But here Oswine stepped forward. “Lord, you said to me that it would be us alone that marched against Oswiu. Already, I see the banners of kings who have long been enemies of Bernicia flying among us – the king of Gwynedd, the banner of Elmet – and their men wreak great damage upon the people of this kingdom. Now you allow your son to ride with us – and all have heard tell of him.”
Peada turned to the Godfriend, and even from afar it was possible to see his knuckles pale as his fingers tightened upon the pommel of his sword.
“What have you heard tell of me?” Peada asked of Oswine. “Think well on your answer before you make it, friend.”
The Godfriend stood, hand also upon the pommel of his sword, but as yet his fingers rested lightly upon the weapon.
“That you are cruel and brutal.”
Peada stood waiting, as if he expected more, but Oswine spoke no further, and at last Peada made answer.
“I am the Red Hand, red with the blood of my enemies. You think this an insult?”
“I think it the truth,” said the Godfriend.
“Then I am content with what men say of me. You would have Oswiu pay for the hurt he has caused you? The Red Hand will leave this land red.”
“I would not have others pay for Oswiu’s fault.”
Before the Red Hand could answer, Penda spoke. “It is always others who pay for the fault of a king.”
“But I ask that you – we – do not despoil this land, but march through it as quickly as we may and then, should Oswiu not come to battle, we return whence we came, with all knowing that Oswiu cannot protect them against the wrath of the High King.”
Penda turned towards the Godfriend, and from the shadow beneath his hood his eye glittered in the firelight.
“You asked my aid as your tribute king, Oswine Godfriend. Know this, then: when I go to war, it is not by half-measures. We will burn as we march, turning this land to waste, and those we do not take as slaves we will lay out in the fields, that their blood may feed the harvest when a new king sits upon the throne of Bernicia – a king whom I have chosen.”
Oswine made to answer, but Penda held up his hand. “I would speak with my son. Tomorrow, I will give your men the honour of the vanguard – and the riches that come from taking whatever they might find.”
Oswiu had heard enough. He pointed where he would have the warmaster go: the paddock where the horses and oxen were picketed. But as the warmaster started towards the enclosure, his foot caught on a tent rope and he fell into the side of a tent. From within the tent, there came a muffled shout as the man who had been sleeping was woken by someone falling on him. From without, there came a shout.
“Hey, you. Who are you?”
Oswiu looked up to see the Red Hand staring at them. His eyes flicked beyond Peada. The king, Penda, was not looking in his direction, but had turned aside to speak with Oswine.
“Who are you?” Peada repeated, picking up a brand from the fire and holding it towards where Oswiu stood over the stricken warmaster.
“Too much…” Oswiu replied. He tried to pitch his voice so that it would carry to the Red Hand, but die away before it reached his father. “He’s had too much.” In the cover of the tent shadow, he kicked Æthelwin, and the warmaster, picking up the cue, responded with a deep, heartfelt groan. The sort of groan a man makes before his insides rush out.
“Get him away before he’s sick,” said Peada. “I’ve spent all day and most of the night riding – I don’t want to sleep with the smell of vomit in my nostrils.”
“Yes, lord,” said Oswiu, keeping his voice low while bending down so that it seemed he was hauling Æthelwin to his feet. Still groaning, the warmaster stood swaying beside him, then when still Peada had not turned away, Æthelwin retched, hunching over as if he was about to throw up.
“Get him out of here,” said Peada, turning away in disgust as the warmaster heaved once more. With one arm round Æthelwin’s shoulder, Oswiu pushed the warmaster away from the kings towards the paddock. As they went, Æthelwin began to sober, first regaining the power of speech – “Whash… wash in that beer?” he said, still playing the part of the drunken soldier – then walking more steadily, so that by the time they came to the paddock, it seemed two sober men, restless in camp, walked abroad for conversation and to await the dawn.
Then: “Who are you?”
