The Wolf and the Raven

by H A CULLEY

  However, Ragnar had not forgotten his oath to kill Edmund and wreak his revenge on Northumbria. In time his dead son Fridlief had grown in his affection as his feelings for his living sons diminished. Nevertheless, he had trouble in putting together a large enough expedition; especially as all the young men wanted to sail with the ever more successful Ivar.

  ‘I’m your king; I decide where and when we raid.’

  It wasn’t until the spring of 862 that events conspired to give him the chance to put together a large enough fleet.

  In 861 Bjorn had finally come to an agreement with the Geats in the south. He then turned his attention to Kvenland in the north. After he had defeated them and killed their king he finally felt safe on the throne of Uppsala and Sigurd was able to visit his father at Agder. He brought five longships and two hundred and fifty warriors with him. However, when Ragnar invited him to join him and raid Northumbria, he declined, asking instead to be given Vestfold to govern. It was a blow, especially as Sigurd was the son he trusted the most.

  With Lagertha and two other jarls, the old king managed to put together a fleet of a dozen ships manned by nearly eight hundred men. Against Edmund’s fleet it should be more than enough and in April 862 he sailed for Northumbria once more.

  -℣-

  When Æthelred had returned to the throne in 858 he had forgiven all those who had deposed him when he was ill and set about reuniting the kingdom. He had improved the defences of Whitby and began repairing the Roman walls of Eoforwīc. He had also agreed to pay for two more longships to replace Edmund’s four birlinns.

  All of this had cost money; money he didn’t have, so he increased taxation which made him unpopular, especially with the Church and his nobles, on whose shoulders the burden largely fell.

  ‘I’ve had enough of being bled dry by Æthelred,’ Osbehrt complained to his wife one evening.

  ‘Well, what do you propose to do about it?’ she replied tartly. ‘You’re always moaning about him but you do nothing.’

  He glared at her and stabbed his knife into a piece of mutton, putting it into his mouth. She watched, noting with distaste the grease running down his chin. Theirs was far from a love match. She was the daughter of his richest thegn and half his age. The attraction for him had been a large dowry and the pleasure of bedding a young girl. Her father had, of course, been flattered by the offer of matrimony from his ealdorman.

  Osbehrt stabbed at another piece of meat.

  ‘I mean, all this tax goes towards defence against the bloody Vikings. What’s the advantage for us? Loidis is as far from the sea as you can get; we’re never likely to see a Norseman or a Dane.’

  ‘So, if you were king you’d abandon those who live on the coast to the depredations of the pirates, would you? That’s hardly likely to make you popular with Edmund and the other ealdormen whose shires are bordered by the German Ocean.’

  ‘Bugger Edmund. Do you know he now has five hundred warriors which we pay to maintain? It’s a bigger warband than that of the king himself. How is that right?’

  ‘But he keeps the Vikings away.’

  ‘So you say. He uses his damned longships to guard his knarrs as they trade with Frankia more like. He’s filling his chests with gold and silver at our expense.’

  Although it was true that two of Edmund’s longships did act as escort to his trading knarrs, they were ships he had paid for and maintained himself. The ships maintained by the royal treasury were only used to patrol the coast, but that was a truth that Osbehrt chose to ignore.

  In March 862 a messenger arrived at Loidis to inform Osbehrt that the king would be visiting him for a few days in early April. Of course, he would be accompanied by the court and he would expect them all to be housed at Osbehrt’s expense.

  ‘It’s not to be borne,’ he yelled at his long suffering wife. ‘Not only does he tax us to death but now he expects me to feed his fawning courtiers and clerks and lay on a hunt.’

  ‘You are always saying that you wish you were king instead of him; well, now is your chance,’ his wife said slyly.

  ‘What? You mean kill him whilst he’s here?’

  ‘There is a wise woman in the town who sells poisons for the right price.’

  He wondered how his wife knew that and, in truth, she’d been tempted to poison her oafish husband on more than one occasion.

