THE BURNING LAND

BERNARD CORNWELL

Copyright

HarperCollinsPublishers

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London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2009

Copyright © Bernard Cornwell 2009

Map © John Gilkes 2009

Family Tree © Colin Hall 2009

Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2016

Cover illustration © Larry Rostant

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.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780007219766

Ebook Edition © October 2009 ISBN: 9780007290017

Version: 2019-09-27

THE BURNING LAND

is for

Alan and Jan Rust

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Place-names

Map

Family Tree

Part One: THE WARLORD

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Part Two: VIKING

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Part Three: BATTLE’S EDGE

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

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 newer Cambridge Dictionary of English Place-Names for the years nearest or contained within Alfred’s reign, AD 871–899, but even that solution is not foolproof. Hayling Island, in 956, was written as both Heilincigae and Hæglingaiggæ. Nor have I been consistent myself; I have preferred the modern form Northumbria to Nor hymbralond to avoid the suggestion that the boundaries of the ancient kingdom coincide with those of the modern county. So this list, like the spellings themselves, is capricious.

Æsc’s Hill | Ashdown, Berkshire
Æscengum | Eashing, Surrey
Æthelingæg | Athelney, Somerset
Beamfleot | Benfleet, Essex
Bebbanburg | Bamburgh Castle, Northumberland
Caninga | Canvey Island, Essex
Cent | Kent
Defnascir | Devonshire
Dumnoc | Dunwich, Suffolk (now mostly vanished beneath the sea)
Dunholm | Durham, County Durham
East Sexe | Essex
Eoferwic | York
Ethandun | Edington, Wiltshire
Exanceaster | Exeter, Devon
Farnea Islands | Farne Islands, Northumberland
Fearnhamme | Farnham, Surrey
Fughelness | Foulness Island, Essex
Grantaceaster | Cambridge, Cambridgeshire
Gleawecestre | Gloucester, Gloucestershire
Godelmingum | Godalming, Surrey
Hæthlegh | Hadleigh, Essex
Haithabu | Hedeby, southern Denmark
Hocheleia | Hockley, Essex
Hothlege | Hadleigh Ray, Essex
Humbre | River Humber
Hwealf | River Crouch, Essex
Lecelad | Lechlade, Gloucestershire
Liccelfeld | Lichfield, Staffordshire
Lindisfarena | Lindisfarne (Holy Island), Northumberland
Lundene | London
Sæfern | River Severn
Scaepege | Isle of Sheppey, Kent
Silcestre | Silchester, Hampshire
Sumorsæte | Somerset
Suthriganaweorc | Southwark, Greater London
Temes | River Thames
Thunresleam | Thundersley, Essex
Tinan | River Tyne
Torneie | Thorney Island, an island that has disappeared – it lay close to the West Drayton station near Heathrow Airport
Tuede | River Tweed
Uisc | River Exe, Devonshire
Wiltunscir | Wiltshire
Wintanceaster | Winchester, Hampshire
Yppe | Epping, Essex
Zegge | Fictional Frisian island

The Royal Family of Wessex

PART ONE
The Warlord

One

Not long ago I was in some monastery. I forget where except that it was in the lands that were once Mercia. I was travelling home with a dozen men, it was a wet winter’s day, and all we needed was shelter, food and warmth, but the monks behaved as though a band of Norsemen had arrived at their gate. Uhtred of Bebbanburg was within their walls and such is my reputation that they expected me to start slaughtering them. ‘I just want bread,’ I finally made them understand, ‘cheese if you have it, and some ale.’ I threw money on the hall floor. ‘Bread, cheese, ale, and a warm bed. Nothing more!’

Next morning it was raining like the world was ending and so I waited until the wind and weather had done their worst. I roamed the monastery and eventually found myself in a dank corridor where three miserable-looking monks were copying manuscripts. An older monk, white-haired, sour-faced and resentful, supervised them. He wore a fur stole over his habit, and had a leather quirt with which he doubtless encouraged the industry of the three copyists. ‘They should not be disturbed, lord,’ he dared to chide me. He sat on a stool beside a brazier, the warmth of which did not reach the three scribblers.

‘The latrines haven’t been licked clean,’ I told him, ‘and you look idle.’

So the older monk went quiet and I looked over the shoulders of the ink-stained copyists. One, a slack-faced youth with fat lips and a fatter goitre on his neck, was transcribing a life of Saint Ciaran, which told how a wolf, a badger and a fox had helped build a church in Ireland, and if the young monk believed that nonsense then he was as big a fool as he looked. The second was doing something useful by copying a land grant, though in all probability it was a forgery. Monasteries are adept at inventing old land grants, proving that some ancient half-forgotten king has granted the church a rich estate, thus forcing the rightful owner to either yield the ground or pay a vast sum in compensation. They tried it on me once. A priest brought the documents and I pissed on them, and then I posted twenty sword-warriors on the disputed land and sent word to the bishop that he could come and take it whenever he wished. He never did. Folk tell their children that success lies in working hard and being thrifty, but that is as much nonsense as supposing that a badger, a fox and a wolf could build a church. The way to wealth is to become a Christian bishop or a monastery’s abbot and thus be imbued with heaven’s permission to lie, cheat and steal your way to luxury.

The third young man was copying a chronicle. I moved his quill aside so I could see what he had just written. ‘You can read, lord?’ the old monk asked. He made it sound like an innocent enquiry, but the sarcasm was unmistakable.

‘“In this year,”’ I read aloud, ‘“the pagans again came to Wessex, in great force, a horde as had never been seen before, and they ravaged all the lands, causing mighty distress to God’s people, who, by the grace of Our Lord Jesus Christ, were rescued by the Lord Æthelred of Mercia who came with his army to Fearnhamme, in which place he did utterly destroy the heathen.”’ I prodded the text with a finger. ‘What year did this happen?’ I asked the copyist.

‘In the year of our Lord 892, lord,’ he said nervously.

‘So what is this?’ I asked, flicking the pages of the parchment from which he copied.

‘They are annals,’ the elderly monk answered for the younger man, ‘the Annals of Mercia. That is the only copy, lord, and we are making another.’

I looked back at the freshly-written page. ‘Æthelred rescued Wessex?’ I asked indignantly.

‘It was so,’ the old monk said, ‘with God’s help’

‘God?’ I snarled. ‘It was with my help! I fought that battle, not Æthelred!’ None of the monks spoke. They just stared at me. One of my men came to the cloister end of the passageway and leaned there, a grin on his half-toothless face. ‘I was at Fearnhamme!’ I added, then snatched up the only copy of the Annals of Mercia and turned its stiff pages. Æthelred, Æthelred, Æthelred, and not a mention of Uhtred, hardly a mention of Alfred, no Æthelflæd, just Æthelred. I turned to the page which told of the events after Fearnhamme. ‘“And in this year,”’ I read aloud, ‘“by God’s good grace, the lord Æthelred and the Ætheling Edward led the men of Mercia to Beamfleot where Æthelred took great plunder and made mighty slaughter of the pagans.”’ I looked at the older monk. ‘Æthelred and Edward led that army?’

‘So it is said, lord.’ He spoke nervously, his earlier defiance completely gone.

‘I led them, you bastard,’ I said. I snatched up the copied pages and took both them and the original annals to the brazier.

‘No!’ the older man protested.

‘They’re lies,’ I said.

He held up a placatory hand. ‘For forty years, lord,’ he said humbly, ‘those records have been compiled and preserved. They are the tale of our people! That is the only copy!’

‘They’re lies,’ I said again. ‘I was there. I was on the hill at Fearnhamme and in the ditch at Beamfleot. Were you there?’

‘I was just a child, lord,’ he said.

He gave an appalled shriek when I tossed the manuscripts onto the brazier. He tried to rescue the parchments, but I knocked his hand away. ‘I was there,’ I said again, staring at the blackening sheets that curled and crackled before the fire flared bright at their edges. ‘I was there.’

‘Forty years’ work!’ the old monk said in disbelief.

‘If you want to know what happened,’ I said, ‘then come to me in Bebbanburg and I’ll tell you the truth.’

They never came. Of course they did not come.

But I was at Fearnhamme, and that was just the beginning of the tale.

Two

Morning, and I was young, and the sea was a shimmer of silver and pink beneath wisps of mist that obscured the coasts. To my south was Cent, to my north lay East Anglia and behind me was Lundene, while ahead the sun was rising to gild the few small clouds that stretched across the dawn’s bright sky.

We were in the estuary of the Temes. My ship, the Seolferwulf, was newly built and she leaked, as new ships will. Frisian craftsmen had made her from oak timbers that were unusually pale, and thus her name, the Silverwolf. Behind me were the Kenelm, named by King Alfred for some murdered saint, and the Dragon-Voyager, a ship we had taken from the Danes. Dragon-Voyager was a beauty, built as only the Danes could build. A sleek killer of a ship, docile to handle yet lethal in battle.

Seolferwulf was also a beauty; long-keeled, wide-beamed and high-prowed. I had paid for her myself, giving gold to Frisian shipwrights, and watching as her ribs grew and as her planking made a skin and as her proud bow reared above the slipway. On that prow was a wolf’s head, carved from oak and painted white with a red lolling tongue and red eyes and yellow fangs. Bishop Erkenwald, who ruled Lundene, had chided me, saying I should have named the ship for some Christian milksop saint, and he had presented me with a crucifix that he wanted me to nail to Seolferwulf’s mast, but instead I burned the wooden god and his wooden cross and mixed their ashes with crushed apples, that I fed to my two sows. I worship Thor.

Now, on that distant morning when I was still young, we rowed eastwards on that pink and silver sea. My wolf’s-head prow was decorated with a thick-leaved bough of oak to show we intended no harm to our enemies, though my men were still dressed in mail and had shields and weapons close to their oars. Finan, my second in command, crouched near me on the steering platform and listened with amusement to Father Willibald, who was talking too much. ‘Other Danes have received Christ’s mercy, Lord Uhtred,’ he said. He had been spouting this nonsense ever since we had left Lundene, but I endured it because I liked Willibald. He was an eager, hard-working and cheerful man. ‘With God’s good help,’ he went on, ‘we shall spread the light of Christ among these heathen!’

‘Why don’t the Danes send us missionaries?’ I asked.

‘God prevents it, lord.’ Willibald said. His companion, a priest whose name I have long forgotten, nodded earnest agreement.

‘Maybe they’ve got better things to do?’ I suggested.

‘If the Danes have ears to hear, lord,’ Willibald assured me, ‘then they will receive Christ’s message with joy and gladness!’

‘You’re a fool, father,’ I said fondly. ‘You know how many of Alfred’s missionaries have been slaughtered?’

‘We must all be prepared for martyrdom, lord,’ Willibald said, though anxiously.

‘They have their priestly guts slit open,’ I said ruminatively, ‘they have their eyes gouged out, their balls sliced off, and their tongues ripped out. Remember that monk we found at Yppe?’ I asked Finan. Finan was a fugitive from Ireland, where he had been raised a Christian, though his religion was so tangled with native myths that it was scarcely recognisable as the same faith that Willibald preached. ‘How did that poor man die?’ I asked.

‘They skinned the poor soul alive,’ Finan said.

‘Started at his toes?’

‘Just peeled it off slowly,’ Finan said, ‘and it must have taken hours.’

‘They didn’t peel it,’ I said, ‘you can’t skin a man like a lamb.’

‘True,’ Finan said. ‘You have to tug it off. Takes a lot of strength!’

‘He was a missionary,’ I told Willibald.

‘And a blessed martyr too,’ Finan added cheerfully. ‘But they must have got bored because they finished him off in the end. They used a tree-saw on his belly.’

‘It was probably an axe,’ I said.

‘No, it was a saw, lord,’ Finan insisted, grinning, ‘and one with savage big teeth. Ripped him into two, it did.’ Father Willibald, who had always been a martyr to seasickness, staggered to the ship’s side.

We turned the ship southwards. The estuary of the Temes is a treacherous place of mudbanks and strong tides, but I had been patrolling these waters for five years now and I scarcely needed to look for my landmarks as we rowed towards the shore of Scaepege. And there, ahead of me, waiting between two beached ships, was the enemy. The Danes. There must have been a hundred or more men, all in chain mail, all helmeted, and all with bright weapons. ‘We could slaughter the whole crew,’ I suggested to Finan. ‘We’ve got enough men.’

