THE LORDS OF
THE NORTH

BERNARD CORNWELL

Copyright

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

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First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2006

Copyright © Bernard Cornwell 2006

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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.

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.

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Source ISBN: 9780007219704

Ebook Edition © September 2008 ISBN: 9780007236879

Version: 2019-09-27

THE LORDS OF THE NORTH

is for Ed Breslin

. . . . . Com on wanre niht scriðan sceadugenga

From out of the wan night slides the shadow walker

Beowulf

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

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

Keep Reading …

About the Author

Also by Bernard Cornwell

About the Publisher

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 bow stroke 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!’

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