  ‘Would you like me to pay her a visit?’ she continued.

  If she had to endure being married to Osbehrt then being queen would help; and it would make her father so proud of her.

  He couldn’t bring himself to reply so he just nodded and swallowed hard. What had he allowed himself to be talked into?

  -℣-

  Æthelred’s mysterious death was put down to a reoccurrence of the illness he’d suffered years before and, at first, nobody suspected poison. When the Witan met at Eoforwīc in May the choice for his successor lay between Osbehrt and Ælle. Neither was popular with their fellow nobles: Osbehrt was a self-indulgent oaf who few thought would make a good king, but his younger brother wasn’t much better.

  One or two knew that one of Edmund’s ancestors had been the King of Northumbria for a short while and the fact that he was married to the previous king’s sister helped his case. However, Edmund made it clear to those who’d approached him in secret that he had no wish to be a candidate for the throne. In view of what happened later his decision was regrettable.

  In the end the Witan chose Osbehrt and Ælle stormed out of the hall declaring that he would never swear allegiance to his brother. Whether he or another started the rumour that Osbehrt’s wife had poisoned Æthelred wasn’t clear but, once the thought was planted in people’s minds Osbehrt’s reputation suffered a severe blow.

  In August the wise woman was dragged before the shire court, now presided over by a new ealdorman who had replaced Osberht when he’d been crowned. He owed loyalty to the man who’d appointed him, but the old woman had confessed to supplying poison to the queen and there was nothing he could do but condemn her to be hanged.

  ‘What will happen now?’ Burwena asked her husband as they stood together on the battlements of Bebbanburg watching three knarrs and their escorting longship sail towards Frankia.

  Edmund put his arm around her waist, pulled her closely to him and kissed her neck.

  ‘The Witan will be asked to depose Osbehrt and that evil bitch he’s married to will be tried for regicide.’

  ‘Good! Hanging’s too good for her.’

  ‘Oh, I doubt that she’ll hang. She is the queen after all. No, my guess is that she’ll spend the rest of her life as a nun.’

  Edmund’s guess proved to be correct and in late May Ælle was crowned. Osbehrt, following his brother’s earlier example, refused to pay him homage and disappeared. When next Edmund heard about him he had taken refuge in Cumbria and was trying to raise an army to take back his throne.

  Civil war threatened but then something happened to take Edmund’s mind off the brothers’ struggle for power.

  -℣-

  Edmund’s ten year old son, Ricsige, was visiting Lindisfarne with his mother and elder sister when the alarm bell was rung. The bishop had finally conceded that the monastery wasn’t defensible and a fort had been built on top of the crag at the south-east tip of the island. It dominated the surrounding landscape and had sheer cliffs on every side. The only approach to the summit was via a narrow path cut into the southern face of the rock.

  As soon as the alarm was given the monastery’s treasures were piled into carts and everyone fled to the small fort. There weren’t enough provisions to withstand any sort of siege and the only water available was what could be carried up the path in small barrels. However, it was only intended as a short term refuge until the fyrd could be called out to come to its relief.

  This time Ragnar had every intention of waiting for the fyrd to arrive. The keels of three drekar slid into the soft sand of the bay below the monastery and the Vikings took their time looting the plac
e as well as the farmsteads scattered over the island. He hoped that Edmund would see one hundred and seventy Vikings as a less than formidable threat and would come to the relief of the besieged fort with his warriors and the local fyrd.

  If he did so, he would be walking into a trap as nine more longships lay just over the horizon waiting for Ragnar to light a signal beacon. It was unfortunate for Ragnar that Edmund was away at a meeting of the Witan at Whitby called to discuss how best to bring the renegade Osbehrt to justice. He also had a personal reason for seeing King Ælle. The latter had written to him privately asking for his daughter Osgern’s hand in marriage. She was now thirteen and, to Edmund’s surprise, she hadn’t been too averse to the idea.