‘We agreed to come in peace!’ Father Willibald protested, wiping his mouth with a sleeve.

And so we had, and so we did.

I ordered Kenelm and Dragon-Voyager to stay close to the muddy shore, while we drove Seolferwulf onto the gently shelving mud between the two Danish boats. Seolferwulf’s bows made a hissing sound as she slowed and stopped. She was firmly grounded now, but the tide was rising, so she was safe for a while. I jumped off the prow, splashing into deep wet mud, then waded to firmer ground where our enemies waited.

‘My Lord Uhtred,’ the leader of the Danes greeted me. He grinned and spread his arms wide. He was a stocky man, golden-haired and square-jawed. His beard was plaited into five thick ropes fastened with silver clasps. His forearms glittered with rings of gold and silver, and more gold studded the belt from which hung a thick-bladed sword. He looked prosperous, which he was, and something about the openness of his face made him appear trustworthy, which he was not. ‘I am so overjoyed to see you,’ he said, still smiling, ‘my old valued friend!’

‘Jarl Haesten,’ I responded, giving him the title he liked to use, though in my mind Haesten was nothing but a pirate. I had known him for years. I had saved his life once, which was a bad day’s work, and ever since that day I had been trying to kill him, yet he always managed to slither away. He had escaped me five years before and, since then, I had heard how he had been raiding deep inside Frankia. He had amassed silver there, had whelped another son on his wife, and had attracted followers. Now he had brought eighty ships to Wessex.

‘I hoped Alfred would send you,’ Haesten said, holding out a hand.

‘If Alfred hadn’t ordered me to come in peace,’ I said, taking the hand, ‘I’d have cut that head off your shoulders by now.’

‘You bark a lot,’ he said, amused, ‘but the louder a cur barks, lord, the weaker its bite.’

I let that pass. I had not come to fight, but to do Alfred’s bidding, and the king had ordered me to bring missionaries to Haesten. Willibald and his companion were helped ashore by my men, then came to stand beside me, where they smiled nervously. Both priests spoke Danish, which is why they had been chosen. I had also brought Haesten a message gilded with treasure, but he feigned indifference, insisting I accompany him to his encampment before Alfred’s gift was delivered.

Scaepege was not Haesten’s main encampment, that was some distance to the east where his eighty ships were drawn up on a beach protected by a newly-made fort. He had not wanted to invite me into that fastness, and so he had insisted Alfred’s envoys meet him among the wastes of Scaepege which, even in summer, is a place of dank pools, sour grass and dark marshes. He had arrived there two days before, and had made a crude fort by surrounding a patch of higher ground with a tangled wall of thorn bushes, inside which he had raised two sailcloth tents. ‘We shall eat, lord,’ he invited me grandly, gesturing to a trestle table surrounded by a dozen stools. Finan, two other warriors and the pair of priests accompanied me, though Haesten insisted the priests should not sit at the table. ‘I don’t trust Christian wizards,’ he explained, ‘so they can squat on the ground.’ The food was a fish stew and rock-hard bread, served by half-naked slave women, none more than fourteen or fifteen years old, and all of them Saxons.

Haesten was humiliating the girls as a provocation and he watched for my reaction. ‘Are they from Wessex?’ I asked.

‘Of course not,’ he said, pretending to be offended by the question. ‘I took them from East Anglia. You want one of them, lord? There, that little one has breasts firm as apples!’

I asked the apple-breasted girl where she had been captured, and she just shook her head dumbly, too frightened to answer me. She poured me ale that had been sweetened with berries. ‘Where are you from?’ I asked her again.

Haesten looked at the girl, letting his eyes linger on her breasts. ‘Answer the lord,’ he said in English.

‘I don’t know, lord,’ she said.

‘Wessex?’ I demanded. ‘East Anglia? Where?’

‘A village, lord,’ she said, and that was all she knew, and I waved her away.

‘Your wife is well?’ Haesten asked, watching the girl walk away.

‘She is.’

‘I am glad,’ he said convincingly enough, then his shrewd eyes looked amused. ‘So what is your master’s message to me?’ he asked, spooning fish broth into his mouth and dripping it down his beard.

‘You’re to leave Wessex,’ I said.

‘I’m to leave Wessex!’ He pretended to be shocked and waved a hand at the desolate marshes, ‘why would a man want to leave all this, lord?’

‘You’re to leave Wessex,’ I said doggedly, ‘agree not to invade Mercia, give my king two hostages, and accept his missionaries.’

‘Missionaries!’ Haesten said, pointing his horn spoon at me. ‘Now you can’t approve of that, Lord Uhtred! You, at least, worship the real gods.’ He twisted on the stool and stared at the two priests. ‘Maybe I’ll kill them.’

‘Do that,’ I said, ‘and I’ll suck your eyeballs out of their sockets.’

He heard the venom in my voice and was surprised by it. I saw a flicker of resentment in his eyes, but he kept his voice calm. ‘You’ve become a Christian, lord?’

‘Father Willibald is my friend,’ I said.

‘You should have said,’ he reproved me, ‘and I would not have jested. Of course they will live and they can even preach to us, but they’ll achieve nothing. So, Alfred instructs me to take my ships away?’

‘Far away,’ I said.

‘But where?’ he asked in feigned innocence.

‘Frankia?’ I suggested.

‘The Franks have paid me to leave them alone,’ Haesten said, ‘they even built us ships to hasten our departure! Will Alfred build us ships?’

‘You’re to leave Wessex,’ I said stubbornly, ‘you’re to leave Mercia untroubled, you’re to accept missionaries, and you are to give Alfred hostages.’

‘Ah,’ Haesten smiled, ‘the hostages.’ He stared at me for a few heartbeats, then appeared to forget the matter of hostages, waving seawards instead. ‘And where are we to go?’

‘Alfred is paying you to leave Wessex,’ I said, ‘and where you go is not my concern, but make it very far from the reach of my sword.’

Haesten laughed. ‘Your sword, lord,’ he said, ‘rusts in its scabbard.’ He jerked a thumb over his shoulder, towards the south. ‘Wessex burns,’ he said with relish, ‘and Alfred lets you sleep.’ He was right. Far to the south, hazed in the summer sky, were pyres of smoke from a dozen or more burning villages, and those plumes were only the ones I could see. I knew there were more. Eastern Wessex was being ravaged, and, rather than summon my help to repel the invaders, Alfred had ordered me to stay in Lundene to protect that city from attack. Haesten grinned. ‘Maybe Alfred thinks you’re too old to fight, lord?’

I did not respond to the taunt. Looking back down the years I think of myself as young back then, though I must have been all of thirty-five or thirty-six years old that year. Most men never live that long, but I was fortunate. I had lost none of my sword-skill or strength, I had a slight limp from an old battle-wound, but I also had the most golden of all a warrior’s attributes; reputation. But Haesten felt free to goad me, knowing that I came to him as a supplicant.

I came as a supplicant because two Danish fleets had landed in Cent, the easternmost part of Wessex. Haesten’s was the smaller fleet, and so far he had been content to build his fortress and let his men raid only enough to provide themselves with sufficient food and a few slaves. He had even let the shipping in the Temes go unmolested. He did not want a fight with Wessex, not yet, because he was waiting to see what happened to the south, where another and much greater Viking fleet had come ashore.

Jarl Harald Bloodhair had brought more than two hundred ships filled with hungry men, and his army had stormed a half-built burh and slaughtered the men inside, and now his warriors were spreading across Cent, burning and killing, enslaving and robbing. It was Harald’s men who had smeared the sky with smoke. Alfred had marched against both invaders. The king was old now, old and ever more sick, so his troops were supposedly commanded by his son-in-law, Lord Æthelred of Mercia, and by the Ætheling Edward, Alfred’s eldest son.

And they had done nothing. They had put their men on the great wooded ridge at the centre of Cent from where they could strike north against Haesten or south against Harald, and then they had stayed motionless, presumably frightened that if they attacked one Danish army the other would assault their rear. So Alfred, convinced that his enemies were too powerful, had sent me to persuade Haesten to leave Wessex. Alfred should have ordered me to lead my garrison against Haesten, allowed me to soak the marshes with Danish blood, but instead I was instructed to bribe Haesten. With Haesten gone, the king thought, his army might deal with Harald’s wild warriors.

Haesten used a thorn to pick at his teeth. He finally scraped out a scrap of fish. ‘Why doesn’t your king attack Harald?’ he asked.

‘You’d like that,’ I said.

He grinned. ‘With Harald gone,’ he admitted, ‘and that rancid whore of his gone as well, a lot of crews would join me.’

‘Rancid whore?’

He grinned, pleased that he knew something I did not. ‘Skade,’ he said flatly.

‘Harald’s wife?’

‘His woman, his bitch, his lover, his sorceress.’

‘Never heard of her,’ I said.

‘You will,’ he promised, ‘and if you see her, my friend, you’ll want her. But she’ll nail your skull to her hall gable if she can.’

‘You’ve seen her?’ I asked, and he nodded. ‘You wanted her?’

‘Harald’s impulsive,’ he said, ignoring my question. ‘And Skade will goad him to stupidity. And when that happens a lot of his men will look for another lord.’ He smiled slyly. ‘Give me another hundred ships, and I could be King of Wessex inside a year.’

‘I’ll tell Alfred,’ I said, ‘and maybe that will persuade him to attack you first.’

‘He won’t,’ Haesten said confidently. ‘If he turns on me then he releases Harald’s men to spread across all Wessex.’

That was true. ‘So why doesn’t he attack Harald?’ I asked.

‘You know why.’

‘Tell me.’

He paused, wondering whether to reveal all he knew, but he could not resist showing off his knowledge. He used the thorn to scratch a line in the wood of the table, then made a circle that was bisected by the line. ‘The Temes,’ he said, tapping the line, ‘Lundene,’ he indicated the circle. ‘You’re in Lundene with a thousand men, and behind you,’ he tapped higher up the Temes, ‘Lord Aldhelm has five hundred Mercians. If Alfred attacks Harald, he’s going to want Aldhelm’s men and your men to go south, and that will leave Mercia wide open to attack.’

‘Who would attack Mercia?’ I asked innocently.

‘The Danes of East Anglia?’ Haesten suggested just as innocently. ‘All they need is a leader with courage.’

‘And our agreement,’ I said, ‘insists you will not invade Mercia.’

‘So it does,’ Haesten said with a smile,’ ‘except we have no agreement yet.’

But we did. I had to yield the Dragon-Voyager to Haesten, and in her belly lay four iron-bound chests filled with silver. That was the price. In return for the ship and the silver, Haesten promised to leave Wessex and ignore Mercia. He also agreed to accept missionaries and gave me two boys as hostages. He claimed one was his nephew, and that might have been true. The other boy was younger and dressed in fine linen with a lavish gold brooch. He was a good-looking lad with bright blond hair and anxious blue eyes. Haesten stood behind the boy and placed his hands on the small shoulders. ‘This, lord,’ he said reverently, ‘is my eldest son, Horic. I yield him as a hostage,’ Haesten paused, and seemed to sniff away a tear, ‘I yield him as a hostage, lord, to show goodwill, but I beg you to look after the boy. I love him dearly.’

I looked at Horic. ‘How old are you?’ I asked.

‘He is seven,’ Haesten said, patting Horic’s shoulder.

‘Let him answer for himself,’ I insisted. ‘How old are you?’

The boy made a guttural sound and Haesten crouched to embrace him. ‘He is a deaf-mute, Lord Uhtred,’ Haesten said. ‘The gods decreed my son should be deaf and mute.’

‘The gods decreed that you should be a lying bastard,’ I said to Haesten, but too softly for his followers to hear and take offence.

‘And if I am?’ he asked, amused. ‘What of it? And if I say this boy is my son, who is to prove otherwise?’

‘You’ll leave Wessex?’ I asked.

‘I’ll keep this treaty,’ he promised.

I pretended to believe him. I had told Alfred that Haesten could not be trusted, but Alfred was desperate. He was old, he saw his grave not far ahead, and he wanted Wessex rid of the hated pagans. And so I paid the silver, took the hostages, and, under a darkening sky, rowed back to Lundene.

