, none of whom I knew. I did not want the men of Cent responding to that bull’s head flag, but luckily the rain made it hang damp and forlorn.

I curbed the horse close to Sigebriht. ‘You want to make a name for yourself, boy?’ I challenged him. ‘Kill me now.’

He looked past me to where his father’s troops were readying for battle. ‘Where’s my father?’ he asked.

‘Dead,’ I said, and drew Serpent-Breath. ‘This killed him.’

‘Then I’m ealdorman,’ he said, and he took a deep breath and I knew he was going to shout at his father’s men to demand their loyalty, but before he could speak I had kicked the borrowed horse forward and brought the blade up.

‘Talk to me, boy,’ I said, holding Serpent-Breath close to his face, ‘not to them.’

Finan had joined me and five more of my men were just paces away now.

Sigebriht was frightened, but forced himself to look brave. ‘You’ll all die,’ he said.

‘Probably,’ I agreed, ‘but we’ll take you with us.’

His horse backed away and I let it take him out of reach of my sword. I looked past him and saw contingents of Danes crossing the bridge. Why had they waited? If they had crossed the previous evening they could have joined Sigelf and been marching south by now, but something had held them back. Then I remembered those mysterious fires burning in the night, the three great blazes of burning halls or fiery villages. Had someone attacked the Danish rear? It was the only explanation for the Danish delay, but who? Yet the Danes were crossing the river now, hundreds of them, thousands, and streaming over the bridge with them were Æthelwold’s men and Beortsig’s Mercians, and I reckoned the enemy army outnumbered us by at least eight to one.

‘I give you three choices, puppy,’ I spoke to Sigebriht. ‘You can join us and fight for your rightful king, or you can fight against me, you and me, right here, or you can run away to your Danish masters.’

He looked at me, but found it difficult to hold my gaze. ‘I’ll feed your carcass to the dogs,’ he said, trying to sound scornful.

I just stared at him and he finally turned away. He and his men rode back to the Danes and I watched him go, and only when he had vanished among the enemy’s thickening ranks did I turn the horse and walk it back to our shield wall. ‘Men of Cent!’ I curbed the horse in front of them. ‘Your ealdorman was a traitor to his country and to his god! The Danes promised to make him king, but when have the Danes ever kept a promise? They wanted you to fight for them, and when you had done their work they planned to take your wives and your daughters for their pleasure! They promised Æthelwold the throne of Wessex, but do any of you think he would keep the throne longer than a month? The Danes want Wessex! They want Cent! They want our fields, they want our women, they want our cattle, they want our children! And tonight they treacherously attacked you! Why? Because they decided they didn’t need you! They have enough men without you so they decided to kill you!’

Much of what I had told them was true. I looked along the Centish ranks, along the shields and spears and axes and swords. I saw anxious faces, scared faces. ‘I am Uhtred of Bebbanburg,’ I shouted, ‘and you know who I am and who I have killed. You’ll fight alongside me now, and all we need do is hold this treacherous enemy at bay until our king reaches us. He’s coming!’ I hoped that was true, because if it was not then this day would be my death-day. ‘He’s close,’ I shouted, ‘and when he reaches us we will slaughter those Danes like wolves ravaging lambs. You!’ I pointed at a priest. ‘Why are we fighting?’

‘For the cross, lord,’ he said.

‘Louder!’

‘For the cross!’

‘Osferth! Where’s your banner?’

‘I have it, lord!’ Osferth shouted.

‘Then let us see it!’ I waited till Osferth’s cross was at the front and centre of our line. ‘That is our banner!’ I shouted, pointing Serpent-Breath at the charred cross and hoping my own gods would forgive me. ‘Today you fight for your god, for your country, for your wives and for your families, because if you lose,’ I paused again, ‘if you lose then all those things will be gone for ever!’

And from behind me, from beside the houses close to the river, the thunder began. The Danes were clashing their spears and swords against their shields, making the war-thunder, the noise to weaken a man’s heart, and it was time to dismount and take my place in the shield wall.

The shield wall.

It terrifies, there is no place more terrible than the shield wall. It is the place where we die and where we conquer and where we make our reputation. I touched Thor’s hammer, prayed that Edward was coming, and readied to fight.

In the shield wall.

I knew the Danes would try to get behind us, but that would take time. They needed to either skirt the marshland or find a way across the swamp, and neither could be done in less than an hour, probably two. I had a messenger back down the road with orders to find Edward and urge haste on him, because his troops were the only ones who could block a Danish encirclement. And if the Danes did try to surround us, they would also want to pin me in place, which meant I could expect a frontal attack to keep me busy while part of their forces looked for a way to reach our rear.

And if Edward did not come?

Then this was where I would die, where Ælfadell’s prophecy would come true, where some man would claim the boast that he had killed Uhtred.

