Sword Song

Sword Song

The Battle for London Bernard Cornwell

Sword Song is voor Aukje,

met liefde:

Er was eens…

PLACE-NAMES

The spelling of place-names in Anglo-Saxon England was an uncertain business, with no consistency and no agreement even about the name itself. Thus London was variously rendered as Lundonia, Lundenberg, Lundenne, Lundene, Lundenwic, Lundenceaster, and Lundres. Doubtless some readers will prefer other versions of the names listed below, but I have usually employed whichever spelling is cited in either the Oxford or the Cambridge Dictionary of English Place-Names for the years nearest or contained within Alfred’s reign, AD 871–899, but even that solution is not foolproof. Hayling Island, in 956, was written as both Heilincigae and Hæglingaiggæ. Nor have I been consistent myself; I spell England as Englaland, but have preferred the modern form Northumbria to Nor∂hymbralond to avoid the suggestion that the boundaries of the ancient kingdom coincide with those of the modern county. So this list, like the spellings themselves, is capricious.

Æscengum

Eashing, Surrey

Arwan

River Orwell, Suffolk

Beamfleot

Benfleet, Essex

Bebbanburg

Bamburgh, Northumberland

Berrocscire

Berkshire

Cair Ligualid

Carlisle, Cumbria

Caninga

Canvey Island, Essex

Cent

Kent

Cippanhamm

Chippenham, Wiltshire

Cirrenceastre

Cirencester, Gloucestershire

Cisseceastre

Chichester, Sussex

Coccham

Cookham, Berkshire

Colaun, River

River Colne, Essex

Contwaraburg

Canterbury, Kent

Cornwalum

Cornwall

Cracgelad

Cricklade, Wiltshire

Dunastopol

Dunstable (Roman name Durocobrivis), Bedfordshire

Dunholm

Durham, County Durham

Eoferwic

York, Yorkshire

Ethandun

Edington, Wiltshire

Exanceaster

Exeter, Devon

Fleot

River Fleet, London

Frankia

Germany

Fughelness

Foulness Island, Essex

Grantaceaster

Cambridge, Cambridgeshire

Gyruum

Jarrow, County Durham

Hastengas

Hastings, Sussex

Horseg

Horsey Island, Essex

Hothlege

River Hadleigh, Essex

Hrofeceastre

Rochester, Kent

Hwealf

River Crouch, Essex

Lundene

London

Mæides Stana

Maidstone, Kent

Medwæg

River Medway, Kent

Oxnaforda

Oxford, Oxfordshire

Padintune

Paddington, Greater London

Pant

River Blackwater, Essex

Scaepege

Isle of Sheppey, Kent

Sceaftes Eye

Sashes Island (at Coccham)

Sceobyrig

Shoebury, Essex

Scerhnesse

Sheerness, Kent

Sture

River Stour, Essex

Sutherge

Surrey

Suthriganaweorc

Southwark, Greater London

Swealwe

River Swale, Kent

Temes

River Thames

Thunresleam

Thundersley, Essex

Wæced

Watchet, Somerset

Wæclingastræt

Watling Street

Welengaford

Wallingford, Oxfordshire

Werham

Wareham, Dorset

Wiltunscir

Wiltshire

Wintanceaster

Winchester, Hampshire

Wocca’s Dun

South Ockenden, Essex

Wodenes Eye

Odney Island (at Coccham)

PROLOGUE

Darkness. Winter. A night of frost and no moon.

We floated on the River Temes, and beyond the boat’s high bow I could see the stars reflected on the shimmering water. The river was in spate as melted snow fed it from countless hills. The winterbournes were flowing from the chalk uplands of Wessex. In summer those streams would be dry, but now they foamed down the long green hills and filled the river and flowed to the distant sea.

Our boat, which had no name, lay close to the Wessex bank. North across the river lay Mercia. Our bows pointed upstream. We were hidden beneath the leafless, bending branches of three willow trees, held there against the current by a leather mooring rope tied to one of those branches.

There were thirty-eight of us in that nameless boat, which was a trading ship that worked the upper reaches of the Temes. The ship’s master was called Ralla and he stood beside me with one hand on the steering-oar. I could hardly see him in the darkness, but knew he wore a leather jerkin and had a sword at his side. The rest of us were in leather and mail, had helmets, and carried shields, axes, swords, or spears. Tonight we would kill.

Sihtric, my servant, squatted beside me and stroked a whetstone along the blade of his short-sword. “She says she loves me,” he told me.

“Of course she says that,” I said.

He paused, and when he spoke again his voice had brightened, as though he had been encouraged by my words. “And I must be nineteen by now, lord! Maybe even twenty?”

“Eighteen?” I suggested.

“I could have been married four years ago, lord!”

We spoke almost in whispers. The night was full of noises. The water rippled, the bare branches clattered in the wind, a night creature splashed into the river, a vixen howled like a dying soul, and somewhere an owl hooted. The boat creaked. Sihtric’s stone hissed and scraped on the steel. A shield thumped against a rower’s bench. I dared not speak louder, despite the night’s noises, because the enemy ship was upstream of us and the men who had gone ashore from that ship would have left sentries on board. Those sentries might have seen us as we slipped downstream on the Mercian bank, but by now they would surely have thought we were long gone toward Lundene.

“But why marry a whore?” I asked Sihtric.

“She’s…” Sihtric began.

“She’s old,” I snarled, “maybe thirty. And she’s addled. Ealhswith only has to see a man and her thighs fly apart! If you lined up every man who’d tupped that whore you’d have an army big enough to conquer all Britain.” Beside me Ralla sniggered. “You’d be in that army, Ralla?” I asked.

“Twenty times over, lord,” the shipmaster said.

“She loves me,” Sihtric spoke sullenly.

“She loves your silver,” I said, “and besides, why put a new sword in an old scabbard?”

It is strange what men talk about before battle. Anything except what faces them. I have stood in a shield wall, staring at an enemy bright with blades and dark with menace, and heard two of my men argue furiously about which tavern brewed the best ale. Fear hovers in the air like a cloud and we talk of nothing to pretend that the cloud is not there.

“Look for something ripe and young,” I advised Sihtric. “That potter’s daughter is ready to wed. She must be thirteen.”

“She’s stupid,” Sihtric objected.

“And what are you, then?” I demanded. “I give you silver and you pour it into the nearest open hole! Last time I saw her she was wearing an arm ring I gave you.”

He sniffed, said nothing. His father had been Kjartan the Cruel, a Dane who had whelped Sihtric on one of his Saxon slaves. Yet Sihtric was a good boy, though in truth he was no longer a boy. He was a man who had stood in the shield wall. A man who had killed. A man who would kill again tonight. “I’ll find you a wife,” I promised him.

It was then we heard the screaming. It was faint because it came from very far off, a mere scratching noise in the darkness that told of pain and death to our south. There were screams and shouting. Women were screaming and doubtless men were dying.

“God damn them,” Ralla said bitterly.

“That’s our job,” I said curtly.

“We should…” Ralla started, then thought better of speaking. I knew what he was going to say, that we should have gone to the village and protected it, but he knew what I would have answered.

I would have told him that we did not know which village the Danes were going to attack, and even if I had known I would not have protected it. We might have shielded the place if we had known where the attackers were going. I could have placed all my household troops in the small houses and, the moment the raiders came, erupted into the street with sword, ax, and spear, and we would have killed some of them, but in the dark many more would have escaped and I did not want one to escape. I wanted every Dane, every Norseman, every raider dead. All of them, except one, and that one I would send eastward to tell the Viking camps on the banks of the Temes that Uhtred of Bebbanburg was waiting for them.

“Poor souls,” Ralla muttered. To the south, through the tangle of black branches, I could see a red glow that betrayed burning thatch. The glow spread and grew brighter to lighten the winter sky beyond a row of coppiced trees. The glow reflected off my men’s helmets, giving their metal a sheen of red, and I called for them to take the helmets off in case the enemy sentries in the large ship ahead saw the reflected glimmer.

I took off my own helmet with its silver wolf crest.

I am Uhtred, Lord of Bebbanburg, and in those days I was a lord of war. I stood there in mail and leather, cloaked and armed, young and strong. I had half my household troops in Ralla’s ship while the other half were somewhere to the west, mounted on horses and under Finan’s command.

Or I hoped they were waiting in the night-shrouded west. We in the ship had enjoyed the easier task, for we had slid down the dark river to find the enemy, while Finan had been forced to lead his men across night-black country. But I trusted Finan. He would be there, fidgeting, grimacing, waiting to unleash his sword.

This was not our first attempt in that long wet winter to set an ambush on the Temes, but it was the first that promised success. Twice before I had been told that Vikings had come through the gap in Lundene’s broken bridge to raid the soft, plump villages of Wessex, and both times we had come downriver and found nothing. But this time we had trapped the wolves. I touched the hilt of Serpent-Breath, my sword, then touched the amulet of Thor’s hammer that hung around my neck.

Kill them all, I prayed to Thor, kill them all but one.

It must have been cold in that long night. Ice skimmed the dips in the fields where the river had flooded, but I do not remember the cold. I remember the anticipation. I touched Serpent-Breath again and it seemed to me that she quivered. I sometimes thought that blade sang. It was a thin, half-heard song, a keening noise, the song of the blade wanting blood; the sword song.

We waited and, afterward, when it was all over, Ralla told me I had never stopped smiling.

I thought our ambush would fail, for the raiders did not return to their ship till dawn blazed light across the east. Their sentries, I thought, must surely see us, but they did not. The drooping willow boughs served as a flimsy screen, or perhaps the rising winter sun dazzled them because no one saw us.

We saw them. We saw the mail-clad men herding a crowd of women and children across a rain-flooded pasture. I guessed there were fifty raiders and they had as many captives. The women would be the young ones from the burned village, and they had been taken for the raiders’ pleasure. The children would go to the slave market in Lundene and from there across the sea to Frankia or even beyond. The women, once they had been used, would also be sold. We were not so close that we could hear the prisoners sobbing, but I imagined it. To the south, where low green hills swelled from the river’s plain, a great drift of smoke dirtied the clear winter sky to mark where the raiders had burned the village.

Ralla stirred. “Wait,” I murmured, and Ralla went still. He was a grizzled man, ten years older than I, with eyes reduced to slits from the long years of staring across sun-reflecting seas. He was a shipmaster, soldier and friend. “Not yet,” I said softly, and touched Serpent-Breath and felt the quiver in the steel.

Men’s voices were loud, relaxed and laughing. They shouted as they pushed their prisoners into the ship. They forced them to crouch in the cold flooded bilge so that the overloaded craft would be stable for its voyage through the downriver shallows, where the Temes raced across stone ledges and only the best and bravest shipmasters knew the channel. Then the warriors clambered aboard themselves. They took their plunder with them, the spits and cauldrons and ard-blades and knives and whatever else could be sold or melted or used. Their laughter was raucous. They were men who had slaughtered, and who would become rich on their prisoners and they were in a cheerful, careless mood.

And Serpent-Breath sang soft in her scabbard.

I heard the clatter from the other ship as the oars were thrust into their rowlocks. A voice called out a command. “Push off!”

The great beak of the enemy ship, crowned with a monster’s painted head, turned out into the river. Men shoved oar-blades against the bank, pushing the boat farther out. The ship was already moving, carried toward us by the spate-driven current. Ralla looked at me.

“Now,” I said. “Cut the line!” I called, and Cerdic, in our bows, slashed through the leather rope tethering us to the willow. We were only using twelve oars and those now bit into the river as I pushed my way forward between the rowers’ benches. “We kill them all!” I shouted. “We kill them all!”

“Pull!” Ralla roared, and the twelve men heaved on their oars to fight the river’s power.

“We kill every last bastard!” I shouted as I climbed onto the small bow platform where my shield waited. “Kill them all! Kill them all!” I put on my helmet, then pushed my left forearm through the shield loops, hefted the heavy wood, and slid Serpent-Breath from her fleece-lined scabbard. She did not sing now. She screamed.

“Kill!” I shouted. “Kill, kill, kill!” and the oars bit in time to my shouting. Ahead of us the enemy ship slewed in the river as panicked men missed their stroke. They were shouting, looking for shields, scrambling over the benches where a few men still tried to row. Women screamed and men tripped each other.

“Pull!” Ralla shouted. Our nameless ship surged into the current as the enemy was swept toward us. Her monster’s head had a tongue painted red, white eyes, teeth like daggers.

“Now!” I called to Cerdic and he threw the grapnel with its chain so that it caught on the enemy ship’s bow and he hauled on the chain to sink the grapnel’s teeth into the ship’s timber and so draw her closer.

“Now kill!” I shouted, and leaped across the gap.

Oh the joy of being young. Of being twenty-eight years old, of being strong, of being a lord of war. All gone now, just memory is left, and memories fade. But the joy is bedded in the memory.

Serpent-Breath’s first stroke was a back-cut. I made it as I landed on the enemy’s bow platform where a man was trying to tug the grapnel free, and Serpent-Breath took him in the throat with a cut so fast and hard that it half severed his head. His whole skull flopped backward as blood brightened the winter day. Blood splashed on my face. I was death come from the morning, blood-spattered death in mail and black cloak and wolf-crested helmet.

I am old now. So old. My sight fades, my muscles are weak, my piss dribbles, my bones ache, and I sit in the sun and fall asleep to wake tired. But I remember those fights, those old fights. My newest wife, as pious a piece of stupid woman who ever whined, flinches when I tell the stories, but what else do the old have, but stories? She protested once, saying she did not want to know about heads flopping backward in bright spraying blood, but how else are we to prepare our young for the wars they must fight? I have fought all my life. That was my fate, the fate of us all. Alfred wanted peace, but peace fled from him and the Danes came and the Norsemen came, and he had no choice but to fight. And when Alfred was dead and his kingdom was powerful, more Danes came, and more Norsemen, and the Britons came from Wales and the Scots howled down from the north, and what can a man do but fight for his land, his family, his home and his country? I look at my children and at their children and at their children’s children and I know they will have to fight, and that so long as there is a family named Uhtred, and so long as there is a kingdom on this windswept island, there will be war. So we cannot flinch from war. We cannot hide from its cruelty, its blood, its stench, its vileness or its joy, because war will come to us whether we want it or not. War is fate, and wyrd bi? ful ãræd. Fate is inescapable.

So I tell these stories so that my children’s children will know their fate. My wife whimpers, but I make her listen. I tell her how our ship crashed into the enemy’s outside flank, and how the impact drove that other ship’s bows toward the southern bank. That was what I had wanted, and Ralla had achieved it perfectly. Now he scraped his ship down the enemy’s hull, our impetus snapping the Dane’s forward oars as my men jumped aboard, swords and axes swinging. I had staggered after that first cut, but the dead man had fallen off the platform to impede two others trying to reach me, and I shouted a challenge as I leaped down to face them. Serpent-Breath was lethal. She was, she is, a lovely blade, forged in the north by a Saxon smith who had known his trade. He had taken seven rods, four of iron and three of steel, and he had heated them and hammered them into one long two-edged blade with a leaf-shaped point. The four softer iron rods had been twisted in the fire and those twists survived in the blade as ghostly wisps of pattern that looked like the curling flame-breath of a dragon, and that was how Serpent-Breath had gained her name.

A bristle-bearded man swung an ax at me that I met with my outthrust shield and slid the dragon-wisps into his belly. I gave a fierce twist with my right hand so that his dying flesh and guts did not grip the blade, then I yanked her out, more blood flying, and dragged the ax-impaled shield across my body to parry a sword cut. Sihtric was beside me, driving his short-sword up into my newest attacker’s groin. The man screamed. I think I was shouting. More and more of my men were aboard now, swords and axes glinting. Children cried, women wailed, raiders died.

The bow of the enemy ship thumped onto the bank’s mud while her stern began to swing outward in the river’s grip. Some of the raiders, sensing death if they stayed aboard, jumped ashore, and that started a panic. More and more leaped for the bank, and it was then Finan came from the west. There was a small mist on the river meadows, just a pearly skein drifting over the iced puddles, and through it came Finan’s bright horsemen. They came in two lines, swords held like spears, and Finan, my deadly Irishman, knew his business and galloped the first line past the escaping men to cut off their retreat and let his second line crash into the enemy before he turned and led his own men back to the kill.

“Kill them all!” I shouted to him. “Kill every last one!”

A wave of a blood-reddened sword was his reply. I saw Clapa, my big Dane, spearing an enemy in the river’s shallows. Rypere was hacking his sword at a cowering man. Sihtric’s sword hand was red. Cerdic was swinging an ax, shouting incomprehensibly as the blade crushed and pierced a Dane’s helmet to spill blood and brains on the terrified prisoners. I think I killed two more, though my memory is not certain. I do remember pushing a man down onto the deck and, as he twisted around to face me, sliding Serpent-Breath into his gullet and watching his face distort and his tongue protrude from the blood welling past his blackened teeth. I leaned on the blade as the man died and watched as Finan’s men wheeled their horses to come back at the trapped enemy. The horsemen cut and slashed, Vikings screamed and some tried to surrender. One young man knelt on a rower’s bench, ax and shield discarded, and held his hands to me in supplication. “Pick up the ax,” I told him, speaking Danish.

“Lord…” he began.

“Pick it up!” I interrupted him, “and watch for me in the corpse-hall.” I waited till he was armed, then let Serpent-Breath take his life. I did it fast, showing mercy by slicing his throat with one quick scraping drag. I looked into his eyes as I killed him, saw his soul fly, then stepped over his twitching body, which slipped off the rower’s bench to collapse bloodily in the lap of a young woman who began to scream hysterically. “Quiet!” I shouted at her. I scowled at all the other women and children screaming or weeping as they cowered in the bilge. I put Serpent-Breath into my shield hand, took hold of the mail collar of the dying man, and heaved him back onto the bench.

One child was not crying. He was a boy, perhaps nine or ten years old, and he was just staring at me, mouth agape, and I remembered myself at that age. What did that boy see? He saw a man of metal, for I had fought with the face-plates of my helmet closed. You see less with the plates hinged across the cheeks, but the appearance is more frightening. That boy saw a tall man, mail-clad, sword bloody, steel-faced, stalking a boat of death. I eased off my helmet and shook my hair loose, then tossed him the wolf-crested metal. “Look after it, boy,” I told him, then I gave Serpent-Breath to the girl who had been screaming. “Wash the blade in river water,” I ordered her, “and dry it on a dead man’s cloak.” I gave my shield to Sihtric, then stretched my arms wide and lifted my face to the morning sun.

There had been fifty-four raiders, and sixteen still lived. They were prisoners. None had escaped past Finan’s men. I drew Wasp-Sting, my short-sword that was so lethal in a shield wall fight when men are pressed close as lovers. “Any of you,” I looked at the women, “who wants to kill the man who raped you, then do it now!”

Two women wanted revenge and I let them use Wasp-Sting. Both of them butchered their victims. One stabbed repeatedly, the other hacked, and both men died slowly. Of the remaining fourteen men, one was not in mail. He was the enemy’s shipmaster. He was gray-haired with a scanty beard and brown eyes that looked at me belligerently. “Where did you come from?” I asked him.

He thought about refusing to answer, then thought better. “Beamfleot,” he said.

“And Lundene?” I asked him. “The old city is still in Danish hands?”

“Yes.”

“Yes, lord,” I corrected him.

“Yes, lord,” he conceded.

“Then you will go to Lundene,” I told him, “and then to Beamfleot, and then to anywhere you wish, and you will tell the Northmen that Uhtred of Bebbanburg guards the River Temes. And you will tell them they are welcome to come here whenever they wish.”

That one man lived. I hacked off his right hand before letting him go. I did it so he could never wield a sword again. By then we had lit a fire and I thrust his bleeding stump into the red-hot embers to seal the wound. He was a brave man. He flinched when we cauterized his stump, but he did not scream as his blood bubbled and his flesh sizzled. I wrapped his shortened arm in a piece of cloth taken from a dead man’s shirt. “Go,” I ordered him, pointing downriver. “Just go.” He walked eastward. If he were lucky he would survive the journey to spread the news of my savagery.

We killed the others, all of them.

“Why did you kill them?” my new wife asked once, distaste for my thoroughness evident in her voice.

“So they would learn to fear,” I answered her, “of course.”

“Dead men can’t fear,” she said.

I try to be patient with her. “A ship left Beamfleot,” I explained, “and it never went back. And other men who wanted to raid Wessex heard of that ship’s fate. And those men decided to take their swords somewhere else. I killed that ship’s crew to save myself having to kill hundreds of other Danes.”

