Читать книгу The Last Kingdom Series Books 1-6 - Bernard Cornwell - Страница 16

Springtime, the year 868, I was eleven years old and the Wind-Viper was afloat.

She was afloat, but not at sea. The Wind-Viper was Ragnar’s ship, a lovely thing with a hull of oak, a carved serpent’s head at the prow, an eagle’s head at the stern and a triangular wind-vane made of bronze on which a raven was painted black. The wind-vane was mounted at her masthead, though the mast was now lowered and being supported by two timber crutches so that it ran like a rafter down the centre of the long ship. Ragnar’s men were rowing and their painted shields lined the ship’s sides. They chanted as they rowed, pounding out the tale of how mighty Thor had fished for the dread Midgard Serpent that lies coiled about the roots of the world, and how the serpent had taken the hook baited with an ox’s head, and how the giant Hymir, terrified of the vast snake, had cut the line. It is a good tale and its rhythms took us up the River Trente, which is a tributary of the Humber and flows from deep inside Mercia. We were going south, against the current, but the journey was easy, the ride placid, the sun warm and the river’s margins thick with flowers. Some men rode horses, keeping pace with us on the eastern bank, while behind us was a fleet of beast-prowed ships. This was the army of Ivar the Boneless and Ubba the Horrible, a host of Northmen, sword-Danes, going to war.

All eastern Northumbria belonged to them, western Northumbria offered grudging allegiance, and now they planned to take Mercia which was the kingdom at England’s heartland. The Mercian territory stretched south to the River Temes where the lands of Wessex began, west to the mountainous country where the Welsh tribes lived, and east to the farms and marshes of East Anglia. Mercia, though not as wealthy as Wessex, was much richer than Northumbria and the River Trente ran into the kingdom’s heart and the Wind-Viper was the tip of a Danish spear aimed at that heart.

The river was not deep, but Ragnar boasted that the Wind-Viper could float on a puddle, and that was almost true. From a distance she looked long, lean and knife-like, but when you were aboard you could see how the midships flared outwards so that she sat on the water like a shallow bowl rather than cut through it like a blade, and even with her belly laden with forty or fifty men, their weapons, shields, food and ale, she needed very little depth. Once in a while her long keel would scrape on gravel, but by keeping to the outside of the river’s sweeping bends we were able to stay in sufficient water. That was why the mast had been lowered, so that, on the outside of the river’s curves, we could slide under the overhanging trees without becoming entangled.

Rorik and I sat in the prow with his grandfather, Ravn, and our job was to tell the old man everything we could see, which was very little other than flowers, trees, reeds, waterfowl and the signs of trout rising to mayfly. Swallows had come from their winter sleep and swooped across the river while martins pecked at the banks to collect mud for their nests. Warblers were loud, pigeons clattered through new leaves and the hawks slid still and menacing across the scattered clouds. Swans watched us pass and once in a while we would see otter cubs playing beneath the pale-leaved willows and there would be a flurry of water as they fled from our coming. Sometimes we passed a riverside settlement of thatch and timber, but the folks and their livestock had already run away.

‘Mercia is frightened of us,’ Ravn said. He lifted his white, blind eyes to the oncoming air, ‘and they are right to be frightened. We are warriors.’

‘They have warriors too,’ I said.

Ravn laughed. ‘I think only one man in three is a warrior, and sometimes not even that many, but in our army, Uhtred, every man is a fighter. If you do not want to be a warrior you stay home in Denmark. You till the soil, herd sheep, fish the sea, but you do not take to the ships and become a fighter. But here in England? Every man is forced to the fight, yet only one in three or maybe only one in four has the belly for it. The rest are farmers who just want to run. We are wolves fighting sheep.’

Watch and learn, my father had said, and I was learning. What else can a boy with an unbroken voice do? One in three men are warriors, remember the Shadow-Walkers, beware the cut beneath the shield, a river can be an army’s road to a kingdom’s heart, watch and learn.

‘And they have a weak king,’ Ravn went on. ‘Burghred, he’s called, and he has no guts for a fight. He will fight, of course, because we shall force him, and he will call on his friends in Wessex to help him, but in his weak heart he knows he cannot win.’

‘How do you know?’ Rorik asked.

Ravn smiled. ‘All winter, boy, our traders have been in Mercia. Selling pelts, selling amber, buying iron ore, buying malt, and they talk and they listen and they come back and they tell us what they heard.’

Kill the traders, I thought.

Why did I think that way? I liked Ragnar. I liked him much more than I had liked my father. I should, by rights, be dead, yet Ragnar had saved me and Ragnar spoilt me and he treated me like a son, and he called me a Dane, and I liked the Danes, yet even at that time I knew I was not a Dane. I was Uhtred of Bebbanburg and I clung to the memory of the fortress by the sea, of the birds crying over the breakers, of the puffins whirring across the whitecaps, of the seals on the rocks, of the white water shattering on the cliffs. I remembered the folk of that land, the men who had called my father ‘lord’, but talked to him of cousins they held in common. It was the gossip of neighbours, the comfort of knowing every family within a half-day’s ride, and that was, and is, Bebbanburg to me; home. Ragnar would have given me the fortress if it could be taken, but then it would belong to the Danes and I would be nothing more than their hired man, Ealdorman at their pleasure, no better than King Egbert who was no king but a pampered dog on a short rope, and what the Dane gives, the Dane can take away, and I would hold Bebbanburg by my own effort.

