We cannot know the future. Perhaps some, like my daughter, can read the runesticks and find prophecies in their tangle, and others, like the bitch-hag in the cave who had once foretold my life, might get dreams from the gods, but for most of us the future is a mist and we only see as far ahead as the mist allows, yet I was certain Northumbria was doomed. To its north was Scotland, and the people of that land are wild, savage, and proud. We are fated to fight them, probably for ever, but I had no wish to lead an army into their bitter hills. To stay in the valleys of Scotland meant ambush, while to march on the heights meant starvation. The Scots were welcome to their land, and if they thought to take ours then we would kill them as we always did just as they slaughtered us if we invaded their hills.
And to the south of Northumbria were the Saxons and they had a dream, Alfred’s dream, the dream I had served for almost my whole life, and that dream was to unite the kingdoms where Saxons lived and call it one country, and Northumbria was the last part of that dream, and Æthelflaed passionately wanted that dream to come true. I have broken many oaths in my life, but I had never broken an oath to Æthelflaed. I would make Sigtryggr king, but the condition was that he lived in peace with Æthelflaed’s Mercia. I would make him king to destroy his brother and to give me a chance to attack Bebbanburg, and I would make him king even as I sowed the seeds of his kingdom’s destruction, because while he must swear to live in peace with Mercia I could not and would not demand that Æthelflaed live in peace with him. Sigtryggr’s Northumbria would be trapped between the savagery of the north and the ambitions of the south.
And I told Sigtryggr none of that. Instead I put my arm around his shoulder and walked him to the top of a dune from where we watched men and women come ashore. The mist was lifting, and all along the beach I could see weapons and shields being carried through the low surf. Children, released from the tightly-packed ships, raced about the sand shrieking and tumbling. ‘We’ll march under your banner,’ I told Sigtryggr.
‘The red axe.’
‘Because men will think you serve your brother.’
‘And we go to Jorvik,’ he said.
‘To Eoferwic, yes.’
He frowned, thinking. A sea breeze had started and it stirred his fair hair. He gazed at the ships and I knew he was thinking that it would be a pity to abandon them, but there was no choice. A small boy climbed the dune and stared open-mouthed at Sigtryggr. I growled and the child looked terrified, then ran away. ‘You don’t like children?’ Sigtryggr asked, amused.
‘Hate them. Noisy little bastards.’
He laughed. ‘Your daughter says you were a good father.’
‘That’s because she hardly ever saw me,’ I said. I felt a slight pang. I had been fortunate in my children. Stiorra was a woman any man would be proud to call his daughter, while Uhtred, who was carrying spears through the shallows and laughing with his companions, was a fine man and a good warrior, but my eldest? My gelded son? He, I thought, was the cleverest of my three, and perhaps the best of them, but we would never be friends. ‘My father never liked me,’ I said.
‘Nor did mine,’ Sigtryggr said, ‘not till I was a man, anyway.’ He turned and looked inland. ‘So what do we do now?’ he asked.
‘We find out where we are. With any luck we’re close to Cair Ligualid, so we’ll go there first and find places for the families. Then we march on Eoferwic.’
‘How far’s that?’
‘Without horses? It’ll take us a week.’
‘Is it defensible?’
‘It has good walls,’ I said, ‘but it lies in flat land. It needs a large garrison.’
He nodded. ‘And if my brother’s there?’
‘We’ll have a fight on our hands,’ I said, ‘but we have that anyway. You’re not safe till he’s dead.’
I doubted that Ragnall would have returned to Eoferwic. Despite his defeat at Eads Byrig he still possessed a large army, and he needed to give that army plunder. I suspected he was still ravaging Mercia, but I also suspected he would have sent a force back to Eoferwic to hold the city till he returned. I also suspected I could be wrong. We were marching blind, but at least our ships had landed in Northumbria because late that morning, when the mist had cleared entirely, I climbed a nearby hill and saw smoke rising from a substantial town to our north. It could only be Cair Ligualid, for there was no other large settlement in Cumbraland.
