THE PALE
HORSEMAN

BERNARD CORNWELL

Copyright

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2005

Copyright © Bernard Cornwell 2005

Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015

Photography by Kata Vermes © Carnival Film & Television Limited 2015

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, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008139483

Ebook Edition © July 2009 ISBN: 9780007338825

Version: 2017-05-08

Dedication

THE PALE HORSEMAN

is for

George MacDonald Fraser,

in admiration

Ac her forlo berað; fugelas singað, gylleð grœghama.

For here starts war, carrion birds sing, and grey wolves howl.

From The Fight at Finnsburh

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Map

Place Names

Part One: VIKING

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Part Two: THE SWAMP KING

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Part Three: THE FYRD

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Historical Note

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

Æsc’s Hill | Ashdown, Berkshire
Æthelingæg | Athelney, Somerset
Afen | River Avon, Wiltshire
Andefera | Andover, Wiltshire
Baðum (pronounced Bathum) | Bath, Avon
Bebbanburg | Bamburgh Castle, Northumberland
Brant | Brent Knoll, Somerset
Bru | River Brue, Somerset
Cippanhamm | Chippenham, Wiltshire
Contwaraburg | Canterbury, Kent
Cornwalum | Cornwall
Cracgelad | Cricklade, Wiltshire
Cridianton | Crediton, Devon
Cynuit | Cynuit Hillfort, nr. Cannington, Somerset
Dærentmora | Dartmoor, Devon
Defereal | Kingston Deverill, Wiltshire
Defnascir | Devonshire
Dornwaraceaster | Dorchester, Dorset
Dreyndynas | ‘Fort of thorns’, fictional, set in Cornwall
Dunholm | Durham, County Durham
Dyfed | South-west Wales, mostly now Pembrokeshire
Dyflin | Dublin, Eire
Eoferwic | York (also the Danish Jorvic, pronounced Yorvik)
Ethandun | Edington, Wiltshire
Exanceaster | Exeter, Devon
Exanmynster | Exminster, Devon
Gewæsc | The Wash
Gifle | Yeovil, Somerset
Gleawecestre | Gloucester, Gloucestershire
Glwysing | Welsh kingdom, approximately Glamorgan and Gwent
Hamptonscir | Hampshire
Hamtun | Southampton, Hampshire
Lindisfarena | Lindisfarne (Holy Island), Northumberland
Lundene | London
Lundi | Lundy Island, Devon
Mærlebeorg | Marlborough, Wiltshire
Ocmundtun | Okehampton, Devon
Palfleot | Pawlett, Somerset
Pedredan | River Parrett
Penwith | Land’s End, Cornwall
Readingum | Reading, Berkshire
Sæfern | River Severn
Sceapig | Isle of Sheppey, Kent
Scireburnan | Sherborne, Dorset
Sillans | The Scilly Isles
Soppan Byrg | Chipping Sodbury, Gloucestershire
Sumorsæte | Somerset
Suth Seaxa | Sussex (South Saxons)
Tamur | River Tamar
Temes | River Thames
Thon | River Tone, Somerset
Thornsæta | Dorset
Uisc | River Exe
Werham | Wareham, Dorset
Wilig | River Wylye
Wiltunscir | Wiltshire
Winburnan | Wimborne Minster, Dorset
Wintanceaster | Winchester, Hampshire

PART ONE
Viking

One

These days I look at twenty-year-olds and think they are pathetically young, scarcely weaned from their mothers’ tits, but when I was twenty I considered myself a full-grown man. I had fathered a child, fought in the shield wall, and was loath to take advice from anyone. In short I was arrogant, stupid and headstrong. Which is why, after our victory at Cynuit, I did the wrong thing.

We had fought the Danes beside the ocean, where the river runs from the great swamp and the Sæfern Sea slaps on a muddy shore, and there we had beaten them. We had made a great slaughter and I, Uhtred of Bebbanburg, had done my part. More than my part, for at the battle’s end, when the great Ubba Lothbrokson, most feared of all the Danish leaders, had carved into our shield wall with his great war axe, I had faced him, beaten him and sent him to join the einherjar, that army of the dead who feast and swive in Odin’s corpse-hall.

What I should have done then, what Leofric told me to do, was ride hard to Exanceaster where Alfred, King of the West Saxons, was besieging Guthrum. I should have arrived deep in the night, woken the king from his sleep and laid Ubba’s battle banner of the black raven and Ubba’s great war axe, its blade still crusted with blood, at Alfred’s feet. I should have given the king the good news that the Danish army was beaten, that the few survivors had taken to their dragon-headed ships, that Wessex was safe and that I, Uhtred of Bebbanburg, had achieved all of those things.

Instead I rode to find my wife and child.

At twenty years old I would rather have been ploughing Mildrith than reaping the reward of my good fortune, and that is what I did wrong, but, looking back, I have few regrets. Fate is inexorable, and Mildrith, though I had not wanted to marry her and though I came to detest her, was a lovely field to plough.

So, in that late spring of the year 877, I spent the Saturday riding to Cridianton instead of going to Alfred. I took twenty men with me and I promised Leofric that we would be at Exanceaster by midday on Sunday and I would make certain Alfred knew we had won his battle and saved his kingdom.

‘Odda the Younger will be there by now,’ Leofric warned me. Leofric was almost twice my age, a warrior hardened by years of fighting the Danes. ‘Did you hear me?’ he asked when I said nothing. ‘Odda the Younger will be there by now,’ he said again, ‘and he’s a piece of goose shit who’ll take all the credit.’

‘The truth cannot be hidden,’ I said loftily.

Leofric mocked that. He was a bearded squat brute of a man who should have been the commander of Alfred’s fleet, but he was not well-born and Alfred had reluctantly given me charge of the twelve ships because I was an ealdorman, a noble, and it was only fitting that a high-born man should command the West Saxon fleet even though it had been much too puny to confront the massive array of Danish ships that had come to Wessex’s south coast. ‘There are times,’ Leofric grumbled, ‘when you are an earsling.’ An earsling was something that had dropped out of a creature’s backside and was one of Leofric’s favourite insults. We were friends.

‘We’ll see Alfred tomorrow,’ I said.

‘And Odda the Younger,’ Leofric said patiently, ‘has seen him today.’

Odda the Younger was the son of Odda the Elder who had given my wife shelter, and the son did not like me. He did not like me because he wanted to plough Mildrith, which was reason enough for him to dislike me. He was also, as Leofric said, a piece of goose shit, slippery and slick, which was reason enough for me to dislike him.

‘We shall see Alfred tomorrow,’ I said again, and next morning we all rode to Exanceaster, my men escorting Mildrith, our son and his nurse, and we found Alfred on the northern side of Exanceaster where his green and white dragon banner flew above his tents. Other banners snapped in the damp wind, a colourful array of beasts, crosses, saints and weapons announcing that the great men of Wessex were with their king. One of those banners showed a black stag, which confirmed that Leofric had been right and that Odda the Younger was here in south Defnascir. Outside the camp, between its southern margin and the city walls, was a great pavilion made of sail-cloth stretched across guyed poles, and that told me that Alfred, instead of fighting Guthrum, was talking to him. They were negotiating a truce, though not on that day, for it was a Sunday and Alfred would do no work on a Sunday if he could help it. I found him on his knees in a makeshift church made from another poled sail-cloth, and all his nobles and thegns were arrayed behind him, and some of those men turned as they heard our horses’ hooves. Odda the Younger was one of those who turned and I saw the apprehension show on his narrow face.

The bishop who was conducting the service paused to let the congregation make a response, and that gave Odda an excuse to look away from me. He was kneeling close to Alfred, very close, suggesting that he was high in the king’s favour, and I did not doubt that he had brought the dead Ubba’s raven banner and war axe to Exanceaster and claimed the credit for the fight beside the sea. ‘One day,’ I said to Leofric, ‘I shall slit that bastard from the crotch to the gullet and dance on his offal.’

‘You should have done it yesterday.’

A priest had been kneeling close to the altar, one of the many priests who always accompanied Alfred, and he saw me and slid backwards as unobtrusively as he could until he was able to stand and hurry towards me. He had red hair, a squint, a palsied left hand and an expression of astonished joy on his ugly face. ‘Uhtred!’ he called as he ran towards our horses, ‘Uhtred! We thought you were dead!’

‘Me?’ I grinned at the priest. ‘Dead?’

‘You were a hostage!’

I had been one of the dozen English hostages in Werham, but while the others had been murdered by Guthrum, I had been spared because of Earl Ragnar who was a Danish war-chief and as close to me as a brother. ‘I didn’t die, father,’ I said to the priest, whose name was Beocca, ‘and I’m surprised you did not know that.’

‘How could I know it?’

‘Because I was at Cynuit, father, and Odda the Younger could have told you that I was there and that I lived.’

I was staring at Odda as I spoke and Beocca caught the grimness in my voice. ‘You were at Cynuit?’ he asked nervously.

‘Odda the Younger didn’t tell you?’

‘He said nothing.’

‘Nothing!’ I kicked my horse forward, forcing it between the kneeling men and thus closer to Odda. Beocca tried to stop me, but I pushed his hand away from my bridle. Leofric, wiser than me, held back, but I pushed the horse into the back rows of the congregation until the press of worshippers made it impossible to advance further, and then I stared at Odda as I spoke to Beocca. ‘He didn’t describe Ubba’s death?’ I asked.

‘He says Ubba died in the shield wall,’ Beocca said, his voice a hiss so that he did not disturb the liturgy, ‘and that many men contributed to his death.’

‘Is that all he told you?’

‘He says he faced Ubba himself,’ Beocca said.

‘So who do men think killed Ubba Lothbrokson?’ I asked.

Beocca could sense trouble coming and he tried to calm me. ‘We can talk of these things later,’ he said, ‘but for now, Uhtred, join us in prayer.’ He used my name rather than calling me lord because he had known me since I was a child. Beocca, like me, was a Northumbrian, and he had been my father’s priest, but when the Danes took our country he had come to Wessex to join those Saxons who still resisted the invaders. ‘This is a time for prayer,’ he insisted, ‘not for quarrels.’

But I was in a mood for quarrels. ‘Who do men say killed Ubba Lothbrokson?’ I asked again.

‘They give thanks to God that the pagan is dead,’ Beocca evaded my question, and tried to hush my voice with frantic gestures from his palsied left hand.

‘Who do you think killed Ubba?’ I asked, and when Beocca did not answer, I provided the answer for him. ‘You think Odda the Younger killed him?’ I could see that Beocca did believe that, and the anger surged in me. ‘Ubba fought me man on man,’ I said, too loudly now, ‘one on one, just me and him. My sword against his axe. And he was unwounded when the fight began, father, and at the end of it he was dead. He had gone to his brothers in the corpse-hall.’ I was furious now and my voice had risen until I was shouting, and the distracted congregation all turned to stare at me. The bishop, whom I recognised as the bishop of Exanceaster, the same man who had married me to Mildrith, frowned nervously. Only Alfred seemed unmoved by the interruption, but then, reluctantly, he stood and turned towards me as his wife, the pinch-faced Ælswith, hissed into his ear.

‘Is there any man here,’ I was still shouting, ‘who will deny that I, Uhtred of Bebbanburg, killed Ubba Lothbrokson in single combat?’

There was silence. I had not intended to disrupt the service, but monstrous pride and ungovernable rage had driven me to defiance. The faces gazed at me, the banners flapped in the desultory wind and the small rain dripped from the edges of the sail-cloth awning. Still no one answered me, but men saw that I was staring at Odda the Younger and some looked to him for a response, but he was struck dumb. ‘Who killed Ubba?’ I shouted at him.

‘This is not seemly,’ Alfred said angrily.

‘This killed Ubba!’ I declared, and I drew Serpent-Breath.

And that was my next mistake.

In the winter, while I was mewed up in Werham as one of the hostages given to Guthrum, a new law had been passed in Wessex, a law which decreed that no man other than the royal bodyguards was to draw a weapon in the presence of the king. The law was not just to protect Alfred, but also to prevent the quarrels between his great men becoming lethal and, by drawing Serpent-Breath, I had unwittingly broken the law so that his household troops were suddenly converging on me with spears and drawn swords until Alfred, red-cloaked and bare-headed, shouted for every man to be still.

Then he walked towards me and I could see the anger on his face. He had a narrow face with a long nose and chin, a high forehead, and a thin-lipped mouth. He normally went clean-shaven, but he had grown a short beard that made him look older. He had not lived thirty years yet, but looked closer to forty. He was painfully thin, and his frequent illnesses had given his face a crabbed look. He looked more like a priest than the king of the West Saxons, for he had the irritated, pale face of a man who spends too much time out of the sun and poring over books, but there was an undoubted authority in his eyes. They were very light eyes, as grey as mail, unforgiving. ‘You have broken my peace,’ he said, ‘and offended the peace of Christ.’

I sheathed Serpent-Breath, mainly because Beocca had muttered at me to stop being a damned fool and to put my sword away, and now the priest was tugging my right leg, trying to make me dismount and kneel to Alfred, whom he adored. Ælswith, Alfred’s wife, was staring at me with pure scorn. ‘He should be punished,’ she called out.

‘You will go there,’ the king said, pointing towards one of his tents, ‘and wait for my judgment.’

I had no choice but to obey, for his household troops, all of them in mail and helmets, pressed about me and so I was taken to the tent where I dismounted and ducked inside. The air smelled of yellowed, crushed grass. The rain pattered on the linen roof and some leaked through onto an altar that held a crucifix and two empty candle-holders. The tent was evidently the king’s private chapel and Alfred made me wait there a long time. The congregation dispersed, the rain ended and a watery sunlight emerged between the clouds. A harp played somewhere, perhaps serenading Alfred and his wife as they ate. A dog came into the tent, looked at me, lifted its leg against the altar and went out again. The sun vanished behind cloud and more rain pattered on the canvas, then there was a flurry at the tent’s opening and two men entered. One was Æthelwold, the king’s nephew, and the man who should have inherited Wessex’s throne from his father except he had been reckoned too young and so the crown had gone to his uncle instead. He gave me a sheepish grin, deferring to the second man who was heavy-set, full-bearded and ten years older than Æthelwold. He introduced himself by sneezing, then blew his nose into his hand and wiped the snot onto his leather coat. ‘Call it springtime,’ he grumbled, then stared at me with a truculent expression. ‘Damned rain never stops. You know who I am?’

‘Wulfhere,’ I said, ‘Ealdorman of Wiltunscir.’ He was a cousin to the king and a leading power in Wessex.

He nodded. ‘And you know who this damn fool is?’ he asked, gesturing at Æthelwold who was holding a bundle of white cloth.

‘We know each other,’ I said. Æthelwold was only a month or so younger than I, and he was fortunate, I suppose, that his Uncle Alfred was such a good Christian or else he could have expected a knife in the night. He was much better looking than Alfred, but foolish, flippant and usually drunk, though he appeared sober enough on that Sunday morning.

‘I’m in charge of Æthelwold now,’ Wulfhere said, ‘and of you. And the king sent me to punish you.’ He brooded on that for a heartbeat. ‘What his wife wants me to do,’ he went on, ‘is pull the guts out of your smelly arse and feed them to the pigs.’ He glared at me. ‘You know what the penalty is for drawing a sword in the king’s presence?’

‘A fine?’ I guessed.

‘Death, you fool, death. They made a new law last winter.’

‘How was I supposed to know?’

‘But Alfred’s feeling merciful,’ Wulfhere ignored my question. ‘So you’re not to dangle off a gallows. Not today, anyhow. But he wants your assurance you’ll keep the peace.’

‘What peace?’

‘His damned peace, you fool. He wants us to fight the Danes, not slice each other up. So for the moment you have to swear to keep the peace.’

‘For the moment?’

‘For the moment,’ he said tonelessly, and I just shrugged. He took that for acceptance. ‘So you killed Ubba?’ he asked.

‘I did.’

‘That’s what I hear.’ He sneezed again. ‘You know Edor?’

‘I know him,’ I said. Edor was one of Ealdorman Odda’s battle chiefs, a warrior of the men of Defnascir, and he had fought beside us at Cynuit.

‘Edor told me what happened,’ Wulfhere said, ‘but only because he trusts me. For God’s sake stop fidgeting!’ This last shout was directed at Æthelwold who was poking beneath the altar’s linen cover, presumably in search of something valuable. Alfred, rather than murder his nephew, seemed intent on boring him to death. Æthelwold had never been allowed to fight, lest he make a reputation for himself, instead he had been forced to learn his letters, which he hated, and so he idled his time away, hunting, drinking, whoring and filled with resentment that he was not the king. ‘Just stand still, boy,’ Wulfhere snarled.

‘Edor told you,’ I said, unable to keep the outrage from my voice, ‘because he trusts you? You mean what happened at Cynuit is a secret? A thousand men saw me kill Ubba!’

‘But Odda the Younger took the credit,’ Wulfhere said, ‘and his father is badly wounded and if he dies then Odda the Younger will become one of the richest men in Wessex, and he’ll lead more troops and pay more priests than you can ever hope to do, so men won’t want to offend him, will they? They’ll pretend to believe him, to keep him generous. And the king already believes him, and why shouldn’t he? Odda arrived here with Ubba Lothbrokson’s banner and war axe. He dropped them at Alfred’s feet, then knelt and gave the praise to God, and promised to build a church and monastery at Cynuit, and what did you do? Ride a damned horse into the middle of mass and wave your sword about. Not a clever thing to do with Alfred.’

