The Warrior Chronicles

by Bernard Cornwell

  ‘You?’ I laughed.

  ‘I’m nearly fourteen!’ she said defiantly.

  ‘So you are. Who’ll marry you?’

  She shrugged. ‘Mother likes Anwend.’ Anwend was one of Ragnar’s warriors, a young man not much older than me, strong and cheerful, but Ragnar had an idea she should marry one of Ubba’s sons, but that would mean she would go away and Sigrid hated that thought and Ragnar slowly came around to Sigrid’s way of thinking. I liked Anwend and thought he would make a good husband for Thyra who was growing ever more beautiful. She had long golden hair, wide-set eyes, a straight nose, unscarred skin, and a laugh that was like a ripple of sunshine. ‘Mother says I must have many sons,’ she said.

  ‘I hope you do.’

  ‘I’d like a daughter too,’ she said, straining with the churn because the butter was solidifying and the work getting harder. ‘Mother says Brida should marry as well.’

  ‘Brida might have different ideas,’ I said.

  ‘She wants to marry you,’ Thyra said.

  I laughed at that. I thought of Brida as a friend, my closest friend, and just because we slept with each other, or we did when Sigrid was not watching, did not make me want to marry her. I did not want to marry at all, I thought only of swords and shields and battles, and Brida thought of herbs.

  She was like a cat. She came and went secretly, and she learned all that Sigrid could teach her about herbs and their uses. Bindweed as a purgative, toadflax for ulcers, marsh marigold to keep elves away from the milk pails, chickweed for coughs, cornflower for fevers, and she learned other spells she would not tell me, women’s spells, and said that if you stayed silent in the night, unmoving, scarce breathing, the spirits would come, and Ravn taught her how to dream with the gods, which meant drinking ale in which pounded redcap mushrooms had been steeped, and she was often ill for she drank it too strong, but she would not stop, and she made her first songs then, songs about birds and about beasts, and Ravn said she was a true skald. Some nights, when we watched the charcoal burn, she would recite to me, her voice soft and rhythmic. She had a dog now that followed her everywhere. She had found him in Lundene on our homeward journey and he was black and white, as clever as Brida herself, and she called him Nihtgenga, which means night-walker, or goblin. He would sit with us by the charcoal pyre and I swear he listened to her songs. Brida made pipes from straw and played melancholy tunes and Nihtgenga would watch her with big sad eyes until the music overcame him and then he would raise his muzzle and howl, and we would both laugh and Nihtgenga would be offended and Brida would have to pet him back to happiness.

  We forgot the war until, when the summer was at its height and a pall of heat lay over the hills, we had an unexpected visitor. Earl Guthrum the Unlucky came to our remote valley. He came with twenty horsemen, all dressed in black, and he bowed respectfully to Sigrid who chided him for not sending warning. ‘I would have made a feast,’ she said.

  ‘I brought food,’ Guthrum said, pointing to some packhorses, ‘I did not want to empty your stores.’

  He had come from distant Lundene, wanting to talk with Ragnar and Ravn, and Ragnar invited me to sit with them because, he said, I knew more than most men about Wessex, and Wessex was what Guthrum wished to talk about, though my contribution was small. I described Alfred, described his piety, and warned Guthrum that though the West Saxon king was not an impressive man to look at, he was undeniably clever. Guthrum shrugged at that. ‘Cleverness is overrated,’ he said gloomily. ‘Clever doesn’t win battles.’

  ‘Stupidity loses them,’ Ravn put in, ‘like dividing the army when we fought outside Æbbanduna?’

  Guthrum scowled, but decided not to pick a fight with Ravn, and instead asked Ragnar’s advice on how to defeat the West Saxons, and demanded Ragnar’s assurance that, come the new year, Ragnar would bring his men to Lundene and join the next assault. ‘If it is next year,’ Guthrum said gloomily. He scratched at the back of his neck, jiggling his mother’s gold-tipped bone that still hung from his hair. ‘We may not have sufficient men.’

  ‘Then we will attack the year after,’ Ragnar said.

  ‘Or the one after that,’ Guthrum said, then frowned. ‘But how do we finish the pious bastard?’