The Danes advanced slowly. Men do not relish the shield wall. They do not rush to death’s embrace. You look ahead and see the overlapping shields, the helmets, the glint of axes and spears and swords, and you know you must go into the reach of those blades, into the place of death, and it takes time to summon the courage, to heat the blood, to let the madness overtake caution. That is why men drink before battle. My own men had no ale or mead, though the Centish forces had enough and I could see the Danes passing skins down their line. They were still beating their weapons on their willow shields and the day was lightening to cast long shadows across the frost. I had seen horsemen go east and knew they were looking for a way around my flank, but I could not worry about those men for I did have enough troops to counter them. I had to hold the Danes in front till Edward came to kill those behind.

Priests were walking down our line. Men knelt to them and the priests blessed them and put pinches of mud on their tongues. ‘This is Saint Lucy’s Day,’ one priest called to the shield-warriors, ‘and she will blind the enemy! She will protect us! Blessed Saint Lucy! Pray to Saint Lucy!’

The rain had stopped, though much of the winter sky was still shrouded by cloud beneath which the enemy banners were bright. Sigurd’s flying raven and Cnut’s shattered cross, Æthelwold’s stag and Beortsig’s boar, Haesten’s skull and Eohric’s weird beast. There were lesser jarls among the enemy ranks and they had their own symbols; wolves and axes and bulls and hawks. Their men shouted insults and beat their weapons on their shields, and slowly they came forward, a few steps at a time. The Saxons and East Anglians of the enemy army were being encouraged by their priests, while the Danes were calling on Thor or Odin. My men were mostly silent, though I suppose they made jokes to cover their fear. Hearts were beating faster, bladders emptying, muscles shaking. This was the shield wall.

‘Remember!’ the Centish priest shouted, ‘that Saint Lucy was so filled with the Holy Spirit that twenty men could not move her! They harnessed a team of oxen to her and still she could not be moved! That is how you must be when the pagans come! Immovable! Filled by the Spirit! Fight for Saint Lucy!’

The men who had gone eastwards had vanished in a morning mist that seeped from the marshes. There were so many of the enemy, a horde, a killing horde, and they came closer still, a hundred paces, and horsemen galloped in front of their tightknit shield wall and called encouragement. One of those horsemen slewed towards us. He wore bright mail, thick arm rings and a glittering helmet, and his horse was a magnificent beast, newly groomed and oiled, its harness bright with silver. ‘You’re going to die!’ he shouted at us.

‘If you want to fart,’ I shouted back, ‘go to your own side and stink them out.’

‘We’ll rape your wives,’ the man called. He spoke in English. ‘We’ll rape your daughters!’

I was happy enough that he should call such hopes, for they would only encourage my men to fight. ‘What was your mother?’ a Centishman called back. ‘A sow?’

‘If you lay your weapons down,’ the man shouted, ‘then we shall spare you!’ He turned his horse and I recognised him. He was Oscytel, Eohric’s commander, the brutal-looking warrior I had met on Lundene’s wall.

‘Oscytel!’ I shouted.

‘I hear a lamb bleating!’ he called back.

‘Get off your horse,’ I said, taking a step forward, ‘and fight me.’

He rested his hands on his saddle’s pommel and stared at me, then he glanced at the flooded ditch that had sheets of thin ice crusting its water. I knew that was why he had come, not just to insult, but to see what obstacle faced the Danish charge. He looked back to me and grinned. ‘I don’t fight old men,’ he said.

That was strange. No one had ever called me old before. I remember laughing, but there was shock behind my laughter. Weeks before, talking with Æthelflaed, I had mocked her because she was staring at her face in a great silver platter. She was worried because she had lines about her eyes and she had responded to my mockery by thrusting the plate at me, and I had looked at my reflection and seen that my beard was grey. I remember staring at it as she laughed at me, and I did not feel old even though my wounded leg could be treacherously stiff. Was that how people saw me? As an old man? Yet I was forty-five years old that year, so yes, I was an old man. ‘This old man will slit you from the balls to the throat,’ I called to Oscytel.

‘This day Uhtred dies!’ he shouted at my men. ‘And you all die with him!’ With that he circled his horse and spurred back towards the Danish shield wall. Those shields were eighty paces away now. Close enough to see men’s faces, to see the snarls. I could see Jarl Sigurd, magnificent in mail and with a black bear’s pelt humped from his shoulders. His helmet was crested with a raven’s wing, black in the dawn’s grey light. I could see Cnut, the man with the quick sword, his cloak white, his thin face pale, his banner the broken Christian cross. Sigebriht was beside Eohric, who in turn was flanked by Æthelwold, and with them were their fiercest, strongest warriors, the men who had to keep the kings and the jarls and lords alive. Warriors were touching crosses or hammers. They were shouting, but what they bellowed I could not tell because the world seemed silent in that moment. I was watching the enemy ahead, judging which one would come to kill me and how I would kill him first.