I half smiled at that, for Wulfhere was right. Alfred was uncommonly pious, and a sure way to succeed in Wessex was to flatter that piety, imitate it and ascribe all good fortune to God.

‘Odda’s a prick,’ Wulfhere growled, surprising me, ‘but he’s Alfred’s prick now, and you’re not going to change that.’

‘But I killed …’

‘I know what you did!’ Wulfhere interrupted me. ‘And Alfred probably suspects you’re telling the truth, but he believes Odda made it possible. He thinks Odda and you both fought Ubba. He may not even care if neither of you did, except that Ubba’s dead and that’s good news, and Odda brought that news and so the sun shines out of Odda’s arse, and if you want the king’s troops to hang you off a high branch then you’ll make a feud with Odda. Do you understand me?’

‘Yes.’

Wulfhere sighed. ‘Leofric said you’d see sense if I beat you over the head long enough.’

‘I want to see Leofric,’ I said.

‘You can’t,’ Wulfhere said sharply. ‘He’s being sent back to Hamtun where he belongs. But you’re not going back. The fleet will be put in someone else’s charge. You’re to do penance.’

For a moment I thought I had misheard. ‘I’m to do what?’ I asked.

‘You’re to grovel,’ Æthelwold spoke for the first time. He grinned at me. We were not exactly friends, but we had drunk together often enough and he seemed to like me. ‘You’re to dress like a girl,’ Æthelwold continued, ‘go on your knees and be humiliated.’

‘And you’re to do it right now,’ Wulfhere added.

‘I’ll be damned …’

‘You’ll be damned anyway,’ Wulfhere snarled at me, then snatched the white bundle from Æthelwold’s grasp and tossed it at my feet. It was a penitent’s robe, and I left it on the ground. ‘For God’s sake, lad,’ Wulfhere said, ‘have some sense. You’ve got a wife and land here, don’t you? So what happens if you don’t do the king’s bidding? You want to be outlawed? You want your wife in a nunnery? You want the church to take your land?’

I stared at him. ‘All I did was kill Ubba and tell the truth.’

Wulfhere sighed. ‘You’re a Northumbrian,’ he said, ‘and I don’t know how they did things up there, but this is Alfred’s Wessex. You can do anything in Wessex except piss all over his church, and that’s what you just did. You pissed, son, and now the church is going to piss all over you.’ He grimaced as the rain beat harder on the tent, then he frowned, staring at the puddle spreading just outside the entrance. He was silent a long time, before turning and giving me a strange look. ‘You think any of this is important?’

I did, but I was so astonished by his question, which had been asked in a soft, bitter voice, that I had nothing to say.

‘You think Ubba’s death makes any difference?’ he asked, and again I thought I had misheard. ‘And even if Guthrum makes peace,’ he went on, ‘you think we’ve won?’ His heavy face was suddenly savage. ‘How long will Alfred be king? How long before the Danes rule here?’

I still had nothing to say. Æthelwold, I saw, was listening intently. He longed to be king, but he had no following, and Wulfhere had plainly been appointed as his guardian to keep him from making trouble. But Wulfhere’s words suggested the trouble would come anyway. ‘Just do what Alfred wants,’ the ealdorman advised me, ‘and afterwards find a way to keep living. That’s all any of us can do. If Wessex falls we’ll all be looking for a way to stay alive, but in the meantime put on that damned robe and get it over with.’

‘Both of us,’ Æthelwold said, and he picked up the robe and I saw he had fetched two of them, folded together.

‘You?’ Wulfhere snarled at him. ‘Are you drunk?’

‘I’m penitent for being drunk. Or I was drunk, now I’m penitent.’ He grinned at me, then pulled the robe over his head. ‘I shall go to the altar with Uhtred,’ he said, his voice muffled by the linen.

Wulfhere could not stop him, but Wulfhere knew, as I knew, that Æthelwold was making a mockery of the rite. And I knew Æthelwold was doing it as a favour to me, though as far as I knew he owed me no favour. But I was grateful to him, so I put on the damned frock and, side by side with the king’s nephew, went to my humiliation.

I meant little to Alfred. He had a score of great lords in Wessex, while across the frontier in Mercia there were other lords and thegns who lived under Danish rule but who would fight for Wessex if Alfred gave them an opportunity. All of those great men could bring him soldiers, could rally swords and spears to the dragon banner of Wessex, while I could bring him nothing except my sword, Serpent-Breath. True, I was a lord, but I was from far off Northumbria and I led no men and so my only value to him was far in the future. I did not understand that yet. In time, as the rule of Wessex spread northwards, my value grew, but back then, in 877, when I was an angry twenty-year-old, I knew nothing except my own ambitions.

And I learned humiliation. Even today, a lifetime later, I remember the bitterness of that penitential grovel. Why did Alfred make me do it? I had won him a great victory, yet he insisted on shaming me, and for what? Because I had disturbed a church service? It was partly that, but only partly. He loved his god, loved the church and passionately believed that the survival of Wessex lay in obedience to the church and so he would protect the church as fiercely as he would fight for his country. And he loved order. There was a place for everything and I did not fit and he genuinely believed that if I could be brought to God’s heel then I would become part of his beloved order. In short he saw me as an unruly young hound that needed a good whipping before it could join the disciplined pack.

So he made me grovel.

And Æthelwold made a fool of himself.

Not at first. At first it was all solemnity. Every man in Alfred’s army was there to watch, and they made two lines in the rain. The lines stretched to the altar under the guyed sail-cloth where Alfred and his wife waited with the bishop and a gaggle of priests. ‘On your knees,’ Wulfhere said to me. ‘You have to go on your knees,’ he insisted tonelessly, ‘and crawl up to the altar. Kiss the altar cloth, then lie flat.’

‘Then what?’

‘Then God and the king forgive you,’ he said, and waited. ‘Just do it,’ he snarled.

So I did it. I went down on my knees and I shuffled through the mud, and the silent lines of men watched me, and then Æthelwold, close beside me, began to wail that he was a sinner. He threw his arms in the air, fell flat on his face, howled that he was penitent, shrieked that he was a sinner, and at first men were embarrassed and then they were amused. ‘I’ve known women!’ Æthelwold shouted at the rain, ‘and they were bad women! Forgive me!’

Alfred was furious, but he could not stop a man making a fool of himself before God. Perhaps he thought Æthelwold’s remorse was genuine? ‘I’ve lost count of the women!’ Æthelwold shouted, then beat his fists in the mud. ‘Oh God, I love tits! God, I love naked women, God, forgive me for that!’ The laughter spread, and every man must have remembered that Alfred, before piety caught him in its clammy grip, had been notorious for the women he had pursued. ‘You must help me, God!’ Æthelwold cried as we shuffled a few feet farther. ‘Send me an angel!’

‘So you can hump her?’ a voice called from the crowd and the laughter became a roar.

Ælswith was hurried away, lest she hear something unseemly. The priests whispered together, but Æthelwold’s penitence, though extravagant, seemed real enough. He was weeping. I knew he was really laughing, but he howled as though his soul was in agony. ‘No more tits, God!’ he called, ‘no more tits!’ He made a fool of himself, but, as men already thought him a fool, he did not mind. ‘Keep me from tits, God!’ he shouted, and now Alfred left, knowing that the solemnity of the day was ruined, and most of the priests left with him, so that Æthelwold and I crawled to an abandoned altar where Æthelwold turned in his mud-spattered robe and leaned against the table. ‘I hate him,’ he said softly, and I knew he referred to his uncle. ‘I hate him,’ he went on, ‘and now you owe me a favour, Uhtred.’

‘I do,’ I said.

‘I’ll think of one,’ he said.

Odda the Younger had not left with Alfred. He seemed bemused. My humiliation, which he had surely thought to enjoy, had turned into laughter and he was aware that men were watching him, judging his truthfulness, and he moved closer to a huge man who was evidently one of his bodyguards. That man was tall and very broad about the chest, but it was his face that commanded attention for it looked as though his skin had been stretched too tight across his skull, leaving his face incapable of making any expression other than one of pure hatred and wolfish hunger. Violence came off the man like the stench of a wet hound and when he looked at me it was like a beast’s soulless stare, and I instinctively understood that this was the man who would kill me if Odda found a chance to commit murder. Odda was nothing, a rich man’s spoiled son, but his money gave him the means to command men who were killers. Then Odda plucked at the tall man’s sleeve and they both turned and walked away.

Father Beocca had stayed by the altar. ‘Kiss it,’ he ordered me, ‘then lie flat.’

I stood up instead. ‘You can kiss my arse, father,’ I said. I was angry, and my anger frightened Beocca who backed away.

But I had done what the king wanted. I had been penitent.

The tall man beside Odda the Younger was named Steapa. Steapa Snotor, men called him, or Steapa the Clever. ‘It’s a joke,’ Wulfhere told me as I ripped off the penitent’s frock and pulled on my mail coat.

‘A joke?’

‘Because he’s dumb as an ox,’ Wulfhere said. ‘He’s got frog spawn instead of a brain. He’s stupid, but he’s not a stupid fighter. You didn’t see him at Cynuit?’

‘No,’ I said curtly.

‘So what’s Steapa to you?’ Wulfhere asked.

‘Nothing,’ I said. I had asked the ealdorman who Odda’s bodyguard was so that I could learn the name of the man who might try to kill me, but that possible murder was none of Wulfhere’s business.

Wulfhere hesitated, wanting to ask more, then deciding he would fetch no better answer. ‘When the Danes come,’ he said, ‘you’ll be welcome to join my men.’

Æthelwold, Alfred’s nephew, was holding my two swords and he drew Serpent-Breath from her scabbard and stared at the wispy patterns in her blade. ‘If the Danes come,’ he spoke to Wulfhere, ‘you must let me fight.’

‘You don’t know how to fight.’

‘Then you must teach me.’ He slid Serpent-Breath back into the scabbard. ‘Wessex needs a king who can fight,’ he said, ‘instead of pray.’

‘You should watch your tongue, lad,’ Wulfhere said, ‘in case it gets cut out.’ He snatched the swords from Æthelwold and gave them to me. ‘The Danes will come,’ he said, ‘so join me when they do.’

I nodded, but said nothing. When the Danes came, I thought, I planned to be with them. I had been raised by Danes after being captured at the age of ten and they could have killed me, but instead they had treated me well. I had learned their language and worshipped their gods until I no longer knew whether I was Danish or English. Had Earl Ragnar the Elder lived I would never have left them, but he had died, murdered in a night of treachery and fire, and I had fled south to Wessex. But now I would go back. Just as soon as the Danes left Exanceaster I would join Ragnar’s son, Ragnar the Younger, if he lived. Ragnar the Younger’s ship had been in the fleet which had been hammered in the great storm. Scores of ships had sunk, and the remnants of the fleet had limped to Exanceaster where the boats were now burned to ash on the riverbank beneath the town. I did not know if Ragnar lived. I hoped he lived, and I prayed he would escape Exanceaster and then I would go to him, offer him my sword, and carry that blade against Alfred of Wessex. Then, one day, I would dress Alfred in a frock and make him crawl on his knees to an altar of Thor. Then kill him.

Those were my thoughts as we rode to Oxton. That was the estate Mildrith had brought me in marriage and it was a beautiful place, but so saddled with debt that it was more of a burden than a pleasure. The farmland was on the slopes of hills facing east towards the broad sea-reach of the Uisc and above the house were thick woods of oak and ash from which flowed small clear streams that cut across the fields where rye, wheat and barley grew. The house, it was not a hall, was a smoke-filled building made from mud, dung, oak and rye-straw, and so long and low that it looked like a green, moss-covered mound from which smoke escaped through the roof’s central hole. In the attached yard were pigs, chickens and mounds of manure as big as the house. Mildrith’s father had farmed it, helped by a steward named Oswald who was a weasel, and he caused me still more trouble on that rainy Sunday as we rode back to the farm.

I was furious, resentful and vengeful. Alfred had humiliated me which made it unfortunate for Oswald that he had chosen that Sunday afternoon to drag an oak tree down from the high woods. I was brooding on the pleasures of revenge as I let my horse pick its way up the track through the trees and saw eight oxen hauling the great trunk towards the river. Three men were goading the oxen, while a fourth, Oswald, rode the trunk with a whip. He saw me and jumped off and, for a heartbeat, it looked as if he wanted to run into the trees, but then he realised he could not evade me and so he just stood and waited as I rode up to the great oak log.

‘Lord,’ Oswald greeted me. He was surprised to see me. He probably thought I had been killed with the other hostages, and that belief had made him careless.

My horse was nervous because of the stink of blood from the oxen’s flanks and he stepped backwards and forwards in small steps until I calmed him by patting his neck. Then I looked at the oak trunk that must have been forty feet long and as thick about as a man is tall. ‘A fine tree,’ I said to Oswald.

He glanced towards Mildrith who was twenty paces away. ‘Good day, lady,’ he said, clawing off the woollen hat he wore over his springy red hair.

‘A wet day, Oswald,’ she said. Her father had appointed the steward and Mildrith had an innocent faith in his reliability.

‘I said,’ I spoke loudly, ‘a fine tree. So where was it felled?’

Oswald tucked the hat into his belt. ‘On the top ridge, lord,’ he said vaguely.

‘The top ridge on my land?’

He hesitated. He was doubtless tempted to claim it came from a neighbour’s land, but that lie could easily have been exposed and so he said nothing.

‘From my land?’ I asked again.

‘Yes, lord,’ he admitted.

‘And where is it going?’

He hesitated again, but had to answer. ‘Wigulf’s mill.’

‘Wigulf buys it?’

‘He’ll split it, lord.’

‘I didn’t ask what he will do with it,’ I said, ‘but whether he will buy it.’

Mildrith, hearing the harshness in my voice, intervened to say that her father had sometimes sent timber to Wigulf’s mill, but I waved her to silence. ‘Will he buy it?’ I asked Oswald.

‘We need the timber, lord, to make repairs,’ the steward said, ‘and Wigulf takes his fee in split wood.’

‘And you drag the tree on a Sunday?’ He had nothing to say to that. ‘Tell me,’ I went on, ‘if we need planks for repairs, then why don’t we split the trunk ourselves? Do we lack men? Or wedges? Or mauls?’

‘Wigulf has always done it,’ Oswald said in a surly tone.

‘Always?’ I repeated and Oswald said nothing. ‘Wigulf lives in Exanmynster?’ I guessed. Exanmynster lay a mile or so northwards and was the nearest settlement to Oxton.

‘Yes, lord,’ Oswald said.

‘So if I ride to Exanmynster now,’ I said, ‘Wigulf will tell me how many similar trees you’ve delivered to him in the last year?’

There was silence, except for the rain dripping from leaves and the intermittent burst of birdsong. I edged my horse a few steps closer to Oswald, who gripped his whip’s handle as if readying it to lash out at me. ‘How many?’ I asked.

Oswald said nothing.

‘How many?’ I demanded, louder.

‘Husband,’ Mildrith called.

‘Quiet!’ I shouted at her and Oswald looked from me to her and back to me. ‘And how much has Wigulf paid you?’ I asked. ‘What does a tree like this fetch? Eight shillings? Nine?’

The anger that had made me act so impetuously at the king’s church service rose again. It was plain that Oswald was stealing the timber and being paid for it, and what I should have done was charge him with theft and have him arraigned before a court where a jury of men would decide his guilt or innocence, but I was in no mood for such a process. I just drew Serpent-Breath and kicked my horse forward. Mildrith screamed a protest, but I ignored her. Oswald ran, and that was a mistake, because I caught him easily, and Serpent-Breath swung once and opened up the back of his skull so I could see brains and blood as he fell. He twisted in the leaf mould and I wheeled the horse back and stabbed down into his throat.

‘That was murder!’ Mildrith shouted at me.

‘That was justice,’ I snarled at her, ‘something lacking in Wessex.’ I spat on Oswald’s body, which was still twitching. ‘The bastard’s been stealing from us.’

Mildrith kicked her horse, leading the nurse who carried our child uphill. I let her go. ‘Take the trunk up to the house,’ I ordered the slaves who had been goading the oxen. ‘If it’s too big to drag uphill then split it here and take the planks to the house.’

I searched Oswald’s house that evening and discovered fifty-three shillings buried in the floor. I took the silver, confiscated his cooking pots, spit, knives, buckles and a deerskin cloak, then drove his wife and three children off my land. I had come home.

Two

My anger was not slaked by Oswald’s killing. The death of a dishonest steward was no consolation for what I perceived as a monstrous injustice. For the moment Wessex was safe from the Danes, but it was only safe because I had killed Ubba Lothbrokson and my reward had been humiliation.

Poor Mildrith. She was a peaceable woman who thought well of everyone she met, and now she found herself married to a resentful, angry warrior. She was frightened of Alfred’s wrath, terrified that the church would punish me for disturbing its peace, and worried that Oswald’s relatives would demand a wergild from me. And so they would. A wergild was the blood price that every man, woman and child possessed. Kill a man and you must pay his price or else die yourself, and I had no doubt that Oswald’s family would go to Odda the Younger, who had been named the Ealdorman of Defnascir because his father was too badly wounded to continue as ealdorman, and Odda would instruct the shire reeve to pursue me and place me on trial, but I did not care. I hunted boar and deer, I brooded and waited for news of the negotiations at Exanceaster. I was expecting Alfred to do what he always did which was to make peace with the Danes and so release them, and when he did I would go to Ragnar.

