Horsemen were riding from the Low Gate. I counted them, reckoning there to be around seventy, which suggested my uncle was not looking for a fight. A man with a hundred household warriors does not want to lose ten in some meaningless skirmish, so he was matching our force with just enough men to deter either side from attacking the other. I watched the horsemen climb the hill towards us. They were in mail and helmeted, with shields and weapons, but they stopped a good four hundred paces away, all except three men who kept riding, though they ostentatiously laid aside their swords and shields before leaving their companions. They flew no banner.
‘They want to talk,’ Ragnar said.
‘Is that my uncle?’
‘Yes.’
The three men had curbed their horses halfway between the two armed bands. ‘I could kill the bastard now,’ I said.
‘And his son inherits,’ Ragnar said, ‘and everyone knows you killed an unarmed man who had offered a truce.’
‘Bastard,’ I said of Ælfric. I unbuckled my two swords and tossed them to Finan, then spurred my borrowed horse. Ragnar came with me. I had half hoped my uncle was accompanied by his two sons, and if he had been I might have been tempted to try and kill all three, but instead his companions were two hard-looking warriors, doubtless his best men.
The three waited close to the rotting carcass of a sheep. I assume a wolf had killed the beast, then been driven off by dogs, and the corpse lay there, crawling with maggots, torn by ravens and buzzing with flies. The wind blew the stench towards us, which was probably why Ælfric had chosen to stop there.
My uncle looked distinguished. He was slender and narrow-faced with a high hooked nose and dark, guarded eyes. His hair, the little that showed beneath his helmet’s rim, was white. He watched me calmly, showing no fear as I stopped close. ‘I assume you are Uhtred?’ he greeted me.
‘Uhtred of Bebbanburg,’ I said.
‘Then I should congratulate you,’ he said.
‘Why?’
‘For your victory over Harald. The news of it caused much rejoicing among good Christians.’
‘So you didn’t rejoice?’ I retorted.
‘Jarl Ragnar,’ Ælfric ignored my small insult and nodded gravely to my companion, ‘you do me honour with this visit, lord, but you should have given me warning of your arrival. I would have made a feast for you.’
‘We’re just exercising the horses,’ Ragnar said cheerfully.
‘A long way from your home,’ Ælfric observed.
‘Not from mine,’ I said.
The dark eyes brooded on me. ‘You are always welcome here, Uhtred,’ my uncle said, ‘any time you wish to come home, then just come. Believe me, I shall be glad to see you.’
‘I’ll come,’ I promised him.
There was silence for a moment. My horse stamped a mud-clodded foot. The two lines of mail-clad warriors watched us. I could just hear the gulls at the distant shore. Their sound had been my childhood noise, never-ending like the sea. ‘As a child,’ my uncle broke the awkward silence, ‘you were disobedient, headstrong and foolish. It seems you haven’t changed.’
‘Ask Alfred of Wessex,’ I said, ‘he wouldn’t be king now without my headstrong foolishness.’
‘Alfred knew how to use you,’ my uncle observed. ‘You were his dog. He fed you and held you. But like a fool you’ve slipped his lead. Who will feed you now?’
‘I will,’ Ragnar said happily.
‘But you, lord,’ Ælfric said respectfully, ‘don’t have enough men to watch them die against my walls. Uhtred will have to find his own men.’
‘There are many Danes in Northumbria,’ I said.
‘And Danes seek gold,’ Ælfric said, ‘do you really think there’s enough inside my walls to draw the Danes of Northumbria to Bebbanburg?’ He half smiled. ‘You will have to find your own gold, Uhtred.’ He paused, expecting me to say something, but I kept quiet. A raven, driven away from the sheep’s carcass by our presence, protested from a bare tree. ‘Do you think your aglæcwif will lead you to the gold?’ Ælfric asked.
An aglæcwif was a fiendish woman, a sorceress, and he meant Skade. ‘I have no aglæcwif,’ I said.
‘She tempts you with her husband’s riches,’ Ælfric said.
‘Does she?’
‘What else?’ he asked, ‘but Skirnir knows she does that.’
‘Because you told him?’