“The Lord Jesus would have wanted you to show mercy,” she said, her eyes wide.

She is an idiot.

Finan took some of the villagers back to their burned homes where they dug graves for their dead while my men hanged the corpses of our enemies from trees beside the river. We made ropes from strips torn from their clothes. We took their mail, their weapons, and their arm rings. We cut off their long hair, for I liked to caulk my ships’ planks with the hair of slain enemies, and then we hanged them and their pale naked bodies twisted in the small wind as the ravens came to take their dead eyes.

Fifty-three bodies hung by the river. A warning to those who might follow. Fifty-three signals that other raiders were risking death by rowing up the Temes.

Then we went home, taking the enemy ship with us.

And Serpent-Breath slept in her scabbard.

PART ONE

THE BRIDE

ONE

The dead speak,” Æthelwold told me. He was sober for once. Sober and awed and serious. The night wind snatched at the house and the rushlights flickered red in the wintry drafts that whipped from the roof’s smoke-hole and through the doors and shutters.

“The dead speak?” I asked.

“A corpse,” Æthelwold said, “he rises from the grave and he speaks.” He stared at me wide-eyed, then nodded as if to stress that he spoke the truth. He was leaning toward me, his clasped hands fidgeting between his knees. “I have seen it,” he added.

“A corpse talks?” I asked.

“He rises!” He wafted a hand to show what he meant.

“He?”

“The dead man. He rises and he speaks.” He still stared at me, his expression indignant. “It’s true,” he added in a voice that suggested he knew I did not believe him.

I edged my bench closer to the hearth. It was ten days after I had killed the raiders and hanged their bodies by the river, and now a freezing rain rattled on the thatch and beat on the barred shutters. Two of my hounds lay in front of the fire and one gave me a resentful glance when I scraped the bench, then rested his head again. The house had been built by the Romans, which meant the floor was tiled and the walls were of stone, though I had thatched the roof myself. Rain spat through the smoke-hole. “What does the dead man say?” Gisela asked. She was my wife and the mother of my two children.

Æthelwold did not answer at once, perhaps because he believed a woman should not take part in a serious discussion, but my silence told him that Gisela was welcome to speak in her own house and he was too nervous to insist that I dismiss her. “He says I should be king,” he admitted softly, then gazed at me, fearing my reaction.

“King of what?” I asked flatly.

“Wessex,” he said, “of course.”

“Oh, Wessex,” I said, as though I had never heard of the place.

“And I should be king!” Æthelwold protested. “My father was king!”

“And now your father’s brother is king,” I said, “and men say he is a good king.”

“Do you say that?” he challenged me.

I did not answer. It was well enough known that I did not like Alfred and that Alfred did not like me, but that did not mean Alfred’s nephew, Æthelwold, would make a better king. Æthelwold, like me, was in his late twenties, and he had made a reputation as a drunk and a lecherous fool. Yet he did have a claim to the throne of Wessex. His father had indeed been king, and if Alfred had possessed a thimbleful of sense he would have had his nephew’s throat sliced to the bone. Instead Alfred relied on Æthelwold’s thirst for ale to keep him from making trouble. “Where did you see this living corpse?” I asked, instead of answering his question.

He waved a hand toward the north side of the house. “On the other side of the street,” he said. “Just the other side.”

“Wæclingastræt?” I asked him, and he nodded.

So he was talking to the Danes as well as to the dead. Wæclingastræt is a road that goes northwest from Lundene. It slants across Britain, ending at the Irish Sea just north of Wales, and everything to the south of the street was supposedly Saxon land, and everything to the north was yielded to the Danes. That was the peace we had in that year of 885, though it was a peace scummed with skirmish and hate. “Is it a Danish corpse?” I asked.

Æthelwold nodded. “His name is Bjorn,” he said, “and he was a skald in Guthrum’s court, and he refused to become a Christian so Guthrum killed him. He can be summoned from his grave. I’ve seen it.”

I looked at Gisela. She was a Dane, and the sorcery that Æthelwold described was nothing I had ever known among my fellow Saxons. Gisela shrugged, suggesting that the magic was equally strange to her. “Who summons the dead man?” she asked.

“A fresh corpse,” Æthelwold said.

“A fresh corpse?” I asked.

“Someone must be sent to the world of the dead,” he explained, as though it were obvious, “to find Bjorn and bring him back.”

“So they kill someone?” Gisela asked.

“How else can they send a messenger to the dead?” Æthelwold asked pugnaciously.

“And this Bjorn,” I asked, “does he speak English?” I put the question for I knew that Æthelwold spoke little or no Danish.

“He speaks English,” Æthelwold said sullenly. He did not like being questioned.

“Who took you to him?” I asked.

“Some Danes,” he said vaguely.

I sneered at that. “So some Danes came,” I said, “and told you a dead poet wanted to speak to you, and you meekly traveled into Guthrum’s land?”

“They paid me gold,” he said defensively. Æthelwold was ever in debt.

“And why come to us?” I asked. Æthelwold did not answer. He fidgeted and watched Gisela, who was teasing a thread of wool onto her distaff. “You go to Guthrum’s land,” I persisted, “you speak to a dead man, and then you come to me. Why?”

“Because Bjorn said you will be a king too,” Æthelwold said. He had not spoken loudly, but even so I held up a hand to hush him and I looked anxiously at the doorway as if expecting to see a spy listening from the darkness of the next room. I had no doubt Alfred had spies in my household and I thought I knew who they were, but I was not entirely certain that I had identified all of them, which was why I had made sure all the servants were well away from the room where Æthelwold and I talked. Even so it was not wise to say such things too loudly.

Gisela had stopped spinning the wool and was staring at Æthelwold. I was too. “He said what?” I asked.

“He said that you, Uhtred,” Æthelwold went on more quietly, “will be crowned King of Mercia.”

“Have you been drinking?” I asked.

“No,” he said, “only ale.” He leaned toward me. “Bjorn the Dead wishes to speak to you also, to tell you your fate. You and me, Uhtred, will be kings and neighbors. The gods want it and they sent a dead man to tell me so.” Æthelwold was shaking slightly, and sweating, but he was not drinking. Something had scared him into sobriety, and that convinced me he spoke the truth. “They want to know if you are willing to meet the dead,” he said, “and if you are then they will send for you.”

I looked at Gisela who merely looked back at me, her face expressionless. I stared back at her, not waiting for a response, but because she was beautiful, so beautiful. My dark Dane, my lovely Gisela, my bride, my love. She must have known what I was thinking, for her long, grave face was transformed by a slow smile. “Uhtred is to be king?” she asked, breaking the silence and looking at Æthelwold.

“The dead say so,” Æthelwold said defiantly. “And Bjorn heard it from the three sisters.” He meant the Fates, the Norns, the three sisters who weave our destiny.

“Uhtred is to be King of Mercia?” Gisela asked dubiously.

“And you will be the queen,” Æthelwold said.

Gisela looked back to me. She had a quizzical look, but I did not try to answer what I knew she was thinking. Instead I was reflecting that there was no king in Mercia. The old one, a Saxon mongrel on a Danish leash, had died, and there was no successor, while the kingdom itself was now split between Danes and Saxons. My mother’s brother had been an ealdorman in Mercia before he was killed by the Welsh, so I had Mercian blood. And there was no king in Mercia.

“I think you had better hear what the dead man says,” Gisela spoke gravely.

“If they send for me,” I promised, “I will.” And so I would, because a dead man was speaking and he wanted me to be a king.

Alfred arrived a week later. It was a fine day with a pale blue sky in which the midday sun hung low above a cold land. Ice edged the sluggish channels where the River Temes flowed about Sceaftes Eye and Wodenes Eye. Coot, moorhen and dabchicks paddled at the edge of the ice, while on the thawing mud of Sceaftes Eye a host of thrush and blackbirds hunted for worms and snails.

This was home. This had been my home for two years now. Home was Coccham, at the edge of Wessex where the Temes flowed toward Lundene and the sea. I, Uhtred, a Northumbrian lord, an exile and a warrior, had become a builder, a trader, and a father. I served Alfred, King of Wessex, not because I wished to, but because I had given him my oath.

And Alfred had given me a task; to build his new burh at Coccham. A burh was a town turned into a fortress and Alfred was riveting his kingdom of Wessex with such places. All around the boundaries of Wessex, on the sea, on the rivers and on the moors facing the wild Cornish savages, the walls were being built. A Danish army could invade between the fortresses, but they would discover still more strongholds in Alfred’s heartland, and each burh held a garrison. Alfred, in a rare moment of savage elation, had described the burhs to me as wasps’ nests from which men could swarm to sting the attacking Danes. Burhs were being made at Exanceaster and Werham, at Cisseceastre and Hastengas, at Æscengum and Oxnaforda, at Cracgelad and Wæced, and at dozens of places between. Their walls and palisades were manned by spears and shields. Wessex was becoming a land of fortresses, and my task was to make the little town of Coccham into a burh.

The work was done by every West Saxon man over the age of twelve. Half of them worked while the other half tended the fields. At Coccham I was supposed to have five hundred men serving at any one time, though usually there were fewer than three hundred. They dug, they banked, they cut timber for walls, and so we had raised a stronghold on the banks of the Temes. In truth it was two strongholds, one on the river’s southern bank and the other on Sceaftes Eye, which was an island splitting the river into two channels, and in that January of 885 the work was nearly done and no Danish ship could now row upstream to raid the farms and villages along the river’s bank. They could try, but they must pass my new ramparts and know that my troops would follow them, trap them ashore and kill them.

A Danish trader called Ulf had come that morning, tying his boat at the wharf on Sceaftes Eye where one of my officials prodded through the cargo to assess the tax. Ulf himself, grinning toothlessly, climbed up to greet me. He gave me a piece of amber wrapped in kidskin. “For the Lady Gisela, lord,” he said. “She is well?”

“She is,” I said, touching Thor’s hammer that hung around my neck.

“And you have a second child, I hear?”

“A girl,” I said, “and where did you hear of her?”

“Beamfleot,” he said, which made sense. Ulf was a northerner, but no ships were making the voyage from Northumbria to Wessex in the depth of this cold winter. He must have spent the season in southern East Anglia, on the long intricate mudflats of the Temes estuary. “It isn’t much,” he said, gesturing at his cargo. “I bought some hides and ax blades in Grantaceaster and thought I’d come upriver to see if you Saxons have any money left.”

“You came upriver,” I told him, “to see whether we’d finished the fortress. You’re a spy, Ulf, and I think I’ll hang you from a tree.”

“No, you won’t,” he said, unmoved by my words.

“I’m bored,” I said, putting the amber into my pouch, “and watching a Dane twitch on a rope would be amusing, wouldn’t it?”

“You must have been laughing when you hanged Jarrel’s crew then,” he said.

“Was that who it was?” I asked. “Jarrel? I didn’t ask his name.”

“I saw thirty bodies,” Ulf said, jerking his head downstream, “maybe more? All hanging from trees and I thought, that looks like Lord Uhtred’s work.”

“Only thirty?” I said, “there were fifty-three. I should add your miserable corpse, Ulf, to help make up the numbers.”

“You don’t want me,” Ulf said cheerfully, “you want a young one, because young ones twitch more than us old ones.” He peered down at his boat and spat toward a red-haired boy who was staring vacantly across the river. “You could hang that little bastard. He’s my wife’s oldest boy and nothing but a piece of toad gristle. He’ll twitch.”

“So who’s in Lundene these days?” I asked.

“Earl Haesten’s in and out,” Ulf said, “more in than out.”

I was surprised by that. I knew Haesten. He was a young Dane who had once been my oath-man, but who had broken his oath and now aspired to be a warrior lord. He called himself an earl, which amused me, but I was surprised he had gone to Lundene. I knew he had made a walled camp on the coast of East Anglia, but now he had moved much closer to Wessex, which suggested he was looking for trouble. “So what’s he doing?” I asked scornfully, “stealing his neighbors’ ducks?”

Ulf drew in a breath and shook his head. “He’s got allies, lord.”

Something in his tone made me wary. “Allies?”

“The Thurgilson brothers,” Ulf said, and touched his hammer amulet.

The name meant nothing to me then. “Thurgilson?”

“Sigefrid and Erik,” Elf said, still touching the hammer. “Norse earls, lord.”

That was something new. The Norse did not usually come to East Anglia or to Wessex. We often heard tales of their raids in the Scottish lands and in Ireland, but Norse chieftains rarely came close to Wessex. “What are Norsemen doing in Lundene?” I asked.

“They got there two days ago, lord,” Ulf said, “with twenty-two keels. Haesten went with them, and he took nine ships.”

I whistled softly. Thirty-one ships was a fleet and it meant the brothers and Haesten together commanded an army of at least a thousand men. And those men were in Lundene and Lundene was on the frontier of Wessex.

Lundene was a strange city back then. Officially it was part of Mercia, but Mercia had no king and so Lundene had no ruler. It was neither Saxon nor Dane, but a mix of both, and a place where a man could become rich, dead, or both. It stood where Mercia, East Anglia, and Wessex met, a city of merchants, tradesmen, and seafarers. And now, if Ulf was right, it had an army of Vikings within its walls.

Ulf chuckled. “They’ve got you stopped up like a rat in a sack, lord.”

I wondered how a fleet had gathered and ridden the tide upstream to Lundene without my finding out long before it sailed. Coccham was the nearest burh to Lundene and I usually knew what happened there within a day, but now an enemy had occupied the city and I had known nothing about it. “Did the brothers send you to tell me this?” I asked Ulf. I was assuming that the Thurgilson brothers and Haesten had only captured Lundene so that someone, probably Alfred, would pay them to go away. In which case it served their interest to let us know of their arrival.

Ulf shook his head. “I sailed as they arrived, lord. Bad enough having to pay you duty without giving half my goods to them.” He shuddered. “The Earl Sigefrid’s a bad man, lord. Not someone to do business with.”

“Why didn’t I know they were with Haesten?” I asked.

“They weren’t. They’ve been in Frankia. Sailed straight across the sea and up the river.”

“With twenty-two ships of Norsemen,” I said bitterly.

“They’ve got everything, lord,” Ulf said. “Danes, Frisians, Saxons, Norse, everything. Sigefrid finds men wherever the gods shake out their shit-pots. They’re hungry men, lord. Masterless men. Rogues. They come from all over.”

The masterless man was the worst kind. He owed no allegiance. He had nothing but his sword, his hunger, and his ambition. I had been such a man in my time. “So Sigefrid and Erik will be trouble?” I suggested mildly.

“Sigefrid will,” Ulf said. “Erik? He’s the younger. Men speak well of him, but Sigefrid can’t wait for trouble.”

“He wants ransom?” I asked.

“He might,” Ulf said dubiously. “He’s got to pay all those men, and he got nothing but mouse droppings in Frankia. But who’ll pay him ransom? Lundene belongs to Mercia, doesn’t it?”

“It does,” I said.

“And there’s no king in Mercia,” Ulf said. “Isn’t natural, is it? A kingdom without a king.”

I thought of Æthelwold’s visit and touched my amulet of Thor’s hammer. “Have you ever heard of the dead being raised?” I asked Ulf.

“The dead being raised?” He stared at me, alarmed, and touched his own hammer amulet. “The dead are best left in Niflheim, lord.”

“An old magic, perhaps?” I suggested. “Raising the dead?”

“You hear tales,” Ulf said, now gripping his amulet tightly.

“What tales?”

“From the far north, lord. From the land of ice and birch. Strange things happen there. They say men can fly in the darkness, and I did hear that the dead walk on the frozen seas, but I never saw such a thing.” He raised the amulet to his lips and kissed it. “I reckon they’re just stories to scare children on winter nights, lord.”

“Maybe,” I said, and turned as a boy came running along the foot of the newly raised wall. He jumped the timbers that would eventually make the fighting platform, skidded in a piece of mud, clambered up the bank and then stood, panting too hard to be able to speak. I waited until he caught his breath. “Haligast, lord,” he said, “Haligast!”

Ulf looked at me quizzically. Like all traders he spoke some English, but haligast puzzled him. “The Holy Ghost,” I translated into Danish.

“Coming, lord,” the boy gasped excitedly and pointed upriver. “Coming now!”

“The Holy Ghost is coming?” Ulf asked in alarm. He probably had no idea what the Holy Ghost was, but he knew enough to fear all specters, and my recent question about the living dead had scared him.

“Alfred’s ship,” I explained, then turned back to the boy. “Is the king on board?”

“His flag’s flying, lord.”

“Then he is,” I said.

Ulf pulled his tunic straight. “Alfred? What does he want?”

“He wants to discover my loyalties,” I said drily.

Ulf grinned. “So you might be the one who twitches on a rope, eh, lord?”

“I need ax-heads,” I told him. “Take your best ones to the house and we’ll discuss a price later.”

I was not surprised by Alfred’s arrival. In those years he spent much of his time traveling between the growing burhs to inspect the work. He had been to Coccham a dozen times in as many months, but this visit, I reckoned, was not to examine the walls, but to find out why Æthelwold had come to see me. The king’s spies had done their work, and so the king had come to question me.

His ship was coming fast, carried by the Temes’s winter flow. In the cold months it was quicker to travel by ship, and Alfred liked the Haligast because it enabled him to work on board as he journeyed along the northern frontier of Wessex. The Haligast had twenty oars and room enough for half Alfred’s bodyguard and the inevitable troop of priests. The king’s banner, a green dragon, flew from the masthead, while two flags hung from the cross spar, which would have held a sail if the ship had been at sea. One flag showed a saint, while the other was a green cloth embroidered with a white cross. At the ship’s stern was a small cabin that cramped the steersman, but provided Alfred a place to keep his desk. A second ship, the Heofonhlaf, carried the rest of the bodyguard and still more priests. Heofonhlaf meant bread of heaven. Alfred never could name a ship.

Heofonhlaf berthed first and a score of men in mail, carrying shields and spears, clambered ashore to line the wooden wharf. The Haligast followed, her steersman thumping the bow hard on a piling so that Alfred, who was waiting amidships, staggered. There were kings who might have disemboweled a steersman for that loss of dignity, but Alfred seemed not to notice. He was talking earnestly with a thin-faced, scrape-chinned, pale-cheeked monk. It was Asser of Wales. I had heard that Brother Asser was the king’s new pet, and I knew he hated me, which was only right because I hated him. I still smiled at him and he twitched away as if I had just vomited down his robe, bending his head closer to Alfred who could have been his twin, for Alfred of Wessex looked much more like a priest than a king. He wore a long black cloak and a growing baldness gave him the tonsured look of a monk. His hands, like a clerk’s, were always ink stained, while his bony face was lean and serious and earnest and pale. His beard was thin. He often went clean-shaven, but now had a beard streaked thick with white hairs.

Crewmen secured the Haligast, then Alfred took Asser’s elbow and stepped ashore with him. The Welshman wore an oversized cross on his chest and Alfred touched it briefly before turning to me. “My lord Uhtred,” he said enthusiastically. He was being unusually pleasant, not because he was glad to see me, but because he thought I was plotting treason. There was little other reason for me to sup with his nephew Æthelwold.

“My lord King,” I said, and bowed to him. I ignored Brother Asser. The Welshman had once accused me of piracy, murder, and a dozen other things, and most of his accusations had been accurate, but I was still alive. He shot me a dismissive glance, then scuttled off through the mud, evidently going to make certain that the nuns in Coccham’s convent were not pregnant, drunk, or happy.

Alfred, followed by Egwine, who now commanded the household troops, and by six of those troops, walked along my new battlements. He glanced at Ulf’s ship, but said nothing. I knew I had to tell him of the capture of Lundene, but I decided to let that news wait until he had asked his questions of me. For now he was content to inspect the work we had been doing and he found nothing to criticize, nor did he expect to. Coccham’s burh was far more advanced than any of the others. The next fort west on the Temes, at Welengaford, had scarcely broken ground, let alone built a palisade, while the walls at Oxnaforda had slumped into their ditch after a week of violent rain just before Yule. Coccham’s burh, though, was almost finished. “I am told,” Alfred said, “that the fyrd is reluctant to work. You have not found that true?”

The fyrd was the army, raised from the shire, and the fyrd not only built the burhs, but formed their garrisons. “The fyrd are very reluctant to work, lord,” I said.

“Yet you have almost finished?”