  Perhaps the idea of being queen sweetened the pill of marriage to an older man, he mused. From Ælle’s point of view it would bind Edmund, and consequently the whole of the north east of the kingdom, to his side in his dispute with Osbehrt over the throne.

  Edmund had travelled down to Whitby on one of the three longships which patrolled the southern coast of Northumbria – so killing two birds with one stone. So when a knarr arrived with a messenger sent by the garrison commander at Bebbanburg, he already had one hundred and seventy warriors with him. It was fortuitous and bad luck for Ragnar.

  It wasn’t the only reason that the Norns appeared to be looking unfavourably on the Viking king. As Edmund sailed north making good progress thanks to a strengthening wind out of the west, further out to sea the rest of Ragnar’s fleet were struggling to maintain position. When the rain arrived Lagertha, who’d been left in charge of the main fleet, decided that it was futile to stay where she was and she headed for the safety of the mouth of the River Twaid.

  Her fleet couldn’t head directly there with the gale force winds pushing them westwards, so she headed north with the intention of turning onto a south-westerly course once she calculated that she had sailed far enough. The other longships followed her but, of course, they had little clear idea of what she intended.

  The rain was now coming at them in horizontal sheets, making it difficult for those ships further out to sea to keep Lagertha’s drekar in sight. After several hours, and with darkness descending, one of the other jarls had had enough and he changed his heading to head west. Let Ragnar continue with his campaign against Northumbria; he was going to head for the Continent and raid there instead.

  The next morning, as the sun rose above the German Ocean to the east, Lagertha counted with dismay the ships who had made it to safety in the Twaid estuary. There were only five in total. Four had vanished in the storm. She didn’t know if they’d been sunk or had deserted her; not that it made any difference. Ragnar’s force was now reduced to five hundred men. The original eight hundred had been few enough when it came to capturing Bebbanburg and killing Edmund; now the task seemed impossible.

  Chapter Twenty Two – The Final Battle

  August 862

  Lagertha decided that it was unwise to stay where they were. A sizeable settlement existed on the north bank of the Twaid a mile inland from the mouth and now armed warriors were gathering along the shoreline and making threatening gestures towards the Viking longships. Various craft were being assembled at the jetty and she knew it wouldn’t be long before some fool decided to lead an attack on her ships.

  She was confident of beating them off, but she would lose warriors in the process to no good purpose. She gave the order to haul up the anchors and the small flotilla sailed lazily out to sea, pushed along by a gentle westerly.

  Once clear of the estuary the swell left behind by the previous day’s storm made for a lively motion under the hull as the boys raised the sails and the ships made their way south east, back towards Lindisfarne. She needed to talk to Ragnar as she saw little point now in sticking to the original plan of ambushing the relief force. As their small army had been severely weakened it was stupid for their forces to remain divided.

  All night Ragnar had worried about the fate of his other ships in the storm and, as Lagertha came in sight, his concerns grew. There were four longships missing and all had all been drekar with crews of seventy or more.

  Ricsige stood beside a grizzled old warrior, one of a dozen who lived in the small fort on Lindisfarne. Like the others, the man was an experienced archer and so far they had managed to keep the Vikings away from the steep approach to the only entrance; not that the Vikings seemed that keen on capturing the place, which puzzled him.

  ‘Look,’ Edmund’s son cried with dismay. ‘There are more Viking ships approaching from the north.’

  ‘Perhaps that’s what these scum have been waiting for?’ the archer said, spitting at the rocky ground below the palisade.

  An hour or so later the newcomers beached their ships in the bay below the monastery and the crews joined their fellows in the camp that encircled the small fortress.

  ‘I hope help arrives soon or we’ll be eating each other,’ the archer said gloomily.

  ‘What do you mean,’ Ricsige replied with some alarm.

  ‘Not literally, Ricsige. What I meant is provisions are running low. The storerooms only hold enough to feed this lot for a few days and the only water is in the barrels over there. They’re nearly empty and even on half rations we’ll run out of food in two days’ time.’

  ‘Oh! My father is still away at Whitby and Godwine the reeve is too timid to do much.’

