War Lord

by Bernard Cornwell

  ‘We’re weary from travelling, lord,’ the priest appealed to me.

  ‘Then the sooner you’re home the better,’ I snarled, then tore the ribbon from the scrolled message.

  ‘If you need help reading it, lord …’ the priest began, then caught my eye and mumbled incoherently.

  ‘Before sunset,’ I insisted and walked away.

  It was discourteous of me, but I was angry. ‘They think I’m too old!’ I complained to Benedetta after he left.

  ‘Too old for what?’

  ‘There was a time,’ I said, ignoring her question, ‘when I was useful to Æthelstan. He needed me! Now he thinks I don’t matter, I’m too old to help him. I’m like the king in tæfl!’

  ‘Tæfl?’ she asked, stumbling over the unfamiliar word.

  ‘You know. The game where you move pieces on a board. And he thinks I’m trapped because I’m old, that I can’t move.’

  ‘He is your friend!’

  ‘He was my friend. Now he wants me gone. He wants Bebbanburg.’

  Benedetta shivered. It had been a warm day, but by sunset the sea wind was moaning cold about the hall’s high gables. ‘Then what the Scottish man said? Yes? He will defend you?’

  I gave a mirthless laugh. ‘They don’t want me, they want Bebbanburg too.’

  ‘Then I will defend you,’ she said fiercely. ‘Tonight! We go to the chapel.’

  I said nothing. If Benedetta wanted to pray for me then I would go with her, but I doubted her prayers were the equal to the ambition of kings. If my suspicions were correct then Æthelstan wanted Bebbanburg and so did Constantine because a kingdom needs strength. King Alfred had proved that great fortresses, whether burhs like Mameceaster or strongholds like Bebbanburg, were the most effective deterrents to invaders, and so Bebbanburg would either defend Æthelstan’s northern frontier or Constantine’s southern border, and its commander would not be named Uhtred, but would be a man of unquestioned loyalty to whichever king won.

  Yet had I not been loyal? I had raised Æthelstan, taught him to fight, and given him his throne. But I was not a Christian, not handsome like Ingilmundr, and not a flatterer like those that rumour now said advised the King of Wessex.

  The priest’s message commanded me to meet Æthelstan at Burgham on the Feast of Zephyrinus, whoever he was, and I was to bring no more than thirty of my men and carry food enough to feed them for ten days. Thirty men! He might as well have asked me just to fall on my sword and please to leave the Skull Gate unbarred!

  But I obeyed.

  I took just thirty of my men.

  But I also asked Egil Skallagrimmrson to keep me company with seventy-one of his Norsemen.

  And so we rode to Burgham.

  I had gone to Bebbanburg’s chapel on the night before we left for Burgham. I did not go there often, nor did I usually go willingly, but Benedetta had pleaded and so I had led her into the cold night wind and thus to the small chapel which had been made next to the great hall.

  I thought I must merely endure her prayers, but saw that she had planned this visit more carefully, because waiting in the chapel were a wide, shallow dish, a jug of water, and a small flask. The altar was bright with candles, which flickered as the wind gusted through the open door. Benedetta closed it, pulled the hood of her cloak over her dark hair, and knelt by the shallow dish. ‘You have enemies,’ she said bleakly.

  ‘All men have enemies, otherwise they’re not men.’

  ‘I will protect you. Kneel.’

  I was reluctant, but I obeyed. I am used to women and sorcery. Gisela would cast the sticks to tell the future, my daughter had used spells, while long ago, in a cave, I had been given dreams. Men are sorcerers too, of course, and we fear them, but a woman’s sorcery is more subtle. ‘What are you doing?’ I asked.

  ‘Hush,’ she said, pouring water into the shallow dish. ‘Il malocchio ti ha colpito,’ she went on quietly. I did not ask what the words meant because I sensed they were spoken to herself rather than to me. She pulled the cork from the small flask and then, very carefully, let three drops of oil fall into the water. ‘Wait now,’ she said.

  The three drops of oil spread, glistened, and made shapes. The wind sighed at the chapel’s roof and the door creaked. The waves beat at the shore. ‘There is danger,’ Benedetta said after staring at the pattern of the oil-stained water.

  ‘There is always danger.’

  ‘The dragon and the star,’ she said. ‘They came from the north?’

