Читать книгу The Last Kingdom Series Books 1-6 - Bernard Cornwell - Страница 18

King Edmund of East Anglia is now remembered as a saint, as one of those blessed souls who live for ever in the shadow of God. Or so the priests tell me. In heaven, they say, the saints occupy a privileged place, living on the high platform of God’s great hall where they spend their time singing God’s praises. For ever. Just singing. Beocca always told me that it would be an ecstatic existence, but to me it seems very dull. The Danes reckon their dead warriors are carried to Valhalla, the corpse-hall of Odin, where they spend their days fighting and their nights feasting and swiving, and I dare not tell the priests that this seems a far better way to endure the afterlife than singing to the sound of golden harps. I once asked a bishop whether there were any women in heaven. ‘Of course there are, my lord,’ he answered, happy that I was taking an interest in doctrine, ‘many of the most blessed saints are women.’

‘I mean women we can hump, bishop.’

He said he would pray for me. Perhaps he did.

I do not know if King Edmund was a saint. He was a fool, that was for sure. He had given the Danes refuge before they attacked Eoferwic, and given them more than refuge. He had paid them coin, provided them with food and supplied their army with horses, all on the two promises that they would leave East Anglia in the spring and that they would not harm a single churchman. They kept their promises, but now, two years later and much stronger, the Danes were back, and King Edmund had decided to fight them. He had seen what had happened to Mercia and Northumbria, and must have known his own kingdom would suffer the same fate, and so he gathered his fyrd and prayed to his god and marched to do battle. First he faced us by the sea, then, hearing that Ivar was marching around the edge of the great watery wastes west of the Gewæsc, he turned about to confront him. Ubba then led our fleet up the Gewæsc and we nosed into one of the rivers until the channel was so narrow our oars could not be used, and then men towed the boats, wading through waist-deep water until we could go no farther and there we left the ships under guard while the rest of us followed soggy paths through endless marshland until, at long last, we came to higher ground. No one knew where we were, only that if we went south we had to reach the road along which Edmund had marched to confront Ivar. Cut that road and we would trap him between our forces and Ivar’s army.

Which is precisely what happened. Ivar fought him, shield wall against shield wall, and we knew none of it until the first East Anglian fugitives came streaming eastwards to find another shield wall waiting for them. They scattered rather than fight us, we advanced, and from the few prisoners we took we discovered that Ivar had beaten them easily. That was confirmed next day when the first horsemen from Ivar’s forces reached us.

King Edmund fled southwards. East Anglia was a big country, he could easily have found refuge in a fortress, or else he could have gone to Wessex, but instead he put his faith in God and took shelter in a small monastery at Dic. The monastery was lost in the wetlands and perhaps he believed he would never be found there, or else, as I heard, one of the monks promised him that God would shroud the monastery in a perpetual fog in which the pagans would get lost, but the fog never came and the Danes arrived instead.

Ivar, Ubba and their brother Halfdan rode to Dic, taking half their army while the other half set about pacifying East Anglia, which meant raping, burning and killing until the people submitted, which most did swiftly enough. East Anglia, in short, fell as easily as Mercia, and the only bad news for the Danes was that there had been unrest in Northumbria. Rumours spoke of some kind of revolt, Danes had been killed, and Ivar wanted that rising quenched, but he dared not leave East Anglia so soon after capturing it, so at Dic he made a proposal to King Edmund that would leave Edmund as king just as Burghred still ruled over Mercia.

The meeting was held in the monastery’s church that was a surprisingly large hall made of timber and thatch, but with great leather panels hanging on the walls. The panels were painted with gaudy scenes. One of the pictures showed naked folk tumbling down to hell where a massive serpent with a fanged mouth swallowed them up. ‘Corpse-Ripper,’ Ragnar said with a shudder.

‘Corpse-Ripper?’

‘A serpent that waits in Niflheim,’ he explained, touching his hammer amulet. Niflheim, I knew, was a kind of Norse hell, but unlike the Christian hell, Niflheim was icy cold. ‘Corpse-Ripper feeds on the dead,’ Ragnar went on, ‘but he also gnaws at the tree of life. He wants to kill the whole world and bring time to an end.’ He touched his hammer again.

Another panel, behind the altar, showed Christ on the cross, and next to it was a third painted leather panel that fascinated Ivar. A man, naked but for a loincloth, had been tied to a stake and was being used as a target by archers. At least a score of arrows had punctured his white flesh, but he still had a saintly expression and a secret smile as though, despite his troubles, he was quite enjoying himself. ‘Who is that?’ Ivar wanted to know.

‘The blessed Saint Sebastian,’ King Edmund was seated in front of the altar, and his interpreter provided the answer. Ivar, skull eyes staring at the painting, wanted to know the whole story, and Edmund recounted how the blessed Saint Sebastian, a Roman soldier, had refused to renounce his faith and so the emperor had ordered him shot to death with arrows. ‘Yet he lived!’ Edmund said eagerly, ‘he lived because God protected him and God be praised for that mercy.’

‘He lived?’ Ivar asked suspiciously.

‘So the emperor had him clubbed to death instead,’ the interpreter finished the tale.

‘So he didn’t live?’

‘He went to heaven,’ King Edmund said, ‘so he lived.’

Ubba intervened, wanting to have the concept of heaven explained to him, and Edmund eagerly sketched its delights, but Ubba spat in derision when he realised that the Christian heaven was Valhalla without any of the amusements. ‘And Christians want to go to heaven?’ he asked in disbelief.

‘Of course,’ the interpreter said.

Ubba sneered. He and his two brothers were attended by as many Danish warriors as could cram themselves into the church, while King Edmund had an entourage of two priests and six monks who all listened as Ivar proposed his settlement. King Edmund could live, he could rule in East Anglia, but the chief fortresses were to be garrisoned by Danes, and Danes were to be granted whatever land they required, except for royal land. Edmund would be expected to provide horses for the Danish army, coin and food for the Danish warriors, and his fyrd, what was left of it, would march under Danish orders. Edmund had no sons, but his chief men, those who lived, had sons who would become hostages to ensure that the East Anglians kept the terms Ivar proposed.

‘And if I say no?’ Edmund asked.

Ivar was amused by that. ‘We take the land anyway.’