  ‘Split his forces,’ Ragnar said, ‘because otherwise we’ll always be outnumbered.’

  ‘Always? Outnumbered?’ Guthrum looked dubious at that assertion.

  ‘When we fought here,’ Ragnar said, ‘some Northumbrians decided not to fight us and they took refuge in Mercia. When we fought in Mercia and East Anglia the same thing happened, and men fled from us to find sanctuary in Wessex. But when we fight in Wessex they have nowhere to go. No place is safe for them. So they must fight, all of them. Fight in Wessex and the enemy is cornered.’

  ‘And a cornered enemy,’ Ravn put in, ‘is dangerous.’

  ‘Split them,’ Guthrum said pensively, ignoring Ravn again.

  ‘Ships on the south coast,’ Ragnar suggested, ‘an army on the Temes, and British warriors coming from Brycheinog, Glywysing and Gwent.’ Those were the southern Welsh kingdoms where the Britons lurked beyond Mercia’s western border. ‘Three attacks,’ Ragnar went on, ‘and Alfred will have to deal with them all and he won’t be able to do it.’

  ‘And you will be there?’ Guthrum asked.

  ‘You have my word,’ Ragnar said, and then the conversation turned to what Guthrum had seen on his journey, and admittedly he was a pessimistic man and prone to see the worst in everything, but he despaired of England. There was trouble in Mercia, he said, and the East Anglians were restless, and now there was talk that King Egbert in Eoferwic was encouraging revolt.

  ‘Egbert!’ Ragnar was surprised at the news, ‘he couldn’t encourage a piss out of a drunk man!’

  ‘It’s what I’m told,’ Guthrum said, ‘may not be true. Fellow called Kjartan told me.’

  ‘Then it’s almost certainly not true.’

  ‘Not true at all,’ Ravn agreed.

  ‘He seemed a good man to me,’ Guthrum said, obviously unaware of Ragnar’s history with Kjartan, and Ragnar did not enlighten him, and probably forgot the conversation once Guthrum had travelled on.

  Yet Guthrum had been right. Plotting was going on in Eoferwic, though I doubt it was Egbert who did it. Kjartan did it, and he started by spreading rumours that King Egbert was secretly organising a rebellion, and the rumours became so loud and the king’s reputation so poisoned that one night Egbert, fearing for his life, managed to evade his Danish guards and flee south with a dozen companions. He took shelter with King Burghred of Mercia who, though his country was occupied by Danes, had been allowed to keep his own household guard that was sufficient to protect his new guest. Ricsig of Dunholm, the man who had handed the captured monks to Ragnar, was declared the new king of Northumbria, and he rewarded Kjartan by allowing him to ravage any place that might have harboured rebels in league with Egbert. There had been no rebellion, of course, but Kjartan had invented one, and he savaged the few remaining monasteries and nunneries in Northumbria, thus becoming even wealthier, and he stayed as Ricsig’s chief warrior and tax collector.

  All this passed us by. We brought in the harvest, feasted, and it was announced that at Yule there would be a wedding between Thyra and Anwend. Ragnar asked Ealdwulf the smith to make Anwend a sword as fine as Serpent-Breath, and Ealdwulf said he would and, at the same time, make me a short sword of the kind Toki had recommended for fighting in the shield wall, and he made me help him beat out the twisted rods. All that autumn we worked until Ealdwulf had made Anwend’s sword and I had helped make my own sax. I called her Wasp-Sting because she was short and I could not wait to try her out on an enemy, which Ealdwulf said was foolishness. ‘Enemies come soon enough in a man’s life,’ he told me, ‘you don’t need to seek them out.’

  I made my first shield in the early winter, cutting the limewood, forging the great boss with its handle that was held through a hole in the wood, painting it black and rimming it with an iron
strip. It was much too heavy, that shield, and later I learned how to make them lighter, but as the autumn came I carried shield, sword and sax everywhere, accustoming myself to their weight, practising the strokes and parries, dreaming. I half feared and half longed for my first shield wall, for no man was a warrior until he had fought in the shield wall, and no man was a real warrior until he had fought in the front rank of the shield wall, and that was death’s kingdom, the place of horror, but like a fool I aspired to it.