Lundene is built in a place where the ground rises in giant steps away from the river. There is terrace after terrace, rising to the topmost level where the Romans built their grandest buildings, some of which still stood, though they were sadly decayed, patched with wattle and scabbed by the thatched huts we Saxons made.

In those days Lundene was part of Mercia, though Mercia was like the grand Roman buildings; half fallen, and Mercia was also scabbed with Danish jarls who had settled its fertile lands. My cousin Æthelred was the chief Ealdorman of Mercia, its supposed ruler, but he was kept on a tight lead by Alfred of Wessex, who had made certain his own men controlled Lundene. I commanded that garrison, while Bishop Erkenwald ruled everything else.

These days, of course, he is known as Saint Erkenwald, but I remember him as a sour weasel of a man. He was efficient, I grant him that, and the city was well-governed in his time, but his unadulterated hatred of all pagans made him my enemy. I worshipped Thor, so to him I was evil, but I was also necessary. I was the warrior who protected his city, the pagan who had kept the heathen Danes at bay for over five years now, the man who kept the lands around Lundene safe so that Erkenwald could levy his taxes.

Now I stood on the topmost step of a Roman house built on the topmost of Lundene’s terraces. Bishop Erkenwald was on my right. He was much shorter than I, but most men are, yet my height irked him. A straggle of priests, ink-stained, pale-faced and nervous, were gathered on the steps beneath, while Finan, my Irish fighter, stood on my left. We all stared southwards.

We saw the mix of thatch and tile that roof Lundene, all studded with the stubby towers of the churches Erkenwald had built. Red kites wheeled above them, riding the warm air, though higher still I could see the first geese flying southwards above the wide Temes. The river was slashed by the remnants of the Roman bridge, a marvellous thing which was crudely broken in its centre. I had made a roadway of timbers that spanned the gap, but even I was nervous every time I needed to cross that makeshift repair which led to Suthriganaweorc, the earth and timber fortress that protected the bridge’s southern end. There were wide marshes there and a huddle of huts where a village had grown around the fort. Beyond the marshes the land rose to the hills of Wessex, low and green, and above those hills, far off, like ghostly pillars in the still, late-summer sky, were plumes of smoke. I counted fifteen, but the clouds hazed the horizon and there could have been more.

‘They’re raiding!’ Bishop Erkenwald said, sounding both surprised and outraged. Wessex had been spared any large Viking raid for years now, protected by the burhs, which were the towns Alfred had walled and garrisoned, but Harald’s men were spreading fire, rape and theft in all the eastern parts of Wessex. They avoided the burhs, attacking only the smaller settlements. ‘They’re well beyond Cent!’ the bishop observed.

‘And going deeper into Wessex,’ I said.

‘How many of them?’ Erkenwald demanded.

‘We hear two hundred ships landed,’ I said, ‘so they must have at least five thousand fighting men. Maybe two thousand of those are with Harald.’

‘Only two thousand?’ the bishop asked sharply.

‘It depends how many horses they have,’ I explained. ‘Only mounted warriors will be raiding, the rest will be guarding his ships.’

‘It’s still a pagan horde,’ the bishop said angrily. He touched the cross hanging about his neck. ‘Our lord king,’ he went on, ‘has decided to defeat them at Æscengum.’

‘Æscengum!’

‘And why not?’ the bishop bridled at my tone, then shuddered when I laughed. ‘There is nothing amusing in that,’ he said tartly. But there was. Alfred, or perhaps it had been Æthelred, had advanced the army of Wessex into Cent, placing it on high wooded ground between the forces of Haesten and Harald, and then they had done nothing. Now it seemed that Alfred, or perhaps his son-in-law, had decided to retreat to Æscengum, a burh in the centre of Wessex, presumably hoping that Harald would attack them and be defeated by the burh’s walls. It was a pathetic idea. Harald was a wolf, Wessex was a flock of sheep, and Alfred’s army was the wolfhound that should protect the sheep, but Alfred was tethering the wolfhound in hope that the wolf would come and be bitten. Meanwhile the wolf was running free among the flock. ‘And our lord king,’ Erkenwald continued loftily, ‘has requested that you and some of your troops join him, but only if I am satisfied that Haesten will not attack Lundene in your absence.’

‘He won’t,’ I said, and felt a surge of elation. Alfred, at last, had called for my help, which meant the wolfhound was being given sharp teeth.

‘Haesten fears we’ll kill the hostages?’ the bishop asked.

‘Haesten doesn’t care a cabbage-smelling fart for the hostages,’ I said. ‘The one he calls his son is some peasant boy tricked out in rich clothes.’

‘Then why did you accept him?’ the bishop demanded indignantly.

‘What was I supposed to do? Attack Haesten’s main camp to find his pups?’

‘So Haesten is cheating us?’

‘Of course he’s cheating us, but he won’t attack Lundene unless Harald defeats Alfred.’

‘I wish we could be certain of that.’

‘Haesten is cautious,’ I said. ‘He fights when he’s certain he can win, otherwise he waits.’

Erkenwald nodded. ‘So take men south tomorrow,’ he ordered, then walked away, followed by his scurrying priests.

I look back now across the long years and realise Bishop Erkenwald and I ruled Lundene well. I did not like him, and he hated me, and we begrudged the time we needed to spend in each other’s company, but he never interfered with my garrison and I did not intervene in his governance. Another man might have asked how many men I planned to take south, or how many would be left to guard the city, but Erkenwald trusted me to make the right decisions. I still think he was a weasel.

‘How many men ride with you?’ Gisela asked me that night.

We were in our house, a Roman merchant’s house built on the northern bank of the Temes. The river stank often, but we were used to it and the house was happy. We had slaves, servants and guards, nurses and cooks, and our three children. There was Uhtred, our oldest, who must have been around ten that year, and Stiorra his sister, and Osbert, the youngest, just two and indomitably curious. Uhtred was named after me, as I had been named after my father and he after his, but this newest Uhtred irritated me because he was a pale and nervous child who clung to his mother’s skirts.

‘Three hundred men,’ I answered.

‘Only?’

‘Alfred has sufficient,’ I said, ‘and I must leave a garrison here.’

Gisela flinched. She was pregnant again, and the birth could not be far off. She saw my worried expression and smiled. ‘I spit babies like pips,’ she said reassuringly. ‘How long to kill Harald’s men?’

‘A month?’ I guessed.

‘I shall have given birth by then,’ she said, and I touched the carving of Thor’s hammer which hung at my neck. Gisela smiled reassurance again. ‘I have been lucky with childbirth,’ she went on, which was true. Her births had been easy enough and all three children had lived. ‘You’ll come back to find a new baby crying,’ she said, ‘and you’ll get annoyed.’

I answered that truth with a swift smile, then pushed through the leather curtain onto the terrace. It was dark. There were a few lights on the river’s far bank where the fort guarded the bridge, and their flames shimmered on the water. In the west there was a streak of purple showing in a cloud rift. The river seethed through the bridge’s narrow arches, but otherwise the city was quiet. Dogs barked occasionally, and there was sporadic laughter from the kitchens. Seolferwulf, moored in the dock beside the house, creaked in the small wind. I glanced downstream to where, at the city’s edge, I had built a small tower of oak at the riverside. Men watched from that tower night and day, watching for the beaked ships that might come to attack Lundene’s wharves, but no warning fire blazed from the tower’s top. All was quiet. There were Danes in Wessex, but Lundene was resting.

‘When this is over,’ Gisela said from the doorway, ‘maybe we should go north.’

‘Yes,’ I said, then turned to look at the beauty of her long face and dark eyes. She was a Dane and, like me, she was weary of Wessex’s Christianity. A man should have gods, and perhaps there is some sense in acknowledging only one god, but why choose one who loves the whip and spur so much? The Christian god was not ours, yet we were forced to live among folk who feared him and who condemned us because we worshipped a different god. Yet I was sworn to Alfred’s service and so I remained where he demanded that I remain. ‘He can’t live much longer,’ I said.

‘And when he dies you’re free?’

‘I gave no oath to anyone else,’ I said, and I spoke honestly. In truth I had given another oath, and that oath would come back to find me, but it was so far from my mind that night that I believed I answered Gisela truthfully.

‘And when he’s dead?’

‘We go north,’ I said. North, back to my ancestral home beside the Northumbrian sea, a home usurped by my uncle. North to Bebbanburg, north to the lands where pagans could live without the incessant nagging of the Christians’ nailed god. We would go home. I had served Alfred long enough, and I had served him well, but I wanted to go home. ‘I promise,’ I told Gisela, ‘on my oath, we will go home.’

The gods laughed.

We crossed the bridge at dawn, three hundred warriors with half as many boys who came to tend the horses and carry the spare weapons. The hooves clattered loud on the makeshift bridge as we rode towards the pyres of smoke that told of Wessex being ravaged. We crossed the wide marsh where, at high tide, the river puddles dark among lank grasses, and climbed the gentle hills beyond. I left most of the garrison to guard Lundene, taking only my own household troops, my warriors and oath-men, the fighters I trusted with my own life. I left just six of those men in Lundene to guard my house under the command of Cerdic, who had been my battle-companion for many years and who had almost wept as he had pleaded with me to take him. ‘You must guard Gisela and my family,’ I had told him, and so Cerdic stayed as we rode west, following tracks trampled by the sheep and cattle that were driven to slaughter in Lundene. We saw little panic. Folk were keeping their eyes on the distant smoke, and thegns had placed lookouts on rooftops and high among the trees. We were mistaken for Danes more than once, and there would be a flurry as people ran towards the woods, but once our identity was discovered they would come back. They were supposed to drive their livestock to the nearest burh if danger threatened, but folk are ever reluctant to leave their homes. I ordered whole villages to take their cattle, sheep and goats to Suthriganaweorc, but I doubt they did. They would rather stay until the Danes were breathing down their throats.

Yet the Danes were staying well to the south, so perhaps those villagers had judged well. We swerved southwards ourselves, climbing higher and expecting to see the raiders at any moment. I had scouts riding well ahead, and it was mid-morning before one of them waved a red cloth to signal he had seen something to alarm him. I spurred to the hill crest, but saw nothing in the valley beneath.

‘There were folk running, lord,’ the scout told me. ‘They saw me and hid in the trees.’

‘Maybe they were running from you?’

He shook his head. ‘They were already panicked, lord, when I saw them.’

We were gazing out across a wide valley, green and lush beneath the summer sun. At its far side were wooded hills and the nearest smoke pyre was beyond that skyline. The valley looked peaceful. I could see small fields, the thatched roofs of a village, a track going west, and the glimmer of a stream twisting between meadows. I saw no enemy, but the heavy-leafed trees could have hidden Harald’s whole horde. ‘What did you see exactly?’ I asked.

‘Women, lord. Women and children. Some goats. They were running that way.’ He pointed westwards.

So the fugitives were fleeing the village. The scout had glimpsed them between the trees, but there was no sign of them now, nor of whatever had made them run. No smoke showed in this long wide valley, but that did not mean Harald’s men were not there. I plucked the scout’s reins, leading him beneath the skyline, and remembered the day, so many years before, when I had first gone to war. I had been with my father, who had been leading the fyrd, the host of men plucked from their farmlands who were mostly armed with hoes or scythes or axes. We had marched on foot and, as a result, we had been a slow, lumbering army. The Danes, our enemy, had ridden. Their ships landed and the first thing they did was find horses, and then they danced about us. We had learned from that. We had learned to fight like the Danes, except that Alfred was now trusting to his fortified towns to stop Harald’s invasion, and that meant Harald was being given the freedom of the Wessex countryside. His men, I knew, would be mounted, except he led too many warriors, and so his raiding parties were doubtless still scouring the land for yet more horses. Our first job was to kill those raiders and take back any captured horses, and I suspected just such a band was at the eastern end of the valley. I found a man in my ranks who knew this part of the country. ‘Edwulf has an estate here, lord,’ he said.

‘Edwulf?’

‘A thegn, lord.’ He grinned and used a hand to sketch a bulge in front of his stomach. ‘He’s a big fat man.’

‘So he’s rich?’