My banner was behind me and that banner would attract ambitious men. They wanted my skull as a drinking cup, my name as a trophy. They watched me as I watched them and they saw a man covered in mud, but a warlord with a wolf-crested helmet and arm rings of gold and with close-linked mail and a cloak of darkest blue hemmed with golden threads and a sword that was famous throughout Britain. Serpent-Breath was famous, but I sheathed her anyway, because a long blade is no help in the shield wall’s embrace, and instead I drew Wasp-Sting, short and lethal. I kissed her blade then bellowed my challenge at the winter wind. ‘Come and kill me! Come and kill me!’

And they came.

The spears came first, launched by men in the third or fourth enemy ranks, and we took them on our shields, the blades thumping hard into the willow, and the Danes were screaming as they rushed us. They must have been warned about the ditch, but even so it trapped scores of men who tried to leap it and instead skidded on our bank, their feet flying out from under them as our long-hafted axes flashed down. When we practise the shield wall I put an axeman next to a swordsman, and the axeman’s job is to hook his blade over the rim of the enemy’s shield and haul it down so the sword can slide over the top and into the enemy’s face, but now the axes crunched down through helmets and skulls and suddenly the world exploded in noise, in screams, in the butcher’s sound of blades cleaving skulls, and the men behind the Danes’ first rank were pushing through the ditch and their long spears were thumping into our shields. ‘Close up!’ I bellowed. ‘Shields touching! Shields touching! Forward a pace!’

Our shields overlapped. We had spent hours practising this. Our shields made a wall as we pushed forward to the ditch’s edge where the steepness of the slick bank made the killing easy. A fallen man tried to stab his sword up under my shield, but I kicked him in the face and my iron-reinforced boot slammed into his nose and eyes and he slid back and I was thrusting Wasp-Sting forward, finding the gap between two enemy shields, ramming the stiff short blade through mail into flesh, shouting, always watching their eyes, seeing the axe come down and aware that Cerdic, behind me, caught it on his shield, though the force of the blow hammered his shield down onto my helmet and for a moment I was dazed and blinded, but still grinding Wasp-Sting forward. Rollo, beside me, had hooked a shield down and as my vision cleared I saw the gap and flicked Wasp-Sting into it, saw her tip take an eye, skewered it hard. A massive blow hit my shield, splintering a board.

Cnut was trying to reach me, bellowing at his men to make space, and that was foolish because it meant they lost their cohesion to let their lord come to the killing place. Cnut and his men were in a frenzy, desperate to break our wall, and their shields were not overlapping and the ditch trapped them and two of my men drove spears hard into the oncoming men. Cnut tripped on one and sprawled in the ditch and I saw Rypere’s axe smash into his helmet, only a glancing blow, but hard enough to stun him because he did not get up. ‘They’re dying!’ I shouted. ‘Now kill all the bastards!’

Cnut was not dead, but his men were dragging him away and in his place came Sigurd Sigurdson, the puppy who had promised to kill me, and he screamed wild-eyed as he charged up the ditch, feet flailing for purchase, and I swung my damaged shield outwards to give him a target and like a fool he took it, lunging his sword Fire-Dragon hard at my belly, but the shield came back fast, deflecting Fire-Dragon between my body and Rollo, and I half turned as I drove Wasp-Sting up at his neck. He had forgotten his lessons, forgotten to protect himself with his shield, and the short blade went under his chin, up through his mouth, breaking teeth, piercing his tongue, shattering the small nasal bones and jarring into his skull so hard that I lifted him off the earth for a moment as his blood poured down my hand and inside my mail sleeve, and then I shook him off the blade and swept it backhanded at a Dane who recoiled, fell, and I let another man kill him because Oscytel was coming, shouting that I was an old man, and the battle-joy was in me.

That joy. That madness. The gods must feel this way every moment of every day. It is as if the world slows. You see the attacker, you see him shouting though you hear nothing, and you know what he will do, and all his movements are so slow and yours are so quick, and in that moment you can do no wrong and you will live for ever and your name will be blazoned across the heavens in a glory of white fire because you are the god of battle.

And Oscytel came with his sword, and with him was a man who wanted to hook my shield down with an axe, but I tipped the top back towards me at the last moment and the axe skidded down the painted wood to strike the boss and Oscytel was slamming his sword two-handed at my throat, but the shield was still there and its iron rim caught his blade, trapping the tip, and I thrust the shield forward, unbalancing him, and drove Wasp-Sting under the lower edge, and all my old man’s strength was in that wicked blow that comes from beneath the shield, and I felt the blade’s tip scraping up a thigh bone, ripping blood and flesh and muscle, and into his groin and I heard him then. I heard his scream filling the sky as I gouged his groin and spilled his blood into the ice-shattered ditch.

Eohric saw his champion fall and the sight stopped him at the ditch’s far side. His men stopped with him. ‘Shields!’ I shouted, and my men lined their shields. ‘You’re a coward, Eohric,’ I called, ‘a fat coward, a pig spawned in shit, runt of a sow’s litter, a weakling! Come and die, you fat bastard!’