The king consulted his priests and monks. Edmund was a tall, spare man, bald as an egg though he was only about thirty years old. He had protruding eyes, a pursed mouth and a perpetual frown. He was wearing a white tunic which made him look like a priest himself. ‘What of God’s church?’ he finally asked Ivar.

‘What of it?’

‘Your men have desecrated God’s altars, slaughtered his servants, defiled his image and stolen his tribute!’ The king was angry now. One of his hands was clenched on the arm of his chair that was set in front of the altar, while the other hand was a fist which beat time with his accusations.

‘Your god cannot look after himself?’ Ubba enquired.

‘Our God is a mighty God,’ Edmund declared, ‘the creator of the world, yet he also allows evil to exist to test us.’

‘Amen,’ one of the priests murmured as Ivar’s interpreter translated the words.

‘He brought you!’ the king spat, ‘pagans from the north! Jeremiah foretold this!’

‘Jeremiah?’ Ivar asked, quite lost now.

One of the monks had a book, the first I had seen in many years, and he unwrapped its leather cover, paged through the stiff leaves and gave it to the king who reached into a pocket and took out a small ivory pointer that he used to indicate the words he wanted. ‘Quia malum ego,’ he thundered, the pale pointer moving along the lines, ‘adduco ab aquilone et contritionem magnam!’

He stopped there, glaring at Ivar, and some of the Danes, impressed by the forcefulness of the king’s words, even though none of them understood a single one of them, touched their hammer charms. The priests around Edmund looked reproachfully at us. A sparrow flew in through a high window and perched for a moment on an arm of the high wooden cross that stood on the altar.

Ivar’s dread face showed no reaction to Jeremiah’s words and it finally dawned on the East Anglian interpreter, who was one of the priests, that the king’s impassioned reading had meant nothing to any of us. ‘For I will bring evil from the north,’ he translated, ‘and great destruction.’

‘It is in the book!’ Edmund said fiercely, giving the volume back to the monk.

‘You can keep your church,’ Ivar said carelessly.

‘It is not enough,’ Edmund said. He stood up to give his next words more force. ‘I will rule here,’ he went on, ‘and I will suffer your presence if I must, and I will provide you with horses, food, coin and hostages, but only if you, and all of your men, submit to God. You must be baptised!’

That word was lost on the Danish interpreter, and on the king’s, and finally Ubba looked to me for help. ‘You have to stand in a barrel of water,’ I said, remembering how Beocca had baptised me after my brother’s death, ‘and they pour more water over you.’

‘They want to wash me?’ Ubba asked, astonished.

I shrugged. ‘That’s what they do, lord.’

‘You will become Christians!’ Edmund said, then shot me an irritated look. ‘We can baptise in the river, boy. Barrels are not necessary.’

‘They want to wash you in the river,’ I explained to Ivar and Ubba, and the Danes laughed.

Ivar thought about it. Standing in a river for a few minutes was not such a bad thing, especially if it meant he could hurry back to quell whatever trouble afflicted Northumbria. ‘I can go on worshipping Odin once I’m washed?’ he asked.

‘Of course not!’ Edmund said angrily. ‘There is only one God!’

‘There are many gods,’ Ivar snapped back, ‘many! Everyone knows that.’

‘There is only one God, and you must serve him.’

‘But we’re winning,’ Ivar explained patiently, almost as if he talked to a child, ‘which means our gods are beating your one god.’

The king shuddered at this awful heresy. ‘Your gods are false gods,’ he said, ‘they are turds of the devil, they are evil things who will bring darkness to the world, while our God is great, he is all powerful, he is magnificent.’

‘Show me,’ Ivar said.

Those two words brought silence. The king, his priests and monks all stared at Ivar in evident puzzlement.

‘Prove it,’ Ivar said, and his Danes murmured their support of the idea.

King Edmund blinked, evidently lost for inspiration, then had a sudden idea and pointed at the leather panel on which was painted Saint Sebastian’s experience of being an archers’ target. ‘Our God spared the blessed Saint Sebastian from death by arrows!’ Edmund said, ‘which is proof enough, is it not?’

‘But the man still died,’ Ivar pointed out.

‘Only because that was God’s will.’

Ivar thought about that. ‘So would your god protect you from my arrows?’ he asked.

‘If it is his will, yes.’

‘So let’s try,’ Ivar proposed. ‘We shall shoot arrows at you, and if you survive then we’ll all be washed.’

Edmund stared at the Dane, wondering if he was serious, then looked nervous when he saw that Ivar was not joking. The king opened his mouth, found he had nothing to say and closed it again, then one of his tonsured monks murmured to him and he must have been trying to persuade the king that God was suggesting this ordeal in order to extend his church, and that a miracle would result, and the Danes would become Christians and we would all be friends and end up singing together on the high platform in heaven. The king did not look entirely convinced by this argument, if that was indeed what the monk was proposing, but the Danes wanted to attempt the miracle now and it was no longer up to Edmund to accept or refuse the trial.

A dozen men shoved the monks and priests aside while more went outside to find bows and arrows. The king, trapped in his defence of God, was kneeling at the altar, praying as hard as any man has ever prayed. The Danes were grinning. I was enjoying it. I think I rather hoped to see a miracle, not because I was a Christian, but because I just wanted to see a miracle. Beocca had often told me about miracles, stressing that they were the real proof of Christianity’s truths, but I had never seen one. No one had ever walked on the water at Bebbanburg and no lepers were healed there and no angels had filled our night skies with blazing glory, but now, perhaps, I would see the power of God that Beocca had forever preached to me. Brida just wanted to see Edmund dead.

‘Are you ready?’ Ivar demanded of the king.

Edmund looked at his priests and monks and I wondered if he was about to suggest that one of them should replace him in this test of God’s power. Then he frowned and looked back to Ivar. ‘I will accept your proposal,’ he said.

‘That we shoot arrows at you?’

‘That I remain king here.’

‘But you want to wash me first.’

‘We can dispense with that,’ Edmund said.

‘No,’ Ivar said. ‘You have claimed your god is all powerful, that he is the only god, so I want it proved. If you are right then all of us will be washed. Are we agreed?’ This question was asked of the Danes who roared their approval.

‘Not me,’ Ravn said, ‘I won’t be washed.’

‘We will all be washed!’ Ivar snarled, and I realised he truly was interested in the outcome of the test, more interested, indeed, than he was in making a quick and convenient peace with Edmund. All men need the support of their god and Ivar was trying to discover whether he had, all these years, been worshipping at the wrong shrine. ‘Are you wearing armour?’ he asked Edmund.