Did I know all that at eleven? Some, I think. It lay in my heart, unformed, unspoken, but hard as a stone. It would be covered over in time, half forgotten and often contradicted, but it was always there. Destiny is all, Ravn liked to tell me, destiny is everything. He would even say it in English, ‘wyrd bið ful ãræd.’

‘What are you thinking?’ Rorik asked me.

‘That it would be nice to swim,’ I said.

The oars dipped and the Wind-Viper glided on into Mercia.

Next day a small force waited in our path. The Mercians had blocked the river with felled trees which did not quite bar the way, but would certainly make it hard for our oarsmen to make progress through the small gap between the tangling branches. There were about a hundred Mercians and they had a score of bowmen and spear-throwers waiting by the blockage, ready to pick off our rowers, while the rest of their men were formed into a shield wall on the eastern bank. Ragnar laughed when he saw them. That was something else I learned, the joy with which the Danes faced battle. Ragnar was whooping with joy as he leaned on the steering oar and ran the ship into the bank, and the ships behind were also grounding themselves while the horsemen who had been keeping pace with us dismounted for battle.

I watched from the Wind-Viper’s prow as the ships’ crews hurried ashore and pulled on leather or mail. What did those Mercians see? They saw young men with wild hair, wild beards and hungry faces. Men who embraced battle like a lover. If the Danes could not fight an enemy, they fought amongst themselves. Most had nothing but monstrous pride, battle-scars and well-sharpened weapons, and with those things they would take whatever they wanted, and that Mercian shield wall did not even stay to contest the fight, but once they saw they would be outnumbered they ran away to the mocking howls of Ragnar’s men who then stripped off their mail and leather and used their axes and the Wind-Viper’s hide-twisted ropes to clear away the fallen trees. It took a few hours to unblock the river, but then we were moving again. That night the ships clustered together on the riverbank, fires were lit ashore, men were posted as sentries and every sleeping warrior kept his weapons beside him, but no one troubled us and at dawn we moved on, soon coming to a town with thick earthen walls and a high palisade. This, Ragnar assumed, was the place the Mercians had failed to defend, but there seemed to be no sign of any soldiers on the wall so he ran the boat ashore again and led his crew towards the town.

The earth walls and timber palisade were both in good condition, and Ragnar marvelled that the town’s garrison had chosen to march downriver to fight us, rather than stay behind their well-tended defences. The Mercian soldiers were plainly gone now, probably fled south, for the gates were open and a dozen townsfolk were kneeling outside the wooden arch and holding out supplicant hands for mercy. Three of the terrified people were monks, their tonsured heads bowed. ‘I hate monks,’ Ragnar said cheerfully. His sword, Heart-Breaker, was in his hand and he swept her naked blade in a hissing arc.

‘Why?’ I asked.

‘Monks are like ants,’ he said, ‘wriggling about in black, being useless. I hate them. You’ll speak for me, Uhtred. Ask them what place this is?’

I asked and learned that the town was called Gegnesburh.

‘Tell them,’ Ragnar instructed me, ‘that my name is Earl Ragnar, I am called the Fearless and that I eat children when I’m not given food and silver.’

I duly told them. The kneeling men looked up at Ragnar who had unbound his hair which, had they known, was always a sign that he was in a mood for killing. His grinning men made a line behind him, a line heavy with axes, swords, spears, shields and war hammers.

‘What food there is,’ I translated a grey-bearded man’s answer, ‘is yours. But he says there is not much food.’

Ragnar smiled at that, stepped forward and, still smiling, swung Heart-Breaker so that her blade half severed the man’s head. I jumped back, not in alarm, but because I did not want my tunic spattered with his blood. ‘One less mouth to feed,’ Ragnar said cheerfully. ‘Now ask the others how much food there is.’

The grey-bearded man was now red-bearded and he was choking and twitching as he died. His struggles slowly ended and then he just lay, dying, his eyes gazing reprovingly into mine. None of his companions tried to help him, they were too frightened. ‘How much food do you have?’ I demanded.

‘There is food, lord,’ one of the monks said.

‘How much?’ I demanded again.

‘Enough.’

‘He says there’s enough,’ I told Ragnar.

‘A sword,’ Ragnar said, ‘is a great tool for discovering the truth. What about the monk’s church? How much silver does it have?’

The monk gabbled that we could look for ourselves, that we could take whatever we found, that it was all ours, anything we found was ours, all was ours. I translated these panicked statements and Ragnar again smiled. ‘He’s not telling the truth, is he?’

‘Isn’t he?’ I asked.

‘He wants me to look because he knows I won’t find, and that means they’ve hidden their treasure or had it taken away. Ask him if they’ve hidden their silver.’

I did and the monk reddened. ‘We are a poor church,’ he said, ‘with little treasure,’ and he stared wide-eyed as I translated his answer, then he tried to get up and run as Ragnar stepped forward, but he tripped over his robe and Heart-Breaker pierced his spine so that he jerked like a landed fish as he died.

There was silver, of course, and it was buried. Another of the monks told us so, and Ragnar sighed as he cleaned his sword on the dead monk’s robe. ‘They’re such fools,’ he said plaintively. ‘They’d live if they answered truthfully the first time.’

‘But suppose there wasn’t any treasure?’ I asked him.