And as I waited I found my first retainer. He was a slave and I discovered him in Exanmynster on a fine spring day. There was a hiring-fair where men looked for employment through the busy days of hay-making and harvest, and like all fairs there were jugglers, storytellers, stiltwalkers, musicians and acrobats. There was also a tall, white-haired man with a lined, serious face, who was selling enchanted leather bags that turned iron into silver. He showed us how it was done, and I saw him place two common nails into the bag and a moment later they were pure silver. He said we had to place a silver crucifix in the bag and then sleep one night with it tied around our necks before the magic worked and I paid him three silver shillings for one bag, and it never worked. I spent months searching for the man, but never found him. Even these days I come across such men and women, selling sorcerous pouches or boxes, and now I have them whipped and run off my land, but I was only twenty then and I believed my own eyes. That man had attracted a large crowd, but there were even more people gathered by the church gate where shouts erupted every few minutes. I pushed my horse into their rear ranks, getting dirty looks from folk who knew I had killed Oswald, but none dared accuse me of the murder for I carried both Serpent-Breath and Wasp-Sting.

A young man was by the church gate. He was stripped to the waist, barefooted and had a rope around his neck, and the rope was tied to the gatepost. In his hand was a short, stout stave. He had long unbound fair hair, blue eyes, a stubborn face and blood all over his chest, belly and arms. Three men guarded him. They too were fair-haired and blue-eyed, and they shouted in a strange accent. ‘Come and fight the heathen! Three pennies to make the bastard bleed! Come and fight!’

‘Who is he?’ I asked.

‘A Dane, lord, a pagan Dane.’ The man tugged off his hat when he spoke to me, then turned back to the crowd. ‘Come and fight him! Get your revenge! Make a Dane bleed! Be a good Christian! Hurt a pagan!’

The three men were Frisians. I suspected they had been in Alfred’s army and, now that he was talking to the Danes rather than fighting them, the three had deserted. Frisians come from across the sea and they come for one reason only, money, and this trio had somehow captured the young Dane and were profiting from him so long as he lasted. And that could have been some time, for he was good. A strong young Saxon paid his three pence and was given a sword with which he hacked wildly at the prisoner, but the Dane parried every blow, wood chips flying from his stave, and when he saw an opening he cracked his opponent around the head hard enough to draw blood from his ear. The Saxon staggered away, half stunned, and the Dane rammed the stave into his belly and, as the Saxon bent to gasp for breath, the stave whistled around in a blow that would have cracked his skull open like an egg, but the Frisians dragged on the rope so that the Dane fell backwards. ‘Do we have another hero?’ a Frisian shouted as the young Saxon was helped away. ‘Come on, lads! Show your strength! Beat a Dane bloody!’

‘I’ll beat him,’ I said. I dismounted and pushed through the crowd. I gave my horse’s reins to a boy, then drew Serpent-Breath. ‘Three pence?’ I asked the Frisians.

‘No, lord,’ one of them said.

‘Why not?’

‘We don’t want a dead Dane, do we?’ the man answered.

‘We do!’ someone shouted from the crowd. The folk in the Uisc valley did not like me, but they liked the Danes even less and they relished the prospect of watching a prisoner being slaughtered.

‘You can only wound him, lord,’ the Frisian said. ‘And you must use our sword.’ He held out the weapon. I glanced at it, saw its blunt edge, and spat.

‘Must?’ I asked.

The Frisian did not want to argue. ‘You can only draw blood, lord,’ he said.

The Dane flicked hair from his eyes and watched me. He held the stave low. I could see he was nervous, but there was no fear in his eyes. He had probably fought a hundred battles since the Frisians captured him, but those fights had been against men who were not soldiers, and he must have known, from my two swords, that I was a warrior. His skin was blotched with bruises and laced by blood and scars, and he surely expected another wound from Serpent-Breath, but he was determined to give me a fight.

‘What’s your name?’ I asked in Danish.

He blinked at me, surprised.

‘Your name, boy,’ I said. I called him ‘boy’, though he was not much younger than me.

‘Haesten,’ he said.

‘Haesten who?’

‘Haesten Storrison,’ he said, giving me his father’s name.

‘Fight him! Don’t talk to him!’ a voice shouted from the crowd.

I turned to stare at the man who had shouted and he could not meet my gaze, then I turned fast, very fast, and whipped Serpent-Breath in a quick sweep that Haesten instinctively parried so that Serpent-Breath cut through the stave as if it was rotten. Haesten was left with a stub of wood, while the rest of his weapon, a yard of thick ash, lay on the ground.

‘Kill him!’ someone shouted.

‘Just draw blood, lord,’ a Frisian said, ‘please, lord. He’s not a bad lad, for a Dane. Just make him bleed and we’ll pay you.’

I kicked the ash stave away from Haesten. ‘Pick it up,’ I said.

He looked at me nervously. To pick it up he would have to go to the end of his tether, then stoop, and at that moment he would expose his back to Serpent-Breath. He watched me, his eyes bitter beneath the fringe of dirty hair, then decided I would not attack him as he bent over. He went to the stave and, as he leaned down, I kicked it a few inches further away. ‘Pick it up,’ I ordered him again.

He still held the stub of ash and, as he took a further step, straining against the rope, he suddenly whipped around and tried to ram the broken end into my belly. He was fast, but I had half expected the move and caught his wrist in my left hand. I squeezed hard, hurting him. ‘Pick it up,’ I said a third time.

This time he obeyed, stooping to the stave, and to reach it he stretched his tether tight and I slashed Serpent-Breath onto the taut rope, severing it. Haesten, who had been straining forward, fell onto his face as the hide rope was cut. I put my left foot onto his back and let the tip of Serpent-Breath rest on his spine. ‘Alfred,’ I said to the Frisians, ‘has ordered that all Danish prisoners are to be taken to him.’

The three looked at me, said nothing.

‘So why have you not taken this man to the king?’ I demanded.

‘We didn’t know, lord,’ one of them said, ‘no one told us,’ which was not surprising because Alfred had given no such order.

‘We’ll take him to the king now, lord,’ another reassured me.

‘I’ll save you the trouble,’ I said. I took my foot off Haesten. ‘Get up,’ I told him in Danish. I threw a coin to the boy holding my horse and hauled myself into the saddle where I offered Haesten a hand. ‘Get up behind me,’ I ordered him.

The Frisians protested, coming at me with their swords drawn, so I pulled Wasp-Sting from her scabbard and gave it to Haesten who had still not mounted. Then I turned the horse towards the Frisians and smiled at them. ‘These people,’ I waved Serpent-Breath at the crowd, ‘already think I am a murderer. I’m also the man who met Ubba Lothbrokson beside the sea and killed him there. I tell you this so you may boast that you killed Uhtred of Bebbanburg.’

I lowered the sword so it pointed at the nearest man and he backed away. The others, no more eager to fight than the first, went with him. Haesten then pulled himself up behind me and I spurred the horse into the crowd, which parted reluctantly.

Once free of them I made Haesten dismount and give me back Wasp-Sting. ‘How did you get captured?’ I asked him.

He told me he had been on one of Guthrum’s ships caught in the storm, and his ship had sunk, but he had clung to some wreckage and been washed ashore where the Frisians had found him. ‘There were two of us, lord,’ he said, ‘but the other died.’

‘You’re a free man now,’ I told him.

‘Free?’

‘You’re my man,’ I said, ‘and you’ll give me an oath, and I’ll give you a sword.’

‘Why?’ he wanted to know.

‘Because a Dane saved me once,’ I said, ‘and I like the Danes.’

I also wanted Haesten because I needed men. I did not trust Odda the Younger, and I feared Steapa Snotor, Odda’s warrior, and so I would have swords at Oxton. Mildrith, of course, did not want sword-Danes at her house. She wanted ploughmen and peasants, milkmaids and servants, but I told her I was a lord, and a lord has swords.

I am indeed a lord, a lord of Northumbria. I am Uhtred of Bebbanburg. My ancestors, who can trace their lineage back to the god Woden, the Danish Odin, were once kings in northern England, and if my uncle had not stolen Bebbanburg from me when I was just ten years old I would have lived there still as a Northumbrian lord safe in his sea-washed fastness. The Danes had captured Northumbria, and their puppet king, Ricsig, ruled in Eoferwic, but Bebbanburg was too strong for any Dane and my uncle Ælfric ruled there, calling himself Ealdorman Ælfric, and the Danes left him in peace so long as he did not trouble them, and I often dreamed of going back to Northumbria to claim my birthright. But how? To capture Bebbanburg I would need an army, and all I had was one young Dane, Haesten.

And I had other enemies in Northumbria. There was Earl Kjartan and his son Sven, who had lost an eye because of me, and they would kill me gladly, and my uncle would pay them to do it, and so I had no future in Northumbria, not then. But I would go back. That was my soul’s wish, and I would go back with Ragnar the Younger, my friend, who still lived because his ship had weathered the storm. I heard that from a priest who had listened to the negotiations outside Exanceaster and he was certain that Earl Ragnar had been one of the Danish lords in Guthrum’s delegation. ‘A big man,’ the priest told me, ‘and very loud.’ That description convinced me that Ragnar lived and my heart was glad for it, for I knew that my future lay with him, not with Alfred. When the negotiations were finished and a truce made, the Danes would doubtless leave Exanceaster and I would give my sword to Ragnar and carry it against Alfred, who hated me. And I hated him.

I told Mildrith that we would leave Defnascir and go to Ragnar, that I would be his man and that I would pursue my bloodfeud against Kjartan and against my uncle under Ragnar’s eagle banner, and Mildrith responded with tears and more tears.

I cannot bear a woman’s crying. Mildrith was hurt and she was confused and I was angry and we snarled at each other like wildcats and the rain kept falling and I raged like a beast in a cage and wished Alfred and Guthrum would finish their talking because everyone knew that Alfred would let Guthrum go, and once Guthrum left Exanceaster then I could join the Danes and I did not care whether Mildrith came or not, so long as my son, who bore my name, went with me. So by day I hunted, at night I drank and dreamed of revenge and then one evening I came home to find Father Willibald waiting in the house.

Willibald was a good man. He had been chaplain to Alfred’s fleet when I commanded those twelve ships, and he told me he was on his way back to Hamtun, but he thought I would like to know what had unfolded in the long talks between Alfred and Guthrum. ‘There is peace, lord,’ he told me, ‘thanks be to God, there is peace.’

‘Thanks be to God,’ Mildrith echoed.

I was cleaning the blood from the blade of a boar spear and said nothing. I was thinking that Ragnar was released from the siege now and I could join him.

‘The treaty was sealed with solemn oaths yesterday,’ Willibald said, ‘and so we have peace.’

‘They gave each other solemn oaths last year,’ I said sourly. Alfred and Guthrum had made peace at Werham, but Guthrum had broken the truce and murdered the hostages he had been holding. Eleven of the twelve had died, and only I had lived because Ragnar was there to protect me. ‘So what have they agreed?’ I asked.

‘The Danes are to give up all their horses,’ Willibald said, ‘and march back into Mercia.’

Good, I thought, because that was where I would go. I did not say that to Willibald, but instead sneered that Alfred was just letting them march away. ‘Why doesn’t he fight them?’ I asked.

‘Because there are too many, lord. Because too many men would die on both sides.’

‘He should kill them all.’

‘Peace is better than war,’ Willibald said.

‘Amen,’ Mildrith said.

I began sharpening the spear, stroking the whetstone down the long blade. It seemed to me that Alfred had been absurdly generous. Guthrum, after all, was the one remaining leader of any stature on the Danish side, and he had been trapped, and if I had been Alfred there would have been no terms, only a siege, and at its end the Danish power in southern England would have been broken. Instead Guthrum was to be allowed to leave Exanceaster. ‘It is the hand of God,’ Willibald said.

I looked at him. He was a few years older than I was, but always seemed younger. He was earnest, enthusiastic and kind. He had been a good chaplain to the twelve ships, though the poor man was ever seasick and blanched at the sight of blood. ‘God made the peace?’ I asked sceptically.

‘Who sent the storm that sank Guthrum’s ships?’ Willibald retorted fervently, ‘who delivered Ubba into our hands?’

‘I did,’ I said.

He ignored that. ‘We have a godly king, lord,’ he said, ‘and God rewards those that serve him faithfully. Alfred has defeated the Danes! And they see it! Guthrum can recognise divine intervention! He has been making enquiries about Christ.’

I said nothing.

‘Our king believes,’ the priest went on, ‘that Guthrum is not far from seeing the true light of Christ.’ He leaned forward and touched my knee. ‘We have fasted, lord,’ he said, ‘we have prayed, and the king believes that the Danes will be brought to Christ and when that happens there will be a permanent peace.’

He meant every word of that nonsense and, of course, it was sweet music to Mildrith’s ears. She was a good Christian and had great faith in Alfred, and if the king believed that his god would bring victory then she would believe it too. It seemed madness to me, but I said nothing as a servant brought us barley ale, bread, smoked mackerel and cheese. ‘We shall have a Christian peace,’ Willibald said, making the sign of the cross above the bread before he ate, ‘sealed by hostages.’

‘We’ve given Guthrum hostages again?’ I asked, astonished.

‘No,’ Willibald said. ‘But he has agreed to give us hostages. Including six earls!’

I stopped sharpening the spear and looked at Willibald. ‘Six earls?’

‘Including your friend, Ragnar!’ Willibald seemed pleased by this news, but I was appalled. If Ragnar was not with the Danes then I could not go to them. He was my friend and his enemies were my enemies, but without Ragnar to protect me I would be horribly vulnerable to Kjartan and Sven, the father and son who had murdered Ragnar’s father and who wanted me dead. Without Ragnar, I knew, I could not leave Wessex.

‘Ragnar’s one of the hostages?’ I asked. ‘You’re sure?’

‘Of course I’m sure. He will be held by Ealdorman Wulfhere. All the hostages are to be held by Wulfhere.’

‘For how long?’

‘For as long as Alfred wishes, or until Guthrum is baptised. And Guthrum has agreed that our priests can talk to his men.’ Willibald gave me a pleading look. ‘We must have faith in God,’ he said. ‘We must give God time to work on the hearts of the Danes. Guthrum understands now that our god has power!’

I stood and went to the door, pulling aside the leather curtain and staring down at the wide sea-reach of the Uisc. I was sick at heart. I hated Alfred, did not want to be in Wessex, but now it seemed I was doomed to stay there. ‘And what do I do?’ I asked.

‘The king will forgive you, lord,’ Willibald said nervously.

‘Forgive me?’ I turned on him. ‘And what does the king believe happened at Cynuit? You were there, father,’ I said, ‘so did you tell him?’

‘I told him.’

‘And?’

‘He knows you are a brave warrior, lord,’ Willibald said, ‘and that your sword is an asset to Wessex. He will receive you again, I’m sure, and he will receive you joyfully. Go to church, pay your debts and show that you are a good man of Wessex.’

‘I’m not a West Saxon,’ I snarled at him, ‘I’m a Northumbrian!’

And that was part of the problem. I was an outsider. I spoke a different English. The men of Wessex were tied by family, and I came from the strange north and folk believed I was a pagan, and they called me a murderer because of Oswald’s death, and sometimes, when I rode about the estate, men would make the sign of the cross to avert the evil they saw in me. They called me Uhtredærwe, which means Uhtred the Wicked, and I was not unhappy with the insult, but Mildrith was. She assured them I was a Christian, but she lied, and our unhappiness festered all that summer. She prayed for my soul, I fretted for my freedom, and when she begged me to go with her to the church at Exanmynster I growled at her that I would never set foot in another church all my days. She would weep when I said that and her tears drove me out of the house to hunt, and sometimes the chase would take me down to the water’s edge where I would stare at Heahengel.

She lay canted on the muddy foreshore, lifted and dropped repeatedly by the tides, abandoned. She was one of Alfred’s fleet, one of the twelve large warships he had built to harry the Danish boats that raided Wessex’s coast, and Leofric and I had brought Heahengel up from Hamtun in pursuit of Guthrum’s fleet and we had survived the storm that sent so many Danes to their deaths and we had beached Heahengel here, left her mastless and without a sail, and she was still on the Uisc’s foreshore, rotting and apparently forgotten.

Archangel. That was what her name meant. Alfred had named her and I had always hated the name. A ship should have a proud name, not a snivelling religious word, and she should have a beast on her prow, high and defiant, a dragon’s head to challenge the sea or a snarling wolf to terrify an enemy. I sometimes climbed on board Heahengel and saw how the local villagers had plundered some of her upper strakes, and how there was water in her belly, and I remembered her proud days at sea and the wind whipping through her seal-hide rigging and the crash as we had rammed a Danish boat.

Now, like me, Heahengel had been left to decay, and sometimes I dreamed of repairing her, of finding new rigging and a new sail, of finding men and taking her long hull to sea. I wanted to be anywhere but where I was, I wanted to be with the Danes, and every time I said that Mildrith would weep again. ‘You can’t make me live among the Danes!’

‘Why not? I did.’

‘They’re pagans! My son won’t grow up a pagan!’