  And we readied ourselves for war. Ragnar had promised his support to Guthrum and so Brida and I made more charcoal and Ealdwulf hammered out spear points and axe heads and spades, while Sigrid found joy in the preparations for Thyra’s wedding. There was a betrothal ceremony at the beginning of winter when Anwend, dressed in his best clothes that were neatly darned, came to our hall with six of his friends and he shyly proposed himself to Ragnar as Thyra’s husband. Everyone knew he was going to be her husband, but the formalities were important, and Thyra sat between her mother and father as Anwend promised Ragnar that he would love, cherish and protect Thyra, and then proposed a bride price of twenty pieces of silver which was much too high, but which, I suppose, meant he really loved Thyra.

  ‘Make it ten, Anwend,’ Ragnar said, generous as ever, ‘and spend the rest on a new coat.’

  ‘Twenty is good,’ Sigrid said firmly, for the bride price, though given to Ragnar, would become Thyra’s property once she was married.

  ‘Then have Thyra give you a new coat,’ Ragnar said, taking the money, and then he embraced Anwend and there was a feast and Ragnar was happier that night than he had been since Rorik’s death. Thyra watched the dancing, sometimes blushing as she met Anwend’s eyes. Anwend’s six friends, all warriors of Ragnar, would come back with him for the wedding and they would be the men who would watch Anwend take Thyra to his bed and only when they reported that she was a proper woman would the marriage be deemed to have taken place.

  But those ceremonies would have to wait until Yule. Thyra would be wedded then, we would have our feast, the winter would be endured, we would go to war. In other words we thought the world would go on as it ever did.

  And at the foot of Yggdrasil, the tree of life, the three spinners mocked us.

  I have spent many Christmases at the West Saxon court. Christmas is Yule with religion, and the West Saxons managed to spoil the midwinter feast with chanting monks, droning priests and savagely long sermons. Yule is supposed to be a celebration and a consolation, a moment of warm brightness in the heart of winter, a time to eat because you know that the lean times are coming when food will be scarce and ice locks the land, and a time to be happy and get drunk and behave irresponsibly and wake up next morning wondering if you will ever feel well again, but the West Saxons handed the feast to the priests who made it as joyous as a funeral. I have never really understood why people think religion has a place in the midwinter feast, though of course the Danes remembered their gods at that time, and sacrificed to them, but they also believed Odin, Thor and the other gods were all feasting in Asgard and had no wish to spoil the feasts in Midgard, our world. That seems sensible, but I have learned that most Christians are fearfully suspicious of enjoyment and Yule offered far too much of that for their taste. Some folk in Wessex knew how to celebrate it, and I always did my best, but if Alfred was anywhere close then you could be sure that we were required to fast, pray and repent through the whole twelve days of Christmas.

  Which is all by way of saying that the Yule feast where Thyra would be married was to be the greatest in Danish memory. We worked hard as it approached. We kept more animals alive than usual, and slaughtered them just before the feast so that their meat would not need to be salted, and we dug great pits where the pigs and cows would be cooked on huge gridirons that Ealdwulf made. He grumbled about it, saying that forging cooking implements took him away from his real work, but he secretly enjoyed it because he loved his food. As well as pork and beef we planned to have herring, salmon, mutton, pike, freshly baked bread, cheese, ale, mead, and, best of all, the puddings that were made by stuffing sheep intestines with blood, offal, oats, horseradish, wild garlic and juniper berries. I loved those puddings, and still do, all crisp on the outside, but bursting with warm blood when you bite into them. I remember Alfred grimacing with distaste as I ate one and as the bloody juices ran into my beard, but then he was sucking on a boiled leek at the time.

  We planned sports and games. The lake in the heart of the valley had frozen and I was fascinated by the way the Danes strapped bones to their feet and glided on the ice, a pastime that lasted until the ice broke and a young man drowned, but Ragnar reckoned the lake would be hard frozen again after Yule and I was determined to learn the skill of ice-gliding. For the moment, though, Brida and I were still making charcoal for Ealdwulf who had decided to make Ragnar a sword, the finest he had ever made, and we were charged with turning two wagonloads of alderwood into the best possible fuel.