‘Then they’d tell the truth and die,’ Ragnar said, and found that funny. ‘But what’s the point of a monk except to hoard treasure for us Danes? They’re ants who hoard silver. Find the ants’ nest, dig, and a man’s rich.’ He stepped over his victims. At first I was shocked by the ease with which he would kill a defenceless man, but Ragnar had no respect for folk who cringed and lied. He appreciated an enemy who fought, who showed spirit, but men who were weakly sly like the ones he killed at Gegnesburh’s gate were beneath his contempt, no better than animals.

We emptied Gegnesburh of food, then made the monks dig up their treasure. It was not much; two silver mass cups, three silver plates, a bronze crucifix with a silver Christ, a bone carving of angels climbing a ladder and a bag of silver pennies. Ragnar distributed the coins among his men, then hacked the silver plates and cups to pieces with an axe and shared out the scraps. He had no use for the bone carving so shattered it with his sword. ‘A weird religion,’ he said, ‘they worship just one god?’

‘One god,’ I said, ‘but he’s divided into three.’

He liked that. ‘A clever trick,’ he said, ‘but not useful. This triple god has a mother, doesn’t he?’

‘Mary,’ I said, following him as he explored the monastery in search of more plunder.

‘I wonder if her baby came out in three bits,’ he said. ‘So what’s this god’s name?’

‘Don’t know.’ I knew he had a name because Beocca had told me, but I could not remember it. ‘The three together are the trinity,’ I went on, ‘but that’s not God’s name. Usually they just call him God.’

‘Like giving a dog the name dog,’ Ragnar declared, then laughed. ‘So who’s Jesus?’

‘One of the three.’

‘The one who died, yes? And he came back to life?’

‘Yes,’ I said, suddenly fearful that the Christian god was watching me, readying a dreadful punishment for my sins.

‘Gods can do that,’ Ragnar said airily. ‘They die, come back to life. They’re gods.’ He looked at me, sensing my fear, and ruffled my hair. ‘Don’t you worry, Uhtred, the Christian god doesn’t have power here.’

‘He doesn’t?’

‘Of course not!’ He was searching a shed at the back of the monastery and found a decent sickle that he tucked into his belt. ‘Gods fight each other! Everyone knows that. Look at our gods! The Aesir and Vanir fought like cats before they made friends.’ The Aesir and the Vanir were the two families of Danish gods who now shared Asgard, though at one time they had been the bitterest of enemies. ‘Gods fight,’ Ragnar went on earnestly, ‘and some win, some lose. The Christian god is losing, otherwise why would we be here? Why would we be winning? The gods reward us if we give them respect, but the Christian god doesn’t help his people, does he? They weep rivers of tears for him, they pray to him, they give him their silver, and we come along and slaughter them! Their god is pathetic. If he had any real power then we wouldn’t be here, would we?’

It seemed an unassailable logic to me. What was the point of worshipping a god if he did not help you? And it was incontrovertible that the worshippers of Odin and Thor were winning, and I surreptitiously touched the hammer of Thor hanging from my neck as we returned to the Wind-Viper. We left Gegnesburh ravaged, its folk weeping and its store-houses emptied, and we rowed on down the wide river, the belly of our boat piled with grain, bread, salted meat and smoked fish. Later, much later, I learned that Ælswith, King Alfred’s wife, had come from Gegnesburh. Her father, the man who had failed to fight us, was Ealdorman there and she had grown up in the town and always lamented that, after she had left, the Danes had sacked the place. God, she always declared, would have his revenge on the pagans who had ravaged her home town, and it seemed wise not to tell her that I had been one of the ravagers.

We ended the voyage at a town called Snotengaham, which means the home of Snot’s people, and it was a much greater place than Gegnesburh, but its garrison had fled and those people who remained welcomed the Danes with piles of food and heaps of silver. There would have been time for a horseman to reach Snotengaham with news of Gegnesburh’s dead, and the Danes were always happy for such messengers to spread fear of their coming, and so the larger town, with its walls, fell without a fight.

Some ships’ crews were ordered to man the walls, while others raided the countryside. The first thing they sought was more horses, and when the war-bands were mounted they ranged farther afield, stealing, burning, and harrowing the land. ‘We shall stay here,’ Ragnar told me.

‘All summer?’

‘Till the world ends, Uhtred. This is Danish land now.’

At winter’s end Ivar and Ubba had sent three ships back to the Danish homeland to encourage more settlers, and those new ships began arriving in ones and twos, bringing men, women and children. The newcomers were allowed to take whatever houses they wished, except for those few that belonged to the Mercian leaders who had bent the knee to Ivar and Ubba. One of those was the bishop, a young man called Æthelbrid, who preached to his congregations that God had sent the Danes. He never said why God had done this, and perhaps he did not know, but the sermons meant that his wife and children lived and his house was safe and his church was allowed to retain one silver mass cup, though Ivar insisted that the bishop’s twin sons be held as hostages in case the Christian god changed his mind about the Danes.

Ragnar, like the other Danish leaders, constantly rode out into the country to bring back food and he liked me to go with him, for I could translate for him, and as the days passed we heard more and more stories of a great Mercian army gathering to the south, at Ledecestre, which Ragnar said was the greatest fortress in Mercia. It had been made by the Romans, who built better than any man could build now, and Burghred, Mercia’s king, was assembling his forces there, and that was why Ragnar was so intent on gathering food. ‘They’ll besiege us,’ he said, ‘but we’ll win and then Ledecestre will be ours and so will Mercia.’ He spoke very calmly, as though there could be no possibility of defeat.