I smiled. “I hanged ten men,” I said, “and it encouraged the rest to enthusiasm.”

He stopped at a place where he could stare downriver. Swans made the view lovely. I watched him. The lines on his face were deeper and his skin paler. He looked ill, but then Alfred of Wessex was always a sick man. His stomach hurt and his bowels hurt, and I saw a grimace as a stab of pain lanced through him. “I heard,” he spoke coldly, “that you hanged them without benefit of trial?”

“I did, lord, yes.”

“There are laws in Wessex,” he said sternly.

“And if the burh isn’t built,” I said, “then there will be no Wessex.”

“You like to defy me,” he said mildly.

“No, lord, I swore an oath to you. I do your work.”

“Then hang no more men without a fair trial,” he said sharply, then turned and stared across the river to the Mercian bank. “A king must bring justice, Lord Uhtred. That is a king’s job. And if a land has no king, how can there be law?” He still spoke mildly, but he was testing me, and for a moment I felt alarm. I had assumed he had come to discover what Æthelwold had said to me, but his mention of Mercia, and of its lack of a king, suggested he already knew what had been discussed on that night of cold wind and hard rain. “There are men,” he went on, still staring at the Mercian bank, “who would like to be King of Mercia.” He paused and I was certain he knew everything that Æthelwold had said to me, but then he betrayed his ignorance. “My nephew Æthelwold?” he suggested.

I gave a burst of laughter that was made too loud by my relief. “Æthelwold!” I said. “He doesn’t want to be King of Mercia! He wants your throne, lord.”

“He told you that?” he asked sharply.

“Of course he told me that,” I said. “He tells everyone that!”

“Is that why he came to see you?” Alfred asked, unable to hide his curiosity any longer.

“He came to buy a horse, lord,” I lied. “He wants my stallion, Smoca, and I told him no.” Smoca’s hide was an unusual mix of gray and black, thus his name, Smoke, and he had won every race he had ever run in his life and, better, was not afraid of men, shields, weapons, or noise. I could have sold Smoca to any warrior in Britain.

“And he talked of wanting to be king?” Alfred asked suspiciously.

“Of course he did.”

“You didn’t tell me at the time,” he said reproachfully.

“If I told you every time Æthelwold talked treason,” I said, “you’d never cease to hear from me. What I tell you now is that you should slice his head off.”

“He is my nephew,” Alfred said stiffly, “and has royal blood.”

“He still has a removable head,” I insisted.

He waved a petulant hand as if my idea were risible. “I thought of making him king in Mercia,” he said, “but he would lose the throne.”

“He would,” I agreed.

“He’s weak,” Alfred said scornfully, “and Mercia needs a strong ruler. Someone to frighten the Danes.” I confess at that moment I thought he meant me and I was ready to thank him, even fall to my knees and take his hand, but then he enlightened me. “Your cousin, I think.”

“Æthelred!” I asked, unable to hide my scorn. My cousin was a bumptious little prick, full of his own importance, but he was also close to Alfred. So close that he was going to marry Alfred’s elder daughter.

“He can be ealdorman in Mercia,” Alfred said, “and rule with my blessing.” In other words my miserable cousin would govern Mercia on Alfred’s leash and, if I am truthful, that was a better solution for Alfred than letting someone like me take Mercia’s throne. Æthelred, married to Æthelflaed, was more likely to be Alfred’s man, and Mercia, or at least that part of it south of Wæclingastræt, would be like a province of Wessex.

“If my cousin,” I said, “is to be Lord of Mercia, then he’ll be Lord of Lundene?”

“Of course.”

“Then he has a problem, lord,” I said, and I confess I spoke with some pleasure at the prospect of my pompous cousin having to deal with a thousand rogues commanded by Norse earls. “A fleet of thirty-one ships arrived in Lundene two days ago,” I went on. “The Earls Sigefrid and Erik Thurgilson command them. Haesten of Beamfleot is an ally. So far as I know, lord, Lundene now belongs to Norsemen and Danes.”

For a moment Alfred said nothing, but just stared at the swan-haunted floodwaters. He looked paler than ever. His jaw clenched. “You sound pleased,” he said bitterly.

“I do not mean to, lord,” I said.

“How in God’s name can that happen?” he demanded angrily. He turned and gazed at the burh’s walls. “The Thurgilson brothers were in Frankia,” he said. I might never have heard of Sigefrid and Erik, but Alfred made it his business to know where the Viking bands were roving.

“They’re in Lundene now,” I said remorselessly.

He fell silent again, and I knew what he was thinking. He was thinking that the Temes is our road to other kingdoms, to the rest of the world, and if the Danes and the Norse block the Temes, then Wessex was cut off from much of the world’s trade. Of course there were other ports and other rivers, but the Temes is the great river that sucks in vessels from all the wide seas. “Do they want money?” he asked bitterly.

“That is Mercia’s problem, lord,” I suggested.

“Don’t be a fool!” he snapped at me. “Lundene might be in Mercia, but the river belongs to both of us.” He turned around again, staring downriver almost as though he expected to see the masts of Norse ships appearing in the distance. “If they will not go,” he said quietly, “then they will have to be expelled.”

“Yes, lord.”

“And that,” he said decisively, “will be my wedding gift to your cousin.”

“Lundene?”

“And you will provide it,” he said savagely. “You will restore Lundene to Mercian rule, Lord Uhtred. Let me know by the Feast of Saint David what force you will need to secure the gift.” He frowned, thinking. “Your cousin will command the army, but he is too busy to plan the campaign. You will make the necessary preparations and advise him.”

“I will?” I asked sourly.

“Yes,” he said, “you will.”

He did not stay to eat. He said prayers in the church, gave silver to the nunnery, then embarked on Haligast and vanished upstream.

And I was to capture Lundene and give all the glory to my cousin Æthelred.

The summons to meet the dead came two weeks later and took me by surprise.

Each morning, unless the snow was too thick for easy travel, a crowd of petitioners waited at my gate. I was the ruler in Coccham, the man who dispensed justice, and Alfred had granted me that power, knowing it was essential if his burh was to be built. He had given me more. I was entitled to a tenth part of every harvest in northern Berrocscire, I was given pigs and cattle and grain, and from that income I paid for the timber that made the walls and the weapons that guarded them. There was opportunity in that, and Alfred suspected me, which is why he had given me a sly priest called Wulfstan, whose task was to make sure I did not steal too much. Yet it was Wulfstan who stole. He had come to me in the summer, half grinning, and pointed out that the dues we collected from the merchants who used the river were unpredictable, which meant Alfred could never estimate whether we were keeping proper accounts. He waited for my approval and got a thump about his tonsured skull instead. I sent him to Alfred under guard with a letter describing his dishonesty, and then I stole the dues myself. The priest had been a fool. You never, ever, tell others of your crimes, not unless they are so big as to be incapable of concealment, and then you describe them as policy or statecraft.

I did not steal much, no more than another man in my position would put aside, and the work on the burh’s walls proved to Alfred that I was doing my job. I have always loved building and life has few ordinary pleasures greater than chatting with the skilled men who split, shape, and join timbers. I dispensed justice, too, and I did that well, because my father, who had been Lord of Bebbanburg in Northumbria, had taught me that a lord’s duty was to the folk he ruled, and that they would forgive a lord many sins so long as he protected them. So each day I would listen to misery, and some two weeks after Alfred’s visit I remember a morning of spitting rain in which some two dozen folk knelt to me in the mud outside my hall. I cannot remember all the petitions now, but doubtless they were the usual complaints of boundary stones being moved or of a marriage-price unpaid. I made my decisions swiftly, gauging my judgments by the demeanor of the petitioners. I usually reckoned a defiant petitioner was probably lying, while a tearful one elicited my pity. I doubt I got every decision right, but folk were content enough with my judgments and they knew I did not take bribes to favor the wealthy.

I do remember one petitioner that morning. He was solitary, which was unusual, for most folk arrived with friends or relatives to swear the truth of their complaints, but this man came alone and continually allowed others to get ahead of him. He plainly wanted to be the last to talk to me, and I suspected he wanted a lot of my time and I was tempted to end the morning session without granting him audience, but in the end I let him speak and he was mercifully brief.

“Bjorn has disturbed my land, lord,” he said. He was kneeling and all I could see of him was his tangled and dirt-crusted hair.

For a moment I did not recognize the name. “Bjorn?” I demanded. “Who is Bjorn?”

“The man who disturbs my land, lord, in the night.”

“A Dane?” I asked, puzzled.

“He comes from his grave, lord,” the man said, and I understood then and hushed him to silence so that the priest who noted down my judgments would not learn too much.

I tipped up the petitioner’s head to see a scrawny face. By his tongue I reckoned him for a Saxon, but perhaps he was a Dane who spoke our tongue perfectly, so I tried him in Danish. “Where have you come from?” I asked.

“From the disturbed ground, lord,” he answered in Danish, but it was obvious from the way he mangled the words that he was no Dane.

“Beyond the street?” I spoke English again.

“Yes, lord,” he said.

“And when does Bjorn disturb your land again?”

“The day after tomorrow, lord. He will come after moonrise.”

“You are sent to guide me?”

“Yes, lord.”

We rode next day. Gisela wanted to come, but I would not allow her for I did not wholly trust the summons, and because of that mistrust I rode with six men; Finan, Clapa, Sihtric, Rypere, Eadric, and Cenwulf. The last three were Saxons, Clapa and Sihtric were Danes, and Finan was the fiery Irishman who commanded my household troops, and all six were my oath-men. My life was theirs as theirs was mine. Gisela stayed behind Coccham’s walls, guarded by the fyrd and by the remainder of my household troops.

We rode in mail and we carried weapons. We went west and north first because the Temes was winter swollen and we had to ride a long way upstream to find a ford shallow enough to be crossed. That was at Welengaford, another burh, and I noted how the earth walls were unfinished and how the timber to make the palisades lay rotting and untrimmed in the mud. The commander of the garrison, a man named Oslac, wanted to know why we crossed the river, and it was his right to know because he guarded this part of the frontier between Wessex and lawless Mercia. I said a fugitive had fled Coccham and was thought to be skulking on the Temes’s northern bank, and Oslac believed the tale. It would reach Alfred soon enough.

The man who had brought the summons was our guide. He was called Huda and he told me he served a Dane named Eilaf who had an estate that bordered the eastern side of Wæclingastræt. That made Eilaf an East Anglian and a subject of King Guthrum. “Is Eilaf a Christian?” I asked Huda.

“We are all Christians, lord,” Huda said, “King Guthrum demands it.”

“So what does Eilaf wear about his neck?” I asked.

“The same as you, lord,” he said. I wore Thor’s hammer because I was no Christian and Huda’s answer told me that Eilaf, like me, worshipped the older gods, though to please his king, Guthrum, he pretended to a belief in the Christian god. I had known Guthrum in the days when he had led great armies to attack Wessex, but he was getting old now. He had adopted his enemy’s religion and it seemed he no longer wanted to rule all Britain, but was content with the wide fertile fields of East Anglia as his kingdom. Yet there were many in his lands who were not content. Sigefrid, Erik, Haesten, and probably Eilaf. They were Norsemen and Danes, they were warriors, they sacrificed to Thor and to Odin, they kept their swords sharp, and they dreamed, as all Northmen dream, of the richer lands of Wessex.

We rode through Mercia, the land without a king, and I noted how many farmsteads had been burned so that the only trace of their existence was now a patch of scorched earth where weeds grew. More weeds smothered what had been plowland. Hazel saplings had invaded the pastures. Where folk did still live, they lived in fear and when they saw us coming they ran to the woodlands, or else shut themselves behind palisades. “Who rules here?” I asked Huda.

“Danes,” he said, then jerked his head westward, “Saxons over there.”

“Eilaf doesn’t want this land?”

“He has much of it, lord,” Huda said, “but the Saxons harass him.”

According to the treaty between Alfred and Guthrum this land was Saxon, but the Danes are land hungry and Guthrum could not control all his thegns. So this was battle land, a place where both sides fought a sullen, small and endless war, and the Danes were offering me its crown.

I am a Saxon. A northerner. I am Uhtred of Bebbanburg, but I had been raised by the Danes and I knew their ways. I spoke their tongue, I had married a Dane, and I worshipped their gods. If I were to be king here then the Saxons would know they had a Saxon ruler while the Danes would accept me because I had been as a son to Earl Ragnar. But to be king here was to turn on Alfred and, if the dead man had spoken truly, to put Alfred’s drunken nephew on the throne of Wessex, and how long would Æthelwold last? Less than a year, I reckoned, before the Danes killed him, and then all England would be under Danish rule except for Mercia where I, a Saxon who thought like a Dane, would be king. And how long would the Danes tolerate me?

“Do you want to be a king?” Gisela had asked me the night before we rode.

“I never thought I did,” I answered cautiously.

“Then why go?”

I had stared into the fire. “Because the dead man brings a message from the Fates,” I told her.

She had touched her amulet. “The Fates can’t be avoided,” she said softly. Wyrd bi? ful ãræd.

“So I must go,” I said, “because fate demands it. And because I want to see a dead man talk.”

“And if the dead man says you are to be a king?”

“Then you will be a queen,” I said.

“And you will fight Alfred?” Gisela asked.

“If the Fates say so,” I said.

“And your oath to him?”

“The Fates know that answer,” I said, “but I don’t.”

And now we rode beneath beech-covered hills that slanted east and north. We spent the night in a deserted farm and one of us was always awake. Nothing disturbed us and, in the dawn, under a sky the color of sword-steel, we rode on. Huda led, mounted on one of my horses. I talked to him for a while to discover that he was a huntsman and that he had served a Saxon lord killed by Eilaf, and that he reckoned himself content under the Dane’s lordship. His replies became surlier and shorter as we neared Wæclingastræt so, after a while, I dropped back to ride beside Finan. “Trust him?” Finan asked, nodding at Huda.

I shrugged. “His master does Sigefrid and Haesten’s bidding,” I said, “and I know Haesten. I saved his life and that means something.”

Finan thought about it. “You saved his life? How?”

“I rescued him from some Frisians. He became my oath-man.”

“And broke his oath?”

“He did.”

“So Haesten can’t be trusted,” Finan said firmly. I said nothing. Three deer stood poised for flight at the far side of a bare pasture. We rode on an overgrown track beside a hedgerow where crocuses grew. “What they want,” Finan went on, “is Wessex. And to take Wessex they must fight. And they know you are Alfred’s greatest warrior.”

“What they want,” I said, “is the burh at Coccham.” And to get it they would offer me the crown of Mercia, though I had not revealed that offer to Finan or to any other man. I had only told Gisela.

Of course they wanted much more. They wanted Lundene because it gave them a walled town on the Temes, but Lundene was on the Mercian bank and would not help them invade Wessex. But if I gave them Coccham then they were on the river’s south bank and they could use Coccham as a base to raid deep into Wessex. At the very least Alfred would pay them to leave Coccham and so they would make much silver even if they failed to dislodge him from the throne.

But Sigefrid, Erik, and Haesten, I reckoned, were not after mere silver. Wessex was the prize, and to gain Wessex they needed men. Guthrum would not help them, Mercia was riven between Dane and Saxon and could supply few men willing to leave their homes unguarded, but beyond Mercia was Northumbria, and Northumbria had a Danish king who commanded the loyalty of a great Danish warrior. The king was Gisela’s brother and the warrior, Ragnar, was my friend. By buying me they believed they could bring Northumbria into their war. The Danish north would conquer the Saxon south. That was what they wanted. That was what the Danes had wanted all my life. And all I needed to do was break my oath to Alfred and become king in Mercia, and the land that some called England would become Daneland. That, I reckoned, was why the dead man had summoned me.

We came to Wæclingastræt at sunset. The Romans had strengthened the road with a gravel bed and stone edges, and some of their masonry still showed through the pale winter grass beside which a moss-grown milestone read Durocobrivis V. “What’s Durocobrivis?” I asked Huda.

“We call it Dunastopol,” he said with a shrug to indicate that the place was negligible.

We crossed the street. In a well-governed country I might have expected to see guards patrolling the road to protect travelers, but there were none in sight here. There were just crows flying to a nearby wood and silvered clouds stretching across the western sky while ahead of us the darkness lay swollen and heavy above East Anglia. Low hills lay to the north, toward Dunastopol, and Huda led us toward those hills and up a long shallow valley where bare apple trees stood stark in the gloom. Night had fallen by the time we reached Eilaf’s hall.

Eilaf’s men greeted me as though I were already a king. Servants waited at the gate of his palisade to take our horses, and another knelt at the doorway of the hall to offer me a bowl of washing water and a cloth to dry my hands. A steward took my two swords, the long-bladed Serpent-Breath and the gut-ripper called Wasp-Sting. He took them respectfully, as if he regretted the custom that no man could carry a blade inside a hall, but that was a good custom. Blades and ale do not mix well.

The hall was crowded. There were at least forty men there, most in mail or leather, standing either side of the central hearth where a great fire blazed to fill the beamed roof with smoke. Some of the men bowed as I entered, others just stared at me as I walked to greet my host, who stood with his wife and two sons beside the hearth. Haesten was beside them, grinning. A servant brought me a horn of ale.

“Lord Uhtred!” Haesten greeted me loudly so that every man and woman in the hall would know who I was. Haesten’s grin was somehow mischievous, as if he and I shared a secret joke in this hall. He had hair the color of gold, a square face, bright eyes and was wearing a tunic of fine wool dyed green, above which hung a thick chain of silver. His arms were heavy with rings of silver and gold, while silver brooches were pinned to his long boots. “It is good to see you, lord,” he said, and gave me a hint of a bow.

“Still alive, Haesten?” I asked, ignoring my host.

“Still alive, lord,” he said.

“And no wonder,” I said, “the last time I saw you was at Ethandun.”

“A rainy day, lord, as I remember,” he said.

“And you were running like a hare, Haesten,” I said.

I saw the shadow cross his face. I had accused him of cowardice, but he deserved an attack from me for he had sworn to be my man and had betrayed his oath by deserting me.

Eilaf, sensing trouble, cleared his throat. He was a heavy man, tall, with hair the brightest red I have ever seen. It was curly, and his beard was curly, and both were flame-colored. Eilaf the Red, he was called, and though he was tall and heavy-set, he somehow seemed smaller than Haesten, who had a sublime confidence in his own abilities. “You are welcome, Lord Uhtred,” Eilaf said.

I ignored him. Haesten was watching me, his face still clouded, but then I grinned. “Yet all Guthrum’s army ran that day,” I said, “and the ones who didn’t are all dead. So I am glad that I saw you run.”

He smiled then. “I killed eight men at Ethandun,” he said, eager for his men to know that he was no coward.

“Then I am relieved I did not face your sword,” I said, recovering my earlier insult with insincere flattery. Then I turned to the redheaded Eilaf. “And you,” I asked, “were you at Ethandun?”

“No, lord,” he said.

“Then you missed a rare fight,” I said. “Isn’t that so, Haesten? A fight to remember!”

“A massacre in the rain, lord,” Haesten said.

“And I still limp from it,” I said, which was true, though the limp was small and hardly inconvenient.

I was named to three other men, three Danes. All of them were dressed well and had arm rings to show their prowess. I forget their names now, but they were there to see me, and they had brought their followers with them. I understood as Haesten made the introductions that he was showing me off. He was proving that I had joined him, and that it was therefore safe for them to join him. Haesten was brewing rebellion in that hall. I drew him to one side. “Who are they?” I demanded.

“They have lands and men in this part of Guthrum’s kingdom.”

“And you want their men?”

“We must make an army,” Haesten said simply.

I gazed down at him. This rebellion, I thought, was not just against Guthrum of East Anglia, but against Alfred of Wessex, and if it was to succeed then all Britain would need be roused by sword, spear, and ax. “And if I refuse to join you?” I asked him.

“You will, lord,” he said confidently.

“I will?” I asked.

“Because tonight, lord, the dead will speak to you.” Haesten smiled, and just then Eilaf intervened to say that all was ready. “We shall raise the dead,” Haesten said dramatically, touching the hammer amulet about his neck, “and then we shall feast.” He gestured toward the door at the back of the hall. “This way, if you will, lord. This way.”

And so I went to meet the dead.

Haesten led us into the darkness and I remember thinking how easy it was to say the dead rose and spoke if the thing was done in such darkness. How would we know? We could hear the corpse perhaps, but not see him, and I was about to protest when two of Eilaf’s men came from the hall with burning brands that flared bright in the damp night. They led us past a pen of pigs and the beasts’ eyes caught the firelight. It had rained while we were in the hall, just a passing winter shower, but water still dripped from the bare branches. Finan, nervous at the sorcery we were about to witness, stayed close to me.