My uncle nodded. ‘I saw fit to send him news of his wife. A courtesy, I think, to a neighbour across the sea. Skirnir, no doubt, will greet you in the spring as I would greet you, Uhtred, should you decide to come home.’ He stressed the last word, curdling it on his tongue, then gathered his reins. ‘I have nothing more to say to you.’ He nodded at Ragnar, then at his men, and the three turned away.
‘I’ll kill you!’ I shouted after him, ‘and your cabbage-shitting sons!’
He just waved negligently and kept riding.
I remember thinking he had won that encounter. Ælfric had come from his fastness and he had treated me like a child, and now he rode back to that beautiful place beside the sea where I could not reach him. I did not move.
‘What now?’ Ragnar asked.
‘I’ll hang him with his son’s intestines,’ I said, ‘and piss on his corpse.’
‘And how do you do that?’
‘I need gold.’
‘Skirnir?’
‘Where else?’
Ragnar turned his horse. ‘There’s silver in Scotland,’ he said, ‘and in Ireland.’
‘And hordes of savages protect both,’ I said.
‘Then Wessex?’ he suggested.
I had not moved my horse and Ragnar was forced to turn back to me. ‘Wessex?’ I echoed him.
‘They say Alfred’s churches are rich.’
‘Oh, they are,’ I said. ‘They’re so rich they can afford to send silver to the Pope. They drip with silver. There’s gold on the altars. There’s money in Wessex, my friend, so much money.’
Ragnar beckoned to his men and two of them rode forward with our swords. We buckled the belts around our waists and no longer felt naked. The two men walked their horses away, leaving us alone again. The sea wind brought the smell of home to lessen the smell of the carcass. ‘So will you attack next year?’ I asked my friend.
He thought for a moment, then shrugged. ‘Brida thinks I’ve grown fat and happy,’ he said.
‘You have.’
He smiled briefly. ‘Why do we fight?’ he asked.
‘Because we were born,’ I answered savagely.
‘To find a place we call home,’ Ragnar suggested. ‘A place where we don’t need to fight any more.’
‘Dunholm?’
‘It’s as safe a fortress as Bebbanburg,’ he said, ‘and I love it.’
‘And Brida wants you to leave it?’
He nodded. ‘She’s right,’ he admitted wanly. ‘If we do nothing then Wessex will spread like a plague. There’ll be priests everywhere.’
We seek the future. We stare into its fog and hope to see a landmark that will make sense of fate. All my life I have tried to understand the past because that past was so glorious and we see remnants of that glory all across Britain. We see the great marble halls the Romans made, and we travel the roads they laid and cross the bridges they built, and it is all fading. The marble cracks in the frost and the walls collapse. Alfred and his like believed they were bringing civilisation to a wicked, fallen world, but all he did was make rules. So many rules, but the laws were only ever an expression of hope, because the reality was the burhs, the walls, the spears on the ramparts, the glint of helmets in the dawn, the fear of mailed riders, the thump of hoofbeats and the screams of victims. Alfred was proud of his schools and his monasteries and his silver-rich churches, but those things were protected by blades. And what was Wessex compared to Rome?
It is hard to bring thoughts into order, but I sense, I have always sensed, that we slide from light to darkness, from glory to chaos, and perhaps that is good. M
y gods tell us that the world will end in chaos, so perhaps we are living the last days and even I might survive long enough to see the hills crack and the sea boil and the heavens burn as the great gods fight. And in the face of that great doom, Alfred built schools. His priests scurried like mice in rotting thatch, imposing their rules as if mere obedience could stop the doom. Thou shalt not kill, they preached, then screamed at us warriors to slaughter the pagans. Thou shalt not steal, they preached, and forged charters to take men’s lands. Thou shalt not commit adultery, they preached, and rutted other men’s wives like besotted hares in springtime.
There is no sense. The past is a ship’s wake etched on a grey sea, but the future has no mark. ‘What are you thinking?’ Ragnar asked, amused.
‘That Brida is right.’
‘I must go to Wessex?’