Rorik stayed in the town while I rode with his father. That was because Rorik was sick again, struck by cramping pains in his belly so severe that he was sometimes reduced to helpless tears. He vomited in the night, was pale, and the only relief came from a brew of herbs made for him by an old woman who was a servant of the bishop. Ragnar worried about Rorik, yet he was pleased that his son and I were such good friends. Rorik did not question his father’s fondness for me, nor was he jealous. In time, he knew, Ragnar planned to take me back to Bebbanburg and I would be given my patrimony and he assumed I would stay his friend and so Bebbanburg would become a Danish stronghold. I would be Earl Uhtred and Rorik and his older brother would hold other strongholds, and Ragnar would be a great lord, supported by his sons and by Bebbanburg, and we would all be Danes, and Odin would smile on us, and so the world would go on until the final conflagration when the great gods fought the monsters and the army of the dead would march from Valhalla and the underworld give up its beasts and fire would consume the great tree of life, Yggdrasil. In other words everything would stay the same until it was all no more. That was what Rorik thought, and doubtless Ragnar thought so too. Destiny, Ravn said, is everything.

News came in the high summer that the Mercian army was marching at last, and that King Æthelred of Wessex was bringing his army to support Burghred, and so we were to be faced by two of the three remaining English kingdoms. We stopped our raids into the countryside and readied Snotengaham for the inevitable siege. The palisade on the earth wall was strengthened and the ditch outside the wall was deepened. The ships were drawn up on the town’s riverbank far from the walls so they could not be reduced to ash by fire-arrows shot from outside the defences, and the thatch of the buildings closest to the wall was pulled off the houses so that they could not be set ablaze.

Ivar and Ubba had decided to endure a siege because they reckoned we were strong enough to hold what we had taken, but that if we took more territory then the Danish forces would be stretched thin and could be defeated piece by piece. It was better, they reckoned, to let the enemy come and break himself on Snotengaham’s defences.

That enemy came as the poppies bloomed. The Mercian scouts arrived first, small groups of horsemen who circled the town warily, and at midday Burghred’s foot soldiers appeared, band after band of men with spears, axes, swords, sickles and hay-knives. They camped well away from the walls, using branches and turf to make a township of crude shelters that sprang up across the low hills and meadows. Snotengaham lay on the north bank of the Trente, which meant the river was between the town and the rest of Mercia, but the enemy army came from the west, having crossed the Trente somewhere to the south of the town. A few of their men stayed on the southern bank to make sure our ships did not cross the river to land men for foraging expeditions, and the presence of those men meant that the enemy surrounded us, but they made no attempt to attack us. The Mercians were waiting for the West Saxons to come and in that first week the only excitement occurred when a handful of Burghred’s archers crept towards the town and loosed a few arrows at us and the missiles whacked into the palisade and stuck there, perches for birds, and that was the extent of their belligerence. After that they fortified their camp, surrounding it with a barricade of felled trees and thorn bushes. ‘They’re frightened that we’ll make a sally and kill them all,’ Ragnar said, ‘so they’re going to sit there and try to starve us out.’

‘Will they?’ I asked.

‘They couldn’t starve a mouse in a pot,’ Ragnar said cheerfully. He had hung his shield on the outer side of the palisade, one of over twelve hundred bright-painted shields which were displayed there. We did not have twelve hundred men, but nearly all the Danes possessed more than one shield and they hung them all on the wall to make the enemy think our garrison equalled the number of shields. The great lords among the Danes hung their banners on the wall; Ubba’s raven flag and Ragnar’s eagle wing among them. The raven banner was a triangle of white cloth, fringed with white tassels, showing a black raven with spread wings, while Ragnar’s standard was a real eagle’s wing, nailed to a pole, and it was becoming so tattered that Ragnar had offered a golden arm ring to any man who could replace it. ‘If they want us out of here,’ he went on, ‘then they’d best make an assault, and they’d best do it in the next three weeks before their men go home and cut their harvest.’

But the Mercians, instead of attacking, tried to pray us out of Snotengaham. A dozen priests, all robed and carrying cross-tipped poles, and followed by a score of monks carrying sacred banners on cross-staffs, came out from behind their barricades and paraded just beyond bowshot. The flags showed saints. One of the priests scattered holy water, and the whole group stopped every few yards to pronounce curses on us. That was the day the West Saxon forces arrived to support Burghred, whose wife was sister to Alfred and to King Æthelred of Wessex, and that was the first day I ever saw the dragon standard of Wessex. It was a huge banner of heavy green cloth on which a white dragon breathed fire, and the standard-bearer galloped to catch up with the priests and the dragon streamed behind him. ‘Your turn will come,’ Ragnar said quietly, talking to the rippling dragon.

‘When?’

‘The gods only know,’ Ragnar said, still watching the standard. ‘This year we should finish off Mercia, then we’ll go to East Anglia, and after that, Wessex. To take all the land and treasure in England, Uhtred? Three years? Four? We need more ships though.’ He meant we needed more ships’ crews, more shield-Danes, more swords.

‘Why not go north?’ I asked him.