He did not want to, but the Danes were winning. Not, perhaps, in the centre of the line where my banner flew, but off to our left the Danes had crossed the ditch and made a shield wall on our side of the obstacle and there they were thrusting Wulferth’s men back. I had left Finan and thirty men as our reserve and they had gone to bolster that flank, but they were hard pressed, hugely outnumbered, and once the Danes came between that flank and the western marsh then they would curl my line in on itself and we would die. The Danes knew it and took confidence from it, and still more men came to kill me because my name was the name that the poets would give to their glory, and Eohric was thrust across the ditch with the rest of the men and they tripped on the dead, slipped in the mud, climbed over their own dead, and we screamed our war song as the axes fell and the spears stabbed and the swords cut. My shield was in scraps, hacked by blades. My head was bruised, I could feel blood on my left ear, but still we were fighting and killing, and Eohric was gritting his teeth and flailing with a huge sword at Cerdic, who had replaced the man on my left. ‘Hook him,’ I snarled at Cerdic, and he brought his axe up from beneath and the beard of the blade snagged in Eohric’s mail and Cerdic hauled him forward and I hacked Wasp-Sting down on the back of his fat neck and he was screaming as he fell at our feet. His men tried to rescue him, and I saw him stare up at me in despair, and he clenched his teeth so hard that they shattered and we killed King Eohric of East Anglia in a ditch that stank of blood and shit. We stabbed him and slashed him, cut him and trampled him. We screamed like demons. Men were calling on Jesus, calling for their mothers, shrieking in pain, and a king died with a mouth full of broken teeth in a ditch turned red. East Anglians tried to haul Eohric away, but Cerdic kept hold of him and I hacked at his neck, and then I shouted to the East Anglians that their king was dead, that their king was killed, that we were winning.

Only we were not winning. We were indeed fighting like demons, we were giving the poets a tale to tell in the years to come, but the song would end with our deaths because our left flank gave way. They still fought, but they bent back, and the Danes streamed into the gap. The men who had ridden to take us in the rear had no need to come now, because we had been turned, and now we would form a shield wall that faced in every direction and that wall would shrink and shrink and we would go to our graves one by one.

I saw Æthelwold. He was on horseback now, riding behind some Danes, shouting them onwards and with him was a standard-bearer who flew the dragon flag of Wessex. He knew he would become king if they won this battle and he had abandoned his white stag banner to adopt Alfred’s flag instead. He had still not crossed the ditch and he was taking care not to be in the fighting, but instead exhorted the Danes forward to kill us.

Then I forgot Æthelwold because our left flank was pushed hard back and we had become a band of Saxons trapped by a horde of Danes. We made a rough circle, surrounded by shields and by the men we had killed. By our own dead too. And the Danes paused to make a new shield wall, to rescue their wounded and to contemplate their victory.

‘I killed that bastard Beortsig,’ Finan said as he joined me.

‘Good, I hope it hurt.’

‘It sounded that way,’ he said. His sword was bloody, his grinning face smirched with blood. ‘It’s not very healthy, is it?’

‘Not really,’ I said. It had begun to rain again, just a small spitting rain. Our defensive circle was close to the eastern marsh. ‘What we could do,’ I said, ‘is tell the men to run into the marsh and go south. Some will get away.’

‘Not many,’ Finan said. We could see the Danes collecting the Centish horses. They were stripping our dead of their mail, their weapons and whatever else they could find. A priest was in the centre of our men, on his knees, praying. ‘They’ll hunt us down like rats in the marsh,’ Finan said.

‘So we’ll fight them here,’ I said, and there was little other choice.

We had hurt them. Eohric was dead, Oscytel slaughtered, Beortsig was a corpse and Cnut was wounded, yet Æthelwold lived and Sigurd lived and Haesten lived. I could see them on horseback, pushing men into line, readying their troops to slaughter us.

‘Sigurd!’ I bellowed, and he turned to look for me. ‘I killed your runt of a son!’

‘You’ll die slowly,’ he shouted back.

I wanted to goad him into a wild attack and kill him in front of his men. ‘He squealed like a child when he died!’ I shouted. ‘He squealed like a little coward! Like a puppy!’

Sigurd, his great plaits twisted about his neck, spat towards me. He hated me, he would kill me, but in his own time and in his own way.

‘Keep your shields tight!’ I shouted at my men. ‘Keep them tight and they can’t break us! Show the bastards how Saxons fight!’

Of course they could break us, but you do not tell men about to die that they are about to die. They knew it. Some were shaking in fear, yet they stayed in line. ‘Fight beside me,’ I told Finan.

‘We’ll go together, lord.’

‘Swords in hand.’

Rypere was dead, I had not seen him die, but I saw a Dane hauling the mail from his skinny body. ‘He was a good man,’ I said.

