War of the Wolf

by Bernard Cornwell

  “You have tents, lord?” the steward asked hopefully.

  “I just need quarters for four men and four horses,” I said.

  “But you’re not on the list,” the steward complained, then looked alarmed as I drew a small knife from my belt. “Lord!” he protested, taking a step back.

  I smiled at him, drew the knife across the ball of my thumb, then picked up a clean quill. I dipped the nib in my welling blood, pulled one of the lists toward me, and wrote my name. “There,” I said, “I’m on the list.” I sucked the shallow cut, then wiped it on my leggings. “Where are you quartering King Sigtryggr?”

  The steward hesitated, glanced at the clerks, then looked back to me. “He’s in the Bullock, lord.”

  “That’s a tavern?”

  “Yes, lord,” the steward said.

  “King Sigtryggr isn’t being given quarters in the palace?” I asked, though the question was really an indignant protest.

  “He’s given the Bullock, lord. No one else will be there, just the king and his followers.”

  “So it’s a big tavern?”

  The steward hesitated again, and the three clerks stared down at their lists. “No, lord,” the steward finally admitted. “King Sigtryggr is only bringing sixteen men, lord.” I suspected he meant that Edward had insisted that Sigtryggr did not arrive with a small army.

  “Sixteen men,” I said, “so it’s a small tavern with rancid ale and rotten food?”

  “I wouldn’t know, lord,” the steward muttered.

  “You put a king in a small shitty tavern because he’s a pagan?” I asked, and the steward had no answer to that so I put him out of his misery. “It will do for us too,” I said, then smiled at the scrawny young priest. “We’ll all be pagans together, sacrificing virgins at midnight.” The poor boy made the sign of the cross, and I pointed my bloody hand at him. “Make sure I’m on the list for the Witan too,” I snarled, “otherwise we’ll sacrifice you as well.”

  “Yes, lord,” he said.

  “You’ve got dirt on your forehead,” I said, “so has he,” I pointed to the other priest.

  “Because it’s Good Friday, lord. The day our Lord died.”

  “Is that why they call it good?”

  They just stared at me, appalled, and we went to the Bullock.

  And next day Sigtryggr arrived.

  He was angry. What did I expect? And there was no one except me on whom to vent that anger. “You didn’t kill him?” he demanded of me. “And you had your sword at his throat?”

  I let him rage. He got drunk that night, and I saw that a one-eyed man could weep like any other. Svart, the commander of his household troops, helped him to bed, then came back and poured himself a pot of ale. “Horse piss,” he said in disgust, “Saxon horse piss.” Svart was a huge man, a great beast of a warrior with broad shoulders and a thick black beard into which were woven two lower jawbones of wolves. “We were in Lindcolne,” he said, “when Sköll attacked Eoferwic.”

  “Why Lindcolne?”

  He shrugged. “King Edward sent men to talk. It was about this,” he waved a huge hand around the room, meaning that the Saxon delegation had gone to Lindcolne to invite Sigtryggr to the Witan. “The queen said we shouldn’t go. She said that if they wanted to talk that meant they weren’t wanting to fight, so we should ignore them. Let them worry, she said. Then Hrothweard persuaded him.” Hrothweard was the Archbishop of Eoferwic, a West Saxon and a good man. My son-in-law had ever tolerated Christians, offering them hospitality and protection, favors that the Christians never offered to pagans in their own lands.

  “I was told the Mercians had invaded,” I said, “and that was why you went south.”

  He shook his head. “No, it was just men talking. Ten crows and three lords.” He meant ten priests.

  “I should have been there. In Jorvik.”

  “We’ve all been saying that.” He poured more ale. “She was a clever one.”

  He meant Stiorra. I nodded. “She was clever from a child.”

  “Now he doesn’t know what to do.”

  “Kill Sköll.”

  “Besides that.”

  I took the jug and poured more horse piss. “His children?” I meant my grandchildren.

  “Safe in Jorvik,” Svart said.

  “Stiorra’s mother,” I said, “cast the runesticks and said Stiorra would be the mother of kings.” Svart said nothing. A draft flickered the rushlights on the table. “Another wise woman,” I went on, “said I would lead armies. That there would be a great battle, and seven kings would die.”