‘He’s my son too,’ I said, ‘and he will worship the gods I worship.’ There would be more tears then, and I would storm out of the house and take the hounds up to the high woods and wonder why love soured like milk. After Cynuit I had so wanted to see Mildrith, yet now I could not abide her misery and piety and she could not endure my anger. All she wanted me to do was till my fields, milk my cows and gather my harvest to pay the great debt she had brought me in marriage. That debt came from a pledge made by Mildrith’s father, a pledge to give the church the yield of almost half his land. That pledge was for all time, binding on his heirs, but Danish raids and bad harvests had ruined him. Yet the church, venomous as serpents, still insisted that the debt be paid, and said that if I could not pay then our land would be taken by monks, and every time I went to Exanceaster I could sense the priests and monks watching me and enjoying the prospect of their enrichment. Exanceaster was English again, for Guthrum had handed over the hostages and gone north so that peace of a sort had come to Wessex. The fyrds, the armies of each shire, had been disbanded and sent back to their farms. Psalms were being sung in all the churches and Alfred, to mark his victory, was sending gifts to every monastery and nunnery. Odda the Younger, who was being celebrated as the champion of Wessex, had been given all the land about the place where the battle had been fought at Cynuit and he had ordered a church to be built there, and it was rumoured that the church would have an altar of gold as thanks to God for allowing Wessex to survive.

Though how long would it survive? Guthrum lived and I did not share the Christian belief that God had sent Wessex peace. Nor was I the only one, for in midsummer Alfred returned to Exanceaster where he summoned his Witan, a council of the kingdom’s leading thegns and churchmen, and Wulfhere of Wiltunscir was one of the men summoned and I went into the city one evening and was told the ealdorman and his followers had lodgings in The Swan, a tavern by the east gate. He was not there, but Æthelwold, Alfred’s nephew, was doing his best to drain the tavern of ale. ‘Don’t tell me the bastard summoned you to the Witan?’ he greeted me sourly. The ‘bastard’ was Alfred who had snatched the throne from the young Æthelwold.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I came to see Wulfhere.’

‘The ealdorman is in church,’ Æthelwold said, ‘and I am not.’ He grinned and waved to the bench opposite him. ‘Sit and drink. Get drunk. Then we’ll find two girls. Three, if you like. Four, if you want?’

‘You forget I’m married,’ I said.

‘As if that ever stopped anyone.’

I sat and one of the maids brought me ale. ‘Are you in the Witan?’ I asked Æthelwold.

‘What do you think? You think that bastard wants my advice? “Lord king,” I’d say, “why don’t you jump off a high cliff and pray that God gives you wings.”’ He pushed a plate of pork ribs towards me. ‘I’m here so they can keep an eye on me. They’re making sure I’m not plotting treason.’

‘Are you?’

‘Of course I am.’ He grinned. ‘Are you going to join me? You do owe me a favour.’

‘You want my sword at your service?’ I asked.

‘Yes.’ He was serious.

‘So it’s you and me,’ I said, ‘against all Wessex. Who else will fight with us?’

He frowned, thinking, but came up with no names. He stared down at the table and I felt sorry for him. I had always liked Æthelwold, but no one would ever trust him for he was as careless as he was irresponsible. Alfred, I thought, had judged him right. Let him be free and he would drink and whore himself into irrelevance. ‘What I should do,’ he said, ‘is go and join Guthrum.’

‘Why don’t you?’

He looked up at me, but had no answer. Maybe he knew the answer, that Guthrum would welcome him, honour him, use him and eventually kill him. But maybe that was a better prospect than his present life. He shrugged and leaned back, pushing hair off his face. He was a startlingly handsome young man, and that too distracted him, for girls were attracted to him like priests to gold. ‘What Wulfhere thinks,’ he said, his voice slurring slightly, ‘is that Guthrum is going to come and kill us all.’

‘Probably,’ I said.

‘And if my uncle dies,’ he said, not bothering to lower his voice even though there were a score of men in the tavern, ‘his son is much too young to be king.’

‘True.’

‘So it’ll be my turn!’ He smiled.

‘Or Guthrum’s turn,’ I said.

‘So drink, my friend,’ he said, ‘because we’re all in the cesspit.’ He grinned at me, his charm suddenly evident. ‘So if you won’t fight for me,’ he asked, ‘how do you propose to pay back the favour?’

‘How would you like it paid?’

‘You could kill Abbot Hewald? Very nastily? Slowly?’

‘I could do that,’ I said. Hewald was abbot at Winburnan and famous for the harshness with which he taught boys to read.

‘On the other hand,’ Æthelwold went on, ‘I’d like to kill that scrawny bastard myself, so don’t do it for me, I’ll think of something that won’t make my uncle happy. You don’t like him, do you?’

‘No.’

‘Then we’ll brew up some mischief. Oh God,’ this last imprecation was because Wulfhere’s voice was suddenly loud just outside the door. ‘He’s angry at me.’

‘Why?’

‘One of the dairymaids is pregnant. I think he wanted to do it himself, but I churned her first.’ He drained his ale. ‘I’m going to the Three Bells. Want to come?’

‘I have to speak to Wulfhere.’

Æthelwold left by the back door as the ealdorman ducked through the front. Wulfhere was accompanied by a dozen thegns, but he saw me and crossed the room. ‘They’ve been reconsecrating the bishop’s church,’ he grumbled. ‘Hours upon damned hours! Nothing but chanting and prayers, hours of prayers just to get the taint of the Danes out of the place.’ He sat heavily. ‘Did I see Æthelwold here?’

‘Yes.’

‘Wanted you to join his rebellion, did he?’

‘Yes.’

‘Damned fool. So why are you here? Come to offer me your sword?’ He meant swear my allegiance to him and so become his warrior.

‘I want to see one of the hostages,’ I said, ‘so I seek your permission.’

‘Hostages,’ he snapped his fingers for ale. ‘Damned hostages. I’ve had to make new buildings to house them. And who pays for that?’

‘You do?’

‘Of course I do. And I’m supposed to feed them too? Feed them? Guard them? Wall them in? And does Alfred pay anything?’

‘Tell him you’re building a monastery,’ I suggested.

He looked at me as if I were mad, then saw the jest and laughed. ‘True enough, he’d pay me then, wouldn’t he? Have you heard about the monastery they’re building at Cynuit?’

‘I hear it’s to have an altar of gold.’

He laughed again. ‘That’s what I hear. I don’t believe it, but I hear it.’ He watched one of the tavern girls cross the floor. ‘It’s not my permission you need to see the hostages,’ he said, ‘but Alfred’s, and he won’t give it to you.’

‘Alfred’s permission?’ I asked.

‘They’re not just hostages,’ he said, ‘but prisoners. I have to wall them in and watch them day and night. Alfred’s orders. He might think God brought us peace, but he’s made damn sure he’s got high-born hostages. Six earls! You know how many retainers they have? How many women? How many mouths to feed?’

‘If I go to Wiltunscir,’ I said, ‘can I see Earl Ragnar?’

Wulfhere frowned at me. ‘Earl Ragnar? The noisy one? I like him. No, lad, you can’t, because no one’s allowed to see them except a damned priest who talks their language. Alfred sent him and he’s trying to make them into Christians, and if you go without my permission then Alfred will hear you’ve been there and he’ll want an explanation from me. No one can see the poor bastards.’ He paused to scratch at a louse under his collar. ‘I have to feed the priest too, and Alfred doesn’t pay for that either. He doesn’t even pay me to feed that lout Æthelwold!’

‘When I was a hostage in Werham,’ I explained, ‘Earl Ragnar saved my life. Guthrum killed the others, but Ragnar guarded me. He said they’d have to kill him before they killed me.’

‘And he looks like a hard man to kill,’ Wulfhere said, ‘but if Guthrum attacks Wessex that’s what I’m supposed to do. Kill the lot of them. Maybe not the women.’ He stared gloomily into the tavern’s yard where a group of his men were playing dice in the moonlight. ‘And Guthrum will attack,’ he added in a low voice.

‘That’s not what I hear.’

He looked at me suspiciously ‘And what do you hear, young man?’

‘That God has sent us peace.’

Wulfhere laughed at my mockery. ‘Guthrum’s in Gleawecestre,’ he said, ‘and that’s just a half day’s march from our frontier. And they say more Danish ships arrive every day. They’re in Lundene, they’re in the Humber, they’re in the Gewæsc.’ He scowled. ‘More ships, more men, and Alfred’s building churches! And there’s this fellow Svein.’

‘Svein?’

‘Brought his ships from Ireland. Bastard’s in Wales now, but he won’t stay there, will he? He’ll come to Wessex. And they say more Danes are joining him from Ireland.’ He brooded on this bad news. I did not know whether it was true, for such rumours were ever current, but Wulfhere plainly believed it. ‘We should march on Gleawecestre,’ he said, ‘and slaughter the lot of them before they slaughter us, but we’ve got a kingdom ruled by priests.’

That was true, I thought, just as it was certain that Wulfhere would not make it easy for me to see Ragnar. ‘Will you give a message to Ragnar?’ I asked.

‘How? I don’t speak Danish. I could ask the priest, but he’ll tell Alfred.’

‘Does Ragnar have a woman with him?’ I asked.

‘They all do.’

‘A thin girl,’ I said, ‘black hair. Face like a hawk.’

He nodded cautiously. ‘Sounds right. Has a dog, yes?’

‘She has a dog,’ I said, ‘and its name is Nihtgenga.’

He shrugged as if he did not care what the dog was called, then he understood the significance of the name. ‘An English name?’ he asked. ‘A Danish girl calls her dog Goblin?’

‘She isn’t Danish,’ I said. ‘Her name is Brida, and she’s a Saxon.’

He stared at me, then laughed. ‘The cunning little bitch. She’s been listening to us, hasn’t she?’

Brida was indeed cunning. She had been my first lover, an East Anglian girl who had been raised by Ragnar’s father and who now slept with Ragnar. ‘Talk to her,’ I said, ‘and give her my greetings, and say that if it comes to war …’ I paused, not sure what to say. There was no point in promising to do my best to rescue Ragnar, for if war came then the hostages would be slaughtered long before I could reach them.

‘If it comes to war?’ Wulfhere prompted me.

‘If it comes to war,’ I said, repeating the words he had spoken to me before my penance, ‘we’ll all be looking for a way to stay alive.’

Wulfhere stared at me for a long time and his silence told me that though I had failed to find a message for Ragnar I had given a message to Wulfhere. He drank ale. ‘So the bitch speaks English, does she?’

‘She’s a Saxon.’

As was I, but I hated Alfred and I would join Ragnar when I could, if I could, whatever Mildrith wanted, or so I thought. But deep under the earth, where the corpse serpent gnaws at the roots of Yggdrasil, the tree of life, there are three spinners. Three women who make our fate. We might believe we make choices, but in truth our lives are in the spinners’ fingers. They make our lives, and destiny is everything. The Danes know that, and even the Christians know it. Wyrd bið ful aræd, we Saxons say, fate is inexorable, and the spinners had decided my fate because, a week after the Witan had met, when Exanceaster was quiet again, they sent me a ship.

The first I knew of it was when a slave came running from Oxton’s fields saying that there was a Danish ship in the estuary of the Uisc and I pulled on boots and mail, snatched my swords from their peg, shouted for a horse to be saddled and rode to the foreshore where Heahengel rotted.

And where, standing in from the long sandspit that protects the Uisc from the greater sea, another ship approached. Her sail was furled on the long yard and her dripping oars rose and fell like wings and her long hull left a spreading wake that glittered silver under the rising sun. Her prow was high, and standing there was a man in full mail, a man with a helmet and spear, and behind me, where a few fisherfolk lived in hovels beside the mud, people were hurrying towards the hills and taking with them whatever few possessions they could snatch. I called to one of them. ‘It’s not a Dane!’

‘Lord?’

‘It’s a West Saxon ship,’ I called, though they did not believe me and hurried away with their livestock. For years they had done this. They would see a ship and they would run, for ships brought Danes and Danes brought death, but this ship had no dragon or wolf or eagle’s head on its prow. I knew the ship. It was the Eftwyrd, the best named of all Alfred’s ships which otherwise bore pious names like Heahengel or Apostol or Cristenlic. Eftwyrd meant judgement day which, though Christian in inspiration, accurately described what she had brought to many Danes.

The man in the prow waved and, for the first time since I had crawled on my knees to Alfred’s altar, my spirits lifted. It was Leofric, and then the Eftwyrd’s bows slid onto the mud and the long hull juddered to a halt. Leofric cupped his hands. ‘How deep is this mud?’

‘It’s nothing!’ I shouted back, ‘a hand’s depth, no more!’

‘Can I walk on it?’

‘Of course you can!’ I shouted back.

He jumped and, as I had known he would, sank up to his thighs in the thick black slime, and I bent over my saddle’s pommel in laughter, and the Eftwyrd’s crew laughed with me as Leofric cursed, and it took ten minutes to extricate him from the muck, by which time a score of us were plastered in the stinking stuff, but then the crew, who were mostly my old oarsmen and warriors, brought ale ashore, and bread and salted pork, and we made a midday meal beside the rising tide.

‘You’re an earsling,’ Leofric grumbled, looking at the mud clogging up the links of his mail coat.

‘I’m a bored earsling,’ I said.

‘You’re bored?’ Leofric said, ‘so are we.’ It seemed the fleet was not sailing. It had been given into the charge of a man named Burgweard who was a dull, worthy soldier whose brother was bishop of Scireburnan, and Burgweard had orders not to disturb the peace. ‘If the Danes aren’t off the coast,’ Leofric said, ‘then we aren’t.’

‘So what are you doing here?’

‘He sent us to rescue that piece of shit,’ he nodded at Heahengel. ‘He wants twelve ships again, see?’

‘I thought they were building more?’

‘They were building more, only it all stopped because some thieving bastards stole the timber while we were fighting at Cynuit, and then someone remembered Heahengel and here we are. Burgweard can’t manage with just eleven.’

‘If he isn’t sailing,’ I asked, ‘why does he want another ship?’

‘In case he has to sail,’ Leofric explained, ‘and if he does then he wants twelve. Not eleven, twelve.’

‘Twelve? Why?’

‘Because,’ Leofric paused to bite off a piece of bread, ‘because it says in the gospel book that Christ sent out his disciples two by two, and that’s how we have to go, two ships together, all holy, and if we’ve only got eleven then that means we’ve only got ten, if you follow me.’

I stared at him, not sure whether he was jesting. ‘Burgweard insists you sail two by two?’

Leofric nodded. ‘Because it says so in Father Willibald’s book.’

‘In the gospel book?’

‘That’s what Father Willibald tells us,’ Leofric said with a straight face, then saw my expression and shrugged. ‘Honest! And Alfred approves.’

‘Of course he does.’

‘And if you do what the gospel book tells you,’ Leofric said, still with a straight face, ‘then nothing can go wrong, can it?’

‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘So you’re here to rebuild Heahengel?’

‘New mast,’ Leofric said, ‘new sail, new rigging, patch up those timbers, caulk her, then tow her back to Hamtun. It could take a month!’

‘At least.’

‘And I never was much good at making things. Good at fighting, I am, and I can drink ale as well as any man, but I was never much good with a mallet and wedge or with adzes. They are.’ He nodded at a group of a dozen men who were strangers to me.

‘Who are they?’

‘Shipwrights.’

‘So they do the work?’

‘Can’t expect me to do it!’ Leofric protested. ‘I’m in command of the Eftwyrd!’

‘So,’ I said, ‘you’re planning to drink my ale and eat my food for a month while those dozen men do the work?’

‘You have any better ideas?’

I gazed at the Eftwyrd. She was a well-made ship, longer than most Danish boats and with high sides that made her a good fighting platform. ‘What did Burgweard tell you to do?’ I asked.

‘Pray,’ Leofric said sourly, ‘and help repair Heahengel.’

‘I hear there’s a new Danish leader in the Sæfern Sea,’ I said, ‘and I’d like to know if it’s true. A man called Svein. And I hear more ships are joining him from Ireland.’

‘He’s in Wales, this Svein?’

‘That’s what I hear.’

‘He’ll be coming to Wessex then,’ Leofric said.

‘If it’s true.’

‘So you’re thinking …’ Leofric said, then stopped when he realised just what I was thinking.

‘I’m thinking that it doesn’t do a ship or crew any good to sit around for a month,’ I said, ‘and I’m thinking that there might be plunder to be had in the Sæfern Sea.’

‘And if Alfred hears we’ve been fighting up there,’ Leofric said, ‘he’ll gut us.’

I nodded up river towards Exanceaster. ‘They burned a hundred Danish ships up there,’ I said, ‘and their wreckage is still on the riverbank. We should be able to find at least one dragon’s head to put on her prow.’

Leofric stared at the Eftwyrd. ‘Disguise her?’

‘Disguise her,’ I said, because if I put a dragon head on Eftwyrd no one would know she was a Saxon ship. She would be taken for a Danish boat, a sea raider, part of England’s nightmare.

Leofric smiled. ‘I don’t need orders to go on a patrol, do I?’

‘Of course not.’

‘And we haven’t fought since Cynuit,’ he said wistfully, ‘and no fighting means no plunder.’

‘What about the crew?’ I asked.

He turned and looked at them. ‘Most of them are evil bastards,’ he said, ‘they won’t mind. And they all need plunder.’

‘And between us and the Sæfern Sea,’ I said, ‘there are the Britons.’

‘And they’re all thieving bastards, the lot of them,’ Leofric said. He looked at me and grinned. ‘So if Alfred won’t go to war, we will?’

‘You have any better ideas?’ I asked.