‘Very, lord.’

All of which suggested some Danes had found a plump nest to plunder, and we had found an easy prey to slaughter. The only difficulty was getting three hundred men across the skyline without being seen from the valley’s eastern end, but we discovered a route that was shrouded by trees, and by midday I had my men hidden in the woods to the west of Edwulf’s estate. Then I baited the trap.

I sent Osferth and twenty men to follow a track that led south towards the smoke pyres. They led a half-dozen riderless horses and went slowly, as if they were tired and lost. I ordered them never to look directly at Edwulf’s hall where, by now, I knew the Danes were busy. Finan, who could move among trees like a ghost, had crept close to the hall and brought back news of a village with a score of houses, a church and two fine barns. ‘They’re pulling down the thatch,’ Finan told me, meaning the Danes were searching the roofs of all the buildings, because some folk hid their treasures in the thatch before they fled. ‘And they’re taking turns on some women.’

‘Horses?’

‘Just women,’ Finan said, then caught my glance and stopped grinning. ‘They’ve a whole herd of horses in a paddock, lord.’

So Osferth rode, and the Danes took the bait like a trout rising to a fly. They saw him, he pretended not to see them, and suddenly forty or more Danes were galloping to intercept Osferth, who pretended to wake to the danger, turned westwards and galloped across the front of my hidden men.

And then it was as simple as stealing silver from a church. A hundred of my men crashed from the trees onto the flank of the Danes, who had no chance to escape. Two of the enemy turned their horses too fast and the beasts went down in a screaming chaos of hooves and turf. Others tried to turn back and were caught by spears in their spines. The experienced Danes swerved towards us, hoping to ride straight through our charge, but we were too many, and my men curled around the enemy horsemen so that a dozen were trapped in a circle. I was not there. I was leading the rest of my men to Edwulf’s hall, where the remainder of the Danes were running to mount their horses. One man, bare below the waist, scrambled away from a screaming woman and twisted as he saw me coming. Smoka, my horse, slowed, the man dodged again, but Smoka needed no guidance from me, and Serpent-Breath, my sword, took the man in the skull. The blade lodged there, so that the dying Dane was dragged along as I rode. Blood sprayed up my arm, then at last his twitching body fell away.

I spurred on, taking most of the men east of the settlement, and so cutting off the retreat of the surviving Danes. Finan had already sent scouts to the southern hill crest. Why, I wondered, had the Danes not posted sentinels on the hilltop from which we had first seen the fugitives?

There were so many skirmishes in those days. The Danes of East Anglia would raid the farmlands about Lundene, and we would retaliate, taking men deep into Danish territory to burn, kill and plunder. There was officially a peace treaty between Alfred’s Wessex and East Anglia, but a hungry Dane took no notice of words on parchment. A man who wanted slaves, livestock, or simply wanted an adventure, would cross into Mercia and take what he wanted, and we would then ride east and do the same. I liked such raids. They gave me a chance to train my youngest men, to let them see the enemy and cross swords. You can drill a man for a year, practise sword craft and spear skills forever, but he will learn more in just five minutes of battle.

There were so many skirmishes that I have forgotten most, yet I recall that skirmish at Edwulf’s hall. In reality it was nothing. The Danes had been careless and we took no casualties, yet I remember because, when it was over, and the swords were still, one of my men called me to the church.

It was a small church, hardly big enough for the fifty or sixty souls who lived or had lived around the hall. The building was made of oak and had a thatched roof on which a wooden cross stood tall. A crude bell hung at the western gable above the only door, while each side wall had two large timber-barred windows through which light streamed to illuminate a fat man who had been stripped naked and tied to a table that I assumed was the church’s altar. He was moaning. ‘Untie him,’ I snarled, and Rypere, who had led the men who captured the Danes inside the church, started forward as if I had just woken him from a trance.

Rypere had seen much horror in his few years, but he, like the men he led, seemed numbed by the cruelty inflicted on the fat man. His eye sockets were a mess of blood and jelly, his cheeks laced red, his ears sliced off, his manhood cut, his fingers first broken and then chiseled from his palms. Two Danes stood beyond the table, guarded by my men, their reddened hands betraying they had been the torturers. Yet it was the leader of the Danish band who was chiefly responsible for the cruelty, and that is why I remember the skirmish.

Because that was how I met Skade, and if ever any woman ate the apples of Asgard that gave the gods their eternal beauty, it was Skade. She was tall, almost as tall as I was, with a wiry body disguised by the mail coat she wore. She was maybe twenty years old, her face was narrow, high-nosed, haughty, with eyes as blue as any I have ever seen. Her hair, dark as the feathers of Odin’s ravens, hung long and straight to her slender waist, where a sword belt held an empty scabbard. I stared at her.

And she stared at me. And what did she see?

She saw Alfred’s warlord. She saw Uhtred of Bebbanburg, the pagan in service to a Christian king. I was tall, and in those days I had broad shoulders. I was a sword-warrior, spear-warrior, and fighting had made me rich so that my mail shone and my helmet was inlaid with silver and my arm rings glittered above the mail sleeves. My sword belt was decorated with silver wolf-heads, Serpent-Breath’s scabbard was cased with jet slivers, while my belt buckle and cloak clasp were made of heavy gold. Only the small image of Thor’s hammer, hanging around my neck, was cheap, but I had owned that talisman since I was a child. I have it still. The glory of my youth has gone, eroded by time, but that was what Skade saw. She saw a warlord.

And so she spat at me. The spittle landed on my cheek and I left it there. ‘Who is the bitch?’ I asked.

‘Skade,’ Rypere gave me her name, then nodded at the two torturers, ‘they say she’s their leader.’

The fat man moaned. He had been cut free and now curled his body into a ball. ‘Find someone to tend him,’ I said irritably, and Skade spat again, this time striking my mouth. ‘Who is he?’ I demanded, ignoring her.

‘We think he’s Edwulf,’ Rypere said.

‘Get him out of here,’ I said, then turned to look at the beauty who spat at me. ‘And who,’ I asked, ‘is Skade?’

She was a Dane, born to a steading in the northern part of their bleak country, daughter to a man who had no great riches and so left his widow poor. But the widow had Skade, and her beauty was astonishing, and so she had been married to a man willing to pay for that long, lithe body in his bed. The husband was a Frisian chieftain, a pirate, but then Skade had met Harald Bloodhair, and Jarl Harald offered her more excitement than living behind a rotting palisade on some tide-besieged sandbank, and so she had run away with him. All that I was to learn, but for now I just knew she was Harald’s woman, and that Haesten had spoken the truth; to see her was to want her. ‘You will release me,’ she said with an astonishing confidence.

‘I’ll do what I choose,’ I told her, ‘and I don’t take orders from a fool.’ She bridled at that, and I saw she was about to spit again, and so raised a hand as if to strike her and she went very still. ‘No lookouts,’ I said to her, ‘what leader doesn’t post sentries? Only a fool.’ She hated that. She hated it because it was true.

‘Jarl Harald will give you money for my freedom,’ she said.

‘My price for your freedom,’ I said, ‘is Harald’s liver.’

‘You are Uhtred?’ she asked.

‘I am the Lord Uhtred of Bebbanburg.’

She gave a ghost of a smile. ‘Then Bebbanburg will need a new lord if you don’t release me. I shall curse you. You will know agony, Uhtred of Bebbanburg, even greater agony than him.’ She nodded at Edwulf, who was being carried out of the church by four of my men.

‘He’s a fool too,’ I said, ‘because he set no sentries.’ Skade’s raiding party had descended on the village in the morning sunlight and no one saw them coming. Some villagers, those we had seen from the skyline, escaped, but most had been captured, and of those only the young women and the children who might have been sold as slaves still lived.

We let one Dane live, one Dane and Skade. The rest we killed. We took their horses, their mail and their weapons. I ordered the surviving villagers to drive their livestock north to Suthriganaweorc because Harald’s men had to be denied food, though as the harvest was already in the barns and the orchards were heavy, that would be hard. We were still slaughtering the last of the Danes when Finan’s scouts reported that horsemen were approaching the hill crest to the south.

I went to meet them, taking seventy men, the one Dane I would spare, Skade and also the long piece of hemp rope that had been attached to the church’s small bell. I joined Finan and we rode to where the hill’s crest was gentle grassland and from where we could look far to the south. New smoke pyres thickened in the distant sky, but nearer, much nearer, was a band of horsemen who rode on the banks of a willow-shadowed stream. I estimated they numbered about the same as my men, who were now lined on the crest either side of my wolf’s-head banner. ‘Get off the horse,’ I ordered Skade.

‘Those men are searching for me,’ she said defiantly, nodding at the horsemen who had paused at the sight of my battle line.

‘Then they’ve found you,’ I said, ‘so dismount.’

She just stared at me proudly. She was a woman who hated being given orders.

‘You can dismount,’ I said patiently, ‘or I can pull you out of the saddle. The choice is yours.’

She dismounted and I gestured for Finan to dismount. He drew his sword and stood close to the girl. ‘Now undress,’ I told her.

A look of utter fury darkened her face. She did nothing, but I sensed an anger like a tensed adder inside her. She wanted to kill me, she wanted to scream, she wanted to call the gods down from the smoke-patterned sky, but there was nothing she could do. ‘Undress,’ I said, ‘or have my men strip you.’

She turned as if looking for a way to escape, but there was none. There was a glint of tears in her eyes, but she had no choice but to obey me. Finan looked at me quizzically, because I was not known for being cruel to women, but I did not explain to him. I was remembering what Haesten had told me, how Harald was impulsive, and I wanted to provoke Harald Bloodhair. I would insult his woman and so hope to force Harald to anger instead of sober judgement.

Skade’s face was an expressionless mask as she stripped herself of her mail coat, a leather jerkin and linen breeches. One or two of my men cheered when her jerkin came off to reveal high, firm breasts, but they went silent when I snarled at them. I tossed the rope to Finan. ‘Tie it round her neck,’ I said.

She was beautiful. Even now I can close my eyes and see that long body standing in the buttercup-bright grass. The Danes in the valley were staring up, my men were gazing, and Skade stood there like a creature from Asgard come to the middle-earth. I did not doubt Harald would pay for her. Any man might have impoverished himself to possess Skade.

Finan gave me the rope’s end and I kicked my stallion forward and led her a third of the way down the slope. ‘Is Harald there?’ I asked her, nodding at the Danes who were two hundred paces away.

‘No,’ she said. Her voice was bitter and tight. She was ashamed and angry. ‘He’ll kill you for this,’ she said.

I smiled. ‘Harald Bloodhair,’ I said, ‘is a puking, shit-filled rat.’ I twisted in the saddle and waved to Osferth, who brought the surviving Danish prisoner down the slope. He was a young man and he looked up at me with fear in his pale blue eyes. ‘This is your chieftain’s woman,’ I said to him, ‘look at her.’

He hardly dared look at Skade’s nakedness. He just gave her a glance then gazed back at me.

‘Go,’ I told him, ‘and tell Harald Bloodhair that Uhtred of Bebbanburg has his whore. Tell Harald I have her naked, and that I’ll use her for my amusement. Go, tell him. Go!’

The man ran down the slope. The Danes in the valley were not going to attack us. Our numbers were evenly matched, and we had the high ground, and the Danes are ever reluctant to take too many casualties. So they just watched us and, though one or two rode close enough to see Skade clearly, none tried to rescue her.

I had carried Skade’s jerkin, breeches and boots. I threw them at her feet, then leaned down and took the rope from her neck. ‘Dress,’ I said.

I saw her consider escape. She was thinking of running long-legged down the slope, hoping to reach the watching horsemen before I caught her, but I touched Smoka’s flank and he moved in front of her. ‘You’d die with a sword in your skull,’ I told her, ‘long before you could reach them.’

‘And you’ll die,’ she said, stooping for her clothes, ‘without a sword in your hand.’

I touched the talisman about my neck. ‘Alfred,’ I said, ‘hangs captured pagans. You had better hope that I can keep you alive when we meet him.’

‘I shall curse you,’ she said, ‘and those you love.’

‘And you had better hope,’ I went on, ‘that my patience lasts, or else I’ll give you to my men before Alfred hangs you.’