  “My grandmother,” Svart said, “cast the sticks when I was born. They said I’d be dead before I could walk.”

  “Seven kings,” I poured him the last of the ale. “I’ll settle for one Norseman.”

  Svart raised his pot. “To Sköll’s death,” he said.

  “Sköll’s death,” I echoed.

  Somewhere in the night a child cried and a hooded hawk screeched. I wished Mus had come with us. I prayed to the gods before I slept, begging them to show me the future in a dream, but if they did I could not remember it when I woke.

  It was dawn on Eostre’s feast day.

  Ragnar, who became my father after he captured me, always sacrificed to Idunn in the spring. “She brings us flowers, lambs, and women,” he had told me, “so she deserves a generous gift.”

  “She brings us women?”

  He had ruffled my hair. “You’ll understand one day.”

  His Saxon slaves were given a feast on Idunn’s day, and they called it Eostre’s feast because their goddess of the spring was called Eostre. There were songs, there was laughter, there was dancing in the pastures if the weather was good and then folk would go to the woods to finish the dance. The hall was hung with boughs bright with petals and new leaves. Idunn and Eostre, I suppose they are the same goddess, bring us new life, they give us bud and blossom, fledglings and lambs. The feast is joyous and the land is adorned with flowers, with primroses and cowslips, bluebells in the woods, lilac and lilies. The Christians, unable to stop folk welcoming the rebirth of the year, made it their own feast day, a feast to celebrate their nailed god’s death and resurrection. Father Beocca liked to call the feast Pascha. “That’s the proper name,” he insisted to me, “Pascha,” but insist as the priests liked, everyone still called it Easter, which was Eostre’s day.

  And that Eostre’s day dawned chill and wet. The rain came in great swaths from the west, poured from the thatch, and ran like streams down the hill where the old fort stood at Tamweorthin’s heart. It had not been a Roman fort, but a Saxon citadel of wood and earth, and all that remained of the old defenses was a ridge of turf above a steep, short slope that had once been the ramparts. A passage led through the ridge, beyond which lay the royal palace and Tamweorthin’s largest church. Sigtryggr and I, cloaked against the malevolent rain, climbed the hill toward the palace. Svart, Berg, and two other warriors followed us. Finan had gone to church as he always did on Eostre’s day, and Sigtryggr and I, bored with the Bullock’s small rooms, were exploring the town. “I was supposed to go to the church,” Sigtryggr told me.

  “Supposed?”

  He shrugged. “Hrothweard said it was expected of me.”

  “Is the archbishop here?”

  Sigtryggr nodded. “He is, only he won’t be quartered in a dirty tavern, will he? They’ll give him space in the palace.” He grimaced. “I was told I couldn’t bring more than sixteen followers.”

  “Why come at all?”

  “They promised safe conduct,” he evaded my question.

  I could hear singing coming from the church at the hill’s top. King Edward was in the gaunt wooden building, as was Æthelstan and most of the nobility of Mercia, Wessex, and East Anglia. I had a sudden memory of the night Ragnar’s hall burned. Kjartan the Cruel had set that fire and had reaped the screams of the trapped, the slaughter at the door, and the shriveled corpses in the ashes. The singing went on, a drone of monks, and
we turned into the Mallard, a big tavern by the lane that led up the hill. It was almost empty because the law said that folk must go to church on Eostre’s day and Tamweorthin’s six churches were doubtless full, but a pair of servants were putting new rushes on the tavern floor and happily brought us ale. We sat by the hearth.

  “Why did I come?” Sigtryggr asked, gazing at the flames.

  “Stiorra would have told you to stay at home.”

  “She would, yes.”

  “They’re humiliating you,” I said.

  Svart growled in protest at my words, but Sigtryggr just nodded agreement. “They are,” he said, “and we’ll find out how tomorrow.” The Witan always began on Eostre’s feast, but the first day, the Sunday, was given over to the priests, and the Witan’s real business would wait till the morning. Sigtryggr stretched out a foot and pushed a log into the heart of the fire. “I sometimes wish you’d never made me King of Northumbria,” he continued. “I could be in a good ship at sea with the whole world waiting to be robbed.”

  “So go back to sea,” I said.