Osferth found us. He was usually so neat, so immaculately dressed, but his mail was torn and his cloak was shredded, and his eyes wild. His helmet had a great dent in its crown, yet he seemed unhurt. ‘Let me fight along with you, lord,’ he said.

‘For ever,’ I told him. Osferth’s cross was still aloft at the centre of our circle, and a priest was calling that God and Saint Lucy would work a miracle, that we would win, that we would live, and I let him preach on because he was saying what men needed to hear.

Jarl Sigurd pushed into the Danish shield wall opposite me. He carried a massive war axe, wide-bladed, and on either side of him were spearmen. Their job was to hold me still while he hacked me to death. I had a new shield, one that showed the crossed swords of Ealdorman Sigelf. ‘Has anyone seen Sigebriht?’ I asked.

‘He’s dead,’ Osferth said.

‘You’re sure?’

‘I killed him, lord.’

I laughed. We had killed so many of the enemy’s leaders, though Sigurd and Æthelwold lived, and they had power enough to crush us and then defeat Edward’s army and so put Æthelwold on Alfred’s throne. ‘Do you remember what Beornnoth said?’ I asked Finan.

‘Should I, lord?’

‘He wanted to know how the story ended,’ I said. ‘I’d like to know that too.’

‘Ours ends here,’ Finan said, and made the sign of the cross with the hilt of his sword.

And the Danes came again.

They came slowly. Men do not want to die at the moment of victory. They want to enjoy the triumph, to share the wealth that winning brings, and so they came steadily, keeping their shields tight-locked.

Someone in our ranks began to sing. It was a Christian song, perhaps a psalm, and most of the men took up the tune, which made me think of my eldest son, and what a bad father I had been, and I wondered if he would be proud of my death. The Danes were beating blades and spear-hafts against their shields. Most of those shields were broken, axe-split, splintered. Men were bloodied, blood of the foemen. Battle in the morning. I was tired, and looking up at the rain clouds, thought this was a bad place to die. But we do not choose our deaths. The Norns do that at the foot of Yggdrasil and I imagined one of those three Fates holding the shears above my thread. She was ready to cut, and all that mattered now was to keep tight hold of my sword so that the winged women would take me to Valhalla’s feasting-hall.

I watched the Danes shouting at us. I did not hear them, not because I was out of earshot, but because the world seemed strangely silent again. A heron came out of the mist and flew overhead and I distinctly heard the heavy beat of its wings, but I did not hear the insults of my enemies. Plant your feet square, overlap the shield, watch the enemy’s blade, be ready to counter-strike. There was pain on my right hip, which I only just noticed. Had I been wounded? I dared not look because the Danes were close and I was watching the two spear tips, knowing they would strike the right-hand side of my shield to force it back and let Sigurd come from my left. I met Sigurd’s eyes and we stared at each other and then the spears came.

They hurled dozens of spears from their rear ranks, heavy spears arcing over their front ranks to crash hard into our shields. At that moment a man in the front rank must crouch to let the shield protect him, and the Danes charged as they saw us go down. ‘Up!’ I shouted, my shield heavy with two spears. My men were screaming in rage, and the Danes beat into us, shrieking their war cries, hacking with axes, and we pushed back, the two lines locked, heaving. It was a pushing match, but we were only three ranks and the Danes were at least six, and they were driving us back. I tried to skewer Wasp-Sting forward, and her blade struck a shield. Sigurd was trying to reach me, screaming and shouting, but the flow of men forced him away from me. A Dane, open-mouthed and with a beard riddled with blood, hacked an axe at Finan’s shield and I tried to slide Wasp-Sting over my own shield into his face, but another blade deflected mine. We were being forced back, the enemy so close we could smell the ale on their breath. And then the next charge came.

It came from our left, from the south, horsemen crashing up the Roman road with spears levelled and a dragon banner flying. Horsemen from the small mist, horsemen who screamed their challenge as they spurred into the rearward ranks of the enemy. ‘Wessex!’ they shouted, ‘Edward and Wessex!’ I saw the close-packed Danish ranks judder and shift under the impact, and the second rank of the oncoming horsemen had swords that they hacked down at the enemy, and that enemy saw yet more horsemen coming, bright-mailed horsemen in the dawn, and the new flags showed crosses and saints and dragons and the Danes were breaking, running back to the protection of the ditch.

‘Forward!’ I shouted, and I felt the pressure of the Danish attack ease and I bellowed at my men to thrust into them, to kill the bastards, and we screamed like men released from death’s valley as we charged them. Sigurd vanished, protected by his men. I hacked at the bloody-bearded Dane with Wasp-Sting, but the pressure of men swept him off to my right and the Danes ahead were breaking, horsemen among them, swords falling, spears striking, and Steapa was there, huge and angry, snarling at his enemy, using his sword like a butcher’s cleaver, his stallion biting and kicking, wheeling and trampling. I guessed Steapa’s force was small, maybe no more than four or five hundred men, but it had panicked the Danes by attacking their rear ranks, yet it would not be long before they recovered and came back to the assault.