‘No.’

‘Best to be sure,’ Ubba intervened and glanced at the fatal painting. ‘Strip him,’ he ordered.

The king and the churchmen protested, but the Danes would not be denied and King Edmund was stripped stark naked. Brida enjoyed that. ‘He’s puny,’ she said. Edmund, the butt of laughter now, did his best to look dignified. The priests and monks were on their knees, praying, while six archers took their stance a dozen paces from Edmund.

‘We are going to find out,’ Ivar told us, stilling the laughter, ‘whether the English god is as powerful as our Danish gods. If he is, and if the king lives, then we shall become Christians, all of us!’

‘Not me,’ Ravn said again, but quietly so that Ivar could not hear. ‘Tell me what happens, Uhtred.’

It was soon told. Six arrows hit, the king screamed, blood spattered the altar, he fell down, he twitched like a gaffed salmon, and six more arrows thumped home. Edmund twitched some more, and the archers kept on shooting, though their aim was bad because they were half helpless with laughter, and they went on shooting until the king was as full of feathered shafts as a hedgehog has spikes. And he was quite dead by then. He was bloodied, his white skin red-laced, open-mouthed and dead. His god had failed him miserably. Nowadays, of course, that story is never told, instead children learn how brave Saint Edmund stood up to the Danes, demanded their conversion and was murdered. So now he is a martyr and saint, warbling happily in heaven, but the truth is that he was a fool and talked himself into martyrdom.

The priests and monks wailed, so Ivar ordered them killed as well, then he decreed that Earl Godrim, one of his chiefs, would rule in East Anglia and that Halfdan would savage the country to quench the last sparks of resistance. Godrim and Halfdan would be given a third of the army to keep East Anglia quiet, while the rest of us would return to subdue the unrest in Northumbria.

So now East Anglia was gone.

And Wessex was the last kingdom of England.

We returned to Northumbria, half rowing and half sailing the Wind-Viper up the gentle coast, then rowing against the rivers’ currents as we travelled up the Humber, then the Ouse until Eoferwic’s walls came in sight, and there we hauled the ship onto dry land so she would not rot through the winter. Ivar and Ubba returned with us, so that a whole fleet skimmed the river, oars dripping, beastless prows bearing branches of green oak to show we came home victorious. We brought home much treasure. The Danes set much store by treasure. Their men follow their leaders because they know they will be rewarded with silver, and in the taking of three of England’s four kingdoms the Danes had amassed a fortune which was shared among the men and some, a few, decided to take their money back home to Denmark. Most stayed, for the richest kingdom remained undefeated and men reckoned they would all become as wealthy as gods once Wessex fell.

Ivar and Ubba had come to Eoferwic expecting trouble. They had their shields displayed on the flanks of their ships, but whatever unrest had disturbed Northumbria had not affected the city and King Egbert, who ruled at the pleasure of the Danes, sulkily denied there had been any rising at all. Archbishop Wulfhere said the same. ‘There is always banditry,’ he declared loftily, ‘and perhaps you heard rumours of it?’

‘Or perhaps you are deaf,’ Ivar snarled, and Ivar was right to be suspicious for, once it was known that the army had returned, messengers came from Ealdorman Ricsig of Dunholm. Dunholm was a great fortress on a high crag that was almost surrounded by the River Wiire, and the crag and the river made Dunholm almost as strong as Bebbanburg. It was ruled by Ricsig who had never drawn his sword against the Danes. When we attacked Eoferwic and my father was killed, Ricsig had claimed to be sick and his men had stayed home, but now he sent servants to tell Ivar that a band of Danes had been slaughtered at Gyruum. That was the site of a famous monastery where a man called Bede wrote a history of the English church which Beocca had always praised to me, saying that when I learned to read properly I could give myself the treat of reading it. I have yet to do so, but I have been to Gyruum and seen where the book was written for Ragnar was asked to take his men there and discover what had happened.

It seemed six Danes, all of them masterless men, had gone to Gyruum and demanded to see the monastery’s treasury and, when the monks claimed to be penniless, the six had started killing, but the monks had fought back and, as there were over a score of monks, and as they were helped by some men from the town, they succeeded in killing the six Danes who had then been spitted on posts and left to rot on the foreshore. Thus far, as Ragnar admitted, the fault lay with the Danes, but the monks, encouraged by this slaughter, had marched west up the River Tine, and attacked a Danish settlement where there were only a few men, those too old or too sick to travel south with the army, and there they had raped and killed at least a score of women and children, proclaiming that this was now a holy war. More men had joined the makeshift army, but Ealdorman Ricsig, fearing the revenge of the Danes, had sent his own troops to disperse them. He had captured a good number of the rebels, including a dozen monks, who were now held at his fortress above the river at Dunholm.

All this we heard from Ricsig’s messengers, then from folk who had survived the massacre, and one of those was a girl the same age as Ragnar’s daughter, and she said the monks had raped her one at a time, and afterwards they had forcibly baptised her. She said there had been nuns present as well, women who had urged the men on and had taken part in the slaughter afterwards. ‘Nests of vipers,’ Ragnar said. I had never seen him so angry, not even when Sven had exposed himself to Thyra. We dug up some of the Danish dead and all were naked and all were blood-spattered. They had all been tortured.

A priest was found and made to tell us the names of the chief monasteries and nunneries in Northumbria. Gyruum was one, of course, and just across the river was a large nunnery, while to the south, where the Wiire met the sea, was a second monastery. The house at Streonshall was close to Eoferwic, and that held many nuns, while close to Bebbanburg, on the island that Beocca had always told me was sacred, was the monastery of Lindisfarena. There were many others, but Ragnar was content with the chief places, and he sent men to Ivar and Ubba suggesting that the nuns of Streonshall should be dispersed, and any found to have joined the revolt should be killed, then he set about Gyruum. Every monk was killed, the buildings that were not made of stone were burned, the treasures, for they did indeed have silver and gold hidden beneath their church, were taken. I remember we discovered a great pile of writings, sheet upon sheet of parchments, all smothered in tight black writing, and I have no idea what the writings were, and now I never will, for they were all burned, and once Gyruum was no more we went south to the monastery at the mouth of the Wiire and we did the same there, and afterwards crossed the Tine and obliterated the nunnery on the northern bank. The nuns there, led by their abbess, deliberately scarred their own faces. They knew we were coming and so, to deter rape, cut their cheeks and foreheads and so met us all bloody, screaming and ugly. Why they did not run away I do not know, but instead they waited for us, cursed us, prayed for heaven’s revenge on us, and died.