  He smiled ruefully. “I’m a king!” For a moment his one eye glistened. “Stiorra would never forgive me,” he went on. “She wants, wanted, our son to be king. You know what she called me? The last pagan king. And you can’t be the last, she always said that. You can’t be the last.”

  Stiorra had been right. I had never thought of it before, but Sigtryggr was the last pagan king in all Britain. The Saxon lands were all Christian. Alba, which some folk called Scotland, was Christian, though I suspected that some of their mountain savages, all hair and grunts, probably still worshipped sticks, stones, and stumps. The Welsh were Christian, though that never stopped them raiding Christian Mercia to steal cattle and slaves. There were a few pagans still clinging to their steadings in the hills of Cumbraland, but even there the Christians built churches and cut down the ancient groves where the old gods lived. Only Northumbria, my country, was ruled by a pagan. Yet when I had been a young man, all fury and sword-skill, the last kingdom had been Wessex. My people, the Saxons, had been driven southward by the pagan Northmen until the only lands they could call their own were the sea marshes of Sumorsæte. Then we had fought back. We had killed the sword-Danes, slaughtered the spear-Danes, we had clawed our land back, and now Northumbria was the last kingdom, the last realm where folk could worship whatever god they chose.

  Sigtryggr glanced up at the roof-hole as a gust of wind swirled the smoke and dashed in a shower of raindrops. “You want to know why I’m here,” he said. “In Lindcolne I have forty-six household warriors, in Eoferwic I have a hundred and seventy-three. That’s when they’re not ill. I can count on the men of Dunholm, and I have your warriors. If it comes to war,” he hesitated, “when it comes to war, I can lead maybe four hundred really good troops. The jarls will give me another three hundred. The host? Maybe a thousand who can half fight. Am I wrong?”

  “The jarls will give you more than three hundred,” I said.

  “They won’t! Remember that bastard Thurferth?”

  “I do,” I said grimly.

  “A dozen jarls have followed him. Now they’re under Edward’s protection. They’ve been baptized.” Thurferth was a rich Dane who owned estates on the southern border of Northumbria and, threatened by Mercian invasion, had chosen to become a Christian and bend his knee to the Saxon king. “If I fight Thurferth and his followers,” Sigtryggr went on, “I’m fighting King Edward. And I’ll get no help from the west, will I?” He meant Cumbraland, which was supposedly a part of Northumbria.

  “No help,” I agreed.

  “And meantime that bastard Constantin would love to take Bebbanburg’s land and make it Scottish. So,” he struck his fingers one by one, counting his enemies, “I have the Scots to the north, my fellow Norsemen to the west, and Saxons to the south, and fewer than two thousand men to fight them all. And that is why I’m here.” He drained his ale. “Being humiliated,” he added bitterly, “is a price worth paying to ensure peace with the biggest of my enemies.” He fell silent as a flurry of voices sounded outside the tavern door, which was suddenly thrown open to let in a group of rain-soaked men. They were warriors, judging by the swords they wore, and with them was a priest.

  “Christ on his cross,” one of the warriors said, “I thought that bastard would never stop preaching. You!” the last word was shouted at one of the servants. “We need ale. Mulled ale!”

  “And food!” another man called.

  They took off their cloaks and I put my hand on Serpent-Breath’s hilt because all the rain-darkened cloaks were red, and I only knew one man who insisted that his followers wear the same color cloaks. “We’ll have the fire too,” the first man said with the easy arrogance of a lord who was accustomed to having his own way. He was clean-shaven and had a thin face unscarred by disease or war. There was gold at his neck and on his wrists. He strode toward us, then saw me and stopped. I saw the flicker of fear in his eyes, instantly gone as he counted us and realized he had twice the men we did. “I said we’d have the fire,” he challenged us.

  It was Æthelhelm the Younger, whose father, my enemy, had died a prisoner in Bebbanburg and whose sister was my son’s wife. “I’m not finished with the fire,” I answered.

  Æthelhelm’s men spread, hands on sword hilts. Svart, smiling, stood. He was a giant, so tall that he needed to bend his shaggy head beneath the tavern’s smoke-blackened beams. “I haven’t killed a Saxon in days,” he growled, but as he spoke in the northern tongue none of Æthelhelm’s men understood him. But they saw his massive size and not one of them seemed eager to face him.