Leofric did not answer for a long time. Instead, idly, as if he was just thinking, he tossed pebbles towards a puddle. I said nothing, just watched the small splashes, watched the pattern the fallen pebbles made, and knew he was seeking guidance from fate. The Danes cast rune sticks, we all watched for the flight of birds, we tried to hear the whispers of the gods, and Leofric was watching the pebbles fall to find his fate. The last one clicked on another and skidded off into the mud and the trail it left pointed south towards the sea. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I don’t have any better ideas.’

And I was bored no longer, because we were going to be Vikings.

We found a score of carved beasts’ heads beside the river beneath Exanceaster’s walls, all of them part of the sodden, tangled wreckage that showed where Guthrum’s fleet had been burned and we chose two of the least scorched carvings and carried them aboard Eftwyrd. Her prow and stern culminated in simple posts and we had to cut the posts down until the sockets of the two carved heads fitted. The creature at the stern, the smaller of the two, was a gape-mouthed serpent, probably intended to represent Corpse-Ripper, the monster that tore at the dead in the Danish underworld, while the beast we placed at the bow was a dragon’s head, though it was so blackened and disfigured by fire that it looked more like a horse’s head. We dug into the scorched eyes until we found unburned wood, and did the same with the open mouth and when we were finished the thing looked dramatic and fierce. ‘Looks like a fyrdraca now,’ Leofric said happily. A fire-dragon.

The Danes could always remove the dragon or beast-heads from the bows and sterns of their ships because they did not want the horrid-looking creatures to frighten the spirits of friendly land and so they only displayed the carved monsters when they were in enemy waters. We did the same, hiding our fyrdraca and serpent head in Eftwyrd’s bilges as we went back down river to where the shipwrights were beginning their work on Heahengel. We hid the beast-heads because Leofric did not want the shipwrights to know he planned mischief. ‘That one,’ he jerked his head towards a tall, lean, grey-haired man who was in charge of the work, ‘is more Christian than the Pope. He’d bleat to the local priests if he thought we were going off to fight someone, and the priests will tell Alfred and then Burgweard will take Eftwyrd away from me.’

‘You don’t like Burgweard?’

Leofric spat for answer. ‘It’s a good thing there are no Danes on the coast.’

‘He’s a coward?’

‘No coward. He just thinks God will fight the battles. We spend more time on our knees than at the oars. When you commanded the fleet we made money. Now even the rats on board are begging for crumbs.’

We had made money by capturing Danish ships and taking their plunder, and though none of us had become rich we had all possessed silver to spare. I was still wealthy enough because I had a hoard hidden at Oxton, a hoard that was the legacy of Ragnar the Elder, and a hoard that the church and Oswald’s relatives would make their own if they could, but a man can never have enough silver. Silver buys land, it buys the loyalty of warriors, it is the power of a lord, and without silver a man must bend the knee or else become a slave. The Danes led men by the lure of silver, and we were no different. If I was to be a lord, if I was to storm the walls of Bebbanburg, then I would need men and I would need a great hoard to buy the swords and shields and spears and hearts of warriors, and so we would go to sea and look for silver, though we told the shipwrights that we merely planned to patrol the coast. We shipped barrels of ale, boxes of hard-baked bread, cheeses, kegs of smoked mackerel and flitches of bacon. I told Mildrith the same story, that we would be sailing back and forth along the shores of Defnascir and Thornsæta. ‘Which is what we should be doing anyway,’ Leofric said, ‘just in case a Dane arrives.’

‘The Danes are lying low,’ I said.

Leofric nodded. ‘And when a Dane lies low you know there’s trouble coming.’

I believed he was right. Guthrum was not far from Wessex, and Svein, if he existed, was just a day’s voyage from her north coast. Alfred might believe his truce would hold and that the hostages would secure it, but I knew from my childhood how land-hungry the Danes were, and how they lusted after the lush fields and rich pastures of Wessex. They would come, and if Guthrum did not lead them then another Danish chieftain would gather ships and men and bring his swords and axes to Alfred’s kingdom. The Danes, after all, ruled the other three English kingdoms. They held my own Northumbria, they were bringing settlers to East Anglia and their language was spreading southwards through Mercia, and they would not want the last English kingdom flourishing to their south. They were like wolves, shadow-skulking for the moment, but watching a flock of sheep fatten.

I recruited eleven young men from my land and took them on board Eftwyrd, and brought Haesten too, and he was useful for he had spent much of his young life at the oars. Then, one misty morning, as the strong tide ebbed westwards, we slid Eftwyrd away from the river’s bank, rowed her past the low sandspit that guards the Uisc and so out to the long swells of the sea. The oars creaked in their leather-lined holes, the bow’s breast split the waves to shatter water white along the hull, and the steering oar fought against my touch and I felt my spirits rise to the small wind and I looked up into the pearly sky and said a prayer of thanks to Thor, Odin, Njord and Hoder.

A few small fishing boats dotted the inshore waters, but as we went south and west, away from the land, the sea emptied. I looked back at the low dun hills slashed brighter green where rivers pierced the coast, and then the green faded to grey, the land became a shadow and we were alone with the white birds crying and it was then we heaved the serpent’s head and the fyrdraca from the bilge and slotted them over the posts at stem and stern, pegged them into place and turned our bows westwards.

The Eftwyrd was no more. Now the Fyrdraca sailed, and she was hunting trouble.

Three

The crew of the Eftwyrd turned Fyrdraca had been at Cynuit with me. They were fighting men and they were offended that Odda the Younger had taken credit for a battle they had won. They had also been bored since the battle. Once in a while, Leofric told me, Burgweard exercised his fleet by taking it to sea, but most of the time they waited in Hamtun. ‘We did go fishing once, though,’ Leofric admitted.

‘Fishing?’

‘Father Willibald preached a sermon about feeding five thousand folk with two scraps of bread and a basket of herring,’ he said, ‘so Burgweard said we should take nets out and fish. He wanted to feed the town, see? Lots of hungry folk.’

‘Did you catch anything?’

‘Mackerel. Lots of mackerel.’

‘But no Danes?’

‘No Danes,’ Leofric said, ‘and no herring, only mackerel. The bastard Danes have vanished.’

We learned later that Guthrum had given orders that no Danish ships were to raid the Wessex coast and so break the truce. Alfred was to be lulled into a conviction that peace had come, and that meant there were no pirates roaming the seas between Kent and Cornwalum and their absence encouraged traders to come from the lands to the south to sell wine or to buy fleeces. The Fyrdraca took two such ships in the first four days. They were both Frankish ships, tubby in their hulls, and neither with more than six oars a side, and both believed the Fyrdraca was a Viking ship for they saw her beast-heads, and they heard Haesten and I talk Danish and they saw my arm rings. We did not kill the crews, but just stole their coins, weapons and as much of their cargo as we could carry. One ship was heaped with bales of wool, for the folk across the water prized Saxon fleeces, but we could take only three of the bales for fear of cluttering the Fyrdraca’s benches.

At night we found a cove or river’s mouth, and by day we rowed to sea and looked for prey, and each day we went further westwards until I was sure we were off the coast of Cornwalum, and that was enemy country. It was the old enemy that had confronted our ancestors when they first came across the North Sea to make England. That enemy spoke a strange language, and some Britons lived north of Northumbria and others lived in Wales or in Cornwalum, all places on the wild edges of the isle of Britain where they had been pushed by our coming. They were Christians, indeed Father Beocca had told me they had been Christians before we were and he claimed that no one who was a Christian could be a real enemy of another Christian, but nevertheless the Britons hated us. Sometimes they allied themselves with the Northmen to attack us, and sometimes the Northmen raided them, and sometimes they made war against us on their own, and in the past the men of Cornwalum had made much trouble for Wessex, though Leofric claimed they had been punished so badly that they now pissed themselves whenever they saw a Saxon.

Not that we saw any Britons at first. The places we sheltered were deserted, all except one river mouth where a skin boat pushed off shore and a half naked man paddled out to us and held up some crabs which he wanted to sell to us. We took a basketful of the beasts and paid him two pennies. Next night we grounded Fyrdraca on a rising tide and collected fresh water from a stream, and Leofric and I climbed a hill and stared inland. Smoke rose from distant valleys, but there was no one in sight, not even a shepherd. ‘What are you expecting,’ Leofric asked, ‘enemies?’

‘A monastery,’ I said.

‘A monastery!’ He was amused. ‘You want to pray?’

‘Monasteries have silver,’ I said.

‘Not down here, they don’t. They’re poor as stoats. Besides.’

‘Besides what?’

He jerked his head towards the crew. ‘You’ve got a dozen good Christians aboard. Lot of bad ones too, of course, but at least a dozen good ones. They won’t raid a monastery with you.’ He was right. A few of the men had showed some scruples about piracy, but I assured them that the Danes used trading ships to spy on their enemies. That was true enough, though I doubt either of our victims had been serving the Danes, but both ships had been crewed by foreigners and, like all Saxons, the crew of the Fyrdraca had a healthy dislike of foreigners, though they made an exception for Haesten and the dozen crewmen who were Frisians. The Frisians were natural pirates, bad as the Danes, and these twelve had come to Wessex to get rich from war and so were glad that the Fyrdraca was seeking plunder.

As we went west we began to see coastal settlements, and some were surprisingly large. Cenwulf, who had fought with us at Cynuit and was a good man, told us that the Britons of Cornwalum dug tin out of the ground and sold it to strangers. He knew that because his father had been a trader and had frequently sailed this coast. ‘If they sell tin,’ I said, ‘then they must have money.’

‘And men to guard it,’ Cenwulf said drily.

‘Do they have a king?’

No one knew. It seemed probable, though where the king lived or who he was we could not know, and perhaps, as Haesten suggested, there was more than one king. They did have weapons because, one night, as the Fyrdraca crept into a bay, an arrow flew from a clifftop to be swallowed in the sea beside our oars. We might never have known that arrow had been shot except I happened to be looking up and saw it, fledged with dirty grey feathers, flickering down from the sky to vanish with a plop. One arrow, and no others followed, so perhaps it was a warning, and that night we let the ship lie at its anchor and in the dawn we saw two cows grazing close to a stream and Leofric fetched his axe. ‘The cows are there to kill us,’ Haesten warned us in his new and not very good English.

‘The cows will kill us?’ I asked in amusement.

‘I have seen it before, lord. They put cows to bring us on land, then they attack.’

We granted the cows mercy, hauled the anchor and pulled towards the bay’s mouth and a howl sounded behind us and I saw a crowd of men appear from behind bushes and trees, and I took one of the silver rings from my left arm and gave it to Haesten. It was his first arm ring and, being a Dane, he was inordinately proud of it. He polished it all morning.

The coast became wilder and refuge more difficult to find, but the weather was placid. We captured a small eight-oared ship that was returning to Ireland and relieved it of sixteen pieces of silver, three knives, a heap of tin ingots, a sack of goose feathers and six goatskins. We were hardly becoming rich, though Fyrdraca’s belly was becoming cluttered with pelts, fleeces and ingots of tin. ‘We need to sell it all,’ Leofric said.

But to whom? We knew no one who traded here. What I needed to do, I thought, was land close to one of the larger settlements and steal everything. Burn the houses, kill the men, plunder the headman’s hall and go back to sea, but the Britons kept lookouts on the headlands and they always saw us coming, and whenever we were close to one of their towns we would see armed men waiting. They had learned how to deal with Vikings, which was why, Haesten told me, the Northmen now sailed in fleets of five or six ships.

‘Things will be better,’ I said, ‘when we turn the coast.’ I knew Cornwalum ended somewhere to the west and we could then sail up into the Sæfern Sea where we might find a Danish ship on its voyage from Ireland, but Cornwalum seemed to be without end. Whenever we saw a headland that I thought must mark the end of the land it turned out to be a false hope, for another cliff would lie beyond, and then another, and sometimes the tide flowed so strongly that even when we sailed due west we were driven back east. Being a Viking was more difficult than I thought, and then one day the wind freshened from the west and the waves heaved higher and their tops were torn ragged and rain squalls hissed dark from a low sky and we ran northwards to seek shelter in the lee of a headland. We dropped our anchor there and felt Fyrdraca jerk and tug like a fretful horse at her long rope of twisted hide.

All night and all next day the weather raged past the headland. Water shattered white on high cliffs. We were safe enough, but our food was getting low, and I had half decided we must abandon our plans to make ourselves rich and sail back to the Uisc where we could pretend we had only been patrolling the coast, but on our second dawn under the lee of that high cliff, as the wind subsided and the rain dropped to a chill drizzle, a ship appeared about the eastern spit of land.

‘Shields!’ Leofric shouted, and the men, cold and unhappy, found their weapons and lined the ship’s side.

The ship was smaller than ours, much smaller. She was squat, high-bowed, with a stumpy mast holding a wide yard on which a dirty sail was furled. A half-dozen oarsmen manned her, and the steersman was bringing her directly towards Fyrdraca, and then, as she came closer and as her small bows broke the water white, I saw a green bough had been tied to her short mast.

‘They want to talk,’ I said.

‘Let’s hope they want to buy,’ Leofric grumbled.

There was a priest in the small ship. I did not know he was a priest at first, for he looked as ragged as any of the crewmen, but he shouted that he wished to speak with us, and he spoke Danish, though not well, and I let the boat come up on the flank protected from the wind where her crewmen gazed up at a row of armed men holding shields. Cenwulf and I pulled the priest over our side. Two other men wanted to follow, but Leofric threatened them with a spear and they dropped back and the smaller ship drew away to wait while the priest spoke with us.

He was called Father Mardoc and, once he was aboard and sitting wetly on one of Fyrdraca’s rowing benches, I saw the crucifix about his neck. ‘I hate Christians,’ I said, ‘so why should we not feed you to Njord?’

He ignored that, or perhaps he did not know that Njord was one of the sea gods. ‘I bring you a gift,’ he said, ‘from my master,’ and he produced, from beneath his cloak, two battered arm rings.

I took them. They were poor things, mere ringlets of copper, old, filthy with verdigris and of almost no value, and for a moment I was tempted to toss them scornfully into the sea, but reckoned our voyage had made such small profit that even those scabby treasures must be kept. ‘Who is your master?’ I asked.

‘King Peredur.’

I almost laughed. King Peredur? A man can expect a king to be famous, but I had never heard of Peredur which suggested he was little more than a local chieftain with a high-sounding title. ‘And why does this Peredur,’ I asked, ‘send me miserable gifts?’

Father Mardoc still did not know my name and was too frightened to ask it. He was surrounded by men in leather, men in mail, and by shields and swords, axes and spears, and he believed all of us were Danes for I had ordered any of Fyrdraca’s crew who wore crosses or crucifixes to hide them beneath their clothes. Only Haesten and I spoke, and if Father Mardoc thought that strange he did not say anything of it, instead he told me how his lord, King Peredur, had been treacherously attacked by a neighbour called Callyn, and Callyn’s forces had taken a high fort close to the sea and Peredur would pay us well if we were to help him recapture the fort that was called Dreyndynas.

I sent Father Mardoc to sit in the Fyrdraca’s bow while we talked about his request. Some things were obvious. Being paid well did not mean we would become rich, but that Peredur would try to fob us off with as little as possible and, most likely, having given it to us he would then try to take it back by killing us all. ‘What we should do,’ Leofric advised, ‘is find this man Callyn and see what he’ll pay us.’

Which was good enough advice except none of us knew how to find Callyn, whom we later learned was King Callyn, which did not mean much for any man with a following of more than fifty armed men called himself a king in Cornwalum, and so I went to the Fyrdraca’s bows and talked with Father Mardoc again, and he told me that Dreyndynas was a high fort, built by the old people, and that it guarded the road eastwards, and so long as Callyn held the fort, so long were Peredur’s people trapped in their lands.

‘You have ships,’ I pointed out.

‘And Callyn has ships,’ he said, ‘and we cannot take cattle in ships.’

‘Cattle?’

‘We need to sell cattle to live,’ he said.

So Callyn had surrounded Peredur and we represented a chance to tip the balance in this little war. ‘So how much will your king pay us?’ I asked.

‘A hundred pieces of silver,’ he said.

I drew Serpent-Breath. ‘I worship the real gods,’ I told him, ‘and I am a particular servant of Hoder, and Hoder likes blood and I have given him none in many days.’

Father Mardoc looked terrified, which was sensible of him. He was a young man, though it was hard to tell for his hair and beard were so thick that most of the time he was just a broken nose and pair of eyes surrounded by a greasy black tangle. He told me he had learned to speak Danish when he had been enslaved by a chieftain called Godfred, but that he had managed to escape when Godfred raided the Sillans, islands that lay well out in the western sea-wastes. ‘Is there any wealth in the Sillans?’ I asked him. I had heard of the islands, though some men claimed they were mythical and others said the islands came and went with the moons, but Father Mardoc said they existed and were called the Isles of the Dead.

‘So no one lives there?’ I asked.

‘Some folk do,’ he said, ‘but the dead have their houses there.’

‘Do they have wealth as well?’

‘Your ships have taken it all,’ he said. This was after he had promised me that Peredur would be more generous, though he did not know how generous, but he said the king was willing to pay far more than a hundred silver coins for our help, and so we had him shout to his ship that they were to lead us around the coast to Peredur’s settlement. I did not let Father Mardoc go back to his ship for he would serve as a hostage if the tale he had told us was false and Peredur was merely luring us to an ambush.

