Lords of the North

by Bernard Cornwell

  She had handles of ash wood, one either side of the sword’s tang, and over the years the twin handles had become polished and smooth. Such worn handles are dangerous. In battle they can slip in the hand, especially when blood is splashed on them, and so I told the swordsmith that I wanted new handles riveted onto the hilt, and that the handles must give a good grip, and that the small silver cross that Hild had given me must be embedded in the hilt’s pommel.

  “I shall do it, lord,” he said.

  “Today.”

  “I shall try, lord,” he said weakly.

  “You will succeed,” I said, “and the work will be well done.” I drew Serpent-Breath and her blade was bright in the shadowed room as I held her toward the smith’s furnace and in the red firelight I saw the patterns on her steel. She had been forged by beating three smooth and four twisted rods into one metal blade. She had been heated and hammered, heated and hammered, and when she was done, and when the seven rods had become one single savage streak of shining steel, the twists in the four rods were left in the blade as ghostly patterns. That was how she got her name, for the patterns looked like the swirling breath of a dragon.

  “She is a fine blade, lord,” the swordsmith said.

  “She is the blade that killed Ubba by the sea,” I said, stroking the steel.

  “Yes, lord,” he said. He was terrified of me now.

  “And you will do the work today,” I stressed, and I put sword and scabbard on his fire-scarred bench. I laid Hild’s cross on the hilt, then added a silver coin. I was no longer wealthy, but nor was I poor, and with the help of Serpent-Breath and Wasp-Sting I knew I would be rich again.

  It was a lovely autumn day. The sun shone, making the new wood of Alfred’s church glow like gold. Ragnar and I were waiting for the king and we sat on the newly-scythed grass in a courtyard and Ragnar watched a monk carrying a pile of parchments to the royal scriptorium. “Everything’s written down here,” he said, “everything! Can you read?”

  “I can read and write.”

  He was impressed by that. “Is it useful?”

  “It’s never been useful for me,” I admitted.

  “So why do they do it?” he wondered.

  “Their religion is written down,” I said, “ours isn’t.”

  “A written religion?” He was puzzled by that.

  “They’ve got a book,” I said, “and it’s all in there.”

  “Why do they need it written down?”

  “I don’t know. They just do. And, of course, they write down the laws. Alfred loves making new laws, and they all have to be written in books.”

  “If a man can’t remember the laws,” Ragnar said, “then he’s got too many of them.”

  The shouts of children interrupted us, or rather the offended screech of one small boy and the mocking laughter of a girl, and a heartbeat later the girl ran around the corner. She looked nine or ten years old, had golden hair as bright as the sun, and was carrying a carved wooden horse that was plainly the property of the small boy who followed her. The girl, brandishing the carved horse like a trophy, ran across the grass. She was coltish, thin and happy, while the boy, three or four years younger, was built more solidly and looked thoroughly miserable. He had no chance of catching the girl for she was much too quick, but she saw me and her eyes widened and she stopped in front of us. The boy caught up with her, but was too overawed by Ragnar and me to try to retrieve his wooden horse. A nurse, red-faced and panting, appeared around the corner and shouted the children’s names. “Edward! Æthelflaed!”

  “It’s you!” Æthelflaed said, staring at me with a look of delight.

  “It’s me,” I said, and I stood because Æthelflaed was the daughter of a king and Edward was the ætheling, the prince who might well rule Wessex when Alfred, his father, died.

  “Where have you been?” Æthelflaed demanded, as if she had only missed me for a week or two.

  “I have been in the land of giants,” I said, “and places where fire runs like water and where the mountains are made of ice and where sisters are never, ever unkind to their little brothers.”

  “Never?” she asked, grinning.

  “I want my horse!” Edward insisted and tried to snatch it from her, but Æthelflaed held it out of reach.

  “Never use force to get from a girl,” Ragnar said to Edward, “what you can take by guile.”

  “Guile?” Edward frowned, evidently unfamiliar with the word.

  Ragnar frowned at Æthelflaed. “Is the horse hungry?”

  “No.” She knew he was playing a game and she wanted to see if she could win.