The questioner was the guard who manned the makeshift gate of the paddock. The gate itself was but a bundle of hazel and hornbeam wands, gathered together and laid in the X-shaped ends of the rough paddock. The shepherds who passed this way twice each year – in spring driving their flocks up into the hills for the summer pasture and in autumn bringing them back down – had made the folds that lined the track as it ran beneath the hills. Now, for a night, kings’ horses used the fold as a paddock. But they would be gone on the morrow, leaving the fold for when the shepherds came down from the hills again.
“Who are you?” The sentry repeated the question, walking towards the two approaching men.
“Come on. You know me,” said Oswiu, as they got nearer. “You don’t have to ask.”
“Is that you, Eanred?” asked the sentry, peering through the night at the two approaching men.
“No, not Eanred,” said Oswiu, and as he spoke, he slid his seax from its sheath, “but the king of this land you ride through and despoil.”
The sentry, making sense of words and sight, began to open his mouth to give alarm while his hand went to his sword hilt. But Æthelwin, leaping forward, put one hand over the sentry’s mouth while the other held his head, and Oswiu, stepping into an embrace that smothered the man’s arms, slid the point of the blade up under his ribs and into his heart.
They held the man as he shivered into death, holding his dying tight and quiet. Then, when he was still, they laid him down in a shadow pool, so that it would take daylight to reveal him.
“Only one sentry?” Æthelwin whispered.
“Reckon on others,” said Oswiu. “We must be quick.”
“Kill or scatter?” asked Æthelwin.
“Scatter,” said Oswiu. He pointed. “And that one we take.”
He was pointing to a white horse tethered slightly apart from the others, its coat so bright that even at night it gleamed in the starlight.
“Penda’s?”
“Surely,” said Oswiu.
“I will take the black.” Æthelwin pointed to another horse, nearly as fine, tethered near the white. The other horses and the oxen, not being so valuable, had been left to wander freely within the paddock, cropping the starlit grass. They lifted the gate out of the way. Now, as the two men approached the tethered horses, the others looked up from their grazing, and the slow, quiet grinding of teeth on grass stopped.
“You have it?” Oswiu whispered, as they began unhitching the horses.
“Yes.”
“I’ll take these outside.”
Æthelwin nodded and began to approach the huddling mass of horses, while the king walked the white horse and black horse out of the paddock.
Holding the animals, Oswiu waited, peering into the night for sign of his warmaster. There. He was among the horses now. They were shifting, becoming uneasy. Then Oswiu saw the warmaster unwrap the thin bundle he carried at his belt, peeling off the waxed leather and taking out the skin – the wolf skin.
The smell of wolf gradually spread among the horses, those nearest reacting first, their panic transmitting faster than the smell. Æthelwin threw his head back and howled. It was the same sound as echoed round the hills.
The horses stampeded. Even the oxen, finally realizing something was happening, began to move, crushing forwards in an overwhelming mass and breaking through the flimsy fence.
Æthelwin ran too, towards Oswiu, sat now upon the white horse and struggling to keep it and the black under control. Jumping up onto its back, Æthelwin urged the horse after Oswiu. The two men drove their horses up the hill as the camp exploded into activity behind them, men bu
rsting from tents and chasing after the scattering horses and oxen, or belabouring the wagoners from their wagons to fetch their lumbering beasts.
There was only one challenge as they rode back uphill. The sentry they had left asleep upon the hillside called out to them, standing, with sword drawn, across the path.
But Oswiu pointed his seax towards the man.
“You live, who should be dead, for I held this knife to your throat while you slept. Stand aside and live, or I will kill you now.”
And the sentry, seeing the two terrible riders, stepped aside and let them past, and lived.
From the hilltop, king and warmaster looked down upon the camp they had stirred. The first dawn light showed it seething now, as an anthill seethes when poked with a stick. Men on foot tried to grab panicky horses, while enraged oxen simply pushed aside whatever was in their way.
“That will slow them down,” said Æthelwin.