I never told Alfred that I took part in that famous harrowing of the northern houses. The tale is still told as evidence of Danish ferocity and untrustworthiness, indeed every English child is told the story of the nuns who cut their faces to the bone so that they would be too ugly to rape, though that did not work any more than King Edmund’s prayers had saved him from arrows. I remember one Easter listening to a sermon about the nuns, and it was all I could do not to interrupt and say that it had not happened as the priest described. The priest claimed that the Danes had promised that no monk or nun would ever be hurt in Northumbria, and that was not true, and he claimed that there was no cause for the massacres, which was equally false, and then he told a marvellous tale of how the nuns had prayed and God had placed an invisible curtain at the nunnery gate, and the Danes had pushed against the curtain and could not pierce it, and I was wondering why, if the nuns had this invisible shield, they had bothered to scar themselves, but they must have known how the story would end, because the Danes were supposed to have fetched a score of small children from the nearby village and threatened to cut their throats unless the curtain was lifted, which it was.

None of that happened. We arrived, they screamed, the young ones were raped and then they died. But not all of them, despite the famous tales. At least two were pretty and not at all scarred, and both of them stayed with Ragnar’s men and one of them gave birth to a child who grew up to become a famous Danish warrior. Still, priests have never been great men for the truth and I kept quiet which was just as well. In truth we never killed everybody because Ravn drove it home to me that you always left one person alive to tell the tale so that news of the horror would spread.

Once the nunnery was burned we went to Dunholm where Ragnar thanked the Ealdorman Ricsig, though Ricsig was plainly shocked by the revenge the Danes had taken. ‘Not every monk and nun took part in the slaughter,’ he pointed out reprovingly.

‘They are all evil,’ Ragnar insisted.

‘Their houses,’ Ricsig said, ‘are places of prayer and of contemplation, places of learning.’

‘Tell me,’ Ragnar demanded, ‘what use is prayer, contemplation or learning? Does prayer grow rye? Does contemplation fill a fishing net? Does learning build a house or plough a field?’

Ricsig had no answer to those questions, nor indeed did the Bishop of Dunholm, a timid man who made no protest at the slaughter, not even when Ricsig meekly handed over his prisoners who were put to death in various imaginative ways. Ragnar had become convinced that the Christian monasteries and nunneries were sources of evil, places where sinister rites were performed to encourage folk to attack the Danes and he saw no point in letting such places exist. The most famous monastery of all, though, was that at Lindisfarena, the house where Saint Cuthbert had lived, and the house that had first been sacked by the Danes two generations before. It had been that attack which had been portended by dragons in the sky and whirlwinds churning the sea and lightning storms savaging the hills, but I saw no such strange wonders as we marched north.

I was excited. We were going close to Bebbanburg and I wondered whether my uncle, the false Ealdorman Ælfric, would dare come out of his fortress to protect the monks of Lindisfarena who had always looked to our family for their safety. We all rode horses, three ships’ crews, over a hundred men, for it was late in the year and the Danes did not like taking their ships into hard weather. We skirted Bebbanburg, riding in the hills, catching occasional glimpses of the fortress’s wooden walls between the trees. I stared at it, seeing the fretting sea beyond, dreaming.

We crossed the flat coastal fields and came to the sandy beach where a track led to Lindisfarena, but at high tide the track was flooded and we were forced to wait. We could see the monks watching us on the farther shore. ‘The rest of the bastards will be burying their treasures,’ Ragnar said.

‘If they have any left,’ I said.

‘They always have some left,’ Ragnar said grimly.

‘When I was last here,’ Ravn put in, ‘we took a chest of gold! Pure gold!’

‘A big chest?’ Brida asked. She was mounted behind Ravn, serving as his eyes this day. She came everywhere with us, spoke good Danish by now and was regarded as bringing luck by the men, who adored her.

‘As big as your chest,’ Ravn said.

‘Not much gold then,’ Brida said, disappointed.

‘Gold and silver,’ Ravn reminisced, ‘and some walrus tusks. Where did they get those?’

The sea relented, the bickering waves slunk back down the long sands and we rode through the shallows, past the withies that marked the track, and the monks ran off. Small flickers of smoke marked where farmsteads dotted the island and I had no doubt those folk were burying what few possessions they owned.

‘Will any of these monks know you?’ Ragnar asked me.

‘Probably.’

‘Does that worry you?’

It did, but I said it did not, and I touched Thor’s hammer and somewhere in my thoughts there was a tendril of worry that God, the Christian god, was watching me. Beocca always said that everything we did was watched and recorded, and I had to remind myself that the Christian god was failing and that Odin, Thor and the Danish gods were winning the war in heaven. Edmund’s death had proved that and so I consoled myself that I was safe.

The monastery lay on the south of the island from where I could see Bebbanburg on its crag of rock. The monks lived in a scatter of small timber buildings, thatched with rye and moss, and built about a small stone church. The abbot, a man called Egfrith, came to meet us carrying a wooden cross. He spoke Danish, which was unusual, and he showed no fear. ‘You are most welcome to our small island,’ he greeted us enthusiastically, ‘and you should know that I have one of your countrymen in our sick chamber.’

Ragnar rested his hands on the fleece-covered pommel of his saddle. ‘What is that to me?’ he asked.

‘It is an earnest of our peaceful intentions, lord,’ Egfrith said. He was elderly, grey-haired, thin and missing most of his teeth so that his words came out sibilant and distorted. ‘We are a humble house,’ he went on, ‘we tend the sick, we help the poor and we serve God.’ He looked along the line of Danes, grim helmeted men with their shields hanging by their left knees, swords and axes and spears bristling. The sky was low that day, heavy and sullen, and a small rain was darkening the grass. Two monks came from the church carrying a wooden box that they placed behind Egfrith, then backed away. ‘That is all the treasure we have,’ Egfrith said, ‘and you are welcome to it.’

Ragnar jerked his head at me and I dismounted, walked past the abbot and opened the box to find it was half full of silver pennies, most of them clipped, and all of them dull because they were of bad quality. I shrugged at Ragnar as if to suggest they were poor reward.