‘A curse and death,’ she said, and there was almost triumph in her voice.

‘Hit her if she speaks again,’ I told Osferth.

Then we rode west to find Alfred.

Three

The first thing I noticed was the cart.

It was enormous, big enough to carry the harvest from a dozen fields, but this wagon would never carry anything so mundane as sheaves of wheat. It had two thick axles and four solid wheels rimmed with iron. The wheels had been painted with a green cross on a white background. The sides of the cart were panelled, and each of the panels bore the image of a saint. There were Latin words carved into the top rails, but I never bothered to ask what they meant because I neither wanted to know nor needed to ask. They would be some Christian exhortation, and one of those is much like any other. The bed of the cart was mostly filled by woolsacks, presumably to protect the passengers from the jolting of the vehicle, while a well-cushioned chair stood with its high back against the driver’s bench. A striped sailcloth awning supported by four serpentine-carved poles had been erected over the whole gaudy contraption, and a wooden cross, like those placed on church gables, reared from one of the poles. Saints’ banners hung from the remaining three poles.

‘A church on wheels?’ I asked sourly.

‘He can’t ride any more,’ Steapa told me gloomily.

Steapa was the commander of the royal bodyguard. He was a huge man, one of the few who were taller than me, and unremittingly fierce in battle. He was also unremittingly loyal to King Alfred. Steapa and I were friends, though we had started as enemies when I had been forced to fight him. It had been like attacking a mountain. Yet the two of us had survived that meeting, and there was no man I would rather have stood beside in a shield wall. ‘He can’t ride at all?’ I asked.

‘He does sometimes,’ Steapa said, ‘but it hurts too much. He can hardly walk.’

‘How many oxen drag this thing?’ I asked, gesturing at the wagon.

‘Six. He doesn’t like it, but he has to use it.’

We were in Æscengum, the burh built to protect Wintanceaster from the east. It was a small burh, nothing like the size of Wintanceaster or Lundene, and it protected a ford which crossed the River Wey, though why the ford needed protection was a mystery because the river could be easily crossed both north and south of Æscengum. Indeed, the town guarded nothing of importance, which was why I had argued against its fortification. Yet Alfred had insisted on making Æscengum into a burh because, years before, some half-crazed Christian mystic had supposedly restored a raped girl’s virginity at the place, and so it was a hallowed spot. Alfred had ordered a monastery built there, and Steapa told me the king was waiting in its church. ‘They’re talking,’ he said bleakly, ‘but none of them knows what to do.’

‘I thought you were waiting for Harald to attack you here?’

‘I told them he wouldn’t,’ Steapa said, ‘but what happens if he doesn’t?’

‘We find Harald and kill the earsling, of course,’ I said, gazing east to where new smoke pyres betrayed where Harald’s men were plundering new villages.

Steapa gestured at Skade. ‘Who’s she?’

‘Harald’s whore,’ I said, loud enough for Skade to hear, though her face showed no change from her customary haughty expression. ‘She tortured a man called Edwulf,’ I explained, ‘trying to get him to reveal where he’d buried his gold.’

‘I know Edwulf,’ Steapa said, ‘he eats and drinks his gold.’

‘He did,’ I said, ‘but he’s dead now.’ Edwulf had died before we left his estate.

Steapa held out a hand to take my swords. The monastery was serving this day as Alfred’s hall, and no one except the king, his relatives and his guards could carry a weapon in the royal presence. I surrendered Serpent-Breath and Wasp-Sting, then dipped my hands in a bowl of water offered by a servant. ‘Welcome to the king’s house, lord,’ the servant said in formal greeting, then watched as I looped the rope about Skade’s neck.

She spat in my face and I grinned. ‘Time to meet the king, Skade,’ I said, ‘spit at him and he’ll hang you.’

‘I will curse you both,’ she said.

Finan alone accompanied Steapa, Skade and I into the monastery. The rest of my men took their horses through the western gate to water them in a stream while Steapa led us to the abbey church, a fine stone building with heavy oak roof beams. The high windows lit painted leather hides, and the one above the altar showed a white-robed girl being raised to her feet by a bearded and haloed man. The girl’s apple-plump face bore a look of pure astonishment, and I assumed she was the newly-restored virgin, while the man’s expression suggested she might soon need the miracle repeated. Beneath her, seated on a rug-draped chair placed in front of the silver-piled altar, was Alfred.

A score of other men were in the church. They had been talking as we arrived, but the voices dropped to silence as I entered. On Alfred’s left was a gaggle of churchmen, among whom were my old friend Father Beocca and my old enemy Bishop Asser, a Welshman who had become the king’s most intimate adviser. In the nave of the church, seated on benches, were a half-dozen ealdormen, the leaders of those shires whose men had been summoned to join the army that faced Harald’s invasion. To Alfred’s right, seated on a slightly smaller chair, was his son-in-law, my cousin Æthelred, and behind him was his wife, Alfred’s daughter, Æthelflæd.

Æthelred was the Lord of Mercia. Mercia, of course, was the country to the north of Wessex, and its northern and eastern parts were ruled by the Danes. It had no king, instead it had my cousin, who was the acknowledged ruler of the Saxon parts of Mercia, though in truth he was in thrall to Alfred. Alfred, though he never made the claim explicit, was the actual ruler of Mercia, and Æthelred did his father-in-law’s bidding. Though how long that bidding could continue was dubious, for Alfred looked sicker than I had ever seen him. His pale, clerkly face was thinner than ever and his eyes had a bruised look of pain, though they had lost none of their intelligence.

He looked at me in silence, waited till I had bowed, then nodded a curt greeting. ‘You bring men, Lord Uhtred?’

‘Three hundred, lord.’

‘Is that all?’ Alfred asked, flinching.

‘Unless you wish to lose Lundene, lord, it’s all.’

‘And you bring your woman?’ Bishop Asser sneered.

Bishop Asser was an earsling, which is anything that drops out of an arse. He had dropped out of some Welsh arse, from where he had slimed his way into Alfred’s favour. Alfred thought the world of Asser who, in turn, hated me. I smiled at him. ‘I bring you Harald’s whore,’ I said.

No one answered that. They all just stared at Skade, and none stared harder than the young man standing just behind Alfred’s throne. He had a thin face with prominent bones, pale skin, black hair that curled just above his embroidered collar, and eyes that were quick and bright. He seemed nervous, overawed perhaps by the presence of so many broad-shouldered warriors, while he himself was slender, almost fragile, in his build. I knew him well enough. His name was Edward, and he was the Ætheling, the king’s eldest son, and he was being groomed to take his father’s throne. Now he was gaping at Skade as though he had never seen a woman before, but when she met his gaze he blushed and pretended to take a keen interest in the rush-covered floor.

‘You brought what?’ Bishop Asser broke the surprised silence.

‘Her name is Skade,’ I said, thrusting her forward. Edward raised his eyes and stared at Skade like a puppy seeing fresh meat.

‘Bow to the king,’ I ordered Skade in Danish.

‘I do what I wish,’ she said and, just as I supposed she would, she spat towards Alfred.

‘Strike her!’ Bishop Asser yapped.

‘Do churchmen strike women?’ I asked him.

‘Be quiet, Lord Uhtred,’ Alfred said tiredly. I saw how his right hand was curled into a claw that clutched the arm of the chair. He gazed at Skade, who returned the stare defiantly. ‘A remarkable woman,’ the king said mildly, ‘does she speak English?’

‘She pretends not to,’ I said, ‘but she understands it well enough.’

Skade rewarded that truth with a sidelong look of pure spite. ‘I’ve cursed you,’ she said under her breath.

‘The easiest way to be rid of a curse,’ I spoke just as softly, ‘is to cut out the tongue that made it. Now be silent, you rancid bitch.’

‘The curse of death,’ she said, just above a whisper.

‘What is she saying?’ Alfred asked.

‘She is reputed to be a sorceress, lord,’ I said, ‘and claims to have cursed me.’

Alfred and most of the churchmen touched the crosses hanging about their necks. It is a strange thing I have noticed about Christians, that they claim our gods have no power yet they fear the curses made in the names of those gods. ‘How did you capture her?’ Alfred asked.

I gave a brief account of what had happened at Edwulf’s hall and when I was done Alfred looked at her coldly. ‘Did she kill Edwulf’s priest?’ he asked.

‘Did you kill Edwulf’s priest, bitch?’ I asked her in Danish.

She smiled at me. ‘Of course I did,’ she said, ‘I kill all priests.’

‘She killed the priest, lord,’ I told Alfred.

He shuddered. ‘Take her outside,’ he ordered Steapa, ‘and guard her well.’ He held up a hand. ‘She is not to be molested!’ He waited till Skade was gone before looking at me. ‘You’re welcome, Lord Uhtred,’ he said, ‘you and your men. But I had hoped you would bring more.’

‘I brought enough, lord King,’ I said.

‘Enough for what?’ Bishop Asser asked.

I looked at the runt. He was a bishop, but still wore his monkish robes cinched tight around his scrawny waist. He had a face like a starved stoat, with pale green eyes and thin lips. He spent half his time in the wastelands of his native Wales, and half whispering pious poison into Alfred’s ears, and together the two men had made a law code for Wessex, and it was my amusement and ambition to break every one of those laws before either the king or the Welsh runt died. ‘Enough,’ I said, ‘to tear Harald and his men into bloody ruin.’

Æthelflæd smiled at that. She alone of Alfred’s family was my friend. I had not seen her in four years and she looked much thinner now. She was only a year or two above twenty, but appeared older and sadder, yet her hair was still lustrous gold and her eyes as blue as the summer sky. I winked at her, as much as anything to annoy her husband, my cousin, who immediately rose to the bait and snorted. ‘If Harald were that easy to destroy,’ Æthelred said, ‘we would have done it already.’

‘How?’ I asked, ‘by watching him from the hills?’ Æthelred grimaced. Normally he would have argued with me, because he was a belligerent and proud man, but he looked pale. He had an illness, no one knew what, and it left him tired and weak for long stretches. He was perhaps forty in that year, and his red hair had strands of white at his temples. This, I guessed, was one of his bad days. ‘Harald should have been killed weeks ago,’ I taunted him scornfully.

‘Enough!’ Alfred slapped the arm of his chair, startling a leather-hooded falcon that was perched on a lectern beside the altar. The bird flapped his wings, but the jesses held him firm. Alfred grimaced. His face told me what I well knew, that he needed me and did not want to need me. ‘We could not attack Harald,’ he explained patiently, ‘so long as Haesten threatened our northern flank.’

‘Haesten couldn’t threaten a wet puppy,’ I said, ‘he’s too frightened of defeat.’

I was arrogant that day, arrogant and confident, because there are times when men need to see arrogance. These men had spent days arguing about what to do, and in the end they had done nothing, and all that time they had been multiplying Harald’s forces in their minds until they were convinced he was invincible. Alfred, meanwhile, had deliberately refrained from seeking my help because he wanted to hand the reins of Wessex and Mercia to his son and to his son-in-law, which meant giving them reputations as leaders, but their leadership had failed, and so Alfred had sent for me. And now, because they needed it, I countered their fears with an arrogant assurance.

‘Harald has five thousand men,’ Ealdorman Æthelhelm of Wiltunscir said softly. Æthelhelm was a good man, but he too seemed infected by the timidity that had overtaken Alfred’s entourage. ‘He brought two hundred ships!’ he added.

‘If he has two thousand men, I’d be astonished,’ I said. ‘How many horses does he have?’ No one knew, or at least no one answered. Harald might well have brought as many as five thousand men, but his army consisted only of those who had horses.

‘However many men he has,’ Alfred said pointedly, ‘he must attack this burh to advance further into Wessex.’

That was a nonsense, of course. Harald could go north or south of Æscengum, but there was no future in arguing that with Alfred, who had a peculiar affection for the burh. ‘So you plan to defeat him here, lord?’ I asked instead.

‘I have nine hundred men here,’ he said, ‘and we have the burh’s garrison, and now your three hundred. Harald will break himself on these walls.’ I saw Æthelred, Æthelhelm and Ealdorman Æthelnoth of Sumorsæte all nod their agreement.

‘And I have five hundred men at Silcestre,’ Æthelred said, as though that made all the difference.