  ‘Except we saw a knarr leave Budle Bay and head south two days ago so hopefully your father is on his way back by now.’

  Ricsige brightened up and anxiously scanned the sea to the south, but it remained depressing empty.

  -℣-

  Uxfrea was immensely proud of the trust that Edmund had displayed in him when he made him the deputy commander of the Northumbrian fleet. Those who had been captains for far longer had resented the appointment of the young man at first but, as time went on, they grudgingly admitted that Uxfrea was a good sailor, a fair commander and a doughty warrior. Not all accepted him, but the few that didn’t were too few to pose much of a problem.

  He wasn’t a brawny man by any means, he was slim, shorter than most and had trouble growing much of a moustache. Few Anglo-Saxons sported a beard like the Vikings did, but most cultivated a luxuriant growth of hair on their upper lip which drooped down either side of their mouths. Uxfrea saved the problem by remaining clean shaven, which made him look even younger than his twenty seven years.

  He might still be in his twenties, but his eyesight was deteriorating, not something he admitted to. When the lookout called down that three longships were approaching from the south he peered in vain in the direction the ship’s boy had indicated but he could see nothing but a blur where sea met sky.

  ‘Can you make out the sails?’

  ‘No, they’re too far away and, in any case their sails will be hard over to catch the westerly wind.’

  Uxfrea felt a fool. He glanced at his own sail which was held almost exactly fore and aft so that the wind from the west pushed the ship southwards. Of course, it also meant that with only a shallow keel they made a great deal of leeway, but it was better than rowing all day.

  The same would apply to the other ships, of course. They too would be crabbing out to sea. He needed to know if they were on course to intercept one another.

  ‘Where will their heading take them, to windward of us or to leeward?’

  ‘I’m not sure. Either way they’ll pass quite close to us.’

  Uxfrea thanked the boy and, as soon as he could make out the other ships, he had the sails on all three of his own ships lowered and the oars run out in preparation for a fight. The archers made for the bows and the rowers donned their helmets and leather jerkins. Few wore byrnies; they were expensive and the weight would drag even the strongest swimmer down into the ocean depths.

  ‘I can make out the sails now,’ the lookout called out. ‘They’re yellow but I still can’t see their device.’

  At that moment the other longships lowered their sai
ls but then the boy up the mast called out again.

  ‘They’ve got crosses on the prow, not dragons’ heads.’

  Uxfrea took a deep breath and released it slowly in relief. It had to be Edmund’s flotilla. He was surprised though. He’d expected him to still be at Whitby.

  ‘You’ve not heard about the Vikings then?’ Edmund called across once they were within hailing distance of each other.

  He knew that Uxfrea was patrolling the northern half of the coastline but evidently he didn’t know about the attack on Lindisfarne.

  ‘No, we’ve seen nothing except for a knarr on the horizon heading south two days ago.’

  ‘That must have been the one that brought the news to me. They’ve landed on Lindisfarne in force and are besieging Lady Burwena and our children in the fort.’

  ‘How many Vikings?’

  ‘Less than two hundred, or so I’m told.’

  ‘Then our combined strength of nearly four hundred should suffice.’

  ‘I hope so, yes, but the knarr has gone to fetch out the two birlinns to join us.’

  It was unfortunate that the other two birlinns belonging to Edmund were away protecting his knarrs en route to Paris with a cargo of wool, weapons and jewellery.

  Uxfrea rubbed his hands together in expectation of teaching the bloody Vikings a lesson. However, when they came in sight of Lindisfarne they saw eight longships on the beach. That meant that there were probably more like five hundred Vikings on shore.

  -℣-

  When Ragnar was told that a fleet of longships had been sighted at first he thought that the rest of his raiders had re-joined him but, when he climbed the rise to the south of his camp and looked out to sea he saw the yellow sails with their wolf’s head. He bared his teeth in a fierce grin. Now at last he could settle his score with Edmund of Bebbanburg.