He was not. Peredur’s home was a huddle of buildings built on a steep hill beside a bay and protected by a wall of thorn bushes. His people lived within the wall and some were fishermen and some were cattle herders and none was wealthy, though the king himself had a high hall where he welcomed us, though not before we had taken more hostages. Three young men, all of whom we were assured were Peredur’s sons, were delivered to Fyrdraca and I gave the crew orders that the three were to be killed if I did not return, and then I went ashore with Haesten and Cenwulf. I went dressed for war, with mail coat and helmet polished, and Peredur’s folk watched the three of us pass with frightened eyes. The place stank of fish and shit. The people were ragged and their houses mere hovels that were built up the side of the steep hill that was crowned with Peredur’s hall. There was a church beside the hall, its thatch thick with moss and its gable decorated with a cross made from sea-whitened driftwood.

Peredur was twice my age, a squat man with a sly face and a forked black beard. He greeted us from a throne, which was just a chair with a high back, and he waited for us to bow to him, but none of us did and that made him scowl. A dozen men were with him, evidently his courtiers, though none looked wealthy and all were elderly except for one much younger man who was in the robes of a Christian monk, and he stood out in that smoke-darkened hall like a raven in a clutch of gulls for his black robes were clean, his face close-shaven and his hair and tonsure neatly trimmed. He was scarcely older than I, was thin and stern-faced, and that face looked clever, and it also carried an expression of marked distaste for us. We were pagans, or at least Haesten and I were pagans and I had told Cenwulf to keep his mouth shut and his crucifix hidden, and so the monk assumed all three of us were heathen Danes. The monk spoke Danish, far better Danish than Father Mardoc. ‘The king greets you,’ he said. He had a voice as thin as his lips and as unfriendly as his pale green eyes. ‘He greets you and would know who you are.’

‘My name is Uhtred Ragnarson,’ I said.

‘Why are you here, Uhtred Ragnarson?’ the priest asked.

I contemplated him. I did not just look at him, but I studied him as a man might study an ox before killing it. I gave him a look which suggested I was wondering where to make the cuts, and he got my meaning and did not wait for an answer to his question, an answer which was obvious if we were Danes. We were here to thieve and kill, of course, what else did he think a Viking ship would be doing?

Peredur spoke to the monk and they muttered for some time and I looked around the hall, searching for any evidence of wealth. I saw almost nothing except for three whalebones stacked in a corner, but Peredur plainly had some treasure for he wore a great heavy torque of bronze about his neck and there were silver rings on his grubby fingers, an amber brooch at the neck of his cloak and a golden crucifix hidden in the cloak’s lice-ridden folds. He would keep his hoard buried, I thought, and I doubted any of us would become rich from this alliance, but in truth we were not becoming rich from our voyage either, and at least Peredur would have to feed us while we haggled.

‘The king,’ the monk interrupted my thoughts, ‘wishes to know how many men you can lead against the enemy.’

‘Enough,’ I said flatly.

‘Does that not depend,’ the monk observed slyly, ‘on how many enemy there are?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘It depends on this,’ and I slapped Serpent-Breath’s hilt. It was a good, arrogant reply, and probably what the monk expected. And, in truth, it was convincing for I was broad in the chest and a giant in this hall where I was a full head taller than any other man. ‘And who are you, monk?’ I demanded.

‘My name is Asser,’ he said. It was a British name, of course, and in the English tongue it meant a he-ass, and ever after I thought of him as the Ass. And there was to be a lot of the ever after for, though I did not know it, I had just met a man who would haunt my life like a louse. I had met another enemy, though on that day in Peredur’s hall he was just a strange British monk who stood out from his companions because he washed. He invited me to follow him to a small door at the side of the hall and, motioning Haesten and Cenwulf to stay where they were, I ducked through the door to find myself standing beside a dung-heap, but the point of taking me outside had been to show me the view eastwards.

I stared across a valley. On the nearer slope were the smoke-blackened roofs of Peredur’s settlement, then came the thorn fence that had been made along the stream which flowed to the sea. On the stream’s far side the hills rose gently to a far off crest and there, breaking the skyline like a boil, was Dreyndynas. ‘The enemy,’ Asser said.

A small fort, I noted. ‘How many men are there?’

‘Does it matter to you?’ Asser asked sourly, paying me back for my refusal to tell him how many men I led, though I assumed Father Mardoc had made a count of the crew while he was on board Fyrdraca, so my defiance had been pointless.

‘You Christians,’ I said, ‘believe that at death you go to heaven. Isn’t that right?’

‘What of it?’

‘You must surely welcome such a fate?’ I asked. ‘To be near your god?’

‘Are you threatening me?’

‘I don’t threaten vermin,’ I said, enjoying myself. ‘How many men are in that fort?’

‘Forty? Fifty?’ He plainly did not know. ‘We can assemble forty.’

‘So tomorrow,’ I said, ‘your king can have his fort back.’

‘He is not my king,’ Asser said, irritated by the assumption.

‘Your king or not,’ I said, ‘he can have his fort back so long as he pays us properly.’

That negotiation lasted until dark. Peredur, as Father Mardoc had said, was willing to pay more than a hundred shillings, but he feared we would take the money and leave without fighting and so he wanted some kind of surety from me. He wanted hostages, which I refused to give, and after an hour or more of argument we had still not reached an agreement, and it was then that Peredur summoned his queen. That meant nothing to me, but I saw the Ass stiffen as though he were offended, then sensed that every other man in the hall was strangely apprehensive. Asser made a protest, but the king cut him off with an abrupt slice of his hand and then a door at the back of the hall was opened and Iseult came to my life.

Iseult. Finding her there was like discovering a jewel of gold in a midden. I saw her and I forgot Mildrith. Dark Iseult, black-haired Iseult, huge-eyed Iseult. She was small, thin as an elf, with a luminous face and hair as black as a raven’s feathers. She wore a black cloak and had silver bands about her neck and silver bracelets at her wrists and silver rings at her ankles and the jewellery clinked gently as she walked towards us. She was maybe two or three years younger than me, but somehow, despite her youth, she managed to scare Peredur’s courtiers who backed away from her. The king looked nervous, while Asser, standing beside me, made the sign of the cross, then spat to ward off evil.

I just stared at her, entranced. There was pain on her face, as if she found life unbearable, and there was fear on her husband’s face when he spoke to her in a quiet, respectful voice. She shuddered when he talked and I thought that perhaps she was mad, for the grimace on her face was awful, disfiguring her beauty, but then she calmed and looked at me and the king spoke to Asser.

‘You will tell the queen who you are and what you will do for King Peredur,’ Asser told me in a distant, disapproving voice.

‘She speaks Danish?’ I asked.

‘Of course not,’ he snapped. ‘Just tell her and get this farce over.’

I looked into her eyes, those big, dark eyes, and had the uncanny suspicion that she could see right through my gaze and decipher my innermost thoughts. But at least she did not grimace when she saw me as she had when her husband spoke. ‘My name is Uhtred Ragnarson,’ I said, ‘and I am here to fight for your husband if he pays what I am worth. And if he doesn’t pay, we go.’

I thought Asser would translate, but the monk stayed silent.

Iseult still stared at me and I stared back. She had a flawless skin, untouched by illness, and a strong face, but sad. Sad and beautiful. Fierce and beautiful. She reminded me of Brida, the East Anglian who had been my lover and who was now with Ragnar, my friend. Brida was as full of fury as a scabbard is filled with blade, and I sensed the same in this queen who was so young and strange and dark and lovely.

‘I am Uhtred Ragnarson,’ I heard myself speaking again, though I had scarcely been aware of any urge to talk, ‘and I work miracles.’

Why I said that I do not know. I later learned that she had no idea what I had said, for at that time the only tongue she spoke was that of the Britons, but nevertheless she seemed to understand me and she smiled. Asser caught his breath. ‘Be careful, Dane,’ he hissed, ‘she is a queen.’

‘A queen?’ I asked, still staring at her, ‘or the queen?’

‘The king is blessed with three wives,’ the monk said disapprovingly.

Iseult turned away and spoke to the king. He nodded, then gestured respectfully towards the door through which Iseult had come. She was evidently dismissed and she obediently went to the door, but paused there and gave me a last, speculative look. Then she was gone.

And suddenly it was easy. Peredur agreed to pay us a hoard of silver. He showed us the hoard that had been hidden in a back room. There were coins, broken jewellery, battered cups and three candleholders which had been taken from the church, and when I weighed the silver, using a balance fetched from the market place, I discovered there was three hundred and sixteen shillings’ worth, which was not negligible. Asser divided it into two piles, one only half the size of the other. ‘We shall give you the smaller portion tonight,’ the monk said, ‘and the rest you will get when Dreyndynas is recovered.’

‘You think I am a fool?’ I asked, knowing that after the fight it would be hard to get the rest of the silver.

‘You take me for one?’ he retorted, knowing that if he gave us all the silver then Fyrdraca would vanish in the dawn.

We agreed in the end that we would take the one third now and that the other two thirds would be carried to the battlefield so that it was easily accessible. Peredur had hoped I would leave that larger portion in his hall, and then I would have faced an uphill fight through his dung-spattered streets, and that was a fight I would have lost, and it was probably the prospect of such a battle that had stopped Callyn’s men attacking Peredur’s hall. They hoped to starve him, or at least Asser believed that.

‘Tell me about Iseult,’ I demanded of the monk when the bargaining was done.

He sneered at that. ‘I can read you like a missal,’ he said.

‘Whatever a missal is,’ I said, pretending ignorance.

‘A book of prayers,’ he said, ‘and you will need prayers if you touch her.’ He made the sign of the cross. ‘She is evil,’ he said vehemently.

‘She’s a queen, a young queen,’ I said, ‘so how can she be evil?’

‘What do you know of the Britons?’

‘That they stink like stoats,’ I said, ‘and thieve like jackdaws.’

He gave me a sour look and, for a moment, I thought he would refuse to say more, but he swallowed his British pride. ‘We are Christians,’ he said, ‘and God be thanked for that great mercy, but among our people there are still some old superstitions. Pagan ways. Iseult is part of that.’

‘What part?’

He did not like talking about it, but he had raised the subject of Iseult’s evil and so he reluctantly explained. ‘She was born in the springtime,’ he said, ‘eighteen years ago, and at her birth there was an eclipse of the sun, and the folk here are credulous fools and they believe a dark child born at the sun’s death has power. They have made her into a,’ he paused, not knowing the Danish word, ‘a gwrach,’ he said, a word that meant nothing to me. ‘Dewines,’ he said irritably and, when I still showed incomprehension, he at last found a word. ‘A sorceress.’

‘A witch?’

‘And Peredur married her. Made her his shadow queen. That is what kings did with such girls. They take them into their households so they may use their power.’

‘What power?’

‘The skills the devil gives to shadow queens, of course,’ he said irritably. ‘Peredur believes she can see the future. But it is a skill she will retain only so long as she is a virgin.’

I laughed at that. ‘If you disapprove of her, monk, then I would be doing you a favour if I raped her.’ He ignored that, or at least he made no reply other than to give me a harsh scowl. ‘Can she see the future?’ I asked.

‘She saw you victorious,’ he said, ‘and told the king he could trust you, so you tell me?’

‘Then assuredly she can see the future,’ I said.

Brother Asser sneered at that answer. ‘They should have strangled her with her own birth-cord,’ he snarled. ‘She is a pagan bitch, a devil’s thing, evil.’

There was a feast that night, a feast to celebrate our pact and I hoped Iseult would be there, but she was not. Peredur’s older wife was present, but she was a sullen, grubby creature with two weeping boils on her neck and she hardly spoke. Yet it was a surprisingly good feast. There was fish, beef, mutton, bread, ale, mead and cheese, and while we ate Asser told me he had come from the kingdom of Dyfed, which lay north of the Sæfern Sea, and that his king, who had an impossible British name which sounded like a man coughing and spluttering, had sent him to Cornwalum to dissuade the British kings from supporting the Danes.

I was surprised by that, so surprised that I looked away from the girls serving the food. A harpist played at the hall’s end and two of the girls swayed in time to the music as they walked. ‘You don’t like Danes,’ I said.

‘You are pagans,’ Asser said scornfully.

‘So how come you speak the pagan tongue?’ I asked.

‘Because my abbot would have us send missionaries to the Danes.’

‘You should go,’ I said. ‘It would be a quick route to heaven for you.’

He ignored that. ‘I learned Danish among many other tongues,’ he said loftily, ‘and I speak the language of the Saxons too. And you, I think, were not born in Denmark?’

‘How do you know?’

‘Your voice,’ he said. ‘You are from Northumbria?’

‘I am from the sea,’ I said.

He shrugged. ‘In Northumbria,’ he said severely, ‘the Danes have corrupted the Saxons so that they think of themselves as Danes.’ He was wrong, but I was scarcely in a position to correct him. ‘Worse,’ he went on, ‘they have extinguished the light of Christ.’

‘Is the light of Thor too bright for you?’

‘The West Saxons are Christians,’ he said, ‘and it is our duty to support them, not because of a love for them, but because of our fellow love for Christ.’

‘You have met Alfred of Wessex?’ I asked sourly.

‘I look forward to meeting him,’ he said fervently, ‘for I hear he is a good Christian.’

‘I hear the same.’

‘And Christ rewards him,’ Asser went on.

‘Rewards him?’

‘Christ sent the storm that destroyed the Danish fleet,’ Asser said, ‘and Christ’s angels destroyed Ubba. That is proof of God’s power. If we fight against Alfred then we range ourselves against Christ, so we must not do it. That is my message to the kings of Cornwalum.’

I was impressed that a British monk at the end of the land of Britain knew so much of what happened in Wessex, and I reckoned Alfred would have been pleased to hear Asser’s nonsense, though of course Alfred had sent many messengers to the British. His messengers had all been priests or monks and they had preached the gospel of their god slaughtering the Danes, and Asser had evidently taken up their message enthusiastically. ‘So why are you fighting Callyn?’ I asked.

‘He would join the Danes,’ Asser said.

‘And we’re going to win,’ I said, ‘so Callyn is sensible.’

Asser shook his head. ‘God will prevail.’

‘You hope,’ I said, touching the small amulet of Thor’s hammer I wore on a thong around my neck. ‘But if you are wrong, monk, then we’ll take Wessex and Callyn will share the spoils.’

‘Callyn will share nothing,’ Asser said spitefully, ‘because you will kill him tomorrow.’

The Britons have never learned to love the Saxons. Indeed they hate us, and in those years when the last English kingdom was on the edge of destruction, they could have tipped the balance by joining Guthrum. Instead they held back their sword arms, and for that the Saxons can thank the church. Men like Asser had decided that the Danish heretics were a worse enemy than English Christians, and if I were a Briton I would resent that, because the Britons might have taken back much of their lost lands if they had allied themselves with the pagan Northmen. Religion makes strange bedfellows.

So does war, and Peredur offered Haesten and myself two of the serving girls to seal our bargain. I had sent Cenwulf back to Fyrdraca with a message for Leofric, warning him to be ready to fight in the morning, and I thought perhaps Haesten and I should retreat to the ship, but the serving girls were pretty and so we stayed, and I need not have worried for no one tried to kill us in the night, and no one even tried when Haesten and I carried the first third of the silver down to the water’s edge where a small boat carried us to our ship. ‘There’s twice as much as that waiting for us,’ I told Leofric.

He stirred the sack of silver with his foot. ‘And where were you last night?’

‘In bed with a Briton.’

‘Earsling,’ he said. ‘So who are we fighting?’

‘A pack of savages.’

We left ten men as ship guards. If Peredur’s men made a real effort to capture Fyrdraca then those ten would have had a hard fight, and probably a losing fight, but they had the three hostages who may or may not have been Peredur’s sons, so that was a risk we had to take, and it seemed safe enough because Peredur had assembled his army on the eastern side of the town. I say army, though it was only forty men, and I brought thirty more, and my thirty were well armed and looked ferocious in their leather. Leofric, like me, wore mail, as did half a dozen of my crewmen, and I had my fine helmet with its face-plate so I, at least, looked like a lord of battles.

Peredur was in leather, and he had woven black horsetails into his hair and onto the twin forks of his beard so that the horsetails hung down wild and long and scary. His men were mostly armed with spears, though Peredur himself possessed a fine sword. Some of his men had shields and a few had helmets, and though I did not doubt their bravery I did not reckon them formidable. My crewmen were formidable. They had fought Danish ships off the Wessex coast and they had fought in the shield wall at Cynuit and I had no doubt that we could destroy whatever troops Callyn had placed in Dreyndynas.

It was afternoon before we climbed the hill. We should have gone in the morning, but some of Peredur’s men were recovering from their night’s drinking, and the women of his settlement kept pulling others away, not wanting them to die, and then Peredur and his advisers huddled and talked about how they should fight the battle, though what there was to talk about I did not know. Callyn’s men were in the fort, we were outside it, so we had to assault the bastards. Nothing clever, just an attack, but they talked for a long time, and Father Mardoc said a prayer, or rather he shouted it, and then I refused to advance because the rest of the silver had not been fetched.

It came, carried in a chest by two men, and so at last, under the afternoon sun, we climbed the eastern hill. Some women followed us, shrieking their battle-screams, which was a waste of breath because the enemy was still too far away to hear them.

‘So what do we do?’ Leofric asked me.