Cumbraland was that part of Northumbria west of the mountains. It had always been a wild and lawless place. The kings who ruled in Eoferwic might claim to rule in Cumbraland, but few would travel there without a large army, and even fewer would see any advantage in making the journey at all. It was a region of hills and lakes, deep valleys, and deeper woods. The Danes and the Norse had settled it, building steadings protected by stout palisades, but it was no land to make a man rich. There were sheep and goats, a few paltry fields of barley, and enemies everywhere. The old inhabitants, small and dark, still lived in the high valleys where they worshipped gods that had been forgotten elsewhere, and always there were Scots crossing the River Hedene to steal cattle and slaves. Cair Ligualid guarded that river, and even that town would not have existed if it had not been for the Romans who had built it, fortified it, and left a great church at its centre.
It might have been a daunting fortress once, as formidable as Ceaster or Eoferwic, but time had not been kind to Cair Ligualid. The stone walls had partly fallen, the Roman buildings had mostly collapsed, and what was left was an untidy collection of timber huts with roofs of mossy thatch. The church still stood, though almost all of its walls had fallen to be replaced with timber, and the old tiled roof had long gone. Yet I loved that church because it was there that I had first seen Gisela. I felt the pang of her loss as we came into Cair Ligualid, and I stole a glance at Stiorra who so resembled her mother.
There were still monks in the town, though at first I thought they were beggars or vagabonds in strange robes. The brown cloth was patched, the hems tattered, and it was only the tonsures and the heavy wooden crosses that betrayed the half-dozen men as monks. The oldest, who had a wispy beard stretching almost to his waist, strode to meet us. ‘Who are you?’ he demanded. ‘What do you want? When are you leaving?’
‘Who are you?’ I retorted.
‘I am Abbot Hengist,’ he said in a tone that suggested I should recognise the name.
‘Who rules here?’ I asked.
‘Almighty God.’
‘He’s the jarl?’
‘He is the mighty jarl of all the earth and everything in it. He is the jarl of creation!’
‘Then why hasn’t he repaired the walls here?’
Abbot Hengist frowned at that, not sure what to answer. ‘Who are you?’
‘The man who’s going to pull the guts out of your arsehole if you don’t tell me who rules in Cair Ligualid,’ I said pleasantly.
‘I do!’ Hengist said, backing away.
‘Good!’ I said briskly. ‘We’re staying two nights. Tomorrow we’ll help repair your wall. I don’t suppose you have enough food for all of us, but you’ll supply us with ale. We’ll be leaving the women and children here under your protection, and you will feed them till we send for them.’
Abbot Hengist gaped at the crowd who had come into his town. ‘I can’t feed that …’
‘You’re a Christian?’
‘Of course!’
‘You believe in miracles?’ I asked, and he nodded. ‘Then you’d better fetch your five loaves and two fishes,’ I went on, ‘and pray that your wretched god provides the rest. I’m leaving some warriors here too, they need feeding as well.’
‘We can’t …’
‘Yes, you can,’ I growled. I walked up to him and seized the front of his grubby robe, grabbing a handful of white beard at the same time. ‘You will feed them, you horrible little man,’ I said, ‘and you will protect them,’ I shook him as I spoke, ‘and if I find one child missing or one child hungry when I send for them I’ll strip the flesh off you
r scrawny bones and feed it to the dogs. You have fish traps? You have seed grain? You have livestock?’ I waited until he gave a reluctant nod to each question. ‘Then you will feed them!’ I shook him again, then let him go. He staggered and fell back on his arse. ‘There,’ I said happily, ‘that’s agreed.’ I waited till he had scrambled to his feet. ‘We’ll also need timber to repair the walls,’ I told him.
‘There is none!’ he whined.
I had noticed few trees close to the town, and those few were stunted and wind-bent, no good for filling the gaps in the ancient ramparts. ‘No timber?’ I asked. ‘So what’s your monastery built from?’
He stared at me for a moment. ‘Timber,’ he finally whispered.
‘There!’ I said cheerfully. ‘You have an answer for all our problems!’
I could not take the wives and children to Eoferwic. The women could march as well as the men, but children would slow us down. Besides, we carried no food, so everything we ate on our journey would have to be bought, stolen, or scrounged, so the fewer mouths we had to feed the better. We were liable to end up in Eoferwic hungry, but I was certain that once there we would find storehouses filled with grain, smoked meat, and fish.