‘And what are they doing there?’ I asked, ‘pissing in the Temes while we fight?’

Æthelflæd grinned, while her brother Edward looked affronted. Dear Father Beocca, who had been my childhood tutor, gave me a long-suffering look of reproof. Alfred just sighed. ‘Lord Æthelred’s men can harry the enemy while they besiege us,’ he explained.

‘So our victory, lord,’ I said, ‘depends on Harald attacking us here? On Harald allowing us to kill his men while they try to cross the wall?’ Alfred did not answer. A pair of sparrows squabbled among the rafters. A thick beeswax candle on the altar behind Alfred guttered and smoked and a monk hurried to trim the wick. The flame grew again, its light reflected from a high golden reliquary that seemed to contain a withered hand.

‘Harald will want to defeat us.’ Edward made his first tentative contribution to the discussion.

‘Why?’ I asked, ‘when we’re doing our best to defeat ourselves?’ There was an aggrieved murmur from the courtiers, but I overrode it. ‘Let me tell you what Harald will do, lord,’ I said, speaking to Alfred. ‘He’ll take his army north of us and advance on Wintanceaster. There’s a lot of silver there, all conveniently piled in your new cathedral, and you’ve brought your army here so he won’t have much trouble breaking through Wintanceaster’s walls. And even if he does besiege us here,’ I spoke even louder to drown Bishop Asser’s angry protest, ‘all he needs do is surround us and let us starve. How much food do we have here?’

The king gestured to Asser, requesting that he stop spluttering. ‘So what would you do, Lord Uhtred?’ Alfred asked, and there was a plaintive note in his voice. He was old and he was tired and he was ill, and Harald’s invasion seemed to threaten all that he had achieved.

‘I would suggest, lord,’ I said, ‘that Lord Æthelred order his five hundred men to cross the Temes and march to Fearnhamme.’

A hound whined in a corner of the church, but otherwise there was no sound. They all stared at me, but I saw some faces brighten. They had been wallowing with indecision and had needed the sword stroke of certainty.

Alfred broke the silence. ‘Fearnhamme?’ he asked cautiously.

‘Fearnhamme,’ I repeated, watching Æthelred, but his pale face displayed no reaction, and no one else in the church made any comment.

I had been thinking about the country to the north of Æscengum. War is not just about men, nor even about supplies, it is also about the hills and valleys, the rivers and marshes, the places where land and water will help defeat an enemy. I had travelled through Fearnhamme often enough on my journeys from Lundene to Wintanceaster, and wherever I travelled I noted how the land lay and how it might be used if an enemy was near. ‘There’s a hill just north of the river at Fearnhamme,’ I said.

‘There is! I know it well,’ one of the monks standing to Alfred’s right said, ‘it has an earthwork.’

I looked at him, seeing a red-faced, hook-nosed man. ‘And who are you?’ I asked coldly.

‘Oslac, lord,’ he said, ‘the abbot here.’

‘The earthwork,’ I asked him, ‘is it in good repair?’

‘It was dug by the ancient folk,’ Abbot Oslac said, ‘and it’s much overgrown with grass, but the ditch is deep and the bank is still firm.’

There were many such earthworks in Britain, mute witnesses to the warfare that had rolled across the land before we Saxons came to bring still more. ‘The bank’s high enough to make defence easy?’ I asked the abbot.

‘You could hold it for ever, given enough men,’ Oslac said confidently. I gazed at him, noting the scar across the bridge of his nose. Abbot Oslac, I decided, had been a warrior before he became a monk.

‘But why invite Harald to besiege us there?’ Alfred asked, ‘when we have Æscengum and its walls and its storehouses?’

‘And how long will those storehouses last, lord?’ I asked him. ‘We have enough men inside these walls to hold the enemy till Judgement Day, but not enough food to reach Christmas.’ The burhs were not provisioned for a large army. The intent of the walled towns was to hold the enemy in check and allow the army of household warriors, the trained men, to attack the besiegers in the open country outside.

‘But Fearnhamme?’ Alfred asked.

‘Is where we shall destroy Harald,’ I said unhelpfully. I looked at Æthelred. ‘Order your men to Fearnhamme, cousin, and we’ll trap Harald there.’

There was a time when Alfred would have questioned and tested my ideas, but that day he looked too tired and too sick to argue, and he plainly did not have the patience to listen to other men challenging my plans. Besides, he had learned to trust me when it came to warfare, and I expected his assent to my vague proposal, but then he surprised me. He turned to the churchmen and gestured that one of them should join him, and Bishop Asser took the elbow of a young, stocky monk and guided him to the king’s chair. The monk had a hard, bony face and black tonsured hair as bristly and stiff as a badger’s pelt. He might have been handsome except his eyes were milky, and I guessed he had been blind from birth. He groped for the king’s chair, found it and knelt beside Alfred, who laid a fatherly hand on the monk’s bowed head. ‘So, Brother Godwin?’ he asked gently.

‘I am here, lord, I am here,’ Godwin said in a voice scarce above a hoarse whisper.

‘And you heard the Lord Uhtred?’

‘I heard, lord, I heard.’ Brother Godwin raised his blind eyes to the king. He said nothing for a while, but his face was twisting all that time, twisting and grimacing like a man possessed by an evil spirit. He started to utter a choking noise, and what astonished me was that none of this alarmed Alfred, who waited patiently until, at last, the young monk regained a normal expression. ‘It will be well, lord King,’ Godwin said, ‘it will be well.’

Alfred patted Brother Godwin’s head again and smiled at me. ‘We shall do as you suggest, Lord Uhtred,’ he said decisively. ‘You will direct your men to Fearnhamme,’ he spoke to Æthelred, then looked back to me, ‘and my son,’ he went on, ‘will command the West Saxon forces.’

‘Yes, lord,’ I said dutifully. Edward, the youngest man in the church, looked embarrassed, and his eyes flicked nervously from me to his father.

‘And you,’ Alfred turned to look at his son, ‘will obey the Lord Uhtred.’

Æthelred could contain himself no longer. ‘What guarantees do we have,’ he asked petulantly, ‘that the heathens will go to Fearnhamme?’

‘Mine,’ I said harshly.

‘But you cannot be certain!’ Æthelred protested.

‘He will go to Fearnhamme,’ I said, ‘and he will die there.’

I was wrong about that.

Messengers rode to Æthelred’s men at Silcestre, ordering them to march on Fearnhamme at first light next morning. Once there they were to occupy the hill that stands just north of the river. Those five hundred men were the anvil, while the men at Æscengum were my hammer, but to lure Harald onto the anvil would mean dividing our forces, and it is a rule of war not to do that. We had, at my best estimate, about five hundred men fewer than the Danes, and by keeping our army in two parts I was inviting Harald to destroy them separately. ‘But I’m relying on Harald being an impulsive fool, lord,’ I told Alfred that night.

The king had joined me on Æscengum’s eastern rampart. He had arrived with his usual entourage of priests, but had waved them away so he could talk with me privately. He stood for a moment just staring at the distant dull glow of fires where Harald’s men had sacked villages and I knew he was lamenting all the burned churches. ‘Is he an impulsive fool?’ he enquired mildly.

‘You tell me, lord,’ I said.

‘He’s savage, unpredictable and given to sudden rages,’ the king said. Alfred paid well for information about the northmen and kept meticulous notes on every leader. Harald had been pillaging in Frankia before its people bribed him to leave, and I did not doubt that Alfred’s spies had told him everything they could discover about Harald Bloodhair. ‘You know why he’s called Bloodhair?’ Alfred asked.

‘Because before every battle, lord, he sacrifices a horse to Thor and soaks his hair in the animal’s blood.’

‘Yes,’ Alfred said. He leaned on the palisade. ‘How can you be sure he’ll go to Fearnhamme?’ he asked.

‘Because I’ll draw him there, lord. I’ll make a snare and pull him onto our spears.’

‘The woman?’ Alfred asked with a slight shudder.

‘She is said to be special to him, lord.’

‘So I hear,’ he said. ‘But he will have other whores.’

‘She’s not the only reason he’ll go to Fearnhamme, lord,’ I said, ‘but she’s reason enough.’

‘Women brought sin into this world,’ he said so quietly I almost did not hear him. He rested against the oak trunks of the parapet and gazed towards the small town of Godelmingum that lay just a few miles eastwards. The people who lived there had been ordered to flee, and now the only inhabitants were fifty of my men who stood sentinel to warn us of the Danish approach. ‘I had hoped the Danes had ceased wanting this kingdom,’ he broke the silence plaintively.

‘They’ll always want Wessex,’ I said.

‘All I ask of God,’ he went on, ignoring my truism, ‘is that Wessex should be safe and ruled by my son.’ I answered nothing to that. There was no law that decreed a son should succeed his father as king, and if there had been then Alfred would not be Wessex’s ruler. He had succeeded his brother, and that brother had a son, Æthelwold, who wanted desperately to be king in Wessex. Æthelwold had been too young to assume the throne when his father died, but he was in his thirties now, a man in his ale-sozzled prime. Alfred sighed, then straightened. ‘Edward will need you as an adviser,’ he said.

‘I should be honoured, lord,’ I said.

Alfred heard the dutiful tone in my voice and did not like it. He stiffened, and I expected one of his customary reproofs, but instead he looked pained. ‘God has blessed me,’ he said quietly. ‘When I came to the throne, Lord Uhtred, it seemed impossible that we should resist the Danes. Yet by God’s grace Wessex lives. We have churches, monasteries, schools, laws. We have made a country where God dwells, and I cannot believe it is God’s will that it should vanish when I am called to judgement.’

‘May that be many years yet, lord,’ I said as dutifully as I had spoken before.

‘Oh, don’t be a fool,’ he snarled with sudden anger. He shuddered, closed his eyes momentarily, and when he spoke again his voice was low and wan. ‘I can feel death coming, Lord Uhtred. It’s like an ambush. I know it’s there and I can do nothing to avoid it. It will take me and it will destroy me, but I do not want it to destroy Wessex with me.’

‘If it’s your God’s will,’ I said harshly, ‘then nothing I can do nor anything Edward can do will stop it.’

‘We’re not puppets in God’s hands,’ he said testily. ‘We are his instruments. We earn our fate.’ He looked at me with some bitterness for he had never forgiven me for abandoning Christianity in favour of the older religion. ‘Don’t your gods reward you for good behaviour?’

‘My gods are capricious, lord.’ I had learned that word from Bishop Erkenwald who had intended it as an insult, but once I had learned its meaning I liked it. My gods are capricious.

‘How can you serve a capricious god?’ Alfred asked.

‘I don’t.’

‘But you said. …’

‘They are capricious,’ I interrupted him, ‘but that’s their pleasure. My task is not to serve them, but to amuse them, and if I do then they will reward me in the life to come.’

‘Amuse them?’ He sounded shocked.

‘Why not?’ I demanded. ‘We have cats, dogs and falcons for our pleasure, the gods made us for the same reason. Why did your god make you?’

‘To be His servant,’ he said firmly. ‘If I’m God’s cat then I must catch the devil’s mice. That is duty, Lord Uhtred, duty.’

‘While my duty,’ I said, ‘is to catch Harald and slice his head off. That, I think, will amuse my gods.’

‘Your gods are cruel,’ he said, then shuddered.

‘Men are cruel,’ I said, ‘and the gods made us like themselves, and some of the gods are kind, some are cruel. So are we. If it amuses the gods then Harald will slice my head off.’ I touched the hammer amulet.

Alfred grimaced. ‘God made you his instrument, and I do not know why he chose you, a pagan, but so he did and you have served me well.’

He had spoken fervently, surprising me, and I bowed my head in acknowledgement. ‘Thank you, lord.’

‘And now I wish you to serve my son,’ he added.

I should have known that was coming, but somehow the request took me by surprise. I was silent a moment as I tried to think what to say. ‘I agreed to serve you, lord,’ I said finally, ‘and so I have, but I have my own battles to fight.’

‘Bebbanburg,’ he said sourly.

‘Is mine,’ I said firmly, ‘and before I die I wish to see my banner flying over its gate and my son strong enough to defend it.’