I nodded, yet I knew he did not want to go where so many had failed. All my life till that moment had been spent, one way or another, in attacking or defending Wessex. Why Wessex? What was Wessex to me? It was the bastion of a dark religion in Britain, it was a place of rules, a Saxon place, and I worshipped the older gods, the gods the Saxons themselves had worshipped before the missionaries came from Rome and gave them their new nonsense. Yet I had fought for Wessex. Time and again the Danes tried to capture Wessex, and time and again Uhtred of Bebbanburg had helped the West Saxons. I had killed Ubba Lothbrokson beside the sea, I had screamed in the shield wall that broke Guthrum’s great army, and I had destroyed Harald. So many Danes had tried, and so many had failed, and I had helped them fail because fate had made me fight for the side with the priests. ‘Do you want to be King of Wessex?’ I asked Ragnar.
He laughed. ‘No! Do you?’
‘I want to be Lord of Bebbanburg.’
‘And I want to be Lord of Dunholm.’ He paused. ‘But.’
‘But if we don’t stop them,’ I finished for him, ‘they’ll come here.’
‘That’s worth fighting for,’ Ragnar said reluctantly, ‘or else our children will be Christians.’
I grimaced, thinking of my own children in Æthelflæd’s household. They would be learning about Christianity. Maybe, by now, they had already been baptised, and that thought gave me a surge of anger and guilt. Should I have stayed in Lundene and meekly accepted the fate Alfred wanted for me? But Alfred had humiliated me once before, forcing me to crawl on my knees to one of his damned altars, and I would not do it again. ‘We’ll go to Wessex,’ I said, ‘and make you king, and I’ll defend you like I defended Alfred.’
‘Next year,’ Ragnar said.
‘But I won’t go naked,’ I said harshly. ‘I need gold, I need men.’
‘You can lead my men,’ Ragnar suggested.
‘They’re sworn to you. I want my own. I need gold.’
He nodded. He understood what I was saying. A man is judged by his deeds, by his reputation, by the number of his oath-men. I was reckoned a warlord, but so long as I only led a handful of men, so long could people like my uncle afford to insult me. I needed men. I needed gold. ‘So you really will make a winter voyage to Frisia?’ Ragnar asked.
‘Why else did the gods send me Skade?’ I retorted, and at that moment it was as if the fog had cleared and I could at last see the way ahead. Fate had sent me Skade, and Skade would lead me to Skirnir, and Skirnir’s gold would let me raise the men who would fight with me through the burhs of Wessex, then I would take the silver of the Christian god and employ it to forge the army that would capture Bebbanburg.
It was all so clear. It even seemed easy.
We turned our horses and rode towards Dunholm.
Seolferwulf’s prow slammed into a wave and the water exploded into white shards that whipped down the deck like ice missiles. Green sea surged over the bows and swilled cold into the bilge. ‘Bail!’ I shouted, and the men not working the oars frantically scooped water over the side as our wolf’s-head prow reared into the sky. ‘Row!’ I bellowed, and the oars bit the water and Seolferwulf fell into a trough of the ocean with a crash that made her timbers tremble. I love the sea.
My forty-three men were on board, though I had allowed none of their women or children to accompany us, and Skade was only on board because she knew Zegge, the sandy island where Skirnir had his treasure hoard. I also had thirty-four of Ragnar’s men, all of them volunteers, and together we sailed eastwards into the teeth of a winter wind. This was no time to be at sea. Winter was when ships were laid up and men stayed in fire-bright halls, but Skirnir would expect me in the spring so I had risked this winter voyage.
‘Wind’s rising!’ Finan shouted at me.
‘It does that!’ I shouted back, and was rewarded with a sceptical look. Finan was never as happy as I was at sea. For months we had shared a rowing bench, and he had endured the discomfort, but he had never revelled in the sea’s threat.
‘Shouldn’t we turn and run?’ he asked.
‘In this little blow? Never!’ I yelled at him over the wind’s howl, then flinched as a slap of cold water hit my face. ‘Row, you bastards,’ I shouted, ‘if you want to live, row!’
We rowed and we lived, reaching the Frisian coast on a morning of cold air, dying winds and sullen seas. The improving weather had released ships from the local harbours and I followed one into the intricate channels that led to the inner sea, a stretch of shallow water that lies between the islands and the mainland. The ship we followed had eight oarsmen and a cargo hidden beneath a great leather cloth, which suggested she carried salt, flour or some other commodity that needed to be protected from the rain. The steersman was terrified by our close approach. He saw a wolf-headed ship crammed with fighting men and he feared he was about to be attacked, but I shouted that we merely needed guidance through the channels. The tide was rising, so even if we had gone aground, we would be safe enough, but the cargo ship led us safely into the deeper water, and it was there we first encountered Skirnir’s reach.