  We planned to break the pile the day before the feast, but it was bigger than any we had made before and it was still not cool enough, and if you break a pile before it is ready then the fire will flare up with terrible force and burn all the half-made charcoal into ash, and so we made certain every vent was properly sealed and reckoned we would have time to break it on Yule morning before the celebrations began. Most of Ragnar’s men and their families were already at the hall, sleeping wherever they could find shelter and ready for the first meal of the day and for the games that would take place in the meadow before the marriage ceremony, but Brida and I spent that last night up at the pile for fear that some animal would scratch through the turf and so start a draught that would revive the burn. I had Serpent-Breath and Wasp-Sting, for I would go nowhere without them, and Brida had Nihtgenga, for she would go nowhere without him, and we were both swathed in furs because the night was cold. When a pile was burning you could rest on the turf and feel the heat, but not that night because the fire was almost gone.

  ‘If you go very still,’ Brida said after dark, ‘you can feel the spirits.’

  I think I fell asleep instead, but sometime towards dawn I woke and found Brida was also asleep. I sat up carefully, so as not to wake her, and I stared into the dark and I went very still and listened for the sceadugengan. Goblins and elves and sprites and spectres and dwarves, all those things come to Midgard at night and prowl among the trees, and when we guarded the charcoal piles both Brida and I put out food for them so they would leave us in peace. So I woke, I listened, and I heard the small sounds of a wood at night, the things moving, the claws in the dead leaves, the wind’s soft sighs.

  And then I heard the voices.

  I woke Brida and we were both still. Nihtgenga growled softly until Brida whispered that he should be quiet.

  Men were moving in the dark, and some were coming to the charcoal pile and we slipped away into the blackness under the trees. We could both move like shadows and Nihtgenga would make no sound without Brida’s permission. We had gone uphill because the voices were downhill, and we crouched in utter darkness and heard men moving around the charcoal pile, and then there was the crack of flint and iron and a small flame sprung up. Whoever it was searched for the folk they reckoned would be watching the charcoal, but they did not find us, and after a while they moved downhill and we followed.

  Dawn was just leeching the eastern sky with a wolf-grey edge. There was frost on the leaves and a small wind. ‘We should get to Ragnar,’ I whispered.

  ‘We can’t,’ Brida said, and she was right, for there were scores of men in the trees and they were between us and the hall, and we were much too far away to shout a warning to Ragnar, and so we tried to go around the strangers, hurrying along the hill’s ridge so we could drop down to the forge where Ealdwulf slept, but before we had gone halfway the fires burst into life.

  That dawn is seared on my memory, burned there by the flames of a hall-burning. There was nothing we could do except watch. Kjartan and Sven had come t
o our valley with over a hundred men and now they attacked Ragnar by setting fire to the thatch of his hall. I could see Kjartan and his son, standing amidst the flaming torches that lit the space in front of the door, and as folk came from the hall they were struck by spears or arrows so that a pile of bodies grew in the firelight which became ever brighter as the thatch flared and finally burst into a tumultuous blaze that outshone the light of the grey dawn. We could hear people and animals screaming inside. Some men burst from the hall with weapons in hand, but they were cut down by the soldiers who surrounded the hall, men at every door or window, men who killed the fugitives, though not all of them. The younger women were pushed aside under guard, and Thyra was given to Sven who struck her hard on the head and left her huddled at his feet as he helped kill her family.

  I did not see Ravn, Ragnar or Sigrid die, though die they did, and I suspect they were burned in the hall when the roof collapsed in a roaring gout of flame, smoke and wild sparks. Ealdwulf also died and I was in tears. I wanted to draw Serpent-Breath and rush into those men around the flames, but Brida held me down, and then she whispered to me that Kjartan and Sven would surely search the nearby woods for any survivors, and she persuaded me to pull back into the lightening trees. Dawn was a sullen iron band across the sky and the sun cloud-hidden in shame as we stumbled uphill to find shelter among some fallen rocks deep in the high wood.