He gazed at the glow of the enemy fires. I was noticing how scattered those fires were, which told me Harald had not yet concentrated his army. It would take time to pull those men together from across the ravaged countryside, which meant, I thought, that the battle would not be fought tomorrow, but the next day. ‘Bebbanburg,’ Alfred said, ‘is an island of the English in a sea of Danes.’

‘True, lord,’ I said, noting how he used the word ‘English’. It embraced all the tribes who had come across the sea, whether they were Saxon, Angle or Jute, and it spoke of Alfred’s ambition, that he now made explicit.

‘The best way to keep Bebbanburg safe,’ he said, ‘is to surround it with more English land.’

‘Drive the Danes from Northumbria?’ I asked.

‘If it is God’s will,’ he said, ‘then I will wish my son to do that great deed.’ He turned to me, and for a moment he was not a king, but a father. ‘Help him, Lord Uhtred,’ he said pleadingly. ‘You are my dux bellorum, my lord of battles, and men know they will win when you lead them. Scour the enemy from England, and so take your fortress back and make my son safe on his God-given throne.’

He had not flattered me, he had spoken the truth. I was the warlord of Wessex and I was proud of that reputation. I went into battle glittering with gold, silver and pride, and I should have known that the gods would resent that.

‘I want you,’ Alfred spoke softly but firmly, ‘to give my son your oath.’

I cursed inwardly, but spoke respectfully. ‘What oath, lord?’

‘I wish you to serve Edward as you have served me.’

And thus Alfred would tie me to Wessex, to Christian Wessex that lay so far from my northern home. I had spent my first ten years in Bebbanburg, that great rock-fastness on the northern sea, and when I had first ridden to war the fortress had been left in the care of my uncle, who had stolen it from me.

‘I will swear an oath to you, lord,’ I said, ‘and to no one else.’

‘I already have your oath,’ he said harshly.

‘And I will keep it,’ I said.

‘And when I’m dead,’ he asked bitterly, ‘what then?’

‘Then, lord, I shall go to Bebbanburg and take it, and keep it, and spend my days beside the sea.’

‘And if my son is threatened?’

‘Then Wessex must defend him,’ I said, ‘as I defend you now.’

‘And what makes you think you can defend me?’ He was angry now. ‘You would take my army to Fearnhamme? You have no certainty that Harald will go there!’

‘He will,’ I said.

‘You can’t know that!’

‘I shall force it on him,’ I said.

‘How?’ he demanded.

‘The gods will do that for me,’ I said.

‘You’re a fool,’ he snapped.

‘If you don’t trust me,’ I spoke just as forcibly, ‘then your son-in-law wants to be your lord of battles. Or you can command the army yourself? Or give Edward his chance?’

He shuddered, I thought with anger, but when he spoke again his voice was patient. ‘I just wish to know,’ he said, ‘why you are so sure that the enemy will do what you want.’

‘Because the gods are capricious,’ I said arrogantly, ‘and I am about to amuse them.’

‘Tell me,’ he said tiredly.

‘Harald is a fool,’ I said, ‘and he is a fool in love. We have his woman. I shall take her to Fearnhamme, and he will follow because he is besotted with her. And even if I did not have his woman,’ I went on, ‘he would still follow me.’

I had thought he would scoff at that, but he considered my words quietly, then joined his hands prayerfully. ‘I am tempted to doubt you, but Brother Godwin assures me you will bring us victory.’

‘Brother Godwin?’ I had wanted to ask about the strange blind monk.

‘God speaks to him,’ Alfred said with a quiet assurance.

I almost laughed, but then thought that the gods do speak to us, though usually by signs and portents. ‘Does he take all your decisions, lord?’ I asked sourly.

‘God assists me in all things,’ Alfred said sharply, then turned away because the bell was summoning the Christians to prayer in Æscengum’s new church.

The gods are capricious, and I was about to amuse them. And Alfred was right. I was a fool.

What did Harald want? Or, for that matter, Haesten? It was simpler to answer for Haesten, because he was the cleverer and more ambitious man, and he wanted land. He wanted to be a king.

The northmen had come to Britain in search of kingdoms, and the lucky ones had found their thrones. A northman reigned in Northumbria, and another in East Anglia, and Haesten wanted to be their equal. He wanted the crown, the treasures, the women and the status, and there were two places those things could be found. One was Mercia and the other Wessex.

Mercia was the better prospect. It had no king and was riven by warfare. The north and east of the country was ruled by jarls, powerful Danes who kept strong troops of household warriors and barred their gates each night, while the south and east was Saxon land. The Saxons looked to my cousin, Æthelred, for protection and he gave it to them, but only because he had inherited great wealth and enjoyed the firm support of his father-in-law, Alfred. Mercia was not part of Wessex, but it did Wessex’s bidding, and Alfred was the true power behind Æthelred. Haesten might attack Mercia and he would find allies in the north and east, but eventually he would find himself facing the armies of Saxon Mercia and Alfred’s Wessex. And Haesten was cautious. He had made his camp on a desolate shore of Wessex, but he did nothing provocative. He waited, certain that Alfred would pay him to leave, which Alfred had done. He also waited to see what damage Harald might achieve.

Harald probably wanted a throne, but above all he wanted everything that glittered. He wanted silver, gold and women. He was like a child that sees something pretty and screams until he possesses it. The throne of Wessex might fall into his hands as he greedily scooped up his baubles, but he did not aim for it. He had come to Wessex because it was full of treasures, and now he was ravaging the land, taking plunder, while Haesten just watched. Haesten hoped, I think, that Harald’s wild troops would so weaken Alfred that he could come behind and take the whole land. If Wessex was a bull, then Harald’s men were blood-maddened terriers who would attack in a pack and most would die in the attacking, but they would weaken the bull, and then Haesten, the mastiff, would come and finish the job. So to deter Haesten I needed to crush Harald’s stronger forces. The bull could not be weakened, but the terriers had to be killed, and they were dangerous, they were vicious, but they were also ill-disciplined, and I would now tempt them with treasure. I would tempt them with Skade’s sleek beauty.

The fifty men I had posted in Godelmingum fled from that town next morning, retreating from a larger group of Danes. My men splashed their horses through the river and streamed into Æscengum as the Danes lined the farther bank to stare at the banners hanging bright on the burh’s eastern palisade. Those banners showed crosses and saints, the panoply of Alfred’s state, and to make certain the enemy knew the king was in the burh I made Osferth walk slowly along the wall dressed in a bright cloak and with a circlet of shining bronze on his head.

Osferth, my man, was Alfred’s bastard. Few people knew, even though Osferth’s resemblance to his father was striking. He had been born to a servant girl whom Alfred had taken to his bed in the days before Christianity had captured his soul. Once, in an unguarded moment, Alfred had confided to me that Osferth was a continual reproof. ‘A reminder,’ he had told me, ‘of the sinner I once was.’

‘A sweet sin, lord,’ I had replied lightly.

‘Most sins are sweet,’ the king said, ‘the devil makes them so.’

What kind of perverted religion makes pleasures into sins? The old gods, even though they never deny us pleasure, fade these days. Folk abandon them, preferring the whip and bridle of the Christians’ nailed god.

So Osferth, a reminder of Alfred’s sweet sin, played the king that morning. I doubt he enjoyed it, for he resented Alfred, who had tried to turn him into a priest. Osferth had rebelled against that destiny, becoming one of my house-warriors instead. He was not a natural fighter, not like Finan, but he brought a keen intelligence to the business of war, and intelligence is a weapon that has a sharp edge and a long reach.

All war ends with the shield wall, where men hack in drink-sodden rage with axes and swords, but the art is to manipulate the enemy so that when that moment of screaming rage arrives it comes to your advantage. By parading Osferth on Æscengum’s wall I was trying to tempt Harald. Where the king is, I was suggesting to our enemies, there is treasure. Come to Æscengum, I was saying, and to increase the temptation I displayed Skade to the Danish warriors who gathered on the river’s far bank.

A few arrows had been shot at us, but those ended when the enemy recognised Skade. She unwittingly helped me by screaming at the men across the water. ‘Come and kill them all!’ she shouted.

‘I’ll shut her mouth,’ Steapa volunteered.

‘Let the bitch shout,’ I said.

She pretended to speak no English, yet she gave me a withering glance before looking back across the river. ‘They’re cowards,’ she shouted at the Danes, ‘Saxon cowards! Tell Harald they will die like sheep.’ She stepped close to the palisade. She could not cross the wall because I had ordered her tied by a rope that was looped about her neck and held by one of Steapa’s men.

‘Tell Harald his whore is here!’ I called over the river, ‘and that she’s noisy! Maybe we’ll cut out her tongue and send it to Harald for his supper!’

‘Goat turd,’ she spat at me, then reached over the palisade’s top and plucked out an arrow that had lodged in one of the oak trunks. Steapa immediately moved to disarm her, but I waved him back. Skade ignored us. She was gazing fixedly at the arrow head which, with a sudden wrench, she freed from the feathered shaft, that she tossed over the wall. She gave me a glance, raised the arrow head to her lips, closed her eyes and kissed the steel. She muttered some words I could not hear, touched her lips to the steel again, then pushed it beneath her gown, hesitated, then jabbed the point into one of her breasts. She gave me a triumphant look as she brought the blood-stained steel into view, then she flung the arrow head into the river and lifted her hands and face to the late summer sky. She screamed to get the attention of the gods, and when the scream faded she turned back to me. ‘You’re cursed, Uhtred,’ she said with a tone she might have used to remark on unremarkable weather.

I resisted the impulse to touch the hammer hanging about my neck because to have done so would have shown that I feared her curse, which instead I pretended to dismiss with a sneer. ‘Waste your breath, whore,’ I said, yet I still moved my hand to my sword and rubbed a finger across the silver cross embedded in Serpent-Breath’s hilt. The cross meant nothing to me, except it had been a gift from Hild, once my lover and now an abbess of extraordinary piety. Did I think that touching the cross was a substitute for the hammer? The gods would not think so.

‘When I was a child,’ Skade said suddenly, and still using a conversational tone as though she and I were old friends, ‘my father beat my mother senseless.’

‘Because she was like you?’ I asked.

She ignored that. ‘He broke her ribs, an arm and her nose,’ she went on, ‘and later that day he took me to the high pastures to help bring back the herd. I was twelve years old. I remember there were snowflakes flying and I was frightened of him. I wanted to ask why he had hurt my mother, but I didn’t like to speak in case he beat me, but then he told me anyway. He said he wanted to marry me to his closest friend, and my mother had opposed the idea. I hated it too, but he said I would marry the man anyway.’

‘Am I supposed to feel sorry for you?’ I asked.

‘So I pushed him over a bluff,’ she said, ‘and I remember him falling through the snowflakes and I watched him bounce on the rocks and I heard him scream. His back was broken.’ She smiled. ‘I left him there. He was still alive when I brought the herd down. I scrambled down the rocks and pissed on his face before he died.’ She looked calmly at me. ‘That was my first curse, Lord Uhtred, but not my last. I will lift the curse on you if you let me go.’

‘You think you can frighten me into giving you back to Harald?’ I asked, amused.

‘You will,’ she said confidently, ‘you will.’

‘Take her away,’ I ordered, tired of her.

Harald came at midday. One of Steapa’s men brought me the news and I climbed again to the ramparts to discover that Harald Bloodhair was on the river’s farther bank with fifty companions, all in mail. His banner showed an axe blade and its pole was surmounted by a wolf-skull that had been painted red.

He was a big man. His horse was big too, but even so Harald Bloodhair seemed to dwarf the stallion. He was too distant for me to see him clearly, but his yellow hair, long, thick and unstained with any blood, was plainly visible, as was his broad beard. For a time he just stared at Æscengum’s wall, then he unbuckled his sword belt, threw the weapon to one of his men and spurred his horse into the river. It was a warm day, but his mail was still covered by a great cloak of black bear fur that made him appear monstrously huge. He wore gold on his wrists and about his neck, and more gold decorated his horse’s bridle. He urged the stallion to the river’s centre where the water surged over his boot tops. Any of the archers on Æscengum’s wall could have shot an arrow, but he had ostentatiously disarmed himself, which meant he wanted to talk and I gave orders that no one was to loose a bow at him. He took off his helmet and searched the men crowding the rampart until he saw Osferth in his circlet. Harald had never seen Alfred and mistook the bastard for the father. ‘Alfred!’ he shouted.