  ‘They did.’

  ‘Yet there is danger from the south,’ she sounded puzzled. Her head was bent over the dish and the hood hid her face.

  She was silent again and then she beckoned me. ‘Come closer.’

  I shuffled closer on my knees.

  ‘I cannot come with you?’ she asked plaintively.

  ‘If there is danger? No.’

  She accepted the answer, however unwillingly. She had pleaded to accompany me, but I had insisted none of my men could take their women so I could not make an exception for myself.

  ‘And I do not know if this will work,’ she said unhappily.

  ‘This?’

  ‘Hai bisogno di farti fare l’affascinò,’ she said, looking up at me and frowning. ‘I must protect you by,’ she paused, looking for the word, ‘a charm?’

  ‘A spell?’

  ‘But a woman,’ she went on, still unhappy, ‘may do this three times in her life. Only three!’

  ‘And you,’ I said carefully, ‘have done it three times?’

  ‘I made curses,’ she said, ‘on the slavers. Three curses.’ She had been enslaved as a child, carried across Christendom and found herself in raw, cold Britain where she became a slave to King Edward’s third wife. Now she was my companion. She made the sign of the cross. ‘But God may give me one more spell because it is not a curse.’

  ‘I hope not.’

  ‘God is good,’ she said. ‘He gave me life again when I met you. He will not leave me alone now.’ She put a forefinger into a ripple of oil. ‘Come close.’

  I leaned closer and she reached out and smeared her finger on my forehead. ‘That is all,’ she said, ‘and when you feel danger is close? All you need do is spit.’

  ‘Just spit?’ I was amused.

  ‘You spit!’ she said, angry at my smile. ‘You think God, the angels, and the demons need more than this? They know what I have done. It is enough. Your gods too, they know!’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said humbly.

  ‘You come back to me, Uhtred of Bebbanburg!’

  ‘I will come back,’ I promised.

  If I remembered to spit.

  None of us knew where Burgham was, though the frightened priest who had brought the summons to Bebbanburg assured me it was in Cumbria. ‘I believe to the north of Mameceaster, lord.’

  ‘There’s a lot of land to the north of Mameceaster,’ I had snarled.

  ‘There’s a monastery at Burgham,’ he had said hopefully, and when I didn’t respond, just looked miserable. Then he brightened. ‘There was a battle nearby, lord, I think.’

  ‘You think.’

  ‘I think, lord, because I heard men talking of it. They said it was your battle, lord!’ he smiled as if expecting me to smile too. ‘They said you won a great victory there! In the north, lord, near the great wall. They say you …’ his voice had tailed away.

  The only battle that fitted his description was the fight at Heahburh and so we followed the priest’s vague directions and rode westwards alongside the old Roman wall that crossed Northumbria. The weather turned bad, bringing a cold driving rain from the Scottish hills, and we made slow progress across the high ground. We were forced to camp one night in the stony remnants of a Roman fort, one of the bastions of their wall, and I sat hunched in the lee of a broken wall remembering the ghastly fight under the ramparts of Heahburh’s fort. Our fires fought the rain that night and I doubt any of us slept much, but the dawn brought clearing skies and a weak sunlight and, instead of pressing
on, we spent the morning drying our clothes and cleaning our weapons. ‘We’re going to be late,’ I told Finan, ‘not that I care. But isn’t today the feast of saint whatever?’

  ‘I think so. Not sure. Might be tomorrow?’

  ‘Who was he?’

  ‘Father Cuthbert said he was a pig-ignorant idiot who became pope. Zephyrinus the Idiot.’

  I laughed at that, then watched a buzzard gliding through the midday sky. ‘I suppose we should move.’

  ‘Do we go to Heahburh?’ Finan asked.

  ‘Close,’ I said. I had no desire to return to that place, but if the priest was right then Burgham lay somewhere to the south and so we followed rough tracks across the bare hills and spent that night in the valley of the Tinan, sheltered by deep trees. Next morning, in a small rain, we climbed out of the valley and I saw Heahburh on a distant hilltop. A shaft of sunlight moved across the old fort, shadowing the Roman ditches where so many of my men had died.

  Egil rode beside me. He said nothing of the fight at Heahburh. ‘So what do we expect at Burgham?’ he asked me.

  ‘Unhappiness.’