‘You are Uhtred!’ Egfrith said. He had been staring at me.

‘So?’ I answered belligerently.

‘I heard you were dead, lord,’ he said, ‘and I praise God you are not.’

‘You heard I was dead?’

‘That a Dane killed you.’

We had been talking in English and Ragnar wanted to know what had been said, so I translated. ‘Was the Dane called Weland?’ Ragnar asked Egfrith.

‘He is called that,’ Egfrith said.

‘Is?’

‘Weland is the man lying here recovering from his wounds, lord,’ Egfrith looked at me again as though he could not believe I was alive.

‘His wounds?’ Ragnar wanted to know.

‘He was attacked, lord, by a man from the fortress. From Bebbanburg.’

Ragnar, of course, wanted to hear the whole tale. It seemed Weland had made his way back to Bebbanburg where he claimed to have killed me, and so received his reward in silver coins, and he was escorted from the fortress by a half dozen men who included Ealdwulf, the blacksmith who had told me stories in his forge, and Ealdwulf had attacked Weland, hacking an axe down into his shoulder before the other men dragged him off. Weland had been brought here, while Ealdwulf, if he still lived, was back in Bebbanburg.

If Abbot Egfrith thought Weland was his safeguard, he had miscalculated. Ragnar scowled at him. ‘You gave Weland shelter even though you thought he had killed Uhtred?’ he demanded.

‘This is a house of God,’ Egfrith said, ‘so we give every man shelter.’

‘Including murderers?’ Ragnar asked, and he reached behind his head and untied the leather lace which bound his hair. ‘So tell me, monk, how many of your men went south to help their comrades murder Danes?’

Egfrith hesitated, which was answer enough, and then Ragnar drew his sword and the abbot found his voice. ‘Some did, lord,’ he admitted, ‘I could not stop them.’

‘You could not stop them?’ Ragnar asked, shaking his head so that his wet unbound hair fell around his face. ‘Yet you rule here?’

‘I am the abbot, yes.’

‘Then you could stop them.’ Ragnar was looking angry now and I suspected he was remembering the bodies we had disinterred near Gyruum, the little Danish girls with blood still on their thighs. ‘Kill them,’ he told his men.

I took no part in that killing. I stood by the shore and listened to the birds cry and I watched Bebbanburg and heard the blades doing their work, and Brida came to stand beside me and she took my hand and stared south across the white-flecked grey to the great fortress on its crag. ‘Is that your house?’ she asked.

‘That is my house.’

‘He called you lord.’

‘I am a lord.’

She leaned against me. ‘You think the Christian god is watching us.’

‘No,’ I said, wondering how she knew that I had been thinking about that very question.

‘He was never our god,’ she said fiercely. ‘We worshipped Woden and Thor and Eostre and all the other gods and goddesses, and then the Christians came and we forgot our gods, and now the Danes have come to lead us back to them.’ She stopped abruptly.

‘Did Ravn tell you that?’

‘He told me some,’ she said, ‘but the rest I worked out. There’s war between the gods, Uhtred, war between the Christian god and our gods, and when there is war in Asgard the gods make us fight for them on earth.’

‘And we’re winning?’ I asked.

Her answer was to point to the dead monks, scattered on the wet grass, their robes bloodied, and now that their killing was done Ragnar dragged Weland out of his sickbed. The man was plainly dying, for he was shivering and his wound stank, but he was conscious of what was happening to him. His reward for killing me had been a heavy bag of good silver coins that weighed as much as a new-born babe, and that we found beneath his bed and we added it to the monastery’s small hoard to be divided among our men.

Weland himself lay on the bloodied grass, looking from me to Ragnar. ‘You want to kill him?’ Ragnar asked me.

‘Yes,’ I said, for no other response was expected. Then I remembered the beginning of my tale, the day when I had seen Ragnar oar-dancing just off this coast and how, next morning, he had brought my brother’s head to Bebbanburg. ‘I want to cut off his head,’ I said.

Weland tried to speak, but could only manage a guttural groan. His eyes were on Ragnar’s sword.

Ragnar offered the blade to me. ‘It’s sharp enough,’ he said, ‘but you’ll be surprised by how much force is needed. An axe would be better.’

Weland looked at me now. His teeth chattered and he twitched. I hated him. I had disliked him from the first, but now I hated him, yet I was still oddly nervous of killing him even though he was already half dead. I have learned that it is one thing to kill in battle, to send a brave man’s soul to the corpse-hall of the gods, but quite another to take a helpless man’s life, and he must have sensed my hesitation for he managed a pitiful plea for his life. ‘I will serve you,’ he said.

‘Make the bastard suffer,’ Ragnar answered for me, ‘send him to the corpse-goddess, but let her know he’s coming by making him suffer.’

I do not think he suffered much. He was already so feeble that even my puny blows drove him to swift unconsciousness, but even so it took a long time to kill him. I hacked away. I have always been surprised by how much effort is needed to kill a man. The skalds make it sound easy, but it rarely is. We are stubborn creatures, we cling to life and are very hard to kill, but Weland’s soul finally went to its fate as I chopped and sawed and stabbed and at last succeeded in severing his bloody head. His mouth was twisted into a rictus of agony, and that was some consolation.

Now I asked more favours of Ragnar, knowing he would give them to me. I took some of the poorer coins from the hoard, then went to one of the larger monastery buildings and found the writing place where the monks copied books. They used to paint beautiful letters on the books and, before my life was changed at Eoferwic, I used to go there with Beocca and sometimes the monks would let me daub scraps of parchment with their wonderful colours.

I wanted the colours now. They were in bowls, mostly as powder, a few mixed with gum, and I needed a piece of cloth which I found in the church; a square of white linen that had been used to cover the sacraments. Back in the writing place I drew a wolf’s head in charcoal on the white cloth and then I found some ink and began to fill in the outline. Brida helped me and she proved to be much better at making pictures than I was, and she gave the wolf a red eye and a red tongue, and flecked the black ink with white and blue that somehow suggested fur, and once the banner was made we tied it to the staff of the dead abbot’s cross. Ragnar was rummaging through the monastery’s small collection of sacred books, tearing off the jewel-studded metal plates that decorated their front covers, and once he had all the plates, and once my banner was made, we burned all the timber buildings.

The rain stopped as we left. We trotted across the causeway, turned south, and Ragnar, at my request, went down the coastal track until we reached the place where the road crossed the sands to Bebbanburg.