  “But suppose I use magic,” Ragnar suggested, “and make it eat grass?”

  “You can’t.”

  “How do you know?” he asked. “I have been to places where the wooden horses go to pasture every morning, and every night the grass grows to touch the sky and every day the wooden horses eat it back to nothing again.”

  “No they don’t,” she said, grinning.

  “And if I say the magic words,” Ragnar said, “your horse will eat the grass.”

  “It’s my horse,” Edward insisted.

  “Magic words?” Æthelflaed was interested now.

  “You have to put the horse on the grass,” Ragnar said.

  She looked at me, wanting reassurance, but I just shrugged, and so she looked back at Ragnar who was being very serious, and she decided she wanted to see some magic and so she carefully placed the wooden horse beside a swathe of cut grass. “Now?” she asked expectantly.

  “You have to shut your eyes,” Ragnar said, “turn around three times very fast, then shout Havacar very loudly.”

  “Havacar?”

  “Careful!” he warned her, looking alarmed. “You can’t say magic words carelessly.”

  So she shut her eyes, turned around three times, and while she did Ragnar pointed at the horse and nodded to Edward who snatched it up and ran off to the nurse, and by the time Æthelflaed, staggering slightly from dizziness, had shouted her magic word the horse was gone.

  “You cheated!” she accused Ragnar.

  “But you learned a lesson,” I said, squatting beside her as if I were going to tell her a secret. I leaned forward and whispered in her ear, “Never trust a Dane.”

  She smiled at that. She had known me well during the long wet winter when her family had been fugitives in the marshes of Sumorsæte and in those dismal months she had learned to like me and I had come to like her. She reached out now and touched my nose. “How did that happen?”

  “A man broke my nose,” I said. It had been Hakka, striking me in Trader because he thought I was shirking at the oar.

  “It’s crooked,” she said.

  “It lets me smell crooked smells.”

  “What happened to the man who broke it?”

  “He’s dead,” I said.

  “Good,” she said. “I’m going to be married.”

  “You are?” I asked.

  “To Æthelred of Mercia,” she said proudly, then frowned because a flicker of distaste had crossed my face.

  “To my cousin?” I asked, trying to look pleased.

  “Is Æthelred your cousin?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “I’m to be his wife,” she said, “and live in Mercia. Have you been to Mercia?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is it nice?”

  “You will like it,” I said, though I doubted she would, not married to my snotty-nosed, pompous cousin, but I could hardly say that.

  She frowned. “Does Æthelred pick his nose?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  “Edward does,” she said, “and then he eats it. Ugh.” She leaned forward, gave me an impulsive kiss on my broken nose, then ran off to the nurse.

  “A pretty girl,” Ragnar said.

  “Who is to be wasted on my cousin,” I said.

  “Wasted?”

  “He’s a bumptious little shit called Æthelred,” I said. He had b
rought men to Ethandun, only a few, but enough to loft him into Alfred’s good graces. “The idea is,” I went on, “that he’ll be Ealdorman of Mercia when his father dies and Alfred’s daughter will be his wife, and that will bind Mercia to Wessex.”

  Ragnar shook his head. “There are too many Danes in Mercia. The Saxons won’t ever rule there again.”

  “Alfred wouldn’t waste his daughter on Mercia,” I said, “unless he thought there was something to gain.”

  “To gain things,” Ragnar said, “you have to be bold. You can’t write things down and win, you have to take risks. Alfred’s too cautious.”

  I half smiled. “You really think he’s cautious?”

  “Of course he is,” Ragnar said scornfully.

  “Not always,” I said, then paused, wondering if I should say what I was thinking.

  My hesitation provoked Ragnar. He knew I was hiding something. “What?” he demanded.

  I still hesitated, then decided no harm could come from an old tale. “Do you remember that winter night in Cippanhamm?” I asked him. “When Guthrum was there and you all believed Wessex had fallen, and you and I drank in the church?”

  “Of course I remember it, yes.”