  ‘Nothing new there, then,’ he said grimly. He was a tall, good-looking Norseman with long fair hair and a prow of a nose. He was a wanderer who had found a home on my land and rewarded me with both friendship and loyalty. He said he owed me a life because I had rescued his younger brother Berg from a cruel death on a Welsh beach, but I considered that debt long paid. He stayed, I think, because he liked me and I liked him. ‘You say Æthelstan has two thousand men?’ he asked.

  ‘That’s what we were told.’

  ‘If he takes a dislike to us,’ he remarked mildly, ‘we’ll be a little outnumbered.’

  ‘Just a little.’

  ‘Will it come to that?’

  I shook my head. ‘He hasn’t come to make war.’

  ‘Then what is he doing here?’

  ‘He’s behaving like a dog,’ I said. ‘He’s pissing on all his boundaries.’ That was why he was in Cumbria, that wild and untamed western part of Northumbria. The Scots wanted it, the Irish Norse claimed it, we had fought for it, and now Æthelstan had come to place his banner on it.

  ‘So he’ll piss on us?’ Egil asked.

  ‘That’s what I expect.’

  Egil touched the hammer at his breast. ‘But he doesn’t like pagans.’

  ‘So he’ll piss harder on us.’

  ‘He wants us gone. They call us strangers. Pagans and strangers.’

  ‘You live here,’ I said forcefully, ‘you’re a Northumbrian now. You fought for this land, so you have as much right to it as anyone.’

  ‘But he wants us to be Ænglisc,’ he said the unfamiliar word carefully, ‘and he wants the Ænglisc to be Christians.’

  ‘If he wants to swallow Northumbria,’ I said savagely, ‘then he’ll have to swallow the gristle along with the flesh. Half of Cumbria is pagan! He needs them as enemies?’

  Egil shrugged again. ‘So he just pisses on us and we go home?’

  ‘If that makes him happy,’ I said, ‘yes.’ And I hoped I was right, though I really suspected I would have to fend off a demand for Bebbanburg.

  Late that afternoon, as the road dropped into a wide well-watered valley, we saw a veil of smoke to the south. Not a great dark pillar that might betray a hall or steading being burned, but a drifting mist of smoke hanging over the rich farmland in the river valley. It had to be where men were assembled and so we turned our horses southwards and, next day, came to Burgham.

  Folk had been there before, the old people who used vast boulders to make strange circles. I touched my hammer when I saw the circles. The gods must know of those places, but what gods? Older gods than mine and much older than the nailed Christian god, and the Christians I had spoken with said such places were malevolent. The devil’s playgrounds, they claimed, yet Æthelstan had chosen one such circle as the place of meeting.

  The circles lay south of a river. I could see two of them, though later I discovered a third nearby. The largest circle lay to the west and that was where Æthelstan’s banners flew amidst hundreds of men, hundreds of tents and hundreds of crude turf shelters, amongst which were campfires and tethered horses. There were banners by the score, a few of them triangular that belonged to Norse jarls, and most of those were to the south beside another river that ran fast and shallow across a stony bed. Closer to the largest circle was a mass of flags that were mostly familiar to me. They were the standards of Wessex; crosses and saints, dragons and rearing horses, the black stag of Defnascir, the crossed swords and the bull’s head flags of Cent, all of which I had seen fly in battle, sometimes on my side of the shield wall and sometimes on the other. The leaping stag of Æthelhelm was there, too, though that house was no longer my enemy. I doubted it was my friend, but the long bloodfeud had died with the death of Æthelhelm the Younger. Mixed among the flags of Wessex were the banners of Mercia and of East Anglia, all now acknowledging the King of Wessex as their overlord. That, then, was the Saxon army come north, and judging by the number of banners, Æthelstan had brought at least a thousand men to Burgham.

  To the west, in a smaller and separate encampment, there was a spread of unfamiliar banners, but I saw Domnall’s red hand holding the cross, which suggested that was where the Scottish had pitched their tents or made turf shelters, while to the south, to my surprise, the red dragon banner of Hywel of Dyfed rippled in the breeze. Closest to us, just beyond the river’s ford, lay a dozen tents over which flew Guthfrith’s three-sided flag of the viciously tusked boar. So he was here, and I saw that his small encampment was guarded by mailed warriors carrying Æthelstan’s badge of the dragon and lightning bolt on their iron-rimmed shields. That same badge flew on Æthelstan’s flag, which was carried by a monstrously tall pine trunk placed at the entrance to the largest stone circle, and next to it, on a pole just as high, there was a pale banner on which was blazoned a cross the colour of dried blood. ‘What’s that flag?’ Finan asked, nodding at it.