We followed a path downhill to a small pasture beside what I took to be a barn, and there the torches were thrust into waiting heaps of wood that caught the fire fast so that the flames leaped up to illuminate the barn’s wooden wall and wet thatch. As the light brightened I saw that it was not a pasture at all, but a graveyard. The small field was dotted with low earth heaps, and was well fenced to stop animals rooting up the dead.

“That was our church,” Huda explained. He had appeared beside me and nodded at what I had assumed was the barn.

“You’re a Christian?” I asked.

“Yes, lord. But we have no priest now.” He made the sign of the cross. “Our dead go to their rest unshriven.”

“I have a son in a Christian graveyard,” I said, and wondered why I had said it. I rarely thought of my dead infant son. I had not known him. His mother and I were estranged. Yet I remembered him on that dark night in that wet place of the dead. “Why is a Danish skald buried in a Christian grave?” I asked Huda. “You told me he was no Christian.”

“He died here, lord, and we buried him before we knew that. Maybe that is why he is restless?”

“Maybe,” I said, then heard the struggle behind me and wished I had thought to ask for my swords before I left Eilaf’s hall.

I turned, expecting an attack, and instead saw that two men were dragging a third toward us. The third man was slight, young and fair-haired. His eyes looked huge in the flamelight. He was whimpering. The men who dragged him were much bigger and his struggles were useless. I looked quizzically at Haesten.

“To raise the dead, lord,” he explained, “we have to send a messenger across the gulf.”

“Who is he?”

“A Saxon,” Haesten said carelessly.

“He deserves to die?” I asked. I was not squeamish about death, but I sensed Haesten would kill like a child drowning a mouse and I did not want a man’s death on my conscience if that man had not deserved to die. This was not battle, where a man stood a chance of going to the eternal joys of Odin’s hall.

“He’s a thief,” Haesten said.

“Twice a thief,” Eilaf added.

I crossed to the young man and lifted his head by raising his chin, and so saw that he had the brand-mark of a convicted robber burned into his forehead. “What did you steal?” I asked him.

“A coat, lord,” he spoke in a whisper. “I was cold.”

“Was that the first theft?” I asked, “or the second?”

“The first was a lamb,” Eilaf said behind me.

“I was hungry, lord,” the young man said, “and my child was starving.”

“You stole twice,” I said, “which means you must die.” That was the law even in this lawless place. The young man was weeping, yet still stared at me. He thought I might relent and order his life spared, but I turned away. I have stolen many things in my life, almost all of them more valuable than any lamb or coat, but I steal while the owner is watching and while he can defend his property with his sword. It is the thief who steals in the dark who deserves to die.

Huda was making the sign of the cross again and again. He was nervous. The young thief shouted incomprehensible words at me until one of his guards slapped him hard across the mouth, and then he just hung his head and cried. Finan and my three Saxons were clutching the crosses they wore about their necks.

“You are ready, lord?” Haesten asked me.

“Yes,” I said, trying to sound confident, yet in truth I was as nervous as Finan. There is a curtain between our world and the lands of the dead and part of me wished that curtain to stay closed. I instinctively felt for Serpent-Breath’s hilt, but of course she was not with me.

“Put the message in his mouth,” Haesten ordered. One of the guards tried to open the young man’s mouth, but the prisoner resisted until a knife stabbed at his lips and then he opened wide. An object was pushed onto his tongue. “A harp string,” Haesten explained to me, “and Bjorn will know its meaning. Kill him now,” he added to the guards.

“No!” the young man shouted, spitting out the coiled string. He started screaming and weeping as the two men dragged him to one of the earth mounds. They stood either side of the mound, holding their prisoner over the grave. The moon was silvering a gap in the clouds. The churchyard smelled of new rain. “No, please, no,” the young man was shaking, crying. “I have a wife, I have children, no! Please!”

“Kill him,” Eilaf the Red ordered.

One of the guards pushed the harp string back into the messenger’s mouth, then held the jaw shut. He tilted the young man’s head back, hard back, exposing his throat, and the second Dane slit it with a quick, practiced thrust and a wrenching pull. I heard a stifled, guttural sound and saw the blood flicker black in the flamelight. It spattered the two men, fell across the grave, and slapped wetly onto the damp grass. The messenger’s body twitched and struggled for a while as the blood flow became weaker. Then, at last, the young man slumped between his captors who let his last blood drops spurt weakly onto the grave. Only when no more blood flowed did they drag him away, dropping his corpse beside the graveyard’s wooden fence. I was holding my breath. None of us moved. An owl, its wings astonishingly white in the night, flew close above me and I instinctively touched my hammer amulet, convinced I had seen the thief’s soul going to the other world.

Haesten stood close to the blood-soaked grave. “You have blood, Bjorn!” he shouted. “I have given you a life! I have sent you a message!”

Nothing happened. The wind sighed on the church’s thatch. Somewhere a beast moved in the darkness and then went still. A log collapsed in one of the fires and the sparks flew upward.

“You have blood!” Haesten shouted again. “Do you need more blood?”

I thought nothing was going to happen. That I had wasted a journey.

And then the grave moved.

TWO

The grave mound shifted.

I remember a coldness gripping my heart and terror consuming me, but I could neither breathe nor move. I stood fixed, watching, waiting for the horror.

The earth fell in slightly, as though a mole was scrabbling out of its small hill. More soil shifted and something gray appeared. The gray thing lurched and I saw the earth was falling away faster as the gray thing rose from the mound. It was in half darkness, for the fires were behind us and our shadows were cast across the phantom that was born out of that winter earth, a phantom that took shape as a filthy corpse that staggered out of its broken grave. I saw a dead man who twitched, half fell, struggled to find his balance and finally stood.

Finan gripped my arm. He had no idea he did such a thing. Huda was kneeling and clutching the cross at his neck. I was just staring.

And the corpse gave a coughing, choking noise like a man’s death rattle. Something spat from his mouth, and he choked again, then slowly unbent to stand fully upright and, in the shadowed flamelight, I saw that the dead man was dressed in a soiled gray winding sheet. He had a pale face streaked with dirt, a face untouched by any decay. His long hair lay lank and white on his thin shoulders. He breathed, but had trouble breathing, just as a dying man has trouble breathing. And that was right, I remember thinking, for this man was coming back from death and he would sound just as he had when he had taken his journey into death. He gave a long moan, then took something from his mouth. He threw it toward us and I took an involuntary step backward before seeing that it was a coiled harp string. I knew then that the impossible thing I saw was real, for I had seen the guards force the harp string into the messenger’s mouth, and now the corpse had shown us that he had received the token. “You will not leave me in peace,” the dead man spoke in a dry half-voice and beside me Finan made a sound that was like a despairing moan.

“Welcome, Bjorn,” Haesten said. Alone among us Haesten seemed unworried by the corpse’s living presence. There was even amusement in his voice.

“I want peace,” Bjorn said, his voice a croak.

“This is the Lord Uhtred,” Haesten said, pointing at me, “who has sent many good Danes to the place where you live.”

“I do not live,” Bjorn said bitterly. He began grunting and his chest heaved spasmodically as though the night air hurt his lungs. “I curse you,” he said to Haesten, but so feebly that the words had no threat.

Haesten laughed. “I had a woman today, Bjorn. Do you remember women? The feel of their soft thighs? The warmth of their skin? You remember the noise they make when you ride them?”

“May Hel kiss you through all time,” Bjorn said, “till the last chaos.” Hel was the goddess of the dead, a rotting corpse of a goddess, and the curse was dreadful, but Bjorn again spoke so dully that this second curse, like the first, was empty. The dead man’s eyes were closed, his chest still jerked and his hands made grasping motions at the cold air.

I was in terror and I do not mind confessing it. It is a certainty in this world that the dead go to their long homes in the earth and stay there. Christians say our corpses will all rise one day and the air will be filled with the calling of angels’ horns and the sky will glow like beaten gold as the dead come from the ground, but I have never believed that. We die and we go to the afterworld and we stay there, but Bjorn had come back. He had fought the winds of darkness and the tides of death and he had struggled back to this world and now he stood before us, gaunt and tall and filthy and croaking, and I was shivering. Finan had dropped to one knee. My other men were behind me, but I knew they would be shaking as I shook. Only Haesten seemed unaffected by the dead man’s presence. “Tell the Lord Uhtred,” he commanded Bjorn, “what the Norns told you.”

The Norns are the Fates, the three women who spin life’s threads at the roots of Yggdrasil, the tree of life. Whenever a child is born they start a new thread, and they know where it will go, with what other threads it will weave, and how it will end. They know everything. They sit and they spin and they laugh at us, and sometimes they shower us with good fortune and sometimes they doom us to hurt and to tears.

“Tell him,” Haesten commanded impatiently, “what the Norns said of him.”

Bjorn said nothing. His chest heaved and his hands twitched. His eyes were closed.

“Tell him,” Haesten said, “and I will give you back your harp.”

“My harp,” Bjorn said pathetically, “I want my harp.”

“I will put it back in your grave,” Haesten said, “and you can sing to the dead. But first speak to Lord Uhtred.”

Bjorn opened his eyes and stared at me. I recoiled from those dark eyes, but made myself stare back, pretending a bravery I did not feel.

“You are to be king, Lord Uhtred,” Bjorn said, then gave a long moan like a creature in pain. “You are to be king,” he sobbed.

The wind was cold. A spit of rain touched my cheek. I said nothing.

“King of Mercia,” Bjorn said in a sudden and surprisingly loud voice. “You are to be king of Saxon and of Dane, enemy of the Welsh, king between the rivers and lord of all you rule. You are to be mighty, Lord Uhtred, for the three spinners love you.” He stared at me and, though the fate he pronounced was golden, there was a malevolence in his dead eyes. “You will be king,” he said, and the last word sounded like poison on his tongue.

My fear passed then, to be replaced by a surge of pride and power. I did not doubt Bjorn’s message because the gods do not speak lightly, and the spinners know our fate. We Saxons say wyrd bi? ful ãræd, and even the Christians accept that truth. They might deny that the three Norns exist, but they know that wyrd bi? ful ãræd. Fate is inexorable. Fate cannot be changed. Fate rules us. Our lives are made before we live them, and I was to be King of Mercia.

I did not think of Bebbanburg at that moment. Bebbanburg is my land, my fortress beside the northern sea, my home. I believed my whole life was dedicated to recovering it from my uncle, who had stolen it from me when I was a child. I dreamed of Bebbanburg, and in my dreams I saw its rocks splintering the gray sea white and felt the gales tear at the hall thatch, but when Bjorn spoke I did not think of Bebbanburg. I thought of being a king. Of ruling a land. Of leading a great army to crush my enemies.

And I thought of Alfred, of the duty I owed him and the promises I had made him. I knew I must be an oath-breaker to be a king, but to whom are oaths made? To kings, and so a king has the power to release a man from an oath, and I told myself that as a king I could release myself from any oath, and all this whipped through my mind like a swirl of wind gusting across a threshing floor to spin the chaff up into the sky. I did not think clearly. I was as confused as the chaff spinning in the wind, and I did not weigh my oath to Alfred against my future as a king. I just saw two paths ahead, one hard and hilly, and the other a wide green way leading to a kingdom. And besides, what choice did I have? Wyrd bi? ful ãræd.

Then, in the silence, Haesten suddenly knelt to me. “Lord King,” he said, and there was unexpected reverence in his voice.

“You broke an oath to me,” I said harshly. Why did I say that then? I could have confronted him earlier, in the hall, but it was by that opened grave I made the accusation.

“I did, lord King,” he said, “and I regret it.”

I paused. What was I thinking? That I was a king already? “I forgive you,” I said. I could hear my heartbeat. Bjorn just watched and the light of the flaming torches cast deep shadows on his face.

“I thank you, lord King,” Haesten said, and beside him Eilaf the Red knelt and then every man in that damp graveyard knelt to me.

“I am not king yet,” I said, suddenly ashamed of the lordly tones I had used to Haesten.

“You will be, lord,” Haesten said. “The Norns say so.”

I turned to the corpse. “What else did the three spinners say?”

“That you will be king,” Bjorn said, “and you will be the king of other kings. You will be lord of the land between the rivers and the scourge of your enemies. You will be king.” He stopped suddenly and went into spasm, his upper body jerking forward and then the spasms stopped and he stayed motionless, bent forward, retching drily, before slowly crumpling onto the disturbed earth.

“Bury him again,” Haesten said harshly, rising from his knees and speaking to the men who had cut the Saxon’s throat.

“His harp,” I said.

“I will return it to him tomorrow, lord,” Haesten said, then gestured toward Eilaf’s hall. “There is food, lord King, and ale. And a woman for you. Two if you want.”

“I have a wife,” I said harshly.

“Then there is food, ale, and warmth for you,” he said humbly. The other men stood. My warriors looked at me strangely, confused by the message they had heard, but I ignored them. King of other kings. Lord of the land between the rivers. King Uhtred.

I looked back once and saw the two men scraping at the soil to make Bjorn’s grave again, and then I followed Haesten into the hall and took the chair at the table’s center, the lord’s chair, and I watched the men who had witnessed the dead rise, and I saw they were convinced as I was convinced, and that meant they would take their troops to Haesten’s side. The rebellion against Guthrum, the rebellion that was meant to spread across Britain and destroy Wessex, was being led by a dead man. I rested my head on my hands and I thought. I thought of being king. I thought of leading armies.

“Your wife is Danish, I hear?” Haesten interrupted my thoughts.

“She is,” I said.

“Then the Saxons of Mercia will have a Saxon king,” he said, “and the Danes of Mercia will have a Danish queen. They will both be happy.”

I raised my head and stared at him. I knew him to be clever and sly, but that night he was carefully subservient and genuinely respectful. “What do you want, Haesten?” I asked him.

“Sigefrid and his brother,” he said, ignoring my question, “want to conquer Wessex.”

“The old dream,” I said scornfully.

“And to do it,” he said, disregarding my scorn, “we shall need men from Northumbria. Ragnar will come if you ask him.”

“He will,” I agreed.

“And if Ragnar comes, others will follow.” He broke a loaf of bread and pushed the greater part toward me. A bowl of stew was in front of me, but I did not touch it. Instead I began to crumble the bread, feeling for the granite chips that are left from the grindstone. I was not thinking about what I did, just keeping my hands busy while I watched Haesten.

“You didn’t answer my question,” I said. “What do you want?”

“East Anglia,” he said.

“King Haesten?”

“Why not?” he said, smiling.

“Why not, lord King,” I retorted, provoking a wider smile.

“King Æthelwold in Wessex,” Haesten said, “King Haesten in East Anglia, and King Uhtred in Mercia.”

“Æthelwold?” I asked scornfully, thinking of Alfred’s drunken nephew.

“He is the rightful King of Wessex, lord,” Haesten said.

“And how long will he live?” I asked.

“Not long,” Haesten admitted, “unless he is stronger than Sigefrid.”

“So it will be Sigefrid of Wessex?” I asked.

Haesten smiled. “Eventually, lord, yes.”

“What of his brother, Erik?”

“Erik likes to be a Viking,” Haesten said. “His brother takes Wessex and Erik takes the ships. Erik will be a sea king.”

So it would be Sigefrid of Wessex, Uhtred of Mercia, and Haesten in East Anglia. Three weasels in a sack, I thought, but did not let the thought show. “And where,” I asked instead, “does this dream begin?”

His smile went. He was serious now. “Sigefrid and I have men. Not enough, but the heart of a good army. You bring Ragnar south with the Northumbrian Danes and we’ll have more than enough to take East Anglia. Half of Guthrum’s earls will join us when they see you and Ragnar. Then we take the men of East Anglia, join them to our army, and conquer Mercia.”

“And join the men of Mercia,” I finished for him, “to take Wessex?”

“Yes,” he said. “When the leaves fall,” he went on, “and when the barns are filled, we shall march on Wessex.”

“But without Ragnar,” I said, “you can do nothing.”

He bowed his head in agreement. “And Ragnar will not march unless you join us.”

It could work, I thought. Guthrum, the Danish King of East Anglia, had repeatedly failed to conquer Wessex and now had made his peace with Alfred, but just because Guthrum had become a Christian and was now an ally of Alfred did not mean that other Danes had abandoned the dream of Wessex’s rich fields. If enough men could be assembled, then East Anglia would fall, and its earls, ever eager for plunder, would march on Mercia. Then Northumbrians, Mercians, and East Anglians could turn on Wessex, the richest kingdom and the last Saxon kingdom in the land of the Saxons.

Yet I was sworn to Alfred. I was sworn to defend Wessex. I had given Alfred my oath and without oaths we are no better than beasts. But the Norns had spoken. Fate is inexorable, it cannot be cheated. That thread of my life was already in place, and I could no more change it than I could make the sun go backward. The Norns had sent a messenger across the black gulf to tell me that my oath must be broken, and that I would be a king, and so I nodded to Haesten. “So be it,” I said.

“You must meet Sigefrid and Erik,” he said, “and we must make oaths.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Tomorrow,” he said, watching me carefully, “we leave for Lundene.”

So it had begun. Sigefrid and Erik were readying to defend Lundene, and by doing that they defied the Mercians, who claimed the city as theirs, and they defied Alfred, who feared Lundene being garrisoned by an enemy, and they defied Guthrum, who wanted the peace of Britain kept. But there would be no peace.

“Tomorrow,” Haesten said again, “we leave for Lundene.”

We rode next day. I led my six men while Haesten had twenty-one companions, and we followed Wæclingastræt south through a persistent rain that turned the road’s verges to thick mud. The horses were miserable, we were miserable. As we rode I tried to remember every word that Bjorn the Dead had said to me, knowing that Gisela would want the conversation recounted in every detail.

“So?” Finan challenged me soon after midday. Haesten had ridden ahead and Finan now spurred his horse to keep pace with mine.

“So?” I asked.

“So are you going to be king in Mercia?”

“The Fates say so,” I said, not looking at him. Finan and I had been slaves together on a trader’s ship. We had suffered, frozen, endured and learned to love each other like brothers, and I cared about his opinion.

“The Fates,” Finan said, “are tricksters.”

“Is that a Christian view?” I asked.

He smiled. He wore his cloak’s hood over his helmet, so I could see little of his thin, feral face, but I saw the flash of teeth when he smiled. “I was a great man in Ireland,” he said, “I had horses to outrun the wind, women to dim the sun, and weapons that could outfight the world, yet the Fates doomed me.”

“You live,” I said, “and you’re a free man.”

“I’m your oath-man,” he said, “and I gave you my oath freely. And you, lord, are Alfred’s oath-man.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Were you forced to make your oath to Alfred?” Finan asked.

“No,” I confessed.

The rain was stinging in my face. The sky was low, the land dark. “If fate is unavoidable,” Finan asked, “why do we make oaths?”

I ignored the question. “If I break my oath to Alfred,” I said instead, “will you break yours to me?”

“No, lord,” he said, smiling again. “I would miss your company,” he went on, “but you would not miss Alfred’s.”

“No,” I admitted, and we let the conversation drift away with the wind-blown rain, though Finan’s words lingered in my mind and they troubled me.

We spent that night close to the great shrine of Saint Alban. The Romans had made a town there, though that town had now decayed, and so we stayed at a Danish hall just to the east. Our host was welcoming enough, but he was cautious in conversation. He did admit to hearing that Sigefrid had moved men into Lundene’s old town, but he neither condemned nor praised the act. He wore the hammer amulet, as did I, but he also kept a Saxon priest who prayed over the meal of bread, bacon, and beans. The priest was a reminder that this hall was in East Anglia, and that East Anglia was officially Christian and at peace with its Christian neighbors, but our host made certain that his palisade gate was barred and that he had armed men keeping watch through the damp night. There was a shiftless air to this land, a feeling that a storm might break at any time.

The rainstorm ended in the darkness. We left at dawn, riding into a world of frost and stillness, though Wæclingastræt became busier as we encountered men driving cattle to Lundene. The beasts were scrawny, but they had been spared the autumn slaughter so they could feed the city through its winter. We rode past them and the herdsmen dropped to their knees as so many armed men clattered by. The clouds cleared to the east so that, when we came to Lundene in the middle of the day, the sun was bright behind the thick pall of dark smoke that always hangs above the city.