‘Form a wedge,’ I guessed. ‘Our best men in the front rank and you and me in front of them, then kill the bastards.’

He grimaced. ‘Have you ever assaulted one of the old people’s forts?’

‘Never.’

‘It can be hard,’ he warned me.

‘If it’s too hard,’ I said, ‘we’ll just kill Peredur and his men and take their silver anyway.’

Brother Asser, his neat black robes muddied about their skirts, hurried over to me. ‘Your men are Saxons!’ he said accusingly.

‘I hate monks,’ I snarled at him. ‘I hate them more than I hate priests. I like killing them. I like slitting their bellies. I like watching the bastards die. Now run off and die before I cut your throat.’

He ran off to Peredur with his news that we were Saxons. The king stared at us morosely. He had thought he had recruited a crew of Danish Vikings, and now he discovered we were West Saxons and he was not happy, so I drew Serpent-Breath and banged her blade against my limewood shield. ‘You want to fight this battle or not?’ I asked him through Asser.

Peredur decided he wanted to fight, or rather he wanted us to fight the battle for him, and so we slogged on up the hill which had a couple of false crests so it was well into the afternoon before we emerged onto the long, shallow summit and could see Dreyndynas’s green turf walls on the skyline. A banner flew there. It was a triangle of cloth, supported on its pole by a small cross-staff, and the banner showed a white horse prancing on a green field.

I stopped then. Peredur’s banner was a wolf’s tail hung from a pole, I carried none, though, like most Saxons, mine would have been a rectangular flag. I only knew one people who flew triangular banners and I turned on Brother Asser as he sweated up the hill. ‘They’re Danes,’ I accused him.

‘So?’ he demanded. ‘I thought you were a Dane, and all the world knows the Danes will fight anyone for silver, even other Danes. But are you frightened of them, Saxon?’

‘Your mother didn’t give birth to you,’ I told him, ‘but farted you out of her shrivelled arsehole.’

‘Frightened or not,’ Asser said, ‘you’ve taken Peredur’s silver, so you must fight them now.’

‘Say one more word, monk,’ I said, ‘and I’ll cut off your scrawny balls.’ I was gazing uphill, trying to estimate numbers. Everything had changed since I had seen the white horse banner because instead of fighting against half-armed British savages we would have to take on a crew of lethal Danes, but if I was surprised by that, then the Danes were equally surprised to see us. They were crowding Dreyndynas’s wall, which was made of earth fronted with a ditch and topped with a thorn fence. It would be a hard wall to attack, I thought, especially if it was defended by Danes. I counted over forty men on the skyline and knew there would be others I could not see, and the numbers alone told me this assault would fail. We could attack, and we might well get as far as the thorn palisade, but I doubted we could hack our way through, and the Danes would kill a score of us as we tried, and we would be lucky to retreat down the hill without greater loss.

‘We’re in a cesspit,’ Leofric said to me.

‘Up to our necks.’

‘So what do we do? Turn on them and take the money?’

I did not answer because the Danes had dragged a section of the thorn fence aside and three of them now jumped down from the ramparts and strolled towards us. They wanted to talk.

‘Who the hell is that?’ Leofric asked.

He was staring at the Danish leader. He was a huge man, big as Steapa Snotor, and dressed in a mail coat that had been polished with sand until it shone. His helmet, as highly polished as his mail, had a face-plate modelled as a boar’s mask with a squat, broad snout, and from the helmet’s crown there flew a white horsetail. He wore arm rings over his mail, rings of silver and gold that proclaimed him to be a warrior chief, a sword-Dane, a lord of war. He walked the hillside as if he owned it, and in truth, he did own it because he possessed the fort.

Asser hurried to meet the Danes, going with Peredur and two of his courtiers. I went after them and found Asser trying to convert the Danes. He told them that God had brought us and we would slaughter them all and their best course was to surrender now and yield their heathen souls to God. ‘We shall baptise you,’ Asser said, ‘and there will be much rejoicing in heaven.’

The Danish leader slowly pulled off his helmet and his face was almost as frightening as the boar-snouted mask. It was a broad face, hardened by sun and wind, with the blank, expressionless eyes of a killer. He was around thirty years old, had a tightly-cropped beard and a scar running from the corner of his left eye down across his cheek. He gave the helmet to one of his men and, without saying a word, hauled up the skirt of his mail coat and began pissing on Asser’s robe. The monk leaped back.

The Dane, still pissing, looked at me. ‘Who are you?’

‘Uhtred Ragnarson. And you?’

‘Svein of the White Horse,’ he said it defiantly, as though I would know his reputation, and for a heartbeat I said nothing. Was this the same Svein who was said to be gathering troops in Wales? Then what was he doing here?

‘You’re Svein of Ireland?’ I asked.

‘Svein of Denmark,’ he said. He let the mail coat drop and glared at Asser who was threatening the Danes with heaven’s vengeance. ‘If you want to live,’ he told Asser, ‘shut your filthy mouth.’ Asser shut his mouth. ‘Ragnarson,’ Svein looked back to me. ‘Earl Ragnar? Ragnar Ravnson? The Ragnar who served Ivar?’

‘The same,’ I said.

‘Then you are the Saxon son?’

‘I am. And you?’ I asked. ‘You’re the Svein who has brought men from Ireland?’

‘I have brought men from Ireland,’ he admitted.

‘And gather forces in Wales?’

‘I do what I do,’ he said vaguely. He looked at my men, judging how well they would fight, then he looked me up and down, noting my mail and helmet, and noting especially my arm rings, and when the inspection was done he jerked his head to indicate that he and I should walk away a few paces and talk privately.

Asser objected, saying anything that was spoken should be heard by all, but I ignored him and followed Svein uphill. ‘You can’t take this fort,’ Svein told me.

‘True.’

‘So what do you do?’

‘Go back to Peredur’s settlement, of course.’

He nodded. ‘And if I attack the settlement?’

‘You’ll take it,’ I said, ‘but you’ll lose men. Maybe a dozen?’

‘Which will mean a dozen fewer oarsmen,’ he said, thinking, and then he looked past Peredur to where two men carried the box. ‘Is that your battle price?’

‘It is.’

‘Split it?’ he suggested.

I hesitated a heartbeat. ‘And we’ll split what’s in the town?’ I asked.

‘Agreed,’ he said, then looked at Asser who was hissing urgently at Peredur. ‘He knows what we’re doing,’ he said grimly, ‘so a necessary deception is about to happen.’ I was still trying to understand what he meant when he struck me in the face. He struck hard, and my hand went to Serpent-Breath and his two men ran to him, swords in hand.

‘I’ll come out of the fort and join you,’ Svein said to me softly. Then, louder, ‘You bastard piece of goat-dropping.’

I spat at him as his two men pretended to drag him away, then I stalked back to Asser. ‘We kill them all,’ I said savagely. ‘We kill them all!’

‘What did he say to you?’ Asser asked. He had feared, rightly as it happened, that Svein and I had made our own alliance, but Svein’s quick display had put doubts in the monk’s mind, and I fed the doubts by raging like a madman, screaming at the retreating Svein that I would send his miserable soul to Hel who was the goddess of the dead. ‘Are you going to fight?’ Asser demanded.

‘Of course we’re going to fight!’ I shouted at him, then I crossed to Leofric. ‘We’re on the same side as the Danes,’ I told him quietly. ‘We kill these Britons, capture their settlement and split everything with the Danes. Tell the men, but tell them quietly.’

Svein, true to his word, brought his men out of Dreyndynas. That should have warned Asser and Peredur of treachery, for no sensible man would abandon a fine defensive position like a thorn-topped earth wall to fight a battle on open ground, but they put it down to Danish arrogance. They assumed Svein believed he could destroy us all in open battle, and he made that assumption more likely by parading a score of his men on horseback, suggesting that he intended to tear our shield wall open with his swords and axes and then pursue the survivors with spear-armed cavalry. He made his own shield wall in front of the horsemen, and I made another shield wall on the left of Peredur’s line, and once we were in the proper array we shouted insults at each other. Leofric was going down our line, whispering to the men, and I sent Cenwulf and two others to the rear with their own orders, and just then Asser ran across to us.

‘Attack,’ the monk demanded, pointing at Svein.

‘When we’re ready,’ I said, for Leofric had not yet given every man his orders.

‘Attack now!’ Asser spat at me, and I almost gutted the bastard on the spot and would have saved myself a good deal of future trouble if I had, but I kept my patience and Asser went back to Peredur where he began praying, both hands held high in the air, demanding that God send fire from heaven to consume the pagans.

‘You trust Svein?’ Leofric had come back to my side.

‘I trust Svein,’ I said. Why? Only because he was a Dane and I liked the Danes. These days, of course, we are all agreed that they are the spawn of Satan, untrustworthy pagans, savages, and anything else we care to call them, but in truth the Danes are warriors and they like other warriors, and though it is true that Svein might have persuaded me to attack Peredur so that he could then attack us, I did not believe it. Besides, there was something I wanted in Peredur’s hall and, to get her, I needed to change sides.

‘Fyrdraca!’ I shouted, and that was our signal, and we swung our shield wall around to the right and went at it.

It was, of course, an easy slaughter. Peredur’s men had no belly for a fight. They had been hoping that we would take the brunt of the Danish assault and that they could then scavenge for plunder among Svein’s wounded, but instead we turned on them, attacked them, and cut them down, and Svein came on their right, and Peredur’s men fled. That was when Svein’s horsemen kicked back their heels, levelled their spears and charged.

It was not a fight, it was a massacre. Two of Peredur’s men put up some resistance, but Leofric swatted their spears aside with his axe and they died screaming, and Peredur went down to my sword, and he put up no fight at all, but seemed resigned to his death that I gave him quickly enough. Cenwulf and his two companions did what I had ordered them to do, which was to intercept the chest of silver, and we rallied around them as Svein’s riders chased down the fugitives. The only man to escape was Asser, the monk, which he managed by running north instead of west. Svein’s horsemen were ranging down the hill, spearing Peredur’s men in the backs, and Asser saw that only death lay that way and so, with surprising quickness, he changed direction and sprinted past my men, his skirts clutched up about his knees, and I shouted at the men on the right of the line to kill the bastard, but they simply looked at me and let him go. ‘I said kill him!’ I snarled.

‘He’s a monk!’ One of them answered. ‘You want me to go to hell?’

I watched Asser run slantwise into the valley and, in truth, I did not much care whether he lived or died. I thought Svein’s horsemen would catch him, but perhaps they did not see him. They did catch Father Mardoc and one of them took off the priest’s head with a single swing of his sword which made some of my men cross themselves.

The horsemen made their killing, but Svein’s other Danes made a shield wall that faced us, and in its centre, beneath the white horse banner, was Svein himself in his boar-mask helmet. His shield had a white horse painted on its boards and his weapon was an axe, the largest war axe I had ever seen. My men shifted nervously. ‘Stand still!’ I snarled at them.

‘Up to our necks in it,’ Leofric said quietly.

Svein was staring at us and I could see the death light in his eyes. He was in a killing mood, and we were Saxons, and there was a knocking sound as his men hefted shields to make the wall, and so I tossed Serpent-Breath into the air. Tossed her high so that the big blade whirled about in the sun, and of course they were all wondering whether I would catch her or whether she would thump onto the grass.

I caught her, winked at Svein and slid the blade into her scabbard. He laughed and the killing mood passed as he realised he could not afford the casualties he would inevitably take in fighting us. ‘Did you really think I was going to attack you?’ he called across the springy turf.

‘I was hoping you would attack me,’ I called back, ‘so I wouldn’t have to split the plunder with you.’

He dropped the axe and walked towards us, and I walked towards him and we embraced. Men on both sides lowered weapons. ‘Shall we take the bastard’s miserable village?’ Svein asked.

So we all went back down the hill, past the bodies of Peredur’s men, and there was no one defending the thorn wall about the settlement so it was an easy matter to get inside, and a few men tried to protect their homes, but very few. Most of the folk fled to the beach, but there were not enough boats to take them away, and so Svein’s Danes rounded them up and began sorting them into the useful and the dead. The useful were the young women and those who could be sold as slaves, the dead were the rest.

I took no part in that. Instead, with all of my men, I went straight to Peredur’s hall. Some Danes, reckoning that was where the silver would be, were also climbing the hill, but I reached the hall first, pushed open the door and saw Iseult waiting there.

I swear she was expecting me for her face showed no fear and no surprise. She was sitting in the king’s throne, but stood as if welcoming me as I walked up the hall. Then she took the silver from her neck and her wrists and her ankles and held it mutely out as an offering and I took it all and tossed it to Leofric. ‘We divide it with Svein,’ I said.

‘And her?’ He sounded amused. ‘Do we share her too?’

For answer I took the cloak from about Iseult’s neck. Beneath it she wore a black dress. I still had Serpent-Breath drawn and I used the bloodied blade to slash at the cloak until I could tear a strip from its hem. Iseult watched me, her face showing nothing. When the strip was torn away I gave her back the cloak, then tied one end of the cloth strip about her neck and tied the other end to my belt. ‘She’s mine,’ I said.

More Danes were coming into the hall and some stared wolfishly at Iseult, and then Svein arrived and snarled at his men to start digging up the hall floor to search for hidden coins or silver. He grinned when he saw Iseult’s leash. ‘You can have her, Saxon,’ he said. ‘She’s pretty, but I like them with more meat on the bone.’

I kept Iseult with me as we feasted that night. There was a good deal of ale and mead in the settlement and so I ordered my men not to fight with the Danes, and Svein told his men not to fight with us, and on the whole we were obeyed, though inevitably some men quarrelled over the captured women and one of the boys I had brought from my estate got a knife in his belly and died in the morning.

Svein was amused that we were a West Saxon ship. ‘Alfred sent you?’ he asked me.

‘No.’

‘He doesn’t want to fight, does he?’

‘He’ll fight,’ I said, ‘except he thinks his god will do the fighting for him.’

‘Then he’s an idiot,’ Svein said, ‘the gods don’t do our bidding. I wish they did.’ He sucked on a pork bone. ‘So what are you doing here?’ he asked.

‘Looking for money,’ I said, ‘the same as you.’

‘I’m looking for allies,’ he said.

‘Allies?’

He was drunk enough to speak more freely than he had when we first met, and I realised this was indeed the Svein who was said to be gathering men in Wales. He admitted as much, but added he did not have enough warriors. ‘Guthrum can lead two thousand men to battle, maybe more! I have to match that.’

So he was a rival to Guthrum. I tucked that knowledge away. ‘You think the Cornishmen will fight with you?’

‘They promised they would,’ he said, spitting out a shred of gristle. ‘That’s why I came here. But the bastards lied. Callyn isn’t a proper king, he’s a village chief! I’m wasting my time here.’

‘Could the two of us beat Callyn?’ I asked.

Svein thought about it, then nodded. ‘We could.’ He frowned suddenly, staring into the hall’s shadows, and I saw he was looking at one of his men who had a girl on his lap. He evidently liked the girl for he slapped the table, pointed to her, beckoned, and the man reluctantly brought her. Svein sat her down, pulled her tunic open so he could see her breasts, then gave her his pot of ale. ‘I’ll think about it,’ he told me.

‘Or are you thinking of attacking me?’ I asked.

He grinned. ‘You are Uhtred Ragnarson,’ he said, ‘and I heard about the fight on the river where you killed Ubba.’

I evidently had more of a reputation among my enemies than I did among my so-called friends. Svein insisted I tell the tale of Ubba’s death, which I did, and I told him the truth which was that Ubba had slipped and fallen, and that had let me take his life.

‘But men say you fought well,’ Svein said.

Iseult listened to all this. She did not speak our language, but her big eyes seemed to follow every word. When the feast was over I took her to the small rooms at the back of the hall and she used my makeshift leash to pull me into her wood-walled chamber. I made a bed from our cloaks. ‘When this is done,’ I told her in words she could not understand, ‘you’ll have lost your power.’

She touched a finger to my lips to silence me and she was a queen so I obeyed her.

In the morning we finished ravaging the town. Iseult showed me which houses might have something of value and generally she was right though the search meant demolishing the houses, for folk hide their small treasures in their thatch, so we scattered rats and mice as we hauled down the mouldy straw and sifted through it, and afterwards we dug under every hearth, or wherever else a man might bury silver, and we collected every scrap of metal, every cooking pot or fish-hook, and the search took all day. That night we divided the hoard on the beach.

Svein had evidently thought about Callyn and, being sober by the time he did his thinking, he had decided that the king was too strong. ‘We can easily beat him,’ he said, ‘but we’ll lose men.’

A ship’s crew can only endure so many losses. We had lost none in the fight against Peredur, but Callyn was a stronger king and he was bound to be suspicious of Svein which meant that he would have his household troops ready and armed. ‘And he’s got little enough to take,’ Svein said scornfully.

‘He’s paying you?’

‘He’s paying me,’ Svein said, ‘just as Peredur paid you.’

‘I split that with you,’ I said.

‘Not the money he paid you before the fight,’ Svein said with a grin, ‘you didn’t split that.’

‘What money?’ I asked.

‘So we’re even,’ he said, and we had both done well enough out of Peredur’s death, for Svein had slaves and we each now possessed over nine hundred shillings’ worth of silver and metal, which was not a fortune, especially once it was divided among the men, but it was better than I had done so far on the voyage. I also had Iseult. She was no longer leashed to me, but she stayed beside me and I sensed that she was happy about that. She had taken a vicious pleasure in seeing her home destroyed and I decided she must have hated Peredur. He had feared her and she had hated him, and if it was true that she had been able to see the future then she had seen me and given her husband bad advice to make that future come true.