Yet before we could march we needed to protect the families we would leave behind. Men will fight willingly enough, but need to know their women and children are safe, and so we spent a day filling the gaps in Cair Ligualid’s wall with heavy timbers pulled down from the monastery. There were only seven monks and two small boys who lived in buildings that could have sheltered seventy, and the rafters and pillars made stout palisades. To man the wall we left thirty-six warriors, mostly the older men or the wounded. They had no hope of resisting a full-scale assault by a horde of shrieking warriors from Strath Clota, but such an attack was unlikely. The Scottish war-bands were rarely more than forty or fifty strong, all of them vicious fighters mounted on small horses, but they did not cross the river to die on Roman walls. They came to snatch slaves from the fields and cattle from the hill pastures, and the few men we left, along with the townspeople, should be more than enough to deter an attack on the town. Just to make sure, we lifted a slab in the church to find an ancient crypt stacked with bones from which we took sixty-three skulls that we placed around the town’s ramparts with their empty eyes staring outwards. Abbot Hengist objected. ‘They are monks, lord,’ he said nervously.
‘You want an enemy raping your two novices?’ I asked.
‘God help us, no!’
‘It’s a ghost fence,’ I said. ‘The dead will protect the living.’
Stiorra, swathed in black, chanted strange incantations to each of the sixty-three guardians, then daubed their foreheads with a symbol that meant nothing to me. It was just a swirl of dampened soot, but Hengist saw the swirl and heard the chant and feared a pagan magic that was too powerful for his feeble faith. I almost felt sorry for him because he was trying to keep his religion alive in a place of paganism. The nearest farmlands were owned by Norsemen who worshipped Thor and Odin, who sacrificed beasts to the old gods and had no love for Hengist’s nailed redeemer. ‘I’m surprised they didn’t kill you,’ I told him.
‘The pagans?’ he shrugged. ‘Some wanted to, but the strongest jarl here is Geir,’ he jerked his head towards the south, indicating where Geir’s land lay, ‘and his wife was sick unto death, lord, and he brought her to us and instructed us to use our God to save her. Which, in His great mercy, He did.’ He made the sign of the cross.
‘What did you do?’ I asked. ‘Pray?’
‘Of course, lord, but we also pricked her buttocks with one of Saint Bega’s arrows.’
‘You pricked her arse?’ I asked, astonished.
He nodded. ‘Saint Bega defended her convent’s land with a bow, lord, but didn’t aim to kill. Just to frighten away the wrongdoers. She always said God aimed her arrows, and we’re lucky to own just one of them.’
‘God shot the bastards in the arse?’
‘Yes, lord.’
‘And now you live under Geir’s protection?’ I asked.
‘We do, lord, thanks to the blessed Saint Bega and her holy arrows.’
‘So where is Geir?’
‘He joined Ragnall, lord.’
‘And what news do you have of Ragnall or Geir?’
‘None, lord.’
Nor did I expect any news. Cumbraland was too remote, but it was significant that Geir had thought it worth his while to cross the hills and join Ragnall’s forces. ‘Why did he go to Jarl Ragnall?’ I asked the monk.
Abbot Hengist shivered and his hand twitched as if he was about to cross himself. ‘He was frightened, lord!’ He looked at me nervously. ‘Jarl Ragnall sent word that he’d slaughter every man here if they didn’t march to join him.’ He made the sign of the cross and momentarily closed his eyes. ‘They all went, lord! All the landowners who had weapons. They fear him. And I hear the Jarl Ragnall hates Christians!’
‘He does.’
‘God preserve us,’ he whispered.
So Ragnall was ruling purely by fear, and that would work so long as he was successful, and I had a moment’s pang of guilt as I thought what his forces would be doing in Mercia. They would be slaughtering and burning and destroying anything and anyone not protected by a burh, but Æthelflaed should have attacked northwards. She was defending Mercia when she should have been attacking Northumbria. A man does not rid his home of a plague of wasps by swatting them one by one, but by finding the nest and burning it. I was Ida the Flamebearer’s descendant and, just as he had brought fire across the sea, I would carry flames across the hills.
We set out next morning.