I have always liked Lundene. It is a place of ruins, trade, and wickedness that sprawls along the northern bank of the Temes. The ruins were the buildings the Romans left when they abandoned Britain, and their old city crowned the hills at the city’s eastern end and were surrounded by a wall made of brick and stone. The Saxons had never liked the Roman buildings, fearing their ghosts, and so had made their own town to the west, a place of thatch and wood and wattle and narrow alleys and stinking ditches that were supposed to carry sewage to the river, but usually lay glistening and filthy until a downpour of rain flooded them. That new Saxon town was a busy place, stinking with the smoke from smithy fires and raucous with the shouts of tradesmen, too busy, indeed, to bother making a defensive wall. Why did they need a wall, the Saxons argued, for the Danes were content to live in the old city and had showed no desire to slaughter the inhabitants of the new. There were palisades in a few places, evidence that some men had tried to protect the rapidly growing new town, but enthusiasm for the project always died and the palisades rotted, or else their timbers were stolen to make new buildings along the sewage-stinking streets.

Lundene’s trade came from the river and from the roads that led to every part of Britain. The roads, of course, were Roman, and down them flowed wool and pottery, ingots and pelts, while the river brought luxuries from abroad and slaves from Frankia and hungry men seeking trouble. There was plenty of that, because the city, which was built where three kingdoms met, was virtually ungoverned in those years.

To the east of Lundene the land was East Anglia, and so ruled by Guthrum. To the south, on the far bank of the Temes, was Wessex, while to the west was Mercia to which the city really belonged, but Mercia was a crippled country without a king and so there was no reeve to keep order in Lundene, and no great lord to impose laws. Men went armed in the alleyways, wives had bodyguards, and great dogs were chained in gateways. Bodies were found every morning, unless the tide carried them downriver toward the sea and past the coast where the Danes had their great camp at Beamfleot from where the Northmen’s ships sailed to demand customs payments from the traders working their way up the wide mouth of the Temes. The Northmen had no authority to impose such dues, but they had ships and men and swords and axes, and that was authority enough.

Haesten had exacted enough of those illegal dues, indeed he had become rich by piracy, rich and powerful, but he was still nervous as we rode into the city. He had talked incessantly as we neared Lundene, mostly about nothing, and he laughed too easily when I made sour comments about his inane words. But then, as we passed between the half-fallen towers either side of a wide gateway, he fell silent. There were sentries on the gate, but they must have recognized Haesten for they did not challenge us, but simply pulled aside the hurdles that blocked the ruined arch. Inside the arch I could see a stack of timbers that meant the gate was being rebuilt.

We had come to the Roman town, the old town, and our horses picked a slow path up the street that was paved with wide flagstones between which weeds grew thick. It was cold. Frost still lay in the dark corners where the sun had not reached the stone all day. The buildings had shuttered windows through which woodsmoke sifted to be whirled down the street. “You’ve been here before?” Haesten broke his silence with the abrupt question.

“Many times,” I said. Haesten and I rode ahead now.

“Sigefrid,” Haesten said, then found he had nothing to say.

“Is a Norseman, I hear,” I said.

“He is unpredictable,” Haesten said, and the tone of his voice told me that it was Sigefrid who had made him nervous. Haesten had faced a living corpse without flinching, but the thought of Sigefrid made him apprehensive.

“I can be unpredictable,” I said, “and so can you.”

Haesten said nothing to that. Instead he touched the hammer hanging at his neck, then turned his horse into a gateway where servants ran forward to greet us. “The king’s palace,” Haesten said.

I knew the palace. It had been made by the Romans and was a great vaulted building of pillars and carved stone, though it had been patched by the kings of Mercia so that thatch, wattle, and timber filled the gaps in the half-ruined walls. The great hall was lined with Roman pillars and its walls were of brick, but here and there patches of marble facing had somehow survived. I stared at the high masonry and marveled that men had ever been able to make such walls. We built in wood and thatch, and both rotted away, which meant we would leave nothing behind. The Romans had left marble and stone, brick and glory.

A steward told us that Sigefrid and his younger brother were in the old Roman arena that lay to the north of the palace. “What is he doing there?” Haesten asked.

“Making a sacrifice, lord,” the steward said.

“Then we’ll join him,” Haesten said, looking at me for confirmation.

“We will,” I said.

We rode the short distance. Beggars shrank from us. We had money, and they knew it, but they dared not ask for it because we were armed strangers. Swords, shields, axes, and spears hung beside our horses’ muddy flanks. Shopkeepers bowed to us, while women hid their children in their skirts. Most of the folk who lived in the Roman part of Lundene were Danes, yet even these Danes were nervous. Their city had been occupied by Sigefrid’s crewmen who would be hungry for money and women.

I knew the Roman arena. When I was a child I was taught the fundamental strokes of the sword by Toki the Shipmaster, and he had given me those lessons in the great oval arena that was surrounded by decayed layers of stone where wooden benches had once been placed. The tiered stone layers were almost empty, except for a few idle folk who were watching the men in the center of the weed-choked arena. There must have been forty or fifty men there, and a score of saddled horses were tethered at the far end, but what surprised me most as I rode through the high walls of the entrance, was a Christian cross planted in the middle of the small crowd.

“Sigefrid’s a Christian?” I asked Haesten in astonishment.

“No!” Haesten said forcefully.

The men heard our hoofbeats and turned toward us. They were all dressed for war, grim in mail or leather and armed with swords or axes, but they were cheerful. Then, from the center of that crowd, from a place close to the cross, stalked Sigefrid.

I knew him without having to be told who he was. He was a big man, and made to look even bigger for he wore a great cloak of black bear’s fur that swathed him from neck to ankles. He had tall black leather boots, a shining mail coat, a sword belt studded with silver rivets, and a bushy black beard that sprang from beneath his iron helmet that was chased with silver patterns. He pulled the helmet off as he strode toward us and his hair was as black and bushy as his beard. He had dark eyes in a broad face, a nose that had been broken and squashed, and a wide slash of a mouth that gave him a grim appearance. He stopped, facing us, and set his feet wide apart as though he waited for an attack.

“Lord Sigefrid!” Haesten greeted him with forced cheerfulness.

“Lord Haesten! Welcome back! Welcome indeed.” Sigefrid’s voice was curiously high-pitched, not feminine, but it sounded odd coming from such a huge and malevolent-looking man. “And you!” he pointed a black-gloved hand toward me, “must be the Lord Uhtred!”

“Uhtred of Bebbanburg,” I named myself.

“And you are welcome, welcome indeed!” He stepped forward and took my reins himself, which was an honor, and then he smiled up at me and his face, that had been so fearsome, was suddenly mischievous, almost friendly. “They say you are tall, Lord Uhtred!”

“So I am told,” I said.

“Then let us see who is taller,” he suggested genially, “you or I?” I slid from the saddle and eased the stiffness from my legs. Sigefrid, vast in his fur cloak, still held my reins and still smiled. “Well?” he demanded of the men nearest to him.

“You are taller, lord,” one of them said hastily.

“If I asked you who was the prettiest,” Sigefrid said, “what would you say?”

The man looked from Sigefrid to me and from me to Sigefrid and did not know what to say. He just looked terrified.

“He fears that if he gives the wrong answer,” Sigefrid confided to me in an amused voice, “that I would kill him.”

“And would you?” I asked.

“I would think about it. Here!” he called to the man, who came nervously forward. “Take the reins,” Sigefrid said, “and walk the horse. So who’s taller?” This last question was to Haesten.

“You are the same height,” Haesten said.

“And just as pretty as each other,” Sigefrid said, then laughed. He put his arms around me and I smelled the rank stench of his fur cloak. He hugged me. “Welcome, Lord Uhtred, welcome!” He stepped back and grinned. I liked him at that moment because his smile was truly welcoming. “I have heard much of you!” he declared.

“And I of you, lord.”

“And doubtless we were both told many lies! But good lies. I also have a quarrel with you.” He grinned, waiting, but I offered him no response. “Jarrel!” he explained, “you killed him.”

“I did,” I said. Jarrel had been the man leading the Viking crew I had slaughtered on the Temes.

“I liked Jarrel,” Sigefrid said.

“Then you should have advised him to avoid Uhtred of Bebbanburg,” I said.

“That is true,” Sigefrid said, “and is it also true that you killed Ubba?”

“I did.”

“He must have been a hard man to kill! And Ivarr?”

“I killed Ivarr, too,” I confirmed.

“But he was old and it was time he went. His son hates you, you know that?”

“I know that.”

Sigefrid snorted in derision. “The son is a nothing. A piece of gristle. He hates you, but why should the falcon care about the sparrow’s hate?” He grinned at me, then looked at Smoca, my stallion, who was being walked about the arena so he could cool slowly after his long journey. “That,” Sigefrid said admiringly, “is a horse!”

“It is,” I agreed.

“Maybe I should take him from you?”

“Many have tried,” I said.

He liked that. He laughed again and put a heavy hand on my shoulder to lead me toward the cross. “You’re a Saxon, they tell me?”

“I am.”

“But no Christian?”

“I worship the true gods,” I said.

“May they love and reward you for that,” he said, and he squeezed my shoulder and, even through the mail and leather, I could feel his strength. He turned then. “Erik! Are you shy?”

His brother stepped out of the crowd. He had the same black bushy hair, though Erik’s was tied severely back with a length of cord. His beard was trimmed. He was young, maybe only twenty or twenty-one, and he had a broad face with bright eyes that were at once full of curiosity and welcome. I had been surprised to discover I liked Sigefrid, but it was no surprise to like Erik. His smile was instant, his face open and guileless. He was, like Gisela’s brother, a man you liked from the moment you met him.

“I am Erik,” he greeted me.

“He is my adviser,” Sigefrid said, “my conscience and my brother.”

“Conscience?”

“Erik would not kill a man for telling a lie, would you, brother?”

“No,” Erik said.

“So he is a fool, but a fool I love.” Sigefrid laughed. “But don’t think the fool is a weakling, Lord Uhtred. He fights like a demon from Niflheim.” He slapped his brother on the shoulder, then took my elbow and led me on toward the incongruous cross. “I have prisoners,” he explained as we neared the cross, and I saw that five men were kneeling with their hands tied behind their backs. They had been stripped of cloaks, weapons, and tunics so that they wore only their trews. They shivered in the cold air.

The cross had been newly made from two beams of wood that had been crudely nailed together and then sunk into a hastily dug hole. The cross leaned slightly. At its foot were some heavy nails and a big hammer. “You see death by the cross on their statues and carvings,” Sigefrid explained to me, “and you see it on the amulets they wear, but I’ve never seen the real thing. Have you?”

“No,” I admitted.

“And I can’t understand why it would kill a man,” he said with genuine puzzlement in his voice. “It’s only three nails! I’ve suffered much worse than that in battle.”

“Me too,” I said.

“So I thought I’d find out!” he finished cheerfully, then jerked his big beard toward the prisoner nearest to the foot of the cross. “The two bastards at the end there are Christian priests. We’ll nail one of them up and see if he dies. I have ten pieces of silver that say it won’t kill him.”

I could see almost nothing of the two priests except that one had a big belly. His head was bowed, not in prayer, but because he had been beaten hard. His naked back and chest were bruised and bloody, and there was more blood in the tangle of his brown curly hair. “Who are they?” I asked Sigefrid.

“Who are you?” he snarled at the prisoners and, when none answered, he gave the nearest man a brutal kick in the ribs. “Who are you?” he asked again.

The man lifted his head. He was elderly, at least forty years old, and had a deep lined face on which was etched the resignation of those who knew they were about to die. “I am Earl Sihtric,” he said, “counselor to King Æthelstan.”

“Guthrum!” Sigefrid screamed, and it was a scream. A scream of pure rage that erupted from nowhere. One moment he had been affable, but suddenly he was a demon. Spittle flew from his mouth as he shrieked the name a second time. “Guthrum! His name is Guthrum, you bastard!” He kicked Sihtric in the chest, and I reckoned that kick was hard enough to break a rib. “What is his name?” Sigefrid demanded.

“Guthrum,” Sihtric said.

“Guthrum!” Sigefrid shouted, and kicked the old man again. Guthrum, when he made peace with Alfred, had become a Christian and taken the Christian name Æthelstan as his own. I still thought of him as Guthrum, as did Sigefrid, who now appeared to be trying to stamp Sihtric to death. The old man attempted to evade the blows, but Sigefrid had driven him to the ground from where he could not escape. Erik seemed unmoved by his brother’s savage anger, yet after a while he stepped forward and took Sigefrid’s arm and the bigger man allowed himself to be pulled away. “Bastard!” Sigefrid spat back at the moaning man. “Calling Guthrum by a Christian name!” he explained to me. Sigefrid was still shaking from his sudden anger. His eyes had narrowed and his face was contorted, but he seemed to control himself as he draped a heavy arm around my shoulder. “Guthrum sent them,” he said, “to tell me to leave Lundene. But it’s none of Guthrum’s business! Lundene doesn’t belong to East Anglia! It belongs to Mercia! To King Uhtred of Mercia!” That was the first time anyone had used that title so formally, and I liked the sound of it. King Uhtred. Sigefrid turned back to Sihtric who now had blood at his lips. “What was Guthrum’s message?”

“That the city belongs to Mercia, and you must leave,” Sihtric managed to say.

“Then Mercia can throw me out,” Sigefrid sneered.

“Unless King Uhtred allows us to stay?” Erik suggested with a smile.

I said nothing. The title sounded good, but strange, as if it defied the strands coming from the three spinners.

“Alfred will not permit you to stay.” One of the other prisoners dared to speak.

“Who gives a turd about Alfred?” Sigefrid snarled. “Let the bastard send his army to die here.”

“That is your reply, lord?” the prisoner asked humbly.

“My reply will be your severed heads,” Sigefrid said.

I glanced at Erik then. He was the younger brother, but clearly the one who did the thinking. He shrugged. “If we negotiate,” he explained, “then we give time for our enemies to gather their forces. Better to be defiant.”

“You’ll pick war with both Guthrum and Alfred?” I asked.

“Guthrum won’t fight,” Erik said, sounding very certain. “He threatens, but he won’t fight. He’s getting old, Lord Uhtred, and he would prefer to enjoy what life is left to him. And if we send him severed heads? I think he will understand the message that his own head is in danger if he disturbs us.”

“What of Alfred?” I asked.

“He’s cautious,” Erik said, “isn’t he?”

“Yes.”

“He’ll offer us money to leave the city?”

“Probably.”

“And maybe we’ll take it,” Sigefrid said, “and stay anyway.”

“Alfred won’t attack us till the summer,” Erik said, ignoring his brother, “and by then, Lord Uhtred, we hope you will have led Earl Ragnar south into East Anglia. Alfred can’t ignore that threat. He will march against our combined armies, not against the garrison in Lundene, and our job is to kill Alfred and put his nephew on the throne.”

“Æthelwold?” I asked dubiously. “He’s a drunk.”

“Drunk or not,” Erik said, “a Saxon king will make our conquest of Wessex more palatable.”

“Until you need him no longer,” I said.

“Until we need him no longer,” Erik agreed.

The big-bellied priest at the end of the line of kneeling prisoners had been listening. He stared at me, then at Sigefrid, who saw his gaze. “What are you looking at, turd?” Sigefrid demanded. The priest did not answer, but just looked at me again, then dropped his head. “We’ll start with him,” Sigefrid said, “we’ll nail the fat bastard to a cross and see if he dies.”

“Why not let him fight?” I suggested.

Sigefrid stared at me, unsure he had heard me correctly. “Let him fight?” he asked.

“The other priest is skinny,” I said, “so much easier to nail to the cross. That fat one should be given a sword and made to fight.”

Sigefrid sneered. “You think a priest can fight?”

I shrugged as though I did not care one way or the other. “It’s just that I like seeing those fat-bellied ones lose a fight,” I explained. “I like seeing their bellies slit open. I like watching their guts spill out.” I was staring at the priest as I spoke and he looked up again to gaze into my eyes. “I want to see yards of gut spilled out,” I said wolfishly, “and then watch as your dogs eat his intestines while he’s still alive.”

“Or make him eat them himself,” Sigefrid said thoughtfully. He suddenly grinned at me. “I like you, Lord Uhtred!”

“He’ll die too easily,” Erik said.

“Then give him something to fight for,” I said.

“What can that fat pig of a priest fight for?” Sigefrid demanded scornfully.

I said nothing, and it was Erik who supplied the answer. “His freedom?” he suggested. “If he wins then all prisoners go free, but if he loses then we crucify them all. That should make him fight.”

“He’ll still lose,” I said.

“Yes, but he’ll make an effort,” Erik said.

Sigefrid laughed, amused by the incongruity of the suggestion. The priest, half naked, big-bellied and terrified, looked at each of us in turn but saw nothing but amusement and ferocity. “Ever held a sword, priest?” Sigefrid demanded of the fat man. The priest said nothing.

I mocked his silence with laughter. “He’ll only flail around like a pig,” I said.

“You want to fight him?” Sigefrid asked.

“He wasn’t sent as an envoy to me, lord,” I said respectfully. “Besides, I’ve heard there is no one to match your skill with a blade. I challenge you to make a cut straight across his belly button.”

Sigefrid liked that challenge. He turned to the priest. “Holy man! You want to fight for your freedom?”

The priest was shaking with fear. He glanced at his companions, but found no help there. He managed to nod his head. “Yes, lord,” he said, “Then you can fight me,” Sigefrid said happily, “and if I win? You all die. And if you win? You can ride away from here. Can you fight?”

“No, lord,” the priest said.

“Ever held a sword, priest?”

“No, lord.”

“So are you ready to die?” Sigefrid asked.

The priest looked at the Norseman and, despite his bruises and cuts, there was a hint of anger in his eyes that was belied by the humility in his voice. “Yes, lord,” he said, “I’m ready to die and meet my Savior.”

“Cut him free,” Sigefrid ordered one of his followers. “Cut the turd free and give him a sword.” He drew his own sword that was a long two-edged blade. “Fear-Giver,” he named the blade with fondness in his voice, “and she needs exercise.”

“Here,” I said, and I drew Serpent-Breath, my own beautiful blade, and I turned her so that I held her by the blade and I tossed the sword to the priest whose hands had just been cut free. He fumbled the catch, letting Serpent-Breath fall among the pale winter weeds. He stared at the sword for a moment as though he had never seen such a thing before, then stooped to pick her up. He was unsure whether to hold her in his right hand or left. He settled for the left and gave her a clumsy experimental stroke that caused the watching men to laugh.

“Why give him your sword?” Sigefrid asked.

“He’ll do no good with it,” I said scornfully.

“And if I break it?” Sigefrid asked forcefully.

“Then I’ll know the smith who made it didn’t know his business,” I said.

“It’s your blade, your choice,” Sigefrid said dismissively, then turned to the priest who was holding Serpent-Breath so that her tip rested on the ground. “Are you ready, priest?” he demanded.

“Yes, lord,” the priest said, and that was the first truthful answer he had given to the Norseman. For the priest had held a sword many times before and he did know how to fight and I doubted he was ready to die. He was Father Pyrlig.

If your fields are heavy and damp with clay then you can harness two oxen to an ard blade, and you can goad the beasts bloody so that the blade plows your ground. The beasts must pull together, which is why they are yoked together, and in life one ox is called Fate and the other is named Oaths.

Fate decrees what we do. We cannot escape fate. Wyrd bi? ful ãræd. We have no choices in life, how can we? Because from the moment we are born the three sisters know where our thread will go and what patterns it will weave and how it will end. Wyrd bi? ful ãræd.

Yet we choose our oaths. Alfred, when he gave me his sword and hands to enfold in my hands did not order me to make the oath. He offered it and I chose. But was it my choice? Or did the Fates choose for me? And if they did, why bother with oaths? I have often wondered about this and even now, as an old man, I still wonder. Did I choose Alfred? Or were the Fates laughing when I knelt and took his sword and hands in mine?

The three Norns were certainly laughing on that cold bright day in Lundene, because the moment I saw that the big-bellied priest was Father Pyrlig I knew that nothing was simple. I had realized in that instant that the Fates had not spun me a golden thread leading to a throne. They were laughing from the roots of Yggdrasil, the tree of life. They had made a jest and I was its victim, and I had to make a choice.

Or did I? Maybe the Fates had made the choice, but at that moment, overshadowed by the gaunt stark makeshift cross, I believed I had to choose between the Thurgilson brothers and Pyrlig.