‘To Dalriada and Pictland?’ he laughed. ‘There’s nothing up there, Uhtred, except bare rocks, bare fields and bare arses. The land there is no better than at home.’ He nodded out towards the enemy encampment. ‘But this is good land. Rich and deep. You can raise children here. You can grow strong here.’ He fell silent as a group of horsemen appeared from the enemy camp and followed the rider who carried the dragon standard. Even from a long way off it was possible to see that these were great men for they rode splendid horses and had mail coats glinting beneath their dark red cloaks. ‘The King of Wessex?’ Ragnar guessed.

‘Æthelred?’

‘It’s probably him. We shall find out now.’

‘Find out what?’

‘What these West Saxons are made of. The Mercians won’t attack us, so let’s see if Æthelred’s men are any better. Dawn, Uhtred, that’s when they should come. Straight at us, ladders against the wall, lose some men, but let the rest slaughter us.’ He laughed. ‘That’s what I’d do, but that lot?’ He spat in derision.

Ivar and Ubba must have thought the same thing, for they sent two men to spy on the Mercian and West Saxon forces to see if there was any sign that ladders were being made. The two men went out at night and were supposed to skirt the besiegers’ encampment and find a place to watch the enemy from outside their fortifications, but somehow they were both seen and caught. The two men were brought to the fields in front of the wall and made to kneel there with their hands tied behind their backs. A tall Englishman stood behind them with a drawn sword and I watched as he poked one of the Danes in the back, as the Dane lifted his head and then as the sword swung. The second Dane died in the same way, and the two bodies were left for the ravens to eat. ‘Bastards,’ Ragnar said.

Ivar and Ubba had also watched the executions. I rarely saw the brothers. Ubba stayed in his house much of the time while Ivar, so thin and wraithlike, was more evident, pacing the walls every dawn and dusk, scowling at the enemy and saying little, though now he spoke urgently to Ragnar, gesturing south to the green fields beyond the river. He never seemed to speak without a snarl, but Ragnar was not offended. ‘He’s angry,’ he told me afterwards, ‘because he needs to know if they plan to assault us. Now he wants some of my men to spy on their camp, but after that?’ He nodded at the two headless bodies in the field. ‘Maybe I’d better go myself.’

‘They’ll be watching for more spies,’ I said, not wanting Ragnar to end up headless before the walls.

‘A leader leads,’ Ragnar said, ‘and you can’t ask men to risk death if you’re not willing to risk it yourself.’

‘Let me go,’ I said.

He laughed at that. ‘What kind of leader sends a boy to do a man’s job, eh?’

‘I’m English,’ I said, ‘and they won’t suspect an English boy.’

Ragnar smiled at me. ‘If you’re English,’ he said, ‘then how could we trust you to tell us the truth of what you see?’

I clutched Thor’s hammer. ‘I will tell the truth,’ I said, ‘I swear it. And I’m a Dane now! You’ve told me that! You say I’m a Dane!’

Ragnar began to take me seriously. He knelt to look into my face. ‘Are you really a Dane?’ he asked.

‘I’m a Dane,’ I said and, at that moment I meant it. At other times I was sure I was a Northumbrian, a secret sceadugengan hidden among the Danes, and in truth I was confused. I loved Ragnar as a father, was fond of Ravn, wrestled and raced and played with Rorik when he was well enough, and all of them treated me as one of them. I was just from another tribe. There were three main tribes among the Northmen; the Danes, the Norse and the Svear, but Ragnar said there were others, like the Getes, and he was not sure where the Northmen ended and the others began, but suddenly he was worried about me. ‘I’m a Dane,’ I repeated forcibly, ‘and who better than me to spy on them? I speak their language!’

‘You’re a boy,’ Ragnar said, and I thought he was refusing to let me go, but instead he was getting used to the idea. ‘No one will suspect a boy,’ he went on. He still stared at me, then stood and glanced again at the two bodies where ravens were pecking at the severed heads. ‘Are you sure, Uhtred?’

‘I’m sure.’

‘I’ll ask the brothers,’ he said, and he did, and Ivar and Ubba must have agreed for they let me go. It was after dark when the gate was opened and I slipped out. Now, I thought, I am a Shadow-Walker at last, though in truth the journey needed no supernatural skills for there was a slew of campfires in the Mercian and West Saxon lines to light the way. Ragnar had advised me to skirt the big encampment and see if there was an easy way in at the back, but instead I walked straight towards the nearest fires that lay behind the felled trees that served as the English protective wall, and beyond that black tangle I could see the dark shapes of sentries outlined by the campfires. I was nervous. For months I had been treasuring the idea of the sceadugengan, and here I was, out in the dark, and not far away there were headless bodies and my imagination invented a similar fate for myself. Why? One small part of me knew I could walk into the camp and say who I was, then demand to be taken to Burghred or to Æthelred, yet I had spoken the truth to Ragnar. I would go back, and I would tell the truth. I had promised that, and to a boy promises are solemn things, buttressed by the dread of divine revenge. I would choose my own tribe in time, but that time had not yet come, and so I crept across the field feeling very small and vulnerable, my heart thumping against my ribs, and my soul consumed by the importance of what I did.

And halfway to the Mercian camp I felt the hairs on the back of my neck prickle. I had the sensation I was being followed and I twisted, listened and stared, and saw nothing but the black shapes that shudder in the night, but like a hare I sprinted to one side, dropped suddenly and listened again, and this time I was sure I heard a footfall in the grass. I waited, watched, saw nothing and crept on until I reached the Mercian barricade and I waited again there, but heard nothing more behind me and decided I had been imagining things. I had also been worrying that I would not be able to pass the Mercian obstacles, but in the end it was simple enough because a big felled tree left plenty of space for a boy to wriggle through its branches, and I did it slowly, making no noise, then ran on into the camp and was almost immediately challenged by a sentry. ‘Who are you?’ the man snarled and I could see the firelight reflecting from a glittering spear head that was being run towards me.