‘Get back!’ Steapa roared at me, pointing his red sword south. ‘Go back now!’

‘Fetch the wounded!’ I shouted at my men. More horsemen came, helmets bright in the grey daylight, spear-blades like silver death, swords striking down at running Danes. Our men were carrying the wounded south, away from the enemy, and in front of us were the bodies of the dead and dying, and Steapa’s horsemen were reforming their ranks, all but one, who put spurs to his stallion and galloped across our front and I saw him crouching low over the beast’s black mane, and I recognised him and dropped Wasp-Sting to pick up a fallen spear. It was heavy, but I launched it hard and it flew between the horse’s legs and brought it down, and I heard the man scream in fright as he thumped onto the wet grass and the horse was thrashing its legs as it tried to stand, and the rider’s foot was caught in the stirrup. I drew Serpent-Breath, ran to him and kicked the stirrup free. ‘Edward is king,’ I said to the man.

‘Help me!’ His horse was in the grasp of one of my men, and now he tried to stand, but I kicked him down. ‘Help me, Uhtred,’ he said.

‘I have helped you all your life,’ I said, ‘all your miserable life, and now Edward is king.’

‘No,’ he said, ‘no!’

He was not denying his cousin’s kingship, but the threat of my sword. I shuddered with anger as I drove Serpent-Breath down. I drove it at his breast and that great blade tore through his mail, forcing the shattered links down through his breastbone and ribs and right into his rotten heart that exploded under the steel’s thrust. He screamed still, and still I plunged that blade down, and the scream dribbled away to a gasp and I held Serpent-Breath there, watching his life leak away into the East Anglian soil.

So Æthelwold was dead, and Finan, who had rescued Wasp-Sting, plucked my arm. ‘Come, lord, come!’ he said. The Danes were shouting again, and we ran, protected by the horsemen, and soon there were more horsemen in the mist and I knew Edward’s army had come, but neither he nor the leaderless Danes wanted a fight. The Danes had the protection of the ditch now, they were in their shield wall, but they were not marching on Lundene.

So we marched there instead.

Edward wore his father’s crown at the Christmas feast. The emeralds glinted in the firelight of the great Roman hall at the top of Lundene’s hill. Lundene was safe.

A sword or axe had cut into my hip, though I had not realised it at the time. My mail coat was being mended by a smith, and the wound itself was healing. I remembered the fear, the blood, the screams.

‘I was wrong,’ Edward told me.

‘True, lord King,’ I said.

‘We should have attacked them at Cracgelad,’ he said, then stared down the hall where his lords and thegns were dining. He looked like his father at that moment, though his face was stronger. ‘The priests said you couldn’t be trusted.’

‘Maybe I can’t,’ I said.

He smiled at that. ‘But the priests say that God’s providence dictated the war. By waiting, they say, we killed all our enemies.’

‘Almost all our enemies,’ I corrected him, ‘and a king cannot wait on God’s providence. A king must make decisions.’

He took the reproof well. ‘Mea culpa,’ he said quietly, then, ‘yet God was on our side.’

‘The ditch was on our side,’ I said, ‘and your sister won that war.’

It had been Æthelflaed who delayed the Danes. If they had crossed the river during the night they would have been ready to attack earlier and they would surely have overwhelmed us long before Steapa’s horsemen came to the rescue. Yet most of the Danes had stayed in Huntandon, held there by the threat to their rear. That threat had been the burning halls. Æthelflaed, ordered by her brother to ride to safety, had instead taken her Mercian troops north and set the fires that had frightened the Danes into thinking another army was behind them.

‘I burned two halls,’ she said, ‘and one church.’

She sat on my left, Edward on my right, while Father Coenwulf and the bishops had been pushed to the ends of the high table. ‘You burned a church?’ Edward asked, shocked.

‘It was an ugly church,’ she said, ‘but big, and it burned bright.’

Burned bright. I touched her hand, which rested on the table. Almost all our enemies were dead, only Haesten, Cnut and Sigurd remained alive, yet to kill one Dane is to resurrect a dozen. Their ships would keep coming across the sea, because the Danes would never rest until the emerald crown was theirs, or until we had crushed them utterly.

Yet for the moment we were safe. Edward was king, Lundene was ours, Wessex had survived, and the Danes were beaten.

Wyrd bið ful āræd.