Sigefrid was no friend, but he was a formidable man, and with his alliance I could become king in Mercia. Gisela would be a queen. I could help Sigefrid, Erik, Haesten, and Ragnar plunder Wessex. I could become rich. I would lead armies. I would fly my banner of the wolf’s head, and at Smoca’s heels would ride a mailed host of spearmen. My enemies would hear the thunder of our hooves in their nightmares. All that would be mine if I chose to ally myself with Sigefrid.

While by choosing Pyrlig I would lose all that the dead man had promised me. Which meant that Bjorn had lied, yet how could a man sent from his grave with a message from the Norns tell a lie? I remember thinking all that in the heartbeat before I made my choice, though in truth there was no hesitation. There was not even a heartbeat of hesitation.

Pyrlig was a Welshman, a Briton, and we Saxons hate the Britons. The Britons are treacherous thieves. They hide in their hill fastnesses and ride down to raid our lands, and they take our cattle and sometimes our women and children, and when we pursue them they go ever deeper into a wild place of mists, crags, marsh, and misery. And Pyrlig was also a Christian, and I have no love for Christians. The choice would seem so easy! On one side a kingdom, Viking friends and wealth, and on the other a Briton who was the priest of a religion that sucks joy from this world like dusk swallowing daylight. Yet I did not think. I chose, or fate chose, and I chose friendship. Pyrlig was my friend. I had met him in Wessex’s darkest winter, when the Danes seemed to have conquered the kingdom, and Alfred with a few followers had been driven to take refuge in the western marshes. Pyrlig had been sent as an emissary by his Welsh king to discover and perhaps exploit Alfred’s weakness, but instead he had sided with Alfred and fought for Alfred. Pyrlig and I had stood in the shield wall together. We had fought side by side. We were Welshman and Saxon, Christian and pagan, and we should have been enemies, but I loved him like a brother.

So I gave him my sword and, instead of watching him nailed to a cross, I gave him the chance to fight for his life.

And, of course, it was not a fair fight. It was over in a moment! Indeed, it had hardly begun before it ended, and I alone was not astonished by its ending.

Sigefrid was expecting to face a fat, untrained priest, yet I knew that Pyrlig had been a warrior before he discovered his god. He had been a great warrior, a killer of Saxons and a man about whom his people had made songs. He did not look like a great warrior now. He was half naked, fat, disheveled, bruised, and beaten. He waited for Sigefrid’s attack with a look of horrified terror on his face and with the tip of Serpent-Breath’s blade still resting on the ground. He backed away as Sigefrid came closer, and began making mewing noises. Sigefrid laughed and swung his sword almost idly, expecting to knock Pyrlig’s blade out of his path and so expose that big belly to Fear-Giver’s gut-opening slash.

And Pyrlig moved like a weasel.

He lifted Serpent-Breath gracefully and danced a backward pace so that Sigefrid’s careless swing went under her blade, and then he stepped toward his enemy and brought Serpent-Breath down hard, all wrist in that stroke, and sliced her against Sigefrid’s sword arm as it was still swinging outward. The stroke was not powerful enough to break the mail armor, but it did drive Sigefrid’s sword arm further out and so opened the Norseman to a lunge. And Pyrlig lunged. He was so fast that Serpent-Breath was a silver blur that struck hard on Sigefrid’s chest.

Once again the blade did not pierce Sigefrid’s mail. Instead it pushed the big man backward and I saw the fury come into the Norseman’s eyes and saw him bring Fear-Giver back in a mighty swing that would surely have decapitated Pyrlig in a red instant. There was so much strength and savagery in that huge cut, but Pyrlig, who seemed a heartbeat from death, simply used his wrist again. He did not seem to move, but still Serpent-Breath flickered up and sideways.

Serpent-Breath’s point met that death-swing on the inside of Sigefrid’s wrist and I saw the spray of blood like a red fog in the air.

And I saw Pyrlig smile. It was more of a grimace, but there was a warrior’s pride and a warrior’s triumph in that smile. His blade had ripped up Sigefrid’s forearm, slicing the mail apart and laying open flesh and skin and muscle from wrist to elbow, so that Sigefrid’s mighty blow faltered and stopped. The Norseman’s sword arm went limp, and Pyrlig suddenly stepped back and turned Serpent-Breath so he could cut downward with her and at last he appeared to put some effort into the blade. She made a whistling noise as the Welshman slashed her onto Sigefrid’s bleeding wrist. He almost severed the wrist, but the blade glanced off a bone and took the Norseman’s thumb instead, and Fear-Giver fell to the arena floor and Serpent-Breath was in Sigefrid’s beard and at his throat.

“No!” I shouted.

Sigefrid was too appalled to be angry. He could not believe what had happened. He must have realized by that moment that his opponent was a swordsman, but still he could not believe he had lost. He brought up his bleeding hands as if to seize Pyrlig’s blade, and I saw the Welshman’s blade twitch and Sigefrid, sensing death a hair’s breadth away, went still.

“No,” I repeated.

“Why shouldn’t I kill him?” Pyrlig asked, and his voice was a warrior’s voice now, hard and merciless, and his eyes were warrior’s eyes, flint-cold and furious.

“No,” I said again. I knew that if Pyrlig killed Sigefrid then Sigefrid’s men would have their revenge.

Erik knew it too. “You won, priest,” he said softly. He walked to his brother. “You won,” he said again to Pyrlig, “so put down the sword.”

“Does he know I beat him?” Pyrlig asked, staring into Sigefrid’s dark eyes.

“I speak for him,” Erik said. “You won the fight, priest, and you are free.”

“I have to deliver my message first,” Pyrlig said. Blood dripped from Sigefrid’s hand. He still stared at the Welshman. “The message we bring from King Æthelstan,” Pyrlig said, meaning Guthrum, “is that you are to leave Lundene. It is not part of the land ceded by Alfred to Danish rule. Do you understand that?” He twitched Serpent-Breath again, though Sigefrid said nothing. “Now I want horses,” Pyrlig went on, “and Lord Uhtred and his men are to escort us out of Lundene. Is that agreed?”

Erik looked at me and I nodded consent. “It is agreed,” Erik said to Pyrlig.

I took Serpent-Breath from Pyrlig’s hand. Erik was holding his brother’s wounded arm. For a moment I thought Sigefrid would attack the unarmed Welshman, but Erik managed to turn him away.

Horses were fetched. The men in the arena were silent and resentful. They had seen their leader humiliated, and they did not understand why Pyrlig was allowed to leave with the other envoys, but they accepted Erik’s decision.

“My brother is headstrong,” Erik told me. He had taken me aside to talk while the horses were saddled.

“It seems the priest knew how to fight after all,” I said apologetically.

Erik frowned, not with anger, but puzzlement. “I am curious about their god,” he admitted. He was watching his brother, whose wounds were being bandaged. “Their god does seem to have power,” Erik said. I slid Serpent-Breath into her scabbard and Erik saw the silver cross that decorated her pommel. “You must think so too?”

“That was a gift,” I said, “from a woman. A good woman. A lover. Then the Christian god took hold of her and she loves men no more.”

Erik reached out and touched the cross tentatively. “You don’t think it gives the blade power?” he asked.

“The memory of her love might,” I said, “but power comes from here.” I touched my amulet, Thor’s hammer.

“I fear their god,” Erik said.

“He’s harsh,” I said, “unkind. He’s a god who likes to make laws.”

“Laws?”

“You’re not allowed to lust after your neighbor’s wife,” I said.

Erik laughed at that, then saw I was serious. “Truly?” he asked with disbelief in his voice.

“Priest!” I called to Pyrlig. “Does your god let men lust after their neighbors’ wives?”

“He lets them, lord,” Pyrlig said humbly as if he feared me, “but he disapproves.”

“Did he make a law about it?”

“Yes, lord, he did. And he made another that says you mustn’t lust after your neighbor’s ox.”

“There,” I said to Erik. “You can’t even wish for an ox if you’re a Christian.”

“Strange,” he said thoughtfully. He was looking at Guthrum’s envoys who had so narrowly escaped losing their heads. “You don’t mind escorting them?”

“No.”

“It might be no bad thing if they live,” he said quietly. “Why give Guthrum cause to attack us?”

“He won’t,” I said confidently, “whether you kill them or not.”

“Probably not,” he agreed, “but we agreed that if the priest won, then they would all live, so let them live. And you’re sure you don’t mind escorting them away?”

“Of course not,” I said.

“Then come back here,” Erik said warmly, “we need you.”

“You need Ragnar,” I corrected him.

“True,” he confessed, and smiled. “See those men safe out of the city, then come back.”

“I have a wife and children to fetch first,” I said.

“Yes,” he said, and smiled again. “You are fortunate in that. But you will come back?”

“Bjorn the Dead told me so,” I said, carefully evading his question.

“So he did,” Erik said. He embraced me. “We need you,” he said, “and together we can take this whole island.”

We left, riding through the city streets, out through the western gate that was known as Ludd’s Gate, and then down to the ford across the River Fleot. Sihtric was bent over his saddle’s pommel, still suffering from the kicking he had received from Sigefrid. I looked behind as we left the ford, half expecting that Sigefrid would have countermanded his brother’s decision and sent men to pursue us, but none appeared. We spurred through the marshy ground and then up the slight slope to the Saxon town.

I did not stay on the road that led westward, but instead turned onto the wharves where a dozen ships were moored. These were river boats that traded with Wessex and Mercia. Few shipmasters cared to shoot the dangerous gap in the ruined bridge that the Romans had thrown across the Temes, so these ships were smaller, manned by oarsmen, and all of them had paid dues to me at Coccham. They all knew me, because they did business with me on every trip.

We forced our way through heaps of merchandise, past open fires and through the gangs of slaves loading or unloading cargoes. Only one ship was ready to make a voyage. She was named the Swan and I knew her well. She had a Saxon crew, and she was nearly ready to leave because her oarsmen were standing on the wharf while the shipmaster, a man called Osric, finished his business with the merchant whose goods he was carrying. “You’re taking us too,” I told him.

We left most of the horses behind, though I insisted that room was found for Smoca, and Finan wanted to keep his stallion too, and so the beasts were coaxed into the Swan’s open hold where they stood shivering. Then we left. The tide was flooding, the oars bit, and we glided upriver. “Where am I taking you, lord?” Osric the shipmaster asked me.

“To Coccham,” I said.

And back to Alfred.

The river was wide, gray, and sullen. It flowed strongly, fed by the winter rains against which the incoming tide gave less and less resistance. The Swan made hard work of the early rowing as the ten oarsmen fought the current and I caught Finan’s eye and we exchanged smiles. He was remembering, as I was, our long months at the oars of a slave-rowed trading ship. We had suffered, bled, and shivered, and we had thought that only death could release us from that fate, but now other men rowed us as the Swan fought around the great swooping bends of the Temes that were softened by the wide floods that stretched into the water meadows.

I sat on the small platform built in the ship’s blunt bow and Father Pyrlig joined me there. I had given him my cloak, which he clutched tight around him. He had found some bread and cheese, which did not surprise me because I have never known a man eat so much. “How did you know I’d beat Sigefrid?” he asked.

“I didn’t know,” I said. “In fact I was hoping he’d beat you, and that there would be one less Christian.”

He smiled at that, then gazed at the waterfowl on the flood water. “I knew I had two or three strokes only,” he said, “before he realized I knew what I was doing. Then he’d have cut the flesh off my bones.”

“He would,” I agreed, “but I reckoned you had those three strokes and they’d prove enough.”

“Thank you for that, Uhtred,” he said, then broke off a lump of cheese and gave it to me. “How are you these days?”

“Bored.”

“I hear you’re married?”

“I’m not bored with her,” I said hurriedly.

“Good for you! Me, now? I can’t stand my wife. Dear God, what a tongue that viper has. She can split a sheet of slate just by talking to it! You’ve not met my wife, have you?”

“No.”

“Sometimes I curse God for taking Adam’s rib and making Eve, but then I see some young girl and my heart leaps and I think God knew what he was doing after all.”

I smiled. “I thought Christian priests were supposed to set an example?”

“And what’s wrong with admiring God’s creations?” Pyrlig asked indignantly. “Especially a young one with plump round tits and a fine fat rump? It would be sinful of me to ignore such signs of his grace.” He grinned, then looked anxious. “I heard you were taken captive?”

“I was.”

“I prayed for you.”

“Thank you for that,” I said, and meant it. I did not worship the Christian god, but like Erik I feared he had some power, so prayers to him were not wasted.

“But I hear it was Alfred who had you released?” Pyrlig asked.

I paused. As ever I hated to acknowledge any debt to Alfred, but I grudgingly conceded that he had helped. “He sent the men who freed me,” I said, “yes.”

“And you reward him, Lord Uhtred, by naming yourself King of Mercia?”

“You heard that?” I asked cautiously.

“Of course I heard it! That great oaf of a Norseman bawled it just five paces from my ear. Are you King of Mercia?”

“No,” I said, resisting the urge to add “not yet.”

“I didn’t think you were,” Pyrlig said mildly. “I’d have heard about that, wouldn’t I? And I don’t think you will be, not unless Alfred wants it.”

“Alfred can piss down his own throat for all I care,” I said.

“And of course I should tell him what I heard,” Pyrlig said.

“Yes,” I said bitterly, “you should.”

I leaned against the curving timber of the ship’s stem and stared at the backs of the oarsmen. I was also watching for any sign of a pursuing ship, half expecting to see some fast warship swept along by banks of long oars, but no mast showed above the river’s long bends, which suggested Erik had successfully persuaded his brother against taking an instant revenge for the humiliation Pyrlig had given him. “So whose idea is it,” Pyrlig asked, “that you should be king in Mercia?” He waited for me to answer, but I said nothing. “It’s Sigefrid, isn’t it?” he demanded. “Sigefrid’s crazy idea.”

“Crazy?” I asked innocently.

“The man’s no fool,” Pyrlig said, “and his brother certainly isn’t. They know Æthelstan’s getting old in East Anglia, and they ask who’ll be king after him? And there’s no king in Mercia. But he can’t just take Mercia, can he? The Mercian Saxons will fight him and Alfred will come to their aid, and the Thurgilson brothers will find themselves facing a fury of Saxons! So Sigefrid has this idea to rally men and take East Anglia first, then Mercia, and then Wessex! And to do all that he really needs Earl Ragnar to bring men from Northumbria.”

I was appalled that Pyrlig, a friend of Alfred’s, should know all that Sigefrid, Erik, and Haesten planned, but I showed no reaction. “Ragnar won’t fight,” I said, trying to end the conversation.

“Unless you ask him,” Pyrlig said sharply. I just shrugged. “But what can Sigefrid offer you?” Pyrlig asked, and, when I did not respond again, provided the answer himself. “Mercia.”

I smiled condescendingly. “It all sounds very complicated.”

“Sigefrid and Haesten,” Pyrlig said, ignoring my flippant comment, “have ambitions to be kings. But there are only four kingdoms here! They can’t take Northumbria because Ragnar won’t let them. They can’t take Mercia because Alfred won’t let them. But Æthelstan’s getting old, so they could take East Anglia. And why not finish the job? Take Wessex? Sigefrid says he’ll put that drunken nephew of Alfred’s on the throne, and that’ll help calm the Saxons for a few months until Sigefrid murders him, and by then Haesten will be King of East Anglia and someone, you perhaps, King of Mercia. Doubtless they’ll turn on you then and divide Mercia between them. That’s the idea, Lord Uhtred, and it’s not a bad one! But who’d follow those two brigands?”

“No one,” I lied.

“Unless they were convinced that the Fates were on their side,” Pyrlig said almost casually, then looked at me. “Did you meet the dead man?” he asked innocently, and I was so astonished by the question that I could not answer. I just stared into his round, battered face. “Bjorn, he’s called,” the Welshman said, putting another lump of cheese into his mouth.

“The dead don’t lie,” I blurted out.

“The living do! By God, they do! Even I lie, Lord Uhtred.” He grinned at me mischievously. “I sent a message to my wife and said she’d hate being in East Anglia!” He laughed. Alfred had asked Pyrlig to go to East Anglia because he was a priest and because he spoke Danish, and his task there had been to educate Guthrum in Christian ways. “In fact she’d love it there!” Pyrlig went on. “It’s warmer than home and there are no hills to speak of. Flat and wet, that’s East Anglia, and without a proper hill anywhere! And my wife’s never been fond of hills, which is why I probably found God. I used to live on hilltops just to keep away from her, and you’re closer to God on a hilltop. Bjorn isn’t dead.”

He had said the last three words with a sudden brutality, and I answered him just as harshly. “I saw him.”

“You saw a man come from a grave, that’s what you saw.”

“I saw him!” I insisted.

“Of course you did! And you never thought to question what you saw, did you?” The Welshman asked the question harshly. “Bjorn had been put in that grave just before you came! They piled earth on him and he breathed through a reed.”

I remembered Bjorn spitting something out of his mouth as he staggered upright. Not the harp string, but something else. I had thought it a lump of earth, but in truth it had been paler. I had not thought about it at the time, but now I understood that the resurrection had all been a trick and I sat on the foredeck of the Swan and felt the last remnants of my dream crumbling. I would not be king. “How do you know all this?” I asked bitterly.

“King Æthelstan’s no fool. He has his spies.” Pyrlig put a hand on my arm. “Was he very convincing?”

“Very,” I said, still bitter.

“He’s one of Haesten’s men, and if we ever catch him he’ll go properly to hell. So what did he tell you?”

“That I would be king in Mercia,” I said softly. I was to be king of Saxon and Dane, enemy of the Welsh, king between the rivers and lord of all I ruled. “I believed him,” I said ruefully.

“But how could you be King of Mercia?” Pyrlig asked, “unless Alfred made you king?”

“Alfred?”

“You gave him your oath, did you not?”

I was ashamed to tell the truth, but had no choice. “Yes,” I admitted.

“Which is why I must tell him,” Pyrlig said sternly, “because a man breaking an oath is a serious matter, Lord Uhtred.”

“It is,” I agreed.

“And Alfred will have the right to kill you when I tell him.”

I shrugged.

“Better you keep the oath,” Pyrlig said, “than be fooled by men who make a corpse from a living man. The Fates are not on your side, Lord Uhtred. Trust me.”

I looked at him and saw the sorrow in his eyes. He liked me, yet he was telling me I had been fooled, and he was right, and the dream was collapsing around me. “What choice do I have?” I asked him bitterly. “You know I went to Lundene to join them, and you must tell Alfred that, and he will never trust me again.”

“I doubt he trusts you now,” Pyrlig said cheerfully. “He’s a wise man, Alfred. But he knows you, Uhtred, he knows you are a warrior, and he needs warriors.” He paused to pull out the wooden cross that hung about his neck. “Swear on it,” he said.

“Swear what?”

“That you will keep your oath to him! Do that and I will keep silent. Do that and I will deny what happened. Do that and I will protect you.”

I hesitated.

“If you break your oath to Alfred,” Pyrlig said, “then you are my enemy and I’ll be forced to kill you.”

“You think you could?” I asked.

He grinned his mischievous grin. “Ah, you like me, lord, even though I am a Welshman and a priest, and you’d be reluctant to kill me, and I’d have three strokes before you woke up to your danger, so yes, lord, I would kill you.”

I put my right hand on the cross. “I swear it,” I said.

And I was still Alfred’s man.

THREE

We reached Coccham that evening and I watched Gisela, who had as little love for Christianity as I did, warm to Father Pyrlig. He flirted with her outrageously, complimented her extravagantly, and played with our children. We had two then, and we had been lucky, for both babies had lived, as had their mother. Uhtred was the oldest. My son. He was four years old with hair as golden-colored as mine and a strong little face with a pug nose, blue eyes, and a stubborn chin. I loved him then. My daughter Stiorra was two years old. She had a strange name and at first I had not liked it, but Gisela had pleaded with me and I could refuse her almost nothing, and certainly not the naming of a daughter. Stiorra simply meant “star,” and Gisela swore that she and I had met under a lucky star and that our daughter had been born under the same star. I had got used to the name by now and loved it as I loved the child, who had her mother’s dark hair and long face and sudden mischievous smile. “Stiorra, Stiorra!” I would say as I tickled her, or let her play with my arm rings. Stiorra, so beautiful.