“But it will not stop him,” said Oswiu. He looked to his warmaster. “Can we meet him in battle?”
“We can always meet him in battle,” said Æthelwin. “It is the riding away afterwards that I fear.”
Oswiu nodded. “So think I. We will withdraw into our stronghold. Let Penda come. He will beat against the rock at Bamburgh with no more success than the sea.”
“This delay will give us longer to gather supplies.”
“And there is something else.” Oswiu turned to his warmaster. “He has given us the wedge by which we may split his kingdom.”
“Lord?” asked Æthelwin.
“Ahlflæd.”
Chapter 6
The messenger stood under the flag of truce. He had come up towards the gate of the stronghold in the night and taken his stand there while he waited for the stars to wheel around the heavens and the sun to rise and reveal him. He stood at the edge of bowshot, waiting, while the dew rose and wet his feet, and the sea whispered under its cover of mist.
The dawn revealed him.
“Wait,” the sentries called to him, while they sent word up from the gate, and he waited, eyes searching the sand falls and the waving of the marram grass for the workings of wyrd. Wihtrun, priest and messenger, waited.
From where he stood, he could see little of Penda’s army. Most of the men were camped to the landward side of Bamburgh, their tents dotting the broad pasture that surrounded the stronghold. There had been a village there before: houses, sheds and stores, sheltering in the lee of the great rock. But they were all gone. Torn down, the timber piled up in great stacks beneath the rock. And more wood was added to these stacks each day, as men returned with the spoils of their raiding – new slaves carrying the wood that had once made their homes and adding it to the stacks before the stronghold before being herded down to the beach and the waiting slavers.
The slaves had earned them much gold and silver, but there had been precious little else to show for the weeks they had spent beneath the rock. During the new moon, after two weeks, Penda had allowed a group of young men, eager for glory and bored with waiting, to try the climb. They were brave men. The only sound they made when they fell was the breaking of bone and flesh on rock.
A week later, they had tried to force the gate. But the path to it was so narrow that only two men might stand next to each other, while the defenders sent arrows and rocks and slingshot down upon them from the battlements. They barely even made it to the gate, and those that did were cut down before they could bring more than one or two axe blows upon it.
But during all that time, troops of men rode off into the surrounding countryside to return with lines of slaves carrying their demolished homes on their backs, to build higher the great wood stacks.
Now Wihtrun came, in the king’s name, to speak with Oswiu.
“Closer.”
The call came from the ramparts. Wihtrun looked up and saw there a man he recognized: the king’s warmaster.
“Closer.”
Wihtrun pulled the flag of truce from the sand and, shaking some life back into his feet, approached the gate.
“What have you to say?”
Wihtrun looked up. “What I have to say is for the king to hear.”
The warmaster stared down at him in silence, then disappeared from sight. Wihtrun waited. Turning, he looked out to sea. The Farne Islands rose sheer from the sea, their white-streaked cliffs rising some fifty feet from the wave froth at their feet. The priest squinted. As befitted his calling, he was far sighted. There, on the nearest island, Inner Farne, was that a man? He slit his eyes so that he might see more sharply. There. That was no rock. That had to be a man.
Staring at the distant figure, Wihtrun became convinced that the man was looking at him too. He made the sign against the evil eye, for the eyes that he felt looking at him were not earthly eyes. Under his breath, Wihtrun began to mutter a charm against the working of magic.
Behind him, the gate creaked and he turned round to see it open, sufficient for a man to enter, and an arm beckoning him to come. With a single glance – the man upon the island was still staring at him, he was sure of that – Wihtrun went in and the gate closed.
Æthelwin, the warmaster, stood in front of him, with two other men at his side, swords sheathed but ready at hand.
“If you would speak with the king, then I must search you.”
In answer, Wihtrun held his arms out wide. The two men each took an arm, pinning the limbs tight, while Æthelwin searched the priest.
“Who lives on the island?” Wihtrun asked as he was being searched.