Historical Note

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles are our best source for the events of the period during which the Angles and Saxons dominated Britain, but there is no single chronicle. It seems probable that Alfred himself encouraged the creation of the original text, which offered a year by year summary of events beginning with Christ’s birth, and that first manuscript was copied and distributed to monasteries who, in turn, kept updating their copies so that no two versions are alike. The entries can be maddeningly obscure and are not always reliable. Thus, for the year AD 793, the Chronicles record fiery dragons in the skies above Northumbria. In 902, the Chronicles record a battle at ‘the Holme’, a place that has never been identified though we know it was somewhere in East Anglia. A Danish army led by King Eohric and by the claimant to the throne of Wessex, Æthelwold, invaded Mercia, crossed the Thames at Cracgelad (Cricklade), harried Wessex and then retreated. King Edward followed them into East Anglia and took his revenge by ravaging Eohric’s land. Then comes the Chronicles’ tantalising account of the battle: ‘When he (Edward) meant to leave there, he had it announced to the army that they would all leave together. The Kentish stayed on there against his command and seven messages he had sent to them. The force came upon them there, and they fought.’ The entry then gives a list of the most notable casualties, among them Æthelwold, King Eohric, Ealdorman Sigelf, his son Sigebriht, and Beortsig. ‘On either hand,’ the Chronicles tell us, ‘much slaughter was made, and of the Danes there were more killed, though they had the battlefield.’ That suggests the Danes won the battle, but in winning, lost most of their leaders. (I am using a translation of the Chronicles by Anne Savage, published by Heinemann, London, 1983.)

What is most tantalising in that brief account is the puzzling refusal of the Kentish forces to withdraw, and my solution, that Ealdorman Sigelf was trying to betray the West Saxon army, is pure invention. We neither know where the battle was fought, nor what really happened there, only that there was a battle and that Æthelwold, Edward’s rival for the throne of Wessex, was killed. The Chronicles tell us about Æthelwold’s rebellion in a long entry for the year 900 (though Alfred’s death was in 899). ‘Alfred, son of Æthelwulf, passed away, six nights before All Saints Day. He was king over all the English, except for that part which was under Danish rule; and he held that kingdom for one and a half years less than thirty. Then his son Edward received the kingdom. Æthelwold, his father’s brother’s son, took over the manors at Wimbourne and at Christchurch, without the leave of the king and his counsellors. Then the king rode with the army until he camped at Badbury Rings near Wimbourne, and Æthelwold occupied the manor with those men who were loyal to him, and had barricaded all the gates against them; he said that he would stay there, alive or dead. Then he stole away under the cover of night, and sought the force in Northumbria. The king commanded them to ride after, but he could not be overtaken. They captured the woman he had seized without the king’s leave and against the bishop’s command, because she was hallowed as a nun.’ But we are not told who the woman was, or why Æthelwold kidnapped her, or what became of her. Again my solution, that it was Æthelwold’s cousin, Æthelflaed, is pure invention.

The Chronicles give us the bare bones of history, but without much detail or even explanations for what happened. Another mystery is the fate of the woman Edward might, or might not, have married; Ecgwynn. We know she gave him two children and that one of them, Æthelstan, would become immensely important to the creation of England, yet she vanishes from the record entirely and is replaced by Ealdorman Æthelhelm’s daughter, Ælflæd. A much later account suggests that Edward and Ecgwynn’s marriage was not considered valid, yet in truth we know very little of that tale, only that the motherless Æthelstan will, in time, become the first king of all England.

The Chronicles note that Alfred was ‘king over all the English’, but then adds the cautious and crucial caveat, ‘except for that part which was under Danish rule’. In truth most of what would become England was under Danish rule; all of Northumbria, all East Anglia, and the northernmost counties of Mercia. Alfred undoubtedly wanted to be king of all the English, and by the time of his death he was by far the most notable and powerful leader among the Saxons, but his dream of uniting all the lands where English was spoken had not been realised, yet he was fortunate in having a son, a daughter and a grandchild who were as committed to that dream as he was himself, and in time they would make it happen. That story is the story behind these tales of Uhtred; the story of England’s creation. It has always puzzled me that we English are so incurious about our nation’s genesis. In school it sometimes seems as if Britain’s history begins in AD 1066, and all that went before is irrelevant, but the story of how England came to exist is a massive, exciting and noble tale.

The father of England is Alfred. He might not have lived to see the land of the Angelcynn united, but he made that unification possible by preserving both the Saxon culture and the English language. He made Wessex into a stronghold that withstood assault after assault from the Danes, and which was strong enough, after his death, to spread northwards until the Danish overlords were overcome and assimilated. There was an Uhtred involved in those years, and he is my direct ancestor, but the tales I tell of him are pure invention. The family held Bebbanburg (now Bamburgh Castle in Northumberland) from the earliest years of the Anglo-Saxon invasion of Britain almost until the Norman Conquest. When the rest of the north fell to Danish rule, Bebbanburg held out, an enclave of Angelcynn among the Vikings. Almost certainly that survival was due as much to collaboration with the Danes as to the immense natural strength of the family’s fortress. I separated the Uhtred of this tale from Bebbanburg so he can be closer to the events that will create England, events that begin in the Saxon south and slowly move to the Angle north. I wanted him close to Alfred, a man he dislikes almost as much as he admires.