We stopped there and I untied my hair so that it hung loose. I gave the banner to Brida who would ride Ravn’s horse while the old man waited with his son. And then, a borrowed sword at my side, I rode home.

Brida came with me as standard-bearer and the two of us cantered along the track. The sea broke white to my right and slithered across the sands to my left. I could see men on the walls and up on the Low Gate, watching, and I kicked the horse, making it gallop, and Brida kept pace, her banner flying above, and I curbed the horse where the track turned north to the gate and now I could see my uncle. He was there, Ælfric the Treacherous, thin-faced, dark-haired, gazing at me from the Low Gate and I stared up at him so he would know who I was, and then I threw Weland’s severed head onto the ground where my brother’s head had once been thrown. I followed it with the silver coins.

I threw thirty coins. The Judas price. I remembered that church tale. It was one of the few that I had liked.

There were archers on the wall, but none drew. They just watched. I gave my uncle the evil sign, the devil’s horns made with the two outer fingers, and then I spat at him, turned and trotted away. He knew I was alive now, knew I was his enemy, and knew I would kill him like a dog if ever I had the chance.

‘Uhtred!’ Brida called. She had been looking behind and I twisted in the saddle to see that one warrior had jumped over the wall, had fallen heavily, but was now running towards us. He was a big man, heavily bearded, and I thought I could never fight such a man, and then I saw the archers loose their arrows and they flecked the ground about the man who I now saw was Ealdwulf, the smith.

‘Lord Uhtred!’ Ealdwulf called, ‘Lord Uhtred!’ I turned the horse and went to him, shielding him from the arrows with my horse’s bulk, but none of the arrows came close and I suspect, looking back on that distant day, that the bowmen were deliberately missing. ‘You live, lord!’ Ealdwulf beamed up at me.

‘I live.’

‘Then I come with you,’ he said firmly.

‘But your wife, your son?’ I asked.

‘My wife died, lord, last year, and my son was drowned while fishing.’

‘I am sorry,’ I said. An arrow skidded through the dune grass, but it was yards away.

‘Woden gives, and Woden takes away,’ Ealdwulf said, ‘and he has given me back my lord.’ He saw Thor’s hammer about my neck and, because he was a pagan, he smiled.

And I had my first follower. Ealdwulf the smith.

‘He’s a gloomy man, your uncle,’ Ealdwulf told me as we journeyed south, ‘miserable as shit, he is. Even his new son don’t cheer him up.’

‘He has a son?’

‘Ælfric the Younger, he’s called, and he’s a bonny wee thing. Healthy as you like. Gytha’s sick though. She won’t last long. And you, lord? You look well.’

‘I am well.’

‘You’d be twelve now?’

‘Thirteen.’

‘A man, then. Is that your woman?’ He nodded at Brida.

‘My friend.’

‘No meat on her,’ Ealdwulf said, ‘so better as a friend.’ The smith was a big man, almost forty years old, with hands, forearms and face black-scarred from countless small burns from his forge. He walked beside my horse, his pace apparently effortless despite his advanced years. ‘So tell me about these Danes,’ he said, casting a dubious look at Ragnar’s warriors.

‘They’re led by Earl Ragnar,’ I said, ‘who is the man who killed my brother. He’s a good man.’

‘He’s the one who killed your brother?’ Ealdwulf seemed shocked.

‘Destiny is everything,’ I said, which might have been true but also avoided having to make a longer answer.

‘You like him?’

‘He’s like a father to me. You’ll like him.’

‘He’s still a Dane, though, isn’t he, lord? They might worship the right gods,’ Ealdwulf said grudgingly, ‘but I’d still like to see them gone.’

‘Why?’

‘Why?’ Ealdwulf seemed shocked that I had asked. ‘Because this isn’t their land, lord, that’s why. I want to walk without being afraid. I don’t want to touch my forelock to a man just because he has a sword. There’s one law for them and another for us.’

‘There’s no law for them,’ I said.

‘If a Dane kills a Northumbrian,’ Ealdwulf said indignantly, ‘what can a man do? There’s no wergild, no reeve to see, no lord to seek justice.’

That was true. Wergild was the blood price of a man’s life, and every person had a wergild. A man’s was more than a woman’s, unless she was a great woman, and a warrior’s was greater than a farmer’s, but the price was always there, and a murderer could escape being put to death if the family of the murdered man would accept the wergild. The reeve was the man who enforced the law, reporting to his Ealdorman, but that whole careful system of justice had vanished since the Danes had come. There was no law now except what the Danes said it was, and that was what they wanted it to be, and I knew that I revelled in that chaos, but then I was privileged. I was Ragnar’s man, and Ragnar protected me, but without Ragnar I would be no better than an outlaw or a slave.

‘Your uncle doesn’t protest,’ Ealdwulf went on, ‘but Beocca did. You remember him? Red-haired priest with a shrivelled hand and crossed eyes?’

‘I met him last year,’ I said.

‘You did? Where?’

‘He was with Alfred of Wessex.’

‘Wessex!’ Ealdwulf said, surprised. ‘Long way to go. But he was a good man, Beocca, despite being a priest. He ran off because he couldn’t stand the Danes. Your uncle was furious. Said Beocca deserved to be killed.’

Doubtless, I thought, because Beocca had taken the parchments that proved me to be the rightful Ealdorman. ‘My uncle wanted me killed too,’ I said, ‘and I never thanked you for attacking Weland.’

‘Your uncle was going to give me to the Danes for that,’ he said, ‘only no Dane complained, so he did nothing.’

‘You’re with the Danes now,’ I said, ‘and you’d better get used to it.’

Ealdwulf thought about that for a moment. ‘Why not go to Wessex?’ he asked.

‘Because the West Saxons want to turn me into a priest,’ I said, ‘and I want to be a warrior.’

‘Go to Mercia then,’ Ealdwulf suggested.

‘That’s ruled by the Danes.’

‘But your uncle lives there.’

‘My uncle?’

‘Your mother’s brother!’ He was astonished that I did not know my own family. ‘He’s Ealdorman Æthelwulf, if he still lives.’

‘My father never talked about my mother,’ I said.

‘Because he loved her. She was a beauty, your mother, a piece of gold, and she died giving birth to you.’

‘Æthelwulf,’ I said.

‘If he lives.’