  It had been the winter when Guthrum had invaded Wessex and it had seemed that Guthrum must have won the war, for the West Saxon army was scattered. Some thegns fled abroad, many made their own peace with Guthrum, while Alfred had been driven into hiding on the marshes of Sumorsæte. Yet Alfred, though he was defeated, was not broken, and he had insisted on disguising himself as a harpist and going secretly to Cippanhamm to spy on the Danes. That had almost ended in disaster, for Alfred did not possess the cunning to be a spy. I had rescued him that night, the same night that I had found Ragnar in the royal church. “And do you remember,” I went on, “that I had a servant with me and he sat at the back of the church with a hood over his head and I ordered him to be silent?”

  Ragnar frowned, trying to recall that winter night, then he nodded. “You did, that’s right.”

  “He was no servant,” I said, “that was Alfred.”

  Ragnar stared at me. In his head he was working things out, realizing that I had lied to him on that distant night, and he was understanding that if he had only known that the hooded servant had been Alfred then he could have won all Wessex for the Danes that same night. For a moment I regretted telling him, because I thought he would be angry with me, but then he laughed. “That was Alfred? Truly?”

  “He went to spy on you,” I said, “and I went to rescue him.”

  “It was Alfred? In Guthrum’s camp?”

  “He takes risks,” I said, reverting to our talk of Mercia.

  But Ragnar was still thinking of that far-off cold night. “Why didn’t you tell me?” he demanded.

  “Because I’d given him my oath.”

  “We would have made you richer than the richest king,” Ragnar said. “We would have given you ships, men, horses, silver, women, anything! All you had to do was speak.”

  “I had given him my oath,” I said again, and I remembered how close I had come to betraying Alfred. I had been so tempted to blurt out the truth. That night, with a handful of words, I could have ensured that no Saxon ever ruled in England again. I could have made Wessex into a Danish kingdom. I could have done all that by betraying a man I did not much like to a man I loved as a brother, and yet I had kept silent. I had given an oath and honor binds us to paths we might not choose. “Wyrd biful aræd,” I said.

  Fate is inexorable. It grips us like a harness. I thought I had escaped Wessex and escaped Alfred, yet here I was, back in his palace, and he returned that afternoon in a clatter of hooves and a noisy rush of servants, monks, and priests. Two men carried the king’s bedding back to his chamber while a monk wheeled a barrow piled with documents which Alfred had evidently needed during his single day’s absence. A priest hurried by with an altar cloth and a crucifix, while two more brought home the relics that accompanied Alfred on all his travels. Then came a group of the king’s bodyguards, the only men allowed to carry weapons in the royal precincts, and then more priests, all talking, among whom was Alfred himself. He had not changed. He still had a clerk’s look about him, lean and pale and scholarly. A priest was talking urgently to him and he nodded his head as he listened. He was dressed simply, his black cloak making him look like a cleric. He wore no royal circlet, just a woolen cap. He was holding Æthelflaed’s hand and Æthelflaed, I noticed, was once again holding her brother’s horse. She was hopping on one leg rather than walking which meant that she kept tugging her father away from the priest, but Alfred indulged her for he was ever fond of his children. Then she tugged him purposely, trying to draw him onto the grass where Ragnar and I had stood to welcome him and he yielded to her, letting her bring him to us.

  Ragnar and I knelt. I kept my head bowed.

  “Uhtred has a broken nose,” Æthelflaed told her father, “and the man who did it is dead now.”

  A royal hand tipped my head up and I stared into that pale, narrow face with its clever eyes. He looked drawn. I supposed that he was suffering another bout of the bowel cramps that made his life perpetual agony. He was looking at me with his customary sternness, but then he managed a half-smile. “I thought never to see you again, Lord Uhtred.”

  “I owe you thanks, lord,” I said humbly, “so I thank you.”

  “Stand,” he said, and we both stood and Alfred looked at Ragnar. “I shall free you soon, Lord Ragnar.”

  “Thank you, lord.”

  “But in a week’s time we shall be holding a celebration here. We shall rejoice that our new church is finished, and we shall formally betroth this young lady to Lord Æthelred. I have summoned the Witan, and I would ask you both to stay until our deliberations are over.”

  “Yes, lord,” I said. In truth all I wanted was to go to Northumbria, but I was beholden to Alfred and could wait a week or two.