‘Osbert,’ I said, using my old name.

‘A boy?’ The man checked, surprised.

‘Needed a piss.’

‘Hell, boy, what’s wrong with pissing outside your shelter?’

‘My master doesn’t like it.’

‘Who’s your master?’ The spear had been lifted and the man was peering at me in the small light from the fires.

‘Beocca,’ I said. It was the first name that came to my head.

‘The priest?’

That surprised me, and I hesitated, but then nodded and that satisfied the man. ‘Best get back to him then,’ he said.

‘I’m lost.’

‘Shouldn’t come all this way to piss on my sentry post then, should you?’ he said, then pointed. ‘It’s that way, boy.’

So I walked openly through the camp, past the fires and past the small shelters where men snored. A couple of dogs barked at me. Horses whinnied. Somewhere a flute sounded and a woman sang softly. Sparks flew up from the dying fires.

The sentry had pointed me towards the West Saxon lines. I knew that because the dragon banner was hung outside a great tent that was lit by a larger fire, and I moved towards that tent for lack of anywhere else to go. I was looking for ladders, but saw none. A child cried in a shelter, a woman moaned, and some men sang near a fire. One of the singers saw me, shouted a challenge and then realised I was just a boy and waved me away. I was close to the big fire now, the one that lit the front of the bannered tent, and I skirted it, going towards the darkness behind the tent that was lit from within by candles or lanterns. Two men stood guard at the tent’s front and voices murmured from inside, but no one noticed me as I slipped through the shadows, still looking for ladders. Ragnar had said the ladders would be stored together, either at the heart of the camp or close to its edge, but I saw none. Instead I heard sobbing.

I had reached the back of the big tent and was hiding beside a great stack of firewood and, judging by the stink, was close to a latrine. I crouched and saw a man kneeling in the open space between the woodpile and the big tent and it was that man who was sobbing. He was also praying and sometimes beating his chest with his fists. I was astonished, even alarmed by what he did, but I lay on my belly like a snake and wriggled in the shadows to get closer to see what else he might do.

He groaned as if in pain, raised his hands to the sky, then bent forward as if worshipping the earth. ‘Spare me, God,’ I heard him say, ‘spare me. I am a sinner.’ He vomited then, though he did not sound drunk, and after he had spewed up he moaned. I sensed he was a young man, then a flap of the tent lifted and a wash of candlelight spilled across the grass. I froze, still as a log, and saw that it was indeed a young man who was so miserable, and then also saw, to my astonishment, that the person who had lifted the tent flap was Father Beocca. I had thought it a coincidence that there should be two priests with that name, but it was no coincidence at all. It was indeed red-haired, cross-eyed Beocca and he was here, in Mercia.

‘My lord,’ Beocca said, dropping the flap and casting darkness over the young man.

‘I am a sinner, father,’ the man said. He had stopped sobbing, perhaps because he did not want Beocca to see such evidence of weakness, but his voice was full of sadness. ‘I am a grievous sinner.’

‘We are all sinners, my lord.’

‘A grievous sinner,’ the young man repeated, ignoring Beocca’s solace. ‘And I am married!’

‘Salvation lies in remorse, my lord.’

‘Then, God knows, I should be redeemed, for my remorse would fill the sky.’ He lifted his head to stare at the stars. ‘The flesh, father,’ he groaned, ‘the flesh.’

Beocca walked towards me, stopped and turned. He was almost close enough for me to touch, but he had no idea I was there. ‘God sends temptation to test us, my lord,’ he said quietly.

‘He sends women to test us,’ the young man said harshly, ‘and we fail, and then he sends the Danes to punish us for our failure.’

‘His way is hard,’ Beocca said, ‘and no one has ever doubted it.’

The young man, still kneeling, bowed his head. ‘I should never have married, father. I should have joined the church. Gone to a monastery.’

‘And God would have found a great servant in you, my lord, but he had other plans for you. If your brother dies …’

‘Pray God he does not! What sort of king would I be?’

‘God’s king, my lord.’

So that, I thought, was Alfred. That was the very first time I ever saw him or heard his voice and he never knew. I lay in the grass, listening, as Beocca consoled the prince for yielding to temptation. It seemed Alfred had humped a servant girl and, immediately afterwards, had been overcome by physical pain and what he called spiritual torment.

‘What you must do, my lord,’ Beocca said, ‘is bring the girl into your service.’

‘No!’ Alfred protested.

A harp began to play in the tent and both men checked to listen, then Beocca crouched by the unhappy prince and put a hand on his shoulder. ‘Bring the girl into your service,’ Beocca repeated, ‘and resist her. Lay that tribute before God, let him see your strength, and he will reward you. Thank God for tempting you, lord, and praise him when you resist the temptation.’

‘God will kill me,’ Alfred said bitterly. ‘I swore I wouldn’t do it again. Not after Osferth.’ Osferth? The name meant nothing to me. Later, much later, I discovered Osferth was Alfred’s bastard son, whelped on another servant girl. ‘I prayed to be spared the temptation,’ Alfred went on, ‘and to be afflicted with pain as a reminder, and as a distraction, and God in his mercy made me sick, but still I yielded. I am the most miserable of sinners.’