I played with her on the night before Gisela and I left for Wintanceaster. It was spring and the Temes had subsided so that the river meadows showed again and the world was hazed with green as the leaves budded. The first lambs wobbled in fields bright with cowslips, and the blackbirds filled the sky with rippling song. Salmon had returned to the river and our woven willow traps provided good eating. The pear trees in Coccham were thick with buds, and just as thick with bullfinches, which had to be scared away by small boys so that we would have fruit in the summertime. It was a good time of year, a time when the world stirred, and a time when we had been summoned to Alfred’s capital for the wedding of his daughter, Æthelflaed, to my cousin, Æthelred. And that night, as I pretended my knee was a horse and that Stiorra was the horse’s rider, I thought about my promise to provide Æthelred with his wedding gift. The gift of a city. Lundene.

Gisela was spinning wool. She had shrugged when I had told her she was not to be Queen of Mercia, and she had nodded gravely when I said I would keep my oath with Alfred. She accepted fate more readily than I did. Fate and that fortunate star, she said, had brought us together despite all that the world had done to keep us apart. “If you keep your oath to Alfred,” she said suddenly, interrupting my play with Stiorra, “then you must capture Lundene from Sigefrid?”

“Yes,” I said, marveling as I often did that her thoughts and mine were so often the same.

“Can you?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said. Sigefrid and Erik were still in the old city, their men guarding the Roman walls that they had repaired with timber. No ship could now come up the Temes without paying the brothers their toll, and that toll was huge, so that the river traffic had stopped, as merchants sought other ways to bring goods to Wessex. King Guthrum of East Anglia had threatened Sigefrid and Erik with war, but his threat had proved empty. Guthrum did not want war, he just wanted to persuade Alfred that he was doing his best to keep the peace treaty, so if Sigefrid was to be removed, then it would be the West Saxons who did the work, and I who would be responsible for leading them.

I had made my plans. I had written to the king and he, in turn, had written to the ealdormen of the shires, and I had been promised four hundred trained warriors along with the fyrd of Berrocscire. The fyrd was an army of farmers, foresters, and laborers, and though it would be numerous it would also be untrained. The four hundred trained men would be the ones I relied on, and spies said Sigefrid now had at least six hundred in the old city. Those same spies said that Haesten had gone back to his camp at Beamfleot, but that was not far from Lundene and he would hurry to reinforce his allies, as would those Danes of East Anglia who hated Guthrum’s Christianity and wanted Sigefrid and Erik to begin their war of conquest. The enemy, I thought, would number at least a thousand, and all of them would be skilled with sword, ax, or spear. They would be war-Danes. Enemies to fear.

“The king,” Gisela said mildly, “will want to know how you plan to do it.”

“Then I shall tell him,” I said.

She gave me a dubious glance. “You will?”

“Of course,” I said, “he’s the king.”

She laid the distaff on her lap and frowned at me. “You will tell him the truth?”

“Of course not,” I said. “He may be the king, but I’m not a fool.”

She laughed, which made Stiorra echo the laugh. “I wish I could come with you to Lundene,” Gisela said wistfully.

“You can’t,” I said forcefully.

“I know,” she answered with uncharacteristic meekness, then touched a hand to her belly. “I really can’t.”

I stared at her. I stared a long time as her news settled in my mind. I stared, I smiled, and then I laughed. I threw Stiorra high into the air so that her dark hair almost touched the smoke-blackened thatch. “Your mother’s pregnant,” I told the happily squealing child.

“And it’s all your father’s fault,” Gisela added sternly.

We were so happy.

Æthelred was my cousin, the son of my mother’s brother. He was a Mercian, though for years now he had been loyal to Alfred of Wessex, and that day in Wintanceaster, in the great church Alfred had built, Æthelred of Mercia received his reward for that loyalty.

He was given Æthelflaed, Alfred’s eldest daughter and second child. She was golden haired and had eyes the color and brightness of a summer’s sky. Æthelflaed was thirteen or fourteen years old then, the proper age for a girl to marry, and she had grown into a tall young woman with an upright stance and a bold look. She was already as tall as the man who was to be her husband.

Æthelred is a hero now. I hear tales of him, tales told by firelight in Saxon halls the length of England. Æthelred the Bold, Æthelred the Warrior, Æthelred the Loyal. I smile when I hear the stories, but I do not say anything, not even when men ask if it is true that I once knew Æthelred. Of course I knew Æthelred, and it is true that he was a warrior before sickness slowed and stilled him, and he was also bold, though his shrewdest stroke was to pay poets to be his courtiers so that they would make up songs about his prowess. A man could become rich in Æthelred’s court by stringing words like beads.

He was never King of Mercia, though he wanted to be. Alfred made sure of that, for Alfred wanted no king in Mercia. He wanted a loyal follower to be the ruler of Mercia, and he made sure that loyal follower was dependent on West Saxon money, and Æthelred was his chosen man. He was given the title Ealdorman of Mercia, and in all but name he was king, though the Danes of northern Mercia never recognized his authority. They did recognize his power, and that power came from being Alfred’s son-in-law, which was why the Saxon thegns of southern Mercia also accepted him. They may not have liked Ealdorman Æthelred, but they knew he could bring West Saxon troops to confront any southward move by the Danes.

And on a spring day in Wintanceaster, a day bright with birdsong and sunlight, Æthelred came into his power. He strutted into Alfred’s big new church with a smile across his red-bearded face. He ever suffered from the delusion that others liked him and perhaps some men did like him, but not me. My cousin was short, pugnacious, and boastful. His jaw was broad and belligerent, his eyes challenging. He was twice as old as his bride, and for almost five years he had been commander of Alfred’s household troops, an appointment he owed to birth rather than to ability. His good fortune had been to inherit lands that spread across most of southern Mercia, and that made him Mercia’s foremost nobleman and, I grudgingly supposed, that sad country’s natural leader. He was also, I ungrudgingly supposed, a piece of shit.

Alfred never saw that. He was deceived by Æthelred’s flamboyant piety, and by the fact that Æthelred was always ready to agree with the King of Wessex. Yes, lord, no, lord, let me empty your night soil bucket, lord, and let me lick your royal arse, lord. That was Æthelred, and his reward was Æthelflaed.

She came into the church a few moments after Æthelred and she, like him, was smiling. She was in love with love, transported that day to a height of joy that showed like radiance on her sweet face. She was a lithe young woman who already had a sway in her hips. She was long-legged, slender, and with a snub-nosed face unscarred by disease. She wore a dress of pale blue linen sewn with panels showing saints with halos and crosses. She had a girdle of gold cloth hung with tassels and small silver bells. Over her shoulders was a cape of white linen that was fastened at her throat with a crystal brooch. The cape swept the rushes on the flagstone floor as she walked. Her hair, gold bright, was coiled about her head and held in place with ivory combs. That spring day was the first on which she wore her hair up, a sign of marriage, and it revealed her long thin neck. She was so graceful that day.

She caught my gaze as she walked toward the white-hung altar and her eyes, already filled with delight, seemed to take on a new dazzle. She smiled at me and I had to smile back, and she laughed for joy before walking on toward her father and the man who was to be her husband. “She’s very fond of you,” Gisela said with a smile.

“We have been friends since she was a child,” I said.

“She is still a child,” Gisela said softly as the bride reached the flower-strewn, cross-burdened altar.

I remember thinking that Æthelflaed was being sacrificed on that altar, but if that was true then she was a most willing victim. She had always been a mischievous and willful child, and I did not doubt that she chafed under her sour mother’s eye and her stern father’s rules. She saw marriage as an escape from Alfred’s dour and pious court, and that day Alfred’s new church was filled with her happiness. I saw Steapa, perhaps the greatest warrior of Wessex, crying. Steapa, like me, was fond of Æthelflaed.

There were close to three hundred folk in the church. Envoys had come from the Frankish kingdoms across the sea, and others had come from Northumbria, Mercia, East Anglia, and the Welsh kingdoms, and those men, all priests or nobles, were given places of honor close to the altar. The ealdormen and high reeves of Wessex were there too, while nearest to the altar was a dark herd of priests and monks. I heard little of the mass, for Gisela and I were in the back of the church where we talked with friends. Once in a while a sharp command for silence would be issued by a priest, but no one took any notice.

Hild, abbess of a nunnery in Wintanceaster, embraced Gisela. Gisela had two good Christian friends. The first was Hild, who had once fled the church to become my lover, and the other was Thyra, Ragnar’s sister, with whom I had grown up and whom I loved as a sister. Thyra was a Dane, of course, and had been raised in the worship of Thor and Odin, but she had converted and come south to Wessex. She dressed like a nun. She wore a drab gray robe with a hood that hid her astonishing beauty. A black girdle encircled her waist, which was normally as thin as Gisela’s, but now was plump with pregnancy. I laid a gentle hand on the girdle. “Another?” I asked.

“And soon,” Thyra said. She had given birth to three children, of whom one, a boy, still lived.

“Your husband is insatiable,” I said with mock sternness.

“It is God’s will,” Thyra said seriously. The humor I remembered from her childhood had evaporated with her conversion, though in truth it had probably left her when she had been enslaved in Dunholm by her brother’s enemies. She had been raped and abused and driven mad by her captors, and Ragnar and I had fought our way into Dunholm to release her, but it was Christianity that had freed her from the madness and made her into the serene woman who now looked at me so gravely.

“And how is your husband?” I asked her.

“Well, thank you,” her face brightened as she spoke. Thyra had found love, not just of God, but of a good man, and for that I was thankful.

“You will, of course, call the child Uhtred if it’s a boy,” I said sternly.

“If the king permits it,” Thyra said, “we shall name him Alfred, and if she’s a girl then she will be called Hild.”

That made Hild cry, and Gisela then revealed that she was also pregnant, and the three women went into an interminable discussion of babies. I extricated myself and found Steapa who was standing head and shoulders above the rest of the congregation. “You know I’m to throw Sigefrid and Erik out of Lundene?” I asked him.

“I was told,” he said in his slow, deliberate way.

“You’ll come?”

He gave a quick smile that I took to be consent. He had a frightening face, his skin stretched tight across his big-boned skull so that he seemed to be perpetually grimacing. In battle he was fearsome, a huge warrior with sword skill and savagery. He had been born to slavery, but his size and his fighting ability had raised him to his present eminence. He served in Alfred’s bodyguard, owned slaves himself, and farmed a wide swath of fine land in Wiltunscir. Men were wary of Steapa because of the anger that was ever-present on his face, but I knew him to be a kind man. He was not clever. Steapa was never a thinker, but he was kind and he was loyal. “I’ll ask the king to release you,” I said.

“He’ll want me to go with Æthelred,” Steapa said.

“You’d rather be with the man who does the fighting, wouldn’t you?” I asked.

Steapa blinked at me, too slow to understand the insult I had offered my cousin. “I shall fight,” he said, then laid a huge arm on the shoulders of his wife, a tiny creature with an anxious face and small eyes. I could never remember her name, so I greeted her politely and pushed on through the crowd.

Æthelwold found me. Alfred’s nephew had begun drinking again and his eyes were bloodshot. He had been a handsome young man, but his face was thickening now and the veins were red and broken under his skin. He drew me to the edge of the church to stand beneath a banner on which a long exhortation had been embroidered in red wool. “All That You Ask of God,” the banner read, “You Will Receive if You Believe. When Good Prayer Asks, Meek Faith Receives.” I assumed Alfred’s wife and her ladies had done the embroidery, but the sentiments sounded like Alfred’s own. Æthelwold was clutching my elbow so hard that it hurt. “I thought you were on my side,” he hissed reproachfully.

“I am,” I said.

He stared at me suspiciously. “You met Bjorn?”

“I met a man pretending to be dead,” I said.

He ignored that, which surprised me. I remembered how affected he had been by his meeting with Bjorn, so impressed indeed that Æthelwold had become sober for a while, but now he took my dismissal of the risen corpse as a thing of no importance. “Don’t you understand,” he said, still gripping my elbow, “that this is our best chance!”

“Our best chance of what?” I asked patiently.

“Of getting rid of him,” he spoke too vehemently and some folk standing nearby turned to look at us. I said nothing. Of course Æthelwold wanted to be rid of his uncle, but he lacked the courage to strike the blow himself, which is why he was constantly seeking allies like me. He looked up into my face and evidently found no support there, for he let go of my arm. “They want to know if you’ve asked Ragnar,” he said, his voice lower.

So Æthelwold was still in contact with Sigefrid? That was interesting, but perhaps not surprising. “No,” I said, “I haven’t.”

“For God’s sake, why not?”

“Because Bjorn lied,” I said, “and it is not my fate to be king in Mercia.”

“If I ever become king in Wessex,” Æthelwold said bitterly, “then you had better run for your life.” I smiled at that, then just looked at him with unblinking eyes and, after a while, he turned away and muttered something inaudible that was probably an apology. He stared across the church, his face dark. “That Danish bitch,” he said vehemently.

“What Danish bitch?” I asked, and, for a heartbeat, I thought he meant Gisela.

“That bitch,” he jerked his head toward Thyra. “The one married to the idiot. The pious bitch. The one with her belly stuffed.”

“Thyra?”

“She’s beautiful,” Æthelwold said vengefully.

“So she is.”

“And she’s married to an old fool!” he said, staring at Thyra with loathing on his face. “When she’s whelped that pup inside her I’m going to put her on her back,” he said, “and show her how a real man plows a field.”

“You do know she’s my friend?” I asked.

He looked alarmed. He had plainly not known of my long affection for Thyra and now tried to recant. “I just think she’s beautiful,” he said sullenly, “that’s all.”

I smiled and leaned down to his ear. “You touch her,” I whispered, “and I’ll put a sword up your asshole and I’ll rip you open from the crotch to the throat and then feed your entrails to my pigs. Touch her once, Æthelwold, just once, and you’re dead.”

I walked away. He was a fool and a drunk and a lecher, and I dismissed him as harmless. In which I was wrong, as it turned out. He was, after all, the rightful King of Wessex, but only he and a few other fools truly believed he should be king instead of Alfred. Alfred was everything his nephew was not; he was sober, clever, industrious, and serious.

He was also happy that day. He watched as his daughter married a man he loved almost like a son, and he listened to the monks chanting and he stared at the church he had made with its gilded beams and painted statues, and he knew that by this marriage he was taking control of southern Mercia.

Which meant that Wessex, like the infants inside Thyra and Gisela, was growing.

Father Beocca found me outside the church where the wedding guests stood in the sunshine and waited for the summons to the feast inside Alfred’s hall. “Too many people were talking in the church!” Beocca complained. “This was a holy day, Uhtred, a sacred day, a celebration of the sacrament, and people were talking as if they were at market!”

“I was one of them,” I said.

“You were?” he asked, squinting up at me. “Well, you shouldn’t have been talking. It’s just plain bad manners! And insulting to God! I’m astonished at you, Uhtred, I really am! I’m astonished and disappointed.”

“Yes, father,” I said, smiling. Beocca had been reproving me for years. When I was a child, Beocca was my father’s priest and confessor and, like me, he had fled Northumbria when my uncle had usurped Bebbanburg. Beocca had found a refuge at Alfred’s court where his piety, his learning, and his enthusiasm were appreciated by the king. That royal favor went a long way to stop men mocking Beocca, who was, in all truth, as ugly a man as you could have found in all Wessex. He had a club foot, a squint, and a palsied left hand. He was blind in his wandering eye that had gone as white as his hair, for he was now nearly fifty years old. Children jeered at him in the streets and some folk made the sign of the cross, believing that ugliness was a mark of the devil, but he was as good a Christian as any I have ever known. “It is good to see you,” he said in a dismissive tone, as if he feared I might believe him. “You do know the king wishes to speak with you? I suggested you meet him after the feast.”

“I’ll be drunk.”

He sighed, then reached out with his good hand to hide the amulet of Thor’s hammer that was showing at my neck. He tucked it under my tunic. “Try to stay sober,” he said.

“Tomorrow, perhaps?”

“The king is busy, Uhtred! He doesn’t wait on your convenience!”

“Then he’ll have to talk to me drunk,” I said.

“And I warn you he wants to know how soon you can take Lundene. That’s why he wishes to speak with you.” He stopped talking abruptly because Gisela and Thyra were walking toward us, and Beocca’s face was suddenly transformed by happiness. He just stared at Thyra like a man seeing a vision and, when she smiled at him, I thought his heart would burst with pride and devotion. “You’re not cold, are you, my dear?” he asked solicitously. “I can fetch you a cloak.”

“I’m not cold.”

“Your blue cloak?”

“I am warm, my dear,” she said, and put a hand on his arm.

“It will be no trouble!” Beocca said.

“I am not cold, dearest,” Thyra said, and again Beocca looked as though he would die of happiness.

All his life Beocca had dreamed of women. Of fair women. Of a woman who would marry him and give him children, and for all his life his grotesque appearance had made him an object of scorn until, on a hilltop of blood, he had met Thyra and he had banished the demons from her soul. They had been married four years now. To look at them was to be certain that no two people were ever more ill-suited to each other. An old, ugly, meticulous priest and a young, golden-haired Dane, but to be near them was to feel their joy like the warmth of a great fire on a winter’s night. “You shouldn’t be standing, my dear,” he told her, “not in your condition. I shall fetch you a stool.”

“I shall be sitting soon, dearest.”

“A stool, I think, or a chair. And are you sure you don’t need a cloak? It would really be no trouble to fetch one!”

Gisela looked at me and smiled, but Beocca and Thyra were oblivious of us as they fussed over each other. Then Gisela gave the smallest jerk of her head and I looked to see that a young monk was standing nearby and staring at me. He had obviously been waiting to catch my eye, and he was just as obviously nervous. He was thin, not very tall, brown haired and had a pale face that looked remarkably like Alfred’s. There was the same drawn and anxious look, the same serious eyes and thin mouth, and evidently the same piety judging by the monk’s robe. He was a novice, because his hair was untonsured, and he dropped to one knee when I looked at him. “Lord Uhtred,” he said humbly.

“Osferth!” Beocca said, becoming aware of the young monk’s presence. “You should be at your studies! The wedding is over and novices are not invited to the feast.”

Osferth ignored Beocca. Instead, with his head bowed, he spoke to me. “You knew my uncle, lord.”

“I did?” I asked suspiciously. “I have known many men,” I said, preparing him for the refusal I was sure I would offer to whatever he requested of me.

“Leofric, lord.”

And my suspicion and hostility vanished at the mention of that name. Leofric. I even smiled. “I knew him,” I said warmly, “and I loved him.” Leofric had been a tough West Saxon warrior who had taught me about war. Earsling, he used to call me, meaning something dropped from an arse, and he toughened me, bullied me, snarled at me, beat me, and became my friend and remained my friend until the day he died on the rain-swept battlefield at Ethandun.

“My mother is his sister, lord,” Osferth said.

“To your studies, young man!” Beocca said sternly.

I put a hand on Beocca’s palsied arm to hold him back. “Your mother’s name?” I asked Osferth.

“Eadgyth, lord.”

I leaned down and tipped Osferth’s face up. No wonder he looked like Alfred, for this was Alfred’s bastard son who had been whelped on a palace servant-girl. No one ever admitted that Alfred was the boy’s father, though it was an open secret. Before Alfred found God he had discovered the joys of palace maids, and Osferth was the product of that youthful exuberance. “Does Eadgyth live?” I asked him.

“No, lord. She died of the fever two years ago.”

“And what are you doing here, in Wintanceaster?”

“He is studying for the church,” Beocca snapped, “because his calling is to be a monk.”

“I would serve you, lord,” Osferth said anxiously, staring up into my face.

“Go!” Beocca tried to shoo the young man away. “Go! Go away! Back to your studies, or I shall have the novice-master whip you!”

“Have you ever held a sword?” I asked Osferth.

“The one my uncle gave me, lord, I have it.”

“But you’ve not fought with it?”

“No, lord,” he said, and still he looked up at me, so anxious and frightened, and with a face so like his father’s face.

“We are studying the life of Saint Cedd,” Beocca said to Osferth, “and I expect you to have copied the first ten pages by sundown.”

“Do you want to be a monk?” I asked Osferth.

“No, lord,” he said.

“Then what?” I asked, ignoring Father Beocca who was spluttering protests, but unable to advance past my sword arm that held him back.

“I would follow my uncle’s steps, lord,” Osferth said.

I almost laughed. Leofric had been as hard a warrior as ever lived and died, while Osferth was a puny, pale youth, but I managed to keep a straight face. “Finan!” I shouted.

The Irishman appeared at my side. “Lord?”

“This young man is joining my household troops,” I said, handing Finan some coins.