  “And at that time,” he went on, “I may have matters,” he paused, as if fearing that he spoke too much, “matters,” he said vaguely, “in which you might be of service to me.”

  “Yes, lord,” I repeated, then he nodded and walked away.

  And so we waited. The town, anticipating the celebrations, filled with folk. It was a time of reunions. All the men who had led Alfred’s army at Ethandun were there, and they greeted me with pleasure. Wiglaf of Sumorsæte and Harald of Defnascir and Osric of Wiltunscir and Arnulf of Suth Seaxa all came to Wintanceaster. They were the powerful men of the kingdom now, the great lords, the men who had stood by their king when he had seemed doomed. But Alfred did not punish those who had fled Wessex. Wilfrith was still Ealdorman of Hamptonscir, even though he had run to Frankia to escape Guthrum’s attack, and Alfred treated Wilfrith with exaggerated courtesy, but there was still an unspoken divide between those who had stayed to fight and those who had run away.

  The town also filled with entertainers. There were the usual jugglers and stilt-walkers, story-tellers and musicians, but the most successful was a dour Mercian called Offa who traveled with a pack of performing dogs. They were only terriers, the kind most men use to hunt rats, but Offa could make them dance, walk on their hind legs, and jump through hoops. One of the dogs even rode a pony, holding the reins in its teeth, and the other dogs followed with small leather pails to collect the crowd’s pennies. To my surprise Offa was invited to the palace. I was surprised because Alfred was not fond of frivolity. His idea of a good time was to discuss theology, but he commanded the dogs be brought to the palace and I assumed it was because he thought they would amuse his children. Ragnar and I both went to the performance, and Father Beocca found me there.

  Poor Beocca. He was in tears because I lived. His hair, which had always been red, was heavily touched by gray now. He was over forty, an old man, and his wandering eye had gone milky. He limped and had a palsied left hand, for which afflictions men mocked him, though none did in my presence. Beocca had known me since I was a child, for he had be
en my father’s mass-priest and my early tutor, and he veered between loving me and detesting me, though he was ever my friend. He was also a good priest, a clever man, and one of Alfred’s chaplains, and he was happy in the king’s service. He was delirious now, beaming at me with tears in his eyes. “You live,” he said, giving me a clumsy embrace.

  “I’m a hard man to kill, father.”

  “So you are, so you are,” he said, “but you were a weakly child.”

  “Me?”

  “The runt of the litter, your father always said. Then you began to grow.”

  “Haven’t stopped, have I?”

  “Isn’t that clever!” Beocca said, watching two dogs walk on their hind legs. “I do like dogs,” he went on, “and you should talk to Offa.”

  “To Offa?” I asked, glancing at the Mercian who controlled his dogs by clicking his fingers or whistling.

  “He was in Bebbanburg this summer,” Beocca said. “He tells me your uncle has rebuilt the hall. It’s bigger than it was. And Gytha is dead. Poor Gytha,” he made the sign of the cross, “she was a good woman.”

  Gytha was my stepmother and, after my father was killed at Eoferwic, she married my uncle and so was complicit in his usurpation of Bebbanburg. I said nothing of her death, but after the performance, when Offa and his two women assistants were packing up the hoops and leashing the dogs, I sought the Mercian out and said I would talk with him.

  He was a strange man. He was tall like me, lugubrious, knowing, and, oddest of all, a Christian priest. He was really Father Offa. “But I was bored with the church,” he told me in the Two Cranes where I had bought him a pot of ale, “and bored with my wife. I became very bored with her.”

  “So you walked away?”

  “I danced away,” he said, “I skipped away. I would have flown away if God had given me wings.”

  He had been traveling for a dozen years now, ranging throughout the Saxon and Danish lands in Britain and welcome everywhere because he provided laughter, though in conversation he was a gloomy man. But Beocca had been right. Offa had been in Northumbria and it was clear that he had kept a very sharp eye on all that he saw. So sharp that I understood why Alfred had invited his dogs to the palace. Offa was plainly one of the spies who brought news of Britain to the West Saxon court. “So tell me what happens in Northumbria,” I invited him.