A ship, much smaller than Seolferwulf, lay waiting a half-mile beyond the place where the channel emptied into the inner sea. I reckoned she had a crew of around twenty men and she was plainly watching the channels, ready to pounce on any shipping, though the sight of Seolferwulf made her cautious. I guessed she would normally have intercepted the incoming cargo ship, but instead she stayed motionless, watching us. The cargo ship’s steersman pointed at the waiting boat. ‘I have to pay him, lord.’
‘Skirnir?’ I asked.
‘That’s one of his ships, lord.’
‘So pay him!’ I said. I spoke in English because the language of the Frisian people is so close to our own.
‘He’ll ask me about you, lord,’ he called back, and I understood his terror. The waiting ship would be curious about us, and they would demand answers from the trading ship’s master, and if he had no satisfactory explanation they might well attempt to beat it out of him.
‘Tell him we’re Danes on our way home,’ I said. ‘My name is Lief Thorrson and if he wants money he must come and ask me.’
‘He won’t ask you, lord,’ the man said. ‘A rat doesn’t demand supper from a wolf.’
I smiled at that. ‘You can tell the rat we mean no harm, we’re just going home, and we merely followed you through the channel, nothing more.’ I tossed him a coin, making sure it bore the legend Christiano Religio, which meant it came from Frankia. I did not want to betray that we had come from Britain.
I watched the cargo ship row to Skirnir’s vessel. Skade had been in the small space beneath the steering platform, but now joined me. ‘That’s the Sea-Raven,’ she said, nodding at Skirnir’s ship. ‘Her master is called Haakon. He’s a cousin to my husband.’
‘So he’ll recognise you?’
‘Of course.’
‘Then don’t let him see you,’ I said.
She bridled at that direct order, but did not argue. ‘He won’t come near us,’ she said.
‘No?’
‘Skirnir leaves fighting ships alone, unless he outnumbers them by four or five to one.�
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I gazed at the Sea-Raven. ‘You said he had sixteen ships like that?’
‘Two years ago,’ she said, ‘he had sixteen about that size, and two larger boats.’
‘That was two years ago,’ I said grimly. We had come into Skirnir’s lair where we would be grossly outnumbered, but I reckoned he would still be wary of us. He would learn that a Viking ship was in his waters, and he would fear that an attack on us might bring other Vikings to take revenge. Would it cross his mind that Uhtred of Bebbanburg might have risked a winter voyage? Even if not, he would surely be curious about Lief Thorrson, and would not relax till that curiosity had been satisfied.
I ordered the wolf’s head taken from the prow, then turned Seolferwulf towards the mainland shore. The Sea-Raven made no move to intercept us, but she did start to follow us, though when I checked the oars, as if waiting for her to catch up, she veered away. We rowed on and she fell out of sight behind us.
I wanted a place to hide, but there was too much shipping for that to be possible. Wherever we took shelter some local boat would see us, and the report would be passed from ship to ship until it reached Skirnir. If we were indeed a Danish ship on passage, going home for the dark winter nights, he would expect us to be gone from his waters in two or three days, so the longer we lingered, the greater his suspicion. And here, in the treacherous shoal waters of the inner sea, we were the rat and Skirnir the wolf.
We rowed north and east all day. We went slowly. Skirnir would hear that we were doing what he anticipated, making passage, and he would expect us to seek shelter for the night. We found that shelter in a creek on the mainland shore, though the tangle of marsh, sand and inlets hardly deserved to be called a shore. It was a place of waterfowl, reeds and hovels. A small village lay on the creek’s southern bank, merely a dozen cottages and a small wooden church. It was a fishing community, and the folk watched Seolferwulf nervously, fearing we might come ashore to steal what little they possessed. Instead we purchased eel and herring from them, paying with Frankish silver, and we carried a barrel of Dunholm’s ale to the village.
The Warrior Chronicles Page 157