“You can’t…” Beocca began protesting, then went silent when both Finan and I stared at him.

“Take Osferth away,” I told Finan, “find him clothes fit for a man, and get him weapons.”

Finan looked dubiously at Osferth. “Weapons?” he asked.

“He has the blood of warriors,” I said, “so now we will teach him to fight.”

“Yes, lord,” Finan said, his tone suggesting he thought I was mad, but then he looked at the coins I had given him and saw a chance of profit. He grinned. “We’ll make him a warrior yet, lord,” he said, doubtless believing he lied, then he led Osferth away.

Beocca rounded on me. “Do you know what you’ve just done?” he spluttered.

“Yes,” I said.

“You know who that boy is?”

“He’s the king’s bastard,” I said brutally, “and I’ve just done Alfred a favor.”

“You have?” Beocca asked, still bristling, “and what kind of favor, pray?”

“How long do you think he’ll last,” I asked, “when I put him in the shield wall? How long before a Danish blade slits him like a wet herring? That, father, is the favor. I’ve just rid your pious king of his inconvenient bastard.”

We went to the feast.

The wedding feast was as ghastly as I expected. Alfred’s food was never good, rarely plentiful, and his ale was always weak. Speeches were made, though I heard none, and harpists sang, though I could not hear them. I talked with friends, scowled at various priests who disliked my hammer amulet, and climbed the dais to the top table to give Æthelflaed a chaste kiss. She was all happiness. “I’m the luckiest girl in all the world,” she told me.

“You’re a woman now,” I said, smiling at her upswept woman’s hair.

She bit her lower lip, looked shy, then grinned mischievously as Gisela approached. They embraced, golden hair against the dark, and Ælswith, Alfred’s sour wife, glowered at me. I bowed low. “A happy day, my lady,” I said.

Ælswith ignored that. She was sitting beside my cousin, who gestured at me with a pork rib. “You and I have business to discuss,” he said.

“We do,” I said.

“We do, lord,” Ælswith corrected me sharply. “Lord Æthelred is the Ealdorman of Mercia.”

“And I’m the Lord of Bebbanburg,” I said with an asperity that matched hers. “How are you, cousin?”

“In the morning,” Æthelred said, “I shall tell you our plans.”

“I was told,” I said, ignoring the truth that Alfred had asked me to devise the plans for the capture of Lundene, “that we were to meet the king tonight?”

“I have other matters for my attention tonight,” Æthelred said, looking at his young bride, and for an eyeblink his expression was feral, almost savage, then he offered me a smile. “In the morning, after prayers.” He waved the pork rib again, dismissing me.

Gisela and I lay in the principal chamber of the Two Cranes tavern that night. We lay close, my arm around her, and we said little. Smoke from the tavern hearth sifted up through the loose floorboards and men were singing beneath us. Our children slept across the room with Stiorra’s nurse, while mice rustled in the thatch above. “About now, I suppose,” Gisela said wistfully, breaking our silence.

“Now?”

“Poor little Æthelflaed is becoming a woman,” she said.

“She can’t wait for that to happen,” I said.

Gisela shook her head. “He’ll rape her like a boar,” she said, whispering the words. I said nothing. Gisela put her head on my chest so that her hair was across my mouth. “Love should be tender,” she went on.

“It is tender,” I said.

“With you, yes,” she said, and for a moment I thought she was crying.

I stroked her hair. “What is it?”

“I like her, that is all.”

“Æthelflaed?”

“She has spirit and he has none.” She tilted her face to look at me and in the darkness I could just see the glint of her eyes. “You never told me,” she said reprovingly, “that the Two Cranes is a brothel.”

“There are not many beds in Wintanceaster,” I said, “and not nearly enough for all the invited guests, so we were very lucky to find this room.”

“And they know you very well here, Uhtred,” she said accusingly.

“It’s a tavern as well,” I said defensively.

She laughed, then reached out a long thin arm and pushed a shutter open to find the heavens were bright with stars.

The sky was still clear next morning when I went to the palace, surrendered my two swords and was ushered by a young and very serious priest to Alfred’s room. I had met him so often in that small, bare chamber that was cluttered with parchments. He was waiting there, dressed in the brown robe that made him look like a monk, and with him was Æthelred who wore his swords because, as Ealdorman of Mercia, he had been granted that privilege within the palace. A third man was in the room, Asser the Welsh monk, who glared at me with undisguised loathing. He was a slight, short man with a very pale face that was scrupulously clean-shaven. He had good cause to hate me. I had met him in Cornwalum where I had led a slaughter of the kingdom where he was an emissary and I had tried to kill Asser too, a failure I have regretted all my life. He scowled at me and I rewarded him with a cheerful grin that I knew would annoy him.

Alfred did not look up from his work, but gestured at me with his quill. The gesture was evidently a welcome. He was standing at the upright desk he used for writing and for a moment all I could hear was the quill spluttering scratchily on the skin. Æthelred smirked, looking pleased with himself, but then he always did.

“De consolatione philosophiae,” Alfred said without looking up from his work.

“Feels as if rain is coming, though,” I said, “there’s a haze in the west, lord, and the wind is brisk.”

He gave me an exasperated look. “What is preferable,” he asked, “and sweeter in this life than to serve and to be near to the king?”

“Nothing!” Æthelred said enthusiastically.

I made no answer because I was so astonished. Alfred liked the formalities of good manners, but he rarely wanted obsequiousness, yet the question suggested that he wished me to express some doltish adoration of him. Alfred saw my surprise and sighed. “It is a question,” he explained, “posed in the work I am copying.”

“I look forward to reading it,” Æthelred said. Asser said nothing, just watched me with his dark Welsh eyes. He was a clever man, and about as trustworthy as a spavined weasel.

Alfred laid down the quill. “The king, in this context, Lord Uhtred, might be thought of as the representative of Almighty God, and the question suggests, does it not, the comfort to be gained from a nearness to God? Yet I fear you find no consolation in either philosophy or religion.” He shook his head, then tried to wipe the ink from his hands with a damp cloth.

“He had better find consolation from God, lord King,” Asser spoke for the first time, “if his soul is not to burn in the eternal fire.”

“Amen,” Æthelred said.

Alfred looked ruefully at his hands that were now smeared with ink. “Lundene,” he said, curtly changing the subject.

“Garrisoned by brigands,” I said, “who are killing trade.”

“That much I know,” he said icily. “The man Sigefrid.”

“One-thumbed Sigefrid,” I said, “thanks to Father Pyrlig.”

“That I also know,” the king said, “but I would dearly like to know what you were doing in Sigefrid’s company.”

“Spying on them, lord,” I said brightly, “just as you spied on Guthrum so many years ago.” I referred to a winter night when, like a fool, Alfred had disguised himself as a musician and gone to Cippanhamm when it was occupied by Guthrum in the days when he was an enemy of Wessex. Alfred’s bravery had gone badly wrong, and if I had not been there then I dare say Guthrum would have become King of Wessex. I smiled at Alfred, and he knew I was reminding him that I had saved his life, but instead of showing gratitude he just looked disgusted.

“It is not what we heard,” Brother Asser went onto the attack.

“And what did you hear, brother?” I asked him.

He held up one long slender finger. “That you arrived in Lundene with the pirate Haesten,” a second finger joined the first, “that you were welcomed by Sigefrid and his brother, Erik,” he paused, his dark eyes malevolent, and raised a third finger, “and that the pagans addressed you as King of Mercia.” He folded the three fingers slowly, as though his accusations were irrefutable.

I shook my head in feigned wonderment. “I have known Haesten since I saved his life many years ago,” I said, “and I used the acquaintance to be invited into Lundene. And whose fault is it if Sigefrid gives me a title I neither want nor possess?” Asser did not answer, Æthelred stirred behind me while Alfred just stared at me. “If you don’t believe me,” I said, “ask Father Pyrlig.”

“He has been sent back to East Anglia,” Asser said brusquely, “to continue his mission. But we will ask him. You may be sure of that.”

“I already have asked,” Alfred said, making a calming gesture toward Asser, “and Father Pyrlig vouched for you,” he added those last words cautiously.

“And why,” I asked, “has Guthrum not taken revenge for the insults to his envoys?”

“King Æthelstan,” Alfred said, using Guthrum’s Christian name, “has abandoned any claims to Lundene. It belongs to Mercia. His troops will not trespass there. But I have promised to send him Sigefrid and Erik as captives. That is your job.” I nodded, but said nothing. “So tell me how you plan to capture Lundene?” Alfred demanded.

I paused. “You attempted to ransom the city, lord?” I asked.

Alfred looked irritated at the question, then nodded abruptly. “I offered silver,” he said stiffly.

“Offer more,” I suggested.

He gave me a very sour look. “More?”

“The city will be difficult to take, lord,” I said. “Sigefrid and Erik have hundreds of men. Haesten will join them as soon as he hears that we have marched. We would have to assault stone walls, lord, and men die like flies in such attacks.”

Æthelred again stirred behind me. I knew he wanted to dismiss my fears as cowardice, but he had just enough sense to keep silent.

Alfred shook his head. “I offered them silver,” he said bitterly, “more silver than a man can dream of. I offered them gold. They said they would take half of what I offered if I added one more thing.” He looked at me belligerently. I gave a small shrug as if to suggest that he had rejected a bargain. “They wanted Æthelflaed,” he said.

“They can have my sword instead,” Æthelred said belligerently.

“They wanted your daughter?” I asked, amazed.

“They asked,” Alfred said, “because they knew I would not grant their request, and because they wished to insult me.” He shrugged, as if to suggest that the insult was as feeble as it was puerile. “So if the Thurgilson brothers are to be thrown out of Lundene, then you must do it. Tell me how.”

I pretended to gather my thoughts. “Sigefrid does not have sufficient men to guard the whole circuit of the city walls,” I said, “so we send a large attack against the western gate, and then launch the real assault from the north.”

Alfred frowned and sifted through the parchments piled on the windowsill. He found the page he wanted and peered at the writing. “The old city, as I understand it,” he said, “has six gates. To which do you refer?”

“In the west,” I said, “the gate nearest the river. The local folk call it Ludd’s Gate.”

“And on the northern side?”

“There are two gates,” I said, “one leads directly into the old Roman fort, the other goes to the market place.”

“The forum,” Alfred corrected me.

“We take the one that leads to the market,” I said.

“Not the fort?”

“The fort is part of the walls,” I explained, “so capture that gate and we still have to cross the fort’s southern wall. But capture the market place and our men have cut off Sigefrid’s retreat.”

I was talking nonsense for a reason, though it was plausible nonsense. Launching an attack from the new Saxon town across the River Fleot onto the old city’s walls would draw defenders to Ludd’s Gate, and if a smaller, better-trained force could then attack from the north they might find those walls lightly guarded. Once inside the city that second force could assault Sigefrid’s men from the rear and open Ludd’s Gate to let in the rest of the army. It was, in truth, the obvious way to assault the city, indeed it was so obvious that I was sure Sigefrid would be guarding against it.

Alfred pondered the idea.

Æthelred said nothing. He was waiting for his father-in-law’s opinion.

“The river,” Alfred said in a hesitant tone, then shook his head as though his thought was leading nowhere.

“The river, lord?”

“An approach by ship?” Alfred suggested, still hesitant.

I let the idea hang, and it was like dangling a piece of gristle in front of an unschooled puppy.

And the puppy duly pounced. “An assault by ship is frankly a better idea,” Æthelred said confidently. “Four or five ships? Traveling with the current? We can land on the wharves and attack the walls from behind.”

“An attack by land will be hazardous,” Alfred said dubiously, though the question suggested he was supporting his son-in-law’s ideas.

“And probably doomed,” Æthelred contributed confidently. He was not trying to hide his scorn of my plan.

“You considered a shipborne assault?” Alfred asked me.

“I did, lord.”

“It seems a very good idea to me!” Æthelred said firmly.

So now I gave the puppy the whipping it deserved. “There’s a river wall, lord,” I said. “We can land on the wharves, but we still have a wall to cross.” The wall was built just behind the wharves. It was another piece of Roman work, all masonry, brick and studded with circular bastions.

“Ah,” Alfred said.

“But of course, lord, if my cousin wishes to lead an attack on the river wall?”

Æthelred was silent.

“The river wall,” Alfred said, “it’s high?”

“High enough, and newly repaired,” I said, “but of course, I defer to your son-in-law’s experience.”

Alfred knew I did no such thing and gave me an irritable look before deciding to slap me down as I had slapped Æthelred. “Father Beocca tells me you took Brother Osferth into your service.”

“I did, lord,” I said.

“It is not what I wish for Brother Osferth,” Alfred said firmly, “so you will send him back.”

“Of course, lord.”

“He is called to serve the church,” Alfred said, suspicious of my ready agreement. He turned and stared out of his small window. “I cannot endure Sigefrid’s presence,” he said. “We need to open the river passage to shipping, and we need to do it soon.” His ink-smeared hands were clasped behind his back and I could see the fingers clenching and unclenching. “I want it done before the first cuckoo sounds. Lord Æthelred will command the forces.”

“Thank you, lord,” Æthelred said and dropped to one knee.

“But you will take Lord Uhtred’s advice,” the king insisted, turning on his son-in-law.

“Of course, lord,” Æthelred agreed untruthfully.

“Lord Uhtred is more experienced in war than you,” the king explained.

“I shall value his assistance, lord,” Æthelred lied very convincingly.

“And I want the city taken before the first cuckoo sounds!” the king reiterated.

Which meant we had perhaps six weeks. “You will summon men now?” I asked Alfred.

“I shall,” he said, “and you will each see to your provisions.”

“And I shall give you Lundene,” Æthelred said enthusiastically. “What good prayers ask, lord, meek faith receives!”

“I don’t want Lundene,” Alfred retorted with some asperity, “it belongs to Mercia, to you,” he gave a slight inclination of his head to Æthelred, “but perhaps you will allow me to appoint a bishop and a city governor?”

“Of course, lord,” Æthelred said.

I was dismissed, leaving father and son-in-law with the sour-faced Asser. I stood in the sunshine outside and thought about how I was to take Lundene, for I knew that I would have to do it, and do it without Æthelred ever suspecting my plans. And it could be done, I thought, but only by stealth and with good fortune. Wyrd bi? ful ãræd.

I went to find Gisela. I crossed the outer courtyard to see a knot of women beside one of the doors. Eanflæd was among them and I turned to greet her. She had been a whore once, then she had become Leofric’s lover, and now she was a companion to Alfred’s wife. I doubted that Ælswith knew her companion had once been a whore, though perhaps she did and did not care because the bond between the two women was a shared bitterness. Ælswith resented that Wessex would not call the king’s wife a queen, while Eanflæd knew too much of men to be fond of any one of them. Yet I was fond of her and I veered out of my way to speak with her, but, seeing me coming, she shook her head to warn me away.

I stopped then and saw that Eanflæd had her arm about a younger woman who sat on a chair with her head bowed. She looked up suddenly and saw me. It was Æthelflaed and her pretty face was wan, drawn, and scared. She had been crying and her eyes were still bright from the tears. She seemed not to recognize me, then she did and offered me a sad reluctant smile. I smiled back, bowed, and walked on.

And thought about Lundene.

PART TWO

THE CITY

FOUR

We had agreed at Wintanceaster that Æthelred would come downriver to Coccham, bringing with him the troops from Alfred’s household guard, his own warriors, and whatever men he could raise from his extensive lands in southern Mercia. Once he arrived we would jointly march on Lundene with the Berrocscire fyrd and my own household troops. Alfred had stressed the need for haste, and Æthelred had promised to be ready in two weeks.

Yet a whole month passed and still Æthelred had not come. The year’s first nestlings were taking wing among trees that were still not in full leaf. The pear blossom was white, and wagtails flitted in and out of their nests under the thatched eaves of our house. I watched a cuckoo staring intently at those nests, planning when to leave her egg among the wagtail’s clutch. The cuckoo had not started calling yet, but it would soon, and that was the time by which Alfred wanted Lundene captured.

I waited. I was bored, as were my household troops, who were ready for war and suffered peace. They numbered just fifty-six warriors. It was a small number, scarcely sufficient to crew a ship, but men cost money and I was hoarding my silver in those days. Five of those men were youngsters who had never faced the ultimate test of battle, which was to stand in the shield wall, and so, as we waited for Æthelred, I put those five men through day after day of hard training. Osferth, Alfred’s bastard, was one of them. “He’s no good,” Finan said to me repeatedly.

“Give him time,” I said just as frequently.

“Give him a Danish blade,” Finan said viciously, “and pray it slits his monkish belly.” He spat. “I thought the king wanted him back in Wintanceaster?”

“He does.”

“So why don’t you send him back? He’s no use to us.”

“Alfred has too many other things on his mind,” I said, ignoring Finan’s question, “and he won’t remember Osferth.” That was not true. Alfred had a most methodical mind, and he would not have forgotten Osferth’s absence from Wintanceaster, nor my disobedience in not sending the youth back to his studies.

“But why not send him back?” Finan insisted.

“Because I liked his uncle,” I said, and that was true. I had loved Leofric and, for his sake, I would be kind to his nephew.

“Or are you just trying to annoy the king, lord?” Finan asked, then grinned and strode away without waiting for an answer. “Hook and pull, you bastard!” he shouted at Osferth. “Hook and pull!”

Osferth turned to look at Finan and was immediately struck on the head by an oak cudgel wielded by Clapa. If it had been an ax the blade would have split Osferth’s helmet and cut deep into his skull, but the cudgel just half stunned him, so he fell to his knees.

“Get up, you weakling!” Finan snarled. “Get up, hook and pull!”

Osferth tried to get up. His pale face looked miserable under the battered helmet that I had given him. He managed to stand, but immediately wobbled and knelt again.

“Give me that,” Finan said, and snatched the ax out of Osferth’s feeble hands. “Now watch! It isn’t difficult to do! My wife could do this!”

The five new men were facing five of my experienced warriors. The youngsters had been given axes, real weapons, and told to break the shield wall that opposed them. It was a small wall, just the five overlapping shields defended by wooden clubs, and Clapa grinned as Finan approached.

“What you do,” Finan was speaking to Osferth, “is hook the ax blade over the top of the enemy bastard’s shield. Is that so difficult? Hook it, pull the shield down, and let your neighbor kill the earsling behind it. We’ll do it slowly, Clapa, to show how it’s done, and stop grinning.”

They made the hook and pull in ludicrously slow motion, the ax coming gently overhand to latch its blade behind Clapa’s shield, and Clapa then allowing Finan to pull the shield’s top down toward him. “There,” Finan turned on Osferth when Clapa’s body had been exposed to a blow, “that’s how you break a shield wall! Now we’ll do it for real, Clapa.”

Clapa grinned again, relishing a chance to clout Finan with the cudgel. Finan stepped back, licked his lips, then struck fast. He swung the ax just as he had demonstrated, but Clapa tilted the shield back to take the ax head on the wooden surface and, at the same time, rammed his cudgel under the shield in a savage thrust at Finan’s groin.

It was always a pleasure to watch the Irishman fight. He was the quickest man with a blade that I ever saw, and I have seen many. I thought Clapa’s lunge would fold him in two and drive him to the grass in agony, but Finan sidestepped, seized the lower rim of the shield with his left hand, and jerked it hard upward to drive the top iron rim into Clapa’s face. Clapa staggered backward, his nose already red with blood, and the ax was somehow dropped with the speed of a striking snake and its blade was hooked around Clapa’s ankle. Finan pulled, Clapa fell back and now it was the Irishman who grinned. “That isn’t hook and pull,” he said to Osferth, “but it works just the same.”

“Wouldn’t have worked if you’d been holding a shield,” Clapa complained.

“That thing in your face, Clapa?” Finan said, “thing that flaps open and closed? That ugly thing you shovel food into? Keep it shut.” He tossed the ax to Osferth who tried to snatch the handle out of the air. He missed and the ax thumped into a puddle.

The spring had turned wet. Rain sheeted down, the river spread, there was mud everywhere. Boots and clothes rotted. What little grain was left in store sprouted and I sent my men hunting or fishing to provide us with food. The first calves were born, slithering bloodily into a wet world. Every day I expected Alfred to come and inspect Coccham’s progress, but in those drenched days he stayed in Wintanceaster. He did send a messenger, a pallid priest who brought a letter sewn into a greased lambskin pouch. “If you cannot read it, lord,” he suggested tentatively as I slit the pouch open, “I can…”