But why go to Æthelwulf when I had Ragnar? Æthelwulf was family, of course, but I had never met him and I doubted he even remembered my existence, and I had no desire to find him, and even less desire to learn my letters in Wessex, so I would stay with Ragnar. I said as much to Ealdwulf. ‘He’s teaching me to fight,’ I said.

‘Learn from the best, eh?’ Ealdwulf said grudgingly. ‘That’s how you become a good smith. Learn from the best.’

Ealdwulf was a good smith and, despite himself, he came to like Ragnar for Ragnar was generous and he appreciated good workmanship. A smithy was added onto our home near Synningthwait and Ragnar paid good silver for a forge, an anvil, and for the great hammers, tongs and files that Ealdwulf needed. It was late winter before all was ready, and then ore was purchased from Eoferwic and our valley echoed to the clang of iron on iron, and even on the coldest days the smithy was warm and men gathered there to exchange stories or to tell riddles. Ealdwulf was a great man for riddles and I would translate for him as he baffled Ragnar’s Danes. Most of his riddles were about men and women and what they did together and those were easy enough to guess, but I liked the complicated ones. My father and mother gave me up for dead, one riddle began, then a loyal kinswoman wrapped and protected me, and I killed all her children, but she still loved me and fed me until I rose above the dwelling houses of men and so left her. I could not guess that one, nor could any of the Danes, and Ealdwulf refused to give me the answer even when I begged him and it was only when I told the riddle to Brida that I learned the solution. ‘A cuckoo, of course,’ she said instantly. She was right, of course.

By spring the forge needed to be larger, and all that summer Ealdwulf made metal for swords, spears, axes and spades. I asked him once if he minded working for the Danes and he just shrugged. ‘I worked for them in Bebbanburg,’ he said, ‘because your uncle does their bidding.’

‘But there are no Danes in Bebbanburg?’

‘None,’ he admitted, ‘but they visit and are made welcome. Your uncle pays them tribute.’ He stopped suddenly, interrupted by a shout of what I thought was pure rage.

I ran out of the smithy to see Ragnar standing in front of the house while, approaching up the track, was a crowd of men led by a mounted warrior. And such a warrior. He had a mail coat, a fine helmet hanging from the saddle, a bright-painted shield, a long sword and arms thick with rings. He was a young man with long fair hair and a thick gold beard, and he roared back at Ragnar like a rutting stag, then Ragnar ran towards him and I half thought the young man would draw the sword and kick at his horse, but instead he dismounted and ran uphill and, when the two met, they embraced and thumped each other’s backs and Ragnar, when he turned towards us, had a smile that would have lit the darkest crypt of hell. ‘My son!’ he shouted up at me, ‘my son!’

It was Ragnar the Younger, come from Ireland with a ship’s crew and, though he did not know me, he embraced me, lifting me off the ground, whirled his sister around, thumped Rorik, kissed his mother, shouted at the servants, scattered gifts of silver chain links, and petted the hounds. A feast was ordered, and that night he gave us his news, saying he now commanded his own ship, that he had come for a few months only and that Ivar wanted him back in Ireland by the spring. He was so like his father, and I liked him immediately, and the house was always happy when Ragnar the Younger was there. Some of his men lodged with us, and that autumn they cut trees and added a proper hall to the house, a hall fit for an earl with big beams and a high gable on which a boar’s skull was nailed.

‘You were lucky,’ he told me one day. We were thatching the new roof, laying down the thick rye straw and combing it flat.

‘Lucky?’

‘That my father didn’t kill you at Eoferwic.’

‘I was lucky,’ I agreed.

‘But he was always a good judge of men,’ he said, passing me a pot of ale. He perched on the roof ridge and gazed across the valley. ‘He likes it here.’

‘It’s a good place. What about Ireland?’

He grinned. ‘Bog and rock, Uhtred, and the skraelings are vicious.’ The skraelings were the natives. ‘But they fight well! And there’s silver there, and the more they fight the more silver we get. Are you going to drink all that ale, or do I get some?’

I handed him back the pot and watched as the ale ran down his beard as he drained it. ‘I like Ireland well enough,’ he said when he had finished, ‘but I won’t stay there. I’ll come back here. Find land in Wessex. Raise a family. Get fat.’

‘Why don’t you come back now?’

‘Because Ivar wants me there, and Ivar’s a good lord.’

‘He frightens me.’

‘A good lord should be frightening.’

‘Your father isn’t.’

‘Not to you, but what about the men he kills? Would you want to face Earl Ragnar the Fearless in a shield wall?’

‘No.’

‘So he is frightening,’ he said, grinning. ‘Go and take Wessex,’ he said, ‘and find the land that will make me fat.’

We finished the thatch, and then I had to go up into the woods because Ealdwulf had an insatiable appetite for charcoal which is the only substance that burns hot enough to melt iron. He had shown a dozen of Ragnar’s men how to produce it, but Brida and I were his best workers and we spent much time among the trees. The charcoal heaps needed constant attention and, as each would burn for at least three days, Brida and I would often spend all night beside such a pile, watching for a tell-tale wisp of smoke coming from the bracken and turf covering the burn. Such smoke betrayed that the fire inside was too hot and we would have to scramble over the warm heap to stuff the crack with earth and so cool the fire deep inside the pile.

We burned alder when we could get it, for that was the wood Ealdwulf preferred, and the art of it was to char the alder logs, but not let them burst into flame. For every four logs we put into a pile we would get one back, while the rest vanished to leave the lightweight, deep black, dirty charcoal. It could take a week to make the pile. The alder was carefully stacked in a shallow pit, and a hole was left in the stack’s centre which we filled with charcoal from the previous burn. Then we would put a layer of bracken over the whole thing, cover that with thick turves and, when all was done, put fire down the central hole and, when we were sure the charcoal was alight, stuff the hole tight. Now the silent, dark fire had to be controlled. We would open gaps at the base of the pit to let a little air in, but if the wind changed then the air holes had to be stuffed and others made. It was tedious work, and Ealdwulf’s appetite for charcoal seemed unlimited, but I enjoyed it. To be all night in the dark, beside the warm burn, was to be a sceadugengan, and besides, I was with Brida and we had become more than friends.