‘So where do you go now?’ Svein asked. We were walking along the beach, past the huddled slaves who watched us with dark, resentful eyes.

‘I have a mind,’ I said, ‘to go into the Sæfern Sea.’

‘There’s nothing left there,’ he said scornfully.

‘Nothing?’

‘It’s been scoured,’ he said, meaning that Danish and Norse ships had bled the coasts dry of any treasure. ‘All you’ll find in the Sæfern Sea,’ he went on, ‘are our ships bringing men from Ireland.’

‘To attack Wessex?’

‘No!’ He grinned at me. ‘I’ve a mind to start trading with the Welsh kingdoms.’

‘And I have a mind,’ I said, ‘to take my ship to the moon and build a feasting hall there.’

He laughed. ‘But speaking of Wessex,’ he said, ‘I hear they’re building a church where you killed Ubba?’

‘I hear the same.’

‘A church with an altar of gold?’

‘I’ve heard that too,’ I allowed. I hid my surprise that he knew of Odda the Younger’s plans, but I should not have been surprised. A rumour of gold would spread like couch grass. ‘I’ve heard it,’ I said again, ‘but I don’t believe it.’

‘Churches have money,’ he said thoughtfully, then frowned, ‘but that’s a strange place to build a church.’

‘Strange, why?’

‘So close to the sea? An easy place to attack?’

‘Or perhaps they want you to attack,’ I said, ‘and have men ready to defend it?’

‘A lure, you mean?’ He thought about that.

‘And hasn’t Guthrum given orders that the West Saxons aren’t to be provoked,’ I said.

‘Guthrum can order what he wants,’ Svein said harshly, ‘but I am Svein of the White Horse and I don’t take orders from Guthrum.’ He walked on, frowning as he threaded the fishing nets that men now dead had hung to dry. ‘Men say Alfred is not a fool.’

‘Nor is he.’

‘If he has put valuables beside the sea,’ he said, ‘he will not leave them unguarded.’ He was a warrior, but like the best warriors he was no madman. When folk speak of the Danes these days they have an idea that they were all savage pagans, unthinking in their terrible violence, but most were like Svein and feared losing men. That was always the great Danish fear, and the Danish weakness. Svein’s ship was called the White Horse and had a crew of fifty-three men, and if a dozen of those men were to be killed or gravely wounded, then the White Horse would be fatally weakened. Once in a fight, of course, he was like all Danes, terrifying, but there was always a good deal of thinking before there was any fighting. He scratched at a louse, then gestured towards the slaves his men had taken. ‘Besides, I have these.’

He meant he would not go to Cynuit. The slaves, once they were sold, would bring him silver and he must have reckoned Cynuit was not worth the casualties.

Svein needed my help next morning. His own ship was in Callyn’s harbour and he asked me to take him and a score of his men to fetch it. We left the rest of his crew at Peredur’s settlement. They guarded the slaves he would take away, and they also burned the place as we carried Svein east up the coast to Callyn’s settlement. We waited a day there as Svein settled his accounts with Callyn, and we used the time to sell fleeces and tin to Callyn’s traders and, though we received a poor enough price, it was better to travel with silver than with bulky cargo. The Fyrdraca was glittering with silver now and the crewmen, knowing they would receive their proper share, were happy. Haesten wanted to go with Svein, but I refused his request. ‘I saved your life,’ I told him, ‘and you have to serve me longer to pay for that.’ He accepted that and was pleased when I gave him a second arm ring as a reward for the men he had killed at Dreyndynas.

Svein’s White Horse was smaller than Fyrdraca. Her prow had a carved horse’s head and her stern a wolf’s head, while at her masthead was a wind-vane decorated with a white horse. I asked Svein about the horse and he laughed. ‘When I was sixteen,’ he said, ‘I wagered my father’s stallion against our king’s white horse. I had to beat the king’s champion at wrestling and swordplay. My father beat me for making the wager, but I won! So the white horse is lucky. I ride only white horses.’ And so his ship was the White Horse and I followed her back up the coast to where a thick plume of smoke marked where Peredur had ruled.

‘Are we staying with him?’ Leofric asked, puzzled that we were going back west rather than turning towards Defnascir.

‘I have a mind to see where Britain ends,’ I said, and I had no wish to return to the Uisc and to Mildrith’s misery.

Svein put the slaves into the belly of his boat. We spent one last night in the bay, under the thick smoke, and in the morning, as the rising sun flickered across the sea, we rowed away. As we passed the western headland, going into the wide ocean, I saw a man watching us from the cliff’s top and I saw he was robed in black and, though he was a long way off, I thought I recognised Asser. Iseult saw him too and she hissed like a cat, made a fist and threw it at him, opening her fingers at the last moment as if casting a spell at the monk.

Then I forgot him because Fyrdraca was back in the open sea and we were going to the place where the world ended.

And I had a shadow queen for company.

PART TWO
The Swamp King

Four

I love the sea. I grew up beside it, though in my memories the seas off Bebbanburg are grey, usually sullen, and rarely sunlit. They are nothing like the great waters that roll from beyond the Isles of the Dead to thunder and shatter against the rocks at the west of Britain. The sea heaves there, as if the ocean gods flexed their muscles, and the white birds cry endlessly, and the wind rattles the spray against the cliffs and Fyrdraca, running before that bright wind, left a path in the sea and the steering oar fought me, pulsing with the life of the water and the flexing of the ship and the joy of the passage. Iseult stared at me, astonished by my happiness, but then I gave her the oar and watched her thin body heave against the sea’s strength until she understood the power of the oar and could move the ship, and then she laughed. ‘I would live on the sea,’ I told her, though she did not understand me. I had given her an arm ring from Peredur’s hoard and a silver toe ring and a necklace of monster’s teeth, all sharp and long and white, strung on a silver wire.

I turned and watched Svein’s White Horse cut through the water. Her bows would sometimes break from a wave so that the forepart of her hull, all green and dark with growth, would rear skywards with her horse’s head snarling at the sun, and then she would crash down and the seas would explode white about her timbers. Her oars, like ours, were inboard and the oar-holes plugged, and we both ran under sail and Fyrdraca was the faster ship, which was not because she was more cunningly built, but because her hull was longer.

There is such joy in a good ship, and a greater joy to have the ship’s belly fat with other men’s silver. It is the Viking joy, driving a dragon-headed hull through a wind-driven sea towards a future full of feasts and laughter. The Danes taught me that and I love them for it, pagan swine though they might be. At that moment, running before Svein’s White Horse, I was as happy as a man could be, free of all the churchmen and laws and duties of Alfred’s Wessex, but then I gave orders that the sail was to be lowered and a dozen men uncleated the lines and the big yard scraped down the mast. We had come to Britain’s ending and I would turn about, and I waved to Svein as the White Horse swept past us. He waved back, watching the Fyrdraca wallow in the long ocean swells.

‘Seen enough?’ Leofric asked me.

I was staring at the end of Britain where the rocks endured the sea’s assault. ‘Penwith,’ Iseult said, giving me the British name for the headland.

‘You want to go home?’ I asked Leofric.

He shrugged. The crew was turning the yard, lining it fore and aft so it could be stowed on its crutches while other men were binding the sail so it did not flap. The oars were being readied to take us eastwards and the White Horse was getting smaller as it swept up into the Sæfern Sea.

I stared after Svein, envying him. ‘I need to be rich,’ I said to Leofric.

He laughed at that.

‘I have a path to follow,’ I said, ‘and it goes north. North back to Bebbanburg. And Bebbanburg has never been captured, so I need many men to take it. Many good men and many sharp swords.’

‘We have silver,’ he said, gesturing into the boat’s bilge.

‘Not enough,’ I answered sourly. My enemies had money and Alfred claimed that I owed the church money, and the courts of Defnascir would be chasing me for wergild. I could only go home if I had enough silver to pay off the church, to bribe the courts and to attract men to my banner. I stared at the White Horse, which was now little more than a sail above the wind-fretted sea and I felt the old temptation to go with the Danes. Wait till Ragnar was free and give him my sword arm, but then I would be fighting against Leofric and I would still need to make money, raise men, go north and fight for my birthright. I touched Thor’s hammer and prayed for a sign.

Iseult spat. That was not quite true. She said a word which sounded like someone clearing their throat, spitting and choking all at the same time, and she was pointing over the ship’s side and I saw a strange fish arching out of the water. The fish was as big as a deerhound and had a triangular fin. ‘Porpoise,’ Leofric said.

‘Llamhydydd,’ Iseult said again, giving the fish its British name.

‘They bring sailors luck,’ Leofric said.

I had never seen a porpoise before, but suddenly there were a dozen of the creatures. They were grey and their backs glistened in the sun and they were all going north.

‘Put the sail back up,’ I told Leofric.

He stared at me. The crew was unlashing the oars and taking the plugs from the oar-holes. ‘You want the sail up?’ Leofric asked.

‘We’re going north.’ I had prayed for a sign and Thor had sent me the porpoise.

‘There’s nothing in the Sæfern Sea,’ Leofric said. ‘Svein told you that.’

‘Svein told me there was no plunder in the Sæfern Sea,’ I said, ‘because the Danes have taken it all, so that means the Danes have the plunder.’ I felt a surge of happiness so intense that I punched Leofric’s shoulder and gave Iseult a hug. ‘And he told me that their ships are coming from Ireland.’

‘So?’ Leofric rubbed his shoulder.

‘Men from Ireland!’ I told Leofric. ‘Danes coming from Ireland to attack Wessex. And if you brought a ship’s crew from Ireland, what would you bring with you?’

‘Everything you possess,’ Leofric said flatly.

‘And they don’t know we’re here! They’re sheep, and we are a fire-dragon.’

He grinned. ‘You’re right,’ he said.

‘Of course I’m right! I’m a lord! I’m right and I’m going to be rich! We’re all going to be rich! We shall eat off gold plates, piss down our enemies’ throats and make their wives into our whores.’ I was shouting this nonsense as I walked down the boat’s centre, casting off the sail’s lashings. ‘We’ll all be rich with silver shoes and golden bonnets. We’ll be richer than kings! We’ll wallow in silver, shower our whores with gold and shit lumps of amber! Tie those oars up! Plug the holes, we’re going north, we’re going to be rich as bishops, every man of us!’ The men were grinning, pleased because I was roaring my enthusiasm, and men like to be led.

They did have qualms about going north, for that would take us out of sight of land, and I had never been that far from the shore, and I was frightened too, for Ragnar the Elder had often told me tales of Norsemen who had been tempted out into the sea-wastes, to sail ever farther westwards, and he said there were lands out there, lands beyond the Isles of the Dead, lands where ghosts walked, but I am not sure if he told the truth. I am sure, though, that he told me that many of those ships never returned. They voyage into the dying sun and they go onwards because they cannot bear to turn back and so they sail to where the lost ships die at the world’s dark ending.

Yet the world did not end to the north. I knew that, though I was not certain what did lie northwards. Dyfed was there, somewhere, and Ireland, and there were other places with barbarous names and savage people who lived like hungry dogs on the wild edges of the land, but there was also a waste of sea, a wilderness of empty waves and so, once the sail was hoisted and the wind was thrusting the Fyrdraca northwards, I leaned on the oar to take her somewhat to the east for fear we would otherwise be lost in the ocean’s vastness.

‘You know where you’re going?’ Leofric asked me.

‘No.’

‘Do you care?’

I grinned at him for answer. The wind, which had been southerly, came more from the west, and the tide took us eastwards, so that by the afternoon I could see land, and I thought it must be the land of the Britons on the north side of the Sæfern, but as we came closer I saw it was an island. I later discovered it was the place the Northmen call Lundi, because that is their word for the puffin, and the island’s high cliffs were thick with the birds, which shrieked at us when we came into a cove on the western side of the island. It was an uncomfortable place to anchor for the night because the big seas rolled in and so we dropped the sail, took out the oars, and rowed around the cliffs until we found shelter on the eastern side.

I went ashore with Iseult and we dug some puffin burrows to find eggs, though all were hatched so we contented ourselves with killing a pair of goats for the evening meal. There was no one living on the island, though there had been because there were the remains of a small church and a field of graves. The Danes had burned everything, pulled down the church and dug up the graves in search of gold. We climbed to a high place and I searched the evening sea for ships, but saw none, though I wondered if I could see land to the south. It was hard to be sure for the southern horizon was thick with dark cloud, but a darker strip within the cloud could have been hills and I assumed I was looking at Cornwalum or the western part of Wessex. Iseult sang to herself.

I watched her. She was gutting one of the dead goats, doing it clumsily for she was not accustomed to such work. She was thin, so thin that she looked like the ælfcynn, the elf-kind, but she was happy. In time I would learn just how much she had hated Peredur. He had valued her and made her a queen, but he had also kept her a prisoner in his hall so that he alone could profit from her powers. Folk would pay Peredur to hear Iseult’s prophecies and one of the reasons Callyn had fought his neighbour was to take Iseult for himself. Shadow queens were valued among the Britons for they were part of the old mysteries, the powers that had brooded over the land before the monks arrived, and Iseult was one of the last shadow queens. She had been born in the sun’s darkness, but now she was free and I was to find she had a soul as wild as a falcon. Mildrith, poor Mildrith, wanted order and routine. She wanted the hall swept, the clothes clean, the cows milked, the sun to rise, the sun to set and for nothing to change, but Iseult was different. She was strange, shadow-born, and full of mystery. Nothing she said to me those first days made any sense, for we had no language in common, but on the island, as the sun set and I took the knife to finish cutting the entrails from the goat, she plucked twigs and wove a small cage. She showed me the cage, broke it and then, with her long white fingers, mimed a bird flying free. She pointed to herself, tossed the twig scraps away and laughed.

Next morning, still ashore, I saw boats. There were two of them and they were sailing to the west of the island, going northwards. They were small craft, probably traders from Cornwalum, and they were running before the south-west wind towards the hidden shore where I assumed Svein had taken the White Horse.

We followed the two small ships. By the time we had waded out to Fyrdraca, raised her anchor and rowed her from the lee of the island both boats were almost out of sight, but once our sail was hoisted we began to overhaul them. They must have been terrified to see a dragon ship shoot out from behind the island, but I lowered the sail a little to slow us down and so followed them for much of the day until, at last, a blue-grey line showed at the sea’s edge. Land. We hoisted the sail fully and seethed past the two small, tubby boats and so, for the first time, I came to the shore of Wales. The Britons had another name for it, but we simply called it Wales which means ‘foreigners’, and much later I worked out that we must have made that landfall in Dyfed, which is the name of the churchman who converted the Britons of Wales to Christianity and had the westernmost kingdom of the Welsh named for him.

We found a deep inlet for shelter. Rocks guarded the entrance, but once inside we were safe from wind and sea. We turned the ship so that her bows faced the open sea, and the cove was so narrow that our stern scraped stone as we slewed Fyrdraca about, and then we slept on board, men and their women sprawled under the rowers’ benches. There were a dozen women aboard, all captured from Peredur’s tribe, and one of them managed to escape that night, presumably sliding over the side and swimming to shore. It was not Iseult. She and I slept in the small black space beneath the steering platform, a hole screened by a cloak, and Leofric woke me there in the dawn, worried that the missing woman would raise the country against us. I shrugged. ‘We won’t be here long.’

But we stayed in the cove all day. I wanted to ambush ships coming around the coast and we saw two, but they travelled together and I could not attack more than one ship at a time. Both ships were under sail, riding the south-west wind, and both were Danish, or perhaps Norse, and both were laden with warriors. They must have come from Ireland, or perhaps from the east coast of Northumbria, and doubtless they travelled to join Svein, lured by the prospect of capturing good West Saxon land. ‘Burgweard should have the whole fleet up here,’ I said. ‘He could tear through these bastards.’

Two horsemen came to look at us in the afternoon. One had a glinting chain about his neck, suggesting he was of high rank, but neither man came down to the shingle beach. They watched from the head of the small valley that fell to the cove and after a while they went away. The sun was low now, but it was summer so the days were long. ‘If they bring men,’ Leofric said as the two horsemen rode away, but he did not finish the thought.

I looked up at the high bluffs on either side of the cove. Men could rain rocks down from those heights and the Fyrdraca would be crushed like an egg. ‘We could put sentries up there,’ I suggested, but just then Eadric, who led the men who occupied the forward steorbord benches, shouted that there was a ship in sight. I ran forward and there she was.

The perfect prey.

She was a large ship, not so big as Fyrdraca, but large all the same, and she was riding low in the water for she was so heavily laden. Indeed, she carried so many people that her crew had not dared raise the sail for, though the wind was not heavy, it would have bent her leeward side dangerously close to the water. So she was being rowed and now she was close inshore, evidently looking for a place where she could spend the night and her crew had plainly been tempted by our cove and only now realised that we already filled it. I could see a man in her bows pointing further up the coast and meanwhile my men were arming themselves, and I shouted at Haesten to take the steering oar. He knew what to do and I was confident he would do it well, even though it might mean the death of fellow Danes. We cut the lines that had tethered us to the shore as Leofric brought me my mail coat, helmet and shield. I dressed for battle as the oars were shipped, then pulled on my helmet so that suddenly the edges of my vision were darkened by its face-plate.

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