‘We are all sinners,’ Beocca said, his good hand still on Alfred’s shoulder, ‘and we are all fallen short of the glory of God.’

‘None has fallen as far as me,’ Alfred moaned.

‘God sees your remorse,’ Beocca said, ‘and he will lift you up. Welcome the temptation, lord,’ he went on urgently, ‘welcome it, resist it, and give thanks to God when you succeed. And God will reward you, lord, he will reward you.’

‘By removing the Danes?’ Alfred asked bitterly.

‘He will, my lord, he will.’

‘But not by waiting,’ Alfred said, and now there was a sudden hardness in his voice that made Beocca draw away from him. Alfred stood, towering over the priest. ‘We should attack them!’

‘Burghred knows his business,’ Beocca said soothingly, ‘and so does your brother. The pagans will starve, my lord, if that is God’s will.’

So I had my answer, and it was that the English were not planning an assault, but rather hoped to starve Snotengaham into surrender. I dared not carry that answer straight back to the town, not while Beocca and Alfred were so close to me, and so I stayed and listened as Beocca prayed with the prince and then, when Alfred was calm, the two moved back to the tent and went inside.

And I went back. It took a long time, but no one saw me. I was a true sceadugengan that night, moving among the shadows like a spectre, climbing the hill to the town until I could run the last hundred paces and I called Ragnar’s name and the gate creaked open and I was back in Snotengaham.

Ragnar took me to see Ubba when the sun rose and, to my surprise, Weland was there, Weland the snake, and he gave me a sour look, though not so sour as the scowl on Ubba’s dark face. ‘So what did you do?’ he growled.

‘I saw no ladders …’ I began.

‘What did you do?’ Ubba snarled, and so I told my tale from the beginning, how I had crossed the fields and had thought I was being followed, and had dodged like a hare, then gone through the barricade and spoken to the sentry. Ubba stopped me there and looked at Weland. ‘Well?’

Weland nodded. ‘I saw him through the barricade, lord, heard him speak to a man.’

So Weland had followed me? I looked at Ragnar who shrugged. ‘My lord Ubba wanted a second man to go,’ he explained, ‘and Weland offered.’

Weland gave me a smile, the kind of smile the devil might give a bishop entering hell. ‘I could not get through the barrier, lord,’ he told Ubba.

‘But you saw the boy go through?’

‘And heard him speak to the sentry, lord, though what he said I could not tell.’

‘Did you see ladders?’ Ubba asked Weland.

‘No, lord, but I only skirted the fence.’

Ubba stared at Weland, making him uncomfortable, then transferred his dark eyes to me and made me uncomfortable. ‘So you got through the barrier,’ he said, ‘so what did you see?’ I told him how I had found the large tent, and of the conversation I had overheard, how Alfred had wept because he had sinned, and how he had wanted to attack the town and how the priest had said that God would starve the Danes if that was his will, and Ubba believed me because he reckoned a boy could not make up the story of the servant girl and the prince.

Besides, I was amused, and it showed. Alfred, I thought, was a pious weakling, a weeping penitent, a pathetic nothing, and even Ubba smiled as I described the sobbing prince and the earnest priest. ‘So,’ Ubba asked me, ‘no ladders?’

‘I saw none, lord.’

He stared at me with that fearsomely bearded face and then, to my astonishment, he took off one of his arm rings and tossed it to me. ‘You’re right,’ he told Ragnar, ‘he is a Dane.’

‘He’s a good boy,’ Ragnar said.

‘Sometimes the mongrel you find in the field turns out to be useful,’ Ubba said, then beckoned to an old man who had been sitting on a stool in the room’s corner.

The old man was called Storri and, like Ravn, he was a skald, but also a sorcerer and Ubba would do nothing without his advice, and now, without saying a word, Storri took a sheaf of thin white sticks, each the length of a man’s hand, and he held them just above the floor, muttered a prayer to Odin, then let them go. They made a small clattering noise as they fell, and then Storri leaned forward to look at the pattern they made.

They were runesticks. Many Danes consulted the runesticks, but Storri’s skill at reading the signs was famous, and Ubba was a man so riddled with superstition that he would do nothing unless he believed the gods were on his side. ‘Well?’ he asked impatiently.

Storri ignored Ubba, instead he stared at the score of sticks, seeing if he could detect a rune letter or a significant pattern in their random scatter. He moved around the small pile, still peering, then nodded slowly. ‘It could not be better,’ he said.

‘The boy told the truth?’

‘The boy told the truth,’ Storri said, ‘but the sticks talk of today, not of last night, and they tell me all is well.’

‘Good.’ Ubba stood and took his sword from a peg on the wall. ‘No ladders,’ he said to Ragnar, ‘so no assault. We shall go.’

They had been worried that the Mercians and West Saxons would launch an attack on the walls while they made a raid across the river. The southern bank was lightly garrisoned by the besiegers, holding little more than a cordon of men to deter forage parties crossing the Trente, but that afternoon Ubba led six ships across the river and attacked those Mercians, and the runesticks had not lied, for no Danes died and they brought back horses, weapons, armour and prisoners.

Twenty prisoners.