  “The king,” I said, “finds your presence offensive. You smell like lizard shit.”

  “The king?” Æthelhelm was momentarily confused, thinking I meant Edward, then Sigtryggr stood beside Svart, and he too was frightening. He had a blade of a face, the one-eyed face of a man who has fought in too many battles and did not fear a mere tavern brawl.

  “So sit on the room’s far side,” I said, “and try not to fart.”

  One of Æthelhelm’s men, a brave one, took a pace forward, but the priest pulled him back. “There are to be no fights! The king has decreed it! No fights. On pain of your immortal souls!”

  For a moment the room was still, then Æthelhelm spat toward us. “This room stinks of pagans. We’ll drink elsewhere.”

  They picked up their cloaks and went back into the rain.

  In my anger at Sköll I had almost forgotten I had other enemies. And the bitterest of those was now in Tamweorthin.

  And, like me, he wanted revenge.

  “He has a hundred and twelve household warriors here,” Finan told me.

  I swore. “I have you and Berg.”

  “Æthelhelm is probably pissing himself in fear then.”

  I smiled dutifully. Would Æthelhelm attack me? Or rather would he direct his men to attack me? King Edward was adamant that there be no fighting in Tamweorthin while the Witan convened, but he might as well have ordered men to stop pissing against church walls. In fact he had ordered that, but they pissed just the same. And there were always fights. The town was full of Mercian and West Saxon warriors and, though Edward might be king of both kingdoms, there was small love between them. So yes, Æthelhelm would try to kill me, though he would make sure no one could accuse him of ordering the murder.

  “It will be at night,” Finan said. It was the evening of Eostre’s feast, and we were sitting by the Bullock’s fire. Rain still beat on the roof.

  “We stay here then,” Berg suggested.

  Finan shrugged. “He’ll burn the tavern down.”

  “And the whole town with it?” Sigtryggr asked.

  “He won’t give a rat’s turd for the town, lord King,” Finan said, “not if he can dance on Lord Uhtred’s bones.”

  “In this rain,” Berg said, “a fire would be hard to set.”

  And just then there was a hammering on the tavern’s street door.

  “Shit,�
�� the King of Northumbria said.

  Finan moved to a window and edged back a shutter. He swore. “Too dark to see,” he said. The hammering sounded again, and Finan moved to the left-hand side of the door while Svart went to the right. Both men drew their swords, while Berg and six of Sigtryggr’s warriors made a line behind a heavy bench we had placed a couple of paces from the doorway. Sigtryggr and I went to stand with Svart. The owner of the tavern, a Saxon, hustled his two serving girls out through the back door. The hammering on the door sounded a third time, more urgently, and I nodded to Finan, who reached out, lifted the heavy locking bar, and let it fall.

  The door burst open and eleven swords pointed at a sopping-wet priest who took two steps into the room and then fell to his knees. “God’s mercy!” he called.

  Svart stepped into the rain. “No one else here,” he growled.

  Eleven swords slid into eleven scabbards. Svart locked the door again. “Get up,” I told the priest, “and who are you?”

  “Father Lucus, lord.” He looked fearfully at the mail-clad men who surrounded him, noticed Sigtryggr’s thick gold chain, and bowed to him. “Lord King,” he said.

  “Why are you here?” I demanded.

  “The king sent me, lord.” Father Lucus bowed again, this time to me. “He demands,” he hesitated, “desires your attendance, lord.” Rainwater dripped from his black robes and cloak.

  “Just mine?” I asked.

  “Yes, lord. And at once, lord. If you please, lord.”

  “How do we know you’re the king’s messenger?” Finan demanded.

  Father Lucus’s expression of sheer incredulity was answer enough. “I can assure you I am,” he stammered.

  “Does Ealdorman Æthelhelm know I’m summoned?” I asked.

  Father Lucus’s puzzlement at the question was obvious, but he answered anyway. “He was in the hall, lord,” he said, “but I don’t know if he knows, lord.”

  “He knows,” Sigtryggr spoke enough of the Saxon tongue to follow what was being said. “The king was at supper?” he asked the priest.

  “Yes, lord King.”

  “If a king summons a man, then news of it is whispered through the hall.” Sigtryggr spoke from experience. “So Æthelhelm knows.”