She lost her first baby up beside the charcoal burn. She had not even known she was pregnant, but one night she was assailed with cramps and spear-like pains, and I wanted to go and fetch Sigrid, but Brida would not let me. She told me she knew what was happening, but I was scared helpless by her agony and I shuddered in fear throughout the dark until, just before dawn, she gave birth to a tiny dead baby boy. We buried it with its afterbirth, and Brida stumbled back to the homestead where Sigrid was alarmed by her appearance and gave her a broth of leeks and sheep brains and made her stay at home. Sigrid must have suspected what had happened for she was sharp with me for a few days and she told Ragnar it was time Brida was married. Brida was certainly of age, being thirteen, and there were a dozen young Danish warriors in Synningthwait who were in need of wives, but Ragnar declared that Brida brought his men luck and he wanted her to ride with us when we attacked Wessex.

‘And when will that be?’ Sigrid asked.

‘Next year,’ Ragnar suggested, ‘or the year after. No longer.’

‘And then?’

‘Then England is no more,’ Ragnar said. ‘It will all be ours.’ The last of the four kingdoms would have fallen and England would be Daneland and we would all be Danes or slaves or dead.

We celebrated the Yule feast and Ragnar the Younger won every competition in Synningthwait, he hurled rocks farther than anyone, wrestled men to the ground and even drank his father into insensibility. Then followed the dark months, the long winter, and in spring, when the gales had subsided, Ragnar the Younger had to leave and we had a melancholy feast on the eve of his going, and next morning he led his men away from the hall, going down the track in a grey drizzle. Ragnar watched his son all the way down into the valley and when he turned back to his newly-built hall he had tears in his eyes. ‘He’s a good man,’ he told me.

‘I liked him,’ I said truthfully, and I did, and many years later, when I met him again, I still liked him.

There was an empty feeling after Ragnar the Younger had left, but I remember that spring and summer fondly for it was in those long days that Ealdwulf made me a sword. ‘I hope it’s better than my last one,’ I said ungraciously.

‘Your last one?’

‘The one I carried when we attacked Eoferwic,’ I said.

‘That thing! That wasn’t mine. Your father bought it in Berewic, and I told him it was crap, but it was only a short sword. Good for killing ducks, maybe, but not for fighting. What happened to it?’

‘It bent,’ I said, remembering Ragnar laughing at the feeble weapon.

‘Soft iron, boy, soft iron.’

There were two sorts of iron, he told me, the soft and the hard. The hard made the best cutting edge, but it was brittle and a sword made of such iron would snap at the first brutal stroke, while a sword made of the softer metal would bend as my short sword had done. ‘So what we do is use both,’ he told me, and I watched as he made seven iron rods. Three were of the hard iron, and he was not really sure how he made the iron hard, only that the glowing metal had to be laid in the burning charcoal, and if he got it just right then the cooled metal would be hard and unbending. The other four rods were longer, much longer, and they were not exposed to the charcoal for the same length of time, and those four he twisted until each had been turned into a spiral. They were still straight rods, but tightly twisted until they were the same length as the hard iron rods. ‘Why do you do that?’ I asked.

‘You’ll see,’ he said mysteriously, ‘you’ll see.’

He finished with seven rods, each as thick as my thumb. Three were of the hard metal, which Ragnar called steel, while the four softer rods were prettily twisted into their tight spirals. One of the hard rods was longer and slightly thicker than the others, and that one was the sword’s spine and the extra length was the tang onto which the hilt would eventually be riveted. Ealdwulf began by hammering that rod flat so that it looked like a very thin and feeble sword, then he placed the four twisted rods either side of it, two to each side so that they sheathed it, and he welded the last two steel rods on the outside to become the sword’s edges, and it looked grotesque then, a bundle of mismatched rods, but this was when the real work began, the work of heating and hammering, metal glowing red, the black dross twisting as it burned away from the iron, the hammer swinging, sparks flying in the dark forge, the hiss of burning metal plunged into water, the patience as the emerging blade was cooled in a trough of ash shavings. It took days, yet as the hammering and cooling and heating went on I saw how the four twisted rods of soft iron, which were now all melded into the harder steel, had been smoothed into wondrous patterns, repetitive curling patterns that made flat, smoky wisps in the blade. In some lights you could not see the patterns, but in the dusk, or when, in winter, you breathed on the blade, they showed. Serpent breath, Brida called the patterns, and I decided to give the sword that name; Serpent-Breath. Ealdwulf finished the blade by hammering grooves which ran down the centre of each side. He said they helped stop the sword being trapped in an enemy’s flesh. ‘Blood channels,’ he grunted.

The boss of the hilt was of iron, as was the heavy crosspiece, and both were simple, undecorated and big, and when all was done, I shaped two pieces of ash to make the handle. I wanted the sword decorated with silver or gilt bronze, but Ealdwulf refused. ‘It’s a tool, lord,’ he said, ‘just a tool. Something to make your work easier, and no better than my hammer.’ He held the blade up so that it caught the sunlight. ‘And one day,’ he went on, leaning towards me, ‘you will kill Danes with her.’

She was heavy, Serpent-Breath, too heavy for a fourteen-year-old, but I would grow into her. Her point tapered more than Ragnar liked, but that made her well-balanced for it meant there was not much weight at the blade’s outer end. Ragnar liked weight there, for it helped break down enemy shields, but I preferred Serpent-Breath’s agility, given her by Ealdwulf’s skill, and that skill meant she never bent nor cracked, not ever, for I still have her. The ash handles have been replaced, the edges have been nicked by enemy blades, and she is slimmer now because she has been sharpened so often, but she is still beautiful, and sometimes I breathe on her flanks and see the patterns emerge in the blade, the curls and wisps, the blue and silver appearing in the metal like magic, and I remember that spring and summer in the woods of Northumbria and I think of Brida staring at her reflection in the newly-made blade.

And there is magic in Serpent-Breath. Ealdwulf had his own spells that he would not tell me, the spells of the smith, and Brida took the blade into the woods for a whole night and never told me what she did with it, and those were the spells of a woman, and when we made the sacrifice of the pit slaughter, and killed a man, a horse, a ram, a bull and a drake, I asked Ragnar to use Serpent-Breath on the doomed man so that Odin would know she existed and would look well on her. Those are the spells of a pagan and a warrior.

And I think Odin did see her, for she has killed more men than I can ever remember.

It was late summer before Serpent-Breath was finished and then, before autumn brought its sea-churning storms, we went south. It was time to obliterate England, so we sailed towards Wessex.