“Only birds,” said Æthelwin. He stepped back, satisfied the man was not carrying any weapon. “Why do you ask?”
“No reason,” said Wihtrun. “Save I thought I saw, while I waited, a man upon the nearest island.”
“Inner Farne. No, no one lives there. But I hear that sometimes one of the monks from the Holy Island goes there to fight devils and see God.”
“There is one there now,” said Wihtrun.
“Well, we will leave him to his fighting; you shall see the king, to speak of yours. But first…” Æthelwin gestured to one of the men, who lifted a long strip of cloth. “Do not think you will take word of what you see back to Penda.”
Wihtrun would have protested, but already the cloth was being wrapped around his head, and the words were sealed in his mouth.
Led by the hand, he was taken upwards into the stronghold. Deprived of sight, he listened, and smelled, and felt. The sounds of metal striking metal, the smell of bread, the swirl of wind, caught behind walls. He was being led across the great open space atop the rock, surrounded by the high walls that edged the stronghold. Then he felt the outrush of familiar smells – tallow and beer and smoke and fat and sweat – that he had smelled in every hall he had entered through the years of his life. The sounds too were familiar: conversation, dying to silence as those speaking saw who entered, the swish of feet on rushes, the crack of the logs on a fire.
He was led on through the hall, his passing marked by jibes and muttered insults and promises of long and painful deaths.
The hand that had been leading him stopped him.
“You would speak with the king. Speak.” It was the warmaster’s voice.
Wihtrun turned his head towards the sound. “I would see the king, to know I speak with him.”
“He is before you. Tell your message.”
“Unless I see him, I will not know my message has been delivered. I would needs tell my king so.”
“Let him see me, Æthelwin.”
The warmaster unwound the cloth.
The priest blinked his eyes open. The king sat before him. Wihtrun remembered him. He remembered him well. He glanced around. He had been brought into the king’s chamber. The king himself sat on the judgement seat. The seat, carved and engraved with flowing beasts and knots, was painted in rich reds and blues and golds. Standing beside the king was a woman – from her clothes and her bearing, the queen. Upon the king’s other hand was his son Ahlfrith, whom Wihtrun
knew well from his time of fostering at Penda’s court, and his daughter Ahlflæd, whom the priest also knew from when she had visited her brother in Mercia. And, squatting on his heels in the corner of the room, rocking backwards and forwards, was the old priest, Coifi. The old priest’s eyes were rolling upwards, but Wihtrun saw the sharp, sudden glance they paid him. The priest remembered…
This was not the first time Wihtrun had been sent as messenger to the king of Bernicia. He had gone earlier in the year, with Penda’s demands that Oswiu cease his attacks on Deira and give tribute to the High King. Both of these demands Oswiu had refused, as they had known and expected he would. But while Wihtrun waited for the reply to come from the king, he had sought the old priest, finding him walking alone by stream and under wood.
Wihtrun had made the courtesy to the old man and Coifi had stared at him. For once, his eyes did not flick to the scatter of light on the stream or the twitch of water across rock, but remained upon the man, clad in wolf cloak, who stood before him.
“Is it so long that anyone made the courtesy to you that you should stare at me?” Wihtrun asked.
Still Coifi made no answer, but rather drew his raven-feather cloak tight around his thin shoulders, although the wind was mild and the day warm.
“In Mercia, where the king still follows the gods of our fathers, I, priest of Woden, am given the respect and honour due to a priest.”
“Honour?” Coifi’s eyes darted away, then came back to the man standing in front of him. “What is honour?”
“Honour is a place at the king’s right hand; it is the casting of runes before he sets forth for war; it is the gifts of war, given to the gods. Honour is to serve the gods, the gods of our fathers. Honour is to hold to the old ways when others abandon them. This is honour.”
Coifi turned, his eyes following the movement of a leaf upon the stream. “I like to watch the water in Clashope Burn.”
“I prefer to watch the smoke of the offerings I make to the gods.”
Oswiu, King of Kings Page 30