The Mercians had beheaded two of our men, so now Ubba killed twenty of theirs, and did it in their sight so they could see his revenge. The headless bodies were thrown into the ditch in front of the wall and the twenty heads were stuck on spears and mounted above the northern gate.

‘In war,’ Ragnar told me, ‘be ruthless.’

‘Why did you send Weland to follow me?’ I asked him, hurt.

‘Because Ubba insisted on it,’ he said.

‘Because you didn’t trust me?’

‘Because Ubba trusts no one except Storri,’ he said. ‘And I trust you, Uhtred.’

The heads above Snotengaham’s gate were pecked by birds till they were nothing but skulls with hanks of hair that stirred in the summer wind. The Mercians and the West Saxons still did not attack. The sun shone. The river rippled prettily past the town where the ships were drawn up on the bank.

Ravn, though he was blind, liked to come to the ramparts where he would demand that I describe all I could see. Nothing changes, I would say, the enemy are still behind their hedge of felled trees, there are clouds above the distant hills, a hawk hunts, the wind ripples the grass, the swifts are gathering in groups, nothing changes, and tell me about the runesticks, I begged him.

‘The sticks!’ he laughed.

‘Do they work?’

He thought about it. ‘If you can read them, yes. I was good at reading the runes before I lost my eyes.’

‘So they do work,’ I said eagerly.

Ravn gestured towards the landscape he could not see. ‘Out there, Uhtred,’ he said, ‘there are a dozen signs from the gods, and if you know the signs then you know what the gods want. The runesticks give the same message, but I have noticed one thing.’ He paused and I had to prompt him, and he sighed as though he knew he should not say more. But he did. ‘The signs are best read by a clever man,’ he went on, ‘and Storri is clever. I dare say I am no fool.’

I did not really understand what he was saying. ‘But Storri is always right?’

‘Storri is cautious. He won’t take risks, and Ubba, though he doesn’t know it, likes that.’

‘But the sticks are messages from the gods?’

‘The wind is a message from the gods,’ Ravn said, ‘as is the flight of a bird, the fall of a feather, the rise of a fish, the shape of a cloud, the cry of a vixen, all are messages, but in the end, Uhtred, the gods speak in only one place.’ He tapped my head. ‘There.’

I still did not understand and was obscurely disappointed. ‘Could I read the sticks?’

‘Of course,’ he said, ‘but it would be sensible to wait till you’re older. What are you now?’

‘Eleven,’ I said, tempted to say twelve.

‘Maybe you’d best wait a year or two before reading the sticks. Wait till you’re old enough to marry, four or five years from now?’

That seemed an unlikely proposition for I had no interest in marriage back then. I was not even interested in girls, though that would change soon enough.

‘Thyra, perhaps?’ Ravn suggested.

‘Thyra!’ I thought of Ragnar’s daughter as a playmate, not as a wife. Indeed, the very idea of it made me laugh.

Ravn smiled at my amusement. ‘Tell me, Uhtred, why we let you live.’

‘I don’t know.’

‘When Ragnar captured you,’ he said, ‘he thought you could be ransomed, but he decided to keep you. I thought he was a fool, but he was right.’

‘I’m glad,’ I said, meaning it.

‘Because we need the English,’ Ravn went on. ‘We are few, the English are many, despite which we shall take their land, but we can only hold it with the help of Englishmen. A man cannot live in a home that is forever besieged. He needs peace to grow crops and raise cattle, and we need you. When men see that Earl Uhtred is on our side then they won’t fight us. And you must marry a Danish girl so that when your children grow they will be both Dane and English and see no difference.’ He paused, contemplating that distant future, then chuckled. ‘Just make sure they’re not Christians, Uhtred.’

‘They will worship Odin,’ I said, again meaning it.

‘Christianity is a soft religion,’ Ravn said savagely, ‘a woman’s creed. It doesn’t ennoble men, it makes them into worms. I hear birds.’

‘Two ravens,’ I said, ‘flying north.’

‘A real message!’ he said delightedly, ‘Huginn and Muminn are going to Odin.’

Huginn and Muminn were the twin ravens that perched on the god’s shoulders where they whispered into his ear. They did for Odin what I did for Ravn, they watched and told him what they saw. He sent them to fly all over the world and to bring back news, and the news they carried back that day was that the smoke from the Mercian encampment was less thick. Fewer fires were lit at night. Men were leaving that army.

‘Harvest time,’ Ravn said in disgust.

‘Does that matter?’

‘They call their army the fyrd,’ he explained, forgetting for a moment that I was English, ‘and every able man is supposed to serve in the fyrd, but when the harvest ripens they fear hunger in the winter so they go home to cut their rye and barley.’

‘Which we then take?’

He laughed. ‘You’re learning, Uhtred.’

Yet the Mercians and West Saxons still hoped they could starve us and, though they were losing men every day, they did not give up until Ivar loaded a cart with food. He piled cheeses, smoked fish, newly baked bread, salted pork and a vat of ale onto the cart and, at dawn, a dozen men dragged it towards the English camp. They stopped just out of bowshot and shouted to the enemy sentries that the food was a gift from Ivar the Boneless to King Burghred.

Next day a Mercian horseman rode towards the town carrying a leafy branch as a sign of truce. The English wanted to talk. ‘Which means,’ Ravn told me, ‘that we have won.’

‘It does?’

‘When an enemy wants to talk,’ he said, ‘it means he does not want to fight. So we have won.’

And he was right.