Alfred is, of course, the only British monarch to be called ‘the Great’. There is no Nobel-like committee to award that honorific, which seems to spring out of history by consent of the historians, yet few people would argue with Alfred’s right to the title. He was, by any measure, a most intelligent man, and he was also a good man. Uhtred might be inimical to a Christian society ruled by law, but the alternative was Danish rule and continuing chaos. Alfred imposed law, education and religion on his people, and he also protected them from fearsome enemies. He made a viable state, no small achievement. Justin Pollard, in his wonderful biography Alfred the Great (John Murray, London, 2005), sums up Alfred’s achievements thus: ‘Alfred wanted a kingdom where the people of each market town would want to defend their property and their king because their prosperity was the state’s prosperity.’ He made a nation to which people felt they belonged because the law was fair, because aspiration was rewarded and because government was not tyrannical. It is not a bad prescription.

He was buried in Winchester’s Old Minster, but the body was later moved to the New Minster, where the tomb was sheathed in lead. William the Conqueror, wanting to dissuade his new English subjects from venerating their past, had the lead-encased coffin moved to Hyde Abbey just outside Winchester. That abbey, like all the other religious houses, was dissolved under Henry VIII, and became a private home and, later, a prison. In the late eighteenth century Alfred’s tomb was discovered by the prisoners, who stripped it of lead and then threw away the bones. Justin Pollard surmises that the remains of the greatest Anglo-Saxon king are probably still in Winchester, scattered in the topsoil somewhere between a car park and a row of Victorian houses. His emerald-studded crown fared no better. It survived until the seventeenth century, when, so it is said, the wretched Puritans who ruled England after the Civil War prised out the stones and melted down the gold.

Winchester is still Alfred’s town. Many of the property lines in the old city’s heart are those laid out by his surveyors. The bones of many of his family lie in stone boxes in the cathedral that replaced his minster, and his statue stands in the town centre, burly and warlike, though in truth he was sick all his life, and his first love was not martial glory, but religion, learning and the law. He was indeed Alfred the Great, but in this tale of England’s making his dream has not yet come true, so Uhtred must fight again.

Copyright

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it, while at times based on historical figures, are the work of the author’s imagination.

Harper

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

77–85 Fulham Palace Road,

Hammersmith, London W6 8JB

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by

HarperCollinsPublishers 2011

Copyright © Bernard Cornwell 2011

Map © John Gilkes 2011

Bernard Cornwell asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

EPub Edition © September 2011 ISBN: 978 0 00 733182 6

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

About the Author

Bernard Cornwell was born in London, raised in Essex, and now lives mainly in the USA, with his wife. He was awarded an OBE in 2006.

As well as the Sharpe series, he is the author of a number of other historical novels including Azincourt and his current series, The Warrior Chronicles.

For more information visit www.bernardcornwell.net

Also by Bernard Cornwell

1356

The Fort

The WARRIOR Chronicles

The Last Kingdom

The Pale Horseman

The Lords of the North

Sword Song

The Burning Land

Death of Kings

Azincourt

The GRAIL QUEST Series

Harlequin

Vagabond

Heretic

Stonehenge: a novel of 2000 BC

The STARBUCK Chronicles

Rebel

Copperhead

Battle Flag

The Bloody Ground

The WARLORD Chronicles

The Winter King

The Enemy of God

Excalibur

Gallows Thief

By Bernard Cornwell and Susannah Kells

A Crowning Mercy

Fallen Angels

The Sharpe Series

(in chronological order)

Sharpe’s Tiger (1799)

Sharpe’s Triumph (1803)

Sharpe’s Fortress (1803)

Sharpe’s Trafalgar (1805)

Sharpe’s Prey (1807)

Sharpe’s Rifles (1809)

Sharpe’s Havoc (1809)

Sharpe’s Eagle (1809)

Sharpe’s Gold (1810)

Sharpe’s Escape (1810)

Sharpe’s Fury (1811)

Sharpe’s Battle (1811)

Sharpe’s Company (1812)

Sharpe’s Sword (1812)

Sharpe’s Enemy (1812)

Sharpe’s Honour (1813)

Sharpe’s Regiment (1813)

Sharpe’s Siege (1814)

Sharpe’s Revenge (1814)

Sharpe’s Waterloo (1815)

Sharpe’s Devil (1820–21)

Copyright

These novels are entirely works of fiction. The names, characters, and incidents portrayed in them, while at times based on historical figures, are the work of the author’s imagination.

Harper

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

77–85 Fulham Palace Road

Hammersmith, London W6 8JB

www.harpercollins.co.uk

The Last Kingdom first published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2004

The Pale Horseman first published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2005

The Lords of the North first published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2006

Sword Song first published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2007

The Burning Land first published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2009

Death of Kings first published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2011

Copyright © Bernard Cornwell 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2011

Bernard Cornwell asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Ebook Edition © December 2012 ISBN: 9780007511464

Version 1

FIRST EDITION

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

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