‘The king doesn’t talk with brigands,’ I called back.

Harald grinned. His face was broad as a barley-shovel, his nose hooked and crooked, his mouth wide, his eyes as feral as any wolf. ‘Are you Uhtred Turdson?’ he greeted me.

‘I know you’re Harald the Gutless,’ I responded with a dutiful insult.

He gazed at me. Now that he was closer I could see that his yellow hair and beard were dirt-flecked, ropy and greasy, like the hair from a corpse buried in dung. The river surged by his stallion. ‘Tell your king,’ Harald called to me, ‘that he can save himself much trouble by giving me his throne.’

‘He invites you to come and take it,’ I said.

‘But first,’ he leaned forward and patted his horse’s neck, ‘you will return my property.’

‘We have nothing of yours,’ I said.

‘Skade,’ he said flatly.

‘She’s yours?’ I asked, pretending surprise. ‘But surely a whore belongs to whoever can pay her?’

He gave me a look of instant hatred. ‘If you have touched her,’ he said, pointing a leather-gloved finger at me, ‘or if any of your men have touched her, then I swear on Thor’s prick I’ll make your deaths so slow that your screams will stir the dead in their caves of ice.’ He was a fool, I thought. A clever man would have pretended the woman meant little or nothing to him, but Harald was already revealing his price. ‘Show her to me!’ he demanded.

I hesitated, as if making up my mind, but I wanted Harald to see the bait and so I ordered two of Steapa’s men to fetch Skade. She arrived with the rope still around her neck, yet such was her beauty and her calm dignity that she dominated the rampart. I thought, at that moment, that she was the most queenlike of any woman I had ever seen. She moved to the palisade and smiled at Harald, who kicked his horse a few paces forward. ‘Have they touched you?’ he shouted up to her.

She gave me a mocking look before answering. ‘They’re not men enough, my lord,’ she called.

‘Promise me!’ he shouted, and the desperation was plain in his voice.

‘I promise you,’ she answered, and her voice was a caress.

Harald wheeled his horse so it was sideways to me, then raised his gloved hand to point at me. ‘You showed her naked, Uhtred Turdson.’

‘Would you like me to show her that way again?’

‘For that you will lose your eyes,’ he said, prompting Skade to laugh. ‘Let her go now,’ Harald went on, ‘and I won’t kill you! Instead I’ll keep you blind and naked, on a rope’s end, and display you to all the world.’

‘You yelp like a puppy,’ I called.

‘Take the rope from her neck,’ Harald ordered me, ‘and send her to me now!’

‘Come and take her, puppy!’ I shouted back. I was feeling elated. Harald, I thought, was proving to be a headstrong fool. He wanted Skade more than he wanted Wessex, indeed more than he wanted all the treasures of Alfred’s kingdom. I remember thinking that I had him exactly where I wished him to be, on the end of my lead, but then he turned his horse and gestured towards the growing crowd of warriors on the river bank.

And from the trees that grew thick on that far bank emerged a line of women and children. They were our people, Saxons, and they were roped together because they had been taken for slavery. Harald’s men, as they ravaged through eastern Wessex, had doubtless captured every child and young woman they could find, and, when they had finished amusing themselves, would ship them to the slave markets of Frankia. But these women and infants were brought to the river’s edge where, on an order from Harald, they were made to kneel. The youngest child was about the age of my own Stiorra, and I can still see that child’s eyes as she stared up at me. She saw a warlord in shining glory and I saw nothing but pitiable despair.

‘Start,’ Harald called to his men.

One of his warriors, a grinning brute who looked as if he could out-wrestle an ox, stepped behind the woman at the southern end of the line. He was carrying a battle-axe that he swung high, then brought down so that the blade split her skull and buried itself in her trunk. I heard the crunch of the blade in bone over the noise of the river, and saw blood jetting higher than Harald on his horse. ‘One,’ Harald called, and gestured to the blood-spattered axeman who stepped briskly to his left to stand behind a child who was screaming because she had just seen her mother murdered. The red-bladed axe rose.

‘Wait,’ I called.

Harald held up his hand to check the axe, then gave me a mocking smile. ‘You said something, Lord Uhtred?’ he asked. I did not answer. I was watching a swirl of blood vanish and fade downstream. A man severed the rope tying the dead woman to her child, then kicked the corpse into the river. ‘Speak, Lord Uhtred, please do speak,’ Harald said with exaggerated courtesy.

There were thirty-three women and children left. If I did nothing then all would die. ‘Cut her free,’ I said softly.

The rope round Skade’s neck was cut. ‘Go,’ I told her.

I hoped she would break her legs as she jumped from the palisade, but she landed lithely, climbed the ditch’s far slope, then walked to the river’s edge. Harald spurred his horse to her, held out a hand and she swung up behind his saddle. She looked at me, touched a finger to her mouth and held the hand towards me. ‘You’re cursed, Lord Uhtred,’ she said, smiling, then Harald kicked his horse back to the far bank where the women and children had been led back into the thick-leaved trees.

So Harald had what he wanted.

But Skade wanted to be queen, and Harald wanted me blind.

‘What now?’ Steapa asked in his deep growling voice.

‘We kill the bastard,’ I said. And, like a faint shadow on a dull day, I sensed her curse.

That night I watched the glow of Harald’s fires; not the nearer ones in Godelmingum, though they were thick enough, but the fainter glimmer of more distant blazes, and I noted that much of the sky was now dark. For the last few nights the fires had been scattered across eastern Wessex, but now they drew closer and that meant Harald’s men were concentrating. He doubtless hoped that Alfred would stay in Æscengum and so he was gathering his army, not to besiege us, but probably to launch a sudden and fast attack on Alfred’s capital, Wintanceaster.

A few Danes had crossed the river to ride round Æscengum’s walls, but most were still on the far bank. They were doing what I wanted, yet my heart felt dour that night and I had to pretend confidence. ‘Tomorrow, lord,’ I told Edward, Alfred’s son, ‘the enemy will cross the river. They will be pursuing me, and you will let them all get past the burh, wait one hour and then follow.’

‘I understand,’ he said nervously.

‘Follow them,’ I said, ‘but don’t get into a fight till you reach Fearnhamme.’

Steapa, standing beside Edward, frowned. ‘Suppose they turn on us?’

‘They won’t,’ I said. ‘Just wait till his army has gone past, then follow it all the way to Fearnhamme.’

That sounded an easy enough instruction, but I doubted it would be so easy. Most of the enemy would cross the river in a great rush, eager to pursue me, but the stragglers would follow all day. Edward had to judge when the largest part of Harald’s army was an hour ahead and then, ignoring those stragglers, pursue Harald to Fearnhamme. It would be a difficult decision, but he had Steapa to advise him. Steapa might not have been clever, but he had a killer’s instinct that I trusted.

‘At Fearnhamme,’ Edward began, then hesitated. The half-moon, showing between clouds, lit his pale and anxious face. He looked like his father, but there was an uncertainty in him which was not surprising. He was only about seventeen years old, yet he was being given a grown man’s responsibility. He would have Steapa with him, but if he was to be a king then he would have to learn the hard business of making choices.

‘Fearnhamme will be simple,’ I said dismissively. ‘I shall be north of the river with the Mercians. We’ll be on a hill protected by earthworks. Harald’s men will cross the ford to attack us, and you will attack their rear. When you do that we attack their vanguard.’

‘Simple?’ Steapa echoed with a trace of amusement.

‘We crush them between us,’ I said.

‘With God’s help,’ Edward said firmly.

‘Even without that,’ I snarled.

Edward questioned me for the better part of an hour, right until the bell summoned him to prayers. He was like his father. He wanted to understand everything and have everything arranged in neat lists, but this was war and war was never neat. I believed Harald would follow me, and I trusted Steapa to bring the greater part of Alfred’s army behind Harald, but I could give Edward no promises. He wanted certainty, but I was planning battle, and I was relieved when he went to pray with his father.

Steapa left me and I stood alone on the rampart. Sentries gave me room, somehow aware of my baleful mood, and when I heard footsteps I ignored them, hoping that whoever it was would go away and leave me in peace.

‘The Lord Uhtred,’ a gently mocking voice said when the steps paused behind me.

‘The Lady Æthelflæd,’ I said, not turning to look at her.

She came and stood beside me, her cloak touching mine. ‘How is Gisela?’

I touched Thor’s hammer at my neck. ‘About to give birth again.’

‘The fourth child?’

‘Yes,’ I said, and shot a prayer towards the house of the gods that Gisela would survive the birth. ‘How is Ælfwynn?’ I asked. Ælfwynn was Æthelflæd’s daughter, still an infant.

‘She thrives.’

‘An only child?’

‘And going to stay that way,’ Æthelflæd said bitterly and I looked at her profile, so delicate in the moonlight. I had known her since she was a small child when she had been the happiest, most carefree of Alfred’s children, but now her face was guarded, as though she shrank from bad dreams. ‘My father’s angry with you,’ she said.

‘When is he not?’

She gave a hint of a smile, quickly gone. ‘He wants you to give an oath to Edward.’

‘I know.’

‘Then why won’t you?’

‘Because I’m not a slave to be handed on to a new master.’

‘Oh!’ she sounded sarcastic, ‘you’re not a woman?’

‘I’m taking my family north,’ I said.

‘If my father dies,’ Æthelflæd said, then hesitated. ‘When my father dies, what happens to Wessex?’

‘Edward rules.’

‘He needs you,’ she said. I shrugged. ‘As long as you live, Lord Uhtred,’ she went on, ‘the Danes hesitate to attack.’

‘Harald didn’t hesitate.’

‘Because he’s a fool,’ she said scornfully, ‘and tomorrow you’ll kill him.’

‘Perhaps,’ I said cautiously.

A murmur of voices made Æthelflæd turn to see men spilling from the church. ‘My husband,’ she said, investing those two words with loathing, ‘sent a message to Lord Aldhelm.’

‘Aldhelm leads the Mercian troops?’

Æthelflæd nodded. I knew Aldhelm. He was my cousin’s favourite and a man of unbounded ambition, sly and clever. ‘I hope your husband ordered Aldhelm to Fearnhamme,’ I said.

‘He did,’ Æthelflæd said, then lowered and quickened her voice, ‘but he also sent word that Aldhelm was to withdraw north if he thought the enemy too strong.’

I had half suspected that would happen. ‘So Aldhelm is to preserve Mercia’s army?’

‘How else can my husband take Wessex when my father dies?’ Æthelflæd asked in a voice of silken innocence. I glanced down at her, but she just gazed at the fires of Godelmingum.

‘Will Aldhelm fight?’ I asked her.

‘Not if it means weakening Mercia’s army,’ she said.

‘Then tomorrow I shall have to persuade Aldhelm to his duty.’

‘But you have no authority over him,’ Æthelflæd said.

I patted Serpent-Breath’s hilt. ‘I have this.’

‘And he has five hundred men,’ Æthelflæd said. ‘But there is one person he will obey.’

‘You?’

‘So tomorrow I ride with you,’ she said.

‘Your husband will forbid it,’ I answered.

‘Of course he will,’ she said calmly, ‘but my husband won’t know. And you will do me a service, Lord Uhtred.’

‘I am ever at your service, my lady,’ I said, too lightly.

‘Are you?’ she asked, turning to look up into my eyes.

I looked at her sad lovely face, and knew her question was serious. ‘Yes, my lady,’ I said gently.

‘Then tomorrow,’ she said bitterly, ‘kill them all. Kill all the Danes. Do that for me, Lord Uhtred,’ she touched my hand with the tips of her fingers, ‘kill them all.’

She had loved a Dane and she had lost him to a blade, and now she would kill them all.

There are three spinners at the root of Yggdrasil, the Tree of Life, and they weave our threads, and those spinners had made a skein of purest gold for Æthelflæd’s life, but in those years they wove that bright thread into a much darker cloth. The three spinners see our future. The gift of the gods to humankind is that we cannot see where the threads will go.

I heard songs from the Danes camped across the river.

And tomorrow I would draw them to the old hill by the river. And there kill them.

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