It was a hard journey across hard country. We had found three ponies and a mule close to Cair Ligualid, but no horses. Stiorra, with her daughter, rode one of the ponies, but the rest of us travelled on foot and carried our own mail, weapons, food, and shields. We drank from mountain streams, slaughtered sheep for supper, and roasted their ribs over paltry fires of bracken and furze. We were all either used to riding to war or else rowing, and our boots were not fit for the journey. By the second day the stony tracks threatened to rip the boots apart and I ordered men to walk barefoot and save the boots for battle. That slowed us as men limped and stumbled. There were no convenient Roman roads showing the way, just goat paths and sheep tracks and high hills and wind from the north bringing rain in vicious gusts. There was no shelter the first two nights and little food, but on the third day we descended into a fertile valley where a rich steading offered warmth. A woman and two elderly servants watched us arrive. There were over three hundred and fifty of us, all carrying weapons, and the woman left the gate of her palisade wide open to show that she could offer no resistance. She was grey-haired, straight-backed, and blue-eyed, the mistress of a hall, two barns, and a rotting cattle shed. ‘My husband,’ she greeted us icily, ‘is not here.’
‘He went to Ragnall?’ I asked.
‘To Jarl Ragnall, yes,’ she sounded disapproving.
‘With how many men?’
‘Sixteen,’ she said, ‘and who are you?’
‘Men summoned by Jarl Ragnall,’ I said evasively.
‘I hear he needs more men,’ she said scornfully.
‘Mistress,’ I asked, intrigued by her tone, ‘what have you heard?’
‘Njall will tell you,’ she said. ‘I suppose you’re about to rob me?’
‘I’ll pay for whatever we take.’
‘Which will still leave us hungry. I can’t feed my people on your hacksilver.’
Njall proved to be one of the sixteen warriors who had gone south to join Ragnall’s army. He had lost his right hand at Eads Byrig and had returned to this lonely valley where he farmed a few thin fields. He came to the hall that night, a morose man with a red beard and a bandaged stump and a thin, resentful wife. Most of my men were eating in the largest barn, dining on three slaughtered pigs and two goats, but Lifa, who was the mistress of the steading during her husband’s absence, insisted tha
t some of us join her in the hall where she served us a meal of beef, barley, bread, and ale. ‘We have a harpist,’ she told me, ‘but he went south with my husband.’
‘And won’t return,’ Njall said.
‘He was killed,’ Lifa explained. ‘What kind of enemy kills harpists?’
‘I was there,’ Njall said gloomily, ‘I saw him take a spear in the back.’
‘So tell your story, Njall,’ our hostess commanded imperiously, ‘tell these men what enemy they will face.’
‘Uhtred,’ Njall snarled.
‘I’ve heard of him,’ I said.
Njall looked at me resentfully. ‘But you haven’t fought him,’ he said.
‘True.’ I poured him ale. ‘So what happened?’
‘He has a witch to help him,’ Njall said, touching the hammer at his neck, ‘a sorceress.’
‘I’d not heard that.’
‘The witch of Mercia. She’s called Æthelflaed.’
‘Æthelflaed is a witch?’ Finan put in.
‘How else can she rule Mercia?’ Njall asked resentfully. ‘You think a woman can rule unless she uses witchcraft?’
‘So what happened?’ Sigtryggr asked.
We coaxed the tale from him. He claimed that Ragnall had us all trapped in Ceaster, though he could not remember the name of that town, only that it was a place that had stone walls, which he assumed had been built by spirits working for Æthelflaed. ‘Even so, they were trapped in the city,’ he said, ‘and the Jarl said he would keep them there while he captured the rest of Mercia. But the witch sent a storm and Uhtred rode the morning wind.’
‘Rode the wind?’
‘He came with the storm. A horde of them came, but he led. He has a sword of fire and a shield of ice. He came with the thunder.’
‘And Jarl Ragnall?’ I asked.
Njall shrugged. ‘He lives. He still has an army, but so does Uhtred.’ He knew little more because, captured at Eads Byrig, he had been one of the men we had released after severing his hand. He had walked home, he said, but then added one more scrap of news. ‘The Jarl could be dead for all I know. But he planned to raid Mercia till his own witch worked her magic.’
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