  ‘Who knows? Æthelstan’s, I suppose.’

  ‘And Hywel’s here!’ Finan said. ‘I thought he was in Rome.’

  ‘He’s been and come back,’ I said, ‘or he’s about to go. Who knows? The Welsh are here anyway.’

  ‘And where’s our banner?’

  ‘At Bebbanburg,’ I said, ‘I forgot it.’

  ‘I brought two of mine,’ Egil said happily.

  ‘Then fly one of them now,’ I said. I wanted Æthelstan to see a three-sided flag showing the dark eagle of a pagan Norse chieftain coming to his encampment.

  We splashed through the ford to be met by the West Saxons guarding Guthfrith’s tents. ‘Who are you?’ A sour-looking warrior held up a hand to check us.

  ‘Egil Skallagrimmrson.’

  I had mischievously asked Egil to lead us across the river. On either side of him were his Norse warriors, while Finan and I hung back. We waited in the ford, the water rippling around our stallions’ fetlocks.

  ‘And where are you going?’ the sour man demanded curtly.

  ‘Wherever I want,’ Egil said, ‘this is my country.’ He spoke Ænglisc well, most of it learned from the Saxon girls who were willingly seduced, but now he was deliberately making his words awkward as though they were unfamiliar.

  ‘You only come here if you’re invited. And I don’t think you are.’ The surly man had been reinforced by a dozen West Saxon spearmen holding Æthelstan’s shields. Some of Guthfrith’s men had assembled behind them, eager for whatever entertainment seemed imminent, while more West Saxon men were hurrying towards the confrontation.

  ‘I’m going there,’ Egil pointed southwards.

  ‘You’re turning around and you’re going back where you came from,’ the sour-faced man said, ‘all of you and all the way back. Back to your damned country across the sea.’ His small force was growing by the minute and, in the way that rumours spread like smoke, still more men were coming from the Saxon encampment to swell his ranks. ‘Turn around,’ the ma
n said slowly and insultingly, as if speaking to a stubborn child, ‘and bugger off.’

  ‘No,’ I said, and pushed my horse between Egil and his standard-bearer.

  ‘And who are you, grandpa?’ the man asked belligerently, hefting his spear.

  ‘Kill the old fool!’ One of Guthfrith’s men shouted, ‘cut the old fool down!’ His companions began jeering me, emboldened perhaps by the presence of Æthelstan’s guards. The man who had shouted was young with long fair hair that he wore in a thick plait. He pushed his way through the West Saxons and stared insolently at me. ‘I challenge you,’ he snarled.

  There are always fools who want reputation, and killing me was a swift route to warrior-fame. The young man was doubtless a good warrior, he looked strong, he evidently had courage, his forearms were bright with rings that he had taken in battle, and he yearned for the renown that would follow my death. More, he was emboldened by the press of men behind him who were shouting at me to dismount and fight. ‘Who are you?’ I asked him.

  ‘I am Kolfinn, son of Hæfnir,’ he replied, ‘and I serve Guthfrith of Northumbria.’

  I suspected he had been with Guthfrith when I had barred the escape to Scotland and Kolfinn Hæfnirson now wanted to avenge that humiliation. He had challenged me and custom decreed I must answer the challenge. ‘Kolfinn, son of Hæfnir,’ I said, ‘I have not heard of you, yet I know of all the warriors of Britain who have reputation. But what I do not know is why I should bother to kill you. What is your cause, Kolfinn, son of Hæfnir? What is our quarrel?’

  He looked bemused for a heartbeat. He had a blunt face with a well-broken nose, and the gold and silver arm rings suggested he was a young warrior who had survived and won many fights, but what he did not have was a sword, or indeed any weapon. Only the West Saxons under the command of the sour-faced man carried spears or swords. ‘Well,’ I demanded, ‘what is our quarrel?’

  ‘You must not—’ the sour-faced West Saxon